In other news, the Senate continued to fund the existence of the deathly School of the Americas and ILEAs (International Law Enforcement Academies) in Latin America. How do they think Latin Americans are feeling? Something like after a good beating? You gotta wonder: where in the world is the US making friends these days? Saudi Arabia?
If you simply google "School of the Americas", the top pages (except for the US military's site) all mention human rights abuses. Excerpts: "Training manuals used at the SOA and elsewhere from the early 1980s through 1991 promoted techniques that violated human rights and democratic standards. SOA graduates continue to surface in news reports regarding both current human rights cases and new reports on past cases.
Another way to look at it: is it worth spending the many (7.5) millions required to keep the SOA open? Or should we rather not cut budget on items like shelters domestic violence victims (35).
An interesting report on "the great divide: how westerners and muslims view each other"; includes European muslims' views as well.
A rare point of agreement between Westerners and Muslims is that both believe that Muslim nations should be more economically prosperous than they are today. But they gauge the problem quite differently. Muslim publics have an aggrieved view of the West - they are much more likely than Americans or Western Europeans to blame Western policies for their own lack of prosperity. For their part, Western publics instead point to government corruption, lack of education and Islamic fundamentalism as the biggest obstacles to Muslim prosperity.
The chasm between Muslims and the West is also seen in judgments about how the other civilization treats women. Western publics, by lopsided margins, do not think of Muslims as "respectful of women." But half or more in four of the five Muslim publics surveyed say the same thing about people in the West.
Concerns over Islamic extremism are widely shared in Western publics and Muslim publics alike. But an exception is China, where 59% express little or no concern over Islamic extremism.
Nearly four-in-ten Germans (37%), and 29% of Americans, say there is a natural conflict between being a devout Christian and living in a modern society.
1 comment:
Dan, I think maybe the issue is not so much whether Zarqawi was a bad guy or not (there's a fair consensus on that). However, our value-system is supposedly based on the rule of law and I do find that there is a worrying trend of extra-judiciary executions be it in Palestine, Yemen or Irak. I do understand the complexeties of dealing with this new type of threat but I feel politicians are not doing enough to safeguard our real way of life - that is freedom, the Habeas Corpus, Human Rights and the rule of law.
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