When the rule of law in a country that reaches to the personal freedoms of personal dress codes while economics realities continue to falter, it is a clear sign that the failed system of government is closer to bankruptcy than we might think.

Watch and see the youth of Iran rise up and mandate a change.
It must happen from within, and it is.

================================================
Anger at Iran dress restrictions
By Frances Harrison
BBC News, Tehran

Two thousand young men in Iran have protested against new clothing curbs, reports say, amid growing discontent about a crackdown on un-Islamic dress.
Shiraz university students were angry about new rules banning sleeveless T-shirts, even inside all-male dorms.

The protest came as the judiciary head warned police that an excessively ferocious campaign could backfire.

Police say they stopped more than 1,300 women for dressing immodestly on the first day of the campaign in Tehran.

Foreign journalists have been prevented from filming women being arrested for un-Islamic clothing
More than 100 women were arrested on Saturday; half of them had to sign statements promising to improve their clothing, the other half are being referred to court.
The focus of the new campaign is to stop women wearing tight overcoats that reveal the shape of their bodies or showing too much hair from beneath their headscarves.

However, young men have also been arrested for sporting wild hair styles or T-shirts considered immodest.

Local news agency reports say the protesting Shiraz students on Sunday night were calling for the resignation of the university chancellor.

Serious crackdown

There is always a crackdown at the start of summer as women start wearing more skimpy clothes because of the hot weather.
In past years the pressure quickly relaxed - headscarves become perched on the back of heads, while fashionable women in affluent north Tehran wear open-toed sandals, three-quarter length trousers and short skin-hugging overcoats.

The police complain that some young women strut the streets looking like fashion models - and it is not a bad description.

But this year the crackdown seems more serious.

Iranian television has broadcast nightly programmes warning women and young men with sleeveless T-shirts and spiky hair to be more careful about their dress.

The newspapers are full of pictures of women being arrested for their un-Islamic clothing, but foreign journalists have been prevented from filming it.

Backlash

The head of the Iranian judiciary, Ayatollah Shahrudi, has warned that a severe crackdown on un-Islamic dress could have the reverse effect.
Meanwhile, an MP has asked why the police should spend so much time arresting young people and filing court cases against them instead of fighting drug addiction and poverty.

Already taxi drivers say there are fewer women on the streets and it is clear most are dressing more conservatively.

It is not just the young and very fashionable who are being harassed this year, middle aged women and even foreign tourists are being cautioned.

One foreign journalist was stopped and the police complained the photograph in her press card was indecent, even though it was taken by the Ministry of Islamic Guidance.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/6584789.stm

Published: 2007/04/23 18:29:36 GMT

COMMENTARY: The Lights Are On in Moscow
By Linda D. Kozaryn
American Forces Press Service
MOSCOW, April 24, 2007 – The city I first saw in 1997 as a depressing, lost world, is now filled with light and life. A decade later, people here appear to have cast off the domination of communism and embraced the prosperity of a free market economy.

Since the mid-1990s, I've been fortunate to have traveled the world with a succession of U.S. defense secretaries. My job as a writer for American Forces Press Service has taken me to more than 60 countries during a period that has seen the end of the Cold War and the decline of the Soviet Empire.
Nothing has been more fascinating than visiting parts of the world long closed to outsiders - places like Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Lithuania, and the Ukraine, to name a few.
When I first traveled to the Russian capital in 1997, Moscow was abysmally grey and dismal. Buildings and people alike appeared sullen and grim. Historic, ornate buildings stood neglected and seemed forlorn. Rows of modern, but dilapidated, high-rise apartment buildings filled the skyline.
A rank odor composed of cigarette smoke, cleaning fluid and diesel fuel permeated the air indoors and out. I later came to realize this smell was common in all the former Soviet Bloc nations. As was, what I perceived as, a general sense of apathy. Nobody seemed to care about much of anything.
In the streets of Moscow, stores without ads or promotional banners were barely distinguishable as retail outlets. Food stores were noted for empty shelves and lines of people hoping for a bit of meat or bread. Arts and crafts vendors stood in sub-zero parking lots, catering to the occasional tourist.
Returning to Moscow in the late 1990s, and in 2002, I stayed at the Radisson Hotel, an oasis of Western food and bright lights. Outside, I saw that the city of gloom had begun to change.
The formerly dark night sky reflected more lights. Floodlights illuminated monumental historic buildings. Garish neon signs sprouted on restaurants and bars. At first, there were only a few, but each visit there were more and more lights.
Driving through the city today, 10 years since my first visit and five years since my last, I saw historic buildings freshly painted in light pastel colors. Boldly colored signs and huge posters advertised goods and theatrical performances. Golden, onion-shaped domes have been restored to their former glistening beauty while others are wrapped in scaffolding undergoing the same process.
I also saw people sweeping the city's dust and dirt. I saw people repainting signs and even drainpipes. I saw men on ladders repairing plaster and roofing. There were signs of restoration and rebirth everywhere.
What I saw was people's sense of pride put into action. Whatever the reason, they now appear to care about their property once again. As I noted the differences between the Moscow of old and today's bustling city, I realized I have been a witness to what I'll call Moscow's "physical reawakening."
Considering that my visits are generally only for one or two days, I realize my perceptions are limited. But, two other reporters who have lived in Russia say they have also witnessed the city's rapid transformation from dark to light.
New York Times reporter Thom Shanker lived in Moscow from 1985 to 1988 and from 1990 to 1992, while he was a reporter with the Chicago Tribune. He has returned nearly every year since to report on the Russian capital. This week he arrived in Moscow aboard the U.S. defense secretary's Air Force 747 command plane.
Shanker said that when he first lived in Moscow in the mid-1980s, the city was drab and gray.
"The only color was the Red Party banners," he said, "and it was the bad old days. Mikhail Gorbachev had just come in, but no one knew for sure if he'd really have this big broom of reform. The KGB (secret police) presence was quite heavy.
"There was a total lack of consumer goods," he noted. "You had to order any sort of fresh fruits from a market in Helsinki that would make weekly deliveries by train. The markets in Moscow certainly had the basics - potatoes, tomatoes, pickles, and beef -- but you had to import any kind of western goods you wanted for quality of life.
"The quality of health care then was just terrible," he recalled.
Over the years, Shanker has watched the city and the life of its people recover from the past. Now, he said, there are a number of, both very modern Russian health clinics, as well as American and French health clinics, and dentists.
"In the almost 15 years since I left as a full-time resident of Moscow," he said, "every time I go back, the city just looks brighter and cleaner and more modern."
Shanker said he's particularly noticed that when you drive in from the airport, the outskirts of Moscow haven't changed very much. "You see a lot of broken down factories that don't ever seem to produce anything," he said. "You see some of the communist era apartments.
"But every ten kilometers you get closer toward the center, it's like going forward in time by ten years," he said.
"There's an IKEA furniture store there. There are big auto dealerships. There are gas stations with bright, shiny pumps and service personnel," he said. "The center of Moscow now is very bright with lots of light and neon and Western consumer stores and all of that."
"On the surface," Shanker concluded, "in just a decade and a half, Moscow has caught up substantially with the appearance of Western capitals."
FOX television reporter Jennifer Griffin has also marked the change in the city.
Griffin was assigned to Moscow from 1996 to 1999, when the Fox network was just getting started, and Boris Yeltsin was the first president of the Russian Federation. Yeltsin, 76, died of heart failure this week on April 23.
"It was the end of the Yeltsin era," Griffin recalled of her early days in Moscow. "It's strange and ironic that the day I landed in Moscow, was the day that Boris Yeltsin died. We spent three years here when his health was very bad and there were constant rumors that he might be very ill and perhaps even dying. It's been a strange return."
Traveling with the defense secretary this week, Griffin returned for the first time in eight years. She too noticed the lack of color and how the city looked "much more gray and grim" in the mid-to-late 1990s.
"This time," she said, "it looks like it's had a fresh coat of paint. There's new life and vibrancy. There are young people in the streets that don't have the same dour expression on their faces that I remember in the 1990s."
Griffin said that in 1991, Yeltsin implemented his "shock therapy" economic program and people lost everything, she said.
"Today, things (in the city) are so vibrant economically," she noted, "Moscow itself looks like it's had a face lift."

A Madrasa Grows In Brooklyn
by Daniel Pipes
New York Sun
April 24, 2007

Come September, an Arabic-language public secondary school is slated to open its doors in Brooklyn. The New York City Department of Education says the Khalil Gibran International Academy, serving grades six through 12, will boast a "multicultural curriculum and intensive Arabic language instruction."

This appears to be a marvelous idea, for New York and the country need native-born Arabic speakers. They have a role in the military, diplomacy, intelligence, the courts, the press, the academy, and many other institutions — and teaching languages to the young is the ideal route to polyglotism. As someone who spent years learning Arabic, I am enthusiastic in principle about the idea of this school, one of the first of its kind in the United States.

In practice, however, I strongly oppose the KGIA and predict that its establishment will generate serious problems. I say this because Arabic-language instruction is inevitably laden with pan-Arabist and Islamist baggage. Some examples:

Franck Salameh taught Arabic at the most prestigious American language school, Middlebury College in Vermont. In an article for the Middle East Quarterly, he wrote: "even as students leave Middlebury with better Arabic, they also leave indoctrinated with a tendentious Arab nationalist reading of Middle Eastern history. Permeating lectures and carefully-designed grammatical drills, Middlebury instructors push the idea that Arab identity trumps local identities and that respect for minority ethnic and sectarian communities betrays Arabism."

For an example of such grammatical drills, see the just-published book by Shukri Abed, "Focus on Contemporary Arabic: Conversations with Native Speakers" (Yale University Press), one chapter of which is titled "The Question of Palestine." Its intensely politicized readings would be unimaginable in a book of French or Spanish conversations.

The Islamist dimension worries me as well. An organization that lobbies for Arabic instruction, the Arabic Language Institute Foundation, claims that knowledge of Islam's holy language can help the West recover from what its leader, Akhtar H. Emon, calls its "moral decay." In other words, Muslims tend to see non-Muslims learning Arabic as a step toward an eventual conversion to Islam, an expectation I encountered while studying Arabic in Cairo in the 1970s.

Also, learning Arabic in of itself promotes an Islamic outlook, as James Coffman showed in 1995, looking at evidence from Algeria. Comparing students taught in French and in Arabic, he found that "Arabized students show decidedly greater support for the Islamist movement and greater mistrust of the West." Those Arabized students, he notes, more readily believed in "the infiltration into Algeria of Israeli women spies infected with AIDS … the mass conversion to Islam by millions of Americans," and other Islamist nonsense.

Dhabah ("Debbie") Almontaser, principal-designate of the Khalil Gibran International Academy
Specifics about the KGIA confirm these apprehensions, including its roster of sponsors and enthusiasts. The school's key figure, principal-designate Dhabah ("Debbie") Almontaser, has a record of extremist views, as William A. Mayer and Beila Rabinowitz have shown at PipeLineNews.org.
Arabs or Muslims, Ms. Almontaser says, are innocent of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001: "I don't recognize the people who committed the attacks as either Arabs or Muslims." Instead, she blames September 11 on Washington's foreign policies, saying they "can have been triggered by the way the USA breaks its promises with countries across the world, especially in the Middle East, and the fact that it has not been a fair mediator."

At a community meeting with the New York Police Department commissioner, she berated the NYPD for using "FBI tactics" when informants were used to prevent a subway bombing, thereby polarizing the Muslim community. For Ms. Almontaser, it appears, preventing terrorism counts less than soothing Muslim sensibilities.

She calls George W. Bush a "nightmare" who is "trying to destroy the United States."

Rewarding these views, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a foreign-funded front organization, in 2005 bestowed an honor on Ms. Almontaser for her "numerous contributions" to the protection of civil liberties.

Her intentions for the KGIA should raise alarms. An Associated Press report paraphrases her saying that "the school won't shy away from sensitive topics such as colonialism and the Israeli-Palestinian crisis," and she notes that the school will "incorporate the Arabic language and Islamic culture." Islamic culture? Not what was advertised — but imbuing pan-Arabism and anti-Zionism, proselytizing for Islam, and promoting Islamist sympathies will predictably make up the school's true curriculum.

To express your concerns about this planned Arabic school, please write the New York City chancellor, Joel Klein, at JKlein@schools.nyc.gov.

From www.danielpipes.org | Original article available at: www.danielpipes.org/article/4441

April 24, 2007
Turkish Party’s Pick for President Worries Secularists

By SABRINA TAVERNISE
ISTANBUL, April 24 — Turkey’s majority political party today chose a prominent leader with an Islamic background to compete for the presidency, a move expected to extend the party’s reach into the heart of Turkey’s secular establishment — and boost a new class of self-described Muslim moderates — for the first time in this country’s history.

The choice of Abdullah Gul, 56, the affable, English-speaking foreign minister who is Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s closest political ally, is expected to be confirmed by parliament in several rounds of voting that begin on Friday.

Turkey is a Muslim country, but its state, set up in 1923 by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, is strictly secular, and the presidency is its most important office. The selection of Mr. Gul, whose wife wears a head scarf, is not likely to sit well with secular Turks, some of whom worry that their lifestyles — drinking alcohol, wearing miniskirts, and swimming in co-ed pools — could eventually be in danger.

Mr. Gul, an agile reformer who has long been his party’s public face abroad, nodded to those concerns in a press conference in Ankara after his nomination today, saying, “Our differences are our richness.” His candidacy was a minor concession. The choice most distasteful to the secular establishment was Mr. Erdogan himself, who deftly bowed out.

Still, if Mr. Gul is confirmed, his party would occupy the posts of president, prime minister and parliamentary speaker, a line-up that opposition party leader, Deniz Baykal, called “unfavorable.”

“This picture would not match with the realities and needs of Turkey,” he said.

The party Mr. Gul helped found, known by its Turkish initials, AK, sprang from Turkey’s political Islamic movements of the 1990’s, but it moderated significantly after coming to power on a national scale in 2002. Since then, it has applied pragmatic policies that helped create an unprecedented economic boom and opened up the state in ways that the rigid secular elite had never imagined, in part to qualify it for membership of the European Union.

“This party has done more for the modernization of Turkey than all the secular parties in the previous years,” said Joost Lagendijk, chairman of the Turkey delegation of the European Parliament. “They were willing to open up the system, to challenge the elite.”

Although the party is publicly adamant about religion not entering policy, bridling at shorthand descriptions of it as pro-Islamic, it draws much of its support from Turkey’s religiously conservative heartland.

Once on the periphery, these traditional Turks are now emerging into mainstream society as a powerful middle class that has driven Turkey’s economic boom. They are also beginning to press Turkey’s long-ruling elite for change.

“These are the new forces, the new social powers,” said Ali Bulac, a columnist for a conservative, mainstream newspaper in Istanbul. “They are very devout. They don’t drink. They don’t gamble. They don’t take holidays.”

“They are loaded with a huge energy.” he added. “This energy has been blocked by the state.”

That energy has helped drive a spectacular economic boom in Turkey. In the country’s two largest cities, progress dazzles. Shiny new fuel-efficient taxis zip down tulip-lined streets. New parks have opened. The air is no longer polluted. The economy has doubled in size in the four years since the AK party came to power, a growth spurt that was kept on track by its strict adherence to an economic program prescribed by the International Monetary Fund.

“Socially pious administrations both locally and centrally have made enormous progress for the modernization of the country,” said Omer Bolat, director of Musiad, the business association that represents the new class. “Unfortunately the secular circles are very much for status quo.”

The growth has drawn more observant Turks out of their homes into public life. The city pool and gym in the lower-middle-class neighborhood of Okmeydani is a testament to the ascendancy of the pious middle class in Turkey. Few observant women attended in 1996 when the pool opened, an attendant said. Now they fill treadmills and lap lanes.

Dondu Koc, 46, pedaled an exercise bike in a room of women last Wednesday.

“I always wanted to but there were no places to go,” she said, small beads of sweat on her forehead. Before Mr. Erdogan’s stewardship as mayor of the city, there was only one public pool. Now there are three and another five under construction.

The city gym and pool are separated by sex, an arrangement Ms. Koc likes because it lets her and other covered women to pedal, jog and swim without their veils. But the division irritates secular Turks who see it as an infringement on their own lifestyle preferences.

“There shouldn’t be a split like this,” said a woman whose hair was still wet from her swim. “We sit next to each other; we should swim next to each other too.”

New Allies on The Amazon
McDonald's, Greenpeace Unite To Prevent Rainforest Clearing
By Marc Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 24, 2007; Page D01

It was an unusual group to be sharing a small boat making its way up the Amazon River.

There were four environmental activists from Greenpeace -- Brazilians and others who flew in from Europe for the trip. And there were four corporate leaders of McDonald's, the world's largest fast-food chain, from its Chicago headquarters and from Europe.

An unlikely team of Greenpeace activists and McDonald's executives took a boat up the Amazon to see the destruction of rainforest partly driven by McDonald's demand for soybeans. (Photo Courtesy Of Bob Langert -- Mcdonald's; Graphic By Laris Karklis And Karen Yourish -- The Washington Post)
related content
Biotech foods are unpopular in Europe, so most companies doing business there make a point of using only soy, corn and other staples that have not been genetically modified.
Brazilian growers saw a market opportunity in non-modified soy. With help from multinational companies such as Cargill, which supplies McDonald's with Brazilian soy for chicken feed, farmers began cutting down trees in the interior of the Amazon rainforest to grow soy and other crops.
Greenpeace and Chicago-based McDonald's pressured Cargill and other soy traders into placing a two-year moratorium on the purchase of any soy from newly deforested areas.
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The eight were in the rainforest together on a mission to see firsthand where farmers were cutting down virgin forest to grow soy beans for, among other customers, McDonald's. And though Greenpeace had not long ago been accusing McDonald's of complicity in the deforestation, by the time of the Amazon trip in January, the eight officials were calling each other partners.

Those weren't just words. The ubiquitous fast-food company and the global environmentalists had already jointly pressured the biggest soy traders in Brazil into placing an unprecedented two-year moratorium on the purchase of any soy from newly deforested areas.

Officials at Cargill, the huge multinational company that supplied McDonald's with Brazilian soy for chicken feed and ultimately pushed fellow soy traders to accept the moratorium, confirmed that the odd couple of McDonald's and Greenpeace made it happen.

"McDonald's and, yes, Greenpeace, were the catalysts," said Laurie Johnson, a spokeswoman for Cargill. "They brought together a wide range of people and created a sense of real urgency."

The tale of how the two heavyweights came together reflects the complexities, pressures and ironies of the globalized economy. It also illustrates how once-unthinkable partnerships can become forces for addressing environmental and social problems that governments cannot handle.

With Brazilian soy, the problem at least partially grew out of an unrelated dispute over genetically modified food products.

While U.S. consumers and many others largely accept biotech foods, the products are unpopular with Europeans, and most companies doing business in Europe make a point of using only soy, corn and other staples that have not been genetically modified. With U.S. and other major soy growers increasingly turning to biotech crops, Brazilian growers saw a market opportunity in traditional, non-modified soy.

With help from multinational companies such as Cargill, some Brazilian farmers began cutting down trees in the interior of the Amazon rainforest to grow soy and other crops. The scale of the operation did not become apparent until 2003, when Greenpeace and other activists saw satellite maps that showed significant new deforestation. Because of the Amazon rainforest's central role in modulating global climate, the maps caused immediate alarm.

Greenpeace's investigators searched records to see which companies were involved in the destruction and which were buying the rainforest soy. One relatively small-scale but high-profile buyer was McDonald's European operation, which fed the soy to chickens destined to become McNuggets.

Greenpeace and other non-governmental organizations have become adept at putting pressure on big companies like McDonald's, which don't want customers to think they are unfriendly to the environment or mistreating animals. Greenpeace not only staged rainforest protests at McDonald's outlets in Europe last spring, but it also sent its ship, the Arctic Sunrise, to block Cargill's port in the Amazon city of Santarem.

Following the protests, the fast-food chain and the environmentalists got together and brought in Cargill. The company had opened a port and series of soy silos at Santarem in 2003 and encouraged some farmers to grow soy for it -- though Johnson, the spokeswoman, said the company thought most of the 150 to 200 farmers it worked with were tilling land that had been deforested long ago. She also said the port was used to ship soy grown outside the rainforest.

At first, Cargill took the stand that it was bringing economic development to an impoverished region and was already working with the Nature Conservancy and others to promote good stewardship practices. Greenpeace, and soon additional environmental groups, replied that the company was inducing farmers to move into environmentally fragile areas, where they often began planting with fake property papers, without proper permits and with little understanding of forest conservation.

Faced with its unhappy McDonald's client, Cargill brought together other Brazilian soy traders, and they ultimately agreed on the moratorium -- an unthinkable action just a few months before.

"We really didn't see an immediate problem with the soy farmers, but we could see how it could grow into a big problem in the future," Cargill's Johnson said. "The moratorium will give everyone time to plan how to better control the farming and protect the forest."

A working group of soy traders and environmental and community organizations is scheduled to meet this month to discuss the soy farmers, this time with representatives of the Brazilian government, too.

For McDonald's, working with a group like Greenpeace was unusual but not unprecedented. The company has joined with a variety of environmental and animal welfare groups over the years on issues including the company's packaging, the use of environmentally harmful refrigerants and treatment of farm animals. Creating a responsible supply chain is part of the corporate culture, its officials say, though it clearly is also good public relations.

"We listened to what Greenpeace was saying about soy from the rainforest, and I think we surprised them at first by saying, 'You're right. We have a problem here,' " said Bob Langert, McDonald's vice president for corporate citizenship. "We have a firm policy against using beef -- or any other products -- that come from the rainforest. So when we learned that some of our soy was coming from there, we got involved."

John Sauven, head of Greenpeace's rainforest initiative, said that joint efforts between nonprofit groups and major corporations have become increasingly important and sophisticated but that the idea of partnering with McDonald's was hardly in the initial plan.

"We have an active campaign to save the rainforests, and it turned out that we and McDonald's had very similar goals," he said. "We didn't start out with the idea of focusing on McDonald's or partnering with them, and someday we may well go after them again on other issues. But on this one, they played a highly positive role."

John Buchanan, director for agriculture and fisheries for Conservation International, a nonprofit group, said his organization has been working with the big traders of soy and other grains in Brazil for some time, helping them create "environmental scorecards" to see how they are doing throughout their long supply chains.

Buchanan said Greenpeace and McDonald's uncovered a growing problem that had not been flagged before. Together they "shook the tree" in "soil that had been cultivated by others," and now unprecedented environmental progress is possible, he said.

"You never know how things will ultimately turn out, but this could be an important model for attacking very complicated social and environmental problems in the future," he said.