… and here’s a small version of the Double Coffee’s logo (a trademark of Double Coffee company) – sorry, I couldn’t find a larger one:

I’d be interested to find out what they have in common with Rahman Baba and what they will do about all the Afghans in Hamburg that have started stealing table mats from Double Coffee stores that have Rahman Baba’s picture printed on them? :-)

Pakistani soldiers enter a building and interrogate the male residents, asking for information on the Taliban. They don’t get the answers they’re looking for so the head of that group orders his subordinates to beat the men. The men beg for mercy while they get kicked, whipped and hit everywhere but the soldiers don’t care and keep on torturing them. One of the brave soldiers even shows his female side by pulling his victim’s hair. The most gruesome part comes at the end, when an old man is beaten up while he’s begging for mercy, for them to let go and screaming “Ya Allah, Ya Allah”.
In war times torturers and those that commit crimes often try to play down their guilt by claiming they were ordered to do what they did but if you have a closer look at the soldiers in this video you will see that some of them really enjoy what they’re doing.

Two of the four beaten men are elderly men that could be your or my grandfather but since torturers have no honour these soldiers don’t care about such things. I’ve been harrassed, blackmailed and chased through Peshawar by the Pakistani police myself so I can tell you one thing: stuff like this is very common over there. In Pakistan, when people speak about the police, they don’t call them “police” but “dogs”.

Make a right-click here and and choose “Save as…” to download the Video.

The thoughest part was making sure the pages are implemented in a fashion that makes it possible to apply a different CSS and language file to it so the complete content, text and writing direction changes. Once that system was set up we provided the translators with three different methods to translate the content: using a backend translation system, inline-editing of words they see on the site and the old-school way of translating the texts from within an Excel-sheet and importing them into the system.

Kudos go out to Max, Dmitri, Amit, Jayawant and Pankaj for all the technical stuff and Ayla (Turkish), Eman (Arabic), Hossein (Persian), Nasir (Urdu) and Saloua (French) for the translations. Our biggest thanks goes to Eman who had the toughest job as she was the first translator and she probably had to spend more time beta-testing than translating the site. Her invaluable feedback paved way for the other translations. In case you’re looking for professional translators get in touch with me and I will connect you to those highly recommended folks.

StumbleUpon is a web browser plugin that allows its users to discover and rate webpages, photos, videos, and news articles. These webpages are typically presented when the user — known within the community as a Stumbler — clicks the “Stumble!” button on the browser’s toolbar. StumbleUpon chooses which new webpage to display based on the user’s ratings of previous pages, ratings by his/her friends, and by the ratings of users with similar interests. i.e. it is a recommendation system which uses peer and social networking principles. [...]

For me this has become one of the most fun tools lately and I discovered quite a few interesting websites by just stumbling upon them. Give it a try :-)

The message the American government tries to convey doesn’t make sense when it claims that those torturing orgies were the deeds of a few individuals that ran out of control. Apparently there’s a scheme behind this as every U.S. military prison, be it Abu Ghraib, Bagram or Guantanamo, has “a few individuals” that permanently run “out of control”. In addition to that it fits into the strategy that the Strategic Command (STRATCOM) has carefully worded in one of its investigations in 1995 called “Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence” (PDF-Document), which actually refers to the U.S. nuclear strategy in a post-cold war world – but still relates to this very same idea of acting unpredictable and being irrational:

“Because of the value that comes from the ambiguity of what the U.S. may do to an adversary if the acts we seek to deter are carried out, it hurts to portray ourselves as too fully rational and cool-headed…”
[...]
“The fact that some elements may appear to be potentially “out of control” can be beneficial to creating and reinforcing fears and doubts within the minds of an adversary’s decision makers. This essential sense of fear is the working force of deterrence. That the U.S. may become irrational and vindictive if its vital interests are attacked should be a part of the national persona we project to all adversaries.”

To put it another way: just because the “Axis of Good” is bombing the middle-east and Afghanistan into a nicely levelled, peaceful, McDonalds parking-lot it doesn’t mean that they’re acting democratically – according to their self-conception.

… reminds me of what pacifists say: “Fighting for peace is like f4v”.

Curious as I am I took a look at their website and, besides all the logos of the Department of Defense scattered all over their pages, I ran across this piece of text:

“The mission of the DLIFLC is to educate, sustain, evaluate, and support foreign language specialists under the guidelines of the Defense Foreign Language Program, which provides the Department of Defense and other Federal agencies with linguists fully capable of supporting United States national interests worldwide.”

So basically I would have helped the American military in their efforts to develop the Dari language skills of their spies, agents and soldiers that are responsible for the killing of tens of thousands of Afghans during their attack on Afghanistan, burning killed Muslims, killing crowds of children with grenades, keeping “ghost prisons” and torture and rape men, women and children.

Needless to say that I sent her a negative reply:

“Dear <Name removed>,

I took a look at your employers website and I’m afraid I can’t help you.
I do not agree with the U.S. policy in regard to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, an information you can also read about on my website sherzad.com, and I have serious reservations against helping the DoD in any way – directly or indirectly. If the DLIFLC was a “regular” company – not related to the American military – I would have been more than glad to help you. Unfortunately the American military is directly responsible for arresting, torturing and killing some of my relatives and family friends and this is keeping me from helping them.

Thank you for your understanding,
Rias A. Sherzad”

Of course me rejecting their request won’t change anything in regard to how the world goes. But the American military must be very used to Afghans helping them achieve their aims. They sure do. Who else does the translating on Guantanamo Bay and on the Bagram Airbase if not such be-namos (be = without) Afghan traitors that the Afghan history is full with?

For the historically challenged: in 1972 a group of Palestinian rebels tried to kidnap the Israeli olympic team in order to trade them in for Palestinians arrested in Israeli jails – a deal that was rejected by Golda Meir, the Israeli premier minister back then (who was, in the movie, portrayed as a nice ‘ole lady that in fact she never was). The plot was foiled, all eleven athletes were killed (most of them accidentally by German police forces) and some of the Palestinian rebels as well. Others were jailed and later released or traded in for hostages (some call them “trading goods”) taken elsewhere. It’s sad to see that those Palestinians and Israelis had to die but as I learnt from western media they can be considered “collateral damage“.

A hit-team of five Mossad agents was sent out to hunt down and kill eleven Palestinians suspected of masterminding the Munich-operation. Killing is what they did, but we’ll forget about the historic fact that the Mossad killed people that had nothing or barely anything to do with the happenings in Munich, as proven many, many times in the past years.

What I found strange about the movie was, that everything around the Israelis was nice and clean. Nice cities, clean streets, nice clothes and the hero had a pretty wife and was perfectly shaved. They always had doubts and hesitated before they killed someone and showed a high level of moral maturity.
The villains, here: Palestinians, had moustaches that would have scared the living hell out of Stalin and Saddam Hussain, had dark circles around their eyes, were always unshaved and had the scariest look and the darkest sunglasses I’ve ever seen. Their motto seemed to be “Shoot, then ask” whilst the Israeli murder-squad had philosophical discussions about what they were doing there and if it was right or wrong.
During the movie, only once of course, a Palestinian villain had the opportunity to explain his point of view to the hero – and was killed some five minutes later. Who would stand alone infront of a group of four armed men, unprotected, and take part in a five-against-one shootout? According to Steven Spielberg: stupid Palestinian cannon fodder, duh!

Historically and morally the biggest bs I’ve seen lately but I didn’t expect anything else…

/privat
/mp3
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There’s nothing exciting on this website’s subfolders for you to see so stop wasting your time and get a life :-)