...Or Does It Explode?

Friday Foto: Mocha, Al-Makha, Mocca

However you spell it, this seaside Yemeni town has seen better days, even though it is forever immortalized in coffee shops worldwide.

Another Silly Video

To stave off a bout of depression over the past few weeks' news, we offer this YouTube classic, sent along by a long-time reader:

Pleading to the Guardian Council (Wednesday Wackiness)

New York Times Profiles Jane Novak

Cool story about a mom in New Jersey who is freaking out the Yemeni regime:

Jane Novak, a 46-year-old stay-at-home mother of two in New Jersey, has never been to Yemen. She speaks no Arabic, and freely admits that until a few years ago, she knew nothing about that strife-torn south Arabian country.

And yet Ms. Novak has become so well known in Yemen that newspaper editors say they sell more copies if her photograph — blond and smiling — is on the cover. Her blog, an outspoken news bulletin on Yemeni affairs, is banned there. The government’s allies routinely vilify her in print as an American agent, a Shiite monarchist, a member of Al Qaeda, or “the Zionist Novak.”

The worst of her many offenses is her dogged campaign on behalf of a Yemeni journalist, Abdul Karim al-Khaiwani, who incurred his government’s wrath by writing about a bloody rebellion in the far north of the country. He is on trial on sedition charges that could bring the death penalty, with a verdict expected Wednesday.

Ms. Novak, working from a laptop in her Monmouth County living room “while the kids are at school,” has started an Internet petition to free Mr. Khaiwani. She has enlisted Yemeni politicians, journalists, human rights activists and others around the globe. Her blog goes well beyond the Khaiwani case and has become a crucial outlet for opposition journalists and political figures, who feed her tips on Yemeni political intrigue by e-mail or text message.

She says her campaign is a matter of basic principle. “This is a country that lets Al Qaeda people go free, and they’re putting a journalist on trial for doing his job?” she said. “It’s just completely crazy.”

Crazy, indeed!

"Islamic world urged to stand against Western-style human rights"

The headline comes from Iran's Islamic Republic News Agency, a.k.a. the Pravda of the Mullahs:

Secretary of the Human Rights Headquarters of Iran's Judiciary Mohammad-Javad Larijani called on all Islamic states on Thursday to stand against the Western-style human rights.

Addressing a local gathering of judiciary officials, Larijani criticized the West's interpretation from the human rights.

He stated that after the victory of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, the country committed to fulfill international undertakings on human rights.

Iran has decided to fulfill those international commitments in accordance to its interest as an Islamic country, stressed the official.

He explained, "Tehran's strategy is to conform international commitments on human rights to the Islamic concepts and then enforce" them nationwide.

According to Larijani, only 20 percent of the international documents signed by Iran on human rights, were different, in words, from Islamic concepts.

"80 percent of international documents signed by Iran on the human rights issue are not literally different from Islamic principles," Larijani said.

It's really terrible how dictatorial regimes take universal standards of human rights and declare them "Western-style." Thugs like Larijani (who looks so thoughtful in the newswire photo) have it backwards. The Iranian people deserve universal human rights like freedom of expression, freedom of the press, and freedom of conscience - not the subversion of these rights rigidly enforced by the unelected Guardian Council of clerics.

Shirin Ebadi's Group Blasts Iranian Human Rights Record

A frank assessment:

"In the year 1386 alternative thinkers and those who are not in line with the ruling policies, regardless of their leanings, faced a lot of intimidation and sentences," the group said, referring to the Iranian year to March 2008.

"Freedom of expression and freedom of circulating information have further declined" since President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to office in August 2005, the report said.

"Censorship and indirect pressure has reached the highest level," it said, adding that 32 media workers were sentenced to jail, lashes and fines, and that 17 publications as well as eight news websites were shut down.

"Despite vast criticism against issuing and carrying out executions, they increased in the past year," it said, adding that at least nine minors were executed.

The Great Smoke-Out: Saudis Try to Burn out Yemeni Migrants

Saudi police apparently have taken a fire-y approach to immigration enforcement:

Human Rights Watch accused Saudi police on Wednesday of setting fire to a hiding place of Yemeni illegal migrants, 18 of whom suffered serious burns.

The New York-based watchdog charged that police had set fire on March 9 to a garbage dump in which 25 undocumented Yemenis were hiding, in an apparent bid to force them out...

Burn victim Majid Shami told HRW that police officers launched a flammable substance that started a fire which engulfed the hiding migrants in the dump.

"We all came out burning ... They shot into the air to prevent us from fleeing," he said, claiming that burn victims were taken for interrogation instead of to hospital.

Friday Foto: Isfahan Perspective

Iran Cracks Down (again) on Baha'is, Arresting Six

To be Baha'i in Iran is to tempt fate, thanks to the regime's complete ban on the faith:

Six Bahá’í leaders in Iran were arrested and taken to the notorious Evin prison yesterday in a sweep that is ominously similar to episodes in the 1980s when scores of Iranian Bahá’í leaders were summarily rounded up and killed.

The six men and women, all members of the national-level group that helped see to the minimum needs of Bahá’ís in Iran, were in their homes Wednesday morning when government intelligence agents entered and spent up to five hours searching each home, before taking them away.

The seventh member of the national coordinating group was arrested in early March in Mashhad after being summoned by the Ministry of Intelligence office there on an ostensibly trivial matter.

“We protest in the strongest terms the arrests of our fellow Bahá'ís in Iran,” said Bani Dugal, the principal representative of the Bahá’í International Community to the United Nations. “Their only crime is their practice of the Bahá’í Faith.”

“Especially disturbing is how this latest sweep recalls the wholesale arrest or abduction of the members of two national Iranian Bahá’í governing councils in the early 1980s -- which led to the disappearance or execution of 17 individuals,” she said.

“The early morning raids on the homes of these prominent Bahá’ís were well coordinated, and it is clear they represent a high-level effort to strike again at the Bahá’ís and to intimidate the Iranian Bahá’í community at large,” said Ms. Dugal.

Arrested yesterday were: Mrs. Fariba Kamalabadi, Mr. Jamaloddin Khanjani, Mr. Afif Naeimi, Mr. Saeid Rezaie, Mr. Behrouz Tavakkoli, and Mr. Vahid Tizfahm. All live in Tehran. Mrs. Kamalabadi, Mr. Khanjani, and Mr. Tavakkoli have been previously arrested and then released after periods ranging from five days to four months.

Arrested in Mashhad on 5 March 2008 was Mrs. Mahvash Sabet, who also resides in Tehran. Mrs. Sabet was summoned to Mashhad by the Ministry of Intelligence, ostensibly on the grounds that she was required to answer questions related to the burial of an individual in the Bahá’í cemetery in that city.

On 21 August 1980, all nine members of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of Iran were abducted and disappeared without a trace. It is certain that they were killed.

The National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of Iran was reconstituted soon after that but was again ravaged by the execution of eight of its members on 27 December 1981.

A number of members of local Bahá’í governing councils, known as local Spiritual Assemblies, were also arrested and executed in the early 1980s, before an international outcry forced the government to slow its execution of Bahá’ís. Since 1979, more than 200 Bahá’ís have been killed or executed in Iran, although none have been executed since 1998.

In 1983, the government outlawed all formal Bahá’í administrative institutions and the Iranian Bahá’í community responded by disbanding its National Spiritual Assembly, which is an elected governing council, along with some 400 local level elected governing councils. Bahá'ís throughout Iran also suspended nearly all of their regular organizational activity.

The informal national-level coordinating group, known as the Friends, was established with the knowledge of the government to help cope with the diverse needs of Iran’s 300,000-member Baháí community, which is the country’s largest religious minority.

Three Years for Tariq Baiasi

Down goes another Syrian blogger:

The State Security Court in Damascus has sentenced Tariq to three years after lessening it from six years to three years (originally, Tariq received three years for each of the following charges):

1- Dwindling the national feeling.

2-Weakening the national ethos.

The militarily security arrested Tariq on 7-7-2007 for leaving a comment on websites considered “suspicious” by the Syrian government.