Europe should convert to Islam: Gaddafi

Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi’s visit to Rome to mark the second anniversary of a friendship treaty with former coloniser Italy stumbled into controversy on Monday after he said Europe should convert to Islam.

Kadhafi made the comments on Sunday during a lecture to a group of 500 young women hired and paid by an agency to attend his lecture.

“Islam should become the religion of all of Europe,” one of the women quoted Kadhafi as saying in the Italian press.

The agency paid the women, mainly students who hire themselves out for advertising of publicity events, 70 or 80 euros (90 or 100 dollars) to attend and said it would not pay girls who gave their names to the press.

It also told them to dress conservatively for the lectures.

About 200 women on Monday gathered at the Libyan cultural centre in Rome to attend a second lecture.

One of the women present said that Kadhafi had said at the gathering that “women are more respected in Libya than in the West” and offered assistance in finding Libyan husbands.

“Islam is the last religion and if we are to have a single faith then it has to be in Mohammed,” he said, according to the participant.

The lectures are “a new, humiliating violation of Italian women’s dignity,” opposition lawmaker and former health minister Rosy Bindi said. Kadhafi’s show also caused discomfort within the coalition of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, a close ally of the Libyan leader.

“Kadhafi’s words show his dangerous Islamisation project for Europe,” said European MP Mario Borghezio of the anti-immigrant Northern League, junior partner in the coalition, according to Il Messaggero.

Carlo Giovanardi, a government undersecretary, tried to stem the criticism, saying Kadhafi’s words were simply “a remark made during a private meeting.”

Kadhafi, who came to power after the overthrow of the monarchy 41 years ago, landed in Italy on Sunday to mark the second anniversary of a friendship treaty signed with Berlusconi that drew a line under the countries’ bitter colonial-era relationship.

Berlusconi and Kadhafi met privately for 30 minutes on Monday, during which Kadhafi confirmed the policy of opening Libya to Italian investment, a member of Berlusconi’s staff said.

After the meeting, the two men toured a photography exhibition tracing the history of the Italian-Libyan relationship, including the bloody colonial period.

Speaking later alongside Berlusconi at a closing ceremony, Kadhafi suggested that the European Union pay Libya “at least five billion euros a year” to put a halt to illegal migration from its Mediterranean shores.

To do so would be in Europe’s interest, he said, if it wants to head off “the advance of millions of migrants” from Africa.

“There is also desirable immigration,” Kadhafi added. “There are Libyans who have money and I encourage them to come to Italy to invest.” Berlusconi credited good relations between Italy and Libya “for countering with success the trafficking of illegal migrants from Africa to Europe controlled by criminal organisations”.

Ties between Rome and its former colony have deepened since the signing of the friendship accord, with Italy now the third largest European investor in the North African country.

Italy has said it will invest five billion dollars and build a 1,700 kilometre (1,050 mile) highway in Libya to compensate for its three decades of colonisation from 1911 to 1943.

The two countries also reached an agreement that allows the Italian navy to intercept illegal migrants at sea and return them to Libya, triggering sharp criticism from the United Nations’ refugee agency and human rights groups.

Kadhafi travelled, as usual, with a Bedouin tent for his accommodation which was pitched in the gardens of the residence of the Libyan embassy in Rome.

In a sign of protest against his visit, an opposition party planted a “tent of legality” in front of the embassy. Kadhafi was set to return to Libya on Tuesday morning, according to sources with knowledge of the visit.

COAS, CJP, Dr Qadeer among top 50 influential Islamic personalities

Chief of Army Staff General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani, Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhary and Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan are among the top fifty influential Muslims of the World says an annual survey of Royal Institute of Strategic Islamic Studies, Jordan.

Some twenty-four Pakistanis have made it to the top 500 influential Muslims in the 2010 edition of “World’s 500 Most Influential Muslims”. The survey mentions the names of five hundred personalities from across the world that command influence on account of their role and Muslim faith identity including prominent names from various walks of life such as heads of states, politicians, scientists, social activists, artists, religious scholars and preachers.

The list includes General Ashfaq Kayani, Army Chief; Qazi Hussain Ahmed, former Amir of the Jamaat-e-Islami, former Ambassador Dr Maleeha Lodhi and Maulana Fazlur Rahman in politics category.

In development category: Chief Justice of Pakistan, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudry and Abdul Sattar Edhi. Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan and Dr Attu r Rehman have been placed in Science Technology Medicine and Law category.

Hajji Mohammed Abdul Wahab, Amir of Tablighi Jamaat; Justice Sheikh Muhammad Taqi Usmani, leading scholar of Islamic jurisprudence; Dr Muhammad Tahir-ul Qadri the founder of Tehrik e Minhaj ul Quran International, Shaikh, Mohammad, founder of the International Islamic Propagation Centre (IIPC), Maulana Shah Hakeem Muhammad Akhtar, a Sufi scholar of the Ashrafia order based in Karachi, Dr Farhat Hashmi, an influential lecturer and scholar and founder of Al-Huda International, an NGO actively promoting Islamic education and welfare since 1994; Sheikh Muhammad Ilyas Attar Qadri, founder of the Dawat-e-Islami; Dr Khalid Mehmood Soomro, Secretary General of Jamiat Ulema-Islam Sindh, Dr Anwar Hussain Siddiqui, President of the International Islamic University, Roshaneh zafar founder of the Kashf Foundation, Junaid Jamshed former pop icon and Abida Parveen, an internationally acclaimed vocalist, Zaid Hamid, Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, the supposed leader of Jama’at ud Da’wah, Pakistan.

Chinese Dragon squeezes the Indian elephant

The highly respected British magazine The Economist featured a front-page article in their 21 August issue about the possibility of a major war between China and India.

I’ve been thinking about this scenario for over a decade, and authored a book, War at the Top of the World, that warned of the dangers of a future Sino-Indian conflict.

Just thinking about this topic staggers the imagination. China and India account for 2.3 billion people, a third of the world’s total population.

My book was directly inspired by meeting the Dalai Lama in the mid-1990’s. I heard him give a long, very interesting speech on the Indian-Chinese border conflict, which I had studied in depth as a result of my deep interest in the Himalayan region.

The audience that came to hear His Holiness expected to hear a warm, fuzzy talk about the meaning of life. Instead, they were totally bemused by the Dalai Lama’s discussion of South Asian grand strategy and the Tibetan-Indian border that had been drawn by Imperial Britain with no regard to China. People often forget the Dalai Lama is the temporal leader of Tibet as well as its spiritual guide.

I was the only person in the audience who understood the subject or who asked questions about the talk. After, His Holiness took me aside and we conversed at length about the contested border, from Ladakh and Kashmir in the West to India’s Assam and Northeast Frontier Agency (today Arunachal Pradesh), and Tibet’s future.

We also talked for a long time about cats, but that’s another story that will be in my next book.

So from my encounter with the Dalai Lama came my first book, War at the Top of the World (now in its fourth, revised edition), which also covered then little-known Afghanistan and the endless conflict over Kashmir between India and Pakistan.

In War, I predicted that the first major crisis of the 21st Century would occur in Afghanistan.

9/11 happened soon after War came out. I was swamped by calls from the media to talk about Afghanistan and a certain Osama bin Laden.

“How did you know?” everyone asked me in amazement.

“Because I was watching that part of the world when few others were doing so,” came my reply.

In 1962, India moved troops into remote valleys high on the eastern Himalayas claimed by China. Beijing proclaimed it would “teach India a lesson.”

It certainly did. Marching over the high mountains, Chinese troops quickly outflanked static Indian forces – as they did with American troops in Korea in 1950. The Indians were routed. The People’s Liberation Army took much of Arunachal Pradesh, and stood before tea-producing Assam, only a relatively short distance to Calcutta.

Satisfied by his “lesson,” Chairman Mao ordered his troops to withdraw.

Proud India was humiliated and deeply shocked. Since then, India has built up its forces in the region to over three army corps of 100,000 mountain troops, backed by high-altitude air bases and a network of new roads and supply depots.

The long, poorly demarcated border has been tense ever since. India claims two large chunks of territory in the west held by China: Aksai Chin and a slice of Kashmir given by Pakistan to China to allow a military road connecting Tibet with Chinese Xinjiang. I have explored both frozen wastelands, both over 15,000 vertiginous feet.

China claims most of Indian-held Arunachal Pradesh on the eastern end of the Himalayan border, known as the McMahon line,

India has only grudgingly accepted China’s 1950 takeover of Tibet and has harbored anti-Chinese groups dedicated to liberating the mountain kingdom. At the same time, India quietly asserted control of two other Himalayan mountain kingdoms, Bhutan and Sikkim.

India sees the growing array of Chinese bases in Tibet as an extreme danger. China’s air, missile and intelligence bases in Tibet look down on the vast plains of India.

India’s leader, Jawaharlal Nehru, once complained of this danger to China’s Premier Chou Enlai. Chou laughed and retorted, “If I wanted to destroy India, I would march 100 million Chinese to the edge of the Tibetan plateau and order them to piss downhill. We would wash you into the Indian Ocean.”

Tibet controls most of the headwaters of India’s great rivers. Delhi has long feared that China may one day dam and divert their waters to China’s dry western provinces.

Other serious potential flashpoints exist. India’s old foe, Pakistan, with whom it has fought four wars, is China’s closet ally. Beijing arms Pakistan and has built up its nuclear arms program. An Indian-Pakistan war over divided Kashmir, or an Indian intervention in a fragmenting Pakistan or Afghanistan, could draw China into the fray. A new port in western Pakistan at Gwadar will give China port rights on the Arabian Sea.

Burma (today Myanmar), on India’s troubled eastern flank, which is rent by tribal uprisings, deeply worries Delhi. Strategic Burma is rapidly becoming an important forward Chinese base. A new road links China with Burma, and provides China’s navy a badly needed port on the Andaman Sea, and thus access to the Indian Ocean.

India believes China is trying to strategically encircle it. To the west, Pakistan; to the north, Tibet; to the east, Burma. To the south, China is busy cultivating Sri Lanka.

In spite of million-man armed forces and nuclear weapons, India feels increasingly threatened by China’s rise. The Indians know full well that China expects obedience from its neighbors. Even a small border clash between these two assertive giants could light the fuse of a broad and very frightening conflict. The scramble for oil and gas offers ample causes of yet more conflict in Central Asia and even the Gulf, where today America rules supreme.
August 31, 2010

Eric Margolis [send him mail] is the author of War at the Top of the World and the new book, American Raj: Liberation or Domination?: Resolving the Conflict Between the West and the Muslim World. China and India: A War of Giants by Eric Margolis
Recently by Eric Margolis: Drowning Pakistan Worries Washington