...born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad

Gag me with a P.E.I tater: A Canadian icon—Anne of Green Gables—has gone, er, green. From the Ceeb:

Anne and Gilbert, the musical featuring fictional redhead Anne Shirley that started its Summerside run earlier this month, has gone green.

Producer Campbell Webster has purchased just over $300 in carbon credits to help offset fuel and other energy usage during staging of the theatre production, and ease the effects

"There's a certain elegance to it. It can be a simple way to offset the carbon fuels that you use," Webster told CBC News.

Being staged at the Harbourfront Jubilee Theatre from July 15 to Sept. 19, Anne and Gilbert is a love story based on Lucy Maud Montgomery's popular Anne of Green Gables book series. 

Carbon credits are vouchers used to sponsor clean-energy research and projects, in an effort to counterbalance carbon emissions produced by activities such as driving or air travel.

Webster purchased his credits from Planetair, a non-profit Montreal company dedicated to reducing greenhouse gases...

Personally, I happen to adore Prince Edward Island—a charming, tiny place where the ground is red, the sea is blue and the grass is a verdant green. But I would purposely shun any musical, wherever it’s stage, that incorporates such idiocy into its theatrics.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:27 | link | comments

A race to the finish: Joe Conason in the Chicago Tribune says that it’s taken decades for science and society to “catch up” to Al Gore.

 If that’s the case, all I can say is God help us all.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:18 | link | comments

Dhimmitude or brinksmanship?: I’m not sure. From the New York Sun:

SHARM EL-SHEIK, Egypt (AP) - President Bush's top national security aides said Tuesday their double-barreled show of diplomatic and military support for friendly Arab allies this week is not a shot across Iran's bow.

"We are out here to talk about the long term," Secretary of Defense Gates said, as he and Secretary of State Rice began two days of meetings among Persian Gulf allies and Egypt. Mr. Gates noted that American relationships in the Gulf and beyond predate the current unease over Iran's ambitions and influence.

If Iran perceives the joint visit and American overtures differently, "that's in the eye of the beholder," Mr. Gates said.

The Cabinet secretaries also said during a joint press conference in this Red Sea resort that they heard worries from Arab allies about the future of the American military presence in Iraq.

"There clearly is concern on the part of the Egyptians, and I think it probably represents concern elsewhere in the region, that the United States will somehow withdraw precipitously from Iraq, or in some way that is destabilizing to the entire region," Mr. Gates told reporters after he and Ms. Rice wrapped up meetings with Egypt's top leaders...

Newsflash for Bush and Condi: the Saudis are the enemy, same as the mullahs.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:14 | link | comments

Sickening: UN "peacekeepers" are racing to Darfur.

Far too late to save the tens of thousands of Christians, animists and black Muslims who have fallen victim to the Arab janjaweed militias unleashed by Khartoum's decades-long jihad.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:57 | link | comments

Cultish devotion and catastrophic thinking: Lots of true believers on the Left who go ga-ga for the Palestinians are devotees of another cult—the Church of Mother Earth.  Don Feder on the FrontPage Magazine site analyzes this impassioned bunch and their “virtuous” views:

Global warming has become the apocalyptic cult of the new millennium. None of the other jeremiahs, throughout the ages, can hold an end-of-the-world candle to ozone-layer mystics prophesying climate Armageddon.

I just came across the ultimate Al Gore coffee table book, "The World Tomorrow: Scenarios of Global Catastrophe" by Yannick Monget.

On the jacket, the author is described as "the founder and chief representative of the Ankaa Group, an organization dedicated to conceiving and developing ambitious projects for the environmental protection of Europe."

If that weren't enough of a contribution to mankind, we are told Monget "has written several volumes of socially committed science fiction in France" - which didn't sell nearly as well as Gore's several volumes of socially committed science fiction, including "The Earth In Balance" and "The Assault on Reason."

"The World Tomorrow" is a lavishly illustrated book that stunningly depicts ecological end-times in familiar settings.

Singapore is demolished by super tornadoes. Fires ravage downtown San Diego (made to resemble Dresden during the Allied bombing). Torrential downpours and "terrible floods" drench Central Europe. (Prague looks like Venice during monsoon season.) Berlin's lush lawns are replaced by dusty, cracked earth. The ruins of Madrid are in the middle of a jungle. Moscow's St. Basil's Cathedral is stranded in a snowy wasteland. New York City is locked in ice. And D.C. is returned to the forest primeval, with what appears to be a giant, mutant iguana crawling in front of the Capitol - oh, I beg your pardon, Senator Clinton.

This enviro-porn compliments the ravings of Global Warming's nuttier acolytes - chimp girl Jane Goodall, at the Live Earth U.S.A. concert, squawking: "Up in the North the ice is melting. What will it take to melt the ice in the human heart?"

Not to be outdone, and demonstrating that the Kennedy clan loses brain cells with each succeeding generation (impossible as that may seem), Robert F. Kennedy Jr. -- son of RFK and president of something called the Waterkeeper Alliance - raved to the Live Earth audience: "Get rid of all of these rotten politicians (presumably, Republicans) we have in Washington, who are nothing more than corporate toadies. This is treason and we need to start treating them as traitors!" His old man, who once worked for Joe McCarthy, would be proud.

Boy Bobbie could have put it differently: "This is heresy. And we need to start treating them as heretics!" Which way to the Global Warming auto-da-fe?

The environmentalist canon may be described thusly: 1) Global Warming caused by carbon dioxide emissions is revealed truth. 2) If we don't repent, mankind will be eternally damned. 3) Doubters are monsters and mental defectives comparable to Holocaust-deniers and members of the Flat Earth Society. And 4) It's time to purge our SUV sins by abolishing the industrial revolution and turning to pig manure and solar power for energy. The former may in found in abundance among Global-Warming advocates in Congress and the media...

Much of the above is also driven by the same kind of leftist self-loathing that prompts true believers to embrace the Third World and cast aspersions on the West, especially Israel and the U.S., which are seen as the alpha and omega of the world’s evil.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:39 | link | comments

The wonder-full land of Oz: Donning his customary rose-colored glasses, Israeli novelist Amos Oz surveys the terrain, and can’t get over all the wonderful things he can see. From the Globe and Mail (article available online for extra shekels):

Hardly anyone seems to notice the good news from the Middle East during the past few weeks. The parting of ways between the Gaza Strip under Hamas's rule and the West Bank under the rule of moderates is a historic window of opportunity for peacemaking between Israel and the administration of Mahmoud Abbas. Both Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Mr. Abbas's government accept the principle of two states for two peoples, the idea of trading land for peace and the goal of ending Israel's occupation of the territories. While there are many points of dispute, in no case does an abyss separate the two sides. Intensive negotiations can bridge these differences and produce a draft agreement.

But what about the Gaza Strip, which has fallen to Hamas and which operates under the influence of Iran and the inspiration of Hezbollah? There is reason to hope that when a comprehensive Israeli-Palestinian agreement is reached, and when the creation of an independent Palestinian state removes the sway of Israeli occupation from the Palestinians there, a popular movement in Gaza will rise up against the tyrannical, religiously fanatic Hamas regime. The Gaza Strip's masses, surely, will comprehend the historic achievement of the West Bank's inhabitants, and will fight to lift the yoke of Hamas and join the Palestinian state.

Positive changes are evident in both the Olmert and Abbas governments. Israel has made a series of gestures to demonstrate its good will: It has released Palestinian prisoners, allowed Mr. Abbas's forces to equip themselves with new weapons, stopped hunting down Palestinians on its wanted list and eased up on other strictures…

Party-pooper that I am, I sent the following response:

 

Amoz Oz is cheered by what he sees as the positive developments in relations between Israel and Mahmoud Abbas, viewing the Fatah chief’s increasing moderation a chance for a lasting peace. Mr. Oz acknowledges that there might be a slight hitch here—Hamas—but insists that once everyone over in Gaza sees how well things are going in the West Bank, they “will rise up against the tyrannical, religiously fanatic Hamas regime.”

 

They will? Such wishful thinking borders on the delusional. It ignores the fact that the Palestinians have already soundly rejected Mr. Abbas, who presided over a tyrannical, inefficient and corrupt regime, albeit an ostensibly secular one. It also fails to consider that Hamas, in the grand tradition of fascists who made the trains run on time, has brought law and order to Gaza and is earning accolades from Gaza residents who have no desire to put Fatah back in charge. And there is little incentive to do so while Hamas has the backing of Iran, which supplies it with weapons and “moral” support; both Hamas and Iran remain committed to an extremist agenda that will never accept Jewish sovereignty in Israel, and won’t rest until the Jewish state has been destroyed.

 

Israel may or may not withstand the threat posed by malevolent jihadists. It seems clear, however, that it cannot and will not survive if it succumbs to the good intentions and unfounded optimism of its wishful thinkers.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:19 | link | comments (2)

Hooked on Hamza: Abu Hamza, the choleric cleric who used to heat up the jihadi laddies from his pulpit at the Finsbury Park mosque, isn’t happy about his new digs in a British prison. The nearly-blind imam, affectionately known as “Hooky” in the British media because, prior to his incarceration, he used to wield the same kind of metal claw as Peter Pan’s nemesis (the contraption was removed so he wouldn’t be able to use it as a weapon), says he’s being bullied by a bunch of “Islamophobes.”

Poor man. To cheer him up, I’ve written him a poem:

 

A cleric called Hamza the Hook

Is not just some regular shnook.

Jihad’s his agenda,

But here’s the addenda—

He failed, both by hook and by crook.

 

Hooky, in his former life

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:54 | link | comments

Bewitched, unbothered and bewildered: How are British universities dealing with the growing threat of Muslim students being radicalized on campus? They’re not. They’re depending on their “moderate” Muslim students to deal with the problem because the dhimmis in charge are more afraid of being labelled racist than they are of the holy war. From the Telegraph:

…Their [the four Muslim undergrads who were just locked away in the slammer for “glorifying Islamic terrorism”] views alarmed the university's Islamic Society, when at a meeting, Zafar [one of the undergrads] called for Muslims to kill anyone who dared re-publish Danish cartoons of the prophet Mohammed.

 

The society ejected them, but the university only became aware of the incident after the police raids.

 

A university spokesman said the society's decision to isolate the group demonstrated that moderate Muslim students were prepared to act when they came across unacceptable behaviour.

 

Up to 48 British universities have been infiltrated by fundamentalists, according to Professor Anthony Glees, the director of Brunel University's Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies. He claims that followers of Omar Bakri, the founder of the disbanded al-Muhajiroun, continue to preach on campuses.

 

A Government report published in December warned of "serious, but not widespread, Islamic extremist activity in higher education institutions".

 

Government guidance, which asks staff to log suspicious behaviour, has been rejected by the University and Colleges Union, which described it as a "witch-hunt".

 

Government guidance has evidently misunderstood the concept of the “witch-hunt”—a paranoid and mean-spirited search for dangerous enemies who are largely a figment of the hunters’ over-heated imaginations. It ain’t a witch-hunt if there are actual witches, ones bent on making Islam supreme.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:39 | link | comments

Sweety assault: A curious piece in the Telegraph by Tim Butcher, one of the Western reporters who went on a Hamas junket in Gaza. Butcher isn’t taken in by Hamas’s charm offensive—which he immediately sees as the crude propaganda it is—but his conclusion leaves something to be desired:

It was the name of the bus company chosen by Hamas to drive foreign guests around Gaza yesterday that said it all. The name was Sweety Tours.

 

The tour was meant to counter weeks of adverse publicity about the supposedly draconian nature of "Hamastan" - the name given to the Gaza Strip by critics of the Islamist movement since its violent takeover last month.

 

So for five sweaty hours, the coach from Sweety Tours took a few dozen reporters on a tour of the Gaza Strip to try to counter this image. The bus stopped at the presidential guest house - Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian national authority and Fatah leader is locked out of Gaza - to show that the gardens were being watered and the building maintained.

 

A great deal was made of the fact the portrait of Mr Abbas still hung in the main reception room. But then a few minutes later the bus passed a vast mural of Yasser Arafat, the former Fatah leader. The mural was pockmarked with fresh-looking bullet holes.

 

"We believe in freedom of speech and democracy," said Ahmed Bahar, the deputy speaker of the Palestinian parliament and a senior Hamas figure.

 

His words would have sounded more convincing had the Hamas authorities in Gaza not chosen yesterday to arrest several distributors of Palestinian newspapers from the West Bank, the territory still under Fatah control.

 

The bus continued to the main prison in Gaza City, the Serai, where the cell doors were thrown open to provide access to the inmates. They all dutifully provided glowing accounts of how the administration had improved since Hamas took over.

 

None of the inmates was prepared to speak about torture even though human rights groups had documented cases allegedly committed by Hamas security forces.

 

The coach party was then taken to the main church of Gaza's tiny 204-strong Palestinian Catholic community to hear a glowing account of co-existence from the priest, Father Manuela Salaameh.

 

The bus tour was a clumsy propaganda exercise but it is worth remembering that a few weeks before Hamas came to power Alan Johnston, the BBC reporter, was being held hostage with warnings that other Western journalists would be targeted.

 

Oh, so you mean Hamas is to be applauded because under its rule Western reporters are now safe?

 

Good for the reporters, perhaps, but considering the whole wretched context of jihadis in charge of Gaza, big whoop.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:04 | link | comments

"Wiggle room," Taliban-style: Who says the Taliban aren't reasonable? Why, they've given the infidels three more hours to meet their demands, after which they promise to off the 23 Christians they've been holding hostage.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:00 | link | comments

Three strikes yer out: A blast of reason from—of all places— Ha’aretz. Danny Dayan notes the senselessness of Israel’s propping up Mahmoud Abbas, the man Israel’s leadership is desperately trying to turn into the Bashar Gemayal of our times. (Bashar was the forward-looking president of Lebanon who wanted to forge closer ties with Israel in the early 1980s—and who was assassinated for his foresight shortly after taking power.) Dayan warns of the dire consequences of leaving the West Bank to Abbas—a man who is not a Bashar, who will never be a Bashar,  but who, should Israel "disengage" and set him up in a West Bank fiefdom, would likely suffer the same fate as Bashar:

Former prime minister Ariel Sharon led Israel into two giant experiments. Most regrettably, both of them were colossal failures. Nevertheless, his successors are currently playing around with the idea of returning to his failed experiments, with the near-messianic expectation that this time they will succeed. The Big Pines campaign of the summer of 1982 was aimed at making Bashir Gemayel the ruler of Lebanon so he would sign a peace agreement with Israel and ensure the security of the northern communities. The results are known: Gemayel was elected president, but he was assassinated before he managed to be sworn in. Sharon's plan collapsed like a house of cards. Bashir's brother Amin Gemayel ignored all the understandings between the two sides. And today, after years of wars that have exacted hundreds of dead, the peace of Kiryat Shmona depends to a large extent on the mood of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

In the summer of 2005, Ariel Sharon carried out his second large experiment: the forced evacuation of thousands of Israelis from their homes and the transfer of the Gaza region to the Palestinians. For the first time a Palestinian state was established on contiguous territory, clear of any Jewish presence. Just a few months after the withdrawal and establishment of the de facto state, the Palestinians elected Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh as prime minister. Hamas later took over the administrative and military mechanisms in the Gaza Strip by force. An Al-Qaida-Hezbollah-Hamas state is currently located on the Israeli border and is supported by Iran. It is raining rockets on the South each day. The diplomatic plans gathering steam these days in the offices of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Vice Premier Haim Ramon are an exact reprise of Sharon's dud operations. The plans aim to establish a "clean" Palestinian state on contiguous territory that covers nearly all of Judea and Samaria - the West Bank - just like Gaza. To prevent, supposedly, the severe damage that has been brought on us by the Gaza state, Israel will ensure the rule of Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, whether or not this is what the Palestinians want, just as in Lebanon.

Abbas (Abu Mazen) is the man who wrote a doctorate on "The Secret Connection between the Nazis and the Leaders of the Zionist Movement." He was involved up to his neck in the murder of the Israeli athletes in Munich and has promised the refugees in Lebanon that they will return to their homes in Israel proper.

 

An Israeli withdrawal from most of the territories of Judea and Samaria and the establishment of a Palestinian state there will inevitably lead to the same disastrous results of the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. In the absence of Israeli settlements and the Israel Defense Forces' control of the territory, a Hamas takeover is only a matter of time. The notion that Gaza is a Hamas state whereas the West Bank is not entirely contradicts the facts. In the last regional elections to the Palestinian parliament, Hamas won 30 seats in Judea and Samaria, while Fatah won only 12. In Hebron, for example, Hamas won all nine seats.

So it is clear that without Israeli intervention, the days of Abbas and his colleagues are numbered. To prevent a Hamas takeover of a future Palestinian state, Israel will have to base its control on what the left in its wickedness likes to call "IDF spears." However, the IDF will not be there. Maintaining Abbas, without an Israeli presence on the ground, is an impossible mission. Sooner or later Abbas' fate will be like Gemayel's…

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:49 | link | comments

New Yorker's mislabelling: The this week's New Yorker, David Remnick has written a profile of Avrahum Berg, an Israeli politician and a former speaker of the Knesset whom the magazine dubs a Zionist “apostate.”

Those of us who align themselves on the opposite end of the political spectrum have another name for him: raving moonbat. That’s because Berg and his batty, self-despising ilk--exemplified by Israel's useless Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert--are ensuring that Israel will implode from a critical mass of mush-brained cluelessness long before the Arabs/Persians and their international enablers get to finish it off.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:14 | link | comments

Getting it—in part: An editorial in the International Herald Tribune is a mixed bag. It “gets it” about the perils of arming oily Wahhabists:

The Bush administration and Saudi Arabia's ruling family have a lot in common, including oil, shared rivals like Iran and a penchant for denial that has allowed both to overlook the Saudis' enabling role in the Sept. 11 attacks. But their recent wrangling over Iraq cannot be denied or papered over with proposals for a big new arms sale. And if these differences are not tackled, there is an increased likelihood that the war's chaos will spread far beyond Iraq's borders.

While Washington hasn't protested publicly, Riyadh is pouring money into Sunni opposition groups and letting Saudis cross the border to join Sunni insurgents fighting the U.S.-backed, Shiite-led government. Washington estimates that nearly half of the 60 to 80 foreign fighters entering Iraq each month come from Saudi Arabia.

So far, neither Washington nor Riyadh is spending any time thinking about containing the chaos that will follow the inevitable U.S. withdrawal. The only good news is that President Bush is sending Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates to Saudi Arabia for what we hope will be a frank discussion.

A failed Iraqi state with Saudi Islamists holed up in Qaeda sanctuaries in its western deserts is clearly not in the interests of the Saudi monarchy. But for Rice and Gates to have any chance of changing Saudi policies, they will have to go beyond the administration's usual mix of bullying and denial and address legitimate Saudi concerns.

One such concern is Iran, which is bankrolling and training Shiite militias, building a power base in Shiite areas of Iraq and drawing the prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, into its orbit. Iran's expanding influence poses a major threat to Saudi Arabia.

Then again, the editorial doesn’t “get it” about Iran, Saudi Arabia, their rivalry—which divides them—and the jihad imperative—which unites them:

After years of mistaken U.S. policy in Iraq, that threat cannot simply be conjured away. Washington needs to face up to these issues, sit down with Tehran and work out mutually acceptable solutions to these issues that the Saudis can live with as well...

Yeah, I’m sure Iran's crazed almost-nuclear theocrats, eagerly awaiting the long-deferred return of their Messiah (he fell down a well in the 9^th Century and hasn’t been heard from since), as well as the untuous Wahhabists, whose oil wealth funds the export of their toxic theology/jihadism to all points of the planet, are just itching to sit down and hash things out with Great Satan—and each other.

 

Good thinking, IHT opiner.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:24 | link | comments

Depressed Swedes: According to the 640 radio report I heard about an hour ago, the death of Woody Allen’s favourite film director, Ingmar Bergman, at the age of 89 is said to have “cast a pall” over Sweden.

Yeah, because they were such chuckleheads before he died.

 

The Bloomberg article about Bergman’s passing is the only one I’ve read so far that mentions Bergman’s “dirty little secret”—a youthful fling with Nazism:

The son of a priest, Bergman described his own childhood as based on concepts such as sin and confession, punishment in the form of brutal floggings, forgiveness and grace. Bergman settled the score with his father, Erik, with the partly autobiographical ``Fanny and Alexander,'' where a stern, Lutheran bishop torments his stepchildren.

Bergman said his authoritarian upbringing may have contributed to an ``astonishing acceptance of Nazism'' before World War II, a stance for which he was later deeply apologetic.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:01 | link | comments

Advantage, Hamas: Hamas’s victory in Gaza wasn’t only a loss for Fatah. As the Wall Street Journal reports, it was also an immense loss for the U.S. and Israel, whose intelligence and security systems may have been seriously compromised:

When the Islamist group Hamas conquered the Gaza Strip in June it seized an intelligence-and-military infrastructure created with U.S. help by the security chiefs of the Palestinian territory's former ruler.

According to current and former Israeli intelligence officials, former U.S. intelligence personnel and Palestinian officials, Hamas has increased its inventory of arms since the takeover of Gaza and picked up technical expertise -- such as espionage techniques -- that could assist the group in its fight against Israel or Washington's Palestinian allies, the Fatah movement founded by Yasser Arafat.

Hamas leaders say they acquired thousands of paper files, computer records, videos, photographs and audio recordings containing valuable and potentially embarrassing intelligence information gathered by Fatah. For more than a decade, Fatah operated a vast intelligence network in Gaza established under the tutelage of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Hamas leaders are expected as early as tomorrow to go public with some of the documents and the secrets they hold.

The exact nature of the threat posed by the intelligence grab in Gaza -- including any damage to U.S. intelligence operations in the Palestinian territories and the broader Middle East -- is difficult to ascertain. U.S. and Israeli officials generally tried to play down any losses, saying any intelligence damage is likely minimal.

But a number of former U.S. intelligence officials, including some who have worked closely with the Palestinians, said there was ample reason to worry that Hamas has acquired access to important spying technology as well as intelligence information that could be helpful to Hamas in countering Israeli and U.S. efforts against the group.

"People are worried, and reasonably so, about what kind of intelligence losses we may have suffered," said one former U.S. intelligence official with extensive experience in Gaza.

A U.S. government official said he doubted serious secrets were compromised in the Gaza takeover. Other officials said they had no reason to believe that U.S. spying operations elsewhere in the Arab world had been compromised.

Close ties between Hamas and the governments of Iran and Syria also mean that intelligence-and-spying techniques could be shared with the main Middle East rivals of the Bush administration. As the White House prepares to lead an international effort to bolster Fatah's security apparatus in the West Bank, the losses in Gaza stand as an example of how efforts to help Fatah can backfire…

A lesson the White House, as well as Parliament Hill, has yet to learn.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:32 | link | comments

Wahhabi Scouts: Don’t look now, but another icon of Western civilization is being Islamized. From Arab News:

JEDDAH, 30 July 2007 — One hundred and fifty Saudi scouts from across the Kingdom are currently participating in the 21st World Scout Jamboree, which is being held in the United Kingdom. Over 155 countries are participating in the event to celebrate the centenary of the scouting movement. The World Scout Jamboree began on July 27 and will conclude on Aug. 8.

 

Prince Mohammed ibn Nawwaf, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United Kingdom and Ireland, will visit the Saudi delegation in London today accompanied by Minister of Education Dr. Abdullah Al-Obaid.

 

Britain’s Prince William helped open the event on Saturday as 40,000 people from around the globe gathered to celebrate the centenary of scouting. Prince William, 25, who is second in line to the throne, sipped tea in a traditional Bedouin tent erected by Saudi scouts and bashed out a rhythm on an African drum as he joined in with an international band.

 

Speaking about the general situation of Saudi scouts, Abdullah Al-Fahad, secretary-general of the Saudi Boy Scouts Association (SBSA) and deputy-president of the Imam Muhammad ibn Saud Islamic University in Riyadh, said their numbers are swelling due to support from families, schools, universities and sports clubs.

 

Al-Fahad said, “We now have around 100,000 Saudi scouts and 15,000 guides. We hope to increase the number of scouts each year by at least five percent.”…

 

Oh, that William--he's a chip off the old blockhead.

 

The set-up of Scouts and Guides is ideal for those pursuing an Islamist agenda because the genders are already separated, as per the requirements of sharia law:

 

He (Al-Fahad) added that Saudi girl guides also have important roles to play, which should not be underestimated. The Saudi Girl Guide Association functions separately under the supervision of Islamic scholar and university lecturer Fatima Naseef.

 

Along with earning the usual merit badges, Saudi Scouts (but, for obvious reasons, not Guides) can demonstrate their good citizenship by helping others fulfill one of their Islamic duties:

 

The secretary-general added that 3,000 Saudi boy scouts will be deployed during the upcoming Haj to guide pilgrims using state-of-the-art GPS technology. To this end, an e-map of Mina and Arafat will be produced to enable scouts to guide pilgrims using GPS. “The software for the map is ready. In the meantime, we shall train scouts in the use of GPS technology, so that they could locate the areas to which pilgrims, who have lost their way, could go.”

 

And consider this: once they outgrow scouting, the helpful lads will be the perfect age to become martyrs for Allah.

Posted by: scaramouche at 09:50 | link | comments

Saudi slime: As the Bush administration gets set to sell weapons to the oily Wahhabists, an editorial by Youssef Ibrahim in the New York Sun itemizes why that’s not such a good idea:

• In the past 30 years, Saudi charities, government funds, and the Saudi royal family itself have sent thousands of wild-eyed, bearded, sandaled Saudi jihadists as fodder to wars in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya, Lebanon, and now Iraq.

• The CIA and British and Iraqi intelligence agencies estimate that a majority of the suicide bombers in Iraq today, as well as 40% of the foreign fighters sneaking in to kill Shiite Iraqis and American troops, are Saudi citizens. No coincidences or "slip-ups" can explain that number. Moreover, a former American ambassador to Kuwait and Jordan, Edward Gnehm says Saudi emissaries are lobbying the oil-rich Sunni ruling families of Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates for funds and fighters in the struggle against Shiites in Iraq.

• The 1987 founding of Hamas — a Palestinian Arab terrorist group that originally was the Gaza wing of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood and whose leaders then resided in Saudi Arabia — was overwhelmingly a Saudi-financed project undertaken by Islamic charities, including those of Mr. Rajhi.

• Half the terrorists killed by the Lebanese army in the ongoing siege at the Nahr el-Bared refugee camp in Lebanon, which began in May, have turned out to be Saudi jihadist fighters.

The myth of Saudi Arabia as a stabilizing power, a friend of America, or a bulwark against Islamist radicalism is just a fairy tale concocted by well-paid Saudi lobbyists on K Street in Washington, a group that includes some former senior American officials. The Saudi Arabia we have painfully come to know for the last two decades is a two-headed monster ruled by the alliance of its hallucinating jihadist priesthood and its ruling family's dilettante princes. The former are on a fanatical mission to proselytize on behalf of radical Islam. The latter see nothing wrong with dropping a few million at roulette tables in Monaco, picking up a few expensive prostitutes on the way to their yachts, then heading to a mosque for dawn prayers on the French Riviera…

In other words, the custodians of the two holy mosques—who arrogate to themselves the Earthly pleasures that are only available to horny young “martyrs” as a posthumous reward, the incentive for their martyrdom—are a bunch of royal hyprocrites. And extremely dangerous ones, to boot.

Posted by: scaramouche at 09:22 | link | comments

Dopplegangers: Ever noticed how a certain waxen but still vital potentate bears a freaky resemblance to a certain Jewish snake-tongued rocker?

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:21 | link | comments

Truth vs. “narrative”: Israeli writer Assaf Wohl is withering in his contempt for the decision to add the Arab perspective to Arab-Israeli textbooks. From YNet News:

A few years ago, falafel balls adorned with the Israeli flag were being handed out at the University of Haifa ahead of Independence Day. An Arab student who studied with me came over and said with a smile: "Look at that. You even stole our food from us, the Palestinians, and put your flag on it." That was his "narrative." "Look at that," I responded. "You stole from us the belief in one God, Abraham our forefather, our only country, and in addition to all that you also stole my uncle's Mitsubishi." That was my "narrative." 

For some reason, whenever I hear the word "narrative" I immediately sense the stench of lies tickling my Jewish nostrils. I found this word too often in articles written by those "new historians," who in order to advance their anti-Israeli and post-Zionist ideas invented the term "narrative."

"Narrative," just like "occupation," always works only one way. This word is used today as a nice wrapping paper that covers the miserable adventure which Land of Israel Arabs were dragged into in 1948.

We can simply say that during that year they chose to "drown the Jews in rivers of blood" and failed. Many of them apparently regret it to this day. Instead of drawing the right conclusions and attempting to live in peace with their Jewish neighbors, their leaders constantly seek to undermine the Israeli flag, as can be attested to by the mustache of former Knesset Member Bishara, which recently became ever-so-closer to Nasrallah's beard.

It is no secret that post-Zionist historians have turned history into irrelevant post-history. Instead of describing events in a manner that approaches objectivity as much as is possible (as there is no such thing as pure objectivity,) they tend to rewrite them. 

 

Paradoxically, these approaches, which make pretenses of presenting the point of view on both sides, argue that only one moral side exists – the Arabic-speaking side. Now, it turns out that school curriculums will be formulated based on this premise as well…

 

Once moral equivalence has rushed in—and turned a critical mass of brains to mush—it’s more or less game over for the side facing the existential threat.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:10 | link | comments

Come again?: In light of this, does this make any sense at all?

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:57 | link | comments

Club Med Gaza: So what if they’re a bunch of genocidal jihadis whose charter calls for the extermination of the Jews? In the grand tradition of totalitarians past, at least they make the trains run on time (metaphorically speaking, of course). And in the same grand tradition, gullible media types continue to swallow the b.s. of clever fascists bent on sprucing up their image. From the Seattle Times:

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — If you think of the Gaza Strip as a volatile, violent battleground run by fanatic Islamist militants bent on destroying Israel, Hamas wants you to think again.

Think: "Safe, clean and green."

One month after seizing the Gaza Strip in a military rout that shattered brittle Palestinian unity, Hamas is embarking on a radical marketing campaign to promote what it calls "the new face of Gaza."

They call it the "Gaza Riviera."

Lime-green Hamas banners flutter over Gaza City with a message in English for aid workers and journalists worried about being kidnapped: "No more threat for our foreign visitors and guests."

Bearded gunmen in blue-gray camouflage uniforms who helped seize control of Gaza now rush to settle routine neighborhood squabbles and family disputes.

Once-deserted Mediterranean beaches now are filled with dozens of families holding picnics to escape the summer heat until long after midnight.

Monday, Hamas is planning to take journalists on a special tour, from the packed beaches to the bullet-scarred security compounds its Islamist fighters overran last month when they ousted Fatah forces loyal to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

While the United States and Israel are working to help Abbas transform the West Bank into a model of pro-Western modernity — and isolate and marginalize Hamas in the Gaza Strip in the process — Hamas is working to assure the world that it has no plans to turn the Gaza Strip into a Taliban-style police state.

"This is our new Riviera," boasted Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar. "This is the most secure period in the history of Gaza."…

Sounds like a regular Côte d'Azur—‘cept for the gunmen and burkinis.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:23 | link | comments

Compatible worlds: Calling all “Islamophobes.” Muslim scholars want you to know that there’s no reason to be phobic about the one true faith since Islam and the other Abrahamic faiths are completely simpatico. The scholars were responding to Pope Benedict’s Islamophobic assertion that Islam poses a threat to Europe’s Christian heritage. From Islam Online:

Islamic values are no threat to Europe's identity as they are found in Christian and Jewish scriptures, but Islamophobes are fueling anti-Islam sentiments in the continent, Muslim scholars said on Saturday, July 28.

 

"Islamic values pose no threat to Europe," Mudr Khugah, the personal envoy of the Islamic Religious Authority in Austria, told IslamOnline.net on Saturday, July 28.

 

"These values, just as justice, peace and equality, are found in Christianity and Judaism; so there is nothing to fear," he added.

 

Pope Benedict VXI's private secretary Georg Gaenswein has called for defending Europe's "Christian roots" against the Islamic values which threaten the European identity.

 

In an interview with the German weekly Sueddeutsche, Gaenswein also defended last year's speech by Pope Benedict XVI, which associated Islam with violence, saying that Islam was a "religion of extremes" and have extremists who "invoke the Qur'an in their actions and use arms."

 

Sheikh Hussein Halawa, imam of the Islamic and cultural center in Dublin, dismissed Gaenswein's statements.

 

"Islamic values are all about peace, fraternity and equality," he said.

 

He said Islam does tolerate the other.

 

"The Qur'an says 'there is no compulsion in religion,'" he added.

Halawa said Muslims in Europe are an integral part of their societies.

 

"Europeans, accordingly, have to respect their religious values."

 

Ali Abu Shema, the head of the Milan Islamic center, saw Gaenswein's warnings "shallow" and "unrealistic."

 

"Most Europeans see Islam as a religion that promotes tolerance and peace," he said.

 

He cited a recent poll in the Italian city of Milan which found that 68 percent of its residents saw Islam in a favorable light and that 62 percent did not oppose the construction of a grand mosque in the city.

 

"Unfortunately, extremists' statements always make headlines."

 

Islamophobia

Hussein Hamed, a member of the European Council for Fatwa and Research (ECFR), described Gaenswein's statements a step backward.

 

"These statements are reminiscent of ages that repressed freedom of religion and trampled on human rights," he said.

 

"Such statements symbolize fanaticism," fumed the scholar.

 

"What is the big deal if Islamic values find ground in the East or the West?" he wondered. "Human beings can choose what suit them best and judge themselves whether they really enhance progress and development."

Muslim scholars blamed the spiraling Islamophobia in the West for anti-Islam statements...

 

Yeah, all that spiraling must be about ‘slamophobia and have nothing to do with legitimate concerns re jihad, terrorism, dhimmitude and sharia law.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:04 | link | comments

A widow laments: The widow of the terrorist in charge of the 7/7 London attacks says she still prays for her late husband. In an interview with Sky News, Hasmina Patel insisted that the man she married was a real sweetie until he underwent an unfortunate transformation. From the Sunday Times:

…Ms Patel fell in love with Khan in 1997 when they were students at Leeds Metropolitan University. “He seemed sensible and polite, a good family man and he came from a good family.”

During the eight years that she spent with him, he transformed from a moderate young man to one who was interested in religious fundamentalism and then active jihad. But she insisted that she had no idea he was involved with extremists.

“We were trying to be good Muslims and, in our religion, we are told that men and women have to be segregated. I never sat in the same room with his friends, he never sat in the same room as my friends, so it is a completely different life.”

She felt that Khan was becoming distant and they had argued frequently. “I didn’t really know what was going on. I knew there was something, like he seemed . . . I thought maybe it is a phase, maybe he is depressed, he is always out with his friends, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.”…

Orthodox Jews sit separately during religious services too, but, remarkably enough, no Hasid has ever strapped on a bomb and blown up a crowd of civilians in the name of Jehovah.

 

Might that be because the seating issue takes a back seat to a little something you can find in the Koran that you won’t find in the Torah: the jihad imperative?

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:30 | link | comments

Jihad’s fearful helpers: Toronto Sun columnist Salim Mansour says “moderate” Muslims and Western liberals are both afraid to speak out against the scourge of radical Islam, but for two different reasons. Muslims are afraid to speak out for fear of being branded apostates; liberals are afraid of being labelled racist.

This state of denial, writes Mansour, is calamitous because it has allowed "Islamist murderers (to) reap their harvest of the innocent dead."

He might have added that it is also helping to facilitate Islamic primacy by allowing the jihad to slip in through the open window of multiculturalism--as in the case of the well-meaning, liberal-minded nincompoops of VisionTV, who broadcast radical Pakistani cleric Dr. Israr Ahmed over their excruciatingly politically correct airwaves for two years.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:12 | link | comments

Criticising Nic: Slick Nic Sarkozy is bent on helping the Libyan waxwork construct a nuclear reactor—in exchange for lots of coin, of course. But at least one of France’s EU partners isn’t too keen on the idea. From AFP via Expatica:

BERLIN, July 27, 2007 (AFP) - Criticism of France's plans to build a nuclear reactor in Libya mounted in Germany on Friday, with the Greens accusing President Nicolas Sarkozy of behaving recklessly.

 

"This is reckless, nationalistic activism on the part of President Sarkozy," the co-president of the environmentalist party, Richard Buetikofer told the daily Passauer Neuen Presse.

 

"I am not surprised that he is suddenly calling (Libyan leader Moammer) Kadhafi a great democrat," he said, adding that France was making it easier for Libya to "reach for nuclear arms."

 

"Kadhafi may have vowed to give up the quest for nuclear fire power but can one really believe a dictator?"

Sarkozy signed a memorandum on building a nuclear reactor for water desalination in Libya after talks with Kadhafi on Thursday, a day after Tripoli freed six foreign medics from jail after an eight-year ordeal.

 

The step has drawn widespread criticism, not least in Germany with its strong anti-nuclear lobby and official plans to phase out nuclear power by around 2020.

German Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Gernot Erler said "politically this is a problematic affair."

 

"Above all the risk of proliferation increases with every country using nuclear energy," he told Friday's edition of the Handelsblatt daily.

 

Gert Weisskirchen, a spokesman for Germany's Social Democrats, who are part of the country's ruling coalition, said it is wise to treat Libya with pragmatism, but asked: "Does one have to start with a nuclear plant?"…

 

Excellent question. Herr Weisskirchen (whose name, if I recall my High School German correctly, means “white church”). France could have started with something smaller, say like encouraging genocide and helping a repellent Arab potentate stay in power.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:48 | link | comments

Inhale, exhale, kaboom: Iran says it can’t possibly put the brakes on its nuclear program because, to the mad theocrats, enrichment is akin to breathing. From the Tehran Times:

TEHRAN (The Independent& The Guardian)-- Iran has issued its strongest signal to date that it will defy UN demands for a suspension of uranium enrichment threatening to respond to any further sanctions and accusing the Americans of ""running away"" from negotiations to end the crisis over the Iranian nuclear program.

Iran's chief nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani told The Independent and The Guardian that uranium enrichment was ""like breathing"" for his country, and that Iran would not halt the spinning centrifuges at its main enrichment plant in Natanz, even if the Bush administration offered security guarantees. Mr.

Larijani was unusually forthcoming about his negotiations with the European foreign policy envoy, Javier Solana, who has been trying to coax Iran back to the negotiating table while the UN Security Council prepares a new round of economic sanctions. The Europeans have taken the lead in dealing with Iran, which has not had diplomatic relations with Washington since 1979.

They want Iran to suspend uranium enrichment as a precondition for negotiations.

This has been rejected.

The Iranians say that the last time they agreed to a voluntary suspension, a three-week suspension ended up lasting two and a half years.

They say they will not be caught out again. Tehran has made clear that it will not suspend enrichment as the UN Security Council has demanded, despite two earlier rounds of financial, travel and arms sanctions.

A decision on a third round has been put off until September.

""If there is another resolution, we will react with whatever we have,"" the senior official told western journalists.

""So far we have answered legally, limiting (UN) inspections, and reducing cooperation with the IAEA within the legal framework. ""But if there is no legal option left, it is obvious we will be tempted to do illegal things.

What is very important to us is our dignity, and we are prepared to act."" Iranian officials made it clear that one option was a formal break with the treaty and a total severance of relations with the IAEA, like North Korea in 2003. However, said the senior official, unlike North Korea Iran had no intention of building a nuclear bomb, even though he said it had now installed enough uranium-enriching centrifuges to make one. Ali Larijani added that if Iran produced a single bomb ""what is it good for? If we attack Israeli with one bomb, America would attack us with thousands of bombs.

It's suicide."" …

Right, Mr. Taqiyah-Spouter, because no one in Iran wants to do that. 

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:15 | link | comments (1)

Condi hearts Islam: U.S. Secretary of State has reiterated the Bush administration’s position that Islam is a warm 'n' cuddly religion—and a very “fast-growing” one, too, which means that every day there are more Muslim voters. From Islam Online:

CAIRO — US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has praised Islam as one of the fastest-growing religions in the United States, commending Muslims as part and parcel of American society.

"We here in the United States could never disrespect Islam because Islam is a part of us," Rice told the US-funded Al-Hurra satellite channel in an interview published on the State Department's website.

"Islam is a very fast-growing religion in the United States."

Rice said the US administration does hold Islam in high esteem.

"We could never disrespect Islam because we know that it is a great faith and a peaceful faith," she said.

"We could never respect -- disrespect Islam by believing that the violent people who kill innocent people and chant the names of Islam really represent the future of the Middle East and the future of the Arab world."

There are between six to seven million Muslims in the United States, making up less than three percent of the country's 300 million population.

A recent poll showed that US Muslims are largely moderate and well integrated into society.

Last April, Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff described the Muslim minority in the US as a success story because Muslims are well integrated into society…

Ms. Rice and Mr. Chertoff are far too polite to mention the alarming percentage of young’uns who, according to a recent Pew poll of Muslim Americans, think that suicide bombing is permissible in certain circumstances. But I’m sure that, as in other Western societies, they represent an tiny, aberrant thread in the weave.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:00 | link | comments (2)

Money madness: The West has pinned its hopes for “peace” on Mahmoud Abbas, the head of an irredeemably corrupt outfit, Fatah, which has been scorned by most Palestinians. Abbas is seen as the way forward, the only alternative to Hamas, the jihadis who rule Gaza. But, despite what we’re told is an unbridgeable chasm between the two factions, Abbas, whose “regime,” such as it is, is awash in Western cash, has earmarked a large portion of it to help bolter Hamas. Not that Hamas needs any help. It has plenty of its own moolah to spread around:

Could the problem here be that there’s too much money, not too little?

 

From YNet News:

…Abbas' government is replete with ministers of tourism, transportation, agriculture, and other important ministries. Yet everything is virtual. The Palestinians in the Territories refer to the Salem Fayyad government as the "government of salaries."

Indeed, the Palestinian Treasury has enough money to pay salaries for many months to come. The Western world, which views radical Islam as the enemy, blindly follows Abbas' declarations and continues to hand over large sums of money. Abbas sends the money to Gaza and helps stabilize the Hamas rule there.

 

Muhammad from Jabaliya doesn't care who pays his salary – Abbas or Haniyeh, Israel or Iran. For him, the important thing is that the money arrives and enables him to buy food for his children.

 

Meanwhile, the Hamas rule in Gaza is stabilizing, partly thanks to the money Israel has transferred to Abbas, who proceeded to transfer it to more than 100,000 Gazans in the form of monthly salaries.

 

Hamas is conducting itself very wisely. Law and order prevails, there are no weapons on the streets besides the ones held by government forces, and no clan disputes. Even the market stalls at Palestine Square have been removed, and traffic is flowing.

 

The introduction of Islam by the regime is being undertaken at a slow pace, but consistently and with determination. Hamas has no shortage of money either, and it pads the pockets of its new supporters with welfare and aid funds…

 

Thus does Israel’s imbecilic leadership fund its enemies and pave the way for Israel’s ruin.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:05 | link | comments

Perfect fit: Two months ago that bastion of “human rights,” Egypt, proudly took its place on the UN’s Human Rights Council. In so doing, it joined the other repressive tyrannies who serve as the arbiters of international rights. The election of a nation whose idea of “human rights” entails the rights of the state to hassle, mistreat and murder humans occasioned some criticism. However, Egypt’s Foreign Minister was quick to assure everyone that his country did indeed belong in such esteemed company, and of his country's continuing commitment to the HRC's conception of rights. From MEMRI:

…Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmad Abu Al-Gheit stated that Egypt's gaining membership in the U.N. Council is a new proof of Egypt's esteem and respect in the eyes of the international community. According to him, this achievement is a clear answer to all attempts to question political reform in Egypt and to denigrate the progress achieved by Egypt in the area of human rights. Al-Gheit added that, as a council member, Egypt will promote international legislation prohibiting insults to religions and will work to reinforce the humanitarian law and to protect civilians in armed conflicts. [1]

Egypt's Ambassador to the U.N. Magd Abd Al-Fatah also expressed satisfaction over Egypt's gaining membership in the U.N. Human Rights Council. He stated that it reflects international faith in Egypt and endorses its leadership in developing standards for human rights in Africa. He further assessed that "Egypt would act in cooperation with the other member countries in order to end the international community's policies of double standard, politization, and selective treatment in human rights issues." According to him, Egypt is against the imposition of international standards for human rights that are opposed to cultural and religious principles of the Arab societies." ^[2]…

Yup. It should fit right in.

Posted by: scaramouche at 09:25 | link | comments

Hot to trot: Self-described global warming activist Laurie David, a woman whose Jimmy Choo-shod carbon footprints are, ironically, humungous, has been caught with her pants down. (Via Tim Blair).

Looks like Larry, that petulant troll, has more excuse than ever to curb his enthusiasm.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:53 | link | comments

VisionTV’s blindness: Stewart Bell has another instalment of the VisionTV saga. In today’s episode, the wealthy Pakistani-Canadian from Edmonton who’s been producing The Dr. Israr Ahmad Hour, a.k.a. Dil Dil Pakistan, explains that “he bought the rights to Dr. Ahmad’s videos and began airing them at least two years ago (emphasis added) because they were among the few that discussed the Koran in English.” He had no idea that the man doing the discussing was the author of such hateful material.

Yeah, no doubt the news took him by complete surprise.

 

Meanwhile, back in Pakistan, Dr. Israr Ahmad has issued a statement in which he “strongly refutes the impression that he hated Jews or held anti-Semitic views.” Ahmad says he couldn’t possibly hold such views because “our Prophet Muhammmad, the last of the Prophets himself, was a Semitic.”

 

Good point, Issy. 'Course, that didn't stop Mo the Semitic from waging jihad against and slaughtering the Jewish Semitics in Medina way back when.

 

Bob Roberts, VisionTV’s CEO, insists that Dr. Ahmad has been allowed to appear on the air for so long due to some “internal lapses”—the same kind of lapses, apparently, that allowed Ahmad back on the air last Saturday, a day after Roberts’s assurance that the jihad-preachin’ Jew-hater’s VisionTV career was over. (Roberts explained that “lapse” as being the result of a “mix-up.” Something along the lines of "the dog ate the producer’s homework.")

 

Not exactly a tight ship you’re running there, Bob. The name “Titanic” springs to mind.

 

Now that the jihadi cat has been let out of the bag, the producers of Dil Dil Pakistan have been forced to issue an apology, and at least feign contrition. Here’s the statement that will be read on the air:

Recently, Dr. Israr Ahmad appeared as a presenter on the program Dil Dil Pakistan, broadcast on Saturdays on VisionTV. The National Post subsequently reported that Dr. Ahmad had made offensive remarks about people of the Jewish community in past speeches and writings. His appearance on this program deeply troubled a number of people and we apologize for any offence that was unknowingly caused. The producer of Dil Dil Pakistan has voluntarily removed Mr. Ahmad as a speaker on any future broadcast of Dil Dil Pakistan. It was never the intention of the producer, or of VisionTV, to offend viewers or to suggest in any way that hatred or violence towards people of other faiths or cultures is acceptable under any circumstances. VisionTV's goal--one which we have been successfully pursuing for decades --is to build bridges of understanding amongst Canadians of different faith and cultural backgrounds. Dil Dil Pakistan and programs like it provide windows into other cultures and religions. Dialogue is the best solution. We may from time to time make mistakes, but we will not waver from this focus.

Shut the window. The jihad is getting inside.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:47 | link | comments

A rhyme for our time: This one’s for Nic, the French P.M., who, disappointingly but in the tradition of his ambitious predecessors, is interested in extending France’s influence in the world. Nic, on a visit to the continent where his nation formerly had some colonial holdings, has had a brilliant idée : “Eurafrica”

As if Eurabia wasn’t bad enough. (Eurafrica, Eurabia—why not call the whole kit and caboodle by its Orwellian name: Oceania?)

 

Yesterday on its front page, the Globe and Mail featured a lovely, full-color photo of Nic and Moo Moo, striding side by side—a portent of things to come. The sight inspired the following flight of verse:

 

A potentate known as Gadhafi

Preened and posed like a boastful giraffi.

Now that things are so rosy

With Nic’las Sarkozy

Seems Gadhafi has had the last laughi.

Posted by: scaramouche at 09:26 | link | comments

A question of priorities: The Liberal government of Ontario had a million dollars to squander on the Ontario Cricket Association—not exactly an outfit that deals with society’s have-nots—but it couldn’t find any funds to help out desperate parents who have children with autism.

Shame on Dalton McGuinty—and shame on us if we don’t turf him out.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:53 | link | comments

A possible new career for Lindsay Lohan?: Report: panel finds astronauts flying drunk.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:45 | link | comments (1)

Corruption in Ontario: Call me hard-hearted, but I will shed no tears for Mike Colle, the Ontario Minister of Citizenship and Immigration (and my M.P.P.) who resigned from his cabinet post today due to some hanky-panky over at his ministry. Seems a few “generous” folks over there were handing out oodles of cash to some groups—many of them ethnic-types—with no paper work and few questions asked. A report has just been released slamming the practice, although it insists that these handouts had nothing whatever to do with providing anyone with added incentive to vote Liberal.

Uh huh.

From CP via 680 News:

…Although Auditor General Jim McCarter found there was no evidence Premier Dalton McGuinty's government doled out year-end grants to Liberal-friendly ethnic groups, he said the province rushed money out the door without adequate accountability or transparency.

The process for awarding the grants was not ``open, transparent or accountable'' and decisions were made in Colle's office without much consultation with ministry staff, he said.

``Decisions were based on conversations, not applications,'' McCarter said, adding many organizations said they weren't even aware how the minister knew they needed the money.

``More could have been done and quite frankly, more should have been done,'' he said.

Colle said he was under ``time constraints,'' was personally familiar with the organizations and had ``to get the money out the door quickly,'' McCarter said.

That's not good enough, McCarter added.

``We said you had enough time to do a lot more and you should have done a lot more,'' he said.

Although McCarter said he doesn't think the organizations received the money because they donated to the Liberal party, he said the lack of a formal application process left the government open to accusations of ``favouritism.''

Some organizations got cash when they didn't really need the money, McCarter added. The Ontario Cricket Association requested $150,000 but got $1 million, he said.

``You need a better process in place,'' he said. ``There were serious flaws with the process. When you're spending this kind of money, you shouldn't be loosening accountability controls so you can get the money out the door.''

McGuinty reluctantly called upon the auditor general to review the year-end grants doled out to multicultural groups by the Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration in the wake of mounting criticism.

Opposition critics argued many of the groups had ties to the Liberal party and that no formal application process existed for handing out the grants _ the latter of which the Liberals did admit to.

The Liberals initially voted down an opposition motion to have the province's auditor examine how the grants were doled out, adding fuel to the scandal that dominated legislative business for about two weeks.

Instead, the Liberals passed a motion urging the grant beneficiaries to account for their spending and to report back within six months _ a deadline that would have been after the Oct. 10 election.

While the Liberals succumbed to the pressure and called for the review, many suggest the timing of the report's release was strategic so as not to dominate debate just prior to the election.

Speaking at a press conference Thursday, McGuinty insisted that his government would implement the recommendations of the Auditor General's report.

"Helping newcomers to Ontario, from all over the world, is the right thing to do, and the smart thing to do, but it must be done in an open, transparent and accountable way," said McGuinty.

"I want to thank the Auditor, who found examples of unacceptable administration of this program - and we are going to fix it," said McGuinty.

"From now on, support for capital projects in ethno-cultural communities will be administered like support for other infrastructure projects - through a set fund administered by the Ministry of Public Infrastructure Renewal, based on stringent criteria, and as a budget item that is set out at the start of a fiscal year."…

A little bit after the fact, I’d say.

 

Dalton McSquinty has an election on the horizon, and is hoping Ontarians will forgive and forget this “minor” indiscretion when it comes time to cast a ballot.  

 

I’m hoping they give the dreadful McSquinty his walking papers.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:22 | link | comments (3)

Back to the future: While many in the West are cheering the victory of Reced Tayyip Erdogan’s “modern” Islamists in Turkey (and the Toronto Star’s Harpoon Siddiqui uses the occasion to lash out at the West for failing to be sufficiently receptive to Reced’s style of Islamism), others, like the Ottawa Citizen’s David Warren, are far less sanguine about it. From RealClear Politics:

…Turkey has been an unconscious model, for Western occupiers trying to guide political developments in Iraq and Afghanistan. She cannot be a conscious model, because the U.S. and allies have never been prepared to do what Ataturk did to create a civil order, nor what the U.S. and allies themselves did when they imposed democracy upon Germany and Japan after the Second World War.

President Bush's hopeful idea from the beginning, was that democracy would spread through the Arab and Muslim world, in the same way it had spread through central and eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He seems sincerely to believe, to this day, that freedom and democracy are things all human beings want, and will have, if only they aren't prevented from obtaining it. Hence, the rather naïve efforts to endow Iraq and Afghanistan with paper constitutions, and in Iraq especially, the failure of the country's politicians to agree to anything. (In President Karzai, Afghanistan has had something more like a strongman.)

Without a George Washington, I doubt the United States itself could have become anything like the vast free republic that emerged. On the other hand, without the cultural and social order that the U.S. inherited from colonial times, a Gen. Washington was inconceivable.

In retrospect, Ataturk is a man who strides through history more as a brilliantly successful Pinochet, than the failed Washington he could easily have been. In free and fair elections on Sunday, the Turkish people again voted a mild but expressly "Islamist" party to power (the Justice and Development Party, whose Turkish initials are A.K.P.) -- this time by a landslide, despite all the alarmed reservations about it expressed by Turkey's own diminishing Westernized, urbane, secular middle class.

As I've written several times before (most recently June 20th), there is every demographic and political indication that Turkey's "secular" experiment is ending. It went sufficiently against the grain of an Islamic society to begin with. Over time, the prestige of Islam revived, and by presenting themselves as only moderate Islamists, whose main intention is to clean up corruption, and deliver welfare services more efficiently to the country's poor, the A.K.P. has cleverly insinuated itself into the hearts and minds of the people who still have most of the children.

Let that be a lesson to us. The Islamic world is not going to become more Western and "modern" over time. For Turkey was the farthest "West" any Islamic society could be taken, and then only by force. We must confront that reality plainly, and stop dreaming that "democracy" will make the Muslims just like us.

So Turkey beats on, a boat against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:29 | link | comments (1)

Nuclear charge: France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy, pictured today on the front page of the Globe and Mail walking beside a triumphant, if waxen, Moo Moo Gadaffi, says there is absolutely no truth to the rumour that those Belgian medics were ransomed for France’s help in building a Libyan nuclear reactor.

So don’t go accusing him of such infamy!

Posted by: scaramouche at 09:42 | link | comments (2)

American madrassas: To paraphrase Miss Jean Brodie in her prime, “Give the Saudis a young child at an impressionable age, and he/she is theirs for life.” From NRO:

Unless we counteract the influence of Saudi money on the education of the young, we’re going to find it very difficult to win the war on terror. I only wish I was referring to Saudi-funded madrassas in Pakistan. Unfortunately, I’m talking about K-12 education in the United States. Believe it or not, the Saudis have figured out how to make an end-run around America’s K-12 curriculum safeguards, thereby gaining control over much of what children in the United States learn about the Middle East. While we’ve had only limited success paring back education for Islamist fundamentalism abroad, the Saudis have taken a surprising degree of control over America’s Middle-East studies curriculum at home.

Game, Set, Match
How did they do it? Very carefully...and very cleverly. It turns out that the system of federal subsidies to university programs of Middle East Studies (under Title VI of the Higher Education Act) has been serving as a kind of Trojan horse for Saudi influence over American K-12 education. Federally subsidized Middle East Studies centers are required to pursue public outreach. That entails designing lesson plans and seminars on the Middle East for America’s K-12 teachers. These university-distributed teaching aids slip into the K-12 curriculum without being subject to the normal public vetting processes. Meanwhile, the federal government, which both subsidizes and lends its stamp of approval to these special K-12 course materials on the Middle East, has effectively abandoned oversight of the program that purveys them (Title VI).

Enter the Saudis. By lavishly funding several organizations that design Saudi-friendly English-language K-12 curricula, all that remains is to convince the “outreach coordinators” at prestigious, federally subsidized universities to purvey these materials to America’s teachers. And wouldn’t you know it, outreach coordinators or teacher-trainers at a number of university Middle East Studies centers have themselves been trained by the very same Saudi-funded foundations that design K-12 course materials. These Saudi-friendly folks happily build their outreach efforts around Saudi-financed K-12 curricula.

So let’s review. The United States government gives money — and a federal seal of approval — to a university Middle East Studies center. That center offers a government-approved K-12 Middle East studies curriculum to America’s teachers. But in fact, that curriculum has been bought and paid for by the Saudis, who may even have trained the personnel who operate the university’s outreach program. Meanwhile, the American government is asleep at the wheel — paying scant attention to how its federally mandated public outreach programs actually work. So without ever realizing it, America’s taxpayers end up subsidizing — and providing official federal approval for — K-12 educational materials on the Middle East that have been created under Saudi auspices. Game, set, match: Saudis…

 

Sounds like the Americans are set for a rude awakening. All that “religion of peace” stuff has acted as a soporific.

Posted by: scaramouche at 23:38 | link | comments (1)

Islamic visions: Dil Dil Pakistan is only one of several Muslim programs offered by multi-faith, multifrikkincultural broadcaster VisionTV. The program that precedes DDP on Saturday afternoon, Visions of Pakistan TV, does not feature radical cleric Dr. Israr Ahmad expounding on the Koran. It's a hodge-podge that features the opinions of Dr. Syed B. Soharwardy, president of the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada. Dr. Soharwardy’s shtick is Muslim victimhood—he’s the driving force behind something called Muslim Holocast Day. But since, unlike Dr. Ahmad, he heads up a Canadian-based outfit, I’m sure he's completely innocuous. Let’s check out the ISCC website, shall we, just to be sure:

Introduction

Islamic Supreme Council of Canada was founded in Calgary on June 18, 2000 with the following mission and objectives. Presently, its head office is located in Calgary, Alberta. ISCC members are from all the denominations of Islam. ISCC believes that the Muslims should not be divided based upon their schools of thoughts. ISCC encourages healthy difference of opinion among its members and follows the Islamic decision-making process, which is more democratic than the western democratic principles. ISCC is a Canadian organization, which is based upon one common belief, " There is no God but Allah and Muhammad (peace be upon him) is his (last) Messenger" and provides nonsectarian environment to its members. ISCC members exhibit this unity through their behaviour.

Mission Statement

To be the leading Muslim organization in Canada helping the government, media and the people of Canada to understand the teachings of Islam and issues of Muslims. To contribute positively in building the Canadian society for the 21^st century and beyond. To provide guidance to the Canadian political, social, Judicial, financial and economical institutions on the issues related to the Muslims in and outside Canada, which may impact the Canadian society. To help Canada in developing better political, trade, social, academic and cultural relationships with the Muslim countries. To organize the political strength of Muslim voters in Canada in order to achieve leading place for Canadian Muslims in Canadian politics.

Major Objectives

1.    To preach and advance the teachings of the Islamic faith and religious tenets, doctrines, observances and culture associated with that faith.

 

2.     To establish, maintain and support a house of worship with services conducted in accordance with the tenets and doctrines of the Islamic faith.

 

3.     To support and maintain missions and missionaries in order to propagate the Islamic faith.

 

4.     To establish and maintain a religious school of instruction for children, youths and adults.

How mission and objectives will be accomplished?

Insha Allah (God willing), the mission and objectives will be achieved by;

·        Following the teachings of the Holy Qur’an and Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), and exhibiting it through our behaviour.

·        Establishing the relationship with the Canadian government’s ministries / departments /organizations and guiding them on Islamic issues.

·        Establishing the relationships with the religious and social institutions / organizations in Canada and working with them on common issues.

·        Establishing working relationships with media organizations.

·        Establishing ISCC chapters and branches in all major cities of Canada

·        Establish web sites and email distribution system for quick access to Islamic and community information.

·        Publish a monthly newsletter / magazine.

·        Broadcast TV and Radio programs on Canadian media.

·        Organize lectures, seminars, rallies, gatherings and meetings.

 

Nope. Nothing to worry about there.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:24 | link | comments

Aussies fight back: In Australia, Muslims are being told to hit the road if they want sharia to be the law of the land. From the Daily Times (Pakistan):

CANBERRA: Muslims who want to live under Islamic Sharia law were told on Wednesday to get out of Australia, as the government targeted radicals in a bid to head off potential terror attacks. A day after a group of mainstream Muslim leaders pledged loyalty to Australia at a special meeting with Prime Minister John Howard, he and his ministers made it clear that extremists would face a crackdown. Treasurer Peter Costello, seen as heir apparent to Howard, hinted that some radical clerics could be asked to leave the country if they did not accept that Australia was a secular state and its laws were made by parliament. “If those are not your values, if you want a country which has Sharia law or a theocratic state, then Australia is not for you,” he said on national television. “I’d be saying to clerics who are teaching that there are two laws governing people in Australia, one the Australian law and another the Islamic law, that that is false. If you can’t agree with parliamentary law, independent courts, democracy, and would prefer Sharia law and have the opportunity to go to another country which practises it, perhaps, then, that’s a better option,” Costello said. Asked whether he meant radical clerics would be forced to leave, he said those with dual citizenship could possibly be asked move to the other country. Education Minister Brendan Nelson later told reporters that Muslims who did not want to accept local values should “clear off”. “Basically, people who don’t want to be Australians, and they don’t want to live by Australian values and understand them, well then they can basically clear off,” he said. Separately, Howard angered some Australian Muslims on Wednesday by saying he supported spies monitoring the nation’s mosques.

 

Nice to see that some in the West have both a clue and a functioning spine—the prerequisites for survival.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:07 | link | comments (1)

Malign attention: Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said re the issue of race in America that it “could benefit from a period of benign neglect.”

The same could be said of the Peace in Our Time Process, which the clueless Quartet and its bumbling envoy, Tony Blair, have placed on the front burner once again.

 

Far better to focus on the real problem area—the jihadists in Iraq and elsewhere pursuing their global ambitions, and Mahdi-minded mullahs on the brink of nuclear capability.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:51 | link | comments

Western wimpitude: Jeff Jacoby poses an impertinent but crucial question: Why does the West consistently reward the Thugocracy for its bad behaviour? From the Boston Globe:

FOUR MONTHS ago, Iranian Revolutionary Guards seized 15 British sailors and marines in the Persian Gulf, and held them hostage for nearly two weeks. They were released only after a stage-managed appearance with Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who freed the captives as "a present to the British people" and was thanked for his "forgiveness" by one of the servicemen.

 

For this outrage, Tehran was richly rewarded. How richly? Let us count the ways:

 

It humiliated the British government, which declined to label the abduction of its personnel an act of war or retaliate with anything stronger than press releases. It demonstrated the ease with which it is able to flout international law and civilized norms. It exposed the cravenness of Britain's European allies, which refused London's request for a freeze on exports to Iran. It secured the release of an Iranian "diplomat" being held in Iraq, and allowed Iran access to five members of its paramilitary Quds Force, which trains insurgents to murder Americans, whom US troops in Irbil had arrested in January.

 

Tehran soon grabbed another set of hostages. Early in May, it arrested four visiting American citizens: Haleh Esfandiari, a director of the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars; social scientist Kian Tajbakhsh of the New York-based Open Society Institute; journalist Parnaz Azima of Radio Farda, the Persian-language equivalent of Radio Free Europe; and peace activist Ali Shakeri of the Center for Citizen Peacebuilding at the University of California at Irvine. Iran accuses the four of espionage; all but Azima are being held in Tehran's notorious Evin Prison.

 

Now, why would Tehran -- already at odds with the United States for sponsoring international terrorism, supporting Iraqi death squads, stoking hatred of the United States, repressing dissidents, and illegally pursuing nuclear weapons -- want to further complicate its relations with Washington? Nearly three decades into a regime one of whose defining characteristics is thuggish criminality, some people are still baffled when the mullahs act like thuggish criminals.

 

"How Iranian officials can believe they will benefit from Ms. Esfandiari's imprisonment is impossible to understand," a New York Times editorial brooded. But it's no mystery. Tehran takes hostages because it benefits from doing so. The 444-day abduction of US diplomats in 1979 solidified the Khomeini dictatorship's jihadist bona fides and showed that the Great Satan's nose could be bloodied with impunity. Twenty-eight years later, the mullahs find that the seizure of American citizens still pays off nicely…

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:28 | link | comments

Hello Muddah, hello Faddah, here I am at Camp Sharia: Ah, summer camp. Weenie roasts. Nature. Canoeing. Corporal punishment.

Corporal punishment?

 

From Expatica via AFP:

NANCY, France, July 24, 2007 (AFP) - An Islamic holiday camp in the Vosges mountains in eastern France has been shut down due to concerns children were being subjected to a punishing religious routine, officials said Tuesday.

The camp, organised by a Turkish group from the city of Nancy, was ordered to close because of "overly present cultural practices," according to an administrative official in the town of Epinal.

"We had information allowing us to believe that children were being physically threatened," said local youth and sports official Frederic Roussel.

The 96 children taking part have been sent home to their families, in line with a July 13 ruling by the local prefecture, confirmed on appeal on July 18. The Nancy Turkish Cultural Centre was denied authorisation to hold a second camp next month.

A probe was opened early this month after a child called the local police to complain of "physical constraints" at the camp, such as being forced to wake up at night to pray.

The subsequent inquiry found the camp environment "excessively rigorous, verging on disciplinarian", focused on the "intensive and compulsory practice of Turkish religion and culture" and lacking in other educational or leisure activities, according to court documents.

"These practices are an attempt on the physical integrity of the minors placed in care of the association," the court ruling said.

Fun times! Where do I sign up?

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:13 | link | comments

A final solution: Reuters headline—Arab ministers in Israel for land-for-peace talks.

Now, if the Jews would only give them what they want—all the land—there wouldn’t be any more need for discussion.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:03 | link | comments (1)

Shocking!: As rare as a sighting of the Abominable Snowman; as unusual as the sound of Jimmy Carter saying something that makes sense—the Globe and Mail’s Mark “Malarkey” MacKinnon has written an article about Israel that isn’t nasty, doesn’t try to make people feel sorry for the Palestinians, and that is actually kind of sweet.

I guess it was bound to happen sooner or later. 

Posted by: scaramouche at 09:28 | link | comments

Dr. Israr Ahmad on YouTube: He may be off VisionTV, but he's still got a bully pulpit on the Web.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:10 | link | comments

Zundel’s black cloud: I was going to do a riff on VisionTV CEO Bob Robert’s mea culpa wherein he compared Israr Ahmad preaching from the Koran on VisionTV to having Holocaust-denier Ernst Zundel doing the weather (not that VisionTV does the weather—now, that requires real vision); the idea of Ernst as a weather guy appealed to my sense of the absurb, and the riff would have likely included something about a cold front of Juden moving in from the East ("just like Der Fuhrer warned us about"). However, when I looked up Ernst in Wikepedia, my riff was suddenly derailed by the following bit of info which came as complete news to me (although perhaps not to you):

According to Toronto Sun columnist Mark Bonokoski, Zündel's mother was Gertrude Mayer and his maternal grandparents were the Jewish Mr and Mrs Nagal and Isador (Izzy) Mayer. Izzy Mayer was a trade union organizer for the garment industry in the Bavarian city of Augsburg.

According to Bonokoski, Ernst's ex-wife Irene Zündel said that the possibility of being at least part-Jewish bothered Zündel so much that he returned to Germany in the 1960s in search of his family's Ariernachweis, a Nazi-era certificate of pure Aryan blood, but was unable to find any such document for his family.

In 1997, Zündel granted an interview to Tsadok Yecheskeli of the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth that includes the following exchange:

Yecheskeli: Are you sure there's no Jewish blood in your family?

Zündel (in hushed voice): No.^[30]

 

You mean old Ernst is really a self-loathing Jew? Somehow, that explains volumes.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:48 | link | comments

The lesson of the VisionTV incident: We must remain vigilant because if we let down our guard, even for a moment, the jihad will hitch a free ride into Canada inside the Trojan Horse of multiculturalism.

Posted by: scaramouche at 16:03 | link | comments (1)

A few questions for Bob Roberts, CEO, VisionTV: These have yet to be answered: 

1. How long has Dr. Israr Ahmad been polluting Canadian airwaves courtesy VisionTV?

2. Has the Dil Dil Pakistan show—which has been on VisionTV for several years—really been  the “Dr. Israr Ahmad Preaches from the Koran Hour” all along?

3. Why, before he was outed, was Dr. Ahmad never mentioned in connection with anything related to Dil Dil Pakistan—not on the VisionTV website, nor on the show itself? Were “producers” afraid that his name might raise some red flags?

4. Who are these “producers”—and who has been paying to put this show on the air?

5. Could it be that, in its cluelessness and multifrikkincultural zeal (which tend to go hand in hand), the kafirs of VisionTV allowed themselves to be duped by some clever jihadists?

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:18 | link | comments

That VisionTV thing: The CEO of VisionTV, Canada’s multi-faith, multiculi channel (a sort of Ceeb, without the religion or public funding), has apologized profusely and promised that sermons by a radical cleric from Pakistan who calls for a global jihad and the extermination of the Jews will never, ever, no way, you can bet the bank on it, run again over his airwaves.

Phew, what a relief.

 

VisionTV remains committed, however, to running this multifrikkincultural tripe.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:52 | link | comments (1)

Same as it ever was: Hamas is in Gaza, Abbas is in the West Bank, and the jizya is flowing once again. 

This time, though, I’m sure the Fatah kleptocrats will exercise greater discipline and won’t help themselves to the lion’s share of the proceeds (Fatah’s militia, the al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades no doubt getting its share, too).

 

In the words of a great mid-20^th Century sage, “What a revoltin’ development this is.”

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:29 | link | comments

Abjuring brutality: Well, whaddya know? It seems even jihadists fighting for Islam’s supremacy have a threshold of barbarity they aren’t prepared to cross. From the Times Online:

Fed up with being part of a group that cuts off a person’s face with piano wire to teach others a lesson, dozens of low-level members of al-Qaeda in Iraq are daring to become informants for the US military in a hostile Baghdad neighbourhood.

The ground-breaking move in Doura is part of a wider trend that has started in other al-Qaeda hotspots across the country and in which Sunni insurgent groups and tribal sheikhs have stood together with the coalition against the extremist movement.

“They are turning. We are talking to people who we believe have worked for al-Qaeda in Iraq and want to reconcile and have peace,” said Colonel Ricky Gibbs, commander of the 4th Brigade, 1st Infantry Division, which oversees the area…

So facial-removal by piano wire is beyond the pale. Good to know. Bear in mind, however, we are talking about people who subscribe to a form of law which prescribes a conking on the noggin by large stones as the appropriate way to deal with adulterers, so presumably these informants are up for some less flagrantly brutal hijinks. What, one might ask, are they prepared to do to fulfill their goal?

Seems to me there are two ways to go here. Either the brutality sickens you, and sends you packing, or you become innured to it—enjoy, it, even—and you move on to even greater heights (or depths) of savagery. Al Qaeda, like other totalitarians (Hitler’s Nazis, Tojo’s Japan, Stalin’s U.S.S.R., Mao’s China, etc.) appears to be an example of the latter.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:52 | link | comments

A: Idiots; fools; gluttons for punishment: Q: What do you call people who pay the salary of their sworn enemy?

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:27 | link | comments (1)

Summer song: In “honour” of Tony Blair assuming the position (the position of abject Dhimmi Peace Envoy, that is) I’ve revised a 60s girl group classic. I like to imagine it being sung by a wised-up Israeli:

Goin’ to the peace talks and we’re

Gonna get buried.

Goin’ to the peace talks and we’re

Gonna get buried.

Gee, they really hate us and we’re

Gonna get buried.

Goin’ to the peace talks again.

 

Summer’s here.

He-eh-ez-bollah’s crazed.

(Woe, woe, woe)

If it attacks

Won’t be amazed.

Those Quartet folks

Are all so dazed

And were’ goin’ to the peace talks again.

 

Because we’re

Goin’ to the peace talks and we’re

Gonna get buried.

Goin’ to the peace talks and we’re

Gonna get buried.

Gee, they really hate us and we’re

Gonna get buried.

Goin’ to the peace talks again.

 

Hamas’s goal: to maim and kill.

(Woe-woe-woe)

And Moo Abbas, he’s such a pill.

I better go and make my will

‘Cause we’re goin’ to the peace talks again…

Posted by: scaramouche at 09:47 | link | comments

Clueless, feckless, useless—but completely calculating: Headline: EU vows to be active player in planned international Mideast talks.

Oh, goody. Maybe they can use the occasion to explain that whole Eurabia thing to us.

Posted by: scaramouche at 22:51 | link | comments

Dry Bones drollery:

Posted by: scaramouche at 22:46 | link | comments

Condi on the outs?: Passport, the blog of journal Foreign Policy, bemwails the diminishing influence of Condoleeza Rice, the result, it says, of her many diplomatic failures. I, however, think there's much to cheer about Condi’s waning influence, seeing in it the glimmers of hint of a clue that dealing with Iran will require more than bribery, appeasement and Foggy Bottom bafflegab.

Posted by: scaramouche at 22:40 | link | comments

How do you spell “diplomacy” in Libya?: E-X-T-O-R-T-I-O-N.

Update: Looks like the addlepated potentate's strategy is already paying off.

Update: That Gadaffi's a genius!

Posted by: scaramouche at 22:25 | link | comments

Oxymoronic punditry: UPI has sussed out the scene in Turkey and concludes that Erdogan's re-election means there will be "more democracy" along with "more Islam" in that country.

Jumbo shrimp, anyone?

Posted by: scaramouche at 22:20 | link | comments

Prescient anagram: The MSM are celebrating the victory of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a man whom it claims belongs to that mythical species, the “moderate” Islamist.

 Silly MSM. Don’t they know that Erdogan’s real agenda—a return to the pre-Kemalist sharia law that made Turkey “the sick man of Europe” (even though half of it is in Asia)—is revealed in his name? Rearrange the letters and, voila!, it becomes “God near.”

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:56 | link | comments (1)

The Left—incurious about George: Christopher Hitchens may have a blind spot when it comes to religion—good or bad, it’s all the same to the Savonorola of atheism—but he sure “gets it” when it comes to the Left. Here he is, in glorious high dudgeon, lambasting the Left and its imbecilic support for the detestable Mr. Galloway. From Slate:

When [George] Galloway came to testify before the Senate and delivered a spittle-fueled harangue instead of answering the direct questions posed to him, he became a populist hero on the Left, was rewarded with a moist profile in the New York Times that praised his general feistiness, and was invited back to the United States to mount a speaking tour in which he repeated his general praise for the heroic "resistance" in Iraq, adding a few well-chosen words in support of the Assad regime in Syria. Praise was showered upon him in the Daily Kos, by columnists in The Nation, and elsewhere. Now we have the sober words of Sir Philip Mawer, the parliamentary commissioner for standards among elected members, who adds to the existing reports and evidence by saying that however much Galloway may have "prevaricated and fudged," the evidence against him is "now undeniable."

 

It’s undeniably undeniably—but not to those receptive to the truth, which excludes, alas, a vast number of those on Georgie’s end of the political spectrum.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:24 | link | comments

We have a winner: Today’s prize for egregious asininity goes to Daniel Levy. Levy, a former Peace in Our Time negotiator, is the son of Lord Levy, also a former Peace in our Time negotiator. (Who says the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree?). Levy fils has advised current chief Peace in Our Time buddinsky, Tony Blair, to “let Hamas inside the tent” (a most picturesque—but completely inappropriate—analogy, summoning up images of infidels past, like, say, Larry of Arabia, holding confabs with desert princes). Otherwise, Palestinians may become disillusioned and turn against the Peace in Our Time process.

As if they’re on side right now.

 

Levy has told Blair to use the I.R.A. case as a model, in the mistaken belief that it is in any way related to the case of bunch of Islamist thugs, supported by Iran, whose agenda includes gaining control not only of a scant piece of Jewish property, but of the entire globe.

 

Congrats on the prize, Dan. You certainly earned it.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:03 | link | comments

Why the Left hates Israel: Here's why.

Posted by: scaramouche at 16:19 | link | comments

"I was ready to hold out for days under their cruel torture...but then they threatened to take away my i-Pod": The Beeb reports that MPs are critical of a decision that would allow the British sailors kidnapped by Iran last summer to sell their stories to the highest bidder.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:00 | link | comments

Iran hostage crisis: With great fanfare this week, Israel freed more than 250 Palestinians who had been convicted of assorted crimes, including many who’d been implicated in terrorism. They appeared hale, hearty and, going by the numerous photos on display in the media, thrilled to reunite with their womenfolk, who’d been keeping the home fires burning while their men were in the slammer.

Contrast that with the plight of Westerners being held in Iranian prisons. They likely committed no crime and, as Mark Steyn notes with his trademark withering sarcasm, they have been left to their fate and have been largely ignored by the media. From the Orange County Register:

…Among the other Zionist-neocon agents currently held in Iranian jails are an American journalist, an American sociologist for a George Soros-funded leftie group, and an American peace activist from Irvine, Ali Shakeri, whose capture became known shortly after the United States and Iran held their first direct talks since the original hostage crisis.

Two months in an Iranian jail is no fun. Four years ago, a Montreal photo-journalist, Zahra Kazemi, was arrested by police in Tehran, taken to Evin prison, and wound up getting questioned to death. Upon her capture, the Canadian government had done as the State Department is apparently doing – kept things discreet, low-key, cards close to the chest, quiet word in the right ears. By the time Zahra Kazemi's son, frustrated by his government's ineffable equanimity, got the story out, it was too late for his mother.

Still, upon hearing of her death, then-Canadian Foreign Minister Bill Graham expressed his "sadness" and "regret," which are pretty strong words. But then, as Reuters put it, this sad regrettable incident had "marred previously harmonious relations between Iran and Canada." In his public pronouncements, Graham tended to give the impression that what he chiefly regretted and was sad about was that one of his compatriots had had the poor taste to get tortured and murdered onto the front pages of the newspapers.

With an apparently straight face, Graham passed on to reporters the official Iranian line that her death in jail was merely an "accident." The following year, Shahram Azam, a physician who'd examined Kazemi's body, fled Iran and said that she had broken fingers, a broken nose, a crushed toe, a skull fracture, severe abdominal bruising, and internal damage consistent with various forms of rape. Quite an accident.

The longer American prisoners are held in Evin, the more likely it is they'll meet with a similar accident…

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:52 | link | comments

The NYT’s two cents' worth: The last time the Jews faced an existential threat, the New York Times chose to more or less ignore it. This time, the jewel in MSM’s crown has opted for a more pro-active approach. It is actively cheering on Israel’s enemies and counselling the Jewish state to accept its inevitable oblivion.

Sage advice worthy of the Elders, I’d say.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:28 | link | comments

Out of sight, out of mind: There’s a bit of a kafuffle in Australia, as authorities try to figure out what to do with Mohammed Haneef, one of those foreign doctor-types for whom the Hippocratic Oath apparently takes a backseat to defeating the infidel. Haneef is said to be connected to the physicians involved in the U.K. Doctor’s Plot. From the SMH:

THE Federal Government is planning to deport detained terrorism suspect Mohamed Haneef to contain the political fallout from a case that insiders fear is becoming farcical.

Attorney-General Philip Ruddock can ensure Haneef is deported immediately by withdrawing the Criminal Justice Certificate issued last week.

As Imran Siddiqui, the cousin of Haneef's wife, arrived in Brisbane last night in a show of support, several senior Government sources said they were furious at the Australian Federal Police's handling of the case and wanted to shut the issue down before it did more damage to the Government's credibility.

"Our best option is to cancel the Criminal Justice Certificate, which was issued to keep Haneef here in Australia after we cancelled his visa, and that is my understanding of what our intentions are," one Government source said.

"Cancel the certificate and get this guy out of Australia. The story ends there and he can become someone else's problem."

Mr Ruddock issued the Certificate of Justice so that Haneef's deportation could be stayed pending judicial proceedings.

But with the police case surrounding Haneef collapsing after revelations that the SIM card he left in Britain was not used in the failed suicide bomb attack in Glasgow, Government strategists believe there is little point holding him in Australia.

"There is no upside proceeding with this. We keep him here, then it remains an issue every day until the election. We deport him and it's over," the source said.

Haneef's SIM card was not found in the car used in the attempted bombing of Glasgow Airport, as initially claimed by the Commonwealth. It was found in Liverpool with his cousin, Sabeel Ahmed.

"Another snafu special from commissioner plod [AFP chief] Mick Keelty," another Government source said.

"There is growing sentiment that we should cut our losses and deport him [Haneef]. No one is backing away from the fact that this guy is a security risk. We are standing by the decision to cancel his visa but there is simply not enough evidence to convict him of anything."…

If I were Haneef, I’d want to come to Canada. When authorities here send you back to where you came from, and you’re tortured, you stand to make some big bucks.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:08 | link | comments

Oops!: Looks like unctuous George Galloway is in trouble again for allegedly helping himself to Saddam's oily lucre.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:56 | link | comments

How China fights "the war on terror": As you can imagine, it ain't with kid gloves.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:50 | link | comments

Interactive Elders: You can include the clueless Ceeb among those who are mighty impressed by “the Elders,” the group of oldsters whose collective “wisdom” could be comfortably contained in a thimble. In its enthusiasm, the Ceeb offers one of its cutting edge interactive posts, so you can click on an old fart’s photo and immediately conjure up his/her profile.

Fun for all ages, but you may lose a few I.Q. points by the time you’re done.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:45 | link | comments

Law of the land: A news snippet in the Toronto Star (no link):

Hamas forms committee to fix judicial system

 

Hamas announced yesterday the formation of a committee to administer justice in the Gaza Strip, which the Islamist movement took over last month.

 

“We have formed a judicial committee to overcome the paralysis in the judicial system since the June 15 takeover,” said Islam Shahwan, spokeman for Hamas’s Executive Force militia.

 

Shahwan said the move was necessary because the head of the Palestine Supreme Court had ordered prosecutors and judges to halt work in Gaza after the Hamas takeover.

 

Out with the old; in with the new. I’m sure the new sharia-based law-makers will have no trouble picking carrying on with the cases currently on the docket. The miscreants, though, may not know what hit them when it comes time to mete out their punishment.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:14 | link | comments

Alternate realities:

THE LEFT	LOVES	LOATHES
	The UN, every last one of the UN’s associated bodies, organizations, and offshoots; Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and most every NGO devoted to “human rights Feeling guilty The MSM Live Aid, Live Earth, etc.—pat-ourselves-on-the-back rock concerts that raise heaps of cash but do little to alleviate actual suffering Downplaying the threat of jihad Multiculturalism Statism Al “the Goracle” Gore, Prophet of Doom who coulda been the president (sigh, if only) Michael “Sicko” Moore The “Elders”, including Jew-hating Hamas-booster, Jimminy “Cricket” Carter The Palestinians, who have been colonized, occupied and brutalized by mean Jews who land to which they have a tenuous claim at best Fidel “Compassionate Health Care Provider” Castro Hugo “Man of the People” Chavez Noam Chomsky Collectivism The Third World One-Worldism (except for America's “globalization”)   Wishful thinking and looking on the bright side, preferring a Rousseau-ian interpretation of mankind’s inclinations	Israel The U.S. Individualism Globalization Republicans Conservatives (Canada); Liberals;  Australia) Fox News and any other “right wing” media outlet   Patriotism   Faith-based anything, unless it’s Muslim

THE RIGHT	LOVES	LOATHES
	Israel   The U.S.   Individualism   Globalization   Republicans   Conservatives (Canada); Liberals (Australia)   Fox News and any other “right wing” media outlet   Patriotism     Faith-based anything, unless its devoted to jihad	The UN and all its revolting offshoots, like the HRC and UNRWA; Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and most every sanctimonious hard left NGO devoted to “human rights Feeling guilty The MSM Live Aid, Live Earth, etc.—pat-ourselves-on-the-back rock concerts that raise heaps of cash but do little to alleviate actual suffering Downplaying the threat of jihad Multiculturalism Statism The pomposity of Al “the Goracle” Gore, Prophet of Doom who coulda been the president (sigh, if only)  Michael “Sicko” Moore   The “Elders”, including Jew-hating Hamas-booster, Jimminy “Cricket” Carter   How the Palestinians have been coddled by those who want to seek an end to the Jewish state.   How Fidel Castro, brutal dictator, has been idolized by the clueless   Ditto Hugo Chavez    Ditto Noam Chomsky   Collectivism   How the Third World is considered virtuous by virtue of its being poor   Self-loathing   Wishful thinking and looking on the bright side, preferring a Hobbesian interpretation of mankind’s inclinations

 

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:11 | link | comments (1)

The Taliban’s Hobson’s choice: You have to wonder about Christian missionaries who would try to win hearts and minds in Talibanistan, one of the least Christian-friendly places on the planet. Still, the penalty for proselytizing seems a tad excessive. From Islam Online:

CAIRO — The Taliban group in Afghanistan threatened Saturday, July 21, to kill 23 South Korean Christian proselytizers unless Seoul withdraws troops from the war-torn country, shortly after claiming the killing of two German hostages.

 

"Right now they are safe though," spokesman Qari Yousef Ahmadi told the Times of Britain.

 

Ahmadi earlier said that Taliban's leadership council would decide later on Saturday the fate of the South Korean hostages without mentioning the troop withdrawal condition.

 

"They are under investigation and once the investigation is over, the Taliban leading council will make a final decision about their fate," he told Reuters.

 

The South Koreans, who are members of a Christian evangelical church group, were kidnapped while traveling from the capital Kabul to the southern city of Kandahar.

 

"They are young Korean Christians who were engaged in short-term evangelistic activity and service for children in Kandahar," said Joseph Park, mission director of the Christian Council of Korea.

 

"We cannot turn away from poor people and children there just because of safety risks," he said.

 

Proselytizing, a sensitive issue, is banned in Muslim Afghanistan.

"In terms of punishment the one who comes to a Muslim country to convert people to their religion must face the strongest punishment," Sayed Murard Shrifi, who heads the public court in Baghlan, told the Times.

 

"The first choice is death and the second life in prison."…

 

I thought the first choice was convert, the second choice was death and third choice was having to sit through the collected oevre of auteur Michael Moore without a bathroom break (by any gauge, a punishment worse than death).

 

Guess I need to read up on my sharia.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:38 | link | comments

More from “Stretch” Armstrong: As dangerous as the jihadists are the apologists for and enablers of the jihad. One of the biggest, most influential—and thus, the most dangerous: former nun, Karen Armstrong, a writer who consistently misrepresents the true nature of Islam. A useful dhimmiot who is prone to stretching the facts to fit her thesis, and who wants everyone to settle down, now, and accept the inevitable primacy of a warm ‘n’ fuzzy—if, on occasion, excessively sensitive—faith.  From, where else?, the Guardian:

In the 17th century, when some Iranian mullahs were trying to limit freedom of expression, Mulla Sadra, the great mystical philosopher of Isfahan, insisted that all Muslims were perfectly capable of thinking for themselves and that any religiosity based on intellectual repression and inquisitorial coercion was "polluted". Mulla Sadra exerted a profound influence on generations of Iranians, but it is ironic that his most famous disciple was probably Ayatollah Khomeini, author of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie.

 

This type of contradiction is becoming increasingly frequent in our polarised world, as I discovered last month, when I arrived in Kuala Lumpur to find that the Malaysian government had banned three of my books as "incompatible with peace and social harmony". This was surprising because the government had invited me to Malaysia, and sponsored two of my public lectures. Their position was absurd, because it is impossible to exert this type of censorship in the electronic age. In fact, my books seemed so popular in Malaysia that I found myself wondering if the veto was part of a Machiavellian plot to entice the public to read them.

 

Old habits die hard. In a pre-modern economy, insufficient resources meant freedom of speech was a luxury few governments could afford, since any project that required too much capital outlay was usually shelved. To encourage a critical habit of mind that habitually called existing institutions into question in the hope of reform could lead to a frustration that jeopardised social order. It is only 50 years since Malaysia achieved independence and, although the public and press campaign vigorously against censorship, in other circles the old caution is alive and well.

 

In the west, however, liberty of expression proved essential to the economy; it has become a sacred value in our secular world, regarded as so precious and crucial to our identity that it is non-negotiable. Modern society could not function without independent and innovative thought, which has come to symbolise the inviolable sanctity of the individual. But culture is always contested, and precisely because it is so central to modernity, free speech is embroiled in the bumpy process whereby groups at different stages of modernisation learn to accommodate one another.

 

It has also, as we have been reminded recently, become a rallying cry in the escalating tension between the Islamic world and the west. Muslim protests against Rushdie's knighthood have recalled the painful controversy of The Satanic Verses, and last week four British Muslims were sentenced to a total of 22 years in prison for inciting hatred while demonstrating against the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.

 

It would, however, be a mistake to imagine that Muslims are irretrievably opposed to free speech. Gallup conducted a poll in 10 Muslim countries (including Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia) and found that the vast majority of respondents admired western "liberty and freedom and being open-minded with each other". They were particularly enthusiastic about our unrestricted press, liberty of worship and freedom of assembly. The only western achievement that they respected more than our political liberty was our modern technology.

 

Then why the book burnings and fatwas? In the past Islamic governments were as prone to intellectual coercion as any pre-modern rulers, but when Muslims were powerful and felt confident they were able to take criticism in their stride. But media and literary assaults have become more problematic at a time of extreme political vulnerability in the Islamic world, and to an alienated minority they seem inseparable from Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay and the unfolding tragedy of Iraq.

 

On both sides, however, there are double standards and the kind of contradiction evident in Khomeini's violation of the essential principles of his mentor, Mulla Sadra. For Muslims to protest against the Danish cartoonists' depiction of the prophet as a terrorist, while carrying placards that threatened another 7/7 atrocity on London, represented a nihilistic failure of integrity.

 

But equally the cartoonists and their publishers, who seemed impervious to Muslim sensibilities, failed to live up to their own liberal values, since the principle of free speech implies respect for the opinions of others. Islamophobia should be as unacceptable as any other form of prejudice…

 

There is no doubt that Muslims, like other groups, face prejudice. However, there is also no doubt that most of those who rant about Islamophobia are usually trying to shield Islam and those who practice it from valid criticism. Armstrong is one of those “Islamophobiaphilics”—someone who loves hurling the epithet in the hopes it will shut down debate. We allow her to do so at our peril—literally.

 

Update: And here's that other notable apologist, John Esposito, in the Washington Post.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:10 | link | comments (1)

Malarkey touts a terrorist: The Globe and Mail’s Mark “Malarkey” MacKinnon is up to his usual tricks—trying to wrest maximum support for the Palestinians by focusing on a poor, hard-done-by Palestinian. In this instance, the “human” in the human interest saga is Mohammed al Abu Hamed. Mr. Hamed is one of the angry young lads who founded the “secular” al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, Yasser Arafat’s successful attempt to get into the terrorist militia game. Abu Hamed, responsible for the deaths of scores of Israeli civilians, is one of the 250 Fatah-niks who were released today in a “goodwill” gesture by Israel, and Malarkey wants you to know that the former terrorist, now gainfully employed in Mahmoud Abbas’ police force, is thrilled that he can live a “normal” life again after his years of incarceration:

JENIN, WEST BANK — Mohammed Abu Hamed did something Thursday he has rarely done in the past six years without looking nervously over his shoulder or up at the sky: He took a walk through the centre of his hometown without wearing a mask or carrying a gun.

Until this week, Mr. Abu Hamed, better known in the West Bank by his nom de guerre Abu Arraj, was one of Israel's most wanted men. As one of the founders and top commanders of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a group dedicated to violent resistance against Israel's 40-year-old occupation, he bore the Jewish state the same ill will that it bore him.

When he did go outside, it was most often to battle the Israeli army during its frequent incursions into this city of 36,000 people. When not fighting, he remained in hiding, avoided speaking on the telephone and told almost no one his whereabouts. He wore disguises when he moved between safe houses, and has said he survived three Israeli assassination attempts.

That tumultuous period of Mr. Abu Hamed's life ended this week, at least temporarily, when he signed a pledge to cease attacks on Israel and exchanged his M-16 and AK-47 assault rifles for a promise that Israel will stop hunting him. It's part of a wider amnesty for Palestinian fighters that both sides are quietly hailing as proof there's substance behind the latest peace push, an effort directed in part at countering the Islamist Hamas movement in the wake of its recent takeover of the Gaza Strip.

“I decided I wanted to create movement in the peace process. We surrendered our weapons because we felt there was political progress,” the fit 33-year-old said as he sat beneath a portrait of Yasser Arafat at a Fatah party office in Jenin. He later took the conversation outside, strolling around the city's ancient centre as if quietly celebrating his new freedom.

Mr. Abu Hamed is among the most high-profile of some 178 al-Aqsa gunmen who agreed this week to the amnesty pact. It's part of a package of goodwill measures aimed at re-establishing trust between Israel and the Palestinian Authority that also includes today's scheduled release of 256 of the more than 10,000 Palestinians being held in Israeli jails. The amnestied fighters have to spend the next three months in informal PA custody as a test of their commitment to the truce, then they will be free to cross Israeli military checkpoints and travel unrestricted in the West Bank.

The al-Aqsa fighters, an offshoot of the secular Fatah movement who are loyal to PA president Mahmoud Abbas, are hardly putting their guns away for good. Most are expected to join the formal Palestinian security forces, bolstering the Western-backed Mr. Abbas as he locks horns with Hamas.

But the decision by Mr. Abu Hamed and other senior al-Aqsa figures to cease fighting Israel ushers in the end of a violent era in Jenin's history marked by the posters of fallen “martyrs” that hang from nearly every one of the town's ancient stone walls…

Notice how Malarkey slipped in that “ancient”—his subtle way of suggesting that the Palestinian claim to the land of Israel is every bit as ancient as the Jews’. Apparently, Malarkey is incapable of doing some basic arithmetic and subtracting 1967—the year the Palestinians became the Palestinians—from 2488 B.C.E., the year Moses died and the Jews crossed over into the Promised Land.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:56 | link | comments

Together again: A study in the journal Nature reports that hundreds of thousands of years ago the U.K. was part of Europe, but was severed from the Continent by a massive flood. The report contradicts the usual theory for the separation—the slow erosion of land along with rising sea levels.

Britain and the Continent: separated eons ago by Mother Nature; reunited in modern times by a common fecklessness, cluelessness, greed, dhimmitude and ennui.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:17 | link | comments

An Elder in the making: Move over, Desmond, Jimminy, and Kofi. There’s a “younger” who’s proving that he belongs in your company—former U.S. Secretary of State, Colin Powell. From China Daily:

Former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said Thursday that the Middle East Quartet should have talks to the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas).

"I don't think you can just cast them into outer darkness and try to find a solution to the problems of the region without taking to account the standing that Hamas has in the Palestinian community," Powell said in a radio interview.

"They (Hamas) won an election that we insisted upon having," Powell said. "And so, as unpleasant a group they may be and as distasteful as I find some of their positions, I think through some means, the Middle East Quartet ... or through some means Hamas has to be engaged."

Powell made the remarks while Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who is visiting Lisbon, Portugal, said neither of the Middle East Quartet - the United States, the European Union, the United Nations and Russia would deal with Hamas unless it recognizes Israel's right to exist and renounces terrorism.

Rice's call has apparently ruled out the possibility of Hamas' participation in an upcoming Middle East peace meeting called by U. S. President George W. Bush.

Give that man a Nobel Peace Prize!

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:06 | link | comments

Same old chanson: More evidence that it’s business as usual in France—the Sarkozy government is about to pull a Pelosi. From AFP via expatica:

WASHINGTON, July 18, 2007 (AFP) - The United States expressed skepticism Wednesday over France's decision to send a top diplomat for talks with Syria, Washington's arch enemy.

"There have been a number of different attempts at outreach by a number of different countries and different envoys to convince Syria that it should change its behavior," said State Department spokesman Sean McCormack.

"We are still waiting for that to happen."

Paris sent ex-envoy to Syria Jean-Claude Cousseran to Damascus this week in the first high-level contact between the two countries in more than two years.

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner described the move as a "sign on the road of conciliation" with Syria, with which relations were frozen since the murder of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri in February 2005.

 

Syria has been implicated in a UN probe over the Hariri assassination despite its repeated denials.

McCormack also accused Syria of being a "source of instability throughout the region in its support for Palestinian rejectionist groups and allowing foreign fighters to use its territory to go into Iraq.

"Obviously we all want to see Syria reorient its policies and change its behavior in the region. Thus far, they have chosen not to play a positive role," he said…

Another unintentionally wry understatement courtesy Foggy Bottom flak McCormack.

Update: Well looky here—it seems someone else is visiting the Baathist backwater. Maybe reps from all three nations can have a tête-à-tête-à-tête. Providing they don't mind if one of the têtes has very little chin.

Posted by: scaramouche at 16:48 | link | comments

Protocols of the Elders of Virgin: Apparently, their protocols entail using moral suasion to effect global dhimmitude, er, peace.

Not to be confused with these protocols, the strategy of Elders who have a much different game plan.

Posted by: scaramouche at 16:18 | link | comments

A radical suggestion: Dean Goodson, the director of a think-tank, rightly slams those who have fallen for the Muslim Council of Britain’s newfound “revisionism”; he rightly describes it as a matter of expediency and butt-covering in the face of ongoing Muslim terrorist plots in the U.K., most recently the one involving foreign doctors. But he goes off the rails with his conclusion. From the Times Online:

The truth is that MCB’s new-found “revisionism” is extremely limited and owes rather more to tactical than ideological considerations. It has not undergone a public transformation, after the fashion of a Hassan Butt or an Ed Husain. If the views of Inayat Bunglawala, its assistant general secretary – as expressed recently on Newsnight – are anything to go by, it still largely blames Western foreign policy for the discontents of the world. By underwriting these attitudes, it contributes mightily to the grievance culture that fuels violent jihadism.

But the Straw-Denham faction will not have it all their own way. Another grouping, including Hazel Blears, the new Secretary of State for Communities, and Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary – backed, significantly, by some of the Muslim MPs – remain unconvinced about the extent of the change in the MCB. Ms Blears resisted strong pressure to attend the MCB’s recent conference held at Regent’s Park mosque on July 7 – which would have constituted an important sign that it enjoyed renewed favour.

The problems with the MCB run far deeper than the issues of the day. For the price of winning the support of the MCB in the struggle against violent jihadism on these shores is high indeed. The coin in which they must be paid is the further ideological radicalisation of Muslim communities.

The MCB’s vision of the future for Muslims in the UK is light years removed from Mr Brown’s conception of Britishness. Its recent document on education Towards Greater Understanding: Meeting the Needs of Muslim Pupils in State Schools is a charter for segregation of the sexes – and urges strict controls on how dance, drama and sports are organised. More Arabic lessons all round, too – in line with the traditional Islamist aim of “Arabising” Britain’s predominantly South Asian Muslims.

This kind of sectionalism is perhaps more entrenched in the public services than Mr Brown realises. Why, for example, is there an Association of Muslim Police? Why is there a Civil Service Islamic Society? Why do such organisations have so little to say about Britishness? Why does “integration” seem to take place on their terms?

The worst aspect of the renewed push for respectability by the MCB is that it caters to the delusion among policymakers that there is some kind of body that can “deliver” Muslims. A Policy Exchange survey this year revealed that a mere 6 per cent of Muslims believe that the MCB represents them – and 51 per cent believe that no organisation here currently does so.

A truly radical approach would be for the State to stop treating British citizens who happen to be Muslims mainly as Muslims. In other words, why does the Government still deem their religious affiliation the most important thing about them in the public space? A prime minister from Scotland – a country that has largely left behind its sectarian past – can surely understand that.

Wow, that would be radical. Unfortunately, it would also involve a serious “revisionism” of British society, with multicultism going out the window, and pluralism and individualism becoming the order of the day. And, given that mulitcultism is resolutely, immoveably entrenched, and the growing influence of the MCB and those it represents, there’s not a hope in Hell that’s ever going to happen. Aside from which, pretending that the issue of terrorism don’t stem from religious belief, and from one religion’s triumphalist, supremacist doctrines, is just another way of avoiding the grim reality.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:39 | link | comments

A clash of frenzies: Islam Online makes note of the unprecedented success of an intrepid lad who has conquered much of the world, and whose latest exploits are sure to set off a “frenzy” among devout followers:

CAIRO — Seizing on the phenomenal success of Harry Potter books and films, the Church of England has published a resource guide advising youth leaders to harness the frenzy to promote Christianity, the Daily Telegraph reported on Wednesday, July 18.

"These sessions draw parallels between events in the world of Harry and his friends, and the world in which we are seeking to proclaim the gospel to young people," Owen Smith, youth worker at St Margaret's Church in Rainham, Kent, writes in the guide.

The resource -- "Mixing it up with Harry Potter" – offers creative ideas for using the Potter books as a basis for Christian teaching.

It uses film scenes to prompt discussion about moral choices and extracts from the books to demonstrate the power of words and their impact on others.

From theological concepts such as sacrifice and mercy, to everyday issues such as fears and boasting, each of the 12 sessions provides a basis for an hour's discussions and activities.

The sessions include Bible verses that present the Christian perspective on the theme, and prayer activities drawing on the topic.

The guide is designed for use with 9-13 year olds and will be available for churches to purchase from a range of Christian and general booksellers.

The publication comes as the world awaits the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — the eagerly anticipated seventh and final book of the series — on Saturday, July 21.

Fans of the bespectacled boy wizard will be queuing outside bookstores around the globe to receive their copy of the book, which is expected to break records and become an instant best-seller when it is released…

I get the feeling that Islam Online is kind of jealous of the frenzy that will ensue when J.K. Rowlings’s final, perfect revelation is released. That’s likely because the only kind of “frenzy” the Wahhabist rag is prepared to accept it that of true believers “protesting” insults to Islam.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:02 | link | comments

True wisdom: You won’t find it on a stage full of senescent, self-important “peace”-lovers. But here’s some, sans hype, from Ralph Peters, a guy who “gets it,” in FrontPage magazine:

FP: What are your thoughts on the role religion plays in wars of religion – and the denial that appears to exist on this issue in our national debate?

 

Peters: It's amazing, isn't it?  The book [Peter's new book, Wars of Blood and Faith: The Conflicts That Will Shape the 21st Century] takes on this issue at length.   In Washington both Dems and Republicans continue to insist--against tidal waves of evidence to the contrary--that religion has nothing to do with religious wars.  When I brief the D.C. crowd, I tell them that it pays to listen to what your enemy says now and then.  And our enemies have declared uncompromising religious war on us.  We don't have to like it.  And this isn't a religious war from our side (at least, not yet).  But our deadliest enemies truly believe that they are on a mission from their God to kill us.  And they're out to prove it.  Yet, the Washington crowd keeps trying to explain everything in term of 20th-century sociology, economics or American misdeeds.  Well, sorry, folks.  All those factors may matter, but they're secondary to the fanatical faith of the terrorists and other assorted murderers we face.   If religion isn't really a factor, where are the Western atheist suicide bombers?, 

 

The problem is that the Washington crowd is secular from start to finish.  Even those who go to a church or synagogue every week have been so thoroughly secularized intellectually by their educations and the circles in which they live their professional and personal lives that they have no sense of the power of unbridled faith, of the spectacular power of revelation, of the suddenness of conversion--or even of the basic human need for something greater than the self in which to believe.  We mock al Qaeda for clinging to the past, but Washington is equally desperate to hold fast to the last century's secular interpretation of all human actions. 

 

We face enemies who want to please their God with blood sacrifices.  And we just want to please the lawyers...

 

Wiser words were n’er spoken.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:32 | link | comments

Old farts on the world stage: They say age brings wisdom, but one would have to question the truism in light of the revered “elders” who have come together to, in the words of the Globe and Mail, “advance the cause of global justice.” Who are these sage geriatics, five of whom have won the Nobel Peace Prize? The Globe features a large photo of them on the front page. At the centre: Nelson Mandela, unassailable icon of freedom and reconciliation. And it’s all downhill from there, with Jew-hating Hamas-booster and self-appointed conscious of the world, Jimminy “Cricket” Carter to his right, and everyone, including British tycoon Richard Branson and singer-activist Peter Gabriel, chortling with delight to the comedic stylings of Archbishop Desmond Tutu (who is not in the photo; also not in view: “Elder” Kofi Annan).

An assembly of mush, who believe “goodness will prevail”—just as soon as something can be done about those pesky Jews:

…The Elders, it emerged, is the brainchild of the English tycoon Sir Richard Branson – who was himself in the audience with his elderly parents. Back in 2001, he and his friend, the British musician and anti-apartheid campaigner Peter Gabriel, sought out Mr. Mandela and asked if he would try to convene a group of world leaders to take on conflicts such as that in Israel and the Palestinian territories – to use their moral influence where others with political agendas had failed.

“The structures we have to deal with these problems are often tied by political, economic and geographical constraints,” Mr. Mandela said Wednesday. “As institutions of government grapple with the challenges they face, the efforts of a small, dedicated group of leaders working objectively and without any vested personal interest in the outcome can help to resolve what often seem like intractable problems.”…

Jimminy Carter, for one, isn’t too worried should the Elders fail to make any headway, because, heck, it’s not like anyone’s going to hold him accountable or anything.

 

But former U.S. president Jimmy Carter said it would be fine with him if no one outside their council ever knew what issues they worked on. “The Elders neither want, nor will we ever have, any kind of authority except that that comes from common moral values,” he said. “We will be able to risk failure and we will not need to claim successes.”

 

Sounds like a fair summation of the Carter presidency. And if Jimminy is counting on “common moral values” to be the wind beneath their wings, the alte kachers, like his presidency, also ain’t getting off the ground.

 

Fair speed, Elders. You have your work cut out for you, especially since there’s an intractable group seeking to advance another sort of “global justice,” one that goes back a good 1,400 years.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:05 | link | comments

Deflation: In recent days, a number of people have floated the trial balloon of Jordan assuming responsibility for the West Bank in what would become a “confederation.” But, as Sholomo Brom on the YNet News site writes, the “moderate” Hashemite autocrat has perforce shot it down:

…However, the bubble burst when King Abdullah gave interviews to Jordanian newspapers in early July in which he focused on the Palestinian issue and attacked with unprecedented severity the idea of confederation. Referring to what he called “American and Israeli pressure on Jordan to retake responsibility for the West Bank,” Abdullah said: “I’m fed up with talk about this issue … Our position is clear and well-known … We reject the idea of confederation or federation. Any such proposal at this time is a conspiracy against both Palestine and Jordan… Only after there is a Palestinian state on Palestinian soil can Jordanians and Palestinians decide on the nature of relations between them.”

 

In short, it is clear that the “Jordanian solution” to the problem of the territories, which was buried in 1988, has not been resurrected.

 

Jordan’s primary objective is to preserve the integrity of the state and the regime in a situation in which it is surrounded by stronger states and, more recently, by chronic crises (Iraq and the PA) that threaten to export problems to Jordan.

Jordan relates to the West Bank not as territory lost in 1967 that should be regained, but rather, as an area that projects permanent threats to Jordan’s existence, especially the threat to the demographic balance and the idea, popular on the Israeli Right, that Jordan is Palestine.

Reunification of the two banks under the current circumstances would mean that Jordan would lose the separate character and independent identity it has managed to formulate and would be transformed into a Palestinian state. That explains the King’s acerbic comments. But he also fears that Israel and the United States are unwilling to do what is necessary in order to promote a settlement of the Palestinian problem and want to throw the ball into Jordan’s court.

From Israel’s perspective, all this means that there is no reason to expect greater Jordanian involvement beyond the known parameters of assistance, training and equipping Mahmoud Abbas’ forces and agreeing to transfer the Badr Brigade to the West Bank. In Jordanian eyes, the movement of Palestinians from Jordan to the West Bank rather than the other way around is a welcome change.

Looks like Israel and Jordan won’t be seeing eye to eye over this one.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:29 | link | comments (4)

Yum, yum: One of the Goreacle’s daughters got hitched over the weekend, and while the environmentally-minded in attendance were no doubt trying to outdo each other by displaying their incredibly tiny carbon footprints (“mine’s smaller,” “no, mine’s smaller”) the hosts went and committed a major environmental faux pas—they served their guests an endangered species.  

From the Daily Telegraph (Australia):

ONLY one week after Live Earth, Al Gore's green credentials slipped while hosting his daughter's wedding in Beverly Hills.

Gore and his guests at the weekend ceremony dined on Chilean sea bass - arguably one of the world's most threatened fish species.

Also known as Patagonian toothfish, the species is under pressure from illegal, unregulated and unreported fishing activities in the Southern Ocean, jeopardising the sustainability of remaining stocks.

The species is currently managed by the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Living Marine Resources, the body which introduced a catch and trade documentation scheme as an attempt to tackle illegal poaching of this species.

Working with non-government organisations, the Humane Society International's focus is now on pursuit of illegal fishing operators who, in the rush to cash in on the highly valued species, plunder stocks with no regard for sustainability.

It has been estimated that more than 50 per cent of toothfish traded is illegally caught, and includes juveniles vital to the ongoing toothfish population…

And what a toothsome toothfish it was. I hear they served it with fava beans and a nice Chianti.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:54 | link | comments (2)

The way to go: Prime Minister Stephen Harper told an audience in Santiago, Chile that it’s “nonsense” to think there are only two ways to go—the authoritarian way or the American way. He says there is a “third way”—Canada’s. From the Ceeb:

Some South American countries are at a crossroads because they falsely believe their only choice is between socialism or the American style of capitalism, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Tuesday.

Speaking at the Canada-Chile Chamber of Commerce in Santiago, Chile, Harper said Canada will play a bigger role in Latin America and the Caribbean, but one that is different from what the United States plays.

"Too often some in the hemisphere are led to believe that their only choices are — if I can be so bold to say — to return to the syndrome of economic nationalism, political authoritarianism and class warfare, or to become, quote, just like the United States," Harper said, in what appeared to be a reference to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. "This is, of course, utter nonsense."

"Canada's very existence demonstrates that the choice is a false one. Canada's political structures differ substantially from those in the United States," said Harper, who is on a six-day, four-country tour of South America and the Caribbean.

"Our cultural and social models have been shaped by unique forces, and we've made our own policy choices to meet our own needs."

He said Canada and Chile are both models of free market economies that  retain the independence of their social and political lives…

True, but it’s also nonsense to believe that Canada would be able to employ such a model were it not afforded the protection that comes from living beside the U.S., and the affluence that comes from being the super power’s largest trading partner. Canada’s “third way” is really just a blend of Euro-style socialism/multicultism and America’s free market free-for-all, with most Canadians favouring the EU mode over the U.S.’s: they’re so much more cultured and less belligerent on the Continent, n’est-ce pas?

While I understand where Harper is coming from—he wants to play to the audience back home that remains uncomfortable being the mouse in bed with the elephant (as unaccountedly beloved Canadian icon, Pierre Eliot Trudeau, once described the asymetrical relationship)—there’s a danger here. At the moment and for the time being, there are only two ways—the free way and the Islamic way. And it’s nonsense to try to distance ourselves from the single greatest impediment to the latter, because to the true believers “it’s our way or the highway.” And frankly, I don’t think anyone should have to go down that road.

Posted by: scaramouche at 09:53 | link | comments (1)

Imagine there’s no Israel: I started to read Michael Chabon’s new novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, but stopped abruptly about thirty pages in. This despite the fact that I adored Chabon’s previous book, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. The reason I stopped reading: I was extremely disturbed by the novel’s premise, which imagines away the state of Israel, and resettles two million Jews displaced after Israel is defeated in 1948—another Chabon conceit—in Alaska. After reading Ruth Wisse’s review of the book in Commentary magazine, it seems clear I made the right choice:

…They [Chabon’s low Yiddish expressions] have certainly charmed Chabon’s reviewers, so enamored of his goofy spoofing as to have largely ignored his message.

But message there is. For the intimacy he creates is, of course, the intimacy of exile, of powerlessness. Chabon’s mock-Yiddish reinforces the sentimental stereotype of the Jew as harmless refugee, one who does not threaten the peace of the world, or the peace of the Jews themselves, unless and until he fatally conspires to resettle the land of Israel. A feisty character in the novel is described as fighting like a salmon—“that aquatic Zionist, forever dreaming of its fatal home.” Messages—in this case, beware the Zionists bearing death—hardly come clearer than this.

The Arab alternative version of Jewish history, which erases Israel from the map of the world while simultaneously fantasizing a gigantic Zionist-American anti-Arab crusade, has been making inroads in the “progressive” circles to which Chabon belongs. Again, nothing new here: protracted hostility, as I say, tends to tarnish the self-image of any group that it assaults, and Chabon, as a supplier of mass culture, also dutifully supplies an example of the syndrome.

That he himself is not joking about it, however, becomes clear from his literary choices. In The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, the Jewish fundamentalists meet to discuss their plot [for global conquest, another of Chabon’s “inspirations”] on a snowy Tuesday “at the corner of Ringelblum and Glatshteyn.” Why, one wonders, these particular street names?

No historian ever did his people a greater service, or merited greater respect from those who value the written word, than Emanuel Ringelblum, who between 1939 and 1943 performed prodigies of meticulous documentation in Jewish Warsaw under the Nazi boot. As for Jacob Glatstein, on the same day I was reading Chabon’s novel I came across a column by that great American Yiddish poet describing his emotions on the morning of November 29, 1960—thirteen years to the date in 1947 when the United Nations voted for the partition of Palestine, thus enabling the birth of the state of Israel. “How very impoverished and desiccated,” Glatstein wrote on that day,

the Jew who gets up this morning and starts chewing up the day like a bland breakfast without recalling that something very great has occurred in Jewish life! . . . We have yearned so long for miracles. How can we fail to see the bright hand of the miracle to which we have awakened?

Merrily conscripting Jewish cultural heroes to the purposes of his farce, Chabon chops them down to his own size, and with them everything they represent, the “miracle” of which Glatstein wrote no less than the late, faithful witness borne by Ringelblum to the decades and centuries of death that preceded it. The “corner of Ringelblum and Glatshteyn” is a purely personal crack, and an exceptionally annihilating one.

The Yiddish writer and Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer may have been the first to realize that the obliteration of European Jewry gave the “demon-writer” leave to distort its culture and historical experience to his heart’s content. The writer of fiction was now free to reinvent, without challenge from the deceased, any aspect of the Yiddish-speaking world they had once inhabited. His own conscience did not prevent even Singer from toying with the memory of the vanished Jews; but neither did the sport ever dull his conscience. His literary heirs, babes in Yiddishland, are free of any such compunction.

A self-loathing Jew who not only loathes the modern Jewish state, but who also seems to despise the Jewish culture destroyed in the Holocaust of Europe’s Jews: how disgusting—and, for someone like me who so admired Chabon’s previous book, how disappointing.

 

It's bad enough that there's an Ahmadinejad who wants to wipe the real Israel off the map. About the last thing I want to read is a "progressive" Jewish American novelist wishing Israel away in his fiction.

Posted by: scaramouche at 00:47 | link | comments (2)

Countdown to blastoff: Iran’s version of the Manhattan Project is getting closer to completion. How do I know?  I can read between the lines of this story in the Tehran Times:

TEHRAN – Scientific development is the only way to overcome the hegemonistic system, Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei said during a visit to the Royan Institute and the exhibition of the University Jihad Organization here on Monday.

At the beginning of the visit, which lasted for two and a half hours, the Leader paid tribute to the memory of the martyrs of the University Jihad Organization as well as the late Saeid Kazemi Ashtiani, the former director of the institute.

Scientists of the various departments explained their activities to Ayatollah Khamenei during his tour of the facility.

He called the institute a brilliant combination of knowledge, faith, and effort.

Established in 1991, the Royan Institute is Iran’s pioneering research and medical center for reproductive biomedicine, stem cell biology, and technology.

Science divorced from religion will eventually lead to the production of weapons like the atomic bomb and will become a tool for coercion, but when science and faith go hand in hand, lasting achievements will follow, the Leader observed.

Ayatollah Khamenei also expressed his appreciation of the work of all scientists who engage in a jihad for the scientific development of the country.

Yup, should be ready any minute now.

Posted by: scaramouche at 22:36 | link | comments

A media non-event: Heard about the 100 Palestinians who’ve been holed up in al-Arish airport for the past month by Egyptian authorities, and who rioted because of the dire conditions in the place where they're being incarcerated?

No?

 

You would think the media, being ever so concerned about Palestinians who are being mistreated and having their human rights violated would be on this story like flies on poopy. But since no Jews are involved, it’s one big ho hum to them.

Posted by: scaramouche at 22:29 | link | comments (1)

The Bard of New Hampshire writes: Hie thee to this SteynOnline link wherein the Shakespeare of political commentary hoists the world on the petard of its own “Arafatuation,” for, yea verily, ‘tis good.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:34 | link | comments (1)

Foggy Bottom obfuscation: Turkey has reached a deal with Iran to pipe oil from Iran and Turkmenistan to Europe, and a Foggy Bottom flak responds to the infamy with the kind of unintentionally droll understatement that only someone who toils in his realm is capable of. From Yahoo! News:

ANKARA (AFP) - Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday defended a preliminary gas deal with neighbouring Iran to carry natural gas to Europe, brushing aside US criticism that the Islamic republic is not "reliable."

"We import oil and natural gas. We want to decrease the amount we pay for imports," the Anatolia news agency quoted Erdogan as telling the NTV news chanel overnight.

He said Iran would let Turkey develop three gas wells without a tender process as part of the deal, which will also allow gas to be piped from Iran and Turkmenistan to Europe.

"Iran made us an attractive offer... Should we not think of our country's interests at this point?" Erdogan said. "Is the United States going to ask why we did not seek their permission? I believe they (the US) will understand."

Erdogan was speaking a day after Washington criticised the agreement signed last week after talks between Turkey's Energy Minister Hilmi Guler and Iranian Oil Minister Kazem Vaziri Hamaneh.

"We don't think that this is the time to make such investments in that particular sector. Iran hasn't necessarily proved itself to be the most reliable partner in this regard," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said Monday…

Not “reliable,” huh? That makes it sound like the mullahs are inclined to be tardy for dental appointments, not like they’re X-ing the days off their Islamic calendars in anticipation of that longed-for date when they’ll finally be able to put a great big hole where Tel Aviv used to be.

 

Talk about downplaying the threat.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:19 | link | comments

The world’s stupidest fatwas: So many to choose from. Here are a few.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:38 | link | comments

“Persistent and evolving”: The nature of the terror threat, spelled out here in black and white.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:44 | link | comments

Assad to Bush: In the immortal words of Samuel Goldwyn, include me out.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:41 | link | comments

Peaceinourtimemania: TIME magazine offers to put you right inside Bush’s plan for peace.

Thanks, but that’s a place I prefer not to go since, if it’s anything like previous peace plans—which it’s bound to be—the end result will be lots of dead Jews and a big spike in world Judenhass.

 

I guess, with his approval rating in the toilet, Bush has forgotten the sage message of an old boomer song: Let it be.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:54 | link | comments

Prize-winning rascal: With the al Qaedists blowing up the Khomeinists—and vice versa—in Iraq, smug reptilian demagogue George Galloway feels confident enough to ramp up his already sky-high chutzpah. He now says that, rather than being punished for supporting his pal Saddam in his hour of need, he should be honoured for it. From the Times Online:

George Galloway said today that MPs should give him a medal for his work on Iraq and not suspend him from the House of Commons for 18 days, as recommended today by a disciplinary committee.

The anti-war Respect MP was criticised by the Standards and Privileges Committee for “concealing the true source of Iraqi funding” to a charity he set up and failure to co-operate with the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards.

It backed a finding that there was “strong circumstantial evidence” that his Mariam Appeal received cash from the regime of Saddam Hussein, the payments delivered through the UN’s Oil for Food Programme “with Mr Galloway’s connivance”.

It said that the MP had been “complicit in the concealment of the true source of the funds” and had “damaged the reputation of the House” - and said that he was “clearly irresponsible” in refusing to look into the source of substantial donations to the fund.

Any ban - which requires the backing of MPs - would take effect from October when the Commons returns from its summer recess.

Speaking outside the Commons this morning, Mr Galloway said that what had upset the committee was that “I robustly defended myself” and if it were not for his criticism of the process, commission and witnesses, “I would merely been asked to apologise”.

He emphasised that it was found again that he did “not benefit by a single penny” from Iraq, from the oil for food programme or any other Iraqi source.

Mr Galloway said that he would not allow people to make false allegations against him. “I challenged everything that Sir Humphrey and Sir Bufton and Sir Tufton put to me because the points they were putting to me were false. I will not allow people to make false allegations against me," he said.

“I am not a punchbag. If you aim low blows at me I will fight back. That’s what I’ve done and that’s what I’ve been suspended for.”

If he is suspended, he said: “It will be painful, I assure you, but I intend to stagger on regardless.”

Last month the Charity Commission condemned Mr Galloway for “unacceptably” failing to prevent the Mariam Appeal, a charity established by him in 1988, from being bankrolled with money from the dictator’s regime.

The charity was founded to deliver medical aid to Iraq and arrange treatment outside Iraq for sick Iraqi children.

Mr Galloway may even have known that the campaign had received at least $376,000 dollars in improper donations, the commission found.

Mr Galloway has dismissed the commission’s allegations against him and the campaign as “palpably false” and has repeatedly denied receiving any funds from the Iraqi regime, or taking part in any oil deal…

I happen to agree with George that his actions merit solemn recognition. I hereby nominate him for the Nobel Prize for Temerity.

 

There’s no prize money involved, but the honour itself is reward enough.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:33 | link | comments

Go fish, Shira: In yesterday’s Globe and Mail, lefty pontificator/wishful thinker Shira Herzog insisted that, sooner or later, Israel will have to deal with Hamas.

Begging to differ, I sent the following e-mail:

 

Shira Herzog offers a reasoned analysis of the facts on the ground in Gaza and why Israel, Canada and the U.S. will have to rethink their strategy and at some stage, “deal” with Hamas.

 

Anyone who has ever played cards, though, knows that it takes at least two sides to play a game: the person dealing the cards and the person picking them up. And since Hamas, which is supported by Iran and aligned ideologically with other jihadist movements, has no intention of ever coming to the table with Israel—an entity whose existence it does not recognize even as it remains bent on its destruction—it seems pointless and counterproductive to try to hand them any cards.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:59 | link | comments (2)

Mutatis mutandis: As I’ve said before, Jew-hate is forever, like diamonds. The fact of the hate, which is woven into both Western and Islamic civilization, doesn’t change, although the hatred may ebb and flow. The shape of the hate does, however, evolve—or mutate—in keeping with current circumstances. Thus, a new poll of Europeans reveals that a substantial number of them still loathe Jews, still believe they are too rich and powerful, and, oh yeah, still think they killed Christ. They also opine that Jews—Jews!—aren’t loyal citizens, only now, instead of saying that Jews owe their greater allegiance to an amorphous Jewish people dispersed in all parts of the world, Europeans say Jews pledge their greater allegiance to the Jewish state.

In other words, same old hass with a modern twist. From YNet News:

 

One half of Europeans believe that Jews are not loyal to their country and more one-third believe they have too much power in business and finance, according to a poll released Tuesday by the Anti-Defamation League.

 

The poll, entitled Attitudes Toward Jews and the Middle East in Six European Countries, surveyed 3,000 adults, 500 in each of the following countries: Austria, Belgium, Hungary, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

Abraham Foxman, the ADL's national director, said he was "especially concerned that the survey found a large percentage of all respondents and a majority in Austria, Hungary and Switzerland believe that American Jews control US policy on the Middle East, an old canard that has been resurrected in mainstream American and bolsters existing European attitudes."

 He also told a press conference in Jerusalem that Hungary exhibited the highest anti-Semitic attitudes of the countries surveyed and the Netherlands the lowest. "The increase and high percentage of respondents in Hungary who hold negative views of Jews are disturbing," Foxman said.

 "More than a decade after the fall of Communism, he hoped that such anti-Jewish attitudes would have begun to diminish rather than increase."

 Attitudes to Israel in the countries polled have only changed slightly since the last poll in 2005. Respondents in Belgium (35 percent up from 26 percent), the Netherlands (39 percent up from 28 percent), Switzerland (33 percent up from 27percent) and the United Kingdom (30 percent up from 27percent) now view Israel more favorably, while Israel's favorability rating has dropped on Austria (20 percent down from 31 percent) and Hungary (17 percent down from 22 percent).

Levels of sympathy for Israelis up

When asked to think about the Israel-Palestinian conflict, levels of sympathy for Israelis have increased in every country compared to two years ago, while sympathy for the Palestinians has dropped, except in Britain (32 percent up from 27 percent) and Belgium (31 percent up from 28 percent).

 

Overall, half of those surveyed in the six countries believe that Jews are more loyal to Israel than to their own country, with a majority in Austria, Belgium, Hungary and the United Kingdom saying they believe that this statement is "probably true."

 

High levels of those polled still believe that "Jews have too much power in the business world". Overall, nearly 35 percent of respondents believe this stereotype to be true; in Hungary it is 60 percent, with similar figures believing the statement "Jews have too much power in international financial markets."

 

Overall, 44 percent of those surveyed believe that Jews "still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust", and 20 percent continue to blame Jews for the death of Jesus…

 

Were they to poll me I’d have to say that, overall, my sympathy for Europe is down 98 percent, while my belief that the continent is now an adjunct of the Arab world and will definitely pay the price for its appalling choices, inherent cluelessness, and pathetic pusillanimity is up by a whopping 99.9 percent.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:33 | link | comments (2)

Ban's first six months: Al That Jaz has an admiring piece about the UN’s indefatigable Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon. Ban, who attributes his vast reserves of energy to entirely natural sources, has now been on the job for six months, and in that time has proven to be a leader in the tradition of Kofi Annan:

He rises at 5:30am. He goes to bed at 1am or later. For the first time in six months he is about to take a week-long holiday, but that is only because some of his staff, half his age, risk burn-out unless they get to take a break.

Ban Ki-moon attributes his stamina to orange juice and ginseng.

Six months on from his inauguration as secretary-general of the United Nations, it is time however to ask whether all of those extra hours, those ever-burning lights on the 38th floor of UN headquarters on Manhattan's East River are achieving results.

Does this most travelled of all secretary-generals have a consistent agenda? Can he act independently of the world's only super-power, the United States, and his principal backer for the job?...

No sweat there, Al That Jaz. Secretary-generals (secretaries-general?) generally act independently of the world’s only super-power, whom they see as the sugar daddy who foots most of the bill for their lavish Turtle Bay digs and can be safely ignored since there are so many other countries willing to band together to direct the agenda.

Posted by: scaramouche at 09:36 | link | comments

Cold comfort: George W. Bush is determined to make the same mistake as his predecessor and try to turn a sow’s ear of a Fatah kleptocrat into a silk purse of a peace-minded statesman.

Lots of luck with that one, Dubya.

 

Leftist rag the Independent describes the Quartet's annointing of Abbas and refusal to acknowledge the movement that bested his in the Palestinian civil war as Hamas being “left in the cold” and, well, you know me—I hear singing and there’s no one there. In this instance, I hear Moo Abbas and Issy Haniyeh crooning a delightful Dean Martin (or is it a Bing Crosby?) number:

 

Moo: You really can’t stay.

(Issy: But Mahmoud, it’s cold outside!)

Moo: You got to go ‘way

(Issy: But Mahoud, it’s cold outside!)

Moo: The Quartet ain't got…

(Issy: Oh, just let it rot.)

Moo:…no time for you.

(Issy: Say what you will, ‘cause I ain’t through.)

Moo: See, Condi says I’m her man now.

(Issy: She’s cooked up quite a plan.)

Moo: And Dubya says I’m the dude.

(Issy: That guy is so damned rude.)

Moo: Go back there to Hamastan now.

(Issy: I just don’t understan’.)

Moo: And don’t give me none ‘o your ‘tude.

(Issy: I’m bored with this whole feud.)

 

Moo: The Zi’nists will kvetch.

(Issy: But Mahmoud, it’s cold out there.)

Moo: And call you a wretch.

(Issy: Why should I even care?)

Moo: They’re handin’ the jiz’…

(Issy: Hold on while I froth and fizz)

Moo:…ya know to me.

(Issy: They’re dhim as they can be.)

Moo: So what if you got elected?

(Issy: I’m feelin’ real rejected.)

Moo: So what if you won the war?

(Issy: What did I do it for?)

 Moo: You really can stay.

(Issy: Oh, man, you’re such a scold—and Mahmoud it’s cold outside!)

 

(Issy: I simply won’t go.)

Moo: Now, Issy, you got no choice.

(Issy: You know I’m your foe.)

Moo: I can’t even hear your voice.

(Issy: And I’m gonna wage…)

Moo: And rant and wail and rage…

(Issy:…a holy war.)

Moo: That’s all you guys are good for.

(Issy: The mullahs still think I’m swell now.

Moo: They all can go to Hell.

(Issy: They’re sendin’ me lots of stuff.)

Moo: Those guys know how to play rough.

(Issy: So enjoy what’ll be a brief spell now.)

Moo: I’m feelin’ awf’ly well.

(Issy: ‘Cause it’ll end soon enough.)

 

Moo: I’ve got all their dough.

(Issy: I know, Mahmoud, I read the news.)

Moo: So you gotta go.

(Issy: An offer I must refuse.)

Moo: My go-slow jihad is back on track.

(Issy: Just wait, I’ll get you back.)

Moo: When I lose I’m still a winner.

(Issy: You old smooth-talkin’ spinner.)

Moo: You really can’t stay.

(Issy: You know I’ll hold out—who cares if it’s cold outside?)

Posted by: scaramouche at 00:25 | link | comments

Clueless Jew: The cluelessness of people knows no bounds. Take the case of Rick Isserman, a Jew from St. Louis who’s lobbying to get a mosque built in his burg. Mr. Isserman seems to be under the impression that it’s a small world, after all, and that his efforts will be greatly appreciated by his Muslim confreres. In the short term, he may be right, but in the long run he’s still going to be a bloody infidel, and a lowly Jewish dhimmi, to boot. From Islam Online:

CAIRO — Jewish American Rick Isserman found it incumbent on him to support his Muslim friend Khalid Shah in his fight to build a mosque in their St. Louis County, Missouri.

 

"It's only natural to make a religious institution accessible to its congregants," Isserman, a 53-year-old Department of Agriculture employee, told St. Louis Today on Monday, July 16.

 

The St. Louis County Council has refused to rezone a 4.7-acre parcel the Islamic Community Center bought for $1.25 million to build a mosque, arguing that the piece was originally allocated to commercial purposes.

 

The county's planning commission had earlier unanimously approved rezoning the land from commercial to religious purpose to accommodate the 25,000-square-foot mosque and community center.

 

"The proposed community center will also be less intense, and therefore more compatible with the adjacent single-family residences, than the uses currently authorized on this site," it recommended.

 

Isserman, who used to organize with Shah monthly meetings for Jews and Muslims to read and discuss the Noble Qur'an and the Torah, defended the proposed location of the new mosque.

 

"That's where the Bosnians are moving."

 

South St. Louis County has a large Muslim minority estimated at 50,000, mostly Bosnians who moved from the city.

 

After a failed attempt at mediation in May, the Islamic Community Center sued the council.

 

"It doesn't sound like the county has much of a chance prevailing here," said Charles Haynes, a senior scholar at the First Amendment Center.

 

"A lot of government officials don't believe it's as tough as it is, then they go to court and find out."

 

The 2000 Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act has given religious groups more legal power.

 

"It forces governments to work harder before they say no," Haynes said.

 

Same Story

 

The Muslims' battle for the right to build the mosque in the county has reminded Isserman of what happened with his Rabbi grandfather nearly five decades ago.

 

"I'm fighting the same battle as my grandfather 50 years ago," he said.

 

"It's a different community and a different place, but it's the same issue."…

 

Yeah, 'cause it's all about prejudice, isn't it? 

 

I guess Mr. I’s study group never got to those portions of the Noble Qur’an where Jews are abominated for turning their backs on Allah’s Messenger who, in a pique, transformed them into chimps and porkers.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:35 | link | comments (1)

Ban Ki-moonbat: Kofi’s Korean successor has surveyed the scene in Aghanistan, and in his “educated” opinion, the anti-Jihadists have to lay off already. 

No word on how he thinks the jihadis should proceed.

 

From the Ceeb:

 

The United Nations secretary general has again spoken out against the "appalling" toll of civilians killed and hurt as NATO forces battle insurgents in Afghanistan.

Speaking to reporters on Monday, Ban Ki-moon said he remonstrated with North Atlantic Treaty Organization officials during a visit to Afghanistan in June and at a conference in Rome in early July.

 

"One of the important areas which I addressed is the increasing number of civilian casualties in Afghanistan," he said.

 

NATO civilian and military chiefs "assured me that they will take necessary precautionary measures to avoid any further civilian casualties," he said.

 

Ban said he understands the problem faced by NATO forces.

 

"I know that it is extremely difficult, because insurgents and Talibans are trying to hide behind the general population, so it makes it very difficult in the course of military operations to differentiate who are innocent citizens and who are insurgents…

 

Thanks for the insight, Mr. Moonbeam. Now, if you could be so kind as to tell NATO how to defeat jihadis who are using civilians as human shields without actually killing any of the human shields, I’m sure the anti-jihadis would be most appreciative. Since you can’t, I suggest you keep your useless opinions to yourself.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:13 | link | comments

Throwing good money after bad: One of the greatest—if not THE greatest—disappointments in recent times are the cataracts that have clouded George. W. Bush’s vision. In the wake of the 9/11 jihadi terrorist attacks on American soil, he was clear-eyed, resolute, determined to root out the terrorist threat. Today, he is chastened, humbled, a shadow of his former self, inhaling—and regurgitating—a miasma of Foggy Bottom fumes, a man who not longer appears to “get it.”

Exhibit A in the case for Bush’s newfound cluelessness: his plan to send a whopping $190 million in U.S. money to “moderate” Mahmoud Abbas—a man who is about as “moderate” as a rattlesnake, and not nearly as appealing.

 

Here’s the scoop from Haroon Siddique, who writes for the far-left rag, the Guardian. (Yes, you read correctly. There are, apparently, two Harpoons—as if one weren’t quite enough, thank you very much):

 

The US president, George Bush, today called for an international conference to bring together representatives of Israel and some of its Arab neighbours, in an attempt to restart Middle East peace talks.

 

A senior administration official told the Associated Press Mr Bush believes in "a moment of choice" for the Palestinian people, between the secular government led by Mahmoud Abbas and that of Hamas.

 

The agency said it had learned Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, would lead the conference, which would include representatives of Israel and "neighbours in the region".

 

Mr Bush promised US diplomatic and $190m in financial support for Mr Abbas, the Palestinian president and Fatah leader, and had harsh words for Hamas, which is in power in Gaza.

 

"You must stop Gaza being a safe haven for attacks against Israel [...] A Palestinian state will never be created by terrorism," he said in the statement.

 

Mr Bush was instrumental in the appointment of the former British prime minister Tony Blair as Middle East peace envoy, to work with the Palestinians on behalf of the quartet of world powers: the US, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia.

 

That group meets in Portugal on Thursday and Ms Rice and other international negotiators will meet with Mr Blair as he begins his new assignment.

 

White House spokesman Tony Snow confirmed that Mr Bush had discussed his new proposals with the former prime minister and said he will talk about Mr Blair's role during today's speech…

 

Open your eyes, boys. Abbas is a joke, Fatah is a spent force, and the jihad’s gonna getcha too, even if you’re prepared to feed the Jews to the crocodiles.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:42 | link | comments

Asshoul: And speaking of being abuzz, there’s a new pest on Hamas TV—a killer bee named Nahoul. Nahoul picks up where Farfour, the jihadi mouse whose TV career was cut short, alas, when he was murdered by an Israeli “terrorist”, left off.  Like Farfour, the new TV pest will be teaching the kids all sorts of fun stuff—why the Jews suck, why Islam’s the bee’s knees, and why being a little martyr is the bestest thing you can possibly be.

Or bee.

 

Anyone got a fly swatter?

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:14 | link | comments (1)

Reactor reaction: The media are abuzz about North Korea mothballing one of its nuclear reactors. Claudia Rosett—a wise, wise woman—puts it into perspective:

It would be more tempting to celebrate North Korea’s shutdown of the Yongbyon nuclear reactor if Kim Jong Il hadn’t done it before, in the mid-1990s — after a previous round of threats, presumed bomb production, and extortion of concessions, aid and fuel from the U.S., South Korea, Japan and Europe.

 

The Yongbyon reactor is just a part of North Korea’s nuclear program. The scale, scope and location of the rest is not fully known, and there is no sign that Pyongyang is about to fully come clean. This shutdown came months after it was promised, and only after North Korea had treated the world to the spectacle of the U.S. State Department, Treasury, and Federal Reserve laboring at the behest of Kim Jong Il to move some $25 million in allegedly crime-tainted funds (the allegations came after extensive investigations by our own Treasury) into the coffers of Kim’s regime.

 

The greatest damage in all this was the example our own government and our allies have allowed North Korea to set for rogue regimes the world over — that nuclear extortion works, that illicit nuclear bomb tests carry no serious penalty, and that our own glorious rhetoric about supporting freedom gets swept aside when our diplomats sit down at the bargaining table with representatives of the world’s worst thugs.

 

The headline we need to see is not that Kim Jong Il has shut down Yongbyon, but that North Korea has shut down Kim Jong Il.

 

We need to shut down the lit’ler Hitler, too.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:56 | link | comments (1)

Skewed vision: Melanie Philips explains why the BBC is dangerous and untrustworthy—comments that also apply to our beloved Ceeb. From the Daily Mail:

…Over a vast range of issues - big business, Conservatism, family values, America, Europe, Northern Ireland, the Middle East, climate change, abortion, multiculturalism - the BBC fails to be dispassionate, objective or truthful.

Both present and former BBC names have spoken about the Left-wing groupthink that saturates its coverage.

In his recent book Can We Trust The BBC?, its former journalist Robin Aitken provides example after example of its bias to show that we cannot.

And only yesterday, the Centre for Policy Studies published an excoriating analysis by the writer Sir Antony Jay - co-author of the brilliant BBC TV comedy series Yes Minister - of the BBC mindset to which he acknowledges he himself once subscribed.

He paints a picture of a BBC in which arrogance and a false sense of moral superiority combine with gross ignorance of the real world to spread an ideology 'based not on observation and deduction but on faith and doctrine', and into which all events are wrenched to fit.

What all this means is that objectivity has been replaced by ideology.

With an attitude that regards all challenges to its warped world-view as beyond the moral pale, it follows axiomatically that the truth goes out of the window altogether.

Most disturbingly of all, that world-view is never challenged. As Sir Antony writes, BBC employees mix only with people who think like themselves.

They are therefore totally unable to tolerate the idea that there is room for any other approach. They represent a totally closed-thought system…

Like the Beeb, the Ceeb sees itself as the default setting on the national consciousness—and therein lies the problem. If your default position is “self-loathing leftism/reflexive multicult-ism/Third World adoration,” you can’t help but serve the interests of those who want to bring down Western civilization and replace it with another "totally closed-thought system," one in which the kind of free expression we enjoy in the West will become a distant memory. Which, when you think about it, means that the Beeb and the Ceeb are working to effect their own obsolescence—as well as ours.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:23 | link | comments

The Jackal japes at al Qaeda: Osama bin Laden has resurfaced in an undated video tape. In the new tape, Osama keeps on message—the message being “martyrdom is swell”—but it’s unclear whether it was filmed last week or last year—or maybe even a lot longer ago than that. Proceeding on the assumption that the attenuated terrormeister is indeed still alive and seethin’, the U.S. Senate has just doubled the bounty on his head—from $25 million to $50 million.

One man who’s not too impressed by Osama and his terror antics is the guy who used to wear the “most successful terrorist in the world” crown: Vladimir Illich Ramirez Sanchez, a.k.a. Carlos the Jackal. From his jail cell in France, the man who used to wreak a heap o’ havoc on the world, pokes fun at the the al Qaedists, pegging them as a kind of jihadist Gang Who Couldn't Shoot Straight.  From the Times Online:

FOR two decades until his capture in 1994, Carlos the Jackal murdered, bombed and kidnapped his way to infamy, retaining the title of world’s most dangerous terrorist before Osama Bin Laden stole his crown.

But speaking from the Clair-vaux prison in northeast France last week he berated terrorist cells said to have targeted Britain, criticising them for plotting to kill ordinary people.

In his first telephone interview with a newspaper, the Venezue-lan-born Vladimir Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, 57, said he was saddened by any loss of life in London, where he lived as a young man. He also attacked what he called a lack of professionalism in some cells linked to Al-Qaeda.

Sanchez is serving a life sentence for three murders in Paris in 1975. He will go on trial again in January over four bomb attacks in France in 1982 and 1983 that killed 12 people and wounded more than 100.

Sanchez, who is now overweight and diabetic, showed no remorse, laughing when asked about the number of his victims.

“I’m not a sadist or a maso-chist – I don’t enjoy the suffering of others,” he claimed in a thick Latin American accent. “When we had to eliminate them it was in a cold, simple way with the least pain possible.”

His most audacious attack was the kidnapping of 11 oil ministers in Vienna in 1975, which elicited an estimated £10m in ransom. He eluded the CIA and French intelligence with the help of Colonel Muammar Gadaffi, the Libyan leader, Saddam Hus-sein in Iraq and a network of bases behind the Iron Curtain.

“Kensington and Chelsea were places where I spent my youth, so I’m not happy about people getting killed in the streets of London,” he said.

He condemned Al-Qaeda followers without specific targets, saying: “They are not professionals. They’re not organised. They don’t even know how to make proper explosives or proper detonators.”…

Heck, the useless buggers can’t even get their shoes to ignite or their shampoo to blow up.

 

Not yet, anyway.

Posted by: scaramouche at 15:33 | link | comments

Hitch’s Achilles heel: He “gets” the existential threat posed by Islamists; he doesn’t “get” religion. By James Lewis on the American Thinker site:

Christopher Hitchens is one of the more sensible voices on the Left. He has not lost his moral sense on the matter of terrorists randomly murdering innocent men, women and children for the greater glory of their twisted fantasies of God. But his latest book reveals his feet of clay. Titled "god (with a small 'g') is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything" it is little more than a sermon on Karl Marx's throwaway line that "religion is the opiate of the masses."

Well, so it is: It's called the consolations of religion in traditional language, and in a world of pain and loss, as well as love and joy, consolation is nothing to be sneered at. All the world religions are full of words and rites of consolation in the face of loss and death; it is one of the supreme uses of religion.

But Hitch trots obediently in the footsteps of Herr Marx to tar all faiths with the same brush, as if your local Unitarian minister is now using his fiery weekly sermons to whip up his foaming-at-the-mouth congregation, getting them to rush out and mob the kindergarten across the street for deviating from strict Unitarian doctrine (whatever that might be this week at that particular congregation). It's just bizarre.

Religion is a great many things, including many decent and noble things, and deflating them all into a soggy rubber balloon for the sake of Leftist analysis is much like trying to reduce all of human sexuality to physical friction between genital organs. Hitch could easily write a book called  "Sex is not great." Well, it is and it isn't. What kind of sex? Practiced by whom? To what end?

 

Hitch's book actually stands for a whole Leftist attitude of sneering superiority in the face of religion. The Left just doesn't get it -- maybe because they have never read any serious works on the subject, or haven't paid any attention lately to the vast body of music, writing, art and architecture inspired by religious feelings, giving it an honest effort to understand. Simple Peruvian peasants understand religion very deeply, even living all their lives in tiny villages on the isolated highlands of the Andes. But sophisticated liberals just can't wrap their minds around this weird stuff. They are suffering from a giant intellectual lacuna: A hole in the intellect, if you will…

 

Now Hitch's hero Karl Marx went right ahead, of course, and concocted an opiate for the masses even purer, more intoxicating, and far more destructive in the 20th century than any religion in history. Marxism killed some 100 million people over a hundred years, trying to coerce its idea of human perfection on earth. Today North Koreans are still dying by the hundreds of thousands at the whim of a chubby little Stalinist monster in Pyongyang. At bottom, of course, Marxism is a secular religion, with its own infallible Prophet, its parasitical priesthood, and a doomed repetition compulsion to create a paradise on earth by coercive force.  For any "Man of the Left" like Hitchens not to be utterly thrown and humbled by the last Marx-made century of catastrophes shows a deep deficiency in his moral sensitivities. And in his book "god is not Great," Hitch shows us why he is a basically silly man when it comes to this subject…

 

He also has a vast blind spot when it comes to the Jewish state.

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:50 | link | comments

Fallout from the Red Mosque attack: The locals are gettin’ busy. From Bloomberg.com:

July 15 (Bloomberg) -- At least 28 people died in two suicide attacks in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province today, after 24 paramilitary soldiers were killed in an explosion yesterday in a remote region near the Afghan border.

 

Seventeen people were killed and about 40 wounded today in a suicide bomb attack that also used remote-controlled mines near Mata, 300 kilometers (186 miles) northwest of Islamabad, said a military official, who did not want to be named.

 

The attack was aimed at a convoy that included police, soldiers and paramilitary forces. He said 13 of those killed were security personnel and four were civilians.

 

In a separate suicide attack 11 people died at a police compound, also in North West Frontier Province, GEO television reported, citing District Administrator Gul Afzal.

 

``A suicide bomber blew himself up,'' Afzal said in an interview with the Pakistani broadcaster. Several people were injured in the attack in the city of Dera Ismail Khan, 386 kilometers south-west of the capital, he said.

 

Today's deaths followed a suicide car-bomb yesterday that killed 24 Pakistani paramilitary soldiers in a remote region near the Afghan border…

 

Anyone keeping track of these casualties? Don’t be silly. Everyone knows that the “international community” cares little about Muslim-on-Muslim killing and rouses itself from indolence only when Palestinians have been “massacred” by brutal, opressive, colonialist, imperialist, racist Jews.

 

Harpoon Siddiqui devotes his Sunday column to mosque-stormings, past and present, with a special focus on Musharraf’s recent Red Mosque attack. As far as Harpoon is concerned, the madrassas churning out Pakistan’s seemingly endless supply of willing jihadis (who he says are waging jihad against Musharraf) are so powerful and wide-spread that Musharraf may as well cry “uncle” right now:

 

…Why doesn't Gen. Pervez Musharraf close down all the militant madrassas, as he keeps promising but fails to?

 

1) His military was in cahoots with them, and may still be with some.

 

2) Madrassas have been a venerable institution for centuries, a font of piety and scholarship, and remain so. There are thousands of them. Separating good ones from bad ones is not all that easy.

 

3) Given the revenues involved, closing the corrupt and militant ones leads to massive and at times violent resistance – couched as jihad against Musharraf, "the American puppet."

 

In other words, there’s no point trying to separate the wheat from the chaff, so roll over, you pathetic non-believers, and let the fascist chaff have its way.

 

More or less the same kind of message appeasers and fellow-travelers were spouting about fascists in the previous century.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:14 | link | comments

Adieu, Antioch: George Will pens a wry obit for Antioch College, a bastion of Left-Lib lunacy that has expired of natural causes—its own arrogance, cluelessness and vacuity. From RealClear Politics:

During the campus convulsions of the late 1960s, when rebellion against any authority was considered obedience to every virtue, the film "To Die in Madrid," a documentary about the Spanish Civil War, was shown at a small liberal arts college famous for, and vain about, its dedication to all things progressive. When the film's narrator intoned, "The rebels advanced on Madrid," the students, who adored rebels and were innocent of information, cheered. Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, had been so busy turning undergraduates into vessels of liberalism and apostles of social improvement that it had not found time for the tiresome task of teaching them tedious facts, such as that the rebels in Spain were Franco's fascists.

That illustrates why it is heartening that Antioch will close after the 2007-08 academic year. Its board of trustees says the decision is to "suspend operations," and it talks dottily about reviving the institution in 2012. There is, however, a minuscule market for what Antioch sells for a tuition, room and board of $35,221 -- repressive liberalism unleavened by learning.

Founded in 1852 -- its first president was Horace Mann -- Antioch was, for a while, admirable. One of the first colleges to enroll women and blacks, it was a destination for escaped slaves. Its alumni include Stephen Jay Gould, Coretta Scott King and Rod Serling, whose "Twilight Zone" never imagined anything weirder than what Antioch became when its liberalism curdled…

Steven Lawry -- Antioch's fifth president in 13 years -- came to the college 18 months ago. He told Scott Carlson of the Chronicle of Higher Education about a student who left after being assaulted because he wore Nike shoes, symbols of globalization. Another left because, she told Lawry, the political climate was suffocating: "They all think they are so different, but they are just a bunch of conformists."

Carlson reports that Lawry stopped the student newspaper's practice of printing "announcements containing anonymous, menacing threats against other students for their political views." Antioch likes to dabble in menace: It invited Mumia Abu-Jamal to deliver its 2000 commencement speech, which he recorded on death row in a Pennsylvania prison, where he lives because 26 years ago he shot a Philadelphia police officer first in the back, then three times in the face. Antioch's invitation was its way of saying . . . what?

In an essay in the Chronicle, Cary Nelson, Antioch Class of 1967 and now a professor of English at the University of Illinois, waxes nostalgic about the fun he had spending, as Antioch students did, much time away from campus, receiving academic credits. What Nelson calls "my employee resistance to injustice" got him "released from almost every job I had until I became a faculty member." But "my little expenditure was never noticed" when "I used some of Lyndon Johnson's anti-poverty money" to bus Vietnam war protesters from Harlem to Washington.

Given that such was Antioch's idea of "work experience" in the "real world," it is unsurprising that the college never produced an alumni cohort capable of enlarging the college's risible $36 million endowment. Besides, the college seems always to have considered raising money beneath its dignity, given its nobility…

As a result, it's now a "noble" corpse.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:34 | link | comments

A Ceeb wish list: Tony Burman, a corporate man from way back, bids adieu to Canadians as he departs his post as editor in chief of Ceeb news. Burman informs us that the Mothercorp is responsive to feedback from us little folk, who have let him know what we desire of our national broadcaster:

You want the CBC to be a strong public broadcaster that serves the public interest and not simply the pursuit of profit. You want a strong, responsible and accountable news and current affairs division that provides substance over hype and tells the stories that need to be told. You want decisions made on the basis of the best available knowledge and rigorously checked.

We are far from perfect, but I assure you that those who work here share that vision.

Here’s what I want from the CBC: I want it to stop viewing events solely through a distoring Left-Lib lens. I want it to stop boasting about its fairness and lack of bias when its contempt for America and Israel is so palpable—and so nauseating. I want it to knock it off with the sappy, squishy, it’s-a-small-world-after-all-let’s-all-drink-the-purple-Koolaid multiculi lunacy and wake up to the reality that a sizeable chunk of one “culture” is waging a jihad against the rest of us (while an even bigger chunk cheers them on) and that, with the Leftists and Jew-haters in its camp, it just may win.

To boil it down: I want the Ceeb to stop being so flippin’ clueless!

 

‘Course, I also want peace in the Middle East, but I’m under no illusions that that’s likely to happen any time soon either.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:35 | link | comments (2)

Two from Hot Air: Here’s a good one—and by that I mean a bad one: A British jihadi has been busily engaging in jihadi activities on his laptop. Not so unusual you say. Thing is, the jihadi’s behind bars, and prison authorities are the ones who gave him the computer. From the Mirror via Hot Air:

AN al-Qaeda fanatic jailed for inciting murder online was caught making a website urging terror attacks - from his cell in Britain's most secure prison.

 

Tariq Al-Daour, 21, used a smuggled mobile phone and modem lead to access the internet on a laptop issued by the Prison Service to help him prepare his court case.

 

The laptop was seized after a violent struggle when prison officers suspected he was misusing it and the hate-filled website called Global Jihad was found.

 

The Home Office has launched an urgent inquiry to discover how the mobile was smuggled into Belmarsh's High Security Unit, which holds the country's most dangerous inmates.

 

They fear Al-Daour may have used it to contact other al-Qaeda terrorists and are scrutinising calls he made.

 

A senior prison source said yesterday: "It is frightening that an al-Qaeda prisoner was able to build an extremist website within Britain's supposedly most secure jail.

 

"This is a massive security breach. It's a real wake-up call

 

"The fact he was inside for building terror websites means he should have been watched like a hawk.

 

"A mobile phone should never have managed to end up in the High Security Unit in the first place.

 

"Prisoners are strip-searched when they enter and leave. The fear is a corrupt member of staff got the phone in.

 

Al-Daour's website - built while he was on trial - was full of al-Qaeda propaganda calling on extremists to wage war on the West

 

The source said: "The website was not finished, but it wasn't far off.

 

"He must have been working on it for some time as there were a lot of pages and text. It is staggering that he was able to work undetected."…

 

Not so staggering, really. I’m sure there are scads of jihadis working undetecting in the U.K. these days. (Canada, too, for that matter.)

 

Another “don’t miss” linked on Hot Air: one of the Ceeb’s most repulsive anti-Zionists, Avi Lewis (the not-any-better half of equally repulsive anti-Zionist, anti-globalization poster gal, Naomi Klein), “interviews” Ayaan Hirsi Ali. The word “interviews” is in scare quotes because what Lewis does is not so much interview Hirsi Ali as blast her with a full-blown anti-American, pro-Islamist tirade.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:46 | link | comments (3)

Les maudit Francais: Any hopes that the election of Nicolas Sarkozy would mark a change of direction for France’s outlook have been dashed by France’s threat to Israel of what might occur should the Mossad take out any of the Hellzbollocksers currently being hosted at a conference in Paris. From YNet News:

France has recently warned Israel not to harm Hizbullah members participating in a convention of Lebanese groups being held near Paris these days.

The Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Seyassah reported Saturday that the French government told Israel an attempt to harm any of the Hizbullah delegates would hinder relations between the countries.

According to the report, the warning was issued after French intelligence received information saying Mossad was planning to attack Hizbullah

and Amal (Lebanese Resistance Detachments) representatives at the conference.

Al-Seyassah said the information, received from both Israel and Jordan, said Mossad was planning to kidnap members of the Shiite group with the aim of using them as bargaining chips in future negotiations for the release of Israeli soldiers Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser, who have been held captive by Hizbullah since July 2006.

More than 400 French officers are securing the venue, the report said. 

 

Lest we forget, this is the country that was instrumental in turning the continent of Europe into Eurabia, and it would be immensely difficult to do a U-ey at this stage of the game. Nor, since the Arabs and Persians have all the oil, is there any reason to want to change direction.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:18 | link | comments

Prayer mats and doormats: Come Monday, the same day a vigil will be held outside the Israeli consulate in Toronto for the four Israeli soldiers kidnapped last year by genocidal Islamists, a section of Queen’s Park will be “graced” by a special art installation. The “sculpture,” consisting of 75 Islamic prayer mats “moulded as if holding Muslims at prayer” (in Toronto Star scribe Jen Gerson’s description) is not intended to symbolize the inroads Islam has been making into the West, including Canada. Rather, the two-day installation “is the first of three that will look at the Abrahamic faiths” and aims “to provoke joy and stupefaction.”

Stupefaction seems to be the perfect word here—stupefaction at provincial authorities who permitted such an inappropriate display; stupefaction at hearing the words of artist Alexander Josephson, who offers this rationale:

 

The impressions are more than sculptures; they can be used as actual platforms, even for prayer. Though he says his installation is critical of Islam, it is not out to provoke anger. The time for overt criticism of religion is past, he argues.

 

“Islam is too sensitive right now,” says Josephson, 25.

 

Um, maybe I’m being a real Philistine, but if someone could kindly explain to me how an art installation consisting of lots of prayer mats splayed out in front of the provincial legislature is being “critical” of Islam, I’d be much obliged. Seems to me what the sculpture is really showing is that Islam, a religion that does not distinguish between the religious and the political, has staked its claim and intends to prevail over the infidel law of Queen’s Park.

 

That’s the way I’d read it, anyway.

Posted by: scaramouche at 16:35 | link | comments

There’s no business like woe business: A Gaza businessman cries woe-is-us about the lack of industry in Hamastan, and the Toronto Star’s Oakland Ross laps it up:

SUFA, Israel–Judging by the pace of commerce underway at this bustling if sniper-prone crossing-point on the Israeli border with Gaza, you would not think that an economic disaster was unfolding on the other side.

 

But "disaster" is the word that Gaza businessman Nasser el-Helou uses to describe what is happening in the beleaguered Palestinian territory, now ruled by a radical Islamist movement called Hamas and shunned by neighbouring Israel.

 

True, humanitarian relief and food supplies are getting through to the territory's 1.5 million people, more than two-thirds of whom are dependent upon emergency relief in order to survive.

 

But it takes more than international charity to keep an economy ticking over, even in a place as impoverished or as lacking in modern infrastructure as Gaza.

 

It takes a steady supply of raw materials, as well as a means of getting exports to market – and, in those two vital areas, Gaza is being shut out.

 

"These steps have paralyzed the Palestinian economy," says el-Helou, referring to the closing of Gaza's four border crossing-points with Israel to all but humanitarian relief and food. "The aim is to keep the strip suffering, to convey this 1.5 million people from producers to people who stand in a line to receive flour, rice and other aid."

 

Since the crossing-points were closed on June 12 in response to bloody infighting between Hamas and another Palestinian faction – the secular Fatah – fully 80 per cent, or 3,200, of Gaza's 4,000 mainly small industrial operations have been forced to close, said el-Helou, who now sits on a nine-member border crisis committee set up by the Gaza Chamber of Commerce.

 

More firms are closing every day…

 

My letter to the Star:

 

It is difficult to muster a great deal of sympathy for the Gaza businessman who bemoans the lack of industry in Gaza, a situation he calls a “disaster.” After being handed the territory, the Palestinians went on a rampage, destroying a ready-made industry—scores of greenhouses that Israel had built. These greenhouses were so successful that, prior to Israel’s departure, Gaza had been serving as one of Israel’s bread-baskets.

 

It could have done the same for the Palestinians—and been the basis of a flourishing economy—had the Palestinians not been so irrational and short-sighted.

 

Until such time as the Palestinians are prepared to come to terms with that destruction and the motivation behind it, nothing save for hatred and recrimination will ever grow in Gaza.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:35 | link | comments

A slap at exceptionalism: Michael Moore’s Sicko, which apparently isn’t doing as well at the box-office as his previous propagandocs, isn’t really about America’s inefficient health care system. At its heart, it’s a cri de coeur from a man who despises America’s stubborn rugged individualism, and who wants Americans to be more like Europeans, people who expect and receive cradle-to-tomb handouts from their collectivism-minded governments. By Rich Lowry in NRO:

Michael Moore set out to make a movie attacking the American insurance industry and ended up attacking the American character. By the end of his movie SiCKO, his plaint is less about American resistance to government-run health care than its overarching rejection of collectivism. As Moore puts it, everywhere else it’s “a world of we,” but here a “world of me.”

His voice thus joins a vast, age-old chorus of left-wing bafflement and disillusion at American exceptionalism — our national traits that have prevented the development of a statist politics along continental European lines. Moore’s explanation for this phenomenon is typically twisted: Americans are saddled with debt from college loans and health care, and that keeps us from demanding French-style pampering from our government for fear of foreclosure by The Man.

Tellingly, Moore picks up this theory in an interview with Tony Benn, an old-school British socialist of the sort who simply doesn’t exist in the U.S. Here, our left-wing politicians vote for war funding before they vote against it, always trimming to keep from rubbing too strongly against the American grain. Moore fervently wishes that grain were different, and he celebrates all countries where government has a vaster reach and tighter grip — from Cuba to France.

He is practically the Leni Riefenstahl of socialism. Anyone in a country with government-provided health insurance is portrayed as tripping through daisies to the hospital, where everything is free and the care is perfect. America, in contrast, is a vista of unrelieved gloom. Moore is adept at the propagandist’s art — keep it simple and keep it dishonest.

You would never know that America ranks highest in the world in patient satisfaction, or that only about half of emergency-room patients in Canada get timely treatment. This is not to say that Moore doesn’t highlight real problems in the American insurance system — which is badly distorted by the fact that most people get their insurance through their employers — but his complaint goes much deeper: Americans don’t have the “free” things of the French, who not only get lots of paid vacation, but have government nannies come to their homes to do their laundry for them after they have children.

Moore hints at — of course — a conspiracy to try to keep us from liking the French for fear that we too will develop a taste for the good life on the government’s dime. Unfortunately for Moore, it’s worse than that. America has a deep-seated individualistic value system that, coupled with the lack of European-style class conflict, inhibited the rise of social democracy here. As one historian has put it, if you were to set out to design a society hostile to collectivism, “one could not have done much better than to implement the social development that has, mostly unplanned, constituted America.”

This exceptionalism has its downsides — our high rates of violence, for one — but it also has created a extraordinarily dynamic and open society that can adjust to and thrive in the globalized economy in a way that sclerotic social democracies can’t…

 

I am now labouring mightily to get the image of Michael Moore cross-dressed as Leni Riefenstal out of my mind. Since Leni was a blonde, at least it doesn’t look like this.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:48 | link | comments

Today’s limerick: An update about the Aussie division of the U.K. Doctor’s Plot, from The Age, and a summary, in verse:

A physician, Mohammed Haneef,

Was a man redolent with belief.

But now he’s made bail,

And won’t go to jail.

Which for him’s an enormous relief.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:25 | link | comments

The truth about Islam: Hassan Butt, an ex-jihadi, minces no words in assigning blame for terrorism where it’s due—on Muslims heeding the Koran’s violent instructions. From the Times Online:

…I spent many years in the British Jihadi Network. While I was a member of that extremist group, I was told to encourage the spread of such theories because they created a useful, murky state of confusion. Propagating the idea that the Government was victimising Muslims by painting them as the bogeymen of the 21st century recruited young men to the radical camp.

This deeply imbedded culture of denial is not a new phenomenon in the Muslim community. Within Muslim families, like any kind of family where its members are expected to live up to demanding traditional standards of behaviour, there has always been a habit of burying their heads in the sand whenever there is something unfavourable happening.

For instance, there was a guy in my year at college who was a known drug dealer. He wasn’t at all subtle in displaying the wealth he had obtained from selling drugs and it was widely known that his family knew what he was up to but had decided it was easier to pretend it wasn’t happening, rather then confront the problems within their household. The same happens in our communities if someone’s sister or daughter is seen at a club or in the company of males, the first response will always be: “No, my daughter isn’t that type of girl! How dare you accuse my daughter and stain her untainted reputation.”

This tendency towards denial is now writ large with the problem of terrorism and Muslims. Let’s remember that the older generation of Muslims emigrated to Britain aspiring to work hard and to better their standard of living. They had always been law-abiding citizens whose loyalties lay with Britain in the main. Muslim involvement in terrorism here in Britain carries as much or even more shame for them as a drug-dealing son or a promiscuous daughter. Muslims do not deal with shame very well or anything that tarnishes their honour or reputation.

Just alcoholics or drug addicts must acknowledge that they have an addiction problem, we Muslims need to accept that there is a problem within our communities. Only when Muslims admit that 9/11 and 7/7 were the work of Muslim terrorists can we move forward to the next juncture: which is recognising the hard truth that Islam does permit the use of violence. Muslims who deny this, preferring instead to mouth easy platitudes about how Islam is nothing but a religion of peace, make the job easier for the radicals who can point to passages in the Koran, set down in black and white, that instruct on the killing of unbelievers…

Sheema Khan, founder of CAIR-CAN and occasional Globe and Mail columnist, would say that pointing to those passages is “cherry-picking.” It is thus refreshing to read the words of a Muslim who is prepared to own up to incontrovertible fact of the rotten fruit.

Posted by: scaramouche at 09:46 | link | comments

Selective outrage: If the boycott of Israel that various Western unions have signed onto was actually about wanting to see “justice” for the Palestinians instead of a leftist desire to bring about the end of Israel, you would hear a lot hubbub about this piece by Amir Taheri in the New York Post:

ONE of Iran's most popular civil-society leaders was ab ducted in Tehran on Tues day after chairing a meeting of trade unionists.

Mansour Osanloo, the 48-year-old president of the Union of Bus Drivers (SKSV), had just stepped off a bus when a group of bearded men emerged from a gray Peugeot and attacked him with clubs and knuckle-dusters.

Shouting, "You are an enemy of Islam," the attackers pushed him into the car and drove away. Witnesses said Osanloo was severely beaten, and his attackers continued to beat him even after they had forced him into their car.

Passengers on the bus, which had halted, tried to restrain the attackers but were held back at gunpoint.

Osanloo's friends and relatives say that secret-service agents had followed him round the clock since his return from Europe last month. On that visit, he addressed a number of international labor meetings in London, Brussels and Geneva.

In 2004, Osanloo helped create one of the first independent trade unions in Iran since the mullahs' 1979 seizure of power. He has led two successful transit-worker strikes, forcing the state-owned bus company to offer concessions.

Other workers have followed his example, creating over 400 independent trade unions with an estimated 1.5 million members. Earlier this year, the independent unions set up the Workers' Organizations and Activists Coordinating Council (WOACC) to foster unity of action. On May 1 (International Labor Day) the WOACC held the first independent workers' marches in Tehran and 11 other major cities since 1979.

Osanloo, regarded by some as "Iran's Lech Walesa," has been abducted by paramilitaries working for the government before. He's also been imprisoned twice, including a spell at Evin, the dreaded "Islamic Alcatraz."

Osanloo has been careful not to give Iran's emerging labor movement a political coloring, but President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad regards the union leader as a threat, for the authorities fear the growth of an independent labor movement.

Workers in independent unions are still no more than 5 percent of wage earners in Iran. Most workers are either not unionized or drafted as members of unions controlled via so-called "Islamic committees."...

Since the desire to see “justice” for the Palestinians has virtually nothing to do with the boycott of Israel and everything to do with the boycotters’ irrational hatred of the Jewish state, the only thing you’re likely to hear from union members re this story is the same thing you hear about the genuine injustices being perpetrated in other countries—that is, the usual stony silence.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:33 | link | comments

The Devil is a Republican: At least, that’s what Toronto Star movie reviewer, Geoff Pevere, seems to think. In a review of Joshua, a confection about a little boy who also happens to be Satan, Pevere writes

This kid – played with young-Republican affectlessness by newcomer [Jacob] Kogan – with his Vulcan mannerisms, morbid fixations (on, among other things, taxidermy and mummification) – seems like something that might have sprung intact from the apartment's stainless-steel fridge.

I don’t know how many young Republicans Pevere has met to be able to say with certainty that they are lacking in affect—I'm fairly certain he hasn’t met any and is simply allowing his political prejudices to seep out—but, taking his illogic to its logical conclusion, I guess he must think that children with autism are similarly demonic. Of course, he would never in a million years make such an assertion because, clearly, that would be idiotic.

 

The same applies to his notion about young Republicans.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:56 | link | comments

Marketing the mission: I have no doubt that we are in the initial phase of the third wave of the global jihad, one that, with human bombs and nuclear weapons thrown into the mix, threatens to be even bloodier and most costly to non-Muslims than the first two waves. That’s me, though. To most of my countrymen, it seems, there’s no jihad, Islam is a religion of furry kittens and warm woolen mittens, and Canadians are in Afghanistan not to turn back repressive Islamists who seek to turn back the clock to the glorious 7^th Century (which, to loopy ‘Slamies represents the high watermark in human achievement) and restore the caliphate, but to be a kind of Canuckian Peace Corps.

Now, I happen to have a problem with the Canadian mission not because I don’t believe that the Taliban and other jihadis have to be put in their place (or, alternatively, dispatched to the next, eternal one) but because it seems unfair to put so much of the onus for getting rid of the Taliban on Canadian troops. My other concern: even should the mission succeed, Afghanistan will still be a backwater of warlords and Islam that has a constitution based, not on democratic principles—Allah forefend!—but on sharia law. And I don’t think any Canadian should have to die for that.

 

That said, at this stage I don’t really know what to do about the Canadian mission, since retreating with our tails between our legs is bound to send entirely the wrong message to the jihadis—and not just the ones in Afghanistan. I do know, however, that this complicated issue cannot be solved by wishing it away, or by talking about it in nicey-nicey and utterly empty euphemisms. The second approach—sanitizing the language so that it reflects our national lassitude, whimpitude and dhimmitude—is the one that has been suggested to Prime Minister Harper. From the Globe and Mail:

OTTAWA — The Harper government has been told to stop referring to “fighting terrorism” and the Sept. 11 attacks, and to banish the phrase “cut and run” from its vocabulary if it is to persuade a skeptical public that the military mission in Afghanistan is worth pursuing.

A public-opinion report says only 40 per cent of respondents across Canada, and almost none in Quebec, support the deployment. To change the perceptions, it recommends putting the emphasis on “rebuilding,” “enhancing the lives of women and children,” and “peacekeeping.”

The report to Foreign Affairs was prepared last month by The Strategic Counsel . It paints a bleak picture of weak public support for the military mission, for which the firm blames “unbalanced, mostly negative” media coverage of the war and misperceptions about the mission's purpose.

Only 40 per cent of Canadians support the mission, according to Strategic Counsel data. And the firm says the public views information from Ottawa “through a thick lens of cynicism.”

“They feel that much of what government says is propaganda, intended simply to appeal to the voting public and to spin stories in a positive manner,” the report points out.

The report is based on 14 focus-group discussions of two hours each, conducted in seven locations across Canada last November.

Canadians of different age groups from rural, urban and suburban regions of the country participated. Strongest support appeared among participants who were 36 and older. In Quebec – focus groups were conducted in Laval and Drummondville – “support was virtually non-existent.”

The report warns that the Afghan mission could be “a lightning rod” for the government. And because of “continuously negative” media reports on casualties and lack of results, the legitimacy of Canada's involvement could be questioned. “Suspicion and cynicism are taking hold in the absence of hard facts and positive stories about progress,” the report states.

“There is a growing belief that the government is trying to avoid talking about the issue to play down the grim reality that the mission is failing.”

The firm said the “communications landscape” is dominated by mounting casualties, and a feeling that “things are getting worse.” Many Canadians believe that the soldiers are part of a U.S.-led mission, and some even think Canada invaded Afghanistan.

Many respondents believe that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are a U.S.-led response to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington.

The report urges the government to promote the fact that Canada has highly professional troops who are “helping the people of Afghanistan” and “getting results even if it's difficult.”…

Yuck. To me the above not only points to the general cluelessness of Canadians, it demonstrates the sheer folly of “focus-grouping” a war.

My letter to the Globe:

A measure of how times have changed—and not for the better: can you imagine Prime Minister Mackenzie King being advised to “tone down” his language during World War II and talk about “rebuilding,” “peacekeeping,” and “enhancing the lives of women and children”?

 

Of course not. If he had, those advisors would have been laughed—and then, unceremoniously tossed—out of his office.

 

The difference between Canadians then and now: back then Canadians were under no illusions about the threat posed by fascists with global ambitions and what had to be done if we wanted to preserve our way of life. And the words “peacekeeping” and “enhancing” certainly didn’t enter into it.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:32 | link | comments

Ditching Hitch’s bitching: The National Post published this Chris Hitch screed yesterday in which the Savonarola of atheism examined the malign influence totalitarian religious doctrine has had in motivating doctors to become killers. Hitch, who makes no distinction between varieties of religious belief—good, bad, he loathes them all—dwelt at length on that infamous Jewish doctor-killer, Baruch Goldstein, and made the following outrageous statement linking Goldstein, a “one-of” lunatic, with a jihadi involved in the U.K. Doctor’s Plot:

In Goldstein's view, Hippocratic precepts were overridden by Orthodox teaching, and there were a number of rabbis ready to support his stand on the matter. There were also a number of rabbis who decided to consecrate his tomb as a shrine to a brave Jewish martyr, and the children of ultra-Orthodox settlers were seen wearing buttons reading, "Dr. Goldstein cured Israel's ills." Now it seems that an Iraqi physician, in the old and famous university town of Cambridge, was so diseased by his own faith that he advocated even the murder of rival Muslims and showed videos of decapitation to housemates who were so profane as to play musical instruments.

 

The Post printed two letters from readers who, like me, took issue with Hitchens’ analysis, although I’m rather partial to my letter, which didn’t make it in. Here it is:

 

In the aftermath of the recent Doctors Plot in the U.K., pundits have hauled open the vaults of history in an attempt to find other instances of physicians defying their Hippocratic Oath to “first, do no harm.” The effort has had limited success, to say the least, turning up a Mengele, a Guevera, and—eureka!—a Baruch Goldstein. Goldstein, as Christopher Hitchens notes as length in his round-up of “totalitarian” doctors, was the religious Israeli who turned an automatic weapon on Arabs praying at Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs in 1994, killing 29. Hitchens puts great weight on “Dr.” Goldstein’s act of terrorism, and the approval it elicited from “a number of Rabbis” who declared him a martyr.

 

The problem, of course, is that Goldstein’s action was an aberration, had no basis in Jewish doctrine, and was soundly condemned by most Israelis and Jews. The actions of those involved in the Doctor’s Plot, however, is all too typical, and while many Muslims condemn them as aberrant, many others believe they are firmly rooted in Islamic texts.

 

There are two points to be made here: First, the most salient fact about the plot in Britain is not that it was conducted by physicians, but that it was conducted by jihadis. It seems clear that their profession was secondary to their belief system, and that they were only taking advantage of a loophole in British security that allowed foreign doctors into the country with few, if any, questions asked; had a similar loophole been available to, say, plumbers, no doubt we’d all now be talking about a Plumbers Plot.

 

Second, Mr. Hitchens’ blanket disdain for all religion—he believes “it poisons everything”, part of the title of his current best-selling anti-faith polemic—has caused him to put far too much emphasis on a single deranged act.

Posted by: scaramouche at 09:30 | link | comments

Double standard: The story about the battle between the Lebanese army and Palestinian “militants” at a “refugee camp” inside Lebanon has dropped off the mainstream media’s radar—but not because hostilities have ceased. As al That Jaz reports, the conflict continues, as the army, which had supposedly wrapped things up weeks ago, is still in the process of “tightening the noose”:

Four Lebanese soldiers have been killed after the army resumed heavy shelling of a Palestinian refugee camp near Tripoli where fighters from the Fatah al-Islam group have been holed up for weeks.

 

The bombardment on Thursday came a day after more than 150 people left the Nahr al-Bared camp amid fears that the army was preparing an assault.

  

"Today's bombardment is a first step in the final battle against the terrorist group whose fighters have refused to surrender to the army," an army officer told the AFP news agency.

But a military statement denied that the bombardment was part of a final assault on the camp.

 

 "The current ongoing military operations are still in the framework of tightening the noose on the gunmen to force them to surrender and submit to justice," it said…

 

See, if you’re an Arab army trying to deal with terrorists, you have all the time in world to devise a framework for noose-tightening. An Israeli Army contending with the same enemies would have all eyes focused—and fixated—on the effort, and is denied the same luxury.

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:13 | link | comments

On second thought…: The president of Norway’s parliament now regrets a visit by that body’s foreign affairs committee to the Shia theocracy last month. From Aftenposten:

Jagland's criticism is surprising, not least because the committee is headed by a fellow Labour Party politician, Olav Akselsen. Jagland also criticized Norway's foreign policy towards Iran, even though that's guided by another Labour Party politician, Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre.

Jagland, a former foreign minister himself, didn't name any names in his critical commentary in Thursday's edition of newspaper Aftenposten, but he strongly suggested that Norway's policy towards Iran hasn't been well thought out.

Politicians in Norway "haven't consciously sat down and discussed our policies towards Iran," Jagland claimed.

He noted that Norwegian politicians opposed stoning in meetings in Iran, but then it took place anyway. That, Jagland said, "shows that we haven't had any effective influence."

Jagland claimed he did not support the foreign affairs committee's application for funding for its trip to Iran last month, and worries that Norway's "strong economic interests in Iran" (mostly through state oil company Statoil's business in Iran) make its foreign policy towards Iran "problematic." Jagland noted that he also opposed the previous government's decision to send a trade delegation to Iran, right when the EU and the US were pressuring the Iranians to halt their nuclear development program.

He stressed that he's not in favor of isolating Iran, but believes the international community needs to "stand together" in an effort to hinder Iran's "destructive" path.

Members of Parliament from Norway's Progress Party were the only politicians to boycott the trip to Iran, to protest Iran's policies. Jagland admitted he agrees with the stand taken by the Progress Party, which usually is his own party's arch rival .

Jagland's criticism of Norway's relations with Iran is also shared by Inge Lønning of the Conservatives. He told Aftenposten, though, that he thinks Statoil's activities in Iran are much more problemactic than last month's visit by the foreign affairs committee.

You mean Iran may not be enriching uranium for purely peaceful purposes?

 

I’m staggered!

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:53 | link | comments

No sex with Suha: Oh, the ongoing frustrations of being a single Palestinian male. On the one hand, you can download all sorts of titillating porn on your cell phone; on the other hand, you live in a society in which hand-holding with a real live woman is a definite no-no. 

Deprived of sexual satiety in the here and now, no wonder many are inclined to go in search of posthumous nooky.

 

From ABC News:

The four men are huddled over a cell phone screen. Its faint color splashes over the stairwell of a dingy shopping center in Ramallah, the de facto Palestinian capital.

In the 30-second video, a man pressures a young woman to perform a sex act. She appears to be a conservative, veiled Muslim, but grudgingly complies. The men watching shift their feet anxiously — being caught watching the clip would bring immediate disgrace.

The men, all in their late 20s, all considered middle-class professionals, watch with eyes sprung open, and with apparent self-disgust. It's the closest thing to sex they've ever had.

In a place where tradition prohibits premarital sex, young, frustrated men are increasingly turning to outlets like cell phone pornography. Some unmarried men seek out Ramallah's few prostitutes, but the vast majority remain virgins, bursting with pent-up sexual energy, until their wedding night.

Cell phones are selling at a blistering rate. Ramallah is packed with cell phone shops, offering not only the newest Nokia models but accessories like leather holsters and shiny, new touch pads. And the Palestinian Telecommunications Co., the primary cell provider in the West Bank and Gaza, has grown to become the largest stock traded on the Palestinian Securities Exchange, according to the PSE Web site.

Suhaib, 28, is a researcher for the Palestinian Authority. "When I first watched it," he said after leading this reporter back into a cafe, "it made me desire more and more and more. I felt ashamed by it, and I only watched each video once."

Marriage Prospects

Some of the porn comes from Ramallah and East Jerusalem, typically forwarded from acquaintance to acquaintance. Some of the clips come from as far away as Kuwait.

Unlike his friends, Suhaib is getting married in January. He's lucky. He'll marry his cousin, who is 14 years old. The family connection, he says, worked to his benefit.

"Because she's my cousin, they gave us a good price of $4,000 for the dowry. That's considered an average dowry these days," he said.

It's ironic that in a place where a couple holding hands in public is rated X, cell phone porn is on the rise.

Every week, says the graduate student Shawki, his phone announces new clips with a double beep. He says he watches them once, then deletes.

Suhaib, also a friend of Shawki's, is getting married in January, but it's hard for Shawki to feel happy.

"I promise you," he said. "The way things are going, I'm convinced I'll still [be] a virgin at 50."…

Seems to me there’s far too much pent up sexual energy and cousin-marrying in the Arab world, and that it’s causing a whole mess of problems.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:18 | link | comments (5)

Still clueless after all these years: Great news—even though some fiery jihadis/Nation Health professionals have been attempting to turn the Hippocratic Oath on its ear, according to the latest poll, the Brits aren’t holding it against the warm ‘n’ fuzzy religion of Islam. And lest you think most Scots are take-no-crapola-types like John Smeaton and the taxi driver who kicked the flaming doctor in the chestnuts, rest assured, they’re not. From Islam Online:

CAIRO — The majority of Britons and Scotts still retain a positive view of Islam as a religion of peace despite the damage done to its image by the recent terrorist plots in London and Glasgow, according to a new poll released Thursday, July 12.

"Despite the failed car bomb attacks, 60 percent of people believe that Islam is fundamentally a religion of peace," said Paul Woolley, director of Theos think tank which conducted the poll.

The Scotts are the most positive of all regions towards Islam, the poll found.

Nearly 69 percent of Scottish respondents believe Islam is a religion of peace against only 7 percent who don't.

"The swift condemnation of the attacks and the active stance taken by Muslim leaders against extremism has clearly helped to build confidence and national solidarity," said Woolley.

Two Muslim men rammed a blazing Jeep Cherokee into Glasgow airport on June 30, a day after two failed car bombs in central London.

Iraqi doctor Bilal Abdullah, 27, was the first to be charged with conspiring to cause the explosions.

The umbrella Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) organized on Saturday, July 7, a high-profile meeting of senior Muslim community leaders and imams to discuss radicalism in Britain.

A declaration issued by participants strongly condemned the Glasgow and London plots and urged all Britons, Muslim and non-Muslims, to stand united against the threat of terrorism.

A recent Populus survey showed that an overwhelming 93 percent of British Muslims think that suicide attacks on civilians in the UK cannot be justified and 86 percent rejected targeting military establishments.

It found a whooping 98 percent of those polled said they would feel shame if a family member decided to join Al-Qaeda.

Damaged

The Theos survey, however, found that the failed attacks have harmed the image of the Islamic faith.

More than seven in ten people (71%) believe that the attacks have given Islam a bad name.

Nearly 54 percent also said that the attacks have damaged the reputation of the faith in general.

The survey found that young people are the most group likely to see Islam as a violent religion...

Nothing a little Orwellian re-education won’t take care of.

Posted by: scaramouche at 15:20 | link | comments (2)

Et tu, Stephen?: Up till now I had Stephen Harper pegged as someone who “gets it.” Alas, he seems to have fallen for the myth of Mahmoud Abbas’s “moderation” and the fantasy of a viable Palestine. From the Canadian Press via the Toronto Star:

OTTAWA–Prime Minister Stephen Harper will announce an immediate $8 million in funding for the Palestinian Authority today, but the lifting of a financing freeze will also come with a private exhortation to the Palestinians to do something about corruption that has sapped public confidence, The Canadian Press has learned.

Harper will use a visit by the king of Jordan to announce he is lifting the freeze on funding to Mahmoud Abbas's Palestinian Authority. The money will be quickly ramped up to more than $30 million, says a government source.

King Abdullah will meet with the prime minister during a two-day visit to Ottawa. The Jordanian ruler is trying to drum up support for Abbas, who recently fired Hamas from the government and formed a new cabinet after bloody fighting between the Islamic militants and Abbas supporters in Gaza.

Canada was one of the first countries to cut off funding to Hamas after the Fatah rivals were elected to lead the Palestinian Authority last year. Harper immediately put a stop to aid that reached $35 million in 2005.

Hamas is considered a terrorist group by several Western countries because of its long campaign of suicide bombings inside Israel that targeted civilians.

Several of those countries followed Canada's lead in suspending aid programs for the Palestinians after the Hamas victory last year.

Harper carefully considered his options before going ahead with the decision to pour money back into the Palestinian territories. Former British prime minister Tony Blair was consulted by the government last week after he assumed his new responsibilities as international envoy to the Middle East.

Canada is also eager to assist the efforts of King Abdullah, seen by the government as a voice of moderation in the region. Jordan is one of the few Arab countries that officially recognizes Israel, and its leader has been looking for support for Abbas since he dismissed Ismail Haniyeh as prime minister after the Hamas takeover of Gaza.

King Abdullah has been trying to rally international support for Hamas since then in conjunction with a new peace initiative in the region.

The Jordanian and Egyptian foreign ministers will travel to Jerusalem over the next two days to represent the Arab League in talks about the Arab peace plan.

The plan would trade full Arab recognition of Israel for an Israeli withdrawal from all lands captured in the 1967 Middle East war and the creation of a Palestinian state.

Palestinians turned their backs on Abbas and his Fatah party for its corruption and bumbling style of governing.

Our misbegotten generosity will no doubt make its way to the usual destinations—the already jizyah-fattened bank accounts of Fatah kleptocrats and to purchase weapons that will be turned on Israelis.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:57 | link | comments

It’s everywhere!: The Toronto Star has belatedly discovered the jihad (and, shockingly, even uses the “j” word in a headline), devoting practically its entire WORLD & COMMENT section to “hot spots” where the holy war has been heating up.

In recognition of the Star’s eureka moment, I’ve revised a song from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel:

 

Jihad is bustin’ out all over.

All over the city and the town!

Shaheeds’re burstin’ outa jackets,

Makin’ lots of dins and rackets

As authorities claim they are clampin' down!

 

Jihad is bustin’ out all over.

The warfare is gettin’ so intense!

And now some youn’uns on computers

Are becomin’ holy shooters

And the bloodshed here and there has grown immense!

 

‘Cause it’s jihad…

‘Had, ‘had, ‘had,

Just ‘cause it’s jihad, ‘had, ‘had!

 

Jihad is bustin’ out all over.

The third time it’s tried for world control!

‘Cause Allah promised them the power,

And they want to make us cower,

And al Qaeda, we are told, is on a roll!

 

Jihad is bustin’ out all over.

The sheep aren’t sleepin’ anymore!

All the commotion’s spoiled their slumber

As they wake in greater number

To the fact of what jihadis have in store.

 

On accounta it’s jihad…

‘Had, ‘had, ‘had,

Just ‘cause it’s jihad, ‘had, ‘had!

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:30 | link | comments

Love’s been-around-the-block-a-few-times not-so-young dream: I know that love can make you goofy, but the much-married Brit who just got hitched to one of terrormeister Osama bin Laden’s sons—a chap young enough to be her son—sounds positively unhinged. From the Times Online:

A British woman has married a son of Osama bin Laden after a holiday romance and is to apply for a visa so that he can visit Britain, The Times has learnt.

Jane Felix-Browne, a 51-year-old grandmother and parish councillor from Cheshire, has until now kept her marriage to Omar Ossama bin Laden, 27, secret from everyone apart from her immediate family and close friends. But she has now agreed to speak about her relationship with bin Laden’s fourth eldest son.

“It would be nice if, like any other married woman, I could stand up and say this is my husband and this is his name, but I have to be realistic about things,” she told The Times. “I hope people don’t judge me too harshly. I married the son, not the father.”

Mrs Felix-Browne says she is aware that some people will be hostile to her marriage. Among the numerous terrorist plots linked to her new father-in-law are the London suicide bombings on July 7, 2005, the July 21 plot, and the recent attempted attacks in London and Glasgow. “I just married the man I met and fell in love with – to me he is just Omar,” she said. “I hope that people will take a step back and think what it was like when they fell in love. He is the most beautiful person I have ever met. His heart is pure, he is pious, quiet, a true gentleman, and he is my best friend.”

Mrs Felix-Browne, who has been married five times previously, met Mr bin Laden in Egypt in September while undergoing treatment for multiple sclerosis. She says that their fairytale romance began when her future husband saw her riding a horse near the Great Pyramid. They were married in Islamic ceremonies in Egypt and Saudi Arabia and are awaiting permission from the authorities in Riyadh to make their marriage official.

Mrs Felix-Browne is still coming to terms with the practical difficulties of being the daughter-in-law of a man with a $25 million (£12.5 million) bounty on his head. “Omar is wary of everyone. He is constantly watching people who he feels might be following him. Not without reason he is fearful of cameras. He is the son of Osama,” she said. “But when we are together he forgets his life.”…

Mrs. Felix-Browne will forgive me if I fail to be caught up in the Cartlandesque romance of it all.

 

My wedding poem for Jane and Omar:

 

A nutter named Jane Felix-Browne

Wed a scion of major renown.

Now Osama's her Pappy

And she's feeling happy--

And my breakfast don't wanna stay down.

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:53 | link | comments (4)

Syria in the thick of it: The Bush push, a.k.a “the surge”, will be for naught unless a forceful message is sent to the state sponsors of Iraqi turmoil, Iran and Syria—and I don’t mean sending Nancy Pelosi there wearing a niqab. (Also essential for the surge to succeed: replacing Iraq’s sharia-based constitution with one based on genuinely democratic precepts—but that’s another story.) From Forbes:

Iraqi security forces seized 200 explosive belts along the Syrian border Wednesday, a police spokesman said, reinforcing Baghdad's claims that its western neighbor isn't doing enough to stop the flow of fighters and weapons to al-Qaida in Iraq.

 

The belts were found during a search of a truck that had crossed into Iraq from Syria at the Waleed border station, Interior Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Abdul-Karim Khalaf said.

 

"When the truck was searched, 200 explosives belts were found in it," the general said. He said the driver was detained but he would not give his name or nationality.

Iraqi and U.S. authorities have long complained that Syria is not doing enough to stem the flow of weapons, ammunition and foreign fighters into Iraq. Syria insists it is trying to stop the flow but that it is impossible to seal off the long desert border.

 

But U.S. military spokesman Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner told reporters that 60 to 80 foreign fighters enter Iraq "in any given month" - 70 percent of them through Syria…

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:17 | link | comments

Same old hate: In case you think Judenhass is a thing of the past on the Continent where the Holocaust occurred, a report from YNet News offers this rude awakening:

Vandals burned a small Israeli flag and knocked over candles at a Berlin memorial to Jews deported during the Holocaust, police said Wednesday.

Police said they discovered the damage shortly before midnight Tuesday at the memorial at the Grunewald train station, from which thousands of Jews were deported to death camps during the Holocaust.

 

An investigation was under way.

 

Meanwhile in Moscow, assailants sprayed swastikas on the walls of the building housing the Jewish Agency in the Russian capital.

 

Earlier this week a group of about 20 people chanting Nazi slogans accosted a rabbi in central Ukraine, a Jewish community spokesman said.

 

Rabbi Shlomo Vilgelm was uninjured in the attack late Monday near the synagogue in Zhytomyr, about 140 kilometers (90 miles) west of Kiev, said Oleh Rostovtsev, spokesman for the Federation of Jewish Communities in Ukraine.

 

Police have opened a criminal investigation into the incident, but did not comment on specifics. 

 

You mean they still hate Jews in Germany, Russia and the Ukraine?

 

Must be something in the water.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:54 | link | comments

Hands across the channel: So far the U.K.’s new P.M., Gordon Brown, has proven to be a right dhimmi, but across the channel in France, where ballsy Nicolas Sarkozy holds office, it’s a completely different story, right? From Arutz Sheva (link via Hot Air):

(IsraelNN.com) Hizbullah officials said on Tuesday that the organization intends to attend a summit of Lebanese political leaders in France this weekend, despite comments made Monday by French President Nicolas Sarkozy characterizing the group's operations as "terrorism." Sarkozy used the term after meeting the parents of Israeli soldiers abducted by Hizbullah.

Hizbullah said it was reviewing Sarkozy's comments. "There is a definite change in circumstances now based on what was said in Paris," said one Hizbullah official. Another, former Minister Mohammed Fneish, was quoted in Lebanon's An-Nahar daily Tuesday as saying "These remarks are meant to satisfy the Zionist lobby" in France.

Meanwhile, French Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Pascale Andreani told reporters that France's invitation to the group was still valid. "Hizbullah is an important political force in Lebanese life, and we therefore hope it is fully integrated in the political stakes," Andreani said. "That is why an invitation was addressed" to Hizbullah…

I'd say what we have here is a clear-cut example of “bad cop, good cop,” which, in practical terms, amounts to giving in to the Iran’s diabolical flying monkeys.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:07 | link | comments

Today’s limerick:

A physician named al-Zawahiri

Subcribes to an “int’resting” theory.

Says Islam’s primacy

Is Allah’s decree—

A prescription of which we’ve grown weary.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:04 | link | comments

Shame on us: A Canadian Federal Court of Appeals has upheld the federal government’s policy of refusing to list Jerusalem, Israel as a birthplace on a Canadian passport. From the Jerusalem Post:

A federal policy that bans Canadians from listing Jerusalem, Israel, as their birthplace on their passport does not violate the Charter of Rights, the Canadian Federal Court of Appeal has ruled.

In 2006, Eliyahu Veffer, a 19-year-old Canadian citizen born in Jerusalem, requested that the minister of foreign affairs list Israel as his country of birth on his Canadian passport. His request was rejected, and last week a three-judge panel ruled against his appeal.

"Mr. Veffer has not been discriminated against in that his human dignity has not been invaded," the judges wrote. "Mr. Veffer still maintains the freedom to express his faith and his subjectively held views as to the status of Jerusalem, he is just not able to do so in his Canadian passport."

The decision maintains that the ban on listing Israel as the birth country alongside Jerusalem is not discriminatory, despite the fact that Israel is the only country that is banned from being listed when cities in disputed territories are concerned.

The appeals court wrote that Veffer's passport was no more than a travel document showing proof of citizenship and "there is no evidence that the absence of a country name beside Jerusalem hinders his ability to travel in any way."

Veffer immigrated to Canada with his family nine years ago. He is now a student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The ruling emphasized that Canada's refusal to recognize Jerusalem as part of Israel was consistent with the UN's stance on the issue…

Canada's Conservative government has shown itself to be a staunch supporter of Israel. Why, in this instance, is it allowing the UN, which has an obvious animus toward Israel, to set Canadian policy?

 

My letter to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, cc’d to Minister of Foreign Affairs Peter MacKay:

 

Dear Prime Minister Harper,

 

I read with great dismay that a Federal Court of Appeals has ruled that a Canadian citizen doesn’t have the right to list Jerusalem, Israel as his place of birth, even though that’s where he was born. The court based its decision on the fact that Canada doesn’t recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, a stance that is in keeping with the United Nation’s.

 

Respectfully, Mr. Prime Minister, I would pose the following questions: why is Canada allowing the United Nations, a body that consistently displays an open contempt for Israel, to influence our passport policy; and, even if Jerusalem’s status is disputed, why should that preclude it from being listed as a place of birth? It seems extraordinary unfair, to say the least, that a person can list his or her birthplace as Tuktoyuktuk or Timbuktu or Toronto, but Jerusalem is the one city in the world that cannot be acknowledged as a birthplace.

 

As a Prime Minister who time and time again has taken a principled stance on the issues, I would urge you to do so here and take the steps necessary to redress this grievous wrong.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:24 | link | comments (1)

There be witches: The U.K. is crawling with holy warriors, both of the domestic and imported variety, but pundit Peregrine Worsthorne (whose name sounds like something P.G. Woodehouse made up) is downplaying the threat and counselling his countrymen to eschew a “demoralising” McCarthy-like “witch hunt” to deal with it. From The First Post:

Almost hourly, news stories appear in the media pouring out alarm and despondency about the ever-widening spread of Muslim terrorists throughout all sections of British society, most sensationally, of course, in the NHS.

 

Even in The Spectator there is a piece this week headlined, 'Jihad amid the dreaming spires', urging Oxford dons to do more to warn pupils against their sinister wiles.

 

Having been a reporter in Washington in the early Cold War years, all this is eerily reminiscent. For that was the time when  Senator Joe McCarthy launched his 'Reds under the bed' witch hunt, the demoralising effects of which the United States has not yet fully recovered.

 

During that period, Britain, unlike America, kept its head. There were no 'reds under the bed' scares here. We kept our cool, possibly too much so, since Cambridge spies were allowed to remain in place for far too long. It could be that this memory has caused the pendulum to swing dangerously too far the other way.

 

I say dangerously because fear is a disastrous counsellor. Just as it led the West to seriously exaggerate the dangers from Soviet communism, so it could again regarding Islamic fundamentalism.

 

Irish sympathisers abounded in Britain during the IRA years. There were pubs in all our major cities where Republican songs could be heard and not only on St Patrick's Day. Believe it or not, there was one such pub in Fleet Street much patronised by the fiercely Unionist Daily Telegraph leader writers, of which I was one.

 

By turning a blind eye, the authorities drew the sting. Had they intervened, the trouble would have only got worse.

 

Memo to Peregrine: the Cold War is over, the jihad is in full swing and, much as you’d prefer to ignore them, there really are holy warriors under the bed. Oh, and it’s going to take a whole lot more than a House Committee on un-British Activities to root them out.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:36 | link | comments

A failing grade: In a refreshing iteration of the obvious—something generally frowned on in his circles—a UN official has conceded that the Human Rights Council, a supposedly revamped version of the Human Rights Commission, has been an abject failure. From the Jerusalem Post:

A United Nations legal expert harshly criticized his organization's recently-formed Human Rights Council on Tuesday, particularly its decision to permanently single out Israel as an item for debate.

"The council has been a huge disappointment," said UN Special Rapporteur Martin Scheinin of Finland in a conversation with The Jerusalem Post as he wrapped up an eight-day visit here.

Officials in Israel have also been critical of the council for singling out the Jewish state.

Scheinin said that the council, which was created last year to replace the now defunct Human Rights Commission, had "repeated many of the mistakes for which people wanted to abolish" its predecessor.

He also said, "The council has created new problems by distracting attention from the protection of human rights to eternal discussions on its own procedures."

Scheinin, who is a former member of another UN monitoring body, the Human Rights Committee, blamed part of the problem on the speed with which the new council replaced the old commission.

"This was predictable," Scheinin said.

Of course, being a UN official, he couldn’t help but revert to the usual bafflegab:

He added that he still hoped there would be a turnaround in the council's attitude on Israel and in its ability to address human rights issues around the globe.

"I am not pessimistic in the sense that I would see this as eternal. I see it as a period of transition," said Scheinin. He added that there had been some improvements over the old Human Rights Commission, such as in the council's membership criteria.

"But I know that there are negative developments, and the agenda issue [which makes Israel a permanent issue of debate] that you are referring to is one of them, because it perpetrates certain patterns," he said.

The council was due to be reviewed by the UN General Assembly in four years, Scheinin said…

Why wait four years when it’s obvious that, if anything, the HRC’s perpetuation of certain patterns is only going to get worse? Time to scupper the whole despicable enterprise NOW!

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:04 | link | comments (1)

Lefto: John Stossel deftly deflates obnoxious gasbag Michael Moore. Moore’s latest pseudo-doc, Sicko, is yet another of his lefty tropes, this time on behalf of big government—his panacea for what ails American health care. Stossel rightly (in both senses of the word) points out that, for someone who purports to be looking out for the little guy, Moore seems awfully disdainful of the individual. From RealClear Politics:

I interviewed Michael Moore recently for an upcoming "20/20" special on health care. It's refreshing to interview a leftist who proudly admits he's a leftist. He told me that government should provide "food care" as well as health care and that big government would work if only the right people were in charge.

Moore added, "I watch your show and I know where you are coming from. ... "

He knows I defend limited government, so he tried to explain why I was wrong. He began in a revealing way:

"I gotta believe that, even though I know you're very much for the individual determining his own destiny, you also have a heart."

Notice his smuggled premise in the words "even though." In Moore's mind, someone who favors individual freedom doesn't care about his fellow human beings. If I have a heart, it's in spite of my belief in freedom and autonomy for everyone.

Doesn't it stand to reason that someone who wants everyone to be free of tyranny does so partly because he cares about others? Wishing freedom to one's fellow human beings strikes me as a sign of benevolence. But Moore and the left don't see it that way.

Moore thinks respecting others' freedom means refusing to help the less fortunate. But where's the connection? All it means is that the libertarian refuses to sanction the use of physical force (which is what government is) to help others. Peaceful methods -- like voluntary charity -- are the only morally consistent methods. I give about a quarter of my income to charities because I've seen that private charity helps the needy far better than government does.

Moore followed up with a religious lesson. "What the nuns told me is true: We will be judged by how we treat the least among us. And that in order to be accepted into heaven, we're gonna be asked a series of questions. When I was hungry, did you feed me? When I was homeless, did you give me shelter? And when I was sick, did you take care of me?"

I'm not a theologian, but I do know that when people are ordered by the government to be charitable, it's not virtuous; it's compelled. Why would anyone get into heaven because he pays taxes under threat of imprisonment? Moral action is freely chosen action.

If Moore's goal is to help the less fortunate, he should preach voluntary charity instead of government action…

It would be interesting to know how much Moore donates to charity every year, but Stossel was too polite to ask.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:36 | link | comments (1)

Precise—and imprecise—parries: Incendiary medic Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, the “brains” behind al Qaeda, has released another of his entertaining audiotapes. In this one, which bears the catchy title “Malicious Britain and its Indian Slaves,” the Zee-Man (his Hip Hop name) warns that the holy warriors are readying “a very precise response” to Salman Rushdie’s knighthood. (Rushdie was born in India, hence the “Indian” reference.) Not surprisingly, the precise nature of the precise response wasn’t mentioned.

A spokesman for Britain’s new P.M. Gordon Brown, a man who is rather less precise in his responses, having shunned the already imprecise label “the war on terror” for fear of offending “moderate” true believers, was quick to respond to the toxic Doctor: “We will not allow terrorists to undermine the British way of life,” said the unnamed functionary.

 

IRA terrorists? Zen Buddhist terrorists? Pentecostal Christian terrorists? Imprecisely, the spokesman wouldn’t specify.

 

The U.K. Foreign Office, too, was quick to respond to the tape, insisting yet again that Rushdie was knighted solely for his literary achievements, and that the honour “was not intended as an insult to Islam or the Prophet Muhammad.”

 

A precise but pointless response, given that the Zee-Man hails from a part of the world whose “literature” consists primarily of Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Posted by: scaramouche at 09:39 | link | comments (2)

Down, boy!: As the owner of a rambunctious canine, I know that unless you repeatedly make clear to your dog who's the boss, he'll assume that he is, and make your life a living Hell. This Cox & Forkum 'toon is a good example of what I mean (even if the beast depicted looks feline):

Posted by: scaramouche at 22:19 | link | comments

A modest proposal: I was feeling rather dejected about the West’s chances of winning “the war on terror”—or what Britain’s new Prime Minister, not wishing to offend those who belong to the raindrops-on-roses-and-whiskers-on-kittens branch of Mo’s religion seems to want to call “the war against to whom it may concern”—when a certain Scots laddie dispelled my gloom. His name: John Smeaton. He’s the Glasgow taxi driver who, with nary a second thought, tackled the flaming medic who was trying to set an airport terminal on fire. Smeaton kicked the fiery jihadi in the nuggets, thereby rendering him incapable of hooking up any compliant virgins if and when he shuffles off this mortal coil. In so doing, Smeaton has single-handedly restored my faith in the West’s ability to fend off the jihad. While our elites may be in the grip of politically correct reveries that have turned them into geldings, there’s no way the Smeatons of the West are going to take the jihadis’ crap.

For that reason, I hereby nominate John Smeaton for the Nobel Peace Prize, because if we follow his example the jihadis will realize there’s no way they can prevail, and peace—true peace—will finally descend on our blighted planet.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:30 | link | comments (2)

The Ceeb sees the “virtue” in anti-vice: In a story about the storming of Islamabad’s Red Mosque and the subsequent killing of the jihadi cleric in charge of the rowdy bunch holding out inside, the imbeciles at the Ceeb put the following caption under the photo of the slain “militant”:

Cleric Abdul Rashid Ghazi, shown in March, was killed Tuesday as troops stormed Islamabad's Lal Masjid. He was one of the clerics leading Islamist students for months in a Taliban-style anti-vice campaign.

 

Yeah, because if there's one thing those Taliban-style clerics can't stand, it’s "vice". Using helpless women and kids as human shields and encouraging "students" to jump the queue into the Afterlife Whorehouse by eviscerating lots of civilians—no problemo. But vice—especially the “vice” of non-belief or insufficiently devout belief—that’s something they simply can't abide.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:45 | link | comments

The clash of civilizations, in a nutshell: If you run around on your wife in the U.S., you get to recount your sleazy exploits to the slavering masses via Jerry Springer or Maury Povich. If you engage in extra-curricular canoodling in Iran and are unfortunate enough to get caught, you get conked on the head with heavy stones until you’re dead.

All in all, I'll stick with the sleaze.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:19 | link | comments

A fly (more like a water buffalo) in the Peace in Our Times ointment: Farfour the jihadi Mouse is no more, but the indoctrination of Palestinian moppets continues unabated. As Itamar Marcus and Barbara Cook of Palestinian Media Watch report, the kidlets are still being exposed to TV messages calling for the extermination of the Jews—a pre-condition, it seems, for the much-anticipated Hour of the resurrection.  

Condi? Tony? Any thoughts on that?

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:07 | link | comments

Generic terror in the U.K.: Harry Potter hysteria is about to burst upon us once more—the latest movie is out this week and the final book in the series will be coming out soon. But for the Brits, Harry’s nemesis Voldemort isn’t the only enemy “who-must-not-be-named.” Melanie Phillips, one of the few dependable voices of sanity coming out of the U.K. these days, writes that affixing the proper name to the jihadist enemy is now similarly verboten. From USA Today:

Britain is now fighting a war it dares not name. The recent failed car bomb attacks on a London nightclub and Glasgow airport demonstrated once again that Britain is a principal target for al-Qaeda. But even now, the British response is dangerously confused.

After eight people in the medical profession were arrested over these attacks, there was widespread shock that those who cure should also want to kill. This naive and ahistorical reaction demonstrated yet again the extraordinary state of denial about the Islamist jihad. After all, Osama bin Laden's sidekick, Ayman al-Zawahri, is a doctor. So are other Islamist terrorists, including Mahmoud Zahar, the Hamas strongman in Gaza.

But because the deeply empirical British do not understand how religious fanaticism twists the human mind, they tell themselves that Islamic terrorism must be driven by rational grievances such as deprivation, "Islamophobia" or British foreign policy.

Many continue to believe that Britain is a target because of its involvement in Iraq. While the war is undoubtedly used to whip up hysteria in the Muslim world, the irrationality of believing that it is the cause of Islamic terror is clearly demonstrated by the fact that British Muslims who have been jailed for terrorist offenses were recruited even before 9/11. Al-Qaeda is also heavily engaged in places such as Indonesia or Africa, which have no connection to Iraq or the Middle East.

A global target

In Britain, all these grievance excuses are wearing very thin, thanks to the recent emergence of former jihadists who have renounced their extremism.

Ed Husain, in his book The Islamist, and another former radical, Hassan Butt, have made the case that the doctrines to which they once subscribed are rooted in nothing other than a fanatical desire to Islamize the world.

But while these courageous people are telling Britain that, far from being motivated by despair, Islamist terrorists kill as an act of religious exultation, the new prime minister, Gordon Brown, has banned his ministers from using the word "Muslim" — and presumably "Islamic" or "Islamist" — in connection with the terrorist crisis. He has also put an end to the phrase "war on terror."

Accordingly, in her statement to Parliament about the attacks, the new home secretary, Jacqui Smith, referred to them as "criminal" acts rather than Islamic terrorism and talked about "communities" that are involved rather than Muslims.

For those in the coalition of the willing who have been nervous about how Brown's leadership will differ from that of Tony Blair, such a signal is deeply alarming. How can Brown talk about winning a battle of ideas — when he is not even prepared to name the central idea that is driving the terrorism?

This is a disastrous misjudgment, and not merely because a society cannot possibly defend itself against a threat it is not even willing to identify. More seriously still, it means the British government is pandering to the refusal by most British Muslims to acknowledge that Islamist terrorism is rooted in their religion and that this is a problem with which they must themselves deal.

Because it is not enough for them to condemn terrorism. They must also repudiate, publicly and authoritatively, those parts of their religion that mandate hatred of the unbeliever and holy war. The Brown government's censorship of language lets them off that crucial hook and, by signaling its own moral and intellectual weakness, emboldens the radicals…

And, Allah knows, the radicals are already plenty bold and don’t need any more encouragement.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:46 | link | comments

I(ran) spy: The glorious Shia Republic has just announced the arrest of several more “spies” working for the West. From Radio Free Europe:

July 10, 2007 -- Iran has reportedly discovered five new espionage networks allegedly linked to Western intelligence services.

 

Iran's Fars and IRNA news agencies quoted the head of the intelligence service in the western province of Kermanshah as saying a total of 20 people have been arrested, including Iranians and foreigners.

 

The official, identified only as Karimi, said the alleged spies were trained for economic, military, political, cultural, and social espionage.

 

Tehran has previously accused the United States, Israel, and Britain of operating in Iran to destabilize the Islamic republic.

 

In May, Iran claimed spy networks with alleged links to U.S. agents in Iraq had been smashed in western, southwestern, and central Iran.

 

Tehran said the spy networks were supported by groups in Iraq with the aim of expanding their activities to five provinces in western and southwestern Iran and to the capital.

 

Also in May, Iran confirmed that charges had been filed alleging that three U.S.-Iranian citizens, including a journalist who works for the U.S. government-funded Radio Farda, acted against Iran's national security.

 

The two others are scholars Kian Tajbakhsh and Haleh Esfandiari.

 

In February, Iranian media quoted Intelligence Minister Gholamhussein Mohseni-Ejei as saying Iran has identified 100 spies working for the United States and Israel in border areas of Iran. The alleged spies intended to gain access to military and political information.

 

The minister added that a number of Iranians who sought to take part in espionage training abroad have also been arrested.

 

If I were going to be a spy, I think I’d be one of those “cultural and social” spies. It sounds kind of fun.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:11 | link | comments

The madness/Judenhass thinly disguised as concern over Palestinian “rights” continues: With flaming Muslims plotting to inflict massive casualties on the British populace, another British union has demonstrated its utter cluelessness about the global jihad by joining the boycott of one of the few impediments to the jihadists’ plans—the nefarious Jewish entity. From Islam Online:

LONDON — The British Transport and General Workers' Union (TGWU), one of Britain's largest trade associations, has decided to boycott all the products made in Israel in protest at the practices of the Israeli army in the occupied Palestinian territories.

"We send a message to the Israel state by our support for a boycott of Israeli products and goods," Barry Camfield, the union's assistant general secretary, told Agence France-Presse (AFP) Sunday night, July 8.

Nearly three-quarters of the 350-odd delegates who attended the union's annual conference last week voted in favor of the boycott motion.

They decision was not given much media coverage whether inside or outside Israel.

The TGWU is one of Britain's largest trade unions, representing some 800,000 members across the country.

The boycott decision came one month after another British trade union, UNISON, also decided to launch a consumer boycott of all the products made in Israel.

Israel's Histadrut labor federation responded with anger to the union's decision, vowing to cut ties with all groups that back boycott of Israel in Britain.

British calls for boycott of Israel over its practices in the occupied Palestinian territories have picked up steam recently.

Last month, Britain's largest association for professors and lecturers, the University and College Union (UCU), backed a call by Palestinian trade unions to boycott Israeli academic institutions.

In April, Britain's National Union of Journalists has voted in favor of a boycott of Israeli goods.

More than 100 British doctors have also called for a boycott of the Israeli Medical Association.

On May 28, Britain's Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine (APJP) blasted fellow professionals in Israel for participating in the Israeli construction projects on occupied Palestinian land…

How ‘bout a boycott “in protest at” the barbaric practices of Hamas and Fatah in unoccupied Gaza? I haven’t seen any evidence that the Israeli army has ever hurled people off roofs or gleefully and animalistically ripped apart corpses. Or how 'bout a boycott of Lebanon for abridging the "rights"--permanently--of all the Palestinian "refugees" killed at that Palestian "refuee camp"? Or how 'bout a boycott of Pakistan for storming a mosque and killing scores of "militants"? Or how 'bout boycotting Saudi Arabia for refusing entry to a Jewish tourist solely because she was Jewish? (A story you probably won't read about anywhere but here, since the woman, a raving moonbat who loves to visit Third World countries--her next jaunt will take in many of the hard-to-pronounce Islami-"stans"--is a childhood friend of my mother's, and my mother only told me the Saudi Arabia story yesterday.)

 

But I guess, for the terminally clueless, all that pales in comparison to the heinous practices of the Jewish brutes.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:48 | link | comments (4)

High times: There’s a reason why Canadians seem so much mellower than other folks—we’re the Cheech and Chong of the developed world. From Canada.com:

OTTAWA — Marijuana use in Canada is the highest in the industrialized world, far higher than in the Netherlands where it’s legal, and more than four times the global rate, a report by the United Nations has found.

The report also says cannabis use around the world appears to have stabilized and appears to be declining in North America. A plunge in use by Ontario high school students was cited as a factor in the trend.

The world drug-use study by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime said that 16.8 per cent of Canadians aged 15 to 64 smoked marijuana or used other cannabis products in 2004, the most recent year for which statistics were cited.

Marijuana possession remains illegal in Canada, despite years of recommendations by parliamentarians to decriminalize it. As a result, tens of thousands of people have criminal records for possession.

The study, using the most recent statistics collected from each country — although some dated back almost a decade — estimated that 3.8 per cent of the world’s population aged 15 to 64 used cannabis in 2005.  That was about 159 million people, down slightly from 162 million the previous year.

The data show Canadian usage fifth after Zambia (17.7 per cent in 2003), Ghana (21.5 per cent in 1998) and Papua New Guinea and Micronesia tied for first place at 29 per cent each in 1995.

The Canadian statistics compared to 2005 rates of 8.7 per cent in England and Wales, 12.6 per cent in the United States, 8.5 per cent in Israel; 10.7 per cent in Jamaica (2001), and 6.1 per cent in the Netherlands (2001), where it is legal to buy and sell marijuana for personal use.

In some countries in East and Southeast Asia, such as Korea and Singapore, and in the Middle East, such as Oman and Qatar, cannabis use is negligible.

The report said cannabis comprises, by far, the largest illicit drug market on the planet…

Illicit, shmillicit: we want our weed.

 

And here I thought we were blissed out from the effects of living in a multiculti Trudeaupia.

Posted by: scaramouche at 09:32 | link | comments

Mush for brains: Want to know why so many Americans have such a hard time answering some seemingly basic questions. As eminent classicist Victor Davis Hanson explains, it’s because sometime during the late 1960s, universities got rid of hard knowledge and exchanged it for pablum and preachy uplift. The result: too many Americans have mushy brains. From The American:

Is “ho”—the rapper slang for the slur “whore”—a bad word? Always, sometimes, or just when an obnoxious white male like Don Imus says it? But not when the equally obnoxious Snoop Dogg serially employs it?

Is the Iraq war, as we are often told, the “greatest mistake” in our nation’s history?

Because Israel and the United States have a bomb, is it then O.K. for theocratic Iran to have one too?

Americans increasingly cannot seem to answer questions like these adequately because they are blissfully uneducated. They have not acquired a broad knowledge of language, literature, philosophy, and history.

Instead, our youth for a generation have been fed a “Studies” curriculum. Fill in the blanks: Women’s Studies, Gay Studies, Environmental Studies, Peace Studies, Chicano Studies, Film Studies, and so on. These courses aim to indoctrinate students about perceived pathologies in contemporary American culture—specifically, race, class, gender, and environmental oppression.

Such courses are by design deductive. The student is expected to arrive at the instructor’s own preconceived conclusions. The courses are also captives of the present—hostages of the contemporary media and popular culture from which they draw their information and earn their relevance.

The theme of all such therapeutic curricula is relativism. There are no eternal truths, only passing assertions that gain credence through power and authority. Once students understand how gender, race, and class distinctions are used to oppress others, they are then free to ignore absolute “truth,” since it is only a reflection of one’s own privilege.

By contrast, the aim of traditional education was to prepare a student in two very different ways. First, classes offered information drawn from the ages—the significance of Gettysburg, the characters in a Shakespeare play, or the nature of the subjunctive mood. Integral to this acquisition were key dates, facts, names, and terms by which students, in a focused manner in conversation and speech, could refer to the broad knowledge that they had gathered.

Second, traditional education taught a method of inductive inquiry. Vocabulary, grammar, syntax, logic, and rhetoric were tools to be used by a student, drawing on an accumulated storehouse of information, to present well-reasoned opinions—the ideology of which was largely irrelevant to professors and the university.

Sometime in the 1960s—perhaps due to frustration over the Vietnam War, perhaps as a manifestation of the cultural transformations of the age—the university jettisoned the classical approach and adopted the therapeutic…

Therapy has its place—but it’s not in the classroom, mostly because it turns people’s brains to mush. And while the mush-brained can be sweet as pie and make for amiable companions, they are, in a word, clueless. So even if they wanted to take time out from saving the world by shutting off lights and bowing down to the Great God Gore (pbuh) to read up on the jihad imperative, it’s unlikely that many would be able to absorb the truth.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:20 | link | comments (1)

Socialized medicine and flaming foreign doctors: Michael Moore’s flicko Sicko is predicated on the notion that socialized medicine as long practiced in Cuba, Canada and the U.K. is far more preferable than the hit-or-miss unsocialized health care Americans receive. Mark Steyn explains why such an assertion is un-Moored to reality, and why the Brits are now paying an exorbitant social cost for this kind of medical service. From the New York Sun:

…Does government health care inevitably lead to homicidal doctors who can't wait to leap into a flaming SUV and drive it through the check-in counter? No. But government health care does lead to a dependence on medical staff imported from other countries.

Some 40% of Britain's practicing doctors were trained overseas — and that percentage will increase, as older native doctors retire and younger immigrant doctors take their place: According to the BBC, "Over two-thirds of doctors registering to practise in the U.K. in 2003 were from overseas — the vast majority from non-European countries." Five of the eight arrested are Arab Muslims, the other three Indian Muslims. Bilal Abdulla, the Wahhabi driver of the incendiary Jeep and a doctor at the Royal Alexandra Hospital near Glasgow, is one of over 2,000 Iraqi doctors working in Britain. Many of these imported medical staff have never practiced in their own countries. As soon as they complete their training, they move to a western world hungry for doctors to prop up their understaffed health systems: Dr. Abdulla got his medical qualification in Baghdad in 2004 and was practicing in Britain by 2006. His co-plotter, Mohammed Asha, a neurosurgeon, graduated in Jordan in 2004 and came to England the same year.

When the President talks about needing immigrants to do "the jobs Americans won't do," most of us assume he means seasonal fruit pickers and the maid who turns down your hotel bed and leaves the little chocolate on it. But in the United Kingdom the jobs Britons won't do has somehow come to encompass the medical profession. Aneurin Bevan, the socialist who created the National Health Service after the Second World War, was once asked to explain how he'd talked the country's doctors into agreeing to become state employees: "I stuffed their mouths with gold," he crowed. Sixty years ago, no amount of gold can persuade Britons to spend their working lives in the country's dirty decrepit hospitals (they spend enough of their non-working lives there, waiting to be seen, waiting for beds, waiting for operations). According to a report in The British Medical Journal, white males comprise 43.5% of the population but now account for less than a quarter of students at U.K. medical schools: in other words, being a doctor is no longer an attractive middle-class career proposition. That's quite a monument to six decades of Michael Moore-style socialist health care…

None of this detracts, of course, from the “hilarity” of Moore’s film—another of his self-righteous, self-important exercises in manipulation, distortion and lefty mishegas.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:14 | link | comments

Arab News views: The Saudi Wahhabists have probably done the most to further the cause of Islamic supremacism around the world, but since they’re ostensibly onside in “the war on terror,” they are compelled to at least pay lip service to it whenever a testy terrorist takes jihadism to heart. Hence this rather tepid editorial in Arab News, a house organ of the oily Royals, that flogs the would-be terrorists with a soggy pita, meanwhile chastising the infidels for daring to fight back and thereby driving mild-mannered Muslims into a life of extremism:

In Britain, counterterrorism agents have foiled several attacks since 7/7. A trans-Atlantic airliner plot last August in which a group planned to blow up as many as 10 airplanes was prevented by a string of arrests, and the most recent failed car bomb attacks in London and Glasgow. Terrorism has no deadline. That the new UK Security Minister Sir Alan West gave it one — that the battle against the threat posed by Islamist extremism could last 15 years — does not mean 2022 will be the cut-off date.

What we can say for sure is that, even if it doesn’t end then, terrorism changes lives and lifestyles. Although the UK has lowered its terror-threat level from “critical” to “severe”, the country remains at a very high level of vigilance. Prime Minister Gordon Brown laid flowers outside one of the train stations hit two years ago in the suicide bombings. He has also laid down the gauntlet. Nobody believes in sweeping curbs on individual liberties in a misguided attempt to appear tough on terrorism. It is through intelligence and police work that threats will be contained. At the same time, the fight will not be won by giving the authorities blanket powers to detain suspects. A draconian crackdown risks alienating the very communities whose cooperation everyone needs.

The danger of stereotyping Muslims is clear. Just as the fact that the London underground bombers were British-born Muslims should not reflect on the vast majority of law-abiding Muslims in Britain or anywhere else. Would terrorism have vanished if the US had not invaded Afghanistan and Iraq or if Palestinians had an independent home to live in? No one can say for sure, but the radicalism of such hot spots is surely an instigator and a breeder of terrorism. These “hot” regions provide the motive to breach the law and violate society’s norms.

Terrorists and those who support them firmly believe that it is the very societal norms in Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan that have been violated to the hilt and so take it upon themselves to take extreme measures to combat extreme situations. They end lives, maim them, and change them. For whatever reasons they have, terrorists seek to destroy an entire way of life. At times they succeed, at others they don’t. But they always keep reminding us that they could.

Odd how these terrorists, for whatever reasons, are just as keen to wreak havoc on the Kingdom ruled by the man Arab News describes as “the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques”—a man who presides over one of the most draconian regimes on the planet. However, for obvious reasons, no explanation about this apparent anomaly seems to be forthcoming from the Arab News editorialist.

 

In another link, two Arab News scribes attempt to sort out the confusion about that “clash of civilizations” we’ve heard so much about—a concept they deem “simplistic”:

BEIRUT/BRUSSELS, 9 July 2007 — While watching media coverage of controversial issues and bloody conflicts taking place between the West and the Arab/Muslim world, one may think that two kinds of human beings exist on the globe.

On one side, people might seem to be lovers of life, peace and prosperity. On the other side, people might seem to cultivate a taste for death, martyrdom and violence.

To what extent is this assertion simplistic? A few months ago, people in war-torn Iraq, the most striking example of violence of our time, took to the streets to cheer — not for their Sunni, Shiite or Kurd leaders but for their young “Mesopotamian” singer Chaza Hassoun, who won the Arabic version of “Star Academy” (an international reality television show). In this simple yet interesting act, Iraqis declared their love for life and their ability to find common ground despite the divisions.

In fact, people all around the world generally share common values. As the American journalist Linda Ellerbee states: “People are pretty much alike. It’s only that our differences are more susceptible to definition than our similarities.” Indeed, we all care for our line of descent by protecting our children; we all desire to be treated with dignity and to have a prosperous life; and, unfortunately, we all tend to do harm to others for a variety of reasons.

Furthermore, globalization has brought our world closer. Although increased interaction can be featured negatively, as in the case of hatred-oriented websites such as anti-Arab or anti-Zionist sites, the similarities between people also becomes clearer. For example, looking at online blogs and shared spaces, it becomes obvious that young people around the world care about their education, hope to find suitable jobs and have in one way or another the same aspirations vis-à-vis their future. Even the youth who surf hate-based websites or join, for instance, a pro-Hezbollah group (a party viewed as terrorist in most Western countries) on the shared website Facebook also share interests in music and books and similar social activities with other young people.

In that regard, it becomes a bit puzzling to talk about people with conflicting cultures, religions or “civilizations”.

Conflicts in the world arise from our tendency to react to harm “the other” when one’s survival is threatened or when one’s dignity is not recognized. We, as young people, have two options before us: We can either continue on the path of our ancestors, developing ways to fight each other and becoming the “puppets” or “hostages” of political movements; or we can use the opportunities we have and choose the great challenge of experiencing “a brave new world”.

Whatever our culture is, lasting and anchored habits of dialogue learned at a young age have a greater chance of becoming lifelong habits. In this regard, many of us have in mind working-class neighborhoods in European, North African or American states, where children from various backgrounds live, play and grow together in peaceful settings. However, it is time for all youth to be empowered to learn about and interact with other societies.

How can this be achieved? The answer lies in focusing on human value and all its facets from childhood onward, in understanding thoroughly what it means to be human. By doing so, we begin to gain a deeper understanding of ourselves, of the cultural, social, and religious dimensions determining the way we define our identity, thus leading us in turn to understand “the other” and see how similar we are in our shared humanity.

In situations of conflict, youth are under the influence of divisive ideas and extreme opinions. In situations of poverty, young people often do not have access to information about, or exchange with, foreign cultures. They might view Western or Arab societies as “enemies” since “the other” values and religious symbols are not always compatible with their way of life.

In these situations, youth often become an easy target for propaganda and can be manipulated by all types of movements and radicalism. That’s why young people must be provided with the proper tools enabling them to gain genuine keys of understanding of each other. Such tools can be acquired through education that is truly centered on human values and human rights. This education would be inclusive, open to people of different cultures and religions, leading to an enlightened generation of autonomous people capable of critical analysis, understanding and pro-active initiatives…

Unfortunately, this enlightened instruction is likely to butt up against the exclusive, unenlightened education that has turned a generation of autonomous young Muslims into a bunch of automatons incapable of independent thought—the result of their being indoctrinated (the opposite of educated) in Saudi-funded madrassas around the globe.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:00 | link | comments

Out of date: The head of Interpol thinks he knows why British authorities are having so much trouble keeping tabs on the jihadists—their anti-terrorist efforts are not au courant. From AP via the Toronto Star:

LONDON – The head of Interpol said Monday that Britain's anti-terrorist efforts are "in the wrong century," pointing out that authorities in London had not shared any information from the investigation of three failed car bomb attacks and had not made good use of a passport database.

 

"We have received not one name, not one fingerprint, not one telephone number, not one address, nothing, from the U.K., about the recent thwarted terrorist attacks," Ronald Noble, Interpol's secretary general, said in an interview with British Broadcasting Corp. television.

 

"My view is that the U.K.'s anti-terrorist effort is in the wrong century," Noble said…

 

Noble didn’t venture which century he thought U.K. anti-terrorist efforts were in, but, funnily enough, the jihadists are in the wrong century, too—the 7^th.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:23 | link | comments

A snitch in time: British authorities now realize that it’s going to be virtually impossible to get a handle on this jihad thing without the assistance of ordinary Muslim Brits. From the Times Online:

Police must develop a network of Muslim spies to gather intelligence on terror suspects plotting attacks in Britain, the former head of MI5 has recommended.

Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller’s demand comes as the country’s new Security Minister urged the public to “grass” on individuals about whom they have suspicions.

An MI5 map indicating the extent of terror networks has been circulated to all police forces in the country.

The terror hot spot is the West Midlands, with about 80 suspected terror networks under surveillance by MI5 and the police, according to security sources yesterday.

The conurbation, centred on Birmingham, has more than double the number in London, where 35 networks are being monitored.

Other areas highlighted are Leeds and Bradford, the Manchester area and Merseyside. There is a total of 219 suspected terror networks in Britain.

Dame Eliza, who retired as head of MI5 this year, said there was a “pressing demand” for the police to create a network of spies from within the Muslim population to help to gather intelligence on suspects and plots.

She said that the networks “scattered across the country” are thought to be plotting up to 30 attacks at any one time.

Her comments, written before she retired but published recently in Policing: A Journal of Policing and Practice, indicate the difficulties the police face in getting information from within the Muslim community.

Yesterday the Government’s new Security Minister also called for people to inform on their neighbours if they had suspicions about terror attacks.

Sir Alan West, the former First Sea Lord who is now security minister in the Home Office, also warned that Britain faces a 15-year battle to tackle the radicalisation of young Muslims.

Britain faced a threat from a “disparate core” of “racist” people, often based abroad, who wanted power, he told The Sunday Telegraph.

He said that preventing people being recruited to extremism was central to beating terrorism and called for some unBritish “snitching” from the public to help the cause.

“This is not a quick thing. I believe it will take 10 to 15 years. But I believe it can be done as long as we as a nation apply ourselves to it and it’s done across the board.”

He added: “Britishness does not normally involve snitching or talking about someone. I’m afraid, in this situation, anyone who’s got any information should say something because the people we are talking about are trying to destroy our entire way of life.

“We’ll have to be a little bit unBritish, I think . . . and say something and tell something.”…

The fact that Sir Alan can’t even bring himself to utter the words “Islam” or “jihad” and sees it as a matter of foreigners' “racism” inspires absolutely no confidence that he comprehends what he’s dealing with—or will be able to do anything about it.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:10 | link | comments

The upside of foot-shooting: With socialized health care and a shortage of qualified physicians, Canada is more or less in the same boat as the Brits. There’s one big difference, however. While the Brits have—or had—that program to fast-track foreign doctors and set them up in practice post haste, Canada has yet to adopt the same approach. Prior to the flaming physicians incident, the crunch had often prompted calls for Canada to recognize the credentials of foreign doctors—as in this 2004 article from the Canadian edition of Reader’s Digest:

…Admitting qualified doctors makes economic sense. If a foreign-trained doctor requires additional training to come up to Canadian standards, it is far cheaper to provide it than to educate a doctor entirely from scratch. Herb Emery, an associate professor of economics at the University of Calgary, says it costs Alberta taxpayers about $300,000 to put a student through three years of medical school. This would be saved if immigrants who already have medical degrees were accepted for residencies.

Joan Atlin, executive director of the Association of International Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario, estimates that Ontario has between 2,000 and 4,000 immigrant doctors looking for a practice. “Doctors are coming with thousands of dollars of training and experience in their pockets,” says Atlin. “They have a right to be assessed, and if found to be qualified, they should be allowed to practise their profession.”

Patrick Coady, co-ordinator of a group that assists the Association of International Medical Doctors of British Columbia, agrees. “We have people who have been the heads of emergency medicine in hospitals servicing a population of a million, anesthetists who have been practising for 20 years. After they pass all the exams, go through all the hoops, they can’t even mop a floor in a hospital let alone work as a medical professional.”

Vancouver MP Dr. Hedy Fry, a medical doctor and the parliamentary secretary to Citizenship and Immigration Minister Judy Sgro, believes that we have to look at fast-tracking. “Do we always have to have doctors come in and spend a year in residency?” she asks. “When do we start valuing foreign experience? Europe is ahead of us on this. You can be trained in Italy and work in the United Kingdom. We’re lagging.”

The Medical Council of Canada’s Dr. Dale Dauphinee is more blunt: “We are shooting ourselves in the foot.”

In retrospect, shooting ourselves in the foot turns out to have been a much wiser policy than putting a bunch of seething, un-Hypocratic jihadis on the fast-track.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:42 | link | comments

Hagiography and iconoclasm: Roger Cohen in a cover story in the Sunday New York Times Magazine pumps up feckless Olmert underling, Tzipi Livni. Jerry Gordon on the American Thinker site takes a sharp pin and deflates it.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:58 | link | comments

Neighbourly concerns: In the aftermath of the failed terror attack on the Glasgow airport terminal, Muslims in that city are concerned about, you guessed it, a “backlash.” From AP via the Toronto Star:

GLASGOW–In the entire row of stores, the only one targeted – the one that still smells of smoke – is owned by a man of Pakistani descent.

Shafiq Ahmed said vandals rammed a car into his "One Stop Shop" convenience store, then set a fire – an assault disturbingly reminiscent of the attempted terror attack days earlier on the airport of this gritty Scottish city.

Police are investigating the attack and others as part of an apparent backlash against Glasgow's Muslims since the failed airport assault and attempted car bombings in London.

At least 24 incidents are being probed, from graffiti on a mosque to firebombed businesses.

As he cleaned the soot from his charred store, Ahmed, who moved to Britain as an infant, hoped the attack on his family business wasn't racially motivated. After 30 peaceful years in Scotland, the idea that some may no longer welcome him and his Scottish-born children is highly uncomfortable.

"I haven't got words to describe it. I'm hoping it's not retaliation," Ahmed, 41, said yesterday in a thick Glasgow accent. "It's a shame to think you can't work with people and enjoy the company of people and instead have to worry."…

Funny, that’s probably what the non-Muslim residents of Glasgow (and the rest of the U.K.) have been thinking, too.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:28 | link | comments

Let freedom sing: In the estimable tradition of Live Aid, a concert extravaganza intended to raise funds to feed starving people in Africa and Live Earth, a concert extravaganza intended to raise funds to cool down our overheated planet, I am delighted to announce the next big thing on the concert extravaganza scene: Live Harb.

To be broadcast live from various sites in the World of War (dar al-Harb), including Glasgow, where infidels have no patience for flaming lunatics who despise Western freedom, Live Harb will raise funds to cool down overheated jihadists and their incendiary rhetoric. And because I have an “in” with the organizers, I was able to score a preview of the Live Harb theme song. It’s an update of the Live Aid smasheroo, “We Are The World.” Here’s the chorus:

We are the Harb.

We are the kaffirs.

We are the ones who reject sharia—

We’re the rebuffers.

There’s a choice we’re makin’

We’re savin’ our own world.

So you can take your caliphate

And stick it in your ear.

                                

Everybody!

Posted by: scaramouche at 09:24 | link | comments

World of wonders