Iraq (2 Viewers)

so i work with a couple of jewish folk who are forever forwarding me shit about how Bush being in Iraq is a good thing, and how Europe is so weak for not standing up to militant Islamism as the White House does. it's doing my head in. what would be a polite way of telling them to fuck off and stop sending me this crap? i can't think of anything besides "fuck off and stop sending me this crap"....
 
Lord Damian said:
so i work with a couple of jewish folk who are forever forwarding me shit about how Bush being in Iraq is a good thing, and how Europe is so weak for not standing up to militant Islamism as the White House does. it's doing my head in. what would be a polite way of telling them to fuck off and stop sending me this crap? i can't think of anything besides "fuck off and stop sending me this crap"....
Click to expand...

I don't see anything wrong with "fuck off and stop sending me this crap" Damo. That'll work ...
 
Lord Damian said:
so i work with a couple of jewish folk who are forever forwarding me shit about how Bush being in Iraq is a good thing, and how Europe is so weak for not standing up to militant Islamism as the White House does. it's doing my head in. what would be a polite way of telling them to fuck off and stop sending me this crap? i can't think of anything besides "fuck off and stop sending me this crap"....
Click to expand...

http://www.iraqbodycount.net/

that'll learn em.
 
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,1740361,00.html


Iraqi woman's Baghdad blog in the running for £30,000 book prize

John Ezard
Monday March 27, 2006
The Guardian


Buy Baghdad Burning at the Guardian bookshop

An anonymous Iraqi woman has become the first blog author to be in the running for a big literary prize for a book published between hard covers.
Baghdad Burning, by a 26-year-old author who has won an international readership under the pen name Riverbend, is longlisted for the £30,000 Samuel Johnson award. In the list, announced today, she is up against 18 other books including Alan Bennett's latest bestseller, histories of the cold war and the great wall of China, and a biography of the 19th-century cookbook author Mrs Beeton. The Guardian carried an extract from Riverbend's title last summer.


Article continues

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The small literary publisher Marion Boyars brought out Baghdad Burning last year, classifying it under biography and memoir. The publishing house says it knows Riverbend's identity but respects her wish to remain anonymous.
It has already come third in the Lettre Ulysses prize for Reportage, winning £14,000, and was shortlisted for an Index on Censorship freedom of expression award.

Riverbend began the blog with the words: "I'm female, Iraqi and 24. I survived the war. That's all you need to know. It's all that matters these days anyway."

University-educated Riverbend worked as a computer programmer before the invasion which began on March 20, 2003.

She lost her job, she told her readers, when it became too dangerous for Iraqi women to travel to work alone.

The Long list

Untold Stories Alan Bennett
The Sale of the Late King's Goods Gerry Brotton
Bad Faith Carmen Callil
The Ongoing Moment Geoff Dyer
The Cold War John Lewis Gaddis
Mozart's Women Jane Glover
The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton Kathryn Hughes
The Sailor in the Wardrobe Hugo Hamilton
Post War Tony Judt
The Great Wall: Against the World 1000BC - 2000AD Julia Lovell
Ancient Americans Charles C Mann
Rosebery Leo McKinstry
Ivan's War Catherine Merridale
Before the Fall-Out Diana Preston
The Orientalist Tom Reiss
Baghdad Burning Riverbend (anonymous, but identity known)
1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare James Shapiro
Witnesses of War Nicholas Stargardt
After the Victorians AN Wilson





Full coverage
Special report: Iraq
The trial of Saddam Hussein

Britain and Iraq
In memoriam: 100 British troops killed in Iraq
Special report: UK politics and Iraq

Chronology
January 1 2005 - present
Feb 1 2004 - 31 Dec 2004
July 16 1979 - Jan 31 2004

Interactive guides
Saddam's trial
More click-through graphics on Iraq

Key documents
Full text of speeches and documents

Audio reports
Audio reports on Iraq

Links
Provisional authority: rebuilding Iraq
Iraqi-American chamber of commerce
Wikipedia: Iraq
 
Status of reconstruction

50% - Proportion of Iraqis with access to clean drinking water before the war.
32% - Proportion of Iraqis with access to clean drinking water now.

16-24 - Hours per day of electrical power to homes in Baghdad before the war.
Under 4 - Hours of electric power to Baghdad homes now.

2.5 million - Iraq's peak prewar oil production in barrels per day (bpd)
1.84 million - Iraq's oil production now (bpd)

Sources: AP reporting, Brookings Institute, Pentagon, U.S. congressional and budget officials.
 
Satirical Submissions

TO: Letters, The Guardian 14 November 2004
A MODEST PROPOSAL

http://www.swiftsociety.com/submissions/satire.html

Dear Sir,

The current battle raging around the city of Fajullah is indeed most
regrettable and no-one laments the consequent loss of life more than yours truly. But it seems to me that beyond the wastage of life lies a perhaps still greater tragedy, viz. the wastage of perfectly good human organs that could be used to save lives in another context.

I hear that an increasing number of US citizens now suffer from potentially life-threatening obesity and will therefore presumably soon require heart transplant surgery in order to survive. I hear also of an unprecedented upsurge in alcohol abuse amongst college students and can only assume that not too far in the future demand for new livers will reach a corresponding peak.

Given that at least 1000 insurgents have been killed in Fajullah in the last week or so, would it not be possible to have on hand an organ retrieval team which could retrieve the hearts and livers of these unfortunate people for whom in any case nothing more can be done (either by the propaganda teams or the medics). They are after all Muslims and therefore their livers are presumably in excellent shape. Many of the most hardened insurgents, moreover, are apparently children and so their hearts will have suffered a minimum amount of ordinary wear and tear.

In order to deflect the protests of sentimentalists I suggest that the organ retrival squad should be organized and paid for by the United Nations (although presumably remaining under the US Supreme Command). This United Nations Organ Retrieval Squad (or UNORG) could arrange for fleets of refrigerated ambulances to wait outside Fajullah or other siege sites from where the organs could be sorted, graded, and flown at high speed to the recipient transplant centers.

A proportion of the organs harvested might go to other destinations than the USA although, needless to say, only those countries who have supported President Bush's "Operation Iraqi Freedom" would be entitled to a share. Clearly the largest third party beneficiary would thus be the United Kingdom. We might even put in a special order for brains.

Ben Thompson
 
'No one knows what we are going through'

Women in Iraq are living a nightmare that is hidden from the west. Now one has turned film-maker to give us a window on to what they endure. She tells Natasha Walter what she saw

Monday May 8, 2006
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1769776,00.html


Rayya Osseilly is an Iraqi doctor who cares for other women in the beleaguered city of Qaim. Unsurprisingly, her tale is not a happy one. "I never feel that today is better than yesterday," she says. "It always seems that yesterday was better than today." Looking at the bombed-out remains of the hospital where she works, it is clear she is struggling against the odds.
It is unusual to see at close quarters what is going on for women in cities like Qaim, which last year came under heavy attack from American troops. Access for the western media is severely restricted. Now, though, we have a window on to Qaim thanks to another Iraqi woman, a film-maker who has travelled through the country speaking to widows and children, to doctors and students, in pursuit of the reality of her fellow country-women's lives.


The film-maker, who lives in Baghdad, wants to keep her identity secret because she fears reprisals, so I'll call her Zeina. When I spoke to her by telephone, the first first thing I asked her was why it is that she feels she has to hide her identity, and in her answer she does not distinguish between the government and the insurgents, in the way that we are taught to do here. "I feel the threat from the government and from the sectarian militias," she says. "The danger in Iraq comes from the Americans, from the sectarian militias - and, of course, it also comes from the crime, the gangs, the random kidnappings."
She decided she wanted to make this film because the things she saw every day were not being seen by the outside world. "No one sees what we are going through. All Iraqis are psychologically traumatised by what is happening. I have seen an eight-year old child who has involuntary tremors, whenever she hears an aeroplane or sees soldiers. I have seen families displaced. I have seen women forced into prostitution because of the poverty of their families."

Zeina was not a supporter of Saddam Hussein's regime. During his rule, she worked as a journalist and a translator of literary criticism. "Politically, before the war, I was not happy," she says. "So many things were not right. We had no freedom of speech, no freedom of expression. But I never imagined the change would be this way, so bad. I never imagined that at all."

From the very start of making her film, this fiftysomething writer knew she would be taking risks. "We travelled just two or three of us, in an ordinary car. It was dangerous. When we went into Qaim we had to travel across the desert because the Americans had blocked the road. It was dark when we got to Qaim, and we could see a cloud of dust ahead of us, and then there was a flash of light in the dust. We were driving right towards the guns. The driver moved so fast off the road that the car almost overturned. Then another time we were filming the hospital that had been bombed. We went to the roof of the hospital and the Americans began shooting at us. They didn't want to kill us, I think, but they wanted to threaten us, they wanted to show us who was in control."

That footage - of the film-makers taking refuge from gunfire in a ruined hospital - is in the finished film. Indeed, the film that has resulted from Zeina's journey is not a polished product, but more like a filmed blog, a series of telling observations that dip in and out of women's lives. Often you are left frustrated, eager for more context in which to slot these moments. But given that western journalists are so constrained by the security situation that most of the country has simply become invisible to us, you can forgive the film's limitations.

The film is particularly good at capturing the texture of family life lived in such insecurity, and one effective section concentrates on the tale of a young girl, just eight years old, who was picked up by American troops after an attack on the car in which she and her father and other Iraqis were travelling. The troops first took her to a military hospital, but then her family say she was held for three months. They were not informed of her whereabouts and she was interrogated by being asked to identify Iraqi corpses in photographs. Her grandfather eventually tracked her down in Baghdad, and as we see her weeping in his lap we sense her family's frustration at having no accountable authority to whom they can take their anger.

Zeina also shows, in a way that will surely give pause for thought even to those people in Britain who supported the war, how women's lives are being curtailed by the rise of religious fundamentalists who have stepped into the power vacuum. "All the time in the television and the newspapers there is propaganda concerning women. It is really disgusting, it is nothing to do with Islam, but everything to do with taking women back into the home and depriving them of rights."

To show the negative effects of these developments on women, Zeina travels to Basra. It will not come as news to those who have followed developments in southern Iraq that women are being forced to wear the hijab and prevented from living their lives freely. But it brings these developments home when we see young women and their families talking about being sent bullets and death threats because they played sport or did not wear a headscarf. As Zeina emphasises, this kind of experience is new to most women in Iraq, who enjoyed economic and social freedom before the occupation. "A while ago, I was looking at photographs of my aunt in college in the 60s, wearing pants and sleeveless tops, playing sports in the college yard; and then I looked at the photographs of the women in college today, and they are covered in black from head to toe, their faces also covered."

Zeina says the responsibility for these developments squarely at the feet of the occupation - it has given sectarianism the opportunity to flourish. She simply laughs when I ask her whether she feels grateful for the democracy that America has given Iraq. "Democracy? What democracy? We do not have democracy. This democracy that Bush talks about - it is a completely empty structure, based on sectarian and ethnic interests. How can you have democracy when you are afraid that your life will be threatened, or your husband will be killed if you express yourself freely? It is a bad joke."

Not all women in Iraq are against the occupation - women are as divided as the men, and we in the west have heard Iraqi women speak in support of the US war. But it is hard to resist the force of Zeina's passion as she describes the chaos that the war has brought to Iraq. She longs to go on documenting the situation of women, despite the very narrow limits within which she has to work. "I feel very restricted. I really want to report on the families who are being arrested, on the bodies that are being found, on torture. But either you are a journalist who is working with the Americans - embedded with them - or you jeopardise your life to cover these stories."

Despite the dangers, she is eager to communicate the reality as she sees it, and she would like us to listen: "I do want people in Britain to understand that the occupation of Iraq is not in the interests of Iraq or Britain. Your soldiers are getting killed and nothing is better for the Iraqi people. On the contrary, the situation is going from bad to worse every day, especially for women"

· Dispatches: Iraq: The Women's Story will be show tonight on ch4 at 8pm.
 
Not really, The Shias are a majority in Iraq and virtually all in the south bordering Iran so it's obvious Iran likes to have a voice in Iraq.
 
dont take that tone with me young man!

I mean it is weird that they have been fighting Iraq since time bgean and now its in chaos they want to go there with diplomats?


anyhow how crazy is this...

Autism - The signing of a disabled Portland man despite warnings reflects problems nationally for military enlistment
Sunday, May 07, 2006
MICHELLE ROBERTS
http://www.oregonlive.com/printer/printer.ssf?/base/news/1146882329307730.xml&coll=7
 
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