How can anyone put guinea pigs before people?
The News Review:
- How can anyone put guinea pigs before people?
- Australian MP urges boycott of McDonald’s over imported potatoes
- Counter-Terror Threatens Liberalism
- ‘Radical’ Muslims told to leave Australia
- Ziauddin Sardar’s journey through Islam
How can anyone put guinea pigs before people?
Telegraph.co.uk – Aug 25, 2005
The animal protesters wrote in their droves to express neither sorrow nor care for the ruined lives of those children, but simply to express in heated terms their horror at the alleged killing of a cat. Two-year-old James Bulger didn’t get a look-in. That for me is the mentality of these home-grown vigilantes: they aim to target cruelty, while a much more serious form of cruelty plays itself out in the darkness of their own minds.
Australian MP urges boycott of McDonald’s over imported potatoes
Forbes – Aug 25, 2005
‘When McDonald’s staff ask me ‘Would you like fries with that?’ I’ll be saying, ‘Not if they’re imported spuds,” said Steve Fielding, a new MP from the Family First party, which grew out of the evangelical Christian movement. ‘Family First is not anti-McDonald’s but it does not want to eat imported french fries,’ he said. A company spokeswoman said most of the fries and hash browns sold in Australia were home-grown but that a new supplier was providing some spuds from New Zealand. 9 mln usd on Australian products for our restaurants, so it’s about 93 pct that we spend on Australian products,’ she told Australian Associated Press. A member of the opposition Australian Labor Party described Fielding’s boycott as ‘incredibly irresponsible. ‘ ‘He doesn’t understand regional and rural economies,’ Catherine King told ABC radio.
Counter-Terror Threatens Liberalism
Forbes – Aug 25, 2005
political elite foreshadow the nature of future legislation. Such comments, which could be seen as undermining the independence of the judiciary, are unprecedented and, arguably, run counter to the separation of the state’s powers into the legislature, executive and judiciary. The July 7 attacks in London, and pending legislative counter-terror measures, indicate a new stage in the evolution of terrorism, where “home-grown” terrorists seek to kill large numbers of their co-nationals, while government responses become more coercive. The democratic institutions that exemplify and perpetuate Western liberalism risk becoming increasingly undermined. However, further tightening of security and curtailment of civil liberties are the most likely prospect.
‘Radical’ Muslims told to leave Australia
Pakistan Dawn – Aug 25, 2005
Education Minister Brendan Nelson later told reporters that Muslims who did not want to accept local values should ‘clear off’. ‘Basically, people who don’t want to be Australians, and they don’t want to live by Australian values and understand them, well then they can basically clear off,’ he said. Muslim schools will have to denounce terrorism as part of an effort to stamp out home-grown extremism under measures announced after Howard’s meeting with 14 Islamic leaders on Tuesday. The prime minister called the meeting in the wake of last month’s London bombings by British-born Muslims, amid fears that Australia could be the target of a similar attack by disaffected members of its small Muslim community. ‘The purpose of the meeting was to identify ways of preventing the emergence of any terrorist behaviour in this country,’ Howard told commercial radio on Wednesday. ‘You won’t change the minds of people who are hardened fanatics and hardened extremists. You have to identify them and take measures to ensure that they don’t become a problem.
Ziauddin Sardar’s journey through Islam
BBC News – Aug 25, 2005
Islam has traditionally been interpreted in a moderate fashion here, and never been state ideology. Since the attacks in the US on 11 September 2001 however, Indonesia has witnessed home-grown extremism and terrorism in the name of Islam, notably the Bali bombing in October 2002. The response of leading political parties and thinkers in Indonesia has been to propose a policy of ethical Islam, dissociated from politics, and to advocate that solutions to problems in society cannot exclusively be found in Islam. However, a recent attempt to reform family law in Indonesia to give greater rights to women failed to be debated by parliament after fundamentalists made threats against those involved in drafting the new law.