Algeria: another fundamentalist NATO ally

You have to dig a bit to find info on Algeria these days. Sure a bomb now and then but little more. And what's happening meanwhile? Emergency rule. And what's happening under emergency rule? Here there is an example:

A journalist of Le Figaro has been arrested an put on trial. Why? For terrorism? For writing too critically of Bouteflika's regime? Nope. For allegedly converting to Christianity. And I say allegedly because the evidence is circumstantial: ownership of two bibles. Journalists at the trial had their booknotes removed.

The case is not about Christianity and Islam as I see it but about civil rights. Do Algerians have civil rights? Or is it actually a fundamentalist state like Saudi Arabia or Egypt? It seems the second. All these regimes, from Morocco to Oman are actively supported with western money, be it from the USA, France, Israel or whoever. The only goal of these regimes seems to create a barrier of fanatic ignorance between Europe and the rest of the world. If a country decides to go laicist, like Iraq, it's quickly invaded and trown to the kind of Al Sadr. Certainly there is no more freedom for women to go unveiled in US-occupied Iraq than under Saddam, whichever his faults.

The Algerian president also made signs of this further fundamentalization of Algeria recently, when he declared before a fundamentalist demonstration that "the koran is the constitution of Algerian society".

Source: The Middle East Media Research Institute (via Marjou at North Africa Forum)