Kurdistan Bloggers Union

"One thing alone seems clear: The Kurds are a people under siege. In the United States we are not."

I would like to bring you to the attention of Jonathan Dworkin, who wrote those impressing words, you have just read. He is a medical student in his final year at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. Currently he is travelling in South Kurdistan from January to March of 2006.

In his recent post he shows more of the Kurdish sentiment towards Israel, that isn't so hostile towards Jews.

To quote one part of his recent post:

Another friend, a KDP man, explained to me that he supports Israel because he believes chauvanism is an ingrained feature of Arab politics. "They have 25 countries," he said. "And still there is this talk of pushing the Jews into the sea. In Kurdistan we have been fighting this thinking for centuries, and believe me we are very tired."

I advise everyone to take a look into his articles. They are balanced and give a good view on the problems in South-Kurdistan. As a commentator posted:"His blog allows thoughtful insights into the problems we face today in this world".

January 25: Kurds and Jews
January 18: At Home in the New Kurdistan
January 14: City of Refugees
January 11: First Impressions

Well I finally got around to reading this month's National Geographic only to find that they had an excellent article about the Kurds in Northern Iraq/Southern Kurdistan. It spoke alot about hope amoung the Kurds and the efforts that they are making towards re-building. I found the article to be quite objective which is nice, sometimes main stream media protrayels of the Kurds are either too emotional or so dry as to whither away your interest in the subject entirely. The National Geographic website has some extra features about their article that are fairly interesting.

*And a quick note to some of the other authors on KBU, don't leave me alone on here, ok?

I received this email from another group that I work with, and I thought that since so many are concerned about a link between the Kurdish areas and the bird flu (and probably would like to help) I thought that I would pass it along:

From Avian Flu Help Team


Dear Editors/Admins,

Please accept our apologies for the group mailing.

You have all been doing a noble effort in collecting information
online about Avian Flu. As you can see there are many scattered
resources available right now to find scientific data, information,
news and other tidbits. This mail is an effort to invite you all
together to collaborate together on one effort so that we can put our
collective minds and hands together in one "Mega" CollaBlog/CollaWiki.

We are members of a group called World Wide Help Group
(http://groups.google.com/group/WorldWideHelp/about) who have
volunteer members all over the world with various skills. We started
working together on TsunamiHelp (http://tsunamihelp.blogspot.com,
http://www.tsunamihelp.info) which became the one-stop resource to
find any and all information related to Tsunami. We had at one point
of time 3000 volunteer bloggers/editors helping us with the content.
It is one of the best example of what an unified online collaboration
effort could bring out. Another fine example is the People Finder
Project (http://katrinahelp.info/rdata/) which collaborated with
industry to create PFIF, a platform-agnostic database interchange
format http://katrinahelp.info/wiki/index.php/PFIF) that has since
been used by all the major People Finder projects (including Google,
Yahoo etc).

Since then, with the help of the other members of the World Wide Help
Group, we have been working on several philanthropic sites of note
including:

http://www.katrinahelp.info/ -- for victims of the Hurricane Katrina
http://www.ritahelp.info/ -- for victims of the Hurricane Rita
http://quakehelp.blogspot.com/ -- for victims of the Kashmir Earthquake
http://mumbaihelp.blogspot.com/-- for victims of the Mumbai Cloudburst
and floods
http://www.hcvaction.org/ -- for victims of Hepatitis C, to
promote research and awareness and support for a cure

At this point we are in contact with an international network of
volunteers including India, the Middle East, USA, and several European
countries. We have begun work on an H5N1 disaster-response web
information delivery system. We have developed a diverse volunteer
corps of online writers, "bloggers", wiki admins, and now wish to
take these efforts to a higher level.

We expect you realize the tremendous value that such a collaboration
could have, both in terms of scientific achievement, humanitarian
concerns, and international relations.

With the common goal of helping the affected and informing the general
public about Avian Flu, we would like to start the discussions among
the various admins of major Avian Flu websites (Blogs, Wiki &
Informational Sites), that is you, about coming together on this noble
cause. We can then work out the logistics on how, when, where and who
of this effort.

Looking forward to hearing from all of you,

With Best Regards

Angelo Embuldeniya
Bala Pitchandi
Peter Griffin
Rudi Cilibrasi

The World Wide Help Group
http://groups.google.com/group/WorldWideHelp/about

Below is a reprint from a post on my personal blog so if some of the personal info in there is confusing I apologize ahead of time.


Last night Mr.3 and I were given the oppurtunity to go and see Ambassador Joe Wilson speak in front of the Salt Lake Chapter of the Council on Foreign Relations. Actually we got to sit at his table, which including a brief 10 minutes of star-struckedness on my part which faded quickly.

For those of you who don't know who he is, Joe Wilson has lately been known as Mr. Valerie Plame (who was "outed" as a CIA employee), but before that he was known as the last American Diplomat to speak with Saddam Hussein in Gulf War 1. But I believe that when the Gulf War broke out he was "acting" Ambassador as the real Ambassador was in the US warning about the possibility of war breaking out at the time war did break out.

Impressions of him: Nice guy when he doesn't talk politics. Fantastic hair, and I would say 95% of the female population in that room would have slept with him if he was willing. He is a self-promoter to the point of being incredibly vain and arrogant. Mr.3 asked him a question privately after the talk and in answering that question told him 3 times to buy his book. Call me crazy but when someone asks you a direct question about 500 tons of yellow-cake uranium that was found in Iraq, the response to that question should not be "buy my book".

What he said that evening: He has a lot of anger about the war in Iraq, as many US democrats do, however it is obvious that his anger is focused on the fact that the current administration did not listen and follow his recommendations. His bush-bashing is completely personal, I do not wish to really discuss the whole issue of his wife being "outed" but he used that in his speech (and probably his book as well) as a further reasoning why he must have been right...it was a case of "I was injured personally, I am a victim, and therefore my opinion is the most correct one", which logically is a load of crap. He wasn't listened to in matters about the Middle East because his knowledge is severely lacking, he may be great and wonderful with Africa, but the Middle East is a completely different animal...here is why:

His definition of weapons of mass destruction: is limited to strictly Nuclear weapons because they alter society and civilization. Biological weapons are weapons of terror and do not affect society in the long term. Anyone who knows about the atrocities Saddam carried out on the Kurdish populations in Iraq can tell you that biological warfare effects you on a systemic level...hum...let's see birth defects, a skewed population demographic, low birth rate, high infant mortalitiy rate, and don't forget little things like the increase in the snake population as all of the birds in the region were killed and there was no natural predators for the snakes. But apparently those are only side effects of "terror weapons".

His lack of knowledge on terrorism in general: Apparently he is under the impression that Ansar el Islam was a pro-Kurdish group rather than a group that was killing Kurds. He also stated that "25 million ethnic people" is no reason to not support our NATO allies. First, where did he get his numbers, secondly the Kurdish situation in Iraq and in Turkey are vastly different and you can't lump them together...but then again he seems to think that Kurds=terrorists. Oddly enough two seconds after he made that statement about the Kurds he stated that HAMAS and Hizbullah were doing things the "right way" in regards to elections, but he failed to mention the whole terrorist bombings which killed innocents. He classifies himself in the lines of a "Progressive" but he isn't really, just another diplomat/pseudo celebrity that believes in the cause that is most popular at the moment. But can you expect anymore from someone who prides himself on delveloping the US stragey in the Rwanda genocide, because we all know how well that turned out.

a short post with some mildly interesting links...

A Stan of their Own.

There seems to be alot going on there that this particular blog has been silent about, particularly the bird flu and predictions for the new year. I know that these are odd things to lump together in one blog but I am going to do it anyway.

First, predictions for the New Year: last week the Daily Kos wrote about a recent KnightRidder column that stated the Iraq army had 10,000 Kurdish soldiers that were loyal to the peshmerga leaders...duh...nothing really new. However, it seemed with this news that the rest of the world realized that there is a definite possibility that an independent Kurdistan could arise if there was (God forbid) civil war in Iraq. Of course, as soon as the Daily Kos covered it, it seems that half of the political blogs in the US began to speculate as to an independent Kurdistan. The only Kurdish blogger (that I saw--I might be wrong and please let me know if I am) that covered even part of that news was Vladimir. The lack of response from the Kurdish bloggers makes me wonder if we really missed an opportunity to bring the issue of an independent Kurdistan to a wider global audience? Or is it just more of the same?

Next item up, the bird flu deaths in Turkey, specifically in the Van region in Northern Kurdistan. While the deaths have been in rural areas and also in Kurdish areas there has been speculation that the bird flu thing is another extension of the Kurdish question. Some of our Kurdish bloggers have written excellent posts supporting that position including Mizgin from Rasti and Vladimir in From Holland to Kurdistan. Ok folks, it is the bird flu, a pandemic that is affecting the whole world, it should not be used as an aid to point out the Turkish Government's treatment of the Kurds, rather it should be used to discuss poverty on a global scale. I know that there will be plenty of people who are mad at me for this point of view (and I have a feeling that some of the comments will be harsh but I will take them), I am just of the opinion that there are some things that it would be wise of us to exploit to further knowledge of the plight of the Kurds, and some things -like this- that are no help to us at all.

Hello Everyone and Happy New Year (albeit a little late)...I found this link a few days ago and thought that I would share. aka Kurdistan