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Muslim chief warns of Nazi climate of fear
Reuters
Reuters - Saturday, November 10 12:11 pm

LONDON (Reuters) - A leading Muslim in Britain has warned authorities against helping to create a climate of fear and suspicion similar to that in Nazi Germany during the 1930s.
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The government's policy of emphasising the threat from al Qaeda is alienating many Muslims and undermining social cohesion, Muhammad Abdul Bari, head of the Muslim Council of Britain, said.

"The air is thick with suspicion and unease. It is not good for the Muslim community, it is not good for society."

He suggested the government and MI5 were helping create an atmosphere of exclusion with their rhetoric.

"Every society has to be really careful so the situation doesn't lead us to a time when people's minds can be poisoned as they were in the 1930s," he said in an interview with The Daily Telegraph.

The new head of MI5, Jonathan Evans, said last week militant Islamists were growing in number and were targeting children as young as 15. Bari said he thought Evans' speech was "creating a scare in the community and wider society".

"It probably helps some people who try to recruit the young to terrorism," he said. "There is a disproportionate amount of discussion surrounding us.

"If your community is perceived in a very negative manner, and poll after poll says that we are alienated, then Muslims begin to feel very vulnerable."

The MCB is an umbrella organisation with 500 affiliates.

It has called for improved ways of working with the police to try and prevent terrorist attacks. Its hardline members have been criticised by some, including the Conservative Party, of harbouring and even promoting militant views.

Sir Paul Lever, former chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee, said talk of the security threat was not exaggerated and described the figure of 200 people having been convicted for terrorism as alarming.

"We need to keep it in proportion, we need to take care in our public discourse that we do not demonise all Muslims," he told BBC radio.

"But equally, we mustn't get into the state where we are so fearful of offending people that we are unwilling to talk about what are, sadly, very worrying facts."

Bari said Britain could learn from aspects of Islamic culture such as arranged marriage, modesty, limits on alcohol, tighter abortion laws and sexual restraint.

"Everyone can learn from everyone. Some of the Muslim principles can help social cohesion -- family, marriage, raising children with boundaries, giving to the poor, not being too greedy," he said.
http://tinyurl.com/36j6sr

Major oil reserve find in Brazil boosts BG
By David Prosser, Deputy Business Editor
Published: 10 November 2007

Brazilian energy ministers have announced the second largest discovery of new oil reserves in the past 20 years in a find that could transform the country into one of the world's largest producers.

The Brazilian government said tests on the Tupi oilfield, in the Atlantic Ocean 160 miles off the coast of Rio de Janeiro, showed it could eventually produce up to 8 billion barrels of light oil and natural gas, increasing the country's reserves by more than 60 per cent. That would make Brazil the world's eighth biggest oil producer, ahead of Nigeria and not far behind its Latin American neighbour Venezuela.

The find, the largest new oil discovery since the 12-billion barrel Kashagan field found in Kazakhstan in 2000, also enabled BG, the British gas group, to defy the falling stock market yesterday. BG, which posted a 1.6 per cent share price rise to 1,005p, has a 25 per cent stake in the Tupi venture, which is 65 per cent owned by Petrobras, the Brazilian oil giant. The final 10 per cent of the operation is held by Galp, a Portuguese exploration company.

Tupi should prove particularly lucrative because the light oil found is more valuable and cheaper to refine than the heavy crude that is much more common in Brazil's existing 14.5 billion barrels of proven resources.

"Tupi changes everything for Brazil and Petrobras," said Carlos Renato Nunes, an oil analyst with the Brazilian firm Coinvalores. "Tupi is not only huge, its light oil offers huge cost advantages."

Brazil became a net exporter of oil last year, but currently imports light oil for its refineries. Nevertheless, the discovery will not transform Brazil's oil industry overnight, because getting at the reserves will require Petrobras and its partners to overcome some significant obstacles.

The field lies 5 to 7 kilometres below the sea-bed, which is itself more than 2km below the surface of the Atlantic. Some of those involved with the project also said further tests were needed to provide certainty about the size of the find.

Nevertheless, Petrobras, which has a good track record in extracting oil from very deep reserves, said yesterday it believed production could begin by 2010, but it would take longer to realise the full potential of the field.

Once this comes on stream, Brazil could reap substantial political benefits from its oil reserves as well as financial rewards. The country would be well placed to export oil to the US, which currently buys more barrels than it would like from Venezuela, with which it has major political disagreements.
http://tinyurl.com/2pllh3

The Sword of Saint Boniface
posted: 10 Nov 2007
by TONY EVANS

I am sometimes drawn to great cathedrals as though to a great promise once offered by God and later denied by man. Like many a heathen before me, I have been seduced by architecture, song and colored glass.

I recently found sanctuary at St. John the Divine Cathedral near Harlem in New York City. Listening to the great emptiness of spirit above the tumult of the city streets, wandering behind the altar, I discovered a depiction in stained glass of a monk chopping down a tree with a sword—St. Boniface.

Born Wynfrith of England at the beginning of the eighth century, Boniface made a name for himself by converting Germanic and Celtic tribes to the official practices of the Roman Church. After the fall of Rome, many of these tribes practiced hybrid versions of pagan Christianity, while continuing to worship ancient gods in sacred groves.

Wynfrith won fame by confronting one such group in Lower Hessia around 720, felling an oak sacred to the thunder God Thor, at Geismar, near Fritzlar. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, "He had a chapel built out of the wood and dedicated it to the prince of the Apostles. The heathens were astonished that no thunderbolt from the hand of Thor destroyed the offender, and many were converted. The fall of this oak marked the fall of heathenism."

Perhaps it also marked an end to the sacred connection with nature the church might have gathered into its many folds.

Speaking recently at the Sun Valley Spiritual Film Festival, Matthew Fox described the earliest Christians as nature mystics. And he called for a return to true Eros—a creative and generative force that pervades all of life and was once worshipped in many different places around the world, including the sacred groves of ancient Europe.

Before the Romans, in a fit of defensive religious intolerance, destroyed all the pagan temples of Europe, the Greeks honored local deities, appeasing Zeus and his thunder bolts at shrines in the Mediterranean, while simultaneously exploring philosophy, atomic theory and calculus, and laying the rules of civil society.

It seems there was once room for all of us.

The sword of St. Boniface, immortalized in stained glass in a tiny corner of church history, seems emblematic of a moment when theologians made a fatal decision to consolidate power at the expense of a deep wonder and regard for nature's power, a decision that has had dire consequences for the modern world.

As I was rocked by lightning and thunder in bed last night I realized that St. Boniface might have made his point well enough, eventually getting promoted to archbishop and involving himself in the intrigues of the Carlovingian Dynasty. But what a far cry his efforts were to the priorities of our day. While he felt compelled to give up on nature, we wonder if nature will soon give up on us.
http://tinyurl.com/2ktrya