Saturday, February 5, 2011
Cameron: Multiculturalism has failed in Britain
State multiculturalism has failed and left young Muslims vulnerable to radicalisation, Prime Minister David Cameron will say today, arguing for a more active policy to heal divisions and promote Western values.
Cameron, in a speech to a security conference in Munich, will argue that Britain and other European nations need to “wake up to what is happening in our countries” as well as tackling terrorism through military operations overseas.
“It is time to turn the page on the failed policies of the past,” he will say, according to extracts from his speech released by his office.
“So first, instead of ignoring this extremist ideology, we — as governments and societies — have got to confront it, in all its forms.”
His comments echo those made by German leader Angela Merkel last year and reflect a push by European governments to better integrate immigrants, given persistent domestic tensions between different cultures.
Conservative leader Cameron (picture) will also deny that cuts to defence spending as part of efforts to tackle a record budget deficit mean that Britain was retreating from an “activist” global role.
“That is the complete reversal of the truth,” he will say. “Yes, we are dealing with the deficit, but we are also making sure our defences are strong.”
Aides say his comments on multiculturalism and radicalisation give a direction of travel for future policy, and it remains unclear how the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition intend to turn his vision into a reality.
Critics point out that Western foreign policy in the Middle East and beyond, not just a clash of cultures at home, has played a big part in stirring up anti-Western sentiment.
“Under the doctrine of state multiculturalism, we have encouraged different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and the mainstream,” Cameron will say.
“We have failed to provide a vision of society to which they feel they want to belong ... All this leaves some young Muslims feeling rootless.”
Some members of Cameron’s centre-right Conservative party, activists in right-wing movements and some voters believe that Britain has become a safe haven for people with anti-Western political views.
Others argue this tolerant approach is the lifeblood of any open and thriving democracy, fearing a crackdown on civil liberties would undermine the kind of society the government was seeking to establish.
Cameron said it was time to replace Britain’s “passive tolerance” with an “active, muscular liberalism” to send a message that life in Britain revolves around certain key values such as freedom of speech, equal rights and the rule of law.
“A passively tolerant society ... stands neutral between different values,” he will say. “A genuinely liberal country does much more. It believes in certain values and actively promotes them.”
The moment unarmed Egyptian protester was gunned down in street by 'Mubarak's police'
* Confusion over future of government after key figures step down
* Newly-appointed vice-president survives assassination attempt
* U.S. suggests President Mubarak should stay in office to oversee transition of power
Footage of what appears to be a Egyptian protester being shot dead by police in Alexandria has been released on the internet.
The clip, which lasts for two-and-a-half minutes, was filmed from the balcony of a backstreet apartment in the Manshya district of Egypt's second city and shows demonstrators setting up a makeshift barricade across the roadway.
A tyre is set on fire and then one of the protesters approaches a number of armed police positioned further up the street.
The protester spreads open his coat as if to show the officers - who already have their weapons drawn - that he is unarmed.
But he continues to face them and gesture to them - even though the black-clad security officers have their weapons trained on him.
Then, after a tense 30-second standoff, the protester drops to the floor as if dead before the clip abruptly ends.
An accompanying caption reads: 'Most likely killed on Friday the 28th of January in the Manshya District in Alexandria'.
Although not confirmed as genuine, the graphic film is the first recorded evidence of fatalities during anti-government demonstrations that have ravaged the country for almost two weeks. So far, officials claim that 11 people have been killed and thousands injured in the clashes.
Last night the country appeared to be in chaos, despite announcements by the unpopular government that it was making moves to stand down.
Key members of President Mubarak’s ruling party resigned in a move protesters dismissed as a ruse designed to ‘gain time’.
Amid confusion after a day of talks between ministers, it was initially reported on state TV that the despised 82-year-old autocrat, who has been in power for 30 years, had also stepped down – but this was later retracted.
And there were further reports that the newly appointed vice president had survived an assassination attempt in which two of his security guards were killed.
Meanwhile, Barack Obama’s special envoy for Egypt, Frank Wisner, said Mubarak should stay in power for the time being to oversee the political transition. The Egyptian president has insisted that he intends to serve out the remaining seven months of his term. Protesters are demanding that he quits immediately.
The president’s son Gamal Mubarak was among the senior National Democratic Party members to leave office. Mr Wisner said the resignations, which were announced on state TV, were a positive step.
The new party secretary-general, Hossam Badrawi, is seen as more liberal.
But protesters were unimpressed. One, Bilal Fathi, 22, said: ‘These are not gains for the protesters; this is a trick by the regime. This is not fulfilling our demands. These are red herrings.’
Leading Muslim Brotherhood member Mohammed Habib said: ‘It is an attempt to choke the revolution and gain time.’
Earlier, opposition leaders claimed they had met with Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq to discuss proposals. One option being considered would leave President Mubarak as a figurehead, with real power handed to his vice-president, former intelligence chief Omar Suleiman.
There were also reports of an ‘organised’ attempt to assassinate Mr Suleiman several days ago in which two of his bodyguards were said to have been killed.
It is not clear who was behind the assassination attempt – if it was genuine – or where it took place. Elsewhere, saboteurs were blamed for an explosion at a gas pipeline in the northern Sinai Peninsula that supplies gas to Israel and Jordan. It is not known whether gas supplies had been disrupted as a result.
More than 70 British expats were ferried under guard to Cairo airport for a flight back to Gatwick laid on by the Foreign Office. Further emergency evacuations are planned ‘if necessary’.
* Newly-appointed vice-president survives assassination attempt
* U.S. suggests President Mubarak should stay in office to oversee transition of power
Footage of what appears to be a Egyptian protester being shot dead by police in Alexandria has been released on the internet.
The clip, which lasts for two-and-a-half minutes, was filmed from the balcony of a backstreet apartment in the Manshya district of Egypt's second city and shows demonstrators setting up a makeshift barricade across the roadway.
A tyre is set on fire and then one of the protesters approaches a number of armed police positioned further up the street.
The protester approaches the police, dropping his jacket to prove that he is unarmed (left). Soon more officers have arrived on the scene and train their weapons on him.End of the line: The protester falls to the ground after apparently being shot
The protester spreads open his coat as if to show the officers - who already have their weapons drawn - that he is unarmed.
But he continues to face them and gesture to them - even though the black-clad security officers have their weapons trained on him.
Then, after a tense 30-second standoff, the protester drops to the floor as if dead before the clip abruptly ends.
An accompanying caption reads: 'Most likely killed on Friday the 28th of January in the Manshya District in Alexandria'.
Although not confirmed as genuine, the graphic film is the first recorded evidence of fatalities during anti-government demonstrations that have ravaged the country for almost two weeks. So far, officials claim that 11 people have been killed and thousands injured in the clashes.
Last night the country appeared to be in chaos, despite announcements by the unpopular government that it was making moves to stand down.
Key members of President Mubarak’s ruling party resigned in a move protesters dismissed as a ruse designed to ‘gain time’.
Amid confusion after a day of talks between ministers, it was initially reported on state TV that the despised 82-year-old autocrat, who has been in power for 30 years, had also stepped down – but this was later retracted.
And there were further reports that the newly appointed vice president had survived an assassination attempt in which two of his security guards were killed.
Meanwhile, Barack Obama’s special envoy for Egypt, Frank Wisner, said Mubarak should stay in power for the time being to oversee the political transition. The Egyptian president has insisted that he intends to serve out the remaining seven months of his term. Protesters are demanding that he quits immediately.
The president’s son Gamal Mubarak was among the senior National Democratic Party members to leave office. Mr Wisner said the resignations, which were announced on state TV, were a positive step.
The new party secretary-general, Hossam Badrawi, is seen as more liberal.
But protesters were unimpressed. One, Bilal Fathi, 22, said: ‘These are not gains for the protesters; this is a trick by the regime. This is not fulfilling our demands. These are red herrings.’
Leading Muslim Brotherhood member Mohammed Habib said: ‘It is an attempt to choke the revolution and gain time.’
Earlier, opposition leaders claimed they had met with Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq to discuss proposals. One option being considered would leave President Mubarak as a figurehead, with real power handed to his vice-president, former intelligence chief Omar Suleiman.
There were also reports of an ‘organised’ attempt to assassinate Mr Suleiman several days ago in which two of his bodyguards were said to have been killed.
It is not clear who was behind the assassination attempt – if it was genuine – or where it took place. Elsewhere, saboteurs were blamed for an explosion at a gas pipeline in the northern Sinai Peninsula that supplies gas to Israel and Jordan. It is not known whether gas supplies had been disrupted as a result.
More than 70 British expats were ferried under guard to Cairo airport for a flight back to Gatwick laid on by the Foreign Office. Further emergency evacuations are planned ‘if necessary’.
Persistence: Tahrir Square was once again crammed with protesters last night, refusing to give up their calls for a change of government
Makeshift camp: People warm themselves around a fire as the protests enter a third week with no sign of Mubarak leaving power
Chain reaction: Anti-government protesters form a human chain to prevent Egyptian Army tanks from clearing barricades, next to the Egyptian Museum at an entrance to Tahrir Square
People power: Egyptian anti-Mubarak protesters face military tanks in Cairo yesterday as the government came under mounting pressure to stand down
Defiant: Demonstrators stand in front of army tanks alongside the Egyptian Museum on the front line near Tahrir Square
Resignations in Egypt -- but not the big one - Mubarak still the President -Protestors demand Mubarak must go.
Military figures spearheading the transition tried to placate protesters without giving them the one resignation they demand, that of President Hosni Mubarak.
Iraqi premier says will give up half his salary
As unrest sweeps the Middle East, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said he would give up half his salary in a possible bid to head off simmering discontent, and called for a two-term limit to be placed on his office.
Iraqis have held sporadic protests against food, power and water shortages and their plight acquired particular attention this month as a wave of anti-government protests rocked the region.
Unlike other countries in the region, however, Iraq’s former autocratic regime has already been swept away, in the 2003 US-led invasion.
Maliki’s media advisor, Ali al-Moussawi, said the premier would forego 50 per cent of his US$30,000 (RM91,500) monthly paycheck to bring his salary closer to other government employees.
“He feels there is a huge difference and says this leads to a kind of caste system in society,” Moussawi said. Maliki made the announcement in a statement late on Friday.
Yesterday, Maliki reiterated that he supported efforts to seek a constitutional reform that would place a two-term limit on the office of prime minister, Moussawi said.
As things stand, Iraq’s prime minister can run for re-election an unlimited number of times, while the president can only serve two terms.
Hundreds of people gathered in Baghdad yesterday to demand better basic services. On Thursday, police fired on protesters making similar demands near the southern city of Diwaniya.
Political analyst Mazin al-Shammari said Maliki’s pay cut could be an attempt to soothe public anger.
“The prime minister, by doing this, is trying to put a windscreen in front of these protests,” Shammari said.
“Politicians in the Middle East are watching where the jasmine cloud moves,” he said, referring to Tunisia’s “Jasmine Revolution” that overthrew President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali.
Maliki was confirmed for a second term in December after nine months of political squabbling over a new government following an inconclusive parliamentary election in March.
His government is trying to rebuild Iraq but the economy remains shattered economy and infrastructure devastated eight years after the invasion ousted Saddam Hussein.
Iraqis complain bitterly about basic services. The national grid supplies only a few hours of electricity a day in a nation where temperatures rise above 50 degrees Celsius in the summer.
Members of parliament make US$27,000 a month, according to Safia al-Suhail, a lawmaker from Maliki’s State of Law political bloc, but have to pay from their salaries the cost of up to 30 personal security guards who make US$635 each per month. Teachers earn about US$350 a month.
“I admit that there is no social fairness between the government employees,” Suhail said.
Government salaries can be a sensitive issue. “Why do you ask me?” said one MP when asked yesterday how much he made. “Do you want to judge me?” — Reuters
Iraq’s Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki speaks during a joint news conference with Iraqi parliament speaker Osama al-Nujaifi in Baghdad on December 20, 2010
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
Over 200,000 in Egypt square call on Mubarak to go
More than 200,000 Egyptians poured into Tahrir Square in Cairo today hoping to gather a million people to bring an end to 30 years of President Hosni Mubarak’s authoritarian rule.
The army’s pledge yesterday not to use force against demonstrators emboldened Egyptians to push for the biggest shake-up of the political system since 1952, when army officers deposed King Farouk.
“Mubarak go away to Saudi or Bahrain” and “We don’t want you, we don’t want you”, chanted men, women and children in a sea of people that began gathering from the early hours.
The scenes in Tahrir, or Liberation Square, were in sharp contrast to Friday when police beat, exploded tear gas and sprayed water cannon on protesters.
There had been talk that the protesters, some shouting “Revolution, Revolution, until victory”, yesterday would march on the presidential palace but by midday with numbers still swelling, the crowd had not moved from the square, the focal point of the unrest.
Initially unorganised, the protests against Mubarak are gradually coalescing into a loose reformist movement encompassing many sections of Egyptian society. Young, unemployed mixed with members of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, the urban poor held hands in solidarity with doctors and teachers.
“We are calling for the overthrow of the regime,” said Ahmed Abdelmoneim, 25, a computer engineer. “We have one goal, and that is to remove Hosni, nothing else. Our politicians need to step in and form coalitions and committees to propose a new administration.”
Effigies of Mubarak, who like all his predecessors was a senior military officer, were strung up from traffic lights.
Absent Mubarak
Mubarak has not addressed the nation since Friday, when he sacked his cabinet. Yesterday, it was his newly appointed vice-president, Omar Suleiman, who announced a call for dialogue with all political forces. Protesters scent victory.
“The revolution won’t accept Omar Suleiman, even for a transitional period,” said Mohamed Saber, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. “We went a new democratic leader.”
Said Mahmoud Ali, 42, a civil servant: “We are very patient, we can stay here a long time . . . For the last 30 years this regime brought the worst out of the people. Now everyone is speaking out. Before, everyone was negative and passive.”
What will come after Mubarak if he steps down is not so clear. Egypt’s opposition has been fragmented and weakened under Mubarak. The Muslim Brotherhood has the biggest grassroots network with its health and other social charity projects.
The group, banned from politics under Mubarak, says it wants an Islamic, pluralistic and democratic state.
“Our country has many people capable of being president,” said Essam Kamel, 48, a lawyer, although he said he did not want Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mohamed ElBaradei, who has said he was ready to take on a role in the transition.
But Kamel added: “We are Muslims, but we don’t need an Islamic government.”
Mubarak’s disconnect from Egyptians may seal fate
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, hanging on to power in the face of mass protests demanding h is immediate exit, has responded with the same contemptuous paternalism that has characterised his 30 years in power.
Apparently deaf to the rage that has convulsed the streets for a week, Mubarak, 82, has named his intelligence chief as vice-president, reshuffled the cabinet and made routine economic pledges, as if business as usual could somehow resume.
For three decades, he has enjoyed firm backing from the United States, Israel and Europe, which saw him as a guarantor of stability and peace, and a rampart against Islamists.
But even Washington, which has given Egypt billions of dollars in mostly military aid despite Mubarak’s resistance to its occasional pressure for political change, says his response to the protests has been inadequate.
“This is not about appointments, it’s about actions,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said yesterday.
The army has not publicly deserted Mubarak, but said it would not fire on protesters hoping to mobilise a million people today, and endorsed their “legitimate demands”.
One of the demonstrators defying an overnight curfew in Cairo’s Tahrir Square summed up the mood. “The only thing we will accept from him is that he gets on a plane and leaves,” lawyer Ahmed Helmi, 45, said.
Mubarak came to power in 1981 when Islamist revolutionaries shot dead his predecessor, Anwar Sadat, at a military parade.
Throughout the intervening three decades and despite scores of promises, Mubarak has done nothing to create an institutional framework for a peaceful and democratic transfer of power in the
Arab world’s most populous nation.
Instead he has perpetuated a suffocating system in which conventional politics hardly exists, running the country by administrative fiat as if it were an army or a corporation.
Described as a dictator in leaked US embassy cables, Mubarak won four terms in single-candidate referenda and easily carried off the first contested election in 2005. He never deigned to debate his main rival, liberal lawyer Ayman Nour, who was later imprisoned for five years on dubious forgery charges.
Many Egyptians had expected him to run for a sixth term in September this year or install his businessman son Gamal in his place. They knew they would have no say in choosing their next
leader.
The final straw? Mubarak’s ruling party gained around 90 per cent of seats in parliament in a November poll in which the main Islamist opposition improbably lost all its 88 seats.
Mubarak owes his presidential career to Sadat, who saw him as a loyal subordinate and appointed him vice-president in 1975, when he commanded the air force and had no political ambitions.
At first, his solid, cautious style helped calm Egyptians traumatised by Sadat’s killing and fearful of the violence used by Islamist rebels hostile to Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel.
But once in power, Mubarak offered no vision beyond economic development under the same authoritarian system inherited from the army officers who toppled a British-backed king in 1952.
He has now ruled Egypt longer than anyone since Muhammad Ali Pasha, the Albanian adventurer who founded in the early 19th century the royal dynasty that fell in the 1952 coup.
“Governing Egypt is not a picnic, not something easy,” Mubarak declared in 2005. “You have limited resources, high population growth and the requirements of the people.”
He has spoken of democracy on occasion, but has done nothing to suggest he understands the concept to include the possibility of retiring or losing power through elections.
He prefers to talk of security and stability, portraying himself as a benign patriarch protecting Egypt from its enemies.
Even economic development was slow and patchy until his son Gamal, a former investment banker, persuaded Mubarak to bring businessmen and neo-liberal economists into the cabinet. Growth picked up, hitting 7.2 per cent in financial year 2007-08, but wealth disparities increased, inflation stayed high, and the poor complain they have seen none of the benefits.
Political cronies
On the political front, little changed. Businessmen friends and associates of Gamal Mubarak moved into the upper reaches of the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP), one of the prime targets of the current uprising.
Growing more complacent and unimaginative with age, Mubarak has condoned or ignored the erosion of the rule of law, making a smooth, broadly accepted transition of power ever more elusive.
Police have tortured with impunity anyone who challenges authority, and corrupt politicians have rigged elections and fixed the rules to exclude all rivals, human rights and transparency watchdogs say. Officials say voting is fair and that they investigate any cases of torture.
Most of Egypt’s youthful population of 80 million, a fifth of whom live on less than US$1 (RM3) a day, have never known another leader.
Mubarak has seemed oblivious to the dangers. Asked last year who would lead Egypt next, he said: “Only God knows who will be my successor. Whomever God prefers, I prefer.”
White House:Obama To Speak About Egypt In About An Hour-With Egypt, US Juggling Longtime Alliance, Protesters' Rights-Israel's Netanyahu Voices Concern for Egypt-Egypt under Israel's spotlight
President Barack Obama will speak in about an hour on the unfolding events in Egypt, where President Hosni Mubarak said almost an hour ago that he wouldn't run for re-election, ...
Google launches Twitter workaround for Egypt
Google Inc said yesterday it has launched a new service for people in Egypt to send Twitter messages without requiring an Internet connection, amid widespread anti-government protests in the country.
Google said the new service allows people to dial a telephone number and leave a voicemail, which is automatically translated into a message on Twitter.
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