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There is no clearer sign that leaders have lost control than when they and their people can no longer trust each other. This breach of trust is at the root of an increasingly frantic campaign on the part of ultra-Orthodox rabbis against the Internet. The latest edict, announced at a gathering of rabbis and senior Haredi educators this week in Jerusalem, demands that all parents enrolling their children in ultra-Orthodox schools sign a written commitment that their home computers are not connected in any way to the poisonous web.
This is no simple step. Haredi families live their lives according to strict rules of halakha (Jewish religious law), as well as the social mores dictated by their rabbis – enforced automatically by an austere surrounding where everyone lives in the same neighborhoods and conforms to identical norms. But eventually, the relentless scrutiny ends somewhere; and while every moment of their lives is regulated by the word of the book and the orders of the spiritual leaders, the rabbis never found a way to enforce what goes on behind closed doors. They never felt they had to.
If you and your family kept up appearances outwardly, it was assumed that your behavior indoors was also beyond reproach. No family belonging to the community has ever been asked for a written undertaking that they did not eat pastrami and cheddar cheese sandwiches or turn the kettle on during Shabbat. All of these and much much more were a given. But the Internet is different.
The rabbis have realized that, despite strict prohibitions for over a decade, many of their followers still surf the Web. And no, it’s not the thousands of pornographic sites that are worrying them, or that kids could be tricked in a Web chat into meeting up with a pedophile; it is the Web sites specifically targeting their communities, especially the forums, that have struck the fear of God in them.
These forums provide digital proof of the pervasiveness of Web use within the ghetto. Until the advent of the Internet, the ultra-Orthodox community reliably regarded itself as its own closed-off world. The newspapers published within the community were heavily censored, and if it wasn’t for the efforts of a small band of religious affairs reporters in the secular Israeli media, none of the rabbis’ internal squabbles would have ever gotten out.
Over the last decade, though, a chain of online forums have become a platform for the release of pent-up discussion and controversy. Under the cloak of anonymity, Haredi men and women – mainly from the younger generation, but also some older ones – have removed the veil from sectional rivalries, crises of belief, and intimate social and familial frustrations, in an almost no-holds-barred exchange of views, accusations, innuendo and good old gossip.
Unlike most of the crap you read on so many forums and blogs, the Haredi writers, many of whom use nicknames that give away only their particular internal affiliation (such as their Hasidic sect or their yeshiva), are usually informed, more to the point and express themselves well. These guys and girls know what they are talking about and not only are they giving away jealously guarded communal secrets, they dare to question the actions and motives of their elders. And from within the closed walls of the community!
On the face of it, the ultra-Orthodox community has never been as powerful as it is today. The United Torah Judaism party controls the Health Ministry and the influential Knesset Finance Committee. Shas controls the Interior Ministry and the Housing and Construction Ministry, and both parties together have a lock on any religious legislation thanks to their pivotal position in the coalition. Beyond that, no one seems to be threatening their sacred cows: state funding and the independence of the Haredi education streams; the exemption of Yeshiva students and religious women from national service; and the stranglehold ultra-Orthodox rabbis have over almost all issues related to conversion, marriage, divorce and burial.
The political dominance, however, belies the growing vulnerability of the rabbis’ leadership. No amount of government funding can change the fact that the increasing birth rates and higher proportion of Haredi families within the general population is rapidly creating a social and financial time bomb. Many secular observers and economists have noted the intolerable burden that a community with low participation in the workplace has on the national economy, but the greatest frustration with the situation can be found among the ranks of young Haredi men and women who realize they are being forced, by familial and communal expectations, on a life path that will be both unsustainable and unrewarding.
It should come as no surprise that nascent initiatives, for example, offering Haredi in their early twenties academic courses and even specialized army careers in the air force and intelligence corps, have rapidly become oversubscribed. For now, few are motivated enough to take the plunge and burn bridges with their families and the community as a whole; but after having a taste of the outside world through the Web, they are anxious to find ways to become part of society as a whole.
Some sociologists and historians who research the Haredi world believe the Internet will ultimately break down the ghetto walls and generate a new wave of enlightenment – a 21st-century haskala that will lead many of the younger generation into the arms of the secular camp. Even if the great majority of the community remains faithful to the ways of their fathers and mothers, the desperate attempts by the rabbis to cut them off from the Web are proof that they are no longer in thrall.
“It is well and good for the preacher to base his sermon on the Bible, but he better get to something relevant pretty quickly, or we start mentally to check out.” That stunningly clear sentence reflects one of the most amazing, tragic, and lamentable characteristics of contemporary Christianity – an impatience with the Word of God.
The sentence above comes from Mark Galli, senior managing editor of Christianity Today in an essay entitled “Yawning at the Word.” In just a few hundred words, he captures the tragedy of a church increasingly impatient with and resistant to the reading and preaching of the Bible. We may wince when we read him relate his recent experiences, but we also recognize the ring of truth.
Galli was told to cut down on the biblical references in his sermon. “You’ll lose people,” the staff member warned. In a Bible study session on creation, the teacher was requested to come back the next Sunday prepared to take questions at the expense of reading the relevant scriptural texts on the doctrine. Cutting down on the number of Bible verses “would save time and, it was strongly implied, would better hold people’s interest.”
As Galli reflected, “Anyone who’s been in the preaching and teaching business knows these are not isolated examples but represent the larger reality.”
Indeed, in many churches there is very little reading of the Bible in worship, and sermons are marked by attention to the congregation’s concerns – not by an adequate attention to the biblical text. The exposition of the Bible has given way to the concerns, real or perceived, of the listeners. The authority of the Bible is swallowed up in the imposed authority of congregational concerns.
As Mark Galli notes:
It has been said to the point of boredom that we live in a narcissistic age, where we are wont to fixate on our needs, our wants, our wishes, and our hopes-at the expense of others and certainly at the expense of God. We do not like it when a teacher uses up the whole class time presenting her material, even if it is material from the Word of God. We want to be able to ask our questions about our concerns, otherwise we feel talked down to, or we feel the class is not relevant to our lives.
It is well and good for the preacher to base his sermon on the Bible, but he better get to something relevant pretty quickly, or we start mentally to check out. Don’t spend a lot of time in the Bible, we tell our preachers, but be sure to get to personal illustrations, examples from daily life, and most importantly, an application that we can use.
The fixation on our own sense of need and interest looms as the most significant factor in this marginalization and silencing of the Word. Individually, each human being in the room is an amalgam of wants, needs, intuitions, interests, and distractions. Corporately, the congregation is a mass of expectations, desperate hopes, consuming fears, and impatient urges. All of this adds up, unless countered by the authentic reading and preaching of the Word of God, to a form of group therapy, entertainment, and wasted time – if not worse.
Galli has this situation clearly in his sights when he asserts that many congregations expect the preacher to start from some text in the Bible, but then quickly move on “to things that really interest us.” Like . . . ourselves?
One of the earliest examples of what we would call the preaching of the Bible may well be found in Nehemiah 8:1-8:
And all the people gathered as one man into the square before the Water Gate. And they told Ezra the scribe to bring the Book of the Law of Moses that the Lord had commanded Israel. So Ezra the priest brought the Law before the assembly, both men and women and all who could understand what they heard, on the first day of the seventh month. And he read from it facing the square before the Water Gate from early morning until midday, in the presence of the men and the women and those who could understand. And the ears of all the people were attentive to the Book of the Law. And Ezra the scribe stood on a wooden platform that they had made for the purpose. And beside him stood Mattithiah, Shema, Anaiah, Uriah, Hilkiah, and Maaseiah on his right hand, and Pedaiah, Mishael, Malchijah, Hashum, Hashbaddanah, Zechariah, and Meshullam on his left hand. And Ezra opened the book in the sight of all the people, for he was above all the people, and as he opened it all the people stood. And Ezra blessed the Lord, the great God, and all the people answered, “Amen, Amen,” lifting up their hands. And they bowed their heads and worshiped the Lord. Also Jeshua, Bani, Sherebiah, Jamin, Akkub, Shabbethai, Hodiah, Maaseiah, Kelita, Azariah, Jozabad, Hanan, Pelaiah, the Levites, helped the people to understand the Law, while the people remained in their places. They read from the book, from the Law of God, clearly, and they gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading with their faces to the ground.
Ezra and his companions stood on a platform before the congregation. They read the scriptural text clearly, and then explained the meaning of the Scripture to the people. The congregation received the Word humbly, while standing. The pattern is profoundly easy to understand – the Bible was read and explained and received.
As Hughes Oliphant Old comments, “This account of the reading of the Law indicates that already at the time of the writing of this text there was a considerable amount of ceremonial framing of the public reading of Scripture. This ceremonial framing is a witness to the authority of the Bible.” The reading and exposition took place in a context of worship as the people listened to the Word of God. The point of the sermon was simple – “to make clear the reading of the Scriptures.”
In many churches, there is almost no public reading of the Word of God. Worship is filled with music, but congregations seem disinterested in listening to the reading of the Bible. We are called to sing in worship, but the congregation cannot live only on the portions of Scripture that are woven into songs and hymns. Christians need the ministry of the Word as the Bible is read before the congregation and God’s people – young and old, rich and poor, married and unmarried, sick and well – hear it together. The sermon is to consist of the exposition of the Word of God, powerfully and faithfully read, explained, and applied. It is not enough that the sermon take a biblical text as its starting point.
How can so many of today’s churches demonstrate what can only be described as an impatience with the Word of God? The biblical formula is clear – the neglect of the Word can only lead to disaster, disobedience, and death. God rescues his church from error, preserves his church in truth, and propels his church in witness only by his Word – not by congregational self-study.
In the end, an impatience with the Word of God can be explained only by an impatience with God. We – both individually and congregationally – neglect God’s Word to our own ruin.
As Jesus himself declared, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”
In church, you come as you are. That’s especially true inside the Whitetail Chapel in Ivor. Clothing is optional for everyone from the pastor to the congregation.
“I really don’t think God cares what you wear when you worship,” said Richard Foley, a member of the congregation. “The thing is worship.”
Churchgoers like Foley have no problem getting the word of God from a pastor in his birthday suit.
“Some of the biggest moments in Jesus’ life he was naked,” Pastor Allen Parker said. “When he was born he was naked, when he was crucified he was naked and when he arose he left his clothes in the tomb and he was naked. If God made us that way, how can that be wrong?”
Pastor Allen says the congregation is a family-oriented one and is very involved in helping others.
The Whitetail Chapel is part of the Whitetail Nudist Resort, the only year-round nudist resort in Virginia. It opened in 1984 and business is booming. More than 10,000 people visited last year and business is up 12 percent from a year ago.
“Obviously, we’re doing something people like,” said Michael Dougherty, the resort’s office manager.
Visitors say being a nudist is about being free from societal judgments. They say it’s a stress-free environment where everyone is equal and there’s no pressure to be anything than who you really are.
The pastor agrees.
“I consider this a gift and a privilege God has given me,” said Pastor Allen. “They’re caring, they’re understanding, and they’re community and family oriented. We have one of the most involved chapels anyplace around. I’ll put our church up against others around.”
Libya’s leader called for a jihad, or holy war, against Switzerland on Thursday because of its ban on mosque minarets — escalating a long-running diplomatic feud between the two countries.
Muammar Qaddafi also urged Muslims everywhere to boycott Swiss products and to bar Swiss planes and ships from the airports or seaports of Muslim nations.
“Those who destroy God’s mosques deserve to be attacked through jihad, and if Switzerland was on our borders, we would fight it,” Qaddafi was quoted by Libya’s official news agency JANA as saying. He spoke before a gathering marking the birthday of the Islamic Prophet Muhammad in the Libyan city of Benghazi.
Swiss Foreign Ministry spokesman Lars Knuchel declined to comment on Qaddafi’s call for a holy war against the neutral Alpine republic.
In November, Swiss voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional ban on minarets, in a controversial decision that put Switzerland at the forefront of a European backlash against a growing Muslim population.
Muslim groups in Switzerland and abroad condemned the vote as biased and anti-Islamic and business groups warned that the decision could damage relations with Muslim nations and wealthy Islamic investors who bank, travel and shop there.
Any Muslims who deal with Switzerland are “apostates,” Qaddafi added.
Muslims comprise about 6 percent of Switzerland’s 7.5 million people. Many are refugees from the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s and about one in 10 actively practices the religion, the government says.
Anxieties about growing Muslim minorities have rippled across Europe in recent years, leading to legal changes in some countries. France has banned headscarves in schools and is considering legislation to ban head-to-toe coverings for women. Some German states have introduced bans on head scarves for Muslim women teaching in public schools.
But the Swiss ban on minarets was one of the most extreme reactions.
Relations between Libya and Switzerland turned icy after Qaddafi’s son, Hannibal, and his wife were arrested in a luxury hotel in Geneva in 2008 for allegedly beating up their servants.
Qaddafi was released after two days, but Libya retaliated by recalling diplomats from Switzerland, taking its money out of Swiss vaults and interrupting oil shipments to the Swiss.
In 2009, former Swiss President Hans-Rudolf Merz apologized in Libya and agreed to possible compensation claims. But Switzerland backed out of the deal after two Swiss businessman were blocked from leaving Libya. One left earlier this week after more than 19 months in the Swiss Embassy in Tripoli. The other has been convicted of violating residency laws and remains in Libyan custody.
Earlier this month, Tripoli responded to a Swiss travel ban on Qaddafi, his family and ministers by banning citizens of 25 European countries from traveling to Libya.
The visa restrictions threatened lucrative work for Europeans in Libya’s booming oil and gas industries, but mediation from Italy and Spain has eased the constraints.
The 24-strong bloc of Latin American states known as the Rio Group is to join the Caribbean Community to form a new trade body intended to present opposition to US dominance.
The Rio Group assertively announced the birth of its successor earlier this week, at a summit in a resort town on Mexico’s Caribbean coast. Mexican President Felipe Calderon declared that a new body had been formed that would represent both the Group of Rio and the 15-member Caribbean Community (CARICOM).
Going under the provisional name the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELC), the newly announced body specifically excluded the United States and Canada from membership, and intends to consolidate the sometimes tenuous solidarity among the Central and South American states. The exclusion of the two North American powerhouses puts the nascent organization in direct competition with the Organization of American States (OAS), established in 1948, over which the US holds decisive authority.
The declaration is clearly a statement of South America’s new self-assertion, and comes in the wake of provocative times, as fellow Rio Group states rallied around Argentina in its current dispute with Britain over oil-drilling rights off the Falkland Islands.
Nikolaus Werz, political scientist at the University of Rostock, believes that the emergence of the new body will only make Europe’s diplomatic ties with Latin America more complicated. “We need a single point of contact, and this adds another to the long list we already have – the Rio Group, OAS, CARICOM and Unasur,” he told Deutsche Welle.
Almost every Latin American country was represented at the annual summit in Mexico, and together they succeeded in formulating some of the values of the sub-continent. Calderon declared, “We have decided to base an organization on shared values including sovereignty and the non-use of force, including threats of force, international cooperation, ever closer integration of Latin America and the Caribbean and permanent political dialogue.”
Historical rhetoric
There was no shortage of high-flown and defiant rhetoric at the meeting, led predictably by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who spoke of finally throwing off the US-yoke. “Now here, in Mexico, we have created a document, a compromise, the creation of a body of Latin America and the Caribbean, without the USA,” Chavez said at the summit. “Now we can say from Mexico we have revived the dream and project of Bolivar.”
There was a strong sense that the region’s most left-wing, anti-American governments had pioneered the creation of the new organization, which is set to convene for the first time on July 5, 2011, in Caracas, Venezuela. But Werz also suggested that the US’s influence on the sub-continent had waned in recent years anyway. “The OAS failed as it tried to take on certain challenges,” he said. “Other players have increased their presence in South America, notably China, but also the EU.”
In an interview with South American broadcaster Telesur, Bolivian president Evo Morales lent his own weight to the vision of a South American brotherhood united against the US. Morales was among many who recently voiced concern about the huge US military presence now stationed on Haiti and the summit pledged to send a further $25 million (18.5 million euros) to the earthquake-hit country.
“A union of Latin American countries is the weapon against imperialism. It is necessary to create a regional body that excludes the United States and Canada,” Morales said. “Where there are US military bases that do not respect democracy, where there is political empire with his blackmailers, with its constraints, there is no development for that country, and especially there is no social peace.”
But the summit also revealed the many tensions likely to threaten the prospective new bloc. The project nearly ran aground this week on the continuing conflict between neighboring Venezuala and Colombia. Colombia is considered a close ally of the US, and Venezuela often perceives itself under threat.
Jamaican head of state Bruce Golding admitted that such tensions were unlikely to go away overnight. “In the past, there were too many occasions where we fought one another. But we still had to live in the same part of the world. I hope that we find ways in the new community to talk about what divides us with the aim of achieving unity.”
Doubts over South American strength
But doubts have also been voiced about the strength and belligerence of the proposed body when it actually comes into being. Few specifics have been revealed about its structure, much of which is yet to be decided, and Rafael Fernandez de Castro, Calderon’s top foreign policy advisor, told the Miami Herald newspaper that the new organization will have neither a building or a permanent staff, and would operate according to a “flexible” program of summits – in other words, CELC would convene either every one or two years.
On top of this, the six nations that have been chosen to draw up the new body’s mission statement – Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic and Venezuela – are mainly countries with no interest in antagonizing the US. The fact that US-friendly Chile takes over the two-year presidency of the Group of Rio in March is unlikely to sharpen tensions within the Americas either.
Human beings may be forced to be ‘microchipped’ like pet dogs, a shocking official report into the rise of the Big Brother state has warned.
The microchips – which are implanted under the skin – allow the wearer’s movements to be tracked and store personal information about them.
They could be used by companies who want to keep tabs on an employee’s movements or by Governments who want a foolproof way of identifying their citizens – and storing information about them.
The prospect of ‘chip-citizens’ – with its terrifying echoes of George Orwell’s ‘Big Brother’ police state in the book 1984 – was raised in an official report for Britain’s Information Commissioner Richard Thomas into the spread of surveillance technology.
The report, drawn up by a team of respected academics, claims that Britain is a world-leader in the use of surveillance technology and its citizens the most spied-upon in the free world.
It paints a frightening picture of what Britain might be like in ten years time unless steps are taken to regulate the use of CCTV and other spy technologies.
The reports editors Dr David Murakami Wood, managing editor of the journal Surveillance and Society and Dr Kirstie Ball, an Open University lecturer in Organisation Studies, claim that by 2016 our almost every movement, purchase and communication could be monitored by a complex network of interlinking surveillance technologies.
The most contentious prediction is the spread in the use of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology.
The RFID chips – which can be detected and read by radio waves – are already used in new UK passports and are also used the Oyster card system to access the London Transport network.
For the past six years European countries have been using RFID chips to identify pet animals.
Already used in America
However, its use in humans has already been trialled in America, where the chips were implanted in 70 mentally-ill elderly people in order to track their movements.
And earlier this year a security company in Ohio chipped two of its employees to allow them to enter a secure area. The glass-encased chips were planted in the recipients’ upper right arms and ‘read’ by a device similar to a credit card reader.
In their Report on the Surveillance Society, the authors now warn: “The call for everyone to be implanted is now being seriously debated.”
The authors also highlight the Government’s huge enthusiasm for CCTV, pointing out that during the 1990s the Home Office spent 78 per cent of its crime prevention budget – a total of £500 million – on installing the cameras.
There are now 4.2 million CCTV cameras in Britain and the average Briton is caught on camera an astonishing 300 times every day.
This huge enthusiasm comes despite official Home Office statistics showing that CCTV cameras have ‘little effect on crime levels’.
They write: “The surveillance society has come about us without us realising”, adding: “Some of it is essential for providing the services we need: health, benefits, education. Some of it is more questionable. Some of it may be unjustified, intrusive and oppressive.”
Yesterday Information Commissioner Richard Thomas, whose office is investigating the Post Office, HSBC, NatWest and the Royal Bank of Scotland over claims they dumped sensitive customer details in the street, said: “Many of these schemes are public sector driven, and the individual has no choice over whether or not to take part.”
“People are being scrutinised and having their lives tracked, and are not even aware of it.”
He has also voiced his concern about the consequences of companies, or Government agencies, building up too much personal information about someone.
He said: “It can stigmatise people. I have worries about technology being used to identify classes of people who present some kind of risk to society. And I think there are real anxieties about that.”
Yesterday a spokesman for civil liberties campaigners Liberty said: “We have got nothing about these surveillance technologies in themselves, but it is their potential uses about which there are legitimate fears. Unless their uses are regulated properly, people really could find themselves living in a surveillance society.
“There is a rather scary underlying feeling that people may worry that these microchips are less about being a human being than becoming a barcoded product.”
An application that lets users point a smart phone at a stranger and immediately learn about them premiered last Tuesday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. Developed by The Astonishing Tribe (TAT), a Swedish mobile software and design firm, the prototype software combines computer vision, cloud computing, facial recognition, social networking, and augmented reality.
“It’s taking social networking to the next level,” says Dan Gärdenfors, head of user experience research at TAT. “We thought the idea of bridging the way people used to meet, in the real world, and the new Internet-based ways of congregating would be really interesting.”
TAT built the augmented ID demo, called Recognizr, to work on a phone that has a five-megapixel camera and runs the Android operating system. A user opens the application and points the phone’s camera at someone nearby. Software created by Swedish computer-vision firm Polar Rose then detects the subject’s face and creates a unique signature by combining measurements of facial features and building a 3-D model. This signature is sent to a server where it’s compared to others stored in a database. Providing the subject has opted in to the service and uploaded a photo and profile of themselves, the server then sends back that person’s name along with links to her profile on several social networking sites, including Twitter or Facebook. The Polar Rose software also tracks the position of the subject’s head–TAT uses this information to display the subject’s name and icons for the Web links on the phone’s screen without obscuring her face.
“It’s a very robust approach” to facial recognition, says Andrew Till, vice president of marketing solutions at Teleca, a mobile software consulting company in the United Kingdom. “It’s much, much better than what I’ve previously seen.”
Till says that applying image and face recognition to the trend of posting photos on social networking sites opens up interesting new possibilities. “You start to move into very creative ways of pulling together lots of services in a very beneficial way for personal uses, business uses, and you start to get into things that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to do,” he says.
Polar Rose’s algorithms can run on the iPhone and on newer Android phones, says the company’s chief technical officer and founder, Jan Erik Solem. The augmented ID application uses a cloud server to do the facial recognition primarily because many subjects will be unknown to the user (so there won’t be a matching photo on the phone), but also to speed up the process on devices with less processing power.
Academic and company research groups have developed augmented reality applications, which superimpose virtual objects and information on top of the real world, for more than a decade. But until the past year or so, all of these prototype applications required bulky headsets and laptop computers. With more powerful sensors, cameras, and microprocessors built into mobile phones, however, augmented reality applications have begun hitting the mainstream. Several apps take advantage of the GPS chips and compasses available in newer smart phones. For example, PresseLite’s Metro Paris app and Acrossair’s Nearest Tube provide iPhone users with directions to nearby subway stops.
But Gärdenfors calls such applications “relatively crude.” They often obscure objects with labels, he notes, and are sometimes limited by the fact that location information may not be available. He thinks that many augmented reality services could benefit from including elements of computer vision to make information retrieval and label positioning more precise. “This could absolutely work for other kinds of objects, and I think we’ll see that soon,” he says.
However, Gärdenfors notes that using computer vision to identify buildings and other objects holds challenges that they didn’t encounter in developing the augmented ID application. “With facial recognition, it’s so obvious what you want to search for,” says Gärdenfors. “With other objects, it may be harder to tell which item on the screen you want to identify.”
Gärdenfors says that TAT has taken potential privacy concerns with the technology seriously from the beginning. “Facial recognition can be a kind of scary thing, and you could use it for a lot of different purposes.” For that reason, the company designed Recognizr as a strictly opt-in service: people would have to upload a photo and profile of themselves, and associate that with different social networks before anyone could use the service to identify them. “You should only be able to look at people who have signed up for this,” Gärdenfors says.
A concept video of the augmented ID application that TAT posted on YouTube last summer garnered a great deal of attention. Gärdenfors says the company often uses this strategy to determine which ideas justify further development. A live demonstration also received a lot of interest at the Mobile World Congress. “We’re probably going to partner with some company over the next couple of months to take it to the next level and actually build a product,” Gärdenfors says. While this will require partnerships with a device maker, a mobile service provider, and social networking services, the technology is developed enough that a commercial application could be ready in as little as a month or two, he says.
Documents from talks on a secret global copyright deal have leaked online, various sources are reporting. The documents discussed are said to confirm that internet service providers could be compelled to constantly sift through their customers’ data looking for copyright transgressions. The European Union’s data protection chief has said that such requirements could curtail individuals’ civil liberties.
It’s the latest twist in the tale of ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which has been swiftly and secretly negotiated by the 27 nations of the European Union, the US, Australia, Canada, Mexico, New Zealand, South Korea, Singapore, Jordan, Morocco and the United Arab Emirates.
The leak, detailed by PC World magazine, covers ACTA’s “enforcement procedures in the digital environment”. The draft being circulated says that ISPs operating in nations that have signed up to ACTA would be forced to operate “automatic technical processes” to detect copyright-infringing activities.
Translated, that means they must examine data transferred by their customers for signs of copyrighted material, using the kind of deep packet inspection technology more typical of security services.
ISPs told New Scientist in December that such technology will not only slow downloads, but puts in place technology that could be used for snooping and censorship.
The leaked draft being circulated also says that those who ignore two warnings about infringing may have their internet connections severed by the state under a “three strikes” rule.
In France, the government has already introduced a measure along these lines. It was declared unconstitutional, but the government then amended it and introduced it again.
A decision by the Israeli government to include a location with an almost 4,000 year-old link to the origins of Judaism in a list of 150 national heritage sites has sparked an uproar among Muslims – and drawn the disapproval of the Obama administration.
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu insisted Thursday that the decision to include the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron on the list would not in any way change the status quo at the site, which has long been shared by Jews and Muslims.
He called accusations being made by Palestinians and others “an artificial attempt to distort reality and sow discord.”
Two days after Palestinian Authority (P.A.) chairman Mahmoud Abbas warned during a visit to Brussels that it could ignite a “religious war,” Palestinians clashed Thursday with Israeli soldiers in Hebron. The radical Palestinian group Islamic Jihad has called for a “day of anger” on Friday.
State Department spokesman Mark Toner said the administration regarded the move as “provocative,” and that U.S. diplomats had conveyed that message to Israeli officials.
On Thursday the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) weighed in, demanding that the United Nations act against “this Israeli unilateral aggression.”
Earlier, a spokesman for U.N. secretary-general Ban Ki-moon said he raised with visiting Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak his concerns about “the inclusion of holy sites in the occupied West Bank on an Israeli heritage list.”
In announcing the expansion of an existing list of sites with religious and national significance to ancient and modern Israel, Netanyahu on Sunday mentioned that they would include the Cave of the Patriarchs and another site in territory claimed by the Palestinians – Rachel’s Tomb between Jerusalem and nearby Bethlehem, the traditional burial site of Rachel, the wife of the biblical patriarch, Jacob.
Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs is at the center of a storm after the Israeli government said it would be included on a list of national heritage sites. (Photo courtesy of Cave of Machpela Web site)It is the site in Hebron, about 20 miles south of Jerusalem, that is causing the most unhappiness.
Although a predominantly Arab city today, Hebron’s importance to Jews goes back to the foundation of their faith. According to the Old Testament (Genesis 49), Abraham bought a cave known as Machpela at the site to bury his wife, Sarah and was himself also buried there, along with Isaac and Jacob, as well as Isaac’s wife Rebecca, and Jacob’s first wife, Leah.
The Old Testament also records that Hebron was the capital of the kingdom of Israel for seven years before King David moved to Jerusalem (2 Samuel 5). Rabbis consider the Cave of the Patriarchs the second holiest site in Judaism, after the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Hebron as a city is also one of Judaism’s four holy cities, the others being Jerusalem, Tiberias and Tzfat.
Historians say Hebron had a small, almost continuous Jewish presence for thousands of years until 1929, when it ended abruptly after 67 members of the then 800-strong Jewish community were killed during three days of Arab riots.
Shortly after Israel captured the West Bank during the 1967 Six Day War Jews began to return to Hebron in small numbers and today some 500 are reported to live in the historic Jewish Quarter, amid tight security.
The Muslim claim to the Cave of the Patriarchs is based on the Islamic precept that major biblical figures, from Adam to Jesus, were Muslim prophets. Thus the mosque at the site is known as Ibrahimi (Abraham) mosque.
Novel claims
In recent days, new claims about the Islamic significance of the site have appeared in Palestinian media.
In a press report Thursday, the Palestinian Ma’an news agency described the Ibrahimi mosque as Islam’s “fourth holiest” site.
The P.A. news agency WAFA cited a London-based organization called the Palestine Return Center as describing the Ibrahimi mosque as “a mosque that Abraham built and is buried in.”
According to the Encyclopedia Judaica, The structure surrounding the cave and still standing today was built by King Herod some 2,000 years ago. Islam reached Hebron with the Muslim conquests in the 7th century AD.
According to the left-wing Middle East scholar Juan Cole, the five holiest sites in Islam are, in order, in Mecca, Medina, Jerusalem, Najaf and Karbala (although others have called the city of Kairouan in northern Tunisia the fourth holiest in Islam.) An online list of the 15 “holiest sites in Islam” does not include Hebron.
At a press conference in Ramallah Wednesday, veteran PLO activist Hanan Ashrawi called Netanyahu’s decision a “direct attack on Palestinian heritage and a crime against Palestinian culture.”
The Cave of the Patriarchs is divided into Jewish and Muslim sections, and for most of the year, Jews and Muslims have free access to their designated spaces. For two 10-day periods each year, each group has access to the entire site while the other is barred from entering.
“We know that it is also a holy place for Muslims,” Netanyahu said Thursday. “We honor both.”
“We are not changing the status quo at the site and we will not, in any way, harm freedom of worship for Muslims, just as we will preserve freedom of worship for Jews.”
The U.N. body known as the Bureau of the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People slammed the Israeli move.
“Laying official claims to religious and historical places throughout the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem and attempts by the Government of Israel purporting itself to be the sole custodian of those sites is yet another measure aimed at consolidating Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian lands,” it said in a statement.
Nearly half of Western European believe that Jews exploit the persecution of their past as a method of extorting money, according to an annual Jewish Agency report released on Sunday.
A joint report on anti-Semitism conducted by the Agency and the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs found that 42 percent of those polled by the University of Bielefeld in Germany agreed that “Jews exploit the past to extort money.”
The countries in which the highest percentage of the population agreed with that statement were Poland and Spain.
According to the Jewish Agency, there were more anti-Semitic incidents in 2009 than in any year since the Second World War. In the first three months of 2009 – immediately following Israel’s three-week offensive on the Gaza Strip – there were as many anti-Semitic incidents recorded as in the entire year of 2008.
In France, for example, there were 631 anti-Semitic incidents recorded in the first half of 2009, compared to 474 in all of 2008.
Worldwide, eight people were killed in attacks last year.
The report indicates that there were two murders linked with anti-Semitism in the United States in 2009 – one of a female university student in Connecticut and the other of a non-Jewish guard at the Holocaust museum in Washington, D.C.
This rise in anti-Semitism is stemming from both the political Left and Right, according to the Jewish Agency.
At the press conference at which the report was released, officials referred to a film that has been making the rounds in recent days that charges Israel with stealing organs at the IDF hospital in Haiti
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