YouTube: The Zionist influence over Winston Churchill

YouTube:

The Zionist Influence Over Winston Churchill

Q & A session with WWII researcher David Irving commenting on Winston Churchill's Jewish ancestry and about how the Zionist Network was able to drag America into World War One and Two.

http://youtu.be/6BpENdKqu0U

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Criminal Rothschilds

'The answer to the Kennedy assassination is with the Federal Reserve Bank. Don't underestimate that. It's wrong to blame it on (CIA official James) Angleton and the CIA per se only. This is only one finger of the same hand. The people who supply the money are above the CIA.'
- wife of accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, told

http://youtu.be/USGSOViaulc

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David Irving # Winston Churchill ~ The Truth ~ The Whole Truth ~ And Nothing but The Truth

http://youtu.be/90GD3NHqCQM

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My today's tweets on Indian Parliament's struggle with Lokpal bill:

My today's tweets on Indian Parliament's struggle with Lokpal bill:

4 minutes ago
 

GhulamMuhammed Ghulam Muhammed

If Sonia Congress had been serious in bringing in a effective Lokpal Bill, it would not have ignored so many suggestions from Anna Team.

GhulamMuhammed Ghulam Muhammed

People are convinced that the corruption being the hallmark of political class, they have vested interest in not passing Jan Lokpal bill.

5 minutes ago

GhulamMuhammed Ghulam Muhammed

The charade that is being staged in Indian Parliament to legislate a watertight people's version of Lokpal bill is a big fraud on Indians.

2 minutes ago

In One Slum, Misery, Work, Politics and Hope - By Jim Yardley - The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/29/world/asia/in-indian-slum-misery-work-politics-and-hope.html?tntemail1=y&_r=1&emc=tnt&pagewanted=all

India's Way

In One Slum, Misery, Work, Politics and Hope

Adam Ferguson for The New York Times

As many as a million people live and work in Dharavi, a sprawling slum in Mumbai, India. More Photos »

By JIM YARDLEY

Published: December 28, 2011

MUMBAI, India — At the edge of India’s greatest slum, Shaikh Mobin’s decrepit shanty is cleaved like a wedding cake, four layers high and sliced down the middle. The missing half has been demolished. What remains appears ready for demolition, too, with temporary walls and a rickety corrugated roof.

India’s Way

Articles in this series are examining the messy and maddening road to progress in India.

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Getting Ahead in Dharavi

GRAPHIC: An Industrial Slum at the Heart of Mumbai

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Adam Ferguson for The New York Times

An extended family of 15 people lives in a Dharavi house with 180 square feet of space. More Photos »
 

Enlarge This Image

Adam Ferguson for The New York Times

Drawn by hopes for a job, migrants from rural India crowd into Dharavi, a vast slum in Mumbai. More Photos »

Yet inside, carpenters are assembling furniture on the ground floor. One floor up, men are busily cutting and stitching blue jeans. Upstairs from them, workers are crouched over sewing machines, making blouses. And at the top, still more workers are fashioning men’s suits and wedding apparel. One crumbling shanty. Four businesses.

In the labyrinthine slum known as Dharavi are 60,000 structures, many of them shanties, and as many as one million people living and working on a triangle of land barely two-thirds the size of Central Park in Manhattan. Dharavi is one of the world’s most infamous slums, a cliché of Indian misery. It is also a churning hive of workshops with an annual economic output estimated to be $600 million to more than $1 billion.

“This is a parallel economy,” said Mr. Mobin, whose family is involved in several businesses in Dharavi. “In most developed countries, there is only one economy. But in India, there are two.”

India is a rising economic power, even as huge portions of its economy operate in the shadows. Its “formal” economy consists of businesses that pay taxes, adhere to labor regulations and burnish the country’s global image. India’s “informal” economy is everything else: the hundreds of millions of shopkeepers, farmers, construction workers, taxi drivers, street vendors, rag pickers, tailors, repairmen, middlemen, black marketeers and more.

This divide exists in other developing countries, but it is a chasm in India: experts estimate that the informal sector is responsible for the overwhelming majority of India’s annual economic growth and as much as 90 percent of all employment. The informal economy exists largely outside government oversight and, in the case of slums like Dharavi, without government help or encouragement.

For years, India’s government has tried with mixed success to increase industrial output by developing special economic zones to lure major manufacturers. Dharavi, by contrast, could be called a self-created special economic zone for the poor. It is a visual eyesore, a symbol of raw inequality that epitomizes the failure of policy makers to accommodate the millions of rural migrants searching for opportunity in Indian cities. It also underscores the determination of those migrants to come anyway.

“Economic opportunity in India still lies, to a large extent, in urban areas,” said Eswar Prasad, a leading economist. “The problem is that government hasn’t provided easy channels to be employed in the formal sector. So the informal sector is where the activity lies.”
Dharavi is Dickens and Horatio Alger and Upton Sinclair. It is ingrained in the Indian imagination, depicted in books or Bollywood movies, as well as in the Oscar-winning hit “Slumdog Millionaire.” 
Dharavi has been examined in a Harvard Business School case study and dissected by urban planners from Europe to Japan. Yet merely trying to define Dharavi is contested.

“Maybe to anyone who has not seen Dharavi, Dharavi is a slum, a huge slum,” said Gautam Chatterjee, the principal secretary overseeing the Housing Ministry in Maharashtra State. “But I have also looked at Dharavi as a city within a city, an informal city.”

It is an informal city as layered as Mr. Mobin’s sheared building — and as fragile. Plans to raze and redevelop Dharavi into a “normal” neighborhood have stirred a debate about what would be gained but also about what might be lost by trying to control and regulate Dharavi. Every layer of Dharavi, when exposed, reveals something far more complicated, and organic, than the concept of a slum as merely a warehouse for the poor.

One slum. Four layers. Four realities.

On the ground floor is misery.

One floor up is work.

Another floor up is politics.

And at the top is hope.

“Dharavi,” said Hariram Tanwar, 64, a local businessman, “is a mini-India.”
 
Misery

The streets smell of sewage and sweets. There are not enough toilets. There is not enough water. There is not enough space. Laborers sleep in sheds known as pongal houses, six men, maybe eight, packed into a single, tiny room — multiplied by many tiny rooms. Hygiene is terrible. Diarrhea and malaria are common. Tuberculosis floats in the air, spread by coughing or spitting. 

Dharavi, like the epic slums of Karachi, Pakistan, or Rio de Janeiro, is often categorized as a problem still unsolved, an emblem of inequity pressing against Mumbai, India’s richest and most glamorous city. A walk through Dharavi is a journey through a dank maze of ever-narrowing passages until the shanties press together so tightly that daylight barely reaches the footpaths below, as if the slum were a great urban rain forest, covered by a canopy of smoke and sheet metal.

Traffic bleats. Flies and mosquitoes settle on roadside carts of fruit and atop the hides of wandering goats. Ten families share a single water tap, with water flowing through the pipes for less than three hours every day, enough time for everyone to fill a cistern or two. Toilets are communal, with a charge of 3 cents to defecate. Sewage flows through narrow, open channels, slow-moving streams of green water and garbage.

At the slum’s periphery, Sion Hospital treats 3,000 patients every day, many from Dharavi, often children who are malnourished or have asthma or diarrhea. Premature tooth decay is so widespread in children that doctors call them dental cripples.

“People who come to Dharavi or other slum areas — their priority is not health,” said Dr. Pallavi Shelke, who works in Dharavi. “Their priority is earning.”

And that is what is perhaps most surprising about the misery of Dharavi: people come voluntarily. They have for decades. Dharavi once was known for gangs and violence, but today Dharavi is about work. Tempers sometimes flare, fights break out, but the police say the crime rate is actually quite low, even lower than in wealthier, less densely populated areas of the city. An outsider can walk through the slum and never feel threatened.

Misery is everywhere, as in miserable conditions, as in hardship. But people here do not speak of being miserable. People speak about trying to get ahead.
 
Work

The order was for 2,700 briefcases, custom-made gifts for a large bank to distribute during the Hindu holiday of Diwali. The bank contacted a supplier, which contacted a leather-goods store, which sent the order to a manufacturer. Had the order been placed in China, it probably would have landed in one of the huge coastal factories that employ thousands of rural migrants and have made China a manufacturing powerhouse.

In India, the order landed in the Dharavi workshop of Mohammed Asif. Mr. Asif’s work force consists of 22 men, who sit cross-legged beside mounds of soft, black leather, an informal assembly line, except that the factory floor is a cramped room doubling as a dormitory: the workers sleep above, in a loft. The briefcases were due in two weeks.

“They work hard,” Mr. Asif said. “They work from 8 in the morning until 11 at night because the more they do, the more they will earn to send back to their families. They come here to earn.”

Unlike China, India does not have colossal manufacturing districts because India has chosen not to follow the East Asian development model of building a modern economy by starting with low-skill manufacturing. If China’s authoritarian leaders have deliberately steered the country’s surplus rural work force into urban factories, Indian leaders have done little to promote job opportunities in cities for rural migrants. In fact, right-wing political parties in Mumbai have led sometimes-violent campaigns against migrants.

Yet India’s rural migrants, desperate to escape poverty, flock to the cities anyway. Dharavi is an industrial gnat compared with China’s manufacturing heartland — and the working conditions in the slum are almost certainly worse than those in major Chinese factories — but Dharavi does seem to share China’s can-do spirit. Almost everything imaginable is made in Dharavi, much of it for sale in India, yet much of it exported around the world.

Today, Dharavi is as much a case study in industrial evolution as a slum. Before the 1980s, Dharavi had tanneries that dumped their effluent into the surrounding marshlands. Laborers came from southern India, especially the state of Tamil Nadu, many of them Muslims or lower-caste Hindus, fleeing drought, starvation or caste discrimination. Once Tamil Nadu’s economy strengthened, migrants began arriving from poverty-stricken states in central India.

Later, the tanneries were closed down for environmental reasons, moving south to the city of Chennai, or to other slums elsewhere. Yet Dharavi had a skilled labor force, as well as cheap costs for workshops and workers, and informal networks between suppliers, middlemen and workshops. So Dharavi’s leather trade moved up the value chain, as small workshops used raw leather processed elsewhere to make handbags for some of the priciest stores in India.

During this same period, Dharavi’s migration waves became a torrent, as people streamed out of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, the teeming, backward northern states now at the locus of rural Indian poverty.

“After 1990, immigration was tremendous,” said Ramachandra Korde, a longtime civic activist commonly known around Dharavi as Bhau, or brother. “It used to be that 100 to 300 to 400 people came to Dharavi every day. Just to earn bread and butter.”

Leatherwork is now a major industry in Dharavi, but only one. Small garment factories have proliferated throughout the slum, making children’s clothes or women’s dresses for the Indian market or export abroad. According to a 2007 study sponsored by the United States Agency for International Development, Dharavi has at least 500 large garment workshops (defined as having 50 or more sewing machines) and about 3,000 smaller ones. Then there are the 5,000 leather shops. Then there are the food processors that make snacks for the rest of India.

And then still more: printmakers, embroiderers and, most of all, the vast recycling operations that sort, clean and reprocess much of India’s discarded plastic.

“We are cleaning the dirt of the country,” said Fareed Siddiqui, the general secretary of the Dharavi Businessmen’s Welfare Association.

Mr. Asif, the leather shop owner, is a typical member of Dharavi’s entrepreneur class.

Now 35, he arrived at the slum in 1988, leaving his village in Bihar after hearing about Dharavi from another family. He jumped on a train to Mumbai. He was 12.

“Someone from my village used to live here,” he said. “We were poor and had nothing.”

Mr. Asif began as an apprentice in a leather shop, learning how to use the heavy cutting scissors, then the sewing machines that stitch the seams on leather goods, until he finally opened his own shop. As a poor migrant, Mr. Asif could never have arranged the loans and workspace if Dharavi were part of the organized economy; he rents his workshop from the owner of the leather-goods store, who got the order from the supplier for the briefcases for the bank.

Today, nearly all of Mr. Asif’s workers are also from Bihar, one of the myriad personal networks that help direct migrants out of the villages. Mohammad Wazair earns roughly 6,000 rupees a month, or about $120, as a laborer in Mr. Asif’s workshop. He sends about half home every month to support his wife and two children. He is illiterate, but he is now paying for his children to attend a modest private school in their village. He visits them twice a year.

“In the village, what options do we have?” he asked. “We can either work in the fields or drive a rickshaw. What is the future in that? Here, I can learn a skill and earn money. At least my children will get an education.”
 
Politics

“Now the place is gold,” said Mr. Mobin, the businessman.
He is sitting on the top floor of his building, surrounded by men’s suits in the apparel shop. His family began in the leather business in the 1970s and has since moved into plastic recycling, garments and real estate. Slum property might not seem like a good investment, but Dharavi is now one of the most valuable pieces of real estate in Mumbai. Which is a problem, as Mr. Mobin sees it.

“People from all over the city, and the politicians, are making hue and cry that Dharavi must be developed,” he said. “But they are not developing it for the people of Dharavi. They will provide office buildings and shopping for the richer class.”

As Mumbai came to symbolize India’s expanding economy — and the country’s expanding inequality — Dharavi began attracting wider attention. Mumbai grew as Dharavi grew. If the slum once sat on the periphery, it now is a scar in the middle of what is a peninsular, land-starved city — an eyesore and embarrassment, if also a harbinger of a broader problem.

Today, more than eight million people live in Mumbai’s slums, according to some estimates, a huge figure that accounts for more than half the city’s population. Many people live in slums because they cannot afford to live anywhere else, and government efforts to build affordable housing have been woefully inadequate. But many newer slums are also microversions of Dharavi’s informal economy. Some newer migrants even come to Dharavi to learn new skills, as if Dharavi were a slum franchising operation.

“Dharavi is becoming their steppingstone,” said Vineet Joglekar, a civic leader here. “They learn jobs, and then they go to some other slum and set up there.”

Dharavi still exists on the margins. Few businesses pay taxes. Few residents have formal title to their land. Political parties court the slum for votes and have slowly delivered things taken for granted elsewhere: some toilets, water spigots.

But the main political response to Dharavi’s unorthodox success has been to try to raze it. India’s political class discovered Dharavi in the 1980s, when any migrant who jabbed four posts into an empty patch of dirt could claim a homestead. Land was scarce, and some people began dumping stones or refuse to fill the marshes at the edge of the Arabian Sea.

Rajiv Gandhi, then India’s prime minister, saw the teeming slum and earmarked one billion rupees, or about $20 million, for a program to build affordable, hygienic housing for Dharavi’s poor. Local officials siphoned off some of the money for other municipal projects while also building some tenements that today are badly decayed. The proliferation of shanties continued.

Three decades later, the basic impulse set in motion by Mr. Gandhi — that Dharavi should be redeveloped and somehow standardized — still prevails. But the incentives have changed. Dharavi’s land is now worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Private developers do not see a slum but a piece of property convenient to the airport, surrounded by train stations and adjacent to a sleek office park.
A sweeping plan approved in 2006 would provide free apartments and commercial space to many Dharavi residents while allowing private investors to develop additional space for sale at market rates. 

Many Dharavi civic and business leaders endorsed the plan, even as critics denounced the proposal as a giveaway to rich developers.

For now, the project remains largely stalled, embroiled in bureaucratic infighting, even as a different, existential debate is under way about the potential risks of redeveloping Dharavi and shredding the informal networks that bind it together.

“They are talking about redeveloping Dharavi,” said Mohammad Khurshid Sheikh, who owns a leather shop. “But if they do, the whole chain may break down. These businesses can work because Dharavi attracts labor. People can work here and sleep in the workshop. If there is redevelopment, they will not get that room so cheap. They will not come back here.”

Matias Echanove, an architect and urban planner, has long argued that Dharavi should not be dismissed as merely a slum, since it operates as a contained residential and commercial city. He said razing Dharavi, or even completely redeveloping it, would only push residents into other slums.

“They are going to create actual, real slums,” he said. “Nobody is saying Dharavi is a paradise. But we need to understand the dynamics, so that when there is an intervention by the government, it doesn’t destroy what is there.”
 
Hope

Sylva Vanita Baskar was born in Dharavi. She is now 39, already a widow. Her husband lost his vigor and then his life to tuberculosis. She borrowed money to pay for his care, and now she rents her spare room to four laborers for an extra $40 a month. She lives in a room with her four children. Two sons sleep in a makeshift bed. She and her two youngest children sleep on straw mats on the stone floor.

“They do everything together,” she said, explaining how her children endure such tight quarters. “They fight together. They study together.”

The computer sits on a small table beside the bed, protected, purchased for $354 from savings, even though the family has no Internet connection. The oldest son stores his work on a pen drive and prints it somewhere else. Ms. Baskar, a seamstress, spends five months’ worth of her income, almost $400, to send three of her children to private schools. Her daughter wants to be a flight attendant. Her youngest son, a mechanical engineer.

“My daughter is getting a better education, and she will get a better job,” Ms. Baskar said. “The children’s lives should be better. Whatever hardships we face are fine.”

Education is hope in Dharavi. On a recent afternoon outside St. Anthony’s, a parochial school in the slum, Hindu mothers in saris waited for their children beside Muslim mothers in burqas. The parents were not concerned about the crucifix on the wall; they wanted their children to learn English, the language considered to be a ticket out of the slums in India.

Once, many parents in Dharavi sent their children to work, not to school, and child labor remains a problem in some workshops. 

Dharavi’s children have always endured a stigma. When parents tried to send their sons and daughters outside the slum for schooling, the Dharavi students often received a bitter greeting.

“Sometimes, the teacher would not accept our children, or would treat them with contempt,” said Mohammad Hashim, 64. 

“Sometimes, they would say, ‘Why are you Dharavi children over here?’ ”

Mr. Hashim responded by opening his own school, tailored for Muslim children, offering a state-approved secular education. He initially offered the curriculum in Urdu but not a single parent enrolled a child. He switched to English, and now his classrooms are overflowing with Muslim students.

Discrimination is still common toward Dharavi. Residents complain that they are routinely rejected for credit cards if they list a Dharavi address. Private banks are reluctant to make loans to businessmen in Dharavi or to open branches. Part of this stigma is as much about social structure as about living in the slum itself.

“They all belong to the untouchables caste,” said Mr. Korde, the longtime social activist, “or are Muslims.”

But money talks in Mumbai, and Dharavi now has money, even millionaires, mixed in with its misery and poverty. Mohammad Mustaqueem, 57, arrived as a 13-year-old boy. He slept outside, in one of the narrow alleyways, and remembers being showered with garbage as people tossed it out in the morning. Today, Mr. Mustaqueem has 300 employees in 12 different garment workshops in Dharavi, with an annual turnover of about $2.5 million a year. He owns property in Dharavi worth $20 million.

“When I came here, I was empty-handed,” he said. “Now I have everything.”

Dharavi’s fingerprints continue to be found across Mumbai’s economy and beyond, even if few people realize it. Mr. Asif, the leather shop owner, made leather folders used to deliver dinner checks at the city’s most famous hotel, the Taj Mahal Palace. The tasty snacks found in Mumbai’s finest confectionaries? Made in Dharavi. The exquisite leather handbags sold in expensive shops? Often made in Dharavi.

“There are hundreds of Dharavis flourishing in the city,” boasted Mr. Mobin, the businessman. “Every slum has its businesses. Every kind of business is there in the slums.”

But surely, Mr. Mobin is asked, there are things not made in Dharavi. Surely not airplanes, for example.

“But we recycle waste for the airlines,” he answered proudly. “Cups and food containers.”

Hari Kumar contributed reporting.

Congress panics and forces change of Vanue for Anna Team's Meeting with Mumbai Muslims - By Ghulam Muhammed

• Breaking News:

According to reliable sources, Anna Team's Arvind Kejriwal and others were invited for a working luncheon at Islam Gymkhana in Mumbai, by Federation of Muslim NGOs. where they were to interact with top leaders of the local and national Muslim organisations. Media was informed at late hours in the night today, but Congress reaction was instant and electric. It forced the President of Islam Gymkhana, Zaka Siddiqui, to cancel the luncheon arrangement between Anna Team and Mumbai's Muslim NGOs. Alternative vanue was finalised and the original luncheon meeting is scheduled to go through as planned tomorrow Dec 26, 2011.

The entire episode reflects Congress panic at Anna Team's initiative to welcome Muslims on board over their anti-corruption campaign.

Ghulam Muhammed, Mumbai

‘Fugitive IM commander’ sues N Ram and Praveen Swami ( both from The Hindu) - By Mumtaz Alam Falahi - TwoCircles.net

http://twocircles.net/2011dec20/%E2%80%98fugitive_im_commander%E2%80%99_sues_n_ram_and_praveen_swami.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Twocirclesnet-IndianMuslim+%28TwoCircles.net+-+Indian+Muslim+News%29

‘Fugitive IM commander’ sues N Ram and Praveen Swami

Submitted by admin7 on 20 December 2011 - 1:19pm

By Mumtaz Alam Falahi, TwoCircles.net,

New Delhi: Muhammed Zarar Sidibapa, a resident of Karnataka, has sued The Hindu newspaper’s Editor-in-chief N Ram and its reporter Praveen Swami for defamation to the tune of Rs 5 crore. Sidibapa has on 7th Dec. 2011 sent a legal notice to the national English language daily demanding also an unconditional apology for a front-page story published on 1st December 2011.

“Fugitive Indian Mujahideen commander Muhammad Zarar Siddibapa — a Karnataka resident also known by the alias Yasin Bhatkal and the commander of the cell, who is wanted for his alleged role in a string of urban bombings that began in 2005 — however escaped arrest, the police said,” Praveen Swami had written in his 1st Dec. story titled ‘Breakthrough in 2010 attacks raises fears of renewed jihadist campaign’ published in The Hindu.

I am not fugitive, I am very much present in Bhatkal

Bhatkal (Karnataka) native Muhammed Zarar Sidibapa, in the legal notice, said he is neither a fugitive nor a terrorist. He comes from a respectable family and he is very much present at his home in Bhatkal. He says he has been doing business in Dubai. So the allegations against him has caused him mental agony and brought disrepute to his family whose surname is Sidibapa.

He has sent the legal notice claiming the damages of Rs 5 crore "for the horrible mental agony caused to our client by declaring him to be absconding terrorist."

The legal notice mentions that Mr. Muhammad Zarar Sidibapa S/o Shamsuddin Sidibapa resides at Jali Road, Maqdoom Colony, Bhatkal, Karnataka.

"Our client is a permanent resident of Bhatkal. He comes from respectable family of Bhatkal. Our client is very much present in Bhatkal in his residence. Your paper has published a highly defamatory report on 01-12-2011 on the front page under the headline ‘Breakthrough in 2010 attacks raises fears of renewed jihadist campaign’. In this article Second of you (Praveen Swami) has deliberately and with the sole intention of defaming our client and to further incite hatred among the people and police towards our client Mr. Muhammad Zarar Sidibapa published the article claiming that our client is a fugitive and further that our client is the commander of Indian Mujahideen and that he is wanted for his alleged role in a string of urban bombings that began in 2005. Our client is neither a fugitive nor is the commander of the Indian Mujahideen nor does he have the alias of Yasin Bhatkal," says the legal notice.

I am not a terrorist,

Referring to police, Praveen Swami had written that Pakistani national Mohammed Adil picked from Madhubani in Bihar last month was dispatched to India by Indian Mujahideen commanders in Karachi to aid Siddibapa's cell.

“Adil is alleged to have had past relationships with both the Jaish-e-Muhammad and organised crime groups. He, the police said, was living under cover in Madhubani, Bihar, since 2010, when he was despatched to India by Indian Mujahideen commanders in Karachi to aid Siddibapa's cell,” Swami had claimed.

In his second story published on page 14 on the same day titled “Delhi arrests cast light on jihadists' ‘Karachi Project' Praveen Swami continuing from his last story had said: “In the hour before the police raided the bomb-making factory he ran on the fringes of the Bhadra forests near Chikmagalur in Karnataka, key Indian Mujahideen operative Muhammad Zarar Siddibapa slipped away on a bus bound for Mangalore — and then, across the Bangladesh border, to the safety of a safe house run by the Lashkar-e-Taiba in Karachi.”
Mr Sidibapa, in the legal notice, refutes all these charges.

"Similarly on page 14 on the same day under the headline 'Delhi arrests cast light on jihadists' ‘Karachi Project' the Second of you (Praveen Swami) has falsely and with the deliberate inention to defame and create animosity against our client written that our client ran a bomb making factory on the fringes of the Bhadra forests near Chikmanglur. You have further falstely alleged our client escaped from the police to Bangladesh and stayed in a safe house of Lashkar-e-Taiba. You hv further falsely asserted that Sidibapa is back in India commanding the Jihadidst Cell responsible for major terrosit attacks since 26/11," says the notice.

"Our client is totally unaware and has nothing to do with any terror network or the Indian Mujahideen. The above article therefor is not only defamatory but is also designed to cause maximum damage to the standing of our client and his family in Bhatkal and Dubai where he earns a living."

In the legal notice, Mr Sidibapa claims he has never been accused of any crime in his entire lifetime. "Our client is a peace loving citizen who hsas led an impeccable life and has never been accused of any crime in his entire lifetime."

Publish apology and pay Rs 5 crore or face legal proceeding

Mr Sidibapa has demanded damages in a sum of Rs 5 crore failing which he will initiate legal proceedings against the respondents.

"We call upon you to pay liquidated damages in a sum of Rs five cor to our client for the horrible mental agony caused to our client by declaring him to be absconding terrorist failing which our client will initate legal proceedings against you," says the notice announcing that Mr Sidibapa is filing separate criminal case for criminal defamation under section 499 and 500 of the IPC.

While N Ram and Praveen Swami have reportedly said they have no information about the notice, S Thyagarajan, Associate Editor, The Hindu, Chennai, however, acknowledged receipt of the notice adding that the group’s lawyers were preparing for a reply, said a news report in Tehelka.

Those acquitted of terror charges should also follow the suit

Civil rights activists have welcomed the step of Sidibapa and said that families of those terror suspects who say they are innocent should come up and follow the suit.

“Yes, families of those youths who have been branded terrorist and put behind bars should come out and if they are innocent they should file damage suits against the media for projecting them as terrorist,” says Nayyar Fatmi, Patna-based eminent social activist. Going ahead, he says that even those who have been acquitted of terror charges by the court should follow the suit.

“Those acquitted of terror charges should also file damage suit because when they were arrested they were declared terrorist but when they were released none took notice of them. Once one is declared terrorist, the stigma carries with him even after acquittal. So heavy damages suits can be deterrent for the media,” said Fatmi who will shortly lead a fact-finding team of civil rights activists to the districts of Bihar from where some alleged Indian Mujahideen terrorists were arrested by the police in last three weeks.

Mr Akhlaque Ahmed, secretary, Association for Protection of Civil Rights (APCR) agrees and says the victims should file damage suits against police and administration also whose biased attitude spoiled their life and career.

“After having been branded as terrorist and then arrest and imprisonment hugely damaged their social life and career. Just acquittal cannot make up the damage. They should file damage lawsuit against media, police and government,” said Mr Ahmed who is based in Delhi.

But he also adds that such steps can’t be expected from the victims and their families as after the trauma they are almost broken. Mr Ahmed says the groups who claim to work for social justice and civil rights should come forward to help the victims.

“Civil groups and those working for social justice should help the victims get damages from those who spoiled their life and career. They include media, police and government,” he says. APCR has been providing legal help to some terror victims.



Damage lawsuit filed by alleged terror mastermind Muhammed Zarar Sidibapa against The Hindu


The two referred stories of Praveen Swami:

Breakthrough in 2010 attacks raises fears of renewed jihadist campaign

http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/article2675232.ece

NEW DELHI, November 30, 2011

Praveen Swami

Delhi Police investigators have announced the arrest of a terrorist cell that they claim was responsible for a string of nationwide attacks last year — raising fears that Pakistan-based jihadist groups may be preparing for a renewed escalation of operations against India.

The Delhi Police's élite Special Cell announced on Wednesday that it had held six men, including Karachi-based Jaish-e-Muhammad operative Muhammad Adil, on the suspicion of having carried out three major attacks last year: a shooting at Delhi's historic Jama Masjid in September; the serial bombs outside Bangalore's Chinnaswami Stadium in April; and the bombing of the German Bakery in Pune in February.

Fugitive Indian Mujahideen commander Muhammad Zarar Siddibapa — a Karnataka resident also known by the alias Yasin Bhatkal and the commander of the cell, who is wanted for his alleged role in a string of urban bombings that began in 2005 — however escaped arrest, the police said.

Adil is alleged to have had past relationships with both the Jaish-e-Muhammad and organised crime groups. He, the police said, was living under cover in Madhubani, Bihar, since 2010, when he was despatched to India by Indian Mujahideen commanders in Karachi to aid Siddibapa's cell.

Bihar residents Mohammad Siddiqi, Irshad Khan, Gauhar Aziz Khomani, Gayur Jamali and Abdur Rahman were held in separate raids in New Delhi and Chennai. The Delhi Police said they had recovered several kg of explosives, ammunition, two assault rifles and a pistol from a safe house used by the cell.

The case is the second involving a Pakistan national in recent weeks. Earlier, the National Investigation Agency said fugitive Jammu and Kashmir-based terror commander Ghulam Sarwar, a resident of Pakistan occupied Kashmir, had carried out the bombing of the Delhi High Court in September.

Sarwar, interestingly, possessed fake documents identifying him as a Bihar resident, and travelled to meet still-unidentified contacts in the State — raising the prospect that he may have had links to the cell held in Delhi.

Wednesday's arrests are the third in a series linked to the Pune bombings —all at apparent odds with each other. Maharashtra prosecutors had earlier charged local resident Himayat Baig with having carried out the bombing in Pune, naming Siddibapa as his commander. Elements of their account, though, sit ill with the Delhi Police's findings. For example, Maharashtra Police investigators said Baig was paid to source bomb-making equipment to fabricate an explosive device at his cyber-café. The discovery of a bomb-factory in Delhi, though, puts this version in some doubt.

Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram told reporters on Wednesday that the six arrested men were suspected of having been “involved in February 13, 2010 German Bakery blast in Pune.”

Earlier this year, though, Mr Chidambaram told Parliament the Maharashtra Police had solved the Pune bombing — following on from an earlier faux pax in which he complimented investigators on having arrested Siddibapa's older brother, Abdul Samad Siddibapa, in connection with the case. Abdul Samad Siddibapa was later cleared of all charges and released.
 
(With inputs from Vinay Kumar in New Delhi and Amruta Byatnal in Pune)

****
 
Delhi arrests cast light on jihadists' ‘Karachi Project'
http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/article2675523.ece

NEW DELHI, December 1, 2011

Praveen Swami

Fugitive Indian Mujahideen commanders based in Pakistan planned attacks in India, investigators say
In the hour before the police raided the bomb-making factory he ran on the fringes of the Bhadra forests near Chikmagalur in Karnataka, key Indian Mujahideen operative Muhammad Zarar Siddibapa slipped away on a bus bound for Mangalore — and then, across the Bangladesh border, to the safety of a safe house run by the Lashkar-e-Taiba in Karachi.

Delhi Police investigators claimed on Wednesday to have found evidence that Siddibapa is back in India, commanding the jihadist cell responsible for three major terrorist attacks since 26/11: multiple bombs placed outside the Chinnaswamy stadium in Bangalore; an incident of shooting at visitors to Delhi's historic Jama Masjid on the eve of the Commonwealth Games; and, most lethal of all, the improvised explosive device that ripped through a Pune café in February 2010, killing 17 people.

Siddibapa escaped the Delhi Police-led raids that resulted in the arrest of seven alleged members of the cell over the weekend, including small-time Karachi gangster-turned-terrorist Muhammad Adil.

The still unfolding investigation into the cell he commanded, though, has made clear what 26/11 terrorist David Headley called “the Karachi Project” is still flourishing — the war by Pakistan-based terrorist groups like the LeT against India.

The loyal lieutenant

More than three years after police investigators first identified Siddibapa as a terror suspect, little is known about the man alleged to have played a central role in the Indian Mujahideen's urban terror campaign that claimed hundreds of lives in 10 cities between 2005 and 2008.

Educated at the well-respected Anjuman Hami-e-Muslimeen school in the affluent coastal Karnataka town of Bhatkal, Siddibapa left for Pune as a teenager. He was later introduced to other members of the Indian Mujahideen as an engineer but the Pune police have found no documentation suggesting he had ever studied in the city. Instead, the police say, Siddibapa spent much of his time with a childhood friend, Unani medicine practitioner-turned-Islamist proselytiser Iqbal Ismail Shahbandri.

Iqbal Shahbandri and his brother Riyaz Ismail Shahbandri, now the Indian Mujahideen's top military commander in Karachi, became ideological mentors for many young Islamists in Pune and Mumbai, many of them highly educated professionals.

The brothers were unlikely terrorists: their father, Ismail Shahbandri, had set up a leather tanning factory in Mumbai's Kurla area in the mid-1970s and struggled to give his children a head start. Riyaz Shahbandri went on to obtain a civil engineering degree from Mumbai's Saboo Siddiqui Engineering College. In 2002, he was married to Nasuha Ismail, daughter of an electronics store owner in Bhatkal's Dubai Market.

Nasuha Ismail's brother, Shafiq Ahmad, is believed to have drawn Riyaz Shahbandri into the Students Islamic Movement of India. Riyaz Shahbandri first met his Indian Mujahideen co-founders, Abdul Subhan Qureshi and Sadiq Israr Sheikh, in the months before his marriage. Later, he also made contact with ganglord-turned-jihadist Amir Raza Khan. In the wake of the 2002 communal violence in Gujarat, the men set about sending recruits to Lashkar camps in Pakistan.

Early in the summer of 2004, investigators say, the core members of the network, which was later to call itself the Indian Mujahideen, met at Bhatkal's cheerfully named Jolly Beach to discuss their plans. Siddibapa had overall charge — illustrating his status as the brothers' most loyal lieutenant.

From the testimony of Pakistani-American jihadist David Headley to Indian and United States investigators, it is clear the terror project continued long after several Indian Mujahideen operatives were arrested in 2008 — and the Indian Mujahideen leadership fled to Karachi. Headley told the National Investigation Agency that there were two distinct, competing jihadist projects targeting India, both headquartered out of Karachi.

Lashkar commanders, Headley said, ran one Karachi Project, using dozens of cadre recruited from the ranks of Islamist groups in India. He claimed the 26/11 assault team initially included an “Indian, possibly from Maharashtra.” Headley also said another Maharashtra resident, who used the alias Abu Ajmal, trained with him at the Lashkar's intelligence-tradecraft in August 2003.

The second Karachi Project, NIA documents reveal, was run by a retired Pakistani military officer called Abdur Rehman Hashim, also known by the code name ‘Pasha.'

This second group of Indian jihadists, Headley told the NIA, was a “personal set-up of Pasha, and it is independent of the LeT [Lashkar-e-Taiba].”

Major Hashim, according to Headley's account, had served with the 6 Baloch Regiment until 2002, when he refused to lead his troops into combat against Taliban fleeing from the Tora Bora complex in Afghanistan — the last stronghold of al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden in that country. Later, having been demoted to captain, he resigned his commission and joined the Lashkar as an instructor — training, among others, the men who attacked Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's rally in Srinagar in 2004.

But Major Hashim later fell out with the Lashkar — incensed, like many jihadists, by its refusal to take on the Pakistani state and the western forces in Afghanistan. He threw his weight behind al-Qaeda's Brigade 313, which later claimed credit for the Pune bombing.

We need to help Muslims who are self-employed - By Jyoti Punwani - Sunday Edition - Mumbai Mirror

http://www.mumbaimirror.com/article/82/2011121820111218031330107264cc219/We-need-to-help-Muslims-who-are-selfemployed.html


Today: Sun, Dec 18, 2011

We need to help Muslims who are self-employed

Kashif Ul Huda, who has started a website for his community, says there is a range of voices that goes unheard

 

By Jyoti Punwani

Posted On Sunday, December 18, 2011 at 03:13:21 AM

Muzaffarpur-born and Jamshedpur-educated Kashif-ul-Huda is the man behind TwoCircles.net, the website for all things Muslim. A bio-chemist by training, the 38-year-old, who’s lived in the US since 1995, is in Mumbai to host a meet of the Muslim elite on how they can help empower the community economically. He tell us why Muslims need to stand on their own feet, be it in the media or in business. Why did you start TwoCircles.Net? I had seen the Jamshedpur riots of 1979, and was here during the Babri Masjid period. Then Gujarat 2002 happened. I felt helpless in the US. I joined online discussions but realised that Muslims have no hard facts to go by. So I started gathering data in 2005 and set up IndianMuslims.info. Around then, the Gudiya and Imrana episodes happened. (Gudiya re-married after her soldier-husband was reported dead; when he came back four years later, the panchayat asked a pregnant Gudiya to return to him. Imrana was raped by her father-in-law, after which Deoband issued a fatwa declaring her marriage null and void.) The media was making a spectacle of Muslims, and no sane Muslim voice was being heard. That’s when I started thinking about how important it was to have a daily news cycle for Muslims, taking advantage of the new medium of the Internet. Obviously you found the English mainstream media lacking. The full range of Muslim voices doesn’t reach the English mainstream media. Those that do, get filtered. The mainstream media has its constraints, it caters to a much wider audience. So there’s always need for community-driven media. Also, with a few exceptions, the English media doesn’t completely understand Muslim issues. I was asking a Hindi newspaper editor in UP about how they cover Muslim issues, and he said they are cautious, these are sensitive issues. Thanks to us, mainstream media can learn how to cover Muslims without offending sensibilities. Your reports reflect Muslim voices. But what about getting the other side of the story? And how do you cross-check what’s told to you? We have developed a large list of contacts. For example, we got news from Gopalganj in Bihar that hundreds had died in anti-Muslim violence. We rang up our contacts and didn’t get any corroboration. So we didn’t do that story. When our reporter covered the Moradabad violence in July, he was shown the damage done to Hindu homes too, and he reported that. We also carry all viewpoints, be it Zakir Naik, or the Central Madarsa Board’s opposition to the Right to Education Act. The mainstream media always portrays Muslims negatively. We try to bring in the positive angle too. If we talked only about discrimination, the young will lose hope.  For example, we decided to hold this conference on empowering Muslims. Many in the community felt we should be focusing on the way the State is hounding Muslims as terrorists. But we feel with the new economy, we need to find ways to help Muslim entrepreneurs. Many Muslims are self-employed. With no access to credit, how can they develop? What about government programmes directed specifically towards Muslims? They don’t reach Muslims. I’ve been touring UP, and people just haven’t heard of these schemes. The State doesn’t take the community into confidence before implementing any welfare scheme. They provide anganwadis where toilets are a primary need. I did an article in the EPW: ‘How not to do minority welfare’, and sent it to minority affairs minister Salman Khurshid. He replied that he had read it - that’s all. Not just Muslims, Indians largely survive without government support. The aim of this conference is to try set up an organisation which can provide financial and intellectual support to self-employed Muslim. It’s a daily struggle for most of them. The second aim is to bring Muslim elite back to the community. They feel disconnected from the larger community. What was your most remarkable finding in your travels through Kerala, Gujarat and UP? In Kerala, Islam came at the time of the Prophet, through trade. In Gujarat too, that’s how Islam entered. In both places, there’s an interesting mix of local and Islamic traditions, which is unique. Islam is very much rooted in the Indian tradition. But because of the continuous onslaught of propaganda, Muslims have also started believing that they came here with Babar and they are ‘Babar ki aulad’. There is no contradiction between being Indian and Muslim - that’s why the name Two Circles. As Muslims and as Indians, we have a stake in what’s going on in the country.

WHO TOPPLED GADDAFI --- 'THE WEST' OR THE JEWS?

WHO TOPPLED GADDAFI --- 'THE WEST' OR THE JEWS?

According to following report appearing in Israeli newspaper, two French Jews, Sarkozy and Bernard-Henri Levy collaborated to wage war on Libya under 'convenient' and contrived pretext of saving civilian lives, and ended up accomplishing their mission to assassinate Gaddafi and take over Libya as a new western colony.

Ghulam Muhammed, Mumbai

--------http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/week-s-end/how-i-liberated-libya-1.401754


Sat, December 17, 2011 Kislev 21, 5772

• Published 08:14 16.12.11
• Latest update 08:14 16.12.11

'How I liberated Libya'

In his new book, Bernard-Henri Levy describes the revolution in Libya as the first European war of the 21st century, and recounts conversations in which he worked to convince Sarkozy to deploy forces there. A conversation with the philosopher who insists that he'd never vote for the French president and that he hates war.

 

By Sefy Hendler
PARIS - Saturday, March 5, conversation with Sarkozy:
'I am in Benghazi, Mr. President.' 

	Bernard-Henri Levy in Misrata.
	Photo by: Marc Roussel

'Ah,' he replies as though nothing were more natural than to hear me calling from Benghazi. 'How are things progressing? How are you?'
'I have something important to tell you. I just met the Massouds of Libya.'

'Who?'

'Massoud [named for Ahmad Shah Massoud, the Afghan anti-Taliban leader who was murdered on the eve of the 9/11 terror attacks], the Libyan Massouds, the opposition to Gadhafi, I saw them founding ...'

The connection is lost"

- Bernard-Henri Levy, "La guerre sans l'aimer" ("War Without Loving Her," Editions Grasset, 2011 ).
 
Nine months have passed since that conversation, which may have been the moment that spurred President Nicolas Sarkozy to meet with the Libyan rebels, and opened the way to French military intervention from the other side of the Mediterranean. 

Bernard-Henri Levy suggests that our own conversation take place a few hundred meters from the Elysee palace, in the bar of a swanky hotel.

With his signature white shirt and black velvet jacket, plugged in as usual to his Blackberry, Levy appears to be as comfortable in Paris as in Benghazi. He shuttled quite a bit between the two continents in recent months, and notched up one of the most impressive achievements in his career as "a socially engaged intellectual": removing a bloodthirsty dictator. The smartphone being used at this moment to conduct an ordinary conversation served, according to Levy, on March 21 to transmit precise coordinates for a bombardment - and, several months later, to receive a list of targets that had to be attacked right before the final battle for Tripoli.

The philosopher-journalist was never a pacifist, but still, he was risking a great deal when he dragged himself and his country into a war.

"First and foremost there was the physical danger. That doesn't matter. Then the danger to your reputation, that is even more important - your name. The third danger, which is even greater, was via-a-vis the world. War is life and death. Living and dying. Do you prevent more deaths than you cause? Do you cause the world to be better or worse? That is the real risk, and I was aware of it from the first moment. This haunted me throughout the conflict," he says.

In his new book he concedes that it is strange for an intellectual to receive "congratulations" the moment a war breaks out. Did the contact with fighters at the front, with arms dealers who sought him out, and with pilots en route to battle cause him to feel any pangs of conscience, we ask.

"When I bring the delegation from Misrata" - referring to a city outside Tripoli - "to the Elysee, I know full well that I am bringing them so they will be given offensive weapons to end this war. And they got the weapons. When, even before that, in April, I bring General Younes to Paris [Abdel Fattah Younes, commander of the rebel forces, murdered in late July], I am not bringing him on a tourist trip. I am bringing him to enable the opening of a new front." Levy pauses for a moment and contemplates what he has just said, before adding, "to end the war."

"These are just sentences. Reality is of course more terrible ... Nevertheless I thought - and this thought was never refuted - that it was the right thing to do for the Libyan citizenry, for regional peace and for the world I will leave to my children."

Inside the Elysee

The fascinating book he published a few weeks ago portrays the story of the conflict as the first European war of the 21st century: 

France and Britain leading a force fighting a member of the Arab League. Levy describes how he persuaded President Nicolas Sarkozy to embark on the adventure that cost Muammar Gadhafi his life. This is a riveting glimpse behind the scenes in today's corridors of power - lists of weapons, the nighttime meetings at the palace, the months of dithering, Gadhafi's attempts to save himself, and finally Tripoli's fall and the liberation of Libya.

Because he does not officially "belong" to the Elysee, Levy allows himself to relate in minute detail his conversations with the president; in them, Sarkozy reveals his opinions of the world's top leaders. The things he says are frequently far from flattering. The Americans? "Oddly soft." Merkel? "Pathetic," in her caution. Berlusconi? "Asks himself if he has a brain left." Papandreou? "Throws too many wrenches into the works. You can't ... sabotage [the operation] when you're not even on deck." And the Turks? "Good thing I blocked them" (during the debate over possible entry to the European Union ). Levy even describes Sarkozy's reaction when, on July 20, a rebel delegation that came to the Elysee offered to assassinate Gadhafi: "I do not want to turn him into a martyr, and in addition to that, I am not a murderer!"

According to Levy, the president nonetheless went on to say that, if Gadhafi were to be "killed in a confrontation, that is another matter. I think it would be a mistake, but it would not be any of my business." The Libyan leader was executed during a "confrontation" three months later.

The president did not call you and say: Bernard, you are going too far?

"He called me up to say that he was happy the book came out, because he enjoyed reading it, and that he had absolutely nothing to say regarding the accuracy of the verbatim conversations."

Levy, who repeats more than once that he did not and will not vote for Sarkozy, has become the intellectual most identified with the right-wing president. Does this new closeness bother him?

"I contributed to entering this war not because of my closeness to Sarkozy ... We have barely spoken since he was elected in 2007. There is a president in France today who miraculously got on the same page as me very quickly. But that does not mean I am close to him. I was closer to Mitterrand, really close. To Chirac I was close at a certain point. To Sarkozy, not really. We've had serious disagreements, suspicions. I am less close to him than to others, and that is what makes this story so strange. With him it succeeded, whereas with the others [Mitterrand in Bosnia and Chirac in Afghanistan] it failed."

There were some in France who saw the Libyan adventure involving the philosopher and the president as something that profited them both, and not only the Libyan people. For his part, Sarkozy was in need of an intellectual "aura."

Naturally, Levy's new book has also drawn fire. "Not that much," he says, trying not to grin. The sharpest barb was hurled in the daily Le Monde (on whose board of directors he sits ), by a writer who claimed that Levy's attempt to take credit for France's declaration of war is baseless, because preparations for a military intervention in Libya had begun even before he telephoned Sarkozy.

"The train left the station," as it were, just before the philosopher climbed aboard? "That is the only detail in dispute," Levy says. His thick skin apparently permits him to ignore such criticism and bask in facts on the ground: Gadhafi is gone, France won.

The mistake

One occasion on which Levy suffered a pretty resounding failure was his attempt to bring about a rapprochement between the new Libya and Jerusalem, by conveying an unofficial message to the Israeli authorities from the rebel council in Libya.

In the book he describes these events in detail. At the end of May he received a call from one of his contacts in Libya, who asked him to tell "your Israeli friends" that "Libya will not be hostile toward them."

Levy takes off for Israel the next day and manages to complete his "assignment": On June 2 he met Benjamin Netanyahu, with whom he jointly drafted a statement saying that "the State of Israel hopes that when a new government will arise in Libya, it will advance peace and security for all peoples of the entire region." The statement was issued after a meeting between the Israeli premier and French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe. In the meantime, news of the message Levy delivered from the Libyans became public, causing an uproar in the Arab world. The Libyans were forced into a vehement denial - and Levy realized he had made a mistake.

"How could I have erred like that?" he asks, before answering himself: "It was difficult for me to imagine that contact with Israel must remain confidential. I was in a state of euphoria over the feasibility of normal ties perhaps some day between Israel and another Arab country. I didn't think it was such a problem," he says sadly.

And beyond this highly significant episode, is Israel not right to be suspicious of the Arab Spring?

"Certainly. I too am suspicious. I have no intention of accepting, of adopting, everything this 'spring' brings. I maintain my critical sense. And when there is a possibility of talking to some of the key players, there is nothing preventing us from telling them what we think. I will give you an example: In the days after Abdel Jalil spoke about sharia [Mustafa Abdel Jalil, head of the rebel National Transitional Council talked about Libya adopting Islamic law], his remarks prompted a storm all over the world. I telephoned people with whom I have contact inside the council to strongly recommend that the government not include Islamists. I'm not claiming that this is what led to there not being any radical Islamists in the new government, but the reality is that there aren't."

Still, we ask, from an Israeli viewpoint, wasn't the situation better off with Bashar Assad; with Hosni Mubarak, who honored the peace treaty; with Gadhafi, who financed global terrorism but was at least the devil we knew? Maybe the fast track has now opened and radical Islam will come to power in various countries?

Levy strongly protests the assumption that the Arab dictators were strategically convenient for Israel, but makes an even more fundamental point: "We have no choice. It is not the role of democracy in general and of Israel in particular to decide whether the dictator should disappear or not. It is the people that are supposed to decide that. The only choice before Israel is to hunker down in a stance of refusal - a position that would bind its fate with that of the dictators, or to express sympathy in principle for the budding signs of democracy and liberty. I, as a friend of Israel, prefer the view that says: Maybe it will end badly but we'll extend it credit for now, we won't shut the door on it. We won't rule out in advance that the friends of human rights will also be able to triumph in the Arab world."

Maybe Israel is afraid of losing its brand name "the only democracy in the Middle East"? Maybe that scares us?

"I don't dare imagine that: Israel hanging on to the monopoly over democracy like Moliere's miser holding onto his treasure chest. I don't want to believe that. And if that is nonetheless the case, then it is an absurd calculation. After all, there is nothing keeping a people from overthrowing the tyrant ruler. We have no influence over it, and hence we can choose between sticking to the old order or saying welcome to the new world. To make Israel's security dependent upon a world order that any sensible being knows is breathing its final breaths, merely in hope that it will hold on for another few months - that is suicide!" Levy bellows.

"Congratulate the people that oust the tyrant, keep your eyes open, and prepare for the best case as for the worst. And if it is the worst, say so clearly. And on that day it will be necessary to say that whoever did not shut the door in advance must regrettably acknowledge the fact that the battle for democracy has given rise, temporarily, to an undemocratic order. We're not there yet. We'll see."

The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the victory of the Islamists in Tunisia, sharia in Libya - are we not headed already in that direction, to the worst case of all? Don't you see in this a sign that the war you supported was justified but the result is bad?

"I see in it a sign that these people [the Islamist movements], who were the most oppressed and the most organized, won a temporary victory. At the same time I am not convinced they will withstand the test of government and that the people won't replace them with the same speed at which they brought them to power."

Lieberman at the bar

Levy's book is full of bizarre anecdotes and encounters - about Al-Qaida men in the desert, about an emissary of Saif al-Islam Gadhafi who tracks Levy down to a fancy hotel in Provence to negotiate a possible compromise, and even about a meeting with the Israeli foreign minister at the bar of the luxurious Hotel Raphael in Paris. "It was the first time I had met him," Levy admits.

Even before that, Avigdor Lieberman's image troubled Levy. One night last winter, with the members of the rebel Libyan leadership beside him, Levy telephoned me to ask whether the rumors that Israel's foreign minister did not want Gadhafi to fall were true, and wondered on behalf of his Libyan friends whether there were ties between people close to Lieberman and Gadhafi's son Saif al-Islam. 

I referred Levy to an investigative report in Haaretz by Gidi Weitz about Martin Schlaff, the Austrian businessman and friend of the Israeli foreign minister. Among other things, Weitz wrote about Schlaff's close ties with Saif al-Islam.

In the book Levy recounts the meeting with Lieberman, this past March 26. According to Levy, it was Lieberman who asked to see him. "He matches what I thought about him - the physiognomy of a nightclub bouncer," he writes. But "aside from that he is intelligent. That is the surprise, I find him more intelligent, more eloquent, than I had thought."

Most of their conversation concerned Israel's reaction to the Arab Spring. Lieberman, according to Levy's book, declared that Israel must not abandon its allies, it must not show even the slightest weakness, and it must not come across as naive. "There is an internal logic to these arguments," Levy concedes, even though "I think they are poor."

Their conversation carried on into the night. Here is how Levy describes the scene in the book: "He sips one whiskey after another. As the hours pass, he looks no longer like a bouncer at the entrance to a bar, but rather as one of its stalwarts who doesn't want to go to bed. The more he drinks, the looser his tongue gets ... The truth is that this man is scared. This man who tells me that he is afraid of being thought of as afraid is in fact terrified himself. The fat face with the simple expressions, the drunken gaze, the enormous and exhausted body, the noisy exhalation - it all seems to me like a cry for help. The bar empties and the hours go by and his voice, which at the beginning of the evening sounded like a minister's voice, no longer deceives, and it wavers a bit. I discover something I know well, thousands of years old: Israel's dramatic fear. And vis-a-vis this fear, I am afraid, there is nothing to be done."

Harsh words. Does Levy regret putting them into print? "The portrait can seem cruel; in my eyes it is not. My conclusion is that he represents the deep fear of Judaism in general and of Israel in particular. A stance of pessimism and utter hopelessness. The idea is that Israel is in every case the target of rivalries that cannot be eradicated, and that all that can be hoped for is to buy a little time. His position is that of one who is under siege. He is afraid, afraid. It is more than a political line: It is a metaphysical line. His position was painful for me. Israel is strong after all. My attitude to Judaism is based on the idea that you must not be a victim. That we will not be the victim anymore. That we have the possibility of being proactive. That is why every time I meet Netanyahu, I tell him these things."

Have you lost faith in Netanyahu?

"No. He could still surprise."

You are the only one who still believes that, I tell Levy. The only surprise that people in Israel think he is capable of would be to attack Iran. And he nods as though he has heard this before. "No one believed that Sarkozy would make the unexpected and bold decision to attack Libya. And he did it. That is the mystery of people, and politicians also have a mysterious part. I do not despair of anyone except the fascists." And he encountered those too in Libya.

As one who insists on not concealing his Jewish identity, the fact of Levy being engaged in the field sometimes created a jarring note in a country that is accustomed to Israel-bashing that frequently spills over into overt anti-Semitism. Such was the case in Benghazi when he saw an anti-Semitic cartoon scrawled on the city walls: Gadhafi with a Star of David on his forehead.

Did this bother you a lot?

"I got them to erase it ... and perhaps a few more. But on that day there was a certain office in the Benghazi municipality that understood that this was beyond the acceptable, that it is taboo, like in France. The law does not prevent people from being anti-Semitic. 

I gave up long ago on trying to prevent people from being anti-Semitic. You have to explain to them that in the current power ratio, such behavior is not recommended. And it was the same thing here: The people from Benghazi understood that day that it is forbidden to have anti-Semitic graffiti on the beachfront promenade ... There may be in other places, I don't know. But along the boardwalk there is no longer such graffiti."

Threats and a bodyguard

The formal interview comes to an end, but our conversation continues as we take an evening stroll down Paris streets strung with Christmas lights. A bodyguard, simultaneously discreet and tough looking, keeps at a distance of three meters. Levy has received threats, and has good reason to think that there are people who want him dead: Gadhafi loyalists as well as Assad loyalists, for example. 

Does the fact that war seeps into his pampered life in Paris annoy him? "I would prefer not to go around with a bodyguard, of course," he says. "But I've come to terms with it, in the hope that it will not go on for too long."

You do know that if anyone thinks that it is easier to stay in power without Bernard-Henri Levy, they will not hesitate to hurt you?

"I have been in these situations several times in my life already. During the Bosnia war. And also three winters ago [when a Moroccan terrorist was captured in Belgium with a list of targets that was topped by Levy]. I am not a fatalist, and I have the will and the intention of living for a long time to come."

Take note, Bashar Assad.