Reuters reported May 29 that Mali's armed forces are hunting down Tuareg rebels who have taken up arms again, demanding more autonomy for the desert north. According to the report, the rebels used pickup trucks mounted with machine guns to attack army camps in the desert town of Kidal, some 1,000 kilometers northeast of Bamako, before withdrawing to surrounding mountains with looted weapons.

Talk about deja vu all over again. The US secretly backs a loose alliance of lawless warlords it had previously fought because they are now opposing an ultra-fundamentalist cleric-led militia with supposed links to al-Qaeda. The clerical militia has just taken the capital and seems set to bring the whole country under its control. It wins support by pledging to bring stability to a war-weary populace long brutalized by the warlords. But Washinghton fears a new regional beachhead for Islamic terrorism. The warlords get hip to this angle, and start spouting "anti-terrorist" rhetoric. Sound familiar? Only this time instead of the Northern Alliance it's the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counterterrorism, and instead of the Taliban it's the Islamic Courts Union. After a four-month siege of Mogadishu, claiming hundreds of lives, the Islamic Courts Union took the capital city June 5. The next to fall may be Baidoa, the inland city where Somalia's recently-assembled (and still largely fictional) official government is based. (Newsday, June 6)

This is not the first anti-Semitic killing in Uzbekistan this year. Yet a Google News search for the story reveals only this account from the vile Arutz Sheva (June 9), voice of the Israeli settler movement. Why is that?

Jewish leaders in the former Soviet Union suspect that anti-Semitism was behind the murder of the secretary of a rabbi and her mother in Tashkent, the major city in Uzbekistan.

We don't necessarily have a problem with prayers in German being spoken at Auschwitz. But this sad case illustrates how the Holocaust has been hijacked for propagandistic purposes: "reified" as the ultimate evil, something unique and existing outside history, serving not as a warning of where racist trends still alive and well today can lead if unchecked, but, perversely, as a reassurance of the niceties of the status quo. Thus the Pope can ruminate at Auschwitz one day after Poland's chief rabbi has suffered an anti-Semitic attack, and not even feel the need to mention the incident. Worse, it is only the Jewish press (which, needless to say, suffers from its own blind spot where Palestine is concerned) that even expresses any outrage, or gives the attacks prominent coverage. From The Forward, June 2 (emphasis added):

From the NY Daily News, June 4:

'Love' then death in Harlem hit-run
Coward kills 30-year-old helping date out of cab

A 30-year-old law student exchanged kisses with a woman in the back of a cab, helped her from the vehicle and then was killed yesterday when a hit-and-run coward mowed him down, police and a witness said.

By now we've all heard that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, notorious leader of "al-Qaeda in Iraq," was killed in a US airstrike late June 7. Seven aides, including two women, were also killed in the raid on a remote area 50 kilometres northeast of Baghdad near Baquba, capital of volatile Diyala province. Major General Bill Caldwell, spokesman for the US forces in Iraq, showed a picture of a dead Zarqawi at a televised news conference in Baghdad. He said two F-16 warplanes dropped two 500-pound bombs on the site where Zarqawi was killed. President Bush said at the White House that Zarqawi's death "is a severe blow to al-Qaida and it is a significant victory in the war on terror," but admitted "we have tough days ahead of us in Iraq that will require the continued patience of the American people." Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the killing of Zarqawi was "enormously important" for the fight against terror in Iraq and around the world, but he cautioned: "Given the nature of the terrorist networks, the network of networks, the death of Zarqawi, while enormously important, will not mean the end of all violence of that country." (China Daily, June 9)

Yet again! As in the recent headline-grabbing terror bust in New York City, and as in the 1993 World Trade Center blast itself, it seems the terror plot itself emerged from police infiltrators... From the Toronto Star, June 4:

RCMP behind bomb material
Investigators controlled the sale and transport of three tonnes of ammonium nitrate in an undercover probe of an alleged homegrown terrorist cell;
Police say they moved in quickly to avert attacks in southern Ontario

The delivery of three tonnes of ammonium nitrate to a group suspected of plotting terrorist attacks in southern Ontario was part of an undercover police sting operation, the Toronto Star has learned.

Oaxaca City saw another massive mobilization in support of striking teachers yesterday, with an estimated 100,000 marching from the Juarez monument to the Plaza de la Danza, where a political tribunal was held to hear charges against Gov. Ulises Ruiz Ortiz. (La Jornada, June 8)