The people of Libya have experienced no peace since the western-backed campaign to oust him from power was launched in April 2011. Colonel Muammar Qaddafi was murdered in cold blood but ruthless criminals have taken over killing innocent people.
Has Libya been ‘liberated’ from the clutches of Muammar Qaddafi’s tyranny or plunged into chaos by the thugs and hoodlums trained and armed by the west? Life for ordinary Libyans has become extremely grim.
In Israeli-NATO “liberated” Libya, endless violence has forced many people to hark back to the days of Qaddafi rule.
The Qatari-based tribal-owned network, al-Jazeera’s news broadcast on February 16 about Libya was revealing. It started with a report on the mayhem that has gripped Libya since the capture and brutal murder of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi on October 20, 2011. Without showing any footage of the brutality perpetrated by various militias against civilians, the network switched to an episode of 16 years ago to tell viewers how terrible Qaddafi’s rule was.
The truth about what is happening in “liberated” Libya is finally seeping through. Both Amnesty International and Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors without Borders) have confirmed that prisoners suspected of being Qaddafi sympathizers have been systematically tortured and killed.
The West has gotten rid of another pesky dictator with the execution-style killing of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi on 10-20-2011 in Sirte. There was much jubilation in Western capitals as news of Qaddafi’s killing spread.
Successive US regimes have claimed that al-Qaeda is their enemy number one and that no effort would be spared in costs or human lives to eliminate it. Does empirical evidence support this claim? Let us examine the facts.
The Muslim East (Middle East) has been in the throes of revolutionary fervor for more than six months. Two dictators have been driven from power; others are teetering on the brink while some are also fighting back with mixed results.
In Libya, al-Jazeera is on the side of the Libyan rebels. Their cause is championed even if Western planes are bombing Libyan positions including the April 26 assassination attempt on Libyan leader, Colonel Muammar Qaddafi.
The witch-hunt of Qaddafi opponents began on 2 October 2005 with the arrest and detention of five Libyan dissidents, who had been granted asylum by the UK, on the grounds that they were a threat to national security.
The West’s attack on Libya is yet another crusade launched against a Muslim country on the pretext of protecting its people. Pope Urban II would be pleased to learn that his disciples are still marching on as good “Christian soldiers” against another group of “heathens” in the Muslim world nearly a thousand years after his sermon on Mount Clermont.
The West’s hypocrisy stands exposed yet again in the contrasting policies toward uprisings in Libya and Bahrain. The US and allies Britain and France pressed the UN Security Council on March 17 to impose a no-fly zone on Libya.
The UN Security Council passed a unanimous resolution on February 26 imposing sanctions on the Qaddafi regime freezing assets of the beleaguered ruler and his close associates as well as referring him to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague for war crimes.
The 10-day Libyan revolution has taken a bloody turn, as Qaddafi mobilizes paramilitary groups against protesters demonstrating for regime change.
Beyond the moralizing statements by British and Scottish officials about the release of a sick and dying Libyan, AbdelBasit Ali al-Megrahi from a Scottish prison is the more earthly question of naked British commercial interests...
In this classic of travel writing, first published sixty years ago, a Danish journalist records his experience of life in North Africa under colonial rule. Driving through the Sahara in a battered Chevrolet, having converted to Islam and with a knowledge of Arabic, he leaves the beaten track to discover communities and landscapes shrouded in mystery for centuries. Brushes with magicians, cave-dwellers and Sufi mystics, however, prove less astonishing than the cruelties inflicted on the local populations by Mussolini's generals.
1When a US secretary of state tells an Arab country to follow Libya’s example, and a US president praises colonel Mu’ammar Qaddafi for his "wise" and "responsible" decision, the view that the Bush administration’s foreign policy is fundamentally and cynically imperial is reinforced.
Colonel Mu’ammar Qaddafi’s humiliating attempts in the last several years to woo the US have culminated in his country’s formal acceptance of responsibility for the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988.
Colonel Mu’ammar Qaddafi, Brother Leader of the Revolution in Libya, arrived in Khartoum on July 17 for two days of talks with president Omar Hassan al-Bashir in connection with the peace proposals sponsored jointly by his country and Egypt.
Amid continuing scepticism over the possibility of a pan-African confederation, some 40 heads of state and government have pledged to speed up the birth of an African union.