Chimpanzees give birth 'like humans' ...and you probably don't want to see this

so the real news here is... no one wanted to see this before. this isn't political... this doesn't prove anything... beyond... ich... gross

LOLZ via news.bbc.co.uk

Gulf of Mexico oil spill: BP sues Transocean for $40bn

BP said safety systems on Transocean's Deepwater Horizon rig had failed.
Separately, BP also sued the maker of the rig's blowout preventer, alleging the device failed to stop the huge oil spill that followed the explosion.
Both lawsuits were filed on Wednesday on the first anniversary of the explosion, which killed 11 workers.
Overnight on 20 April 2010, Transocean's Deepwater Horizon burst into flames while drilling a well for BP.
In the months that followed, more than 200 million gallons (780 million litres) of oil flowed in the Gulf of Mexico from the well, soiling hundreds of miles of coastline in the worst US oil spill in recent history.
In federal court in New Orleans on Wednesday, BP said Swiss-based Transocean and Cameron International, the Houston company that supplied the blowout preventer (BOP), should help it pay for tens of billions of dollars in liabilities resulting from the spill, which include clean-up and compensation costs.
BP also wants the court to declare that Cameron caused or contributed to the disaster.
"The Deepwater Horizon BOP was unreasonably dangerous, and has caused and continues to cause harm, loss, injuries, and damages to BP (and others) stemming from the blowout of Macondo well" and resulting spill, the BP lawsuit said.
Cameron has filed counter-claims and defended the integrity of its products. Transocean did not immediately comment on the BP lawsuit but has also requested court judgements against BP, Cameron and others.
BP has estimated its liability at $40.9bn, but could face tens of billions more in fines and penalties.

via bbc.co.uk

it is important to find the real cause of this disaster. I support petroleum, but it is important that this kind of disaster is diverted in the future. I feel the same way about other forms of energy development.

Posted via email from noahdavidsimon's posterous

Wonkette Pulls Offensive Post About Sarah Palin's Handicapped Son

Under intense pressure from readers and advertisers, the site's editor took the post down Thursday:

A post on this page satirizing Sarah Palin using her baby as a political prop was very badly done and sounded like the author was mocking the child and not just Sarah Palin/Sarah Palin’s followers.

The writer, Jack Stuef, has apologized for it. And we have decided to remove the post as requested by some people who have nothing to do with Sarah Palin, but who do have an interest in the cause of special needs children. We apologize for the poor comedic judgment.

After our article and others from conservative as well as liberal websites expressed outrage for the now deleted post, pressure was put on Wonkette editor Ken Layne by some unlikely sources including Mediaite's Tommy Christopher and Slate's David Weigel.
When Layne unrelented, companies such as Papa John's Pizza, Huggies, Nordstrom, and others cancelled their ads. Maybe this will finally teach these vulgarians that children shouldn't be used as pawns in this dirty game of politics. via newsbusters.org

Leftists Visit, Hug Mother of Fogel Murderer

Nuf Awad on Al-Hayat al-Jadida: 'he couldn't slaughter a chicken'

...Several_ultra-leftist groups organized a visit to the Arab village of Awarta on Saturday,April16,in support of the villagers and against the IDF's activities there in the search for the murderers of Ruth and Rabbi Ehud Fogel and their children Yoav (11), Elad (4) and Hadas (three months).

The leftists visited several homes in the Samaria village, including that of the Awad family, which spawned the murderers. The identities of the confessed murderers were released for publication on Sunday, the day after the visit. The murderers were already in IDF custody at the time of the leftists' visit and their arrest - including the fact that they are relatively young - was already widely rumored and hinted at by the press.

A photograph from the visit which can be viewed here, posted by one of the activists on her Internet blog, shows Raya Yaron, spokeswoman of Machsom Watch, comforting a woman described as being 37 years old and "in a deep depression." The blogger explained in her post that the woman fainted during the leftist women's visit and was distraught over the arrest of her husband, her two sons and a daughter.

The woman is easily recognizable as Nuf Awad, mother of Hakem Awad, whose photograph was featured on the front page of Arab newspaper al-Hayat al-Jadida Monday.

"It is impossible that my son did this," she is quoted by the paper as saying. "My son doesn't know how to slaughter a chicken" (the translation is from the Seventh Eye media-watch website). The two murderers confessed, however, to slaughtering five human beings and investigators reported that they expressed no remorse, and even said that had they realized there were two more children sleeping in the house, they would have killed them as well. They saw no problem in slitting baby Hadas's throat, they explained, since she was a Jew.

Another leftist visitor, Yaakov Manor of the Center for Alternative Information, described the visit thus on the AIC's Hebrew website: 

"The horror that we witnessed at the home of the family of Muhammad Awad cannot be described as anything but a pogrom - a primitive and brutal act of revenge intended to strike fear and awe into the hearts of the residents..."

"The father, Muhammad, 45, the son Majdi, 20, a third year university student, the son Amjad, 19, a freshman university student, and the son Hakem, 17, were arrested."  

At about the same time that Manor wrote the post, a court lifted a gag order and allowed the press to publish the names and photos of the murder suspects. One of them was 17 year old Hakem Awad. The other was his cousin, Amjad Awad, who is apparently not the same Amjad mentioned above as brother of Hakem.

Machsom Watch is a women's group that interferes with soldiers looking for weapons and explosives at checkposts and is a member of the Women's Coalition for Peace. Both are radical groups that espouse a pacifist, anti-religious and anti-Western brand of gender feminism, and both received considerable funding from the New Israel Fund as recently as 2007, according to NGO Monitor. 

Despite allegations of siding with Israel's enemies, the New Israel Fund is still perceived as a legitimate body by many liberals in Israel and outside it.

As reported on Arutz Sheva, Israel Online Ambassadors said Sunday that these leftist groups had crossed a red  line. “The time has come to make leftist groups that support murderers illegal. Whoever supports baby killers has no place in a democratic society,” the group said in a statement.

via israelnationalnews.com

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Gay revision of the Bible to go on sale

Move over Adam and Eve. Here comes Adam and Steve, as well as Samantha and Delilah. A newly revised gay-friendly Bible is set to go on sale in the next few weeks. Reaction to the announcement has been met with venom from conservative Christian groups.
Pink Cross Publishing, the same company that published a gay-friendly version of the Koran, stated that they were adding the finishing touches to the newly revised Bible. Mary and Joseph will be replaced by Mary and Josephine, a lesbian couple unable to have children the conventional way, hence the virgin birth of Jesus. All of Jesus’ disciples will be gay except for Judas. In the new Bible, all of the disciples will pair off after the Last Supper with the exception of Judas. Satan will also be straight. The new gay-friendly Bible has yet to be named.
Westboro Baptist Church has promised to picket Pink Cross Publishing and any store selling the new Bible. In response, members of the gay community have stated that they will purchase the new Bible to support Pink Cross Publishing.
A companion workbook for children will also be available for use in Sunday schools. With input from newly defrocked priests, a Catholic version of the gay-friendly Bible will be published by year end. via theendtimesarehere.com

...I support their right to free expression. it is also useful to people that are faithful to religions as a teaching tool... to explain why the genders in these narratives are so necessary. Rather then getting hysterical... we should be thankful that people are thinking about these issues... even if we disagree. image via gentleforest.blogspot.com

Israel 'supplied arms to Argentina during Falklands War'

ok... and... good... I am no fan of Argentina's claims to the Falklands, but you sabotage the enemy.

Air to air missiles, missile radar alert systems, fuel tanks for fighter bombers and gas masks were dispatched from Israel apparently destined for Peru but were then transported on to Argentina, it claims.

As the British Task Force sent to reclaim the islands after the 1982 Argentine invasion of the Falklands began to get the upper hand, Argentina's ruling military junta was left with few choices from which to source replacements for equipment lost in war.

But according to 'Operation Israel: the rearming of Argentina during the dictatorship (1976/1983)' the junta found that Begin was willing to strike an agreement.

Interviews conducted by the author of the book, the Argentine journalist Hernan Dobry, reveal that Begin saw the deals as a form of revenge for the hanging of a personal friend, Dov Gruner, by the British Mandatory Authorities in Palestine in 1947.

After the Argentine Air Force contacted Isrex, the Israeli defence company, a meeting was arranged between representatives of the company and Begin.

via telegraph.co.uk

ok... and... good... I am no fan of Argentina's claims to the Falklands, but you sabotage the enemy

Air to air missiles, missile radar alert systems, fuel tanks for fighter bombers and gas masks were dispatched from Israel apparently destined for Peru but were then transported on to Argentina, it claims.

As the British Task Force sent to reclaim the islands after the 1982 Argentine invasion of the Falklands began to get the upper hand, Argentina's ruling military junta was left with few choices from which to source replacements for equipment lost in war.

But according to 'Operation Israel: the rearming of Argentina during the dictatorship (1976/1983)' the junta found that Begin was willing to strike an agreement.

Interviews conducted by the author of the book, the Argentine journalist Hernan Dobry, reveal that Begin saw the deals as a form of revenge for the hanging of a personal friend, Dov Gruner, by the British Mandatory Authorities in Palestine in 1947.

After the Argentine Air Force contacted Isrex, the Israeli defence company, a meeting was arranged between representatives of the company and Begin. via telegraph.co.uk

let that be a lesson to the U.K. today. Israel will get it's hands dirty to survive... or at least I certainly would hope so.

If it looks like s**t and smells like s**t, it must be - Lauren Booth!

Lauren Booth : Her idiocy again....

she might be better for Israel then Helen Thomas!!!!

Lauren Booth, unhinged moonbat and unabashed terrorist supporter, has described what she considers clear proof that Israel killed both Juliano Mer Khamis and Vittorio Arrigoni:

The headline ‘Italian peace activist killed by Palestinian extremists’ is an Israeli propagandists wet dream....Which brings us to timing of both Juliano and Vittorio’s murders. ...
It is no coincidence then that both Juliano and Vittorio should die within two weeks. Both, at the hands of unknown Palestinian ‘cells.’ As they say on children’s TV - tell us boys and girls what’s wrong with this picture?
Israel’s supporters will doubtless feel affronted at the assertion that Vittorio was murdered by those almost certainly in the pay of the Jewish State. But they can’t have their dark ops cake and eat it too. Not this time. Too many of us have our eyes open to the filthy tactics employed by Israel every time they come under intellectual attack. And there is no doubt that Israeli Apartheid is losing traction by the day.
As Hamas rounds up the perpetrators of this most recent, deadly crime, the Gaza grapevine is buzzing with the news that they will indeed be found to be, (as suspected from the get-go), Israeli collaborators.
Statements of denial from the ‘Salafis’ accused of the murder have already been issued.
So, who benefits from the killing of Vittorio Arrigoni? And what is the significance of the timing of his murder?
Well, if it smells like s***t and looks like s**t it almost certainly is - Israel.
Sure, the kidnappers’ video looked genuine at first. It had all the customary layout of the kind of ‘Jihadi’ videos that the tabloid press loves: the black flag of Islam, the Quranic verse in the introduction, footage of the kidnapped victim. But a small detail on the black flag, underneath the precious, Islamically untouchable phrase ‘There is No God, but God’ raises questions about the authenticity of the groups grasp on Islam. The extra words read something like “the Brigades of Muhammad Ibn Maslama.” This has been hard for experts to verify because the video is being systematically pulled off YouTube. But one thing is certain;

‘Jihadis’ never write ANYTHING on the flag besides La Ilaha Ila Allah.

After reading her whole diatribe, this is her only real shred of "proof" that Israel must be behind the murders: because of text that is under the Shahada, something Jihadi's "never do."
Here's the supposedly problematic flag from the video:

Five minutes of searching found this:

I don't read Arabic, but it looks like the bottom flag also contains the Muslim declaration of faith, if stylized differently. And there is text underneath, something that even newly-Muslim Lauren Booth knows is not done by real Muslims!
Well, she can always still rely on the "Gaza grapevine" for unassailable proof of her fevered fantasies.
The rest of her posting is equally stupid. Read it all to see how detached from reality the anti-Israel crowd is.


my biggest fear is that a smart person with a chip on his or her shoulder should become an enabler of terrorism.

via elderofziyon.blogspot.com

image via uprootedpalestinians.blogspot.com

Sister in Law of Tony Blair: Reads Koran Every Day. On Page 60

Woman sues Yankees over top hat logo designed by her grandfather in 1936

One of the most iconic logos in sport is the subject of a new lawsuit in Manhattan, it has emerged. The New York Yankees’ top hat logo has adorned the baseball giants’ uniforms and merchandise for over 70 years but Tanit Buday claims her uncle created the design and was never paid for it. While she seeks unspecified damages for copyright infringement, the Yankees insist there is no basis for her claim and they have not yet been served with a lawsuit. In a claim filed in Manhattan Federal Court on Monday, Ms Buday, of Yonkers, New Jersey, says her uncle Kenneth Timur was commissioned by the Yankees to design a logo after then owners Jacob Ruppert and Del Webb learnt of his skill as an artist from his Brooklyn-based sister. She alleges he learnt the logo had been adopted when he moved to America in 1947 and, when asked to fashion an updated version for the team’s 50th anniversary, altered the logo with a signature ‘P’, so it read ‘1P03-1952’ on players’ uniforms, instead of ‘1903-1952’. According to the complaint, Ms Buday took the logos to design analyst Rob Wallace who concluded it to be ‘evident that they are so significantly similar that they could not have been created independently from one another’.

via dailymail.co.uk

Posted via email from noahdavidsimon's posterous

Barry Rubin on Obama's 'Passover message'

Barry Rubin wasn't crazy about President Obama's 'Passover message' either.

I think the greater problem here is the endless universalizing of specifically Jewish experiences that are never seen as sufficient in their own right, as well as the basic opportunism of making Passover into an event backing Obama Administration policy.
But a peculiar personal experience of mine has given this controversy a special meaning for me. Some years ago I attended a dinner in Washington that was one of those endless--and always futile--events bringing together Arabs and Israelis for "dialogue." Since it was during the Passover table, the thoughtful hosts had placed matzo on the table.
One of the Egyptians, a relatively moderate diplomat who had built a whole second career in the peace process industry, said in an annoyed voice something like: "Isn't this a Jewish holiday that celebrates a victory over the Egyptians?"
I had a fraction of a second in which I knew I had to think of the perfect answer. And it came to me. I replied, "That was during Jahiliyya times." He nodded with understanding and the problem was solved.
The Jahiliyya era, for Muslims, was the time of pre-Islamic paganism and ignorance. In the Koran, the pharoah was a villain. So if it happened then he could see the "Egyptians" as having nothing to do with him and accept that the pharoah was a bad guy who deserved to be drowned in the sea.
Here's the problem. When radical Islamists killed President Anwar al-Sadat, they said, "I shot the pharoah." One of the reasons that Sadat was assassinated was because he made peace with Israel. Another reason was that he opposed making Egypt an Islamist state. Now that President Husni Mubarak has been overthrown, he's referred to as the pharoah for reasons including those two.
An important lesson from Jewish experience--for those willing to heed it--is that change is not always good and that some things never change. But after all, the Jews were doing pretty well in ancient Egypt until there came a pharoah who knew not Joseph.
It is also no accident that the Passover seder reminds us: "In every generation, there are those that rise up against us to destroy us...." Wow, does the history of the last few years prove that to be true!

Read the whole thing.

via israelmatzav.blogspot.com

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Wikileaks: Assad not bluffing, nearly shot chem weapons at Israel

OMG...

The headline of this Wikileaks disclosure is that Bashar al-Assad considered shooting chemical weapons at Israel in the aftermath of the destruction of his al-Kibar nuclear plant in 2007. But it's not the headline to which Israelis should pay attention in this story. It's the rest of it.

According to these documents, Israeli and American intelligence analysts met here in November 2009 and their deliberations produced four separate debriefings from the US Embassy to Washington.
From these it emerges that the Mossad is convinced that Syrian- and Iranian-backed Hezbollah is determined to fire as many as 400-600 rockets daily in the next round of hostilities with Israel, 100 of which will be aimed each day at Tel Aviv.
That war, estimate Mossad experts, could last for as long as two months, meaning that as many as 24,000- 36,000 missiles – 6,000 targeting Tel Aviv specifically – could be rained upon Israel from the north alone.
How the Hamas Iranian proxy would behave during that conflict is an unaddressed complication in the deeply worrying equation.
These are not speculative doomsday predictions which we can afford to repress in the far recesses of our collective consciousness. They become all the more relevant in the face of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s teetering position as he strives to hang on to power.
For one thing, the leaked information consistently reinforces allegations that, contrary to its international undertakings, Syria has continued supplying Hezbollah with ballistic missiles, including Scuds. The leaks further indicate that North Korea is stoking the regional arms build-up by providing missile systems to both Syria and Iran, which in turn sustain Hezbollah and Hamas.
The bottom line, in the Syrian context, is that Assad sits on a particularly large and nasty arsenal. Both his late father and he had practiced self-control, making their border with Israel exceedingly quiet to date, while transferring the confrontational brunt to the Lebanese and Gazan fronts. In other words, while the Assad regime had itself avoided open warfare with Israel, it was the nefarious catalyst actively fomenting trouble elsewhere.
It is in part because of his capacity for trouble-making, indeed, that the US has thus far refrained from openly calling for Assad’s removal. The conventional wisdom in Washington is that a relatively stable Syria will help facilitate the American exit from Iraq.

Sorry folks, but that's letting the tail wag the dog. Setting a deadline for a US withdrawal from Iraq was a stupid move in the first place, as was the notion of making Afghanistan the 'good war' and Iraq the 'bad war' for which George Bush was to be blamed. There is no way there can be an 'orderly withdrawal' from Iraq now. Given everything else that is going on in the region, a US withdrawal from Iraq would put it under Syrian or Iranian hegemony (or both) in about a week.

Yet assuming, for argument’s sake, that Assad does not survive the mounting challenges to his rule, into whose hands would his formidable weapons and rocket stockpiles fall? One may disbelieve certain details and incidentals in individual WikiLeaks texts, but their entirety eminently accords with what had been evident from Damascus for too long. Assad has amassed and controls particularly deadly weaponry. For Israel, Assad is a cunning enemy. The danger is that he may well be supplanted by even more malicious, yet less restrained enemies.

Actually, as cruel as it may sound, we here in Israel may be better off if the ethnic groups in Syria kill each other in a bloodbath as Israeli experts on Syria are predicting will happen if Assad is deposed. If they're busy killing each other, they will be too busy to go to war with us. If Assad is deposed, the IDF can neglect Syria and concentrate on destroying Hezbullah's capabilities in Lebanon. No, it won't be a walk in the park, but the IDF is certainly capable of handling Hezbullah. And at least if Tel Aviv is under fire (and it may be under fire from Hamas as well), you can bet that the IDF won't hold back. Goldstone will be a distant memory. The open question is what Hamas will do in response and whether Egypt will respond at all.

via israelmatzav.blogspot.com

sounds good to me! go at it guys!

Posted via email from noahdavidsimon's posterous

Nigeria election riots

In anticipation of the results of Nigeria's remarkably smooth presidential vote over the weekend, angry young men took to the streets across the country's mainly Muslim north on Monday with knives and clubs.
Despite the fact that international and domestic observers said this was the first relatively free and fair election since the tumultuous country moved beyond military rule 12 years ago, someone had convinced the mobs that the election had been rigged in favor of incumbent president Goodluck Jonathan, a southern Christian.
Protests soon turned deadly, with churches, mosques, homes, and businesses set ablaze in the northern cities of Kaduna and Kano. In Kaduna on Tuesday, Christian neighborhoods were targeted, and known supporters of Mr. Jonathan's ruling People's Democratic Party were burned alive and hacked with machetes. Reprisal attacks by Christians quickly followed. More than 200 have been killed, according to one local rights group.
The Muslim-Christian violence underscores a bitter reality: The age of "do-or-die" politics and "thugs-for-hire" patronage networks is not dead in Nigeria. And although Nigerian politicians do have the power to tamp down local rivalries that quickly morph into brutal religious violence, more often than not, these leaders do the opposite.
On Tuesday after his official defeat in the presidential race, after dozens of people had been killed and more than 10,000 displaced, popular opposition leader Muhammadu Buhari characterized the violence as "sad, unfortunate, and totally unwarranted," but issued no direct appeal for calm. "We have commenced consultations at the highest levels to recover your stolen mandate," Mr. Buhari said Wednesday.
For his part, Mr. Jonathan told CNN on Tuesday that the violence was "not spontaneous" and thus was a planned disruption, though the president said he didn't want to accuse anybody. Jonathan also said the "crisis" was linked to the festering problem of jobless, hopeless young masses in both northern and southern Nigeria.
How religious violence pops off
In such an environment, the often intense divide between deeply religious Muslim and Christian citizens, and the always high-stakes nature of politics and power, means that political violence frequently becomes religious.
Given the "ready army" made up of thousands of discontented youth, this violence frequently escalates, with politicians using the chaos and bloodshed as leverage as they jockey for influence and a greater share of the oil-rich country's immense economic spoils.
Aside from the latest wave of violence in the north, the country's Middle Belt region – where the mainly Muslim north meets the predominately Christian south – has become a case study in how Nigerian politicians fuel religious violence.
Muslim and Christians in the Middle Belt's unofficial capital, Jos, in Plateau state, now live cheek by jowl in what many residents call a religious apartheid.
Over the past year plus, since several massacres – of Muslims by Christians and of Christians by Muslims – killed hundreds in January and March 2010, whole communities in Jos have displaced themselves out of fear of further violence.
"People should be able to do things with freedom," said Archbishop Ignatius Kaigama of the Catholic Archdiocese of Jos. "But instead you must be worried about who is next door to you."
Fanning the flames
Despite the divergences in the various accounts of how Jos came to be an epicenter of horrific violence over the past decade, many residents pinpoint an issue that drives the conflict: the "'indigene" concept, which has become a discriminatory, state government-enforced policy.
The Muslim community, which makes up the majority of the population in the northern part of the city, accuses the state government of consistently denying the Muslim community their basic rights as citizens on the basis that they are "settlers" in the state, and therefore not so-called indigenes privy to citizen rights.
Mohamed Lawal Ishaq, a lawyer and a member of a Muslim affairs council, says that – like all Muslim residents in Jos – his children are unable to enroll in public schools because they lack indigene certificates, despite the fact that they were born in Jos, as were there parents.
Like many other Muslims – and moderate Christians – Mr. Ishaq holds Plateau State Gov. Jonah David Jang responsible for such discriminatory polices and says that the governor is fanning the flames of the trouble.
"You expect a leader, during a crisis, to calm a situation," said Ishaq. "But the governor provokes, worsens, and take sides."
'Delivering' the Muslim vote?
Ishaq's council seems to be playing a political game of its own, however. He said his council is currently "in negotiations" with several opposition gubernatorial candidates, suggesting that the council is capable of delivering the Muslim vote in the state governor race on April 26.
Although Ishaq says imams in Jos are continuing to call for the community's youth to remain peaceful during the tense elections period and its aftermath, the fact that the Muslim council is clearly using its religious authority to play politics indicates the ease of religious mobilization for political gain in the polarized society.
Governor Jang told the Monitor in an interview that he is "very conscious of the fact that all of the citizens " in his state are his responsibility. Jang then gave his take on the Constitution, suggesting that his state's so-called settlers are, in effect, second-class citizens who should respect, even adopt, the culture, traditions, and religion of the "indigenous" population.
The governor, an evangelical Christian who received a divinity degree from a Nigerian theological college after he retired from the Air Force in the early 1990s, is unequivocal about defending Christianity as the religion of his state. "As a result of the failure of the Muslim jihad here [in the 1800s], they still think they can get [Plateau state] back to Islamicize," he told the Monitor.
Theory vs. practice
"The Nigeria Constitution absolutely forbids any discrimination on the basis of sex, religion, and circumstances of your birth ... that is in theory," says Sule Kwasau, a lawyer in private practice in Jos. "In practice, some of these absurdities [related to the "indigene" concept] are not only prevalent in Plateau state, they are prevalent all over Nigeria."
Since Governor Jang's election in 2007, the crisis in the Middle Belt has worsened. With each new, major wave of violence – notably in 2008 and 2010 – resentment between Muslim and Christians over the killings has increased, until finally reaching its current apartheid-like state in the city of Jos.
"Fighting is no good," says a waiter in a Jos restaurant, who says his mother is Christian and his father is a Muslim. "We have to learn to live together again."
Running for re-election in the April 26 elections with the campaign slogan of "REDEMPTION 2011," the current governor is not publicly seen as taking the initiative to embrace the Muslim community who he views as "settlers," despite their two century-long history in his state.
Some long-time Jos residents who did not want to be quoted publicly say that Jang has benefited from the ongoing crisis in his state. Last year's crisis resulted in additional federal government funds being allocated to Jang for bosltering security. Jang has also used the tense situation to rally Christians behind him, cultivating a savior-like image during his gubernatorial campaign.
Meanwhile, the Muslim community is busy rallying its own support base, largely behind opposition candidate Pauline Tellen – the current deputy governor who has fallen out with Jang over the crisis.
"The real problem is bad governance, says Hadjiya Khadija Hawaya, a local Muslim women's leader, detailing the discrimination her community has suffered under the indigene policy pushed by the current governor.
There is no doubt among Muslims and Christians alike that the local government must play a crucial role in the resolution of the crisis.
"All efforts boil down to the government in power," said Ishaq, the lawyer at the Muslim council, voicing a familiar refrain of his community.
Catholic Archbishop Kaigama criticized the state government for perpetuating the myth of a one-dimensional religious crisis, saying that the government's "failure to address other problems" such as poverty, underdevelopment, and youth unemployment is an important reason why the conflict persists.
"The way the leadership responds to these issues goes a long way toward knowing if the conflict will be resolved peacefully," said Chris Kwaja, a professor at the Centre for Conflict Management and Peace Studies at the University of Jos.
Until then, Jos may well remain a city divided, with citizens living in fear and half-charred homes and bombed-out churches and mosques standing as living memorials to the ongoing tragedy stoked by the politicians in power.

via minnpost.com

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