Tuesday, March 30, 2004
Drudge: Gore channel alternative to ailing CNN
US to "cross the Rubicon" of space weaponization
7 Former Communist Countries Join NATO : Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia.
Bill Gates: Hardware to Be Nearly Free in 10 Years : MS is betting that advances in hardware and computing will make it possible for computers to interact with people via speech and that computers which can recognize handwriting will become ubiquitous
WSJ article by Ian Johnson:
"The separation of some Muslims from broader German society is seen as a factor in the rise of the Hamburg terrorist cell that led the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. And since then, some members of German Muslim communities have been recruited for jihad against U.S. forces in Iraq.
"In Germany, Muslims live mainly in ghettos in Berlin, Hamburg, Munich and cities of the Ruhr industrial belt. Even second- and third-generation immigrants, predominantly from Turkey, often still think of themselves as Turkish.
"Muslims... are still widely denied their constitutional right in Germany to religious education at public schools, although it is provided to Christian and Jewish pupils....Local German governments routinely turn down requests to build mosques because they might disturb 'social peace.'"
Israeli Arab intellectual and poet Salman Masalha on illiteracy:
"In order to explain a complex idea, you need high language, not the language of the souq. ... If you take young people, let's say eighth-grade Arab [children], and their French, or Jewish Israeli, counterparts, you will discover the discrepancy in self-expression. ..., the Arab pupil runs into a big problem. Thus it is in the entire Arab world.
"The Arab world does not read. .... Illiteracy in the Arab world is not 50% like it says in the reports. I say that it is over 80%. ... The average book published in Israel sells more copies than a successful book in the entire Arab world. This also has to do with the economic situation. Reading books is a privilege for people who have spare time and money. ...."
".... Crime and force rule in all Arab villages in Israel. There is a need to bring in Western culture, not only its margins; Western culture that is founded upon the drive of curiosity, the desire to truly develop, to ask…"
"The Islamists see the Arab world according to what I read in the scriptures, ...are trying to revive Islam by uniting in the framework of an Islamic nation. Was it really like that? [The Third Caliph] Muhammad Othman bin 'Affan was murdered and thrown onto the dung heap. Three days he lay there, and a dog ate his foot. This is the golden age to which they want to return?
"There's something in the Islamic perception that drives you crazy, and that is the looking only backwards, not to the future. If the golden age was in the past, your entire vision is rearwards. This causes deterioration. ...There is a need for change in this programming. There is a disk in the Arab mind that must be replaced with another disk...
Those who dare flee to America or Europe, because they cannot create and write in their own societies. Others ... received over the years envelopes full of dinars from Saddam Hussein. Intellectuals of this kind are the root of the problem.
"Today anyone who may not even have finished elementary school can grow a beard and become an authority and a source of power. People don’t know the history of Islam. ...There's no arguing with faith.... the war on fundamentalism cannot come out of ignorance; it must come out of knowledge...
