To follow up on my previous two posts [1,2] regarding the Justice Department battling the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority, the New York Daily News provides us with the latest [thanks for the tip Ankur K.]:

The Transit Authority may be cracking down on workers wearing turbans, but the agency is ignoring secular headgear – everything from Russian-style winter hats to Mets caps to do-rags, a federal survey has found.

Conducting surveillance at subway stations, bus stops and terminals, the Justice Department, which has accused the TA of discrimination, spotted 208 TA employees blatantly violating dress-code regulations, the Daily News has learned.

The offenders wore hats that were not issued by the TA and lacked the agency logo.

The TA, meanwhile, has penalized a Sikh worker who wears turbans and Muslim employees clad in head scarves called khimars.

“These observations confirm that the TA has gone [and continues to go] out of its way to selectively enforce its uniform policies against a handful of Muslim and Sikh employees, while ignoring rampant and easily observable violations by a large contingent of its employees,” a Justice Department lawyer wrote to the TA late last week.

To give credit where credit is due, I want to point out that this is more than likely the same Civil Rights sub-division of the Justice Department that I last week criticized for its position with regards to the Salvation Army.

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A Canadian judge declared today that two men were not guilty of murdering 331 people who died when bombs exploded in 1985 aboard an Air India plane over the Atlantic, and at Tokyo’s Narita Airport:

Spectators in the courtroom, including dozens of victims’ relatives, gasped when the verdicts were read. Some started wailing…The defendants — Ripudaman Singh Malik, 58, and Ajaib Singh Bagri, 55 — were immediately removed from the courtroom. Malik sat impassively while the verdict was read, wiping his beard with a scarf. Supporters slapped his son on the back. [AP/S.F. Gate]

British Columbia Supreme Court Justice Ian Josephson explained that the two-year trial of Canada’s worst case of mass murder had failed to produce credible witnesses. The bombings stood as the largest terrorist strike before Sept. 11, and are believed to have been retaliation by Sikh separatists for a deadly 1984 raid by Indian forces on the Golden Temple in Amritsar.

The decision stunned Canada’s Sikh community, which reacted to the verdict with surprise and dissapointment:

“Who did it?,” Mr. (Sarwan Singh) Rahawa asked. “Who put the bombs on the plane? This is not fair for those families whose loved ones are lost.”…“There should be a public inquiry. Every Canadian has the right to an answer. Something went wrong. Everyone’s disappointed after 20 years,” he concluded. [Globe and Mail]

AP/S.F. Gate: Indian-born Sikhs cleared in plane bombs
Globe and Mail: Decision stuns community

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The Washington Post carries an uplifting story about the counter-counter demonstration in Lebanon on the one month anniversary of Hariri’s assasination. Not to be one-upped by the Hezbollah’s counter protest last week, the Lebanese people showed up in enormous numbers (by some estimates a quarter of the population of the country).

Hundreds of thousands of Lebanese rallied at the grave of former prime minister Rafiq Hariri on Monday to mark the one-month anniversary of his assassination and to intensify pressure on Syria to immediately withdraw its troops from a country that appears split into two rival political camps.

The demonstration covered wind-swept Martyrs’ Square and stretched for blocks into side streets, likely surpassing the size of the rally organized last week in Beirut by Hezbollah, the militant Shiite Muslim movement at the forefront of support for Syria’s three-decade presence here.

In a crowd that Lebanese police officials estimated at close to 1 million people, some demonstrators waved placards that read “100 percent Lebanese,” a direct challenge to Syria’s supporters here and the delicate balance among Lebanon’s sectarian parties that has prevailed since the country’s civil war ended more than 15 years ago.

Slate’s daily news round-up however, points out an interesting sentence buried deep within the story:

Many opposition members contended Monday that Hezbollah’s Beirut rally was populated mostly by Syrian intelligence agents and poor Shiites from the south. “They didn’t come by their free will,” said Charles Kanaan, 23, a systems engineer and Maronite Christian from Beirut. “And they weren’t 100 percent Lebanese. This is free will. This is the real Lebanon.”

In an apparent response, Hezbollah’s satellite channel, al-Manar, focused its coverage of Monday’s rally on the maids from South Asian countries who attended with their employers.

I get it. It isn’t patriotic Lebanese that want the Syrians out of their country. It is those dirty South Asian immigrant maids who make up the majority of the crowd. This is just another example that as bad as FOXNEWS is with their propaganda, it’s still nothing compared to the propaganda machines in the Arab world.

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