Archive for December, 2006

Saddam is Dead and so is the real atrocity

Saturday, December 30th, 2006

Saddam Hussein shaking hands with Donald RumsfeldSaddam Hussein is dead. The man once called the “Butcher of Baghdad” and the “Modern-day Yazid” has been executed by way of hanging in Iraq.

Without going into the morality of the execution (as under Islamic Law, he probably would have been executed), it is interesting that trial and execution were considered illegal by most of the international community.

That in itself should not be cause for alarm since the entire war and occupation has been illegal. What is more intriguing is the question, “Why?” Why wasn’t Saddam, a head of state, transferred to the Hague to stand for war crimes? Were they afraid justice would not be served? I doubt it. Why did the Iraqi courts only charge him with one atrocity (the killing of 168 Shias) and not anything else?

The answer is as sinister and deceptive as the premises for the war. The United States profited little in the court of public opinion by holding the trial in Iraq. They knew this from the beginning, but they also knew that, if all of Saddam’s crimes came to light in the International Criminal Court, his accomplices would also be fingered. His number-one accomplice, of course, is the good old U.S. of A.

We will never have the chance to hear testimonies from any of the countless Iranians who suffered and lost love-ones as a result of chemical weapons used in the Iran-Iraq war, weapons of mass destruction funded by the United States. We will never hear about any atrocities directed towards the enemies of the US because they aided and abetted Saddam in committing them. If today Saddam was guilty of war crimes, then so is Rumsfeld and Cheney, so was Reagan, and so are both father and son Bush.

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Finally

Saturday, December 30th, 2006

…charged the camera. Here:

Tahira asleep

Click the photo for more pictures.

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Milad Umm Zahra

Thursday, December 28th, 2006

Today is Umm Zahra’s birthday. She’s getting a special surprise (more on that later), inshaAllah.

In other news, it looks as though Eid will be on the 31st of December, inshaAllah. Many activities planned, including bowling. It should be fun.

Once again, my prayers go out to those on Hajj, both for those who will complete it and those who return to Allah along the journey.

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Binary Blobs

Tuesday, December 26th, 2006

The BlobI have been wanting to write something about this for some time, but, as with many other things, I didn’t have the right words. For those of you who are new to free software, a “binary blob” is a kernel module installed into the Linux kernel that is closed (both as in closed source) and non-free (as in no freedom). In other words, it is incompatible with the kernel license (the GPL) and, for all intents and purposes, is a violation of that license.

First, let me say a few things about politics. I do not consider myself to be a “free software zealot” but I am also not oblivious to the apparent political ramifications of using various types of software. Proprietary software (i.e. software that has restrictive licenses) is ultimately bad both for developers and for end-users.

I do not, however, think it is productive to completely shut out proprietary software if and only if it is needed (or strongly desired as the case may be).

Now distribution is a different animal entirely, and now that the Ubuntu developers are considering distributing the Nvidia and ATI proprietary drivers, this issue has come to the limelight. Keep in mind that Ubuntu has always distributed some binary blobs, but they have not generated much publicity in the past, and Ubuntu calls its operating system “software libre”. In an effort to make a “free” version, the Free Software Foundation came up with GNewSense.

In one corner are the pragmatists who say, “The software should just work, and it won’t work with all hardware unless those drivers are included.”

On the other side are those who say, “If it isn’t free, it doesn’t belong in a free operating system.”

I can see the pragmatic point. Mac OS X “just works”, but the question is “Why?” Well, for one, they make their own computers. All of the hardware that goes into their computers is carefully tested and supplied with drivers ahead of time.

There is a perception among some people that Windows also “just works,” but I beg to differ. For anyone who as actually installed Windows (and I’ve done so on hundreds of computers when I used to work in IT), it rarely “just works.” There are inevitably driver problems and many things that need to be installed before you have a working system. What most people experience is either a computer that has had windows installed by someone like me or a pre-installed factory shipped computer.

If a GNU/Linux distribution is pre-installed on a computer, it does “just work” because the retailers have to make sure it does. It is not the job of the distributor of the operating system to make sure it works on every piece of imaginable hardware, and it is very dangerous to start making promises that it will “just work” when, in all likelihood, there will be cases where it won’t.

In my Windows days, the Nvidia 3D accelerated driver did not even ship with Windows. I had to download it myself. How is this any different than needing to download it in GNU/Linux? Also, with serious efforts to create free driver versions, why condition people to use the binary blobs?

Furthermore, Nvidia has stated that they can never “open source” their drivers because there is too much “intellectual property” from other vendors tied into their graphics cards. If that is the case, what are the legal ramifications of distributing (either free of charge or for profit) a GNU/Linux distribution under the GPL? Is it even legal? Can it be shipped to countries like Iran or North Korea, where sanctions on proprietary software are in place?

If free software is ultimately to be about choice, why not give the user the choice as to which proprietary software to install? It need not be complicated, but it also shouldn’t be automatic. After all, installing an operating system is an advanced task. Anyone who is capable of doing it aught to be capable of installing a few drivers. If they are not, they should probably buy a pre-installed factory shipped computer with GNU/Linux already installed anyway. In the meantime, we should form a company with the sole purpose of making free and open source drivers and pay the people who work for that company to do this full-time. It is in the legal of interest of many large corporations (such as IBM, Novell, Redhat, Sun, etc.) to support such an endeavor.

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Have a safe Hajj

Wednesday, December 20th, 2006

The ka'ba in MakkahInshaAllah, the journey, destination, and return for all hajis will be safe this year. My father-in-law will be among them, so I know the level of iman among the masses will be boosted. :-)

A man narrated: “We had made a pilgrimage to Mecca along with Imam Sajjad (that is Ali ibn al-Husayn Zain-ul-’Abidin, upon them be peace) and when we looked down at the Desert of Arafat it was full of Hajis (pilgrims). There were many of them that year. The Imam said: “There is much uproar, but few are true pilgrims.” The man said, “I do not know how the Imam gave me the insight, but when he asked me to look down again, I saw a desert full of animals, like that in a zoo, among whom a few human beings were moving about.”

I pray that all those who journey this year are true pilgrims and that their Hajj will be accepted.

It is no crime in you if you seek of the bounty of your Lord (during pilgrimage). Then when you pour down from (Mount) Arafat, celebrate the praises of Allah at the Sacred Monument, and celebrate His praises as He has directed you, even though, before this, you went astray. ” (Qur’an 2:198)

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Is it really Holocaust denial?

Tuesday, December 19th, 2006

Yad Vashem's Auschwitz AlbumI have been wanting to write this post for a few weeks now but haven’t really known how to approach it. No, it is not that I am afraid of the repercussions. After all, I have no doubt that the Holocaust did in fact occur, that numerous people were killed by the Nazis. If nothing else, I know at least one person lived in a concentration camp, because I met her. I saw the number tattooed on her arm and listened to her very real and tragic stories.

Having said that, I wonder why people are shocked and surprised by the language of the Iranian president. He never denied the Holocaust as a whole but rather questioned the numbers. How many people actually died? How many of those were actually Jewish? The statistics that I’ve traditionally been taught indicated that as many as 12 million people died and only 6 million of them were Jewish. Who were the other people and why has the Holocaust become an exclusively Jewish tragedy?

These are real questions that real seekers of knowledge ask, not the the questions that “deniers” or “revisionists” ask. What Mr. Ahmadinejad has called “mythology” is the religious imposition that the Zionists have placed on the world. You must “believe” in the holocaust, not just accept that it happened. Questioning any aspect of the Holocaust is blasphemy (regardless of whether or not you are Jewish), and any blasphemy against Judaism is anti-semetism.

So, if the Holocaust is a religious belief of the Jews, then mocking it or offending it is akin to mocking or offending a religious belief of another religion. Some have wrongly assumed, however, that this situation is similar to the cartoons erroneously depicting Prophet Muhammad (Allah bless him and grant him peace). The difference is that the cartoons were intended to offend and were designed to ridicule him with obviously false depictions. A conference on the Holocaust (whether politically motivated or not) simply questions the accuracy of certain facts. This is done at conferences all the time.

If the question were of enslaved Africans in the Americas, we would hear no outcry. If the question were of enslaved Africans in the Americas, we would hear no outcry. (I said it twice so you couldn’t skip over it). Many white academics have questioned the oft-repeated statistics of slavery: the number of slaves kidnapped and brought to the “new world”, the number of captives on slave ships who died on the journey, the number of people killed in resistance to slave masters, and so on.

The numbers listed by many scholars reaches in the tens of millions, while some scholars cite much smaller numbers. Are the latter “revisionists” or slavery “deniers”? Very few, if any, would call them that.

The question one must ultimately ask is, what do the Zionists have to hide? Why can no serious academic inquiry be done? I doubt that they have lied about the number of deaths; that is not the issue at all.

But the “mythology”, as Ahmadinejad calls it, that has allowed them to gain not only the world’s sympathy, but also an unflinching belief that the Jews have an undeniable right to Palestine and that they can seize that land in whatever matter they please, even if it means committing some of the same atrocities that were once committed against them by the Nazis, that they can setup Palestinian concentration camps, exile hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, shoot and bomb men, women, and children, and setup an Apartheid-like regime that denies Palestinians even the most basic rights of life, dignity, and property.

Then, as if that were not enough, they prop up this vicious, militarist, terrorist state and justify it under the banner of “retribution” for the crimes committed against them by the Nazis? And who among the Palestinians were Nazis? Why not turn their guns, their bombs, and their bulldozers on Berlin? Occupy Germany and exile millions of Germans? It is the pinnacle of euro-centric racism that no Arab or African life is as sacred as that of a white person, and Israel is a symbol of that racism. Even the Arabs who have accepted Israel live as second-class citizens. And the lost tribes from Ethiopia and even India have experience similar maltreatment (and they are Jewish).

Why can such a small and miserably unpleasant state such as Israel hold sway over the entire civilized world? No wonder there are conspiracy theories! All Iran has to do is build a nuclear reactor and the conspiracy theories run wild in western media. Israel has admitted to having nuclear weapons, and yet the world remains silent. Even a child can see when something is not fair, yet we have grown folks who will deny injustice and turn a blind eye to those crying out for help.

Most of the people Ahmadinejad invited to that conference might be crazy, but they’re not stupid. Truth stands clear from falsehood. When people are honest and kind, they have nothing to fear, yet Israel is terrified of Iran and terrified of any Muslims who speak out against them. God will judge between all of us, and He is surely the best to judge.

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Author Interview

Monday, December 18th, 2006

From GoldenScrolls.com:

“Tavis J. Hampton, author of the Golden Scrolls has been featured at Leicester Review of Books and Blogcritics.org in an interview conducted by Ambrose Musiyiwa. The interview highlights his inspiration for writing The Golden Scrolls, his goals for future writing, and some aspects of his personal life.”

Make sure to check it out at one of those sites.

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Top Ten Most Dangerous Toys of All Time

Saturday, December 16th, 2006

dangerous dart in boy
In true Christmas spirit, the Radar reviews the top ten most dangerous toys of all time. Enjoy!

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The Evil that is Wal-Mart

Monday, December 11th, 2006

Wal-Mart is EvilFor those of you who haven’t seen Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, you should rent the DVD.

And thereafter, you should avoid shopping at Wal-Mart.

That is all.

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I know I know I know

Saturday, December 9th, 2006

I still haven’t posted any pictures of the little one. Well, you can blame Kodak for that. Apparently, the “charger” that I bought for my EasyShare camera is not actually a charger. It is only an a/c adapter so that you can use it plugged in (I know, you’re thinking, ’so just use it plugged in.’) I will, inshaAllah. But I still need to find that charger or buy a new one. We’re not always near an outlet with those “Kodak moments” occur.

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