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Hungarian far right decries 'Israeli plot' before World Jewish Congress meeting
By Reuters | May.05, 2013

Leaders of a far-right Hungarian party Saturday accused Israelis of plotting to buy up the country, with several hundred nationalists protesting on the eve of Sunday's World Jewish Congress meeting in the Hungarian capital. Senior figures from the opposition Jobbik party, the third biggest with 43 seats in the 386-member parliament, harangued the crowd with charges that Israeli President Shimon Peres had praised Jews for buying property in Hungary. They said the WJC had decided to hold its four-yearly gathering in Budapest to shame the Hungarian people.

Conservative Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who is due to address the WJC assembly's opening session this evening, had ordered that the rally be banned. However, a court ruled Friday that police had overstepped their authority in trying to block it. The WJC, which normally holds its worldwide assembly in Jerusalem, chose Hungary this time to highlight the rise of far-right groups and anti-Semitism in Europe. More than half a million Hungarian Jews were killed in the Holocaust.

"The Israeli conquerors, these investors, should look for another country in the world for themselves because Hungary is not for sale," Jobbik chairman Gabor Vona told the rally, near the neo-Gothic parliament along the Danube River.
"Our country has become subjugated to Zionism. It has become a target of colonization, while we, the indigenous people, can play only the role of extras," Marton Gyongyosi, a Jobbik member of parliament, told the crowd.The rally ended after almost two hours and the protesters dispersed without incident.

WJC spokesman Michael Thaidigsmann said: "We find it a worrying sign that these people express their anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli ideology in such a public way." Some foreign Jews have made or planned investments in post-communist Hungary, including U.S. businessman Ronald Lauder, who is president of the WJC, but those are dwarfed by far larger deals from other European and American businesses. The charge, based on comments Peres made in 2007 about Israeli businesses abroad, has become a mantra in Jobbik's discourse about threats it says Hungary faces from Roma, Jews, the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. "This kind of conspiracy theory has a long history in Hungary," said Peter Kreko, director of the Political Capital research and consulting company. Hungary's wartime fascist leaders used xenophobic charges to win support, he noted.

Jobbik leaders occasionally issue provocative statements about Jews, such as a call by Gyongyosi last November to list all Jews in the government and parliament as potential national-security risks. He later apologized but did not resign. There are about 80,000-100,000 Jews among the 10 million population of Hungary, which was once a center of Jewish life in Europe and has seen a modest revival since communism ended in 1989.

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IT WAS, he said, the greatest revolution the world had ever seen. It would be written in golden letters on the pages of history: how the Cambodian people had returned to the countryside to become pure, agrarian communists, relieved of all private property, free of all ties of family, religion and culture, devoted only to Angkar (“the organisation”) and the teachings of Mao and Stalin. When Ieng Sary, then deputy prime minister and foreign minister for the Khmer Rouge regime, sent out such messages in 1975 to thousands of Cambodian students and intellectuals living overseas, they naturally came home—to be condemned as spies, thrown in jail, tortured and killed. Few survived his propaganda.

There were, Ieng Sary admitted—disarming Western listeners with his ready, radiant smile, as he savoured a sip of champagne—a few technical hitches along the revolutionary way. For example, the regime had to remove everyone from Cambodia’s cities, because there was not enough transport to bring in food for them. It made more sense to take the people to the countryside, where the food was. What he did not add was that these “new people”, once in the fields, became slave labour, forced into punishing manual work and so underfed that they tried to survive on grass; and that over the four years of Khmer Rouge rule perhaps 2m Cambodians, or around a quarter of the population, died from overwork, malnutrition and starvation, as well as mass killings.

If you faced Ieng Sary with this, he shrugged his shoulders. What did he know? As the foreign minister, he had to travel all the time. He was just a secondary figure, not privy to the policies and tactics of Pol Pot, the regime’s “sole and supreme architect”, as he called him. For himself, he had killed one man—no more—and done nothing wrong. He was a gentle person, he insisted, as he sniffed delicately at the bottles of French perfume he liked to buy on first-class international flights.

What he did not add, though most people knew it, was that Pol Pot was his chum from the elite Lycée Sisowath in Phnom Penh and his student buddy at the Sciences Po in Paris, later his brother-in-law when they married girls who were sisters. Deep down, Ieng Sary thought him a simpleton. He would bang on his door at dawn in the Latin Quarter, yelling at him to get to his Marxist studies, long before they both began, in 1963, to stir up revolts in the Cambodian countryside against the American-backed regime. Once they had seized power in 1975 Ieng Sary was “Brother No. 3”, implicated with cosy, family closeness in the torture of thousands in secret prisons and afterwards in their murder.

As foreign minister his role was hypocritical, yet simple. He had to present a disarming face to the world, build up visceral hatred of neighbouring Vietnam and draw in help from China, the regime’s only friend, in the form of money, weapons and advisers. When the Khmer Rouge government itself was toppled by a Vietnamese invasion in 1979, he fled to Thailand; and there found fresh clothes, new sandals and a VIP air ticket to Beijing, all supplied by the Chinese embassy in Bangkok. His skilful contacts with China kept the movement going for two more decades.

Sapphires in his hands

You could say he was a proper revolutionary, in drab jacket, cap and scarf, railing against “economic saboteurs” who wasted food and “traitors”, undoubtedly CIA or KGB agents, who smoked Western cigarettes or had non-Cambodian blood. Yet he had been born in loathed Vietnam (his old Vietnamese name swapped for a Cambodian nom de guerre) to a Chinese mother and a rich father, and had become the very model of a hated French-speaking intellectual. Despite all that, slippery as an eel, he triumphantly survived inside the regime.

He was also increasingly rich. The peasant-poverty enjoined by the Khmers Rouges, and practised by some, never appealed to him. In 1982 (the movement still pretending to govern Cambodia from bases on the Thai border) he gave up the job of foreign minister to become minister of economics and finance, which required China’s largesse of more than $1 billion to flow through his hands. He made deals, too, with Thai sapphire-mining and logging companies. The rough frontier town of Pailin became his bailiwick, containing his large villa and bungalows, each with a tank parked outside, for his supporters. In 1996, sensing change in the wind, he persuaded thousands of Khmer Rouge troops to defect from Pol Pot, leave the jungle and claim an amnesty from the prime minister, Hun Sen, and King Sihanouk—a man to whom he had always bowed, while feeling nothing but contempt for him.

Life was good after the amnesty, as indeed it had always been for him before it. His Toyota Land Cruiser, with its darkened windows, was a common sight outside the capital’s best restaurants. Security guards protected his villa in an elegant part of town. He smoked the best cigars.

There was the nettlesome matter of a UN-backed Cambodia tribunal investigating war crimes, which arrested him in 2007 and put him on trial four years later. But it had convicted only one person, and moved so achingly slowly that it was never going to catch him. He waited to frustrate it with his charming, duplicitous smile. Crimes against humanity? Moi?

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Eleven men sentenced in Britain for terrorist plot
By Janet Stobart
April 26, 2013

LONDON -- Three men convicted of leading a plot to launch terrorist attacks in Britain to rival the Sept. 11 assault and surpass the 2005 deadly bombings on London’s transit system were given sentences Friday ranging from life to 15 years' imprisonment. Sentencing the men in Woolwich Crown Court in East London, Judge Richard Henriques told Irfan Naseer, 31, the ringleader of a gang of would-be bombers from Birmingham, that he would serve a life sentence on each of five counts for planning terrorist acts between December 2010 and September 2011. "Your plot had the blessing of Al Qaeda and you intended to further the aims of Al Qaeda," he told him. “Clearly nothing was going to stop you short of intervention of the authorities. "Many deaths were planned by a determined team of individuals who were fully radicalized and you, Naseer, were their leader,” the judge added. Naseer’s co-defendant and friend, Irfan Khalid, 28, received 18 years on four counts of terrorism and Ashik Ali, 27, who described himself as the “tea boy and runner for others,” received 15 years on three counts for engaging in preparation of terrorist acts.

Henriques later sentenced eight other men belonging to the group to lesser sentences. Rahin Ahmed, 28, was given 12 years and Mujahid Hussain, 21, four years. Both pleaded guilty to bogus fundraising for the group. Bahadir Ali, 34, the older brother of Ashik Ali, was sentenced to six years for inciting others to acts of terror. Naweed Ali, 24, Ishaaq Hussain, 20, Khobaib Hussain, 20, and Shahid Khan, 20, who went to Pakistan to a jihadist training camp; and Mohammed Rizwan, 32, a potential recruit, received sentences ranging from 40 months to four years.

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