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| Join Daniel Pipes on a Fact Finding Expedition to Israel (For full details click here) Please take a moment to visit and log in at the subscriber area, and submit your city & country location. We will use this information in future to invite you to any events that we organize in your area. Dear Reader: I discussed the barrage of news yesterday from four Middle Eastern countries – Iran, Yemen, Syria, and Egypt – on "The Arena with Michael Coren." Also, you are invited to an American Hellenic Institute conference on "The Evolution of Turkey's Policy in the Eastern Mediterranean: Implications for U.S. Interests," to take place 9:30am to noon on February 6 at The Capital Hilton Hotel, 1001 16th St. N.W. Washington. I will be delivering the keynote address at the event. If you might wish to attend, click here for the conference schedule and reply card. Yours sincerely, Daniel Pipes Egyptian Nuclear Power Plant Ransackedby Daniel Pipes http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2012/01/egyptian-nuclear-power-plant-ransacked
Egypt Independent reports on vandalizing, looting, and fighting at the nuclear power plant being built at El-Dabaa, a town in the desert to the west of Alexandria. The account draws on an unnamed source at the Ministry of Electricity and Energy who
accused security authorities and the governor of North Sinai of "causing the disaster." The official said the initial losses were around LE0.5 billion [= US$83 million]. He also accused a businessman and former member in the defunct National Democratic Party of being "behind the chaos," but did not name the businessman allegedly involved. The source said the meteorological station, ground water station and many of the offices had been attacked by "organized looters," who took objects including computers, monitoring devices for earthquakes, furniture, cables and transformers. On Friday, about 500 residents had rallied demanding the dismantling of the nuclear power plant, saying their land had been confiscated for the project. They say the government did not compensate them for the land it took. However, other reports suggest that the construction site was attacked by residents of the area angry at the way in which the land for the power plant had been acquired by the government. Residents of Dabaa staged a sit-in on Saturday after clashes with Egyptian military police on Friday. The clashes left 41 people injured, including 29 soldiers, according to state-run newspaper Al-Ahram. Comments: (1) L'Institut d'Égypte, a nuclear power plant site … the situation has degenerated in Egypt to the point that nothing is safe. (2) The Islamists lack real power but they appear to be in charge; so as Egypt heads into economic decay and social anarchy, they will receive the blame. Could this be what the crafty military tyrants want, so they can swoop in and "save" the country? (January 16, 2012) Jan. 20, 2012 update: The news gets worse, with the possibility that radioactive material was stolen: The UN atomic energy agency issued a statement Thursday saying "the items that have gone missing are low-level radioactive sources. The sources were stolen not from an operating NPP (nuclear power plant), but from a laboratory at a construction site for an NPP that is not yet operational," the International Atomic Energy Agency said. The Vienna-based agency said it is "in touch with the Egyptian authorities." Al-Ahram newspaper reported Thursday that a safe containing radioactive material was stolen from a site in Al-Dabaa, on the Mediterranean coast. Another safe was broken and some of its contents were taken, Al-Ahram said. … It said the team of experts entered the site but "did not find the missing safe. It did, however, find two sources of radioactivity in another safe that had been broken into." Will No-Interest Banking Undo Turkey's Economy?by Daniel Pipes http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2012/01/will-no-interest-banking-undo-turkey-economy
That's the thesis implicit to David Goldman's analysis at "Recall notice for the Turkish model." After dubbing the Turkish economy a bubble that "is bursting, starting with the stock market and national currency," he makes this observation about the prime minister: Erdoğan has the weirdest economic views of any serving head of government. He justified the credit bubble on religious grounds, pledging repeatedly to cut the "real" interest rate (the cost of interest minus the inflation rate) to zero. "We aim to cut the real interest rate in the long run, so people will increase their incomes through working, not through interest," he said last April. "Eventually we aim to equalize the interest rate and inflation rate." Erdoğan believes that this would fulfill the Islamic injunction against lending for interest; if the real interest rate is zero, he seems to think, the sharia ban on interest is fulfilled de facto. In other words, Erdoğan's wacky financial ideas, which are likely to doom his country's economy, follow directly from his Islamist dream of eliminating riba (usury). More generally put, the Islamist economic program undermines itself. (January 10, 2012)
Related Topics: Radical Islam, Turkey and Turks This text may be reposted or forwarded so long as it is presented as an integral whole with complete information provided about its author, date, place of publication, and original URL. | ||||||||||
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