Islamic fundamentalism with leadership election

David Charter in Brussels

The UK Independence Party is set to head in a fresh direction, fighting radical Islam, with the election today of a replacement for Nigel Farage as its national leader.

The two favourites to take over from Mr Farage are committed to adding the battle against Islamic fundamentalism to the party’s main goal of withdrawing Britain from the European Union.

Mr Farage resisted strong grassroots pressure during his three-year leadership to broaden UKIP’s focus to include actively campaigning against Islamism and immigration. But both Lord Pearson of Rannoch and the London MEP Gerard Batten - the two front-runners in a field of five candidates - say that they are determined to target Islamic fundamentalism.

The other three candidates are Mike Nattrass and Nikki Sinclaire, both MEPs, and Alan Wood, a councillor from Wiltshire and a senior party insider.

The result of the ballot of UKIP’s 16,500 members will to be announced today. Lord Pearson, 67, an Eton-educated self-made millionaire, was endorsed by Mr Farage as his only “serious” successor this month. Mr Batten called the endorsement an “insult” to the other challengers.

Lord Pearson invited the anti-Islam Dutch politician Geert Wilders to the House of Lords in February only for Jacqui Smith, then the Home Secretary, to issue a banning order so that Mr Wilders was turned away at Heathrow. The Dutchman travelled to Britain in October after overturning the ban.

Lord Pearson’s own outspoken views about Islam were recorded in Washington DC last month. Asked how much time Britain had before losing control of its cultural identity he said: “What is going to decide the answer to that is the birthrate. The fact that Muslims are breeding ten times faster than us. I do not know at what point they reach such a number that we are no longer able to resist the rest of their demands . . . but if we do not do something now within the next year or two we have in effect lost.”

He later insisted that his remark was directed at Islamists. “One is talking about the violent end of the spectrum,” he said.

Mr Batten, 55, has also invited Mr Wilders to speaking engagements and has called the Dutch politician “a brave man trying to defend western civilisation”. This year, writing in the magazine Freedom Today, Mr Batten addressed the notion of the confrontation of Islamism and the West. “It is a clash between civilisation and barbarism. It is a clash between everything that has made the modern world what it is and an ideology that wants to enslave us to a belief system that belongs in seventh-century Arabia and which was primitive and backward even then.”

Ms Sinclaire, 41, a newly elected MEP, has campaigned strongly and is regarded as having an outside chance of taking the leadership. Her main aim is to professionalise UKIP and organise a Shadow Cabinet to extend its appeal.

Mr Nattrass, 63, an MEP for the West Midlands since 2004, believes that UKIP’s main focus should be on winning votes in the next general election but has largely been absent during the campaign due to an illness in the family. Mr Wood is well known within UKIP as its nominating officer.

A UKIP source said that if Lord Pearson or Mr Batten were elected “You are going to see quite a lot stronger position from us. Nigel has always been afraid of the Islam thing backfiring. But the BNP are taking ownership of issues that have not been addressed by Labour, the Conservatives or the Lib Dems and they need addressing.”

Rainforest destruction accounts for 17% of global greenhouse gas emissions

Environmentalists across the world are to be enlisted as armchair detectives to monitor satellite images of rainforests and report any illegal logging.

The images will be frequently updated and anyone with internet access will be able to make instant comparisons with historical images and spot destruction of rainforest almost as soon as it happens.

Every four seconds an area of rainforest the size of a football pitch is cut or burnt down for timber and paper or to clear land for cattle and plantations.

Rainforest destruction accounts for 17 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, more than is produced by all the world’s cars, ships and aircraft. Tropical forests cover 15 per cent of the world’s land surface and have a double cooling effect, soaking up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and maintaining high levels of evaporation from the canopy.

(Rickey Rogers/Reuters)

Rainforest destruction accounts for 17% of global greenhouse gas emissions

The armchair detectives will be able to report their findings to an international agency being created to monitor whether countries are meeting their commitments to reduce deforestation. Any state found to have broken its pledge will lose its share of a new global fund established by rich countries to pay nations for leaving their trees standing.

The fund, called Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (Redd) and worth up to $30 billion (£18 billion) a year, is due to be approved at the UN climate change summit in Copenhagen next month.

Google is helping to create the new online detective tool, which is likely to be launched next year. Philipp Schindler, from Google UK, said: “Our engineers are exploring how we might contribute to this effort by developing a global forest platform that would enable anyone in the world, including tropical nations, to monitor deforestation and draw attention to it.”

Mr Schindler was speaking yesterday at a seminar on deforestation hosted at St James’s Palace by Prince Charles and attended by leaders and ministers from several of the largest rainforest countries.

President Jagdeo of Guyana told the seminar that the cheapest way for industrialised countries to reduce carbon emissions was to pay poor countries, such as Guyana, not to fell their trees.

Contributors to the Redd fund will pay about £4 for each tonne of CO2 saved by reducing the rate of deforestation. Fitting carbon capture and storage systems to coal-fired power stations costs more than £50 for each tonne saved.

Norway announced last week that it would demonstrate how Redd could work by paying Guyana up to £150 million over five years to preserve its trees.

Guyana’s forests have been far less logged than in many tropical nations, and under the terms of the new deal with Norway, Guyana could actually be paid for increasing deforestation. The memorandum states that Norway will compensate Guyana if it does not cut down more than 0.45 per cent of its forests per year, but Guyana is currently felling trees at a far slower rate. The countries contributing to Redd are concerned that their money could disappear into the pockets of corrupt officials in poorly governed countries. There are also fears that payments will result in logging companies switching to unprotected areas, resulting in no net reduction in deforestation.

Per Frederik Pharo, of the Norwegian Government’s forest protection fund, said payments would only be made when countries could prove that they had reduced their annual rate of deforestation by an agreed amount. He said the targets would be raised every five years.

Brazil has halved its rate of deforestation in the past year but Tasso Azevedo, of Brazil’s Forest Service, warned that it could increase again unless the country received substantial sums of Redd “People have to have some income and we need a lot of cash for the community to maintain the forest,”he said.

Amazing Designs From Top Web Desiners Wordwide

I have got lots of requests to post WordPress theme versions of my templates. Unfortunally, I am not a very good theme coder, so I have been waiting and hoping that the people who use the templates would build themes that they would want to share. But none of the themes have been for public use, so now I am working on converting them by myself. In a first step I will build andreas01 and andreas02 for WordPress, and I will host it on the templates page (using "download as: WordPress theme" or similar). I can't say how long it will take to finish the work, since I have a lot of other content to sort and upload first. But I will do my best to do it quick. If any skilled theme designer would like to help me out, I welcome all assistance. Also, specific requests and suggestions for 01 and 02 as themes are of course welcome.

Shortly after I posted the previous entry, I got an e-mail with a simple but interesting question: "So, how does your non-ugly and non-simple design look?". This is really a question about the difference between template coding and professional site design, since I act in completely different ways depending on which one of the two I am working with. I could show a lot of examples, and some day I will add a portfolio showing my site design work. But this site is not really made to promote my professional design services, so the portfolio is not a high priority right now. But since the question came because of a recent blog entry and I have got similar questions about my professional design before, I will try to explain the differences right here – and also why I rather promote my templates than my business design. For the first time on andreasviklund.com, here is a long entry!

First off, the XHTML/CSS templates that I have released through OSWD.org and on my templates page are not really supposed to look great. They are supposed to work as a solid ground for people who want to get a high-quality website online in a fast and simple way – in the spirit of OSWD.org, the site that got me started with open source template design. But the templates are also made as a tool for other designers who want to start with a working layout and add a great visual appearance along with their content. There is no need to waste time on building core layouts when the web is full of great open source layouts that works great…

The templates are built in a "one-size-fits-all" kind of fashion, which makes them suitable for many different kinds of websites. They are easy to customize, and very simple in code and layout structure. The more generic, the more useful they are so simplicity is an actual feature. The basic layout and details like valid code, accessibility features, low file size, and a simple navigation system are more important than beautiful images and flashy effects. I could of course do very specific and detailed templates, but that would mean that only a few people would find them useful. And usability is what the templates are all about.

But How With Amazing Designs From Top Web Desiners Wordwide? Please your Feedback and crazy ideas are welcome, as always

Who Top web designers and web templates?

Many visitors are requesting the current design of this site in regular template format, and of course I will make it available not that I abandon the design myself. I am considering to make a WordPress theme version of it as well, since it is also a common request. But the customized theme version that I run on the site right now is not good at all, so I would have to build a new theme from scratch if I would provide a WP-theme version as well…

Regarding progress for the new design and new content: The music will go down now, and pages will be removed and reorganized. Sorry for the big mess that my site will be for a while, it will hopefully be worth it in the end.

I haven't decided what to do yet but I will probably release the template first, and if someone makes a good WordPress theme version of it within the first couple of days I can support that version rather than doing a theme version myself. If anyone would want to build an officially supported theme quickly, feel free to contact me to get the template version before the official release! If noone would want to build the theme, I will do it myself in a few days.

But I need a name for the template! Suggestions are very welcome, post a comment or write me an e-mail. Ideas and general feedback about naming templates are of course also welcome, as there will be more releases. It would probably be a bit silly to continue with andreas11 and up. Or would that work? Let me know what you think…

Pluralism in Egyptian Religious

by MICHAEL SLACKMAN

The New York Times

CAIRO - Writing in his weekly newspaper column, Gamal al-Banna said recently that God had created humans as fallible and therefore destined to sin. So even a scantily clad belly dancer, or for that matter a nude dancer, should not automatically be condemned as immoral, but should be judged by weighing that person’s sins against her good deeds.

This view is provocative in Egypt’s conservative society, where many argue that such thinking goes against the hard and fast rules of divine law. Within two hours of the article’s posting last week on the Web site of Al Masry al Youm, readers had left more than 30 comments - none supporting his position.

“So a woman can dance at night and pray in the morning; this is duplicity and ignorance,” wrote a reader who identified himself as Hany. “Fear God and do not preach impiety.”

Still, Mr. Banna was pleased because at least his ideas were being circulated. Mr. Banna, who is 88 years old and is the brother of Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, has been preaching liberal Islamic views for decades.

But only now, he said, does he have the chance to be heard widely. It is not that a majority agrees with him; it is not that the tide is shifting to a more moderate interpretative view of religion; it is just that the rise of relatively independent media - like privately owned newspapers, satellite television channels and the Internet - has given him access to a broader audience.

And there is another reason: The most radical and least flexible thinkers no longer intimidate everyone with differing views into silence.

“Everything has its time,” Mr. Banna said, seated in his dusty office crammed with bookshelves that stretch from floor to ceiling.

It is a testament to how little public debate there has been over the value of pluralism, or more specifically of the role of religion in society, that so many see the mere chance to provoke as progress. But now, more than any time in many years, there are people willing to risk challenging conventional thinking, said writers, academics and religious thinkers like Mr. Banna.

“There is a relative development, enough to at least be able to present a different opinion that confronts the oppressive religious current which prevails in politics and on the street, and which has made the state try to outbid the religious groups,” said Gamal Asaad, a former member of Parliament and a Coptic intellectual.

It is difficult to say exactly why this is happening. Some of those who have begun to speak up say they are acting in spite of - and not with the encouragement of - the Egyptian government. Political analysts said that the government still tried to compete with the Muslim Brotherhood, a banned but tolerated Islamic movement, to present itself as the guardian of conservative Muslim values.

Several factors have changed the public debate and erased some of the fear associated with challenging conventional orthodoxy, political analysts, academics and social activists said. These include a disillusionment and growing rejection of the more radical Islamic ideology associated with Al Qaeda, they said. At the same time, President Obama’s outreach to the Muslim world has quieted the accusation that the United States is at war with Islam, making it easier for liberal Muslims to promote more Western secular ideas, Egyptian political analysts said.

“It is not a strategic or transformational change, but it is a relative change,” said Mr. Asaad, who emphasized that the dynamic was for Christians as well as Muslims in Egypt. “And the civil forces can unite to capitalize on this atmosphere and invest in it to raise it to become a more general atmosphere.”

Two events this summer highlighted the new willingness of a minority to confront the majority - and the overwhelming response by a still conservative community.

In June, a writers’ committee affiliated with the Ministry of Culture gave a prestigious award to Sayyid al-Qimni, a sharp critic of Islamic fundamentalism who in 2005 stopped writing, disavowed his own work and moved after receiving death threats for his writing.

Muhammad Salmawy, a committee member and president of the Egyptian Writers’ Union, said he thought Mr. Qimni had been honored in part because “he represents the secular direction and discusses religion on an objective basis and is against the religious current.”

What happened next followed a predictable path, but then veered. Islamic fundamentalists like Sheik Youssef al-Badri asked the government to revoke the award and moved to file a lawsuit against Mr. Qimni and the government.

“Salman Rushdie was less of a disaster than Sayyid al-Qimni,” said Mr. Badri in a television appearance on O TV, an independent Egyptian satellite channel. “Salman Rushdie, everyone attacked him because he destroyed Islam overtly. But Sayyid al-Qimni is attacking Islam and destroying it tactfully, tastefully and politely.”

But this time Mr. Qimni did not go into hiding. He appeared on the television show, sitting beside Sheik Badri as he defended himself.

A second development involved a religious minority, Bahais, who face discrimination in Egypt, where the only legally recognized faiths are Islam, Judaism and Christianity. Nine years ago the state stopped issuing identification records to Bahais unless they agreed to characterize themselves as members of one of the three recognized faiths. The documents are essential for access to all government services.

An independent group, The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, won a court order on behalf of the Bahais that forced the government to issue records leaving the religious identification blank. The first cards were issued this month. While the decision was aimed specifically at solving the problem faced by the Bahai community, the case tapped into the evolving debate, said the group’s executive director, Hossam Bahgat.

“It is an unprecedented move to recognize that one can be Egyptian and not adhere to one of these three religions,” Mr. Bahgat said. Still, he remains less than optimistic; most of the public reaction to the Bahais’ legal victory was negative, Mr. Bahgat said.

“It is known that you are apostates,” read one of many comments posted on Al Youm Al Sabei, an online newspaper.

But there has been at least a hint of diversity and debate in response to Mr. Banna’s remarks on belly dancers. Hours after they were posted, some readers began, however tentatively, to come to his defense. “Take it easy on the man,” an anonymous post said. “He did not issue a religious edict saying belly dancing is condoned. But he is saying that a person’s deeds will be weighed out because God is just. Is anything wrong with that?”

Mona el-Naggar contributed reporting.