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

A delectable rant: As a connoisseur of totalitarian propaganda and bafflegab—the two usually go hand in hand—I found the following overheated condemnation of Tiny Hitler’s cool reception at Columbia to be especially yummy. From the Tehran Times:

Columbia school of scandal
By Ismail Salami

TEHRAN (Press TV) -- It is widely believed that a university is the bastion that houses the best and the greatest of minds and that which produces future leaders.

Yet, the belief was ruefully shattered on Monday September 24 when Mr. Lee Bollinger, the president of Columbia University proved to the world that a prestigious institute of higher education like Columbia can harbor a man of crooked mindset as the president who can be easily used as a puppet in the hands of those who dictate to him what he should or should not say.

Bollinger, a U.S. Constitution scholar who has led Columbia since 2002, said the university encourages free speech and said bald-facedly, “Let's, then, be clear at the beginning, Mr. President. You exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator.” Had he invited the president with the intention of lambasting him? Was the invitation not a mockery of his own rhetoric of free speech? Or was it a mockery of American democracy and free speech?

Was he talking as a world leader to another leader who represents a nation? Did he really contemplate the consequences of his affront and contumely? Did he know that his insult to the president would not only target him but recoil against an entire nation whom he represents?

The fact that Bollinger had invited President Ahmadinejad required him to treat the president with respect and hospitality. However, his attitude was a far cry from hospitality. Instead, Bollinger was discourteous and boorish in manners. In fact, he had an opportunity to show to Iranian people, their president and the whole world what American democracy and free speech really meant. Yet, he squandered the excellent opportunity and helped further tarnish the image of Uncle Sam.

Mr. Bollinger's vitriolic and uncalled for introduction could have been a prelude to further insults if President Ahmadinejad had not shown a great degree of composure and magnanimity.

As a sophisticated person, Bollinger could have used a softer tone and said, “Mr. President, we welcome you here. You represent a land with a great civilization and culture. You come from the land of Cyrus the Great who formulated the first charter on human rights. Since we have some questions on our minds to which we fail to find convincing answers, we beg your permission to let us ask the questions which have long been lingering in our minds. We really hope you will answer them.”

Poor Mr. Bollinger actually played more the part of a neocon than president of a distinguished university did. He was surely put under a lot of pressure by the propagandists and thought police of the American right wing. The plain truth is that an invited Muslim leader was affronted by an academician in a Christian land where love and respect are considered as the most sublime values. This is the way the values are tailored to suit the interests of a police regime.

Brainwashed by the American thought police, he leveled an improper, indecent and unprofessional attack on the Iranian president. The New York Times even praised Bollinger as a paragon of democratic values for his impertinent behavior, writing that he “defended the event as in the best tradition of America's free speech.” American free speech indeed!...

And by “American free speech” the splenetic Shia is obviously referring to the “freedom” to act like a sycophantic toady—just like they do over there in Iran.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:49 | link | comments (2)

Talk is cheap: Mark Steyn, a man who’s much too smart to be a politician or a New York Times pundit, explains the essential difference between democracies and Ahmadinejad—the former are talkers; the latter’s a doer. From the OC Register:

…Lots of prime ministers and diplomats accepted invitations to meet with Hitler, and generally the meetings went very well – except for one occasion when Lord Halifax, the British foreign secretary, was greeted by the little chap with the mustache, mistook him for the butler, and handed him his coat. But even that faux pas is a testament to how normal thugs can appear in social situations. Civilized nations like chit-chatting, having tea, holding debates, talking talking talking. Tyrannies like terrorizing people, torturing people, murdering people, doing doing doing. It's easier for the doers to pass themselves off as talkers then for the talkers to rouse themselves to do anything.

As witness this last week. Lee Bollinger, the president of Columbia University, was evidently taken aback by the criticism he got for inviting Ahmadinejad and so found himself backed into what, for a conventional soft-leftie of academe, was a ferocious denunciation of his star guest, dwelling at length on Iran's persecution of minorities, murder of dissidents, sponsorship of terrorism, nuclear ambitions, genocidal threats toward Israel, etc. For a warmup act, Bollinger pretty much frosted up the joint. The Iranian leader sat through the intro with a plastic smile, and then said: "I shall not begin by being affected by this unfriendly treatment." He offered many illuminating insights: There are, he declared, no homosexuals in Iran. Not one. Where are they? On a weekend visit to Kandahar to see the new production of "Mame"? Alas, there was no time for follow-up questions.

And afterwards Bollinger got raves even from the right for "speaking truth to power." But so what? It's like Noel Coward delivering a series of devastating put-downs to Hitler. The Fuhrer's mad as hell but at the end of the afternoon he goes back to killing, and dear Noel goes back to singing "The Stately Homes Of England." Ahmadinejad goes back to doing – to persecuting, to murdering, to terrorizing, to nuclearizing – and Bollinger cuts out his press clippings and puts them on the fridge.

The other day, National Review's Jay Nordlinger was musing about our habit of referring to some benighted part of the world's "humanitarian needs" and wondered when we'd stopped using the term "human needs," which is, after all, what food, water and shelter are. And his readers wrote in to state the obvious: That "humanitarian" label gives top billing not to the distant, Third World victim but the generous Western donor – the "humanitarian" relief effort, the "humanitarian" organizations, the NGOs, the Western charities: It's about us, not them. Bill Clinton's new bestseller on charity is called "Giving" – because it's better to give than to receive, and that's certainly true if the giver is busying himself with some ineffectual feel-good "Save Darfur" fundraiser while the recipient is on the receiving end of the Janjaweed's machetes. The Sudanese government appreciates that, as long as we're allowed to feel good about ourselves and to participate in "humanitarian relief," the killing can go on until there's no one left to kill. Likewise, Ahmadinejad knows that, as along as we're allowed to do what we do best – talk and talk and talk, whether at Columbia or in EU negotiations – his regime can quietly get on with its nuclear program.

These men understand the self-absorption of advanced democracies. The difference between Winston Churchill and Ward Churchill, another famous beneficiary of "academic freedom" who called the 9/11 dead "little Eichmanns," is that for Sir Winston talking was a call to action while for poseurs like professor Churchill it's a substitute for it.

The pen is not mightier than the sword if your enemy is confident you will never use anything other than your pen. Sometimes it's not about "freedom of speech," but about freedom. Ask an Iranian homosexual. If you can find one.

Like finding a needle in a haystack, since, in der Shialand, friends of Dorothy are being tortured and exterminated, ruby slippers and all.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:08 | link | comments

Speak for yourself, Tom: The New York Times’s pundit di tutti pundits, Thomas L. Friedman, opines that 9/11 made us stupid.

Au contraire, Tom. 9/11 woke up lots of folks but, sadly, not those (like you) who've made a choice to remain in the dark about the existential threat posed by the ardent souls who heed the eternal, seductive call of the jihad imperative:

...I’d love to see us salvage something decent in Iraq that might help tilt the Middle East onto a more progressive pathway. That was and is necessary to improve our security. But sometimes the necessary is impossible — and we just can’t keep chasing that rainbow this way.

Look at our infrastructure. It’s not just the bridge that fell in my hometown, Minneapolis. Fly from Zurich’s ultramodern airport to La Guardia’s dump. It is like flying from the Jetsons to the Flintstones. I still can’t get uninterrupted cellphone service between my home in Bethesda and my office in D.C. But I recently bought a pocket cellphone at the Beijing airport and immediately called my wife in Bethesda — crystal clear.

I just attended the China clean car conference, where Chinese automakers were boasting that their 2008 cars will meet “Euro 4” — European Union — emissions standards. We used to be the gold standard. We aren’t anymore. Last July, Microsoft, fed up with American restrictions on importing brain talent, opened its newest software development center in Vancouver. That’s in Canada, folks. If Disney World can remain an open, welcoming place, with increased but invisible security, why can’t America?

We can’t afford to keep being this stupid! We have got to get our groove back. We need a president who will unite us around a common purpose, not a common enemy. Al Qaeda is about 9/11. We are about 9/12, we are about the Fourth of July — which is why I hope that anyone who runs on the 9/11 platform gets trounced.

Poor Tom. Still stupid (and a really crappy writer) after all these years.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:22 | link | comments

I heart John Bolton: A great man, Churchillian in his vision, but one who could never be a politician in our era because he is compelled to tell the unvarnished, unshaded, unadulterated truth. From the Guardian:

John Bolton, the former US ambassador to the United Nations, told Tory delegates today that efforts by the UK and the EU to negotiate with Iran had failed and that he saw no alternative to a pre-emptive strike on suspected nuclear facilities in the country.

Mr Bolton, who was addressing a fringe meeting organised by Lord (Michael) Ancram, said that the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was "pushing out" and "is not receiving adequate push-back" from the west.

"I don't think the use of military force is an attractive option, but I would tell you I don't know what the alternative is.

"Because life is about choices, I think we have to consider the use of military force. I think we have to look at a limited strike against their nuclear facilities."

He added that any strike should be followed by an attempt to remove the "source of the problem", Mr Ahmadinejad.

"If we were to strike Iran it should be accompanied by an effort at regime change ... The US once had the capability to engineer the clandestine overthrow of governments. I wish we could get it back."

The fact that intelligence about Iran's nuclear activity was partial should not be used as an excuse not to act, Mr Bolton insisted.

"Intelligence can be wrong in more than one direction." He asked how the British government would respond if terrorists exploded a nuclear device at home. "'It's only Manchester?' ... Responding after they're used is unacceptable."

Mr Bolton, now a fellow at the conservative thinktank the American Enterprise Institute and the author of a forthcoming book called Surrender is Not an Option, was applauded by delegates when he described the UN as "fundamentally irrelevant".

Defending the decision to invade Iraq, he mocked the Foreign Office's "softly softly" approach to Iran's imprisonment of 15 British sailors accused of straying into Iranian waters in April this year.

They were released after Mr Ahmadinejad announced he was making a "gift" to the British people. "They [Iran] got no response from the UK or the US. If you were the Iranian leader, what conclusion do you draw?"

Mr Bolton said he did not really want "to get into the specifics of your own internal politics here" and made no comment on David Cameron's foreign policy. But he said that Gordon Brown's performance under pressure had not been tested and he hoped that Britain would not withdraw from Iraq.

"There is too much of a view in Europe that you have passed beyond history," Mr Bolton told delegates. "That everything can be worked out by negotiation ... Democrats or Republicans, we [Americans] don't see it that way."

However, he praised the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, and his forthright criticism of Iran in recent weeks.

Raising the spectre of George Bush's "axis of evil", Mr Bolton said that Kim Jong-il's regime in North Korea was akin to a "prison camp" and that he would "sell anything to anyone".

Those who thought North Korea would give up its nuclear capability voluntarily were wrong, he said.

The regime had made similar promises during the past decade. Only reunification between North and South Korea could resolve the problem. That could be achieved "if China were to get serious" and cut off fuel supplies to Mr Kim, but the country feared a reunited Korea.

Mr Bolton told an inquiring delegate that he was not and had never been a neoconservative: "I'm not even a Reagan conservative. I'm a [Barry] Goldwater conservative. They [neocons] have somewhat - I would say excessively - Wilsonian views about the benefits of democracy."

However, the threat to world peace did not come from neoconservatives but from the perception that "we have passed beyond history", he said…

If John Bolton’s a Goldwater conservative then, by gum, so am I.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:50 | link | comments

Deadly fairy tales: The always perceptive Diana West describes what happens when people succumb to the soothing pieties of moral relativism: the clueless idiots think the Three Bears’ point of view is as equally valid as Goldilocks’s--and may, in fact, be more valid, since Goldilocks hails from an imperialist, coloniolist, Zionist hegemon. From the Washington Times:

Some years ago, when our teenagers were tots, my husband and I took them to a puppet version of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears." Or was that "The Three Bears and Goldilocks"? Turns out, we were seeing "the other side" of the old story. Here, Goldilocks was no wandering lass improbably meeting up with an even more improbable household of bears, but a human interloper vandalizing the home of her fellow mammals.

 

When the bears came home from their walk, happened upon Goldilocks' mischief and chased her out of the house, they were acting in fright, not anger, and had no thought of, say, devouring the heroine — which is often the conventionally climactic possibility in this and other such fairy tales. The puppets made it clear that the whole incident resulted from a lack of communication. Everyone — bears, children — should listen to one another because, as the puppets sang in conclusion, "there are two sides to every story."

 

This really burned me up, naturally. First, the kids in the theater were too young to have their Goldilocks narrative down pat and, therefore too young to have it messed with. And who did these puppeteers think they were injecting a dose of moral relativism into age-old tales? It's not that Goldilocks is a rallying figure exactly, but there's a disconnect here. For kids still grappling with moral absolutes known as right and wrong, it's very confusing to contend with the "alternate" message: essentially, that there is right and right again. For the preschoolers in the audience, this was just the beginning of their postmodern education.

 

It's no coincidence that this anecdote comes up in the aftermath of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's obscene caper across New York City — from Columbia University (with a threatened detour to Ground Zero), to the United Nations and to the Intercontinental Hotel where he hosted a dinner for 50 American guests from academia and the media. The same childlike ethos of right and right again — moral relativism — of the PC puppet show was the institutional rationale that permitted Mr. Ahmadinejad's terrible PR triumph over America. I fear it has only convinced him that he can win more.

 

He came, he raved, he hosted the media. Question: Couldn't cable stars Brian Williams and Christiane Amanpour and Time magazine's Richard Stengel and whoever else supped with Iran's jihadist-in-chief have told him, if not where to go, that they had to wash their hair? Alas, no. No one in charge, not the president, not the State Department, not Columbia, not the media, could think of a single reason to say no to this thug — this sworn enemy of our country fighting a covert war against U.S. troops in Iraq, this largest sponsor of terrorism in the world, this Holocaust-denier seeking the nuclear tools for another Holocaust —and deny him an American showcase on the world stage.

 

That's because they don't know a single reason. Decades of multiculturalism, positing that all cultures are equally valuable, except, of course, for Western culture, which is the pits, have undermined our ability to make distinctions, to understand that being open to everything — like Mr. Ahmadinejad — is not the same as preserving a tolerant society. "If we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant," Karl Popper wrote, "then the tolerant will be destroyed and tolerance with them."…

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

Wake us up before you blow blow: After a disasterous performance at the MTV Awards, flabby has-been slattern Britney Spears is trying to get her self-torpedoed career back on track (to mix a metaphor). Here she is singing a new version of the hit that propelled her to fame all those years ago. To appeal to the largest possible audience, Britney's words reflect the mindset of the clueless, craven, appeasing majority:

Oh, Mahmoud baby

How were we supposed to know

That something wasn’t right here?

Oh, Mahmoud baby

We shouldn’t have let you crow.

We shoulda been much brighter.

 

Show us that you are a threat now

Make us all regret how we ignored it.

Because…

Our cluelessness is killing us.

And you don't seem so ominous.

IAEA’s ElBaradai says, “Show me a sign.

Nuke me, Mahmoud one more time.”

 

Oh, Mahmoud baby

You’re petty, short  and ‘foonish

So you don’t really scare us.

Oh, Mahmoud baby

Although you’re kinda goonish

We’ll let you rant and dare us.

Shake us out of our deep slumber

Make us take a number

While your boys prepare for "five, four, three, two, one..."

'Cause..

Our cluelessness is killing us.

And you don't seem so ominous.

The MSM, most all of them, say, “Give us a sign.

Nuke us, Mahmoud one more time.”...

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:00 | link | comments

A seemingly solitary voice of reason: Back in the days of the seeth-a-thon following a Danish newspaper’s publication of Prophet ‘toons, I had a heated exchange with a high-ranking member of the Canadian Jewish Congress executive. I was seething myself because the CJC had seen fit to issue a media release condemning the rampage, but condemning, too, the Danish paper. As I recall, the CJN criticised it for being “unduly provocative,” or something along those lines. It seemed to me that the CJC had no business weighing in on the matter—unless it was to support the fundamental Western value of free expression. Since it didn’t, and since it seemed to be acting in a dhimmified manner for no good reason, I sent an e-mail to this exec to express my horror at the CJC’s action. It took one, two, three emails before he finally revealed what was at the bottom of this dhimmitude: a desire to—I believe his words were “march arm-in-arm”—to Queen’s Park with his Muslim “buddies” to persuade the government to fund their religious schools.

Fools! Knaves! Short-sighted nincompoops! Jews incapable of seeing past their own short-term self-interest and making common cause with those who, given their druthers, would get rid of Western freedom altogether and replace it with sharia law.

I have repeated the same refrain—fools, knaves, etc.—during the current election campaign, the one in which Jews and Muslims, in convincing Conservative leader John Tory to take up their cause, will in all probably cost him the election. By and large, however, mine has been a minority voice among those who fork over mucho dinero to send their kids to non-Catholic religious schools, the vast majority falling in lockstep with the CJC and Bnai Brith on this issue.

I was thus thrilled to read a commentary in the Canadian Jewish News by someone who has the same doubts as I do about climbing into bed with Islam:

As the Ontario provincial election draws closer, the push for funding faith-based schools will no doubt intensify. And so it should. The cause is just and, with fees at most Jewish day schools at an all-time high – and way beyond what many families can afford – the timing couldn’t be more crucial.  Proponents of such subsidies need to maintain their momentum and do whatever seems practical to sway Ontario voters toward supporting a redress of the current system.

That the Jewish community leadership of Toronto has opted to join up with Armenian, Hindu, Sikh and Muslim groups with like-minded objectives is probably a good strategy. Interfaith cohesion on issues of common interest plays well in the public domain and carries with it a certain respectability that may have other positive spin-offs as relationships develop and dialogue becomes more comfortable.

However, we in the broader Jewish community need to be extraordinarily vigilant that we do not compromise our values and loyalties as we engage in coalition-building of this sort. We need to be clear on who our partners are and what view of us they bring to the table. It might reasonably be argued that it’s not acceptable to include as part of such a group those who, under other circumstances, might wish us harm – individually or collectively – by actively promoting anti-Jewish or anti-Zionist positions.

It is, therefore, a matter of great concern when one reads in the September issue of the Hamilton Jewish News that a Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC) memo has been sent to federations in Ottawa, Windsor and London “asking them to build interfaith partnerships on the Hamilton model to support the Jewish community on this important matter” (i.e., school funding).

There is no reason to doubt Congress’ good intentions, but what really is the “Hamilton model”? Well, unlike the multicultural Toronto coalition, the Hamilton “dialogue” comprised only Muslims and Jews. Before expanding – to primarily focus on the funding issue – the group, aside from UJA Federation of Hamilton, had just three other “partners.” Of these, one has gone on public record expressing contempt for Israel during the Lebanon war and praising “Hezbollah’s resistance,” while another helped to sponsor a local rally just over a year ago where Israel was venomously attacked and the Hamilton Jewish federation was itself accused of “endorsing the killing of Lebanese”.

Yet such “partners” continue to be part of the ongoing Hamilton dialogue, and the Hamilton community leadership persists in according them credibility and public affirmation.

So if this is the prototype that other small communities across Ontario are being encouraged to emulate, a plea for caution is needed. We can certainly do better.

Hear, hear. Fortunately, the majority of Ontarians have no taste for funding madrassahs (Bigotry! Islamophobia! shriek the media), and, come Oct. 10, will give the Tory Tories a big ole thumbs down.

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:27 | link | comments (1)

The sight and sound of pure evil: Tiny Hitler came a-calling this past week, and for the most part our mainstream media outlets—as per usual—buried the lede. (The Toronto Star and The Glib and Mewl, for two, concentrating on how “petty” and “buffoonish” he is). Luckily, we have Caroline Glick to offer clarity, and to audaciously state the obvious that the MSM obviously and willfully missed. From RealClear Politics:

During his visit to New York this week, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad attacked every basic assumption upon which Western civilization is predicated. Ahmadinejad offered up his attacks while extolling his vision of Islamic global domination.

Refusing to note his existential challenge to the Free World, the Western media concentrated their coverage of his trip on his statements regarding specific Western policy goals. His rejection of the UN Security Council's authority to take action against Iran's illicit nuclear weapons program; his championing of the Palestinian cause and Israel's destruction; his denials of Iranian support for terrorism, and his attacks against the US were widely reported. So too, his insistence that Iranian women enjoy full rights and that there are no homosexuals in Iran received banner headlines.

Ahmadinejad gave two major addresses this week - at Columbia University and at the UN General Assembly. He devoted both to putting forward his vision for global Islamic domination. And while the Western media sought hidden meanings and signals for peaceful intentions in his words, the fact is that on both occasions, Ahmadinejad made absolutely clear that his vision of Islamic domination cannot coexist in any manner with Western civilization. Consequently, Ahmadinejad's statements were not negotiating stances. They were the direct consequence of the world view he propounds. As such, they are non-negotiable.

At Columbia University, Ahmadinejad devoted the majority of his speech to a discussion of the role of science in human affairs. While most coverage surrounded his refusal to renounce his call to annihilate Israel, his central message, that he rejects the right of people to be free to choose their paths in life, was ignored. His remarks on the issue were dismissed as "weird" or "unintelligible." Yet they were neither.

Speaking as "an academic," Ahmadinejad said that from his perspective, the role of science is to serve Islam and that any science that does not serve Islamic goals is corrupt. As he put it, "Science is the light, and scientists must be pure and pious. If humanity achieves the highest level of physical and spiritual knowledge but its scholars and scientists are not pure, then this knowledge cannot serve the interests of humanity." Elaborating on this notion, he argued that Western scientists serve corrupt governments who reject the pure and pious path of Islam and therefore are used as agents for corruption.

Tellingly, Ahmadinejad moved directly from his assault on non-Islamic scientists and regimes to a defense of Iran's nuclear program. The message was clear: Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons is done in the name of Islam and therefore it is inherently legitimate. As far as he is concerned, refusing to allow Iran to pursue nuclear weapons is tantamount to an assault on God.

IN HIS address at the UN, Ahmadinejad laid out his case for Islamic supremacy. He claimed that all of the world's problems are the consequence of two things. First, by his reading of history, after the Second World War, "The victors of the war drew the road map for global domination and formulated their policies not on the basis of justice but for ensuring the interests of the victors over the vanquished nations."

The second cause for the world's woes is the world powers' rejection of Islam. As he put it, "The second and more important factor is some big powers' disregard of morals, divine values, the teachings of prophets and instructions by the Almighty God... Unfortunately, they have put themselves in the position of God!"

Thankfully for Ahmadinejad, this "corrupted" world order will soon be swept away. Either the "corrupted" powers will "return from the path of arrogance and obedience to Satan to the path of faith in God," or "the same calamities that befell the people of the distant past will befall them as well."

Concluding his UN remarks Ahmadinejad pledged, "Without any doubt, the Promised One who is the ultimate Savior... will come. In the company of all believers, justice-seekers and benefactors, he will establish a bright future and fill the world with justice and beauty. This is the promise of God; therefore it will be fulfilled."…

Tiny Hitler plans to nuke the Jews so the “Promised One…will come” and Shia Islam with rule the planet.

Try as I might, I fail to see anything “petty” or “buffoonish” about that.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:48 | link | comments

Proceeding from a false premise to a false conclusion: The Globe and Mail, an ardent multiculti organ, has a lead editorial which, unbeknownst to the editorialist, points to the basic flaw in our national social doctrine—that it makes no distinction between cultural practices, and, in the name of “tolerance” forces us to tolerate the intolerable:  

The liberal societies of the West are increasingly faced with cultural practices from abroad that subjugate women. This week, a young Muslim woman who had been beaten and sexually assaulted by an unknown assailant announced through the Ottawa Hospital's sexual-assault unit that she had not been raped, so as to preserve her chances of finding an observant Muslim husband.

The announcement is a disturbing one, even if, on balance, the hospital acted appropriately. Liberal and multicultural societies such as Canada's do not need to declare all cultural ideas equal. Far from it. They need to insist on equality before the law. Treating rape victims as ruined for marriage is a pernicious form of discrimination. It's a life punishment doled out to the victim. Victims fearing this punishment will not come forward for justice. They are therefore denied equal protection of the law.

Why, then, was the hospital's action defensible? Because it would be wrong to put the principle ahead of the individual, and thus make the 24-year-old pay the very price that society wishes to save women from. The hospital's immediate duty is to care for its patients, and therefore to help the woman avoid a serious harm arising from the sexual assault. All the hospital did, in a sense, was correct what appears to have been a factual error in some news reports about the notorious incident, which happened after midnight in a chemistry lab at Carleton University, as the academic year began.

But there's a risk in making such an announcement based on a highly vulnerable victim's say-so. If a victim believes that to be raped is to destroy her life chances, should the onus be on her in effect to press charges? Of course not. The onus is on the police to ascertain the evidence.

When the 24-year-old told the hospital a few days after the assault that she was not raped, the hospital checked with the police, and the police confirmed her story. Still, can that story be trusted? When she arrived at the hospital she was in shock and not fully conscious. Shouldn't the hospital, having done a medical check according to its protocols, know the answer? “When we do a sexual-assault examination, it's very hard to determine if someone was raped. It's not like on CSI,” Christine Baker, a nurse with the Ottawa Hospital's sexual-assault unit, said yesterday. “If I thought she was denying it to save herself, there's no way I would say anything.” Fair enough, but it's a dangerous precedent. Imagine a case where a woman was raped and a hospital or counselling centre declared on the basis of a victim's request that no rape occurred. It would be impossible to bring the culprit fully to justice.

There's another risk, too. The hospital may have inadvertently reinforced the very stigma that causes so much harm to sexual-assault victims. That stigma is linked to a growing problem in Europe. In Ayaan Hirsi Ali's autobiography Infidel, the Somali-born former Dutch politician writes of Somali women in the Netherlands who have been raped and live in fear of their family or clan finding out. “Honour killings” in the West are rare, but they happen.

It is not as if Canada and other liberal societies can claim to be above shaming and stereotyping sexual-assault victims. “Distrust and contempt for the unchaste female accuser was formalized into a set of legal rules unique to rape cases,” a legal observer wrote about past practices in the West. It's fair to say, though, that at least since 1983, when Canada rewrote many of those legal rules, it has made advances toward equal treatment.

This country needs to ensure that all women benefit from these advances. In some Muslim villages, people “despise the person who has been a victim of rape, even if it is their own daughter,” says Mumtaz Akhtar, president of the Ottawa Muslim Association. “But it is not like that here. People are more educated.” Canada needs to make sure it does not become like that here…

The editorial wants to have it both ways: criticize a backward, primitive, misogynistic, duplicitous practice, but allow it to continue so as not to “punish” the individual—even though it isn’t the individual’s “rights” which are being upheld here, but the “right” of the group to keep her in line (the essence of multiculturalism, which considers the group over the individual).  And, of course, call for “education” and “equal treatment,” hoping to change the group, little realizing that the group has virtually no incentive to adapt to Canada when Canada bends over backwards to adapt to them—and, by social fiat, keeps them locked away (out of sight out of mind?) in ethnic ghettos.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:07 | link | comments (2)

Luxuriating in victimhood; blaming the Jews: An editorial in the Muslim News (U.K.) interprets Tiny Hitler’s mixed reception in the U.S. as a sign that another  Muslim country is about to become the “victim” of American “belligerence.”

The war drums are sounding yet again. Needless to say, the threat is being made against more Muslims and the country being named, Iran, is nothing new. The belligerent tone has come not only from the US but now from France following the election of new President, Nicolas Sarkozy, who is reportedly seeking to improve relations with Washington by filling the vacant role left by former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, after his retirement. It also coincides with attempts to blame Iran for the failure of the Iraq war.

The supposed justification goes back more than three years after it was realised that the US-led regime change wars in Afghanistan and Iraq altered the balance of power in the region in favour of Iran. The demand is that Tehran permanently closes down its development of uranium enrichment, even though they are entitled to this development under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). It is based not on any evidence but mere suspicions - which draw eerily uncanny similarities with the pretext of invading Iraq - that Iran may be seeking to develop a nuclear weapon capability. The discrimination is being made in contrast to 40 years of silence regarding Israel’s proven stockpile of nuclear weapons, which Britain has helped to develop.

The renewed saber-rattling comes after Iran reached an agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on a work plan to clear any outstanding issues on its nuclear programme. It led IAEA Secretary General, Mohamed ElBaradei, to warn against talk of war. “There are rules on how to use force, and I would hope that everybody would have gotten the lesson after the Iraq situation, where 700,000 innocent civilians have lost their lives on the suspicion that a country has nuclear weapons,” the Egyptian diplomat said.

Although the IAEA is the UN agency responsible for implementing the NPT treaty, the US supported by the UK made it a political matter by referring Iran’s case to the Security Council, but two years on it has reached a stalemate.

Reports have spoken of Washington running out of patience and intensifying plans for mass air strikes against Iran amid difficulties in reaching a consensus with Russia and China to impose more sanctions. To this end, the Bush Administration is being zealously egged on by Israel, which hopes to be the main beneficiary by boosting its military domination in the region. Yet it appears the US has learnt nothing from the debacle of the Iraq war and its sole reliance on brute force as the world’s only remaining super power. Instead of attempting to clear up the mess Washington has caused in the Middle East, it is threatening to create more havoc…

Not nearly as much havoc as the prospect of mullahs with nukes.

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:01 | link | comments

Intrepid truth teller: Alan Dershowitz, debunker of the Mearslimer-Walt blood libel, debunks Tiny Hitler's demented Holocaust fantasies.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:09 | link | comments

The nutty professor(s): Bristling with pride and disdain, and in the grip of the same dementia as Professors Mearshimer and Walt, an Iranian academic pens a condemnatory missive to an American academic. From the Tehran Times:

Mr. Lee Bollinger, The President of Columbia University Dear Sir,

I wish to register my deepest regret in regard to your remarkably discourteous introductory remarks to President Ahmadinejad. Your class act as an arbiter at the University of Columbia was nothing short of disgrace. It lacked professionalism especially given the fact that Mr. Ahmadinejad had not even been given the chance to speak. And it clearly undermined your repeatedly made claim that the event upheld free speech. Fortunately, this age, despite all its cruelty and barbarity, is an age of transparency, which is why not even liberals can hide themselves behind their usual covers these days.

What happened yesterday (Monday, Sept. 24) merely displayed utter conceit and petty politics showing who it was that really lacked civility. Trying to humiliate an invited guest, an elected President of a sovereign country, before an international media only reflects the culture of an insular and bigoted society. One wonders if your reaction had anything to do with the donors threatening to withdraw funds from Columbia. It is incredulous that a respected American university chose to turn this meeting into a show trial of Iranian policies. So much for academic integrity and intellectual honesty.

Your crass, ill-mannered and duplicitous greeting of President Ahmadinejad amounted to a crude planned ambush. It is just unbelievable that someone who is simply questioning elements of the U.S. foreign policy and refuses to be a U.S. client should be submitted to such a systematic harassment.

If anybody wanted any proof that the Israeli lobby controls U.S. foreign policy, media, academia, etc., he has found plenty of evidence today. It has been noted that the protests against Iran at the UN and at Columbia were primarily made up of Israeli advocacy groups. Obviously there is nothing wrong with that, but it highlights, among other things, AIPAC’s influence not only on U.S. foreign policy but also in the mainstream academia.

One could be forgiven for thinking that what happened yesterday (Monday, 24) at Columbia University represents the typical mindset of the present American ruling elite: delusionally arrogant, insolent and insensitive to the rest of the world. A sad spectacle since they have become so politically isolated that they are even incapable of learning from their past experience.

It is extremely dishonest and manipulative to call into question the Iranian president’s integrity when in reality it is the USA that is responsible for the misery and death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and total destruction of their country. America is the same country that installed a medieval Shah with its secret Savak police after removing the democratically elected government of Dr. Mossadeq which in turn led to the hundreds of thousands of Iranians being killed and tortured by an Israeli trained police force. Ever since its inception, the Islamic Republic of Iran has been subject to countless destabilizing attempts by the U.S. But it has thwarted them all. The 8-year-old war with Iraq, when all Western countries were helping their then good old chum Saddam, failed to bring this country to its knees. We do not think that the current drive towards waging a new war on Iran will stand a better chance of success.

In any case, yesterday (Monday Sept. 24) was an opportunity to show the world that the USA is an open country that will challenge its opponents with appropriate compassion and honest debate. Instead, your decision to gather all Zionist- manufactured anti-Iranian appellations, pile them up on the stage, and throw them shamelessly at your invited guest, will become the black page of’ ignominy in Columbia University’s history.

With regards,

M. J. A. Larijani President Institute for Studies in Theoretical Physics and Mathematics (IPM)

“It is incredulous”?“All Zionist-manufactured anti-Iranian appellations”? “The black page of ignominy”?

Quite the silver-tongued rhetoritician, that President Larijani—a trait he shares in common with the tyrant to whose rescue he has raced.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:04 | link | comments

A clarification: There are political figures who are described as "clowns," the better to downplay the threat they pose.

Then there's London's mayor Ken Livingstone:

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:13 | link | comments

Loony “virtuous” lefties assist jihadis, undermine Israel: Far-leftist Canadian rag This Magazine gives a hearty “you, go, guys” to (self-loathing, usefully idotic) Jews and other lefties who are “protesting” Chapters/Indigo because the company’s head, Heather Reisman, supports an Israeli charity they don’t approve of. The magazine pretends to do one of those hard-hitting “is criticism of Israel anti-Semitic?” pieces, but all it really wants to do is sling muck at the Jews for being “racist” and practising “apartheid”—patently specious claims (though embraced as gospel by those who exist in this alternate reality). The magazine is of the opinion that these charges have a much better chance of sticking if genuine Jews are making them:

“Tear Down That Wall!”

Activists demanding a better fate for Palestinians have chosen a potent accusation—the new apartheid—to rally support for the growing anti-Israel boycott. Their belief: what forced change in South Africa can provoke change in the Middle East. But it may not be that easy-or that simple.

BY Sue Ferguson
Photography by Reuters: Reinhard Krause

Imagination. Creativity. Inspiration. Three words to stir the soul crown the towering windows of Toronto’s flagship Indigo bookstore. At ground level, shoppers pass in and out of wood-framed glass doors, navigating planters and benches intended to create a friendly, front-porch sort of welcome. They take little notice as, on the sidewalk beyond, two women unfurl an off-white canvas banner. Printed on one side are another three words, less poetic perhaps than the store’s motto, but the intended effect is just as moving: Boycott Chapters/Indigo.

No, the protest is not a last-ditch attempt by independent booksellers to draw the literate back into their fold. Rather, the activists—11 have turned up on this Friday in April, the fi rst truly warm day of spring—are taking a page from a much larger book. They are members of the Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid (CAIA), a network of Palestinian rights, Jewish peace and socialist groups doing their part to promote an international boycott campaign against Israel. They compare themselves to the early voices against South African apartheid, and history, they believe, can repeat itself: If international pressure could help rescue South Africa from apartheid, the same can be true for Israel.

Indigo picketer and Holocaust survivor Suzanne Weiss greets approaching pedestrians at the corner of Bloor and Bay streets, “Have a bookmark.” Weiss is handing out rectangular pieces of cardstock. Printed on each are the logos of Chapters, Indigo and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) with the words “Partners in Apartheid” beneath. Flip it over and a short statement explains why Indigo Books and Music is the coalition’s fi rst and most prominent target: Two years ago, the chain’s founder and CEO, Heather Reisman, and her husband, Gerry Schwartz, chairman and CEO of Onex Corporation, launched the Heseg Foundation for lone soldiers. About 6,000 lone soldiers-so-called because they have no family living in Israel-serve in the Israeli army. Heseg (Hebrew for “achievement”) awards 100 scholarships each year to those who, after completing service, want to remain and study in Israel. Reisman and Schwartz donate $3 million a year to the cause.

The impetus behind such generosity? “We are a family,” Schwartz announced to the scholarship’s first recipients in December 2005. “As Jews who live outside of Israel, I can tell you that family extends to so many nations around the globe... and you’re here not just for yourself, or just for the State of Israel, you are here protecting the freedom of Jews around the world.”

Schwartz, Reisman and the lone soldiers share a deep commitment to political Zionism—a variant of the Jewish religious doctrine advocating pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Born of hundreds of years of anti-Semitism, the 19th century doctrine holds that only a nation-state, Israel, can guarantee Jews freedom from persecution. It follows then, that for hundreds of thousands of people around the world, an attack on Israel, whether physical or ideological, is tantamount to an attack on the very right of Jews to exist.

Outside Indigo, the protesters—mostly older Jewish peaceniks and socialists—could not be easily mistaken for anti-Semites. And although one participant, jazz composer Charnie Guettel, says she senses “a turning point in consciousness,” she acknowledges some passersby are contemptuous and hostile. Most people, however, ignore them. Fair enough. Eleven protesters on a downtown Toronto sidewalk doesn’t look much like a revolution, but they are part of a broader movement gaining momentum and commanding attention on the world stage…

For those disinclined to wade through the remainder of this bilge, I can sum it up as follows: a bunch of loathsome lefties/moral solipsists have bought into the fraudelent concept of Palestinan victimhood/Israeli iniquity and want to punish—through boycotts, protests and other measures—those Jews who continue to have chutpah enough to support Israel.

‘Twas ever thus: Jews helping the enemies of Jews do their dirty work.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:16 | link | comments (1)

Tiny's Star champion: Someone who’s as equally off the wall as Rick Salutin—Harpoon Siddiqui. The Toronto Star’s very own revered Order of Canada recipient would no doubt see my missive to the Globe (posted below) as being unduly “alarmist." Like Columbia U's Lee Bollinger, Harpoon wants us to downgrade Tiny Hitler from "evil" to "petty"—a puny, innocuous blowhard:

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad questions the Holocaust and wants Israel wiped off the map. Still, the American reaction to his visit to New York has been way over the top.

The city thought that his sinful presence would desecrate the site of 9/11. "The evil has landed," screamed a tabloid. A TV pundit called him "a foul-smelling fruit bat." A councillor likened him to the "snakes slithering through the streets of New York."

The president of Columbia University, ostensibly celebrating the civility of academic freedom, unleashed a 10-minute tirade, pandering to agitated patrons.

But was the petty politician from Tehran worth all this attention?

The president of Iran has little power. This was proven during the tenure of his predecessor, the popular and suave Mohammed Khatami, who could not get much done despite holding a commanding majority in parliament.

Iran itself has little or no power to wipe Israel off the map. It can only support Hamas and Hezbollah.

Iran is also nowhere near making a nuclear bomb. The International Atomic Energy Agency has repeatedly said so, even while noting some minor cheating.

Iran cannot develop the bomb if the agency inspections continue. (North Korea, Pakistan, India and Israel made the bomb on the sly by not letting the inspectors in). Recently, the IAEA and Iran agreed on even more intrusive inspections.

Yet the United States, joined by France and Germany, wants to pursue bilateral and Security Council sanctions.

The latter would pave the way for a possible war on Iran (not likely, given the quagmire in Iraq) or the bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities, its oil installations as well as military and civilian infrastructure (highly likely).

This makes Mohamed ElBaradei, the IAEA chief, "shudder." The U.S. is pounding "war drums" the way it did prior to invading Iraq. Congress, too, is caving in, just as it did then.

Demonizing Ahmadinejad fits in this bigger picture. Not all those angry at him want war with Iran. But many do. He obliges them with dangerous and sometimes stupid statements, such as that there are no homosexuals in Iran (he should read Farsi literature).

Either he's the fool we think he is or he's playing to his constituency of poor Iranians who he promised economic gains but failed to deliver. Lobbing rhetorical bombs at the U.S. and Israel is a diversion…

Go back and read everything that holy rollah Khomeini—Tiny Hitler’s mentor and inspiration—had to say on the subject, Harpoon. It’s not a diversion; it’s the main event. And soon enough the mully-bullies will have real nukes to lob along with their rhetorical ones.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:16 | link | comments (2)

Sounds painful: Hillary flip flop on torture inspired after meeting generals--New York Daily News headline.

Youch! I hope she got some physio for that.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:47 | link | comments

Make ‘em laugh: The Globe and Mail’s battiest moonbat, Rick Salutin, insists that, contrary to all appearances and the impression conveyed by the media, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is not a buffoon. The real buffoon, writes Salutin, is, drum roll, please…Chimpsky McHaliburtonrovecheneyhitler, a.k.a., well, I don't think I have to spell it out for it.

Since I was shocked to find myself agreeing with even a portion of a rootin’-tootin’-Salutin piece, I felt compelled to write the Globe’s editor to tell him:

 

It isn’t often that I agree with Rick Salutin—the phrase “once in a blue moon” leaps to mind—but I must concur with his assessment of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Mr. Ahmadinejad, the front man for a bunch of brutal, ambitious theocrats who aim to dominate their region and, ultimately, the Muslim world, is definitely not “a buffoon.” I’m prepared to go even further and say there is nothing the least bit “buffoonish” about him. It is comforting to view him that way, however, since it makes his statements about wanting to wipe Israel off the map and the Holocaust and the presence of homosexuals in Iran both being “myths” far easier to bear—and to dismiss.

 

We have been gulled by Mr. Ahmadinejad’s physical appearance—a short man with an ever-present grin (or smirk) on his face—into perceiving him as clownish, and thus, as not all that threatening. But look behind the puckish demeanour and you can see a man who is deadly serious about solving his region’s Jewish “problem”.

 

An eerily familiar visage, I’d say.

 

I think Smokey Robinson said it best: Well if there’s a smile on my face/It’s only there tryin’ to fool the public…

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

Barf!: That’s my educated comment after reading this, the journalistic equivalent of Ipicac, in the New York Times. (I have held down my rising gorge long enough to highlight the most egregiously emetic passages):

After two days of prickly confrontations with critics at Columbia University and the United Nations, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran held a friendly, even warm, exchange yesterday with Christian leaders from the United States and Canada convinced that dialogue is the only way to prevent war.

The session, held under tight security at a chapel across the street from the United Nations, was a reminder that Mr. Ahmadinejad is a religious president of a religious nation who relishes speaking on a religious plane. He spent his 20 allotted minutes at the start of the two-hour meeting recounting the chain of prophets central to Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and the commonality of their messages.

He took questions from a panel that included a Quaker, a Catholic, an Anglican, a Baptist and a representative of the interfaith World Council of Churches, some of whom separately said they had been criticized by other religious leaders for sitting down with the Iranian president. Given the furor over Mr. Ahmadinejad’s earlier appearances, there was no advance publicity.

The gathering, which included an audience of about 140 other religious leaders, was organized by the Mennonites and Quakers, churches known for their commitment to pacifism.

The organizers said that they had pressed hard to find a Jewish leader to join the panel of questioners, but that those invited declined because they could not win support from Jewish organizations.

“My heart was broken that there was so little support from other religions to be here,” said Mary Ellen McNish, general secretary of the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker group that helped sponsor the event. “If we don’t walk down this path of dialogue, we’re going to end up in conflagration.”

Mr. Ahmadinejad’s smile at times turned to a grimace as the panelists prodded him, politely, about his record on the Holocaust, human rights abuses, Israel and nuclear weapons development. Also politely, he conceded nothing, and often deflected the inquiries by turning the spotlight on the policies of the United States and Israel.

“Who are the ones that are filling their arsenals with nuclear weapons?” he said. “In the United States they have tested the fifth generation of atomic bunker bombs, missiles that go as far as 12,000 kilometers. Who is the real danger here?”

Though Mr. Ahmadinejad’s answers differed little, the tone of the session was a marked contrast to the verbal pummeling he received at Columbia University on Monday, when the university’s president, Lee C. Bollinger, called the Iranian president either “brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated” for his stance on the Holocaust.

At the clerics’ meeting, Albert Lobe, executive director of the Mennonite Central Committee, said pointedly, “We mean to extend to you the hospitality which a head of state deserves.”…

Such a friendly chap, that Herr Hitler. And so well-groomed.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:42 | link | comments (2)

A modest request: Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, Prince Somethingorother (is there any native-born person in the Magic Kingdom who isn’t a Prince or Princess Somethingorother?) wants Israel to cease and desist construction on its security barrier as—hold on to your burnoose—a goodwill gesture to Arabs.

Hahahahahahahahahahhahahahahhahaha!

 

Sure thing Princey. Just as soon as Jews are allowed to defile your holy desert kingdom with their infidel cooties. And, oh yeah, when you Saudis tear down that other wall.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:12 | link | comments

Big mosque in Scandinavia: Islam Online reports on “a dream come true”—after years of patience, Muslims in Goteborg, Sweden, will soon see the rise of a “stately” mosque:

GOTEBORG, Sweden — After years of praying in halls and basements, Muslims in the Swedish city of Goteborg are rejoicing as this year's Ramadan bings (sic) them closer to their distant dream of a stately mosque with a dome and minarat.

"This year's holy month of Ramadan brought good news for us in Goteborg," Abdulghani Hakki, president of the Muslim Association in the city, told IslamOnline.net.

"The construction of the stately mosque Muslims have long dreamed of will begin in the next few weeks," he added.

After two years of planning, the mosque construction will start thanks to Saudi funding.

"The construction licence was initially granted in 1996," recalled Hakki, also a member of the Islamic Awqaf in Sweden which will supervise the building.

He noted that the mosque idea was first tabled in the 1980s by a Turkish group before later being championed by the Islamic Awqaf.

But it was last year's agreement with Saudi Arabia to finance the mosque project that paved the way for the long-cheriched dream to turn real.

The mosque, to be established on the bank of Gota river, is a traditional place of worship with a dome and a crescent minarat.

Designed by Swedish archticts (sic), the mosque will combine both the Islamic spirit and innovation of modern architecture.

The 5000-meter mosque will accomodate about 1200 people.

Goteborg, which lies on the west coast of the Scandinavian country, is home to nearly 40,000 Muslims, mostly from Somali, Turkish, Bosnian and Moroccan background...

Note to Goteborgians (Goteborgers?): Been to Malmo lately?

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:04 | link | comments (1)

Hamas's "charm" offensive: And offensive it is! As Israel keeps getting Mearslimed, Carterized and Garfinkled, the Hamas P.R. machine just keeps chugging along--and persuading Americans that, all in all, genocidal jihadi terrorists aren't so bad.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:46 | link | comments (2)

Oy vey!: The Ceeb fantasy sitcom about funny Muslims and silly infidels in small town Saskatchewan is about to land (with a thud?) in Israel and the Palestinian entities. (As if they don’t have enough problems.) From marketwire.com:

TORONTO, ONTARIO--(Marketwire - Sept. 25, 2007) - Little Mosque On The Prairie, the award-winning CBC breakout hit situation comedy that looks into the lives of a small Muslim community in the fictional prairie town of Mercy, will soon air in Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, Finland and Turkey, announced the show's executive producer Mary Darling of WestWind Pictures.

Beginning on October 23, Little Mosque On The Prairie will begin airing season one in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza on the country's paid satellite channel, Stars 3. The show will air in English with Hebrew subtitles.

"This is a really exciting distribution deal for the show and for the viewers in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank who will be able to view the show for the first time ever. Since debuting last season, we have received numerous emails from people in this region asking when the show will be coming to their country. We are delighted that we can finally announce an air date in this region," said Darling.

Little Mosque On The Prairie's producers also secured a distribution deal with one of Finland's largest television broadcasters, YLE Teema, a free-to-air channel. The broadcaster obtained licensing rights for seasons one and two for a three-year period. The show's first season will begin airing in 2008. It is expected that Little Mosque On The Prairie will air in English with subtitles.

"YLE has been extremely proactive in bringing this series to air and we are thrilled that the show will air in this marketplace," said Darling.

Finally, Little Mosque On The Prairie will also be aired in Turkey on Kanal 7, a free-to-air channel. The broadcaster has secured the license to air season one and five episodes of season two with an option for the remaining episodes of second season. No date has been provided when the show will debut in this marketplace.

"It is clear to us that there is a strong appetite for innovative programming in the international broadcasting arena. Our goal is to continue reaching out to broadcasters overseas while producing Canadian television shows that have universal appeal and positive messaging," said Darling…

 

Funny, this kind of multiculti drivel makes me lose my appetite.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:29 | link | comments (1)

My letter to the Ceeb: Just sent this one out into the ether and thought I'd share:

Once again, on the eve of a Jewish holiday, CBC radio has chosen to feature someone who is extremely—and unduly—critical about Jews and the Jewish state. On the eve of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, Anna Maria Tremonti of The Current interviewed John Mearshime for twenty uninterupted minutes. Professor Mearshimer is the Harvard academic who, along with his colleague, Stephen Walt, has posited that American Jews are involved in a nefarious plot to poison American foreign policy by convincing the U.S. to act in Israel’s interests, ones which, according to Mearshimer and Walt, run counter to America’s. This venomous diatribe, masquerading as academic inquiry, had been torn to shreds by another Harvard notable—Alan Dershowitz—among many others. Even so, it remains in the running to become The Protocols of the Elders of Zion of our era—a discredited tract which did untold damage and eventually became, in the words of historian Norman Cohn, a Warrant for Genocide.

 

This afternoon, on the eve of the Jewish festival of Sukkoth, you chose to feature someone else who has harsh words for Israel—author Jonathan Garfinkle. On the program Here and Now, Mr. Garfinkle shared his “ambivalence” about the situation vis a vis Israelis and Palestinians—Ambivalence being the title of his new book—and how upset he is that some Jews who may not share his “ambivalence” have had the temerity to see him as self-loathing and anti-Zionist.

 

The nerve of some people!

 

While I have no problem with free expression and the exchange of ideas, I have become increasingly alarmed in recent days by the marked imbalance of ideas and expression on CBC radio. As a frequent and longstanding listener—I have been listening to CBC radio for several decades—it is my general impression that those who want to slam/damn/condemn Israel are given free reign to “share” their ideas, with little or no rebuttal. Meanwhile, those who have something positive to say about Israel, America and the West in general are given extremely short shrift, to say the least.

 

As Canada’s national public broadcaster, the CBC has a mandate to provide balanced programming and, in so doing, to serve the interests of Canadians. I would suggest that because of this obvious imbalance, at the moment you are failing both your mandate and your audience.

 

Yours very truly,

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:13 | link | comments (3)

Sha sha sha sha sharia: Tiny Hitler and the oily Wahhabis may differ about who they see as the Prophet’s legitimate successor, but there’s one thing they have in common: a commitment to the stringent application of Allah’s law.

If you listen carefully, you can hear T.H., the mully-bullies and the oily “custodian of the two holy mosques” (a phrase which, to me, makes it sound like he's the janitor) come together in a souped-up jihadi version of the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann”:

 

Sha sha sha sha sharia.

Sha sha sha sha sharia.

Oh, sharia.

Islamic law.

Sharia.

“The one true law,” they howl.

Don’t ever run afoul of sharia,

Sha sha sha sharia.

 

Stole a bread for sport,

Had to go to court,

Adjudication’s brief

And now I’m one appendage short.

Oh, sharia,

Sha sha sha sharia.

The law that has no errors,

Submit, or say your prayers,

It’s sharia, sha sha sha sharia.

 

Went and messed around.

Adultery was found.

According to sharia

On my head with rocks they’ll pound.

Oh, sharia, sha sha sha sharia.

It isn’t always nice,

You’ll have to pay the price

Of sharia, sha sha sha sharia.

 

Apostasy for me—

Christianity.

But if you ever leave Islam

Then death’s the penalty

Of sharia, sha sha sha sharia.

The law that supercedes

And often makes folks bleed

It’s sharia, sha sha sha sharia.

Posted by: scaramouche at 15:58 | link | comments

Fatal reflex: Tony Blankley thinks he knows why lefties like Columbia U president Lee Bollinger are so keen to cozy up to anti-Western thugs like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. From RealClear Politics:

Our Founding Fathers were wise to create a constitutional republic rather than a direct democracy. Although, given the caliber of many of our elected representatives -- whose role it is to intermediate between the rashness of the public and the safety of the nation -- it seems like rather thin protection. Nonetheless, we must be grateful for small blessings.

On Monday, the left-wing Daily Kos (as pointed out by the blog American Thinker, which apparently monitors that citadel of leftish chat so we don't have to) had the following entry from one of its readers:

"I know I'm a Jewish lesbian and he'd probably have me killed. But still, the guy (President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran) speaks some blunt truths about the Bush Administration that make me swoon...

 

Okay, I admit it. Part of it is that he just looks cuddly. Possibly cuddly enough to turn me straight. I think he kind of looks like Kermit the Frog. Sort of. With smaller eyes. But that's not all...

I want to be very clear. There are certainly many things about Ahmadinejad that I abhor -- locking up dissidents, executing gay folks, denying the fact of the Holocaust, potentially adding another dangerous nuclear power to the world and, in general, stifling democracy. Even still, I can't help but be turned on by his frank rhetoric calling out the horrors of the Bush Administration and, for that matter, generations of US foreign policing preceding."

While some people might view this as merely an extreme case of Bush derangement syndrome, it is even worse. After all, the writer is able to articulate that while Ahmadinejad would kill people like her, she nonetheless finds him cute and appealing because he speaks with "frank rhetoric," not merely about Bush, but regarding generations of U.S. foreign policy.

This is a telling example of the state of left-wing thought today. Even if, arguendo, one accepted the substantive objectives of left-wing thought as wise and true, it still is deranged to find appealing that which would kill you. Left-wing thought has become disconnected even from the left wing's own view of reality.

Admittedly it can be noted that the author of these sad convulsions of thought is, presumably, an obscure and inconsequential person. All shades of the political spectrum have such sad figures, perhaps victims of chemical imbalances or excessive dodgeball playing in their youth.

But what are we to make of the comments of the exalted president of Columbia University, Lee Bollinger? After all, as the president of one of our greatest liberal universities, he surely must be judged by the liberal elite who selected him to be an exemplar of their breed and a paladin of their cause.

Let us examine two of his statements in this affair: the first, crushingly inconsistent with prior expressions; and the second, more explainable by pathology than philosophy. Regarding his first mental failure: President Bollinger previously had barred the ROTC from his campus because they discriminate against gay people. And yet he invites Ahmadinejad to speak on campus, even though Ahmadinejad would -- as an act of state policy -- murder gay people. Bollinger's anti-ROTC policy reflects an extreme solicitude to gay interests, while his Ahmadinejad policy completely abjures that concern.

But it is his second statement that truly stuns: He asserted that under similar circumstances, he would invite Hitler to speak in the interest of freedom of speech. Keep in mind that Ahmadinejad is currently -- according to the testimony of several of our senior generals in the past month -- directing Iranian policy to kill American troops in Iraq. So this is the equivalent of inviting Hitler to speak in, say, 1943 -- not 1937.

The fact that Congress may pass no law abridging the freedom of speech is a non sequitur to the proposition that a patriotic president of a college ought not offer his campus to the leader of a wartime enemy (and provide him with a chance to propagandize against us. Indeed, the mere presence of such a person in such a location enhances his position and his cause in the eyes of many feebleminded people.)

I do not suggest that President Bollinger is unpatriotic. Rather, I think he suffers from a worse disease than Bush derangement syndrome; he suffers from a loss of the first instinct that nature implanted in every creature: the instinct of self-preservation…

I have a somewhat different explanation for it, one I came across recently in Ruth Wisse’s new book, Jews and Power—moral solipsism. As Wisse explains it, moral solipsism is the reflexive Jewish impulse to focus almost exclusively on one’s own moral rectitude, thereby avoiding the ugly reality of the amoral and immoral Jew-haters who want to kill you. This tendency to look inward and never outward can be a good thing, helping ensure that one becomes and remains a “mensch,” a decent human being. But it can also have dire consequences, for in emphasizing one’s own morality and moral failings above all else and turning away from the amorality/immorality of others, one can lack the resources to defend oneself against those who are truly evil.

 

I would suggest that leftists, like Jews, suffer from the same impulse. While making them feel extremely virtuous (whether or not they really are virtuous), their moral solipsism blinds them to the reality of genuine, evident evil, and renders them incapable of fighting it.

 

Thus, in this instance at least, virtue is definitely not its own reward: it is the suicidal character trait that allows one to defy “the first instinct”—the instinct of self-preservation.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:03 | link | comments (2)

His struggle: He may not have produced an unreadable tome like Hitler (the title of which, quel co-incidence, translates in Arabic as My Jihad), but Tiny Hitler has clearly expressed his Hitlerian sentiments on many occasions. David Horowitz describes these as yet uncollected words--which speak volumes--as "The Islamic Mein Kampf."

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:17 | link | comments

Tiny Hitler’s Eva Braun: Tiny Hitler’s visit to the Big Apple sans spouse got me to thinking: What’s the deal with Mrs. Ahmadinejad? Who is she and how come she never accompanies her husband on these important trips, as one would expect the First Lady of a country to do? Is she too hideous to be seen in public? Too busy raising all the little Ahmadinejads back home? Why do we hear so little about the woman behind—as tradition would have it, by at least a good four steps—the despot?

A little research on the Web reveals—practically nothing. All we know for sure is that there is a Mrs. Ahmadinejad. Her provenance: unclear. Her first and maiden names: your guess is as good as mine. We know that she is the mother of three Ahmadinejad spawn—which means, shudder, that she had sexual relations with him on at least three occasions. She is said to have been studying Mechanical Engineering when Tiny married her in 1980 at the age of 24. (That’s his age; we don’t know how old she was).

 

It’s impossible to even say what she looks like, since she wears one of those all-encompassing black shrouds and has glasses on the only bit of skin that is showing. So she could be a babe. Then again, she could look like Quasimodo.

 

An appeal to Mrs. Ahmadinejad: come out, come out whoever you are.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:21 | link | comments

Net saavy: Just 'cause he's a Medieval-minded homocidal madman who believes he's been tapped by Allah to nuke the Jews and host the 12th imam's return engagement doesn't mean he can't have a My Space page.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:59 | link | comments

The haters crawl out of their worm holes: On the same day Tiny Hitler regaled the folks over at Columbia with his take on the Shoa and same-gender sexuality in Aryan, some Nazi types, no doubt inspired by his appearance in their burg, got busy and left their spoors (Nazi swastikas) at least 19 synagogues in Brooklyn Heights.

Way to work up the rabble, Tiny!

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:26 | link | comments

Bears repeating: I've said it before and I'll say it again (and again and again and again): There is a religious conspiracy to domitate the world, but it isn't secret, and it sure ain't Jewish.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:18 | link | comments

A date with destiny: Islam Online slams Morocco for importing dates from Israel, the avowed enemy of the Arabs--and on Ramadan, no less. Meanwhile, there's nary a peep on the I.O. site about Tiny Hitler at Columbia. Guess the Wahabbists don't want to give their arch-rival, the would-be Mahdi-greeter, any free publicity.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:02 | link | comments

Tiny Hitler's fantasies: Homosexuals in Iran? Why, they're a myth--same as the Holocaust:

Posted by: scaramouche at 16:27 | link | comments

The crescent moon has landed: The jihad is alive and well and living in America (and Canada). It hitched a ride inside the belly of the multiculti Trojan Horse. From JWR:

"We're fighting them there, so we don't have to fight them here" has become a hymn for the American right and an abominable lie to the left. But drowned out by all the noise is the fact that "they" are here already, having landed a long time ago and gotten very busy indeed constructing the American wing of jihad.

Have you watched the Arabic Channel, also known as TAC, which serves the New York region? Probably not, as most New Yorkers neither understand nor speak Arabic. But if you are among the estimated 1 million viewers — legal and illegal, new and old Arabic-speaking immigrants to the tri-state area — who tune in daily to Channel 507 on Time Warner Cable, this is what you can get:

• A daily dose of Islamic jurisprudence from an Egyptian sheik, Amr Khaled, who comes direct from Cairo as TAC's prime advocate of "peaceful jihad," on how the duty of every Arab-American is to become first, second, and only a member of the Muslim Ummah.

• A nightly helping of Syria's CNN-style digest of the world, sent fresh from a Damascus studio where the Iraq war is nothing but an American butchery of Arabs, and the Zionist regime in Jerusalem is just biding its time until it gets what it deserves.

• A sprinkling of Egyptian and Syrian soap operas (though TAC completely avoids footage of "Oriental" dancing and other "infidel" joys of life).

On its Web site, TAC says it is now 14 years old and serves the "Greater New York City Metropolitan area, including Jersey City, Bergen County, N.J., and Mt. Vernon, N.Y." through cable and satellite transmission.

TAC's ownership and funding are, to put it mildly, ambiguous. What is clear is that someone is funding this Islamist Trojan Horse already anchored inside the American fortress…

Yikes. And you thought VisionTV’s Islam shows were bad.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:07 | link | comments

No news is bad news: I took a gander at the Tehran Times, “Iran’s leading international daily,” to see what it had to say about Tiny Hitler’s “rough time” at Columbia. It said this: diddly, bupkes, nada. Instead, the lead story on the site of this government mouthpiece is an in-depth look at Iranian films vying be the country’s official entry in the race for this year’s “Best Foreign Language Film” Oscar. (If one of them does get nominated and wins, maybe Hollywood could ask Juan Cole to hand it out.)

I might be inclined to think that Tiny Hitler’s string-pullers are embarrassed by his rude reception in the halls of academe, if not for a piece that does appear on the site. The piece takes great umbrage at New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s refusal to grant AhMAHDInejad’s request to visit Ground Zero—a request the mayor called “an outrage.” In the highest of high dudgeon, a cleric who belongs to an Iranian outfit called—wait for it—the Association of Combative Clerics—expectorated that Bloomberg’s “(i)nsult to the president is (an) insult to the nation.”

 

I’d say the fact that Iran has an organization called the Association of Combative Clerics underscores and is emblematic of the grave threat the mullocracy poses to us.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:47 | link | comments

Giving Tiny short shrift: The media are agog at Tiny Hitler’s visit to Columbia U and aghast at how its prez, Lee Bollinger, called him a “petty and cruel tyrant” to his face in front of the assembled. Michael Colton, the Ceeb’s guy on the scene, called it “a snub”—as if Bollinger had done something nasty and uncalled for. The Globe and Mail describes it as the “Iranian president (getting) a rough welcome.”

For those in the know (like, say, Caroline Glick, Columbia class of ’91), not nearly rough enough

 

Here’s the letter I sent the Globe:

 

After extending an invitation to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Lee Bollinger, head of Columbia University, dismisses him as “a petty and cruel dictator.” That characterization probably made Mr. Bollinger feel good—even as it angered his guest—but it is actually highly misleading. In his time, Hitler, too, was dismissed as petty and cruel by many in the West; they saw him as little more than a funny-looking little man with a moustache. That didn’t stop him from getting on with his plans for a Thousand Year Reich and a Final Solution for the Jews—depraved schemes he came awfully close to fulfilling, plunging the world into a brutal war and murdering most of Europe’s Jews.

 

The point is not whether outsiders see a leader as petty and cruel. It is whether the man himself has grandiose dreams along with the will, power, and personal dynamism that compel people to follow his lead and help him make those dreams a reality.

 

Is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad such a man? His personality and pronouncements certainly make it appear that he could be. It is thus to his great advantage—and our extreme disadvantage—to ignore historical precedent and perceive him exactly as Lee Bollinger does.

 

Update: So what if he was insulted and, though his own absurd words about the Holocaust and homosexuals in Iran (according to Tiny, there aren't any) made himself look the fool? As Ha'aretz notes, there was one clear loser in this encounter--and it sure wasn't the beardo weirdo.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:45 | link | comments

Ross Hashanah: Season’s greetings! Although the Jewish New Year has recently come and gone and Christmas is months away, the Toronto Star’s Oakland Ross cannot restrain his sarcasm at the sight of Christian pilgrims starting to return to Arab-controlled Bethlehem (acidly, he calls the pilgrims “a very rare species”). Mr. Ross wants us to know that while Muslims bear some responsibility for the paucity of visitors—holy warriors wearing semtex tend to have that effect on the tourist trade—the Israelis are equally, if not more, at fault.

Rather than quote directly from the article—you can read Ross's piece of disinformation here—I have decided to write it up in the form of familiar seasonal standard song:

 

O little town of Bethlehem,

The season’s not yet here.

But Oakland Ross,

The Star’s sage scribe,

Will bring to you some cheer.

He says the “occupation”

Caused folks to rise and rage

A heated intafada chased the pilgrims away.

 

O little town of Bethlehem

O. Ross apportions blame

On Jews who dared to counter those

Who war in Allah’s name.

They went and built a wall there

To keep the shahids out.

And he'll let Arabs off the hook,

Of that there is no doubt.

 

Here’s the letter—not written in verse—I sent the Star:

 

It’s nice to see foreign tourists starting to trickle back into Bethlehem after years of finding it an inhospitable place to visit. I can’t help but contrast it, though, to the flood of Christian visitors I personally witnessed pouring into Jerusalem’s Old City during Easter and Passover, which coincided this past April. People from China, Africa, Latin America and many other parts of the world, mingling with Jews on their way to Judaism’s holiest site, the Western Wall, and Muslims on their way to their holy sites, the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa Mosque.

 

This free intermingling was made possible, of course, when the Old City came under Israeli control as a result of the 1967 war; during the years when Arabs were in charge, there were restrictions on Christian visitors and Jews were denied access to their holy sites. Hundreds of synagogues were trashed and destroyed.

 

How tragic that Arabs who control Bethlehem do not accord Christians who want to visit the town they revere as the birthplace of Jesus the same kind of freedom they have when visiting Jerusalem. At least now, with Israel’s security barrier firmly in place, Christian pilgrims can take comfort in the knowledge that they are protected from those who believe they have a duty to perpetrate terrorism against non-believers in the name of their God.  

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:30 | link | comments (1)

Tiny Hitler's grandiose plan (and malign defender): Mahmoud  Ahmadinejad thinks the Holocaust was a fraud perpetrated by Zionist-colonialists determined to rob Muslims of their rightful land; has vowed to correct this grievous wrong by wiping Israel off the map—a pre-requisite for the return of his Messiah; is the front man for a bunch of holy rollers who fund the jihad throughout the region and in other parts of the world; is thrilled to bits that in short order he will have a nuke or two to lob at the Zionist entity and set into motion the long-deferred plan for Shia vindication/domination (they’ve been waiting ever since the Prophet’s cousin/son-in-law, their man Ali, was robbed of his rightful succession when Mo kicked the bucket).

Writing in Salon magazine, “esteemed” professor Juan Cole describes this bald statement of the obvious as the “demonization” of Ahmadinejad, a tactic of the cunning neoconservatives to push the U.S. into war with Iran.

 

Silly Juan. No need for anyone to “demonize” Tiny Hitler. He has shown himself perfectly capable of demonizing himself—as he will no doubt demonstrate when he addresses the UN. As for that august international body of Jew-haters, it will divest itself of its last shed of moral authority (and a very small shed it was) by providing him his forum, his Nuremberg, in which to spew his Judenhass.

 

At that moment, the Aryan plan for liquidating the Jews will meld once and for all with the Iranian plan to complete what the Aryans started.

 

Better rev up those bombers, Ehud. Time's a-running out.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:41 | link | comments (1)

Dumb idea: You know that Baathist backwater which may or may not have been building some sort of atomic thingamajiggy with the help of Dear Leader's minions--a somethingorother which may or may not have been demolished by the Zionists with the approval--and perhaps even under the auspices of--the U.S.?

It has been invited to sit down and talk Peace in Our Time with the Zionists and the Palestinians.

An idea on par with, say, inviting Tiny Hitler to kite his profile by addressing the world via the UN.

Posted by: scaramouche at 00:14 | link | comments

Lost in space: Star Simpson, a “quirky” MIT student, got in heck for going to Boston’s Logan airport while wearing a fake bomb (she claimed it was an “art” project). But according to her mortified parents, it was all a huge “mistake.”  From the Star-Bulletin:

Star Simpson probably went to a Boston airport yesterday mistakenly wearing a shirt she wore the day before that had a computer circuit board that security officials thought was a bomb, said her mother.

Stephanie Simpson said Star put on the shirt when she was going to pick up her boyfriend at the airport.

Star Simpson, 19, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineering student, was arrested and charged yesterday for bringing what appeared to be a bomb to the Logan International Airport in Boston. The device turned out to be a computer circuit board attached to a 9-volt battery on a black hooded sweatshirt.

The computer circuit board on Star Simpson's sweatshirt that security thought may have been a bomb at a Boston airport isn't out of character for her, according to the Maui woman's background, school affiliations and online supporters.

But her mother, Stephanie Simpson, said it may have been a mistake because Star used the shirt the day before on career day at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and when she went to pick up her boyfriend at the airport. "It was just sleepyheads. She must have been just asleep to the fact of where she was going," Stephanie Simpson said.

But Stephanie Simpson said it was an important lesson for her daughter. "You can be shot if you're that stupid to come up to the airport with something like that," Simpson said by phone from her Maui home. "She's going to have to learn from this experience." Star Simpson, 19, an MIT engineering student, was arrested and charged yesterday for bringing what appeared to be a bomb to the Logan International Airport in Boston. The device turned out to be a circuit board attached to a 9-volt battery on a black hooded sweatshirt.

Simpson, a former captain of the Hawaii Preparatory Academy's robotics team, claims it to be artwork she wanted to show off for career day, the latest creation in a long string of gadgets and experiments for the engineering enthusiast.

Stephanie Simpson said her daughter is not someone who has ill will or malice, but "lives and breathes in the workshop" to build robotics…

In that case, she obviously needs to get out more. Maybe watch the news now and then.

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:01 | link | comments

Incomplete conquest: Sweden’s third largest city, Malmo, has largely submitted to its immigrant population, but as Islam Online notes (with distinct regret), the same cannot be said—as yet—of the Swedish capital:

STOCKHOLM — For Muslims visiting the Swedish capital Stockholm, the holy fasting month of Ramadan and its traditional manifestations are conspicuous by their absence.

There is almost nothing in the busy streets of Stockholm indicating that Ramadan, the most important month in the Islamic calendar, is eleven-day old.

Walking through Stockholm, one can hardly find a halal shop or hijab-clad young Muslims walking by, which have become part of everyday life in most European capitals.

Even dates, which most Muslims use to break their fast following in the footsteps of Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him), are something of a rarity at markets and shops selling only Swedish pastry.

One tradesman referred to a not-so-far Moroccan shop.

"Still, you might not find what you want for Ramadan," he said.

Muslims make up some 200,000 of the country's nine million people, according to semi-official estimates.

Leaders of the Muslim minority put the number at 400,000.

Religion, let along Islam, takes a back seat in the capital though Sweden is counted as a Christian country…

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:52 | link | comments (2)

Spewing under the influence: Is it just me, or does this photo of Tiny Hitler look like his meds have just kicked in?

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:43 | link | comments (1)

Liar, liar, pants on fire: Tiny Hitler sez there’s absolutely no evidence that his Republic of Virtue and Great Satan are on a collision course.

As a public service, I have taken the liberty of bolding all the taqiyah spewed by "hot pants" in this Reuters report:

 

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Iran did not need nuclear weapons and his country was not heading for war with the United States, according to a television interview to be broadcast Sunday.

Asked whether Iran's goal was to obtain a nuclear bomb, he said the answer was a "firm no," according to a transcript of his interview with CBS' "60 Minutes" recorded on Thursday in Tehran.

"You have to appreciate we don't need a nuclear bomb. We don't need that. What need do we have for a bomb?" he said.

The United States accuses Iran of seeking to develop nuclear weapons under the cover of its civil nuclear program. Iran denies both allegations.

Asked whether Iran and the United States were heading toward conflict over Tehran's nuclear ambitions, he said: "It's wrong to think that Iran and the U.S. are walking toward war. Who says so? Why should we go to war? There is no war in the offing."

Officials of the five permanent U.N. Security Council members and Germany met on Friday for what they called "serious and constructive" talks about new U.N. Security Council sanctions aimed at trying to force Iran to halt its uranium enrichment activities.

Ahmadinejad, who was due to arrive in New York on Sunday for the U.N. General Assembly, reiterated Iran's position that its nuclear program is purely peaceful.

"Our plan and program is very transparent," he said. "In political relations right now, the nuclear bomb is of no use. If it was useful, it would have prevented the downfall of the Soviet Union. If it was useful, it would resolved the problem the Americans have in Iraq.

"The time of the bomb is passed."

If Tiny Hitler were Pinocchio, at this point his nose would be so long he'd need a forklift to be able to perambulate.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:30 | link | comments

Nazis, real and imagined: I have it on good authority (i.e. from someone who was there) that the gist of a sermon preached from the pulpit at one of Toronto’s more liberal-minded synagogues was this: the far-left and far-right in Israel are involved in such unspeakable things that, should the country remain on the same path, it will shortly become a fascist state like Nazi Germany.

The Rabbi making such Carteresque pronouncements on Judaism’s Day of Atonement said that, even so, that didn’t preclude her—and shouldn’t preclude her congregation—from supporting the Jewish state.

 

How exceptionally magnanimous and “forgiving” of her—but not exactly the kind of sales pitch that would induce her flock to open their wallets and buy Israel bonds.

 

Said Rabbi is one of the many sanctimonious deaf, dumb and blind dumb types who find it easier and more satisfying to throttle Israel and concentrate on its manifest imperfections rather than to focus on the obvious, apparent, and existential threat it currently faces from Tiny Hitler and his galloping gang of nuclear nutbars. Which means that not even the following would likely penetrate her mush-brain. From the New York Daily News:

On the eve of his trip to New York City, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stood before a banner blaring "Death to America," showed off his military might and declared his extremist regime will not bow to Western pressure.

"Those who think, that by using such decayed tools as psychological warfare and economic sanctions, they can stop the Iranian nation's progress are making a mistake," Ahmadinejad said yesterday outside of Tehran.

As the hatemonger spoke, a parade of anti-aircraft guns, missiles and military hardware moved before him. Three jet fighters flew overhead.

In a menacing move, Ahmadinejad's military henchmen said the medium-range missiles could reach Israel and U.S. bases in the Gulf.

Ahmadinejad, who is coming to New York to address the United Nations General Assembly, is expected to land at Kennedy Airport today.

The White House and U.S. military leaders have accused Iran of supplying training and weapons to terrorists who are attacking and killing U.S. troops in Iraq.

Large protests will greet Ahmadinejad - an accused terrorist, Holocaust denier and member of the Axis of Evil - when he speaks at Columbia University on Monday and when he addresses the UN Tuesday.

Ahmadinejad sparked outrage last week by requesting an official tour of Ground Zero. The proposed visit, which was promptly rejected by the NYPD, sickened victims' relatives and U.S. leaders.

Ahmadinejad said he was "amazed" by the negative reaction. But he has said he will abandon his plans to lay a wreath on the hallowed ground where nearly 3,000 people were killed by terrorists - an attack he has suggested was an inside job carried out by U.S. intelligence agents.

Columbia has refused to cancel Ahmadinejad's appearance at its School of International and Public Affairs. University President Lee Bollinger has vowed to challenge Ahmadinejad on his denial of the Holocaust, his alleged sponsorship of terrorism, his pursuit of nuclear weapons and the imprisonment of journalists and scholars in Iran.

But several political leaders and religious groups have slammed Columbia for inviting the madman to mouth off.

"Anyone who supports terror, pledges to destroy a sovereign nation [Israel], punishes by death anyone who 'insults' religion ... denies the Holocaust and thumbs his nose at the international community has no legitimate role to play at a university," Catholic League President Bill Donohue said…

How mean of that reporter to call Mr. Ahmadinejad a “madman.” Everyone knows that the real “madmen” in the region belong to the Likud Party (says scaramouche, channelling a certain leftist lady Rabbi).

Posted by: scaramouche at 16:00 | link | comments

Two schools, world’s apart: That bastion of multicultism, the Toronto Star, is doing a three-part series on religious schools in Ontario that are in line for public funding should Ontario voters opt for the Tory plan (which at the moment seems highly unlikely). In yesterday’s paper we learned about the ISNA Elementary School, a Muslim school in Mississagua. The front page featured a startling yet frolicsome photo of Fourth Grade ISNA female moppets at play during recess. The girls are decked out in blindingly white hijabs and full-length black robes, such that, save for the multi-coloured sneakers poking out cheekily at the bottom of their get-up, they resemble a bunch of young—really young—novitiates at a nunnery.

The school, which manages to keep fees down to a paltry $350 per student per month (leaving readers, though not apparently the reporter, to wonder who’s picking up the rest of the tab), follows traditional Islamic teachings, some of which aren't exactly in line with Ontario’s mainstream:

…But some of its practices appear at odds with what the public system embodies — equal treatment of all. In the debate around the use of public funds for private religious schools, it is the segregation of students along religious lines in these schools – and the separation of women at Islamic schools in particular – that are a central issue.

Yarkhan, a graduate of McMaster and the University of Toronto, said his students are "taught equality between boys and girls," but that even at family gatherings, women and men sit separately. The school's teachers have separate staff rooms, one for "sisters" and another for "brothers."

It doesn't mean the school expects any less academically from its female students.

"We don't discourage girls from having a career," said Yarkhan, 27, himself pursuing a master's degree at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. "Our graduates go on to be doctors, engineers."

Indeed, girls – who make up two-thirds of the school's population – participate just as often as boys in class. Also, the school's vice-principal is a female, as are most of the teachers.

Yarkhan will not shake the hand of a female visitor "because of my religion," however, the chair of the school board will, as will the director of education. He later apologizes if any offence was taken, and says it is not something his students are taught.

ISNA Elementary School, the first organized Islamic elementary school in Canada and possibly North America, was established by the Islamic Society of North America (Canada) but is now run by a separate charity under the society. It purchased its building, on a leafy subdivision street, from the Peel public board for about $500,000 in 1982.

The Conservatives have said in order to qualify for public funds, schools would have to teach the Ontario curriculum, take part in standardized testing and hire those who hold a teaching degree recognized by the Ontario College of Teachers.

ISNA elementary already does the first two – in fact, its test scores in reading, writing and math are far higher than the provincial average – and says with additional funds it could afford certified teachers.

Here, students are taught the full Ontario curriculum. So if that means teaching parts of evolutionary theory in science, it does – but in Islamic studies, students learn that Allah created and sustains the universe. Students also learn Arabic and how to properly read the Qur'an. These classes are squeezed in the school day by eliminating the morning recess and cutting short the lunch hour.

But the budget is tight, says M.D. Khalid, who chairs the Islamic Schools Association of Canada, which oversees ISNA elementary and its secondary counterpart, ISNA High School, also in Mississauga, with 65 students. With elementary school tuition at just $350 per month, discounted rates for each additional sibling, and a bit of fundraising, it's not a lot of money.

Teacher salaries start at $25,000; and it's tough to keep them when the certified ones could be earning $42,000 at a public board.

He sees the opportunity to join a public board as a way to bring in much-needed funds for classroom materials and teacher resources.

But when asked about hot-button topics – like how to handle homosexuality – and if the school would be willing to compromise its teachings, he says that, first, religious schools should be publicly funded on principle.

"Those are the details that will come out when it comes to that issue," added Khalid Khokhar, director of education, who worked for a Guelph-area public board for almost three decades.

Yarkhan said if the school was to become a part of the public system, sex segregation is something that could be "open for discussion" but right now it's the school's practice.

"We don't find it harmful for a boy to sit with another girl, but it's just some of the etiquettes the school has – the school, the parents, this is what they would like to see."

The school serves a Sunni population, but Khalid says it has enrolled students of other sects, and once a Christian family. While most of ISNA's students were born in Canada, their families may hail from Somalia, Pakistan or Saudi Arabia.

"Religion is not something you leave at home," said Khalid. "It's a way of life."…

Indeed. Contrast that with the subject of today’s article about a faith-based school, Toronto’s Leo Baeck Jewish Day School. At Leo Baeck, a school affiliated with Judaism’s ultra-liberal Reform movement, fees are far more exorbitant, running to almost $10, 000 per student per year, and mainstream multiculti-think—emphasizing "global citizenship"—is most definitely the order of the day:

…Though central to their identity, Jewish is far from all these students are. The school's mission statement is to prepare them for lives as practising liberal Jews who "participate effectively in a complex, ever-changing Canadian society."

That means more than just embracing the central tenets of Judaism – God, Torah and Israel. It's also believing women, gays and lesbians are religious and social equals and abortion is a personal decision, respecting other beliefs and cultures and opening congregations to non-Jewish partners of members and those considering conversion.

Each week, classes in two grades lead the Friday afternoon prayer service. Held in the school's synagogue, which doubles as its library, it features Torah readings and reflections of students who study one of the Five Books of Moses and relate it to life today.

"You can show leadership by doing your homework and respecting others," a Grade 4 student told the congregation at one recent service.

The majority of each student's day is spent on the same lessons as their counterparts in public schools – science, math, social studies and English language arts, making no religious deviations for such hot-button issues as sex education, creationism or homosexuality.

Leo Baeck is also a candidate to become an International Baccalaureate school, a global organization of more than 2,100 schools in 125 countries with the lofty mission of "creating a better world through education."

"It's a method of learning that then stays with you for life," Prashker said. "We want to be part of the public education system because we think it can gain from us and we can gain from it."

Parent Ronna Rubin, 48, said while the faith-based components of Leo Baeck are appealing, it's the fact that it offers kids an understanding of how that fits into the rest of their lives that matters most.

"Religious education for its own sake isn't something that really appeals to me," said Rubin, who has daughters aged 9 and 12 at the school. "Our goal is to graduate children who are curious and interested and ambitious about doing good things in the world, not just their very small community."

The main variance from the Ontario curriculum comes with French, the third language on offer at Leo Baeck. A core subject from Grade 4 for all students in the government-funded system, it begins at senior kindergarten here, as do classes in gym, art and music.

"The average Jewish Torontonian is involved in daily life in the city, in the modern world," said Eric Petersiel, south campus principal. "Why would they choose an education that segregates their children?

"It's a fully integrated experience."

For the past two years, the school's Grade 8 class has worked with Na-Me-Res, a native men's residence in Toronto. In addition to collecting coats, many travelled in the centre's outreach van delivering food, clothing and other essentials to the homeless.

Such initiatives are part of the Jewish belief in tikkun olam, or repairing the world. Other recent projects have included an annual Passover food drive, a Grade 5 class raising $321.62 in pennies last year for the Stephen Lewis Foundation for those afflicted with HIV/AIDS in Africa and the collection of more than 300 backpacks in 24 hours to send to students after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans.

"I like that they teach global citizenship and do it in a nurturing way," said Bonnie Goldberg, 38, who has two children, 4 and 8, at the school. "It doesn't have to be a Jewish issue for kids to mobilize."…

Good citizens of the world, to be sure. Pitching in, trying to minimize their cabon footprints, summoning up sympathy for the world's afflicted, no matter who or where they are—and remaining utterly clueless about the kind of Koran-based lessons in "global citizenship" being taught at the Islamic school to their north.

 

The Star is to be commended for shining a light on these two schools. It has thereby (and no doubt unintentionally) revealed that the world view of each is, in its own way, dangerously skewed.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:39 | link | comments (2)

Siddiqui cooks the books: The Toronto Star's revered editorial page editor emeritus, Harpoon Siddiqui, nattering on, and on, about the how Iraq and Afghanistan are two sides of the same coin, and the failure to add up the number of people who have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan as a direct result of American interference in those countries.

My rebuttal to the most recent nattering, in which Harpoon high-fives the late Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini, sworn enemy of the West and Tiny Hitler's main man (next to the Prophet and the Mahdi, of course):

 

In an effort to get to the bottom of true number of civilians who have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan—numbers he says the Americans are trying to cover up—Haroon Siddiqui quotes the late Ayatollah Khomeini. Mr. Siddiqui apparently sees a parallel between the Ayatollah’s contempt for the special treatment the Americans received during the Shah’s era, and the way Americans authorities today have yet to be held to be held for account for—and do a proper accounting of—civilian casualties in these two besieged countries.

 

I, too, would like an accounting. I want to know how many thousands of people have been stolen away in the middle of the night by the Ayatollah’s police since the Islamists came to power? How many have been tortured? How many killed? How many have simply disappeared, never to be seen again? I can think of one such person right off the bat—Zahra Kazemi, the Iranian-Canadian photo-journalist brutally raped and murdered by Iranian authorities while in custody on trumped-up charges; to this day, her remains have yet to be returned to her grieving family back in Canada. How many more anonymous Zahra Kazemis are out there who have never been counted?

 

I would also like a precise count of the number of Iranian children the Ayatollah used as human sacrifices on the field of battle during the Iran-Iraq war. How many youngsters did this holy man send out to clear land mines with their bodies so that his soldiers could advance? How many of the innocent were bloodied and killed because of his cruel indifference to their fate?

 

And I believe it is crucial for us to know exactly how many people have been killed in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere because Iran has been supplying extremists with armaments and supporting their political agenda, thereby helping advance the political agenda of the current Grand Ayatollah and his police state.

 

So by all means, let’s crunch the numbers. But let’s crunch all the numbers, so we can have a better sense of what is really going on in the area, and the reason behind much of the carnage.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:25 | link | comments

Bonkers in Beantown: An MIT computer student with a “quirky” (yes, that’s the word being used) personality tried to board an airplane in Boston while rigged out in a fake bomb.

Security officials were, shall we say, less than amused. From Information Week:

 

A woman arrested Friday for carrying a fake bomb into Boston's Logan airport is an MIT computer whiz who loves "crazy ideas" and "saving the planet from evil villains," according to her blog on a Web site hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

 

In her blog, MIT student Star Simpson says she is "currently studying computers and how they work." Simpson also participates in MIT's MITER project, a student run electronic engineering workship.  

Cops arrested Simpson, 19, on Friday after she reportedly walked into Logan International Airport with a fake bomb  made of lights, wires, and putty strapped to her chest. She was charged with disturbing the peace and perpetrating a hoax.

An MIT spokeswoman on Friday confirmed that Simpson is currently enrolled in the school's famed computer science program. The spokeswoman could not say whether the school is contemplating any disciplinary action against Simpson. "It's too early to say," she said. The spokeswoman said MIT is planning to release a formal statement on the matter.

Simpson's blog indicates she previously lived in Hawaii. It reveals a personality that could be described as quirky. She writes that she previously spent time "traveling the world and saving the planet from evil villains with my delivered-just-in-time gadgets."

Two of the flights that were hijacked as part of the September 11 terror attacks originated at Logan. As a result, Boston city officials have little tolerance for terror-related hoaxes. Earlier this year, two men were arrested for planting bomb-like devices around Boston in an effort to drum up publicity for the cable show Aqua Teen Hunger Force.

Oh, those college kids--they get up to such hijinks. I suppose officials should be thankful she wasn’t one of those “quirky” jihadis.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:40 | link | comments (1)

 Maclean's' outrageous cover:

Even if you despise him; even if you think he's the worst American president ever; even if you consider the decision to try to remake Iraq into a democracy using a constitution based on sharia law to be the most cockamanie scheme in history; and even if you're a struggling Canadian magazine trying to boost interest in your rag by having the most inflammatory cover on the magazine rack: it is beyond disgusting—obscene, even—to equate the leader of the free world with the would-be Caliph of Badghad, a brutal, barbaric, tyranical, mass-murdering thug (may he roil for all eternity in blazing Hades—him and his equally wicked spawn).

Or did I miss the part where Bush gassed tens of thousands of Kurds and had his henchmen dispose of his enemies by inserting them feet-first into a plastic-shredder?

Posted by: scaramouche at 15:49 | link | comments (1)

Out with the old, in the new: The old “axis of evil”—Iran, Iraq, North Korea. The really old axis of evil—Germany, Italy, Japan. The new “axis of evil”—Iran, Syria, North Korea.

Seems the Jews (and the the civilized world) just can’t catch a break:

From the Telegraph:

 

Just when we thought we'd seen the back of one axis of evil, up pops another one to give us all sleepless nights.

The original axis of evil, as defined by President George W Bush in his State of the Union address in January 2002, consisted of Iraq, Iran and North Korea.

 

In fact, this axis was always an unlikely amalgam, conjured from the imagination of David Frum, the President's chief speechwriter at the time, who was casting around for a suitably demonic phrase to capture the gravity of the threat America was said to face from its combined enemies in the wake of the September 11 attacks.

 

The phrase made great headlines, but the reality was that Saddam Hussein's Iraq had no meaningful ties to Pyongyang or Teheran, other than a shared hatred of American military supremacy.

 

This summer it appeared that, with the stubborn exception of Iran, Mr Bush's axis of evil was on the wane: Saddam's regime no longer threatened the Gulf oil fields that fuel the West's economies, and the North Koreans appeared to be moving towards decommissioning the nuclear reactor that enabled it to test an atom bomb last autumn.

There were even signs that the serious economic hardship Iran was suffering because of its controversial nuclear programme had prompted the mullahs to have a serious rethink about pursuing the holy grail of uranium enrichment.

 

All that optimism seems wildly out of place following this week's revelation that the Israeli Air Force launched a daredevil attack on a remote region of northern Syria to destroy a top-secret military facility.

 

The precise nature of the target remains a matter of intense speculation, not least because the Israeli government has imposed a news black-out on the events of the night of September 6; and the Syrians, whose much-vaunted, Russian-built air defence systems failed to detect, let alone repel, the intruders, have been equally secretive.

 

But judging from the small scraps of information that have emerged, it would be fair to conclude that a new axis of evil is under construction, with Syria assuming Iraq's place. But unlike Iraq, Syria has well-documented links to the pariah regimes in North Korea and Teheran, and is cooperating with them on a range of projects, from the acquisition of long-range ballistic missiles to the development of chemical and nuclear weapons…

 

Two words for Tiny Hitler, Boy Assad and Dear Leader (and I ain’t gonna atone for uttering them): Bugger off! Two words in answer to the question “What the heck do we do now?”: regime change.

 

I leave to the experts the details as to how that's to be accomplished.

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:33 | link | comments (1)

Un-"fast"-en your belt: To all those atoning, here's wishing you an easy one:

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:00 | link | comments (1)

Iran weaves its web: Charles Krauthammer looks that mysterious air strike in Syria, which may or may not have taken out a North Korean nuclear somethingorother. He thinks he has it figured out. From RealClear Politics: 

…Apart from the usual suspects -- Syria, Iran, Libya and Russia -- only two countries registered strong protests to the Israeli strike: Turkey and North Korea. Turkey we can understand. Its military may have permitted Israel an overflight corridor without ever having told the Islamist civilian government. But North Korea? What business is this of North Korea's? Unless it was a North Korean facility being hit.

Which raises alarms for many reasons. First, it would undermine the whole North Korean disarmament process. Pyongyang might be selling its stuff to other rogue states or perhaps just temporarily hiding it abroad while permitting ostentatious inspections back home.

Second, there are ominous implications for the Middle East. Syria has long had chemical weapons -- on Monday, Jane's Defence Weekly reported on an accident that killed dozens of Syrians and Iranians loading a nerve-gas warhead onto a Syrian missile -- but Israel will not tolerate a nuclear Syria.

Tensions are already extremely high because of Iran's headlong rush to go nuclear. In fending off sanctions and possible military action, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has chosen a radically aggressive campaign to assemble, deploy, flaunt and partially activate Iran's proxies in the Arab Middle East:

(1) Hamas launching rockets into Israeli towns and villages across the border from the Gaza Strip. Its intention is to invite an Israeli reaction, preferably a bloody and telegenic ground assault.

(2) Hezbollah heavily rearmed with Iranian rockets transshipped through Syria and preparing for the next round of fighting with Israel. The third Lebanon war, now inevitable, awaits only Tehran's order.

(3) Syria, Iran's only Arab client state, building up forces across the Golan Heights frontier with Israel. And on Wednesday, yet another anti-Syrian member of Lebanon's parliament was killed in a massive car bombing.

(4) The al-Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard training and equipping Shiite extremist militias in the use of the deadliest IEDs and rocketry against American and Iraqi troops. Iran is similarly helping the Taliban attack NATO forces in Afghanistan.

Why is Iran doing this? Because it has its eye on a single prize: the bomb. It needs a bit more time, knowing that once it goes nuclear, it becomes the regional superpower and Persian Gulf hegemon…

Come Persian hegemon, hedging bets for A-bombs; daylight come and me wanna go home.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:55 | link | comments (1)

Baader, Meinhoff and Muhammad: One of my favourite essayists, Theodore Dalrymple, pegs ‘Slamism as the Marxism of our time—an ideology that’s enticing a whole bunch of lost, excitement-seeking boys (and girls) into its ranks, especially in Europe. From City Journal via FrontPage Magazine:

From an Islamist point of view, the news from Europe looks good. The Times of London, relying on a police report, recently observed that the Deobandis, a fundamentalist sect, now run nearly half of the 1,350 mosques in Britain and train the vast majority of the Muslim clerics who get their training in the country. The man who might become the sect’s spiritual leader in Britain, Riyadh ul Haq, believes that friendship with a Christian or a Jew makes “a mockery of Allah’s religion.” At least no one could accuse him of a shallow multiculturalism.

According to Le Figaro, 70 percent of Muslims in France intend to keep the fast during Ramadan, up from 60 percent in 1989. Better still, from the Islamist point of view, non-practicing Muslims feel increasing social pressure to comply with the fast, whether they want to or not. The tide is thus running in the Islamists’ favor.

Best news of all for the Islamists, however, comes from Germany. Two of the men that the German police arrested in early September for plotting a series of huge explosions in the country were young German converts to Islam. It is impossible to know how many such German converts there are, but it is thought to run into tens of thousands, principally men; in the nature of things, it is also uncertain how many of them are attracted to extremism, but few people are so attracted by moderation that they are converted by it.

The man believed to be the leader of the little group, Fritz G., the son of a doctor and an engineer, was himself a student of engineering, of mediocre attainment. He grew up in Ulm, where a quarter of the population is now Muslim, and at the time of his parents’ divorce, when he was 15, he began to frequent the Islamic Information Center of Ulm, and also the comically named Multikultihaus in the neighboring town of Neu-Ulm, where young men of jihadist views, including Mohammed Atta, had long congregated. In 2004, he was spotted at the Ulm Islamic center, selling a journal called Think in the Islamic Way. In December of that year, the police found propaganda in favor of Osama bin Laden in his car. In 2006, he went to a terrorist training camp in Pakistan.

His fellow conspirator, Daniel S., came from a well-off family and converted early in life to radical Islam. He traveled to Egypt to learn Arabic, and then returned to Germany, where he sometimes irritated his neighbors by praying loudly in Arabic three times a day.

All this suggests that Islam is fast becoming the Marxism of our times. Had Fritz G. and Daniel S. grown up a generation earlier, they would have become members of the Baader-Meinhof Gang rather than Islamic extremists. The dictatorship of the proletariat, it seems, has given way before the establishment of the Caliphate as the transcendent answer to some German youths’ personal angst.

This is good news indeed for Islamists, but not so good for the rest of us.

Fritz G. loved the Multikultihaus

‘Cause it gave him a cause to espaus.

Unfortunately,

It was jihadi,

And his ardour we’ve since had to daus.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:33 | link | comments

Seeing things: Time to commit Ehud Olmert to the loony bin. He’s in the grip of a powerful dementia that has caused him to fabricate fantastical creatures which don’t exist—like a genuine “peace partner.”

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:27 | link | comments

Monstrous Ahmadinejad: How is he monstrous? Let me count the ways. He has a monstrous ego, monstrous gall, and a monstrous ambition—to dominate the planet prior to pushing it into Armageddon. Steve Emerson, one the world’s pre-eminent “Islamophobes” (i.e., a pundit who, despite being in the firing line of the slings and arrows of outraged true believers, continues to sound the alarm about the jihad) lists a few instances of Tiny Hitler’s monstrousness—the latest being, of course, his request to violate sacred ground. From the New York Post:

GIVE Iranian President Mah moud Ahmadinejad credit for chutzpah: He has asked for permission to visit Ground Zero while he's in New York for a U.N. session.

In other words, a request to visit the site of the worst terrorist attack in history - from a guy who's involved in terrorism up to his neck.

Iran's government has actively and proudly supported terrorism for decades. It created and directs Hezbollah while funding Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist organizations.

Iran coordinates its terrorist sponsorship largely through its Ministry of Intelligence and Security and via the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. The Guard is also Ahmadinejad's chief power base - he's an IRGC veteran.

At the time of the Iranian Revolution, Ahmadinejad was a member of the executive committee of the student group that initially seized the U.S. embassy and took dozens of U.S. diplomats hostage. During his later time in the Guard, he was a member of the assassination team that killed several exiled Iranian Kurd dissidents in Vienna in 1989.

One of the Guard's five branches, the Quds (Jerusalem) Force, bears primary responsibility for coordinating with terrorist groups and sleeper networks around the globe - as well as insurgent groups and militias in Iraq now targeting American forces.

* On Feb. 11, the United States reported that Iran was the source of highly lethal explosively formed projectiles (EFPs) being provided to Iraqi Shiite insurgent groups. This Iranian ordinance had already killed 170 U.S. soldiers. Two months later, the United States stated that Iran was providing EFPs to Sunni insurgent groups as well.

Iran also has a warm relationship with al Qaeda - aiding it in the run-up to 9/11, and ever since:

* The al Qaeda-Iran relationship began in late 1991 or early 1992 when Iranian agents met with al Qaeda leaders in Sudan and informally agreed to provide mutual support for attacks against Israel and the United States.

* Not long after this initial meeting, al Qaeda operatives and trainers went to Iran, where they received training in explosives.

* After al Qaeda was forced to relocate from Sudan to Afghanistan, Iranian agents continued to meet with al Qaeda leadership figures. Iranian officials often accommodated al Qaeda operatives by not stamping their passports -facilitating covert travel through Iran.

* The 9/11 Commission Report notes that eight to 10 of the 9/11 hijackers traveled through Iran between October 2000 and February 2001.

* After the liberation of Afghanistan, several top al Qaeda figures took refuge in Iran.

Iran's various terror puppets have also taken many other American lives:

* Hezbollah was founded in 1982 in the Bekaa Valley by Lebanese Shiite clerics educated in Iran. The IRGC established training camps in Lebanon where Hezbollah recruits trained alongside members of other national and transnational terrorist organizations. Hezbollah members train in Iran on IRGC bases and facilities.

* Before 9/11, Hezbollah was responsible for more American deaths than any other terrorist group, having carried out the deadly 1983 attack on the Marine barracks in Beirut, which killed 200 American servicemen.

* Saudi Hezbollah, which also receives Iranian support, executed a truck bombing at the Khobar Towers housing complex in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 Americans in 1996.

Allowing the president of the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism to visit Ground Zero would be an obscene slap at the victims and survivors of the 9/11 attacks. The request itself is an insult of the worst kind.

Anyone got some garlic, a cross and a wooden stake?

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:50 | link | comments (2)

 Flogging a deceased camel dep’t: Condi Rice has met with “secular” has-been Moo Abbas in an attempt to revive the dead Peace in Our Time process. From YNet News: 

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Thursday to try to bridge his differences with Israel over what a US-led Middle East peace conference might achieve.

 

Rice has found growing interest in “intensifying the dialogue”, a senior aide said, after her talks on Wednesday with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. She will see Olmert again, ending her two-day visit, after her session with Abbas.

 

Rice, meeting Israeli President Shimon Peres before traveling to the West Bank city of Ramallah, said she saw “a spirit and a desire to move towards peace” among Israelis and Palestinians, but there were “many obstacles to overcome"…

 

The chief obstacle: Israel’s being Jewish and sovereign. Good luck leaping over that hurdle, Condi.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:05 | link | comments

Racing to Mo’s defence: I would never accuse UN Nuclear Watchthingy, Mo ElBaradei, of being in the pay of those with a vested interest in seeing the successful completion of Iran’s nuclear power project. I’d accuse him of being feckless, clueless and useless—sure. But crooked and corrupt? Not on your life!

Someone else willing to vouch for Mo’s lilly-whiteness in matters atomic: a scribe with the Tehran Times. Dr. Shireen M. Mazari thinks Mo and the gang have been doing a bang-up job monitoring Iran’s big kaboom facilities. He wants the entire cabal of nervous infidels—that means you, M. Sarkozy!—to lay off the put-upon Nobel Peace Prize winner, and let the mullahs get on with the task at hand:

ISLAMABAD (The News) -- Being at the IAEA these days has once again reminded one that U.S. diatribes are not limited to regimes and states that act contrary to U.S. goals or even wishes. In the usual alliance of the government and the media -- clearly the U.S. media has its own interpretations of a “free” media -- the Americans have launched a blitzkrieg against the IAEA and especially its head, ElBaradei.

The issue, which has aroused a hail of abuse is Iran’s nuclear program. What has irked the U.S. is the fact that the IAEA under its present leadership has proactively sought to resolve this issue peacefully by dialoguing with Iran instead of supporting the American position of seeking confrontation through provocation so that a pretext can be provided for U.S. military action. Remember Iraq and the WMD issue?

Now we have begun to see a spate of articles targeting ElBaradai in the U.S. and U.S.-controlled print media. Some have been downright abusive with the Washington Post labeling him a “rogue” regulator. Ah that word which has become so central to the Bush era in the U.S. If one is not falling in line with the U.S., then one is a “rogue” of one form or another.

The problem arises when heads of international organizations, selected by the international community, are actually abused because they fall out of step with the U.S. Some UN secretary generals also had to suffer a similar fate, but the language now being used by the U.S. media for Baradei goes further than earlier vilifications of international personalities.

Worse still, this time a newly resurgent rightwing leadership in countries like France are supporting this new aggression against U.S. detractors, while British publications like The Economist continue to be predictable in their criticism.

Even the EU launched an attack against Baradei in the just concluded IAEA Board meeting, which led to the IAEA chief actually walking out for some time from the meeting. Such are the antics of the U.S. and its European allies in international organizations today.

Why is ElBaradai being abused and vilified with such vigor? What is his crime? Very simply, he has managed to get Iran back into a dialogue with a timeline for resolving the nuclear issue…

Very simply, he has donned a pair of blinkers and helped facilitate Iran’s End of the World scheme.

 

Update: Mo's IAEA springs into action--and slams Israel. From the Jerusalem Post: 

A 144-nation atomic energy conference criticized Israel Thursday for refusing to put its nuclear program under international purview, with the United States alone in supporting the Jewish state.

Besides Washington, only Israel voted against the resolution while 53 nations backed it and 47 abstained.

The remaining nations were absent for the highly unusual vote - only the second in the 16 years the issue has been on the agenda of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Up to last year, the resolution on "Application of IAEA Safeguards in the Middle East" had been adopted by consensus, but in 2006, and again this year, Israeli objections forced a vote.

This year, Israel opposed two paragraphs - one calling all nations in the Middle East "not to develop, test or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons," the other urging nuclear weapons states to "refrain from any action" hindering the establishment of a Mideast zone free of nuclear weapons.

Both passages were clearly aimed at Israel, which is considered to have nuclear weapons despite its "no tell" policy on the issue and which counts on the United States as its chief ally for support - both in the outside world and in forums such as the conference.

Israeli opposition last year was sparked by a separate Arab-sponsored resolution deeming Israel a "nuclear threat" and refusal by its sponsors to withdraw it.

While that resolution was put up for adoption it was not voted on. A similar resolution was being prepared for consideration at the gathering Friday.

A Western diplomat whose country normally is supportive of Israel sought to diminish the negative impact of the vote, pointing out that last year, 98 approved the resolution, with three abstaining and the United States and Israel opposed.

Still, although the conference has no decision-making powers, the lack of consensus reflected deepening tensions in the Middle East…

Apparently, 98 out of 102 condemning Israel is insufficient to count as a "consensus." It appears the Israel-bashers won't be satisfied until there's unanimity, and the vote is 101 to 1.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:40 | link | comments

Sharia “women’s lib”: How does a by-the-book sharia state attempt to bamboozle infidels into seeing it as “progressive”? By showcasing women in roles one would expect to be fulfilled solely by men. Last week, for example, The Today Show’s Matt Lauer, who was visiting beautiful, downtown Tehran, treated viewers to the sight of an entire fire brigade made up of women. These women had been fully trained in the art of snuffing out fires and were merely awaiting the sound of an alarm to hop to it. ‘Course, they still had to sit at the back of public buses, and should a stray hair emerge from their headscarf, they could be in line for a severe whupping by religious police. But, hey, no Medieval-minded totalitarian state is perfect, right?

In a similar vein, Hamas wants to show how progressive it is by signing up a bunch of chicks to be members of a police force in Gaza. A tough assignment, since the women have to do all their policing wearing outfits that aren’t exactly conducive to chasing criminals. From the Daily Star:

…Shrouded in a loose-fitting black coat, wearing a purple headscarf and white cotton underpiece designed to hide all of her hair, and with her face clean of make-up, Aqal is one of 50 women working with Hamas paramilitaries in Gaza City.

While most are secretaries, she is one of 10 policewomen based at the Saraya Prison in a nascent force set up by Hamas last month as "proof" of its progressive thinking.

"I know that this job needs a strong personality and someone who is courageous. I'm not scared. I just feel that the guilty need to be punished," she says, reeling off a list of crimes she interrogates suspects for - murder, drugs, theft and moral vice.

"We're treated very well within our brotherhood. I work here in the compound and deal with criminals directly. I interrogate men as well as women. At the moment I'm assisting our officers because we haven't finished our training yet," she says.

Amin Nawfal, a commander in the self-styled "man's police" - the Executive Force that supervises the women - says they will eventually be given firearms training, take part in arrest operations and be fully integrated.

"Females can't be touched by a man, therefore we need women police. That's proof we are a lawful country and not an Islamic state. It doesn't violate Shariah law either," Nawfal says.

Women work as police across the Muslim world, including in Hamas' patron Iran, where women clad in black chadors are taught how to use guns, rappel down buildings, chase cars and disable bombs.

"Having women in security jobs shows how democratic we are and that we have equality between men and women," says Nawfal, dressed in military fatigues and sitting at an enormous desk, Hamas television flickering in the background.

But despite his lofty comments, he silences the suggestion that Aqal talk in private, saying he should be present because she might not know the answers to all the questions…

Wow. How very Helen Reddy of him.

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:59 | link | comments (1)

Hell, no, he can’t go: Pass me some smelling salts. I near about fainted when I read this one—which has to represent the apex of chutzpah on one side and the enth-degree of wimpitude on the other. From the New York Sun:

In a move that has stunned New York, the Bloomberg administration is in discussions to escort the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to ground zero during his visit to New York next week, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said today.

The Iranian mission to the U.N. made the request to the New York City Police Department and the Secret Service, who will jointly oversee security during the president's two-day visit. Mr. Ahmadinejad is scheduled to arrive September 24 to speak to the U.N. General Assembly as the Security Council decides whether to increase sanctions against Iran for its uranium enrichment program.

Mr. Kelly said the NYPD and Secret Service were in discussions with the Iranian mission about the logistics for the possible visit, and whether it will take place at all. He said Mr. Ahmadinejad would not be allowed to descend into the pit for safety reasons related to ongoing construction there.

"There has been some interest expressed in his visiting the area," Mr. Kelly said. "It's something that we are prepared to handle if in fact it does happen."

Mr. Kelly said that Mr. Ahmadinejad had not indicated why he wants to visit the site of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Iran has been called the world's "most active state sponsor of terrorism" by the U.S. State Department.

I have no problem allowing Tiny Hitler to defame the memory of the murdered by treading on their gravesite—as soon as Hell freezes over, the moon turns blue and pigs learn to fly. Until then, keep this smirking bastard away from the site and off American soil.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:14 | link | comments (2)

Jewish web masters: For all you Mearshimer-Walt-Carter types out there who think a Jewish cabal is secretly pulling all the strings, looks like you may be right.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:53 | link | comments

Fly ‘n’ cry babies: Here’s a good one. Some Israeli Arab leaders are planning to “boycott” El Al Airlines because of its “discriminatory” security practices. The leaders don’t like the way security officials tend to give Arabs who want to fly Israel’s national airline a harder time than they do to non-Arabs.

Serves you right, El Al. Keep it up and the next thing you know, your outrageous “apartheid” practices will be condemned by the likes of Jimminy Carter, Bishop Desmond Tutu and the UN Human Rights Thingamebobbir.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:08 | link | comments

Tiny Hitler’s clueless helpers: There are three things you can count on in this life: death, taxes, and useful idiots cozying up to the wicked in the name of doing good.

Oh, and also the jihad; you can always count on the jihad.

 

FrontPage Magazine has a barf-inducing account of #3. It’s all about how some pacifist Leftist Christians have been thwarted in their efforts to make kissy-face with Hitler’s successor.

 

I advise you not to read it on a full stomach.

Posted by: scaramouche at 16:47 | link | comments

Jimminy’s hate-on for the Jews: The most sickening aspect of Jimmy Carter’s ongoing and unfounded smear of the Jewish state is that the old gasbag has the audacity to drape himself in the cloak of virtue while doing his dirty work.

You know, kind of like the Spanish Inquisition--and the jihadis.

Update: I had this in "comments" but decided to move it up here:

Mearshimer, Carter, and Walt
Believe that it's all the Jews' fault:
"Palestinians make us sobby,
As does that Jew lobby,
And as for those 'neo-Cons'--
Oy Gevalt!"

Posted by: scaramouche at 16:11 | link | comments (2)

Baathist bafflegab: The terrorism-sponsoring backwater on Israel's northern borden--the winged monkey to the mully-bullies' Wicked Witch of the East (or, alternatively, Mini-Me to the ayatollahs' Dr. Evil--Mark Steyn's characterization) wants us to know one thing. There is absotively, posilutely no truth to the rumour that they had been goin' fission with the kindly assistance of "Dear Leader's" atomic lads.

So don't you be frettin' your teeny little infidel heads about it any more.

Posted by: scaramouche at 15:50 | link | comments

Flawed argument: At an event last night, an executive with the Canadian Jewish Congress tried to address concerns that a vote for religious school funding would also be a vote for funding Islamic madrassahs. Have no fear, said he. He’d looked into the matter—why, he'd even visited a Muslim school attached to a mosque. (“You can see the minaret from the highway,” he said.) Upon inquiring, he was told that school fees amounted to $2,500 a year—about a quarter of what Jewish parents pay. The exec suggested that, ahem, foreign elements, were picking up the slack. The way to curtail this foreign intrusion: extend full funding to Muslim schools and bring them under the public umbrella. We could thereby be assured that Muslim students would be taught a “moderate” version of Islam. Otherwise—and here’s the part we should be concerned about—Saudi-funded madrassahs teaching that old time Wahhabi religion would proliferate, a state of affairs which, to quote that old cliché, would not be good for the Jews.

I see several problems with this argument. First and foremost, why the heck are we allowing the Saudis to butt into our education system and indoctrinate Canadian youngsters with pro-jihadist, anti-Western messages? Shouldn’t that be, oh, I dunno, discouraged by Canadian officials? Second, to qualify for public funding, religious schools will have to agree to adopt certain standards—some of which may not be to the liking of parents who prefer the fundamentalist approach to education. Since the school fees at some Muslim schools are already kept pretty low courtesy the “unintrusive” Custodians of the Two Holy Mosques, wouldn’t these schools simply opt out of public funding? Also, Muslim schools opting in would still be instructing students in lessons from the Noble Koran, including, perhaps, the ones commanding Muslims to resist the temptation to become friendly with Christians and Jews. (Especially the Jews, since the Prophet, that epitome of perfection, took it upon himself to turn us into apes and pigs—and who wants to have a lowly ape or pig as a pal?). Hard to see how any of that is conducive to building a cohesive society—unless, of course, it’s an Islamic one.

 

As for the argument that public funding will invariably have a moderating effect, it can be countered (and deflated) with these few salient words: the Khalil Gibran International Academy.

 

In any event, there’s no way Ontarians are voting “aye” to religious schools.  A new poll reveals that, in a gross political miscalculation that will likely cost him the premiership, John Tory has hitched his wagon to a turkey—and that bird ain’t getting off the ground.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:33 | link | comments (5)

Wahhabi damage control: In a web exclusive, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to Canadian urges restive infidels to calm down and accept sharia law—all in the name of religious sensitivity and multicultural amity, of course. From the Globe and Mail:

The recent decision by Elections Canada to allow veiled voters to participate in the upcoming federal elections without having to lift their veils has prompted a wave of objections from all political parties, including the governing Conservatives. Prime Minister Stephen Harper stated his outright opposition to this decision, suggesting it contravenes previous decisions adopted by Parliament in this regard.

It seems that the niqab issue is taking a sensitive and unfortunate direction between Canadian authorities and the Muslim community in Canada.

First, there was the decision in April to bar five Muslim girls from taking part in a tae kwon do tournament on account of their insistence on wearing the hijab, followed by a series of similar incidents that seem to target Muslim women who wear the hijab or niqab. The recurrence of such cases has opened the door very wide for those who seek to poison the relationship between Canadian Muslims and the authorities as well as the rest of society. Some have interpreted these incidents as an example of religious discrimination against Muslims and as a preamble to further stricter measures against the wearing of hijab by Canadian Muslim women, especially in Quebec.

With the exception of Mr. Harper's objection to the recent decision by Elections Canada, there hasn't been any change in the official position of the Canadian government concerning the hijab or niqab.

In 2004, then-prime minister Paul Martin told the Canadian Council on American Islamic Relations that "wearing the hijab is part of the religious freedom that should be respected and safeguarded." So far, I haven't read that this policy has undergone any review or change by the government of Mr. Harper. One should also point out that the general reaction of the Canadian public has been very positive, in keeping with the spirit of openness and tolerance that characterizes a Canadian society built on the foundation of multiculturalism. A letter writer to this newspaper noted: "Isn't it ironic that Canadian soldiers are willing to die in Afghanistan defending the freedom of the Muslim people there, while in Montreal we are taking their rights away?"

Canada opens its heart and its doors to refugees and immigrants, including Muslims, from all corners of the world. Freedom of religion is entrenched in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms that forms an integral part of the Canadian Constitution. In spite of the horrific Sept. 11 attacks on the United States and the ensuing backlash against Muslims, Canada hasn't changed its positive attitude towards its Muslim community. For this reason, Canada is considered by many Muslims as an oasis of peace and security.

I did not want to intervene in the issue of the niqab and hijab, as this is a domestic matter that concerns Canadians themselves, but the name of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has been implicated by some writers. I do so now, more in my personal than official capacity.

The Kingdom prides itself on being the cradle of Islam that includes the faith's most sacred sites — Mecca and Medinah — to which more than 1.5 billion Muslims turn in prayers from the four corners of the world. The King of Saudi Arabia is known as Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, refusing the title "His Majesty," which is reserved only to Almighty God.

One of the fundamental pillars of Saudi foreign policy is not to intervene in the internal affairs of other countries; for this reason, no official comment or statement has been issued by the Kingdom on the subject of hijab in Canada.

Nevertheless, Muslims are encouraged to give sound advice to each other. As a fellow Muslim, my advice to Canadian Muslims is to avoid being isolated in their own society, without giving up their identity. Canadian Muslims are law-abiding citizens who contribute immensely to the progress of their new country, serving their society and their community positively.

I trust that countries where Muslims represent a minority, including Canada, will understand and appreciate the religious rights of such minorities; at the same time, Muslims in the diaspora have every interest to honour their responsibilities and duties towards the societies where they live.

I am confident that the issue of niqab that was recently brought to the surface will be dealt with by Canadian Muslims with calm and wisdom, in order to prevent any attempts to exploit this kind of issues for political gain at their expense.

It should be remembered that Muslims in Canada contribute in a very positive and constructive manner in the prosperity and diversity of the Canadian society. They are entitled to be treated with respect and not be used as pawns in any partisan games.

Then stop treating them—and us—that way, Mr. Ambassador. And stop spouting taqiyah about the Magic Kingdom’s not messing around in the internal affairs of other nations. The gazillions of oil dollars forked out every year in a Wahhabist outreach program to mosques and madrassahs around the world, including many right here in Canuckistan, makes your words ring very hollow indeed.

 

My letter to the Globe:

 

The Saudi ambassador claims that that “a pillar” of his country’s foreign policy is to stay out of the internal affairs of other countries.

 

Really? Then how does he account for the billions of dollars Saudi Arabia spends every year to spread its extreme Wahhabist version of Islam to mosques and madrassahs around the world, including many right here in Canada. Surely the ambassador knows that the lessons absorbed in such settings have the potential to affect another country’s “internal affairs.” If they didn’t, there would be little point in funding them.

 

If Saudi Arabia was really serious about keeping out of others’ internal affairs, it would pack up its tents and go home.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:14 | link | comments (4)

Who were those masked men?: Taking advantage of legislation that apparently allows Canadians to cast a ballot while their face is covered, some prankish Quebecers turned up at polls to vote in by-elections yesterday wearing a variety of disguises. Five guys (at least, I think they were guys; it’s hard to say for certain from the photo in the Globe and Mail) showed up in Sainte-Hyacinthe-Bagot wearing cowboy hats, one wearing a gas mask, another rubber animal mask, and still another, a real wise guy, decked out in a cowboy hat and a burka. There’s also a shot of an Outremont voter who showed up wearing a pumpkin on his head; the unintentionally droll caption explains that “(h)is ID was verified, though his face remained hidden.” (Alas, the photos aren’t available online.)

Are these guys goofballs? Bigots? Some combo of both? Or is there a serious message beneath the zany get-ups, a protest against the affront to Canadian values of an enshrouded women not having to reveal her face before casting a vote?

 

Update: Maclean's has a picture of Mr. Pumpkin Head.

Posted by: scaramouche at 09:45 | link | comments (2)

Covering Islam—and missing the real story: From CAIR-CAN’s A Journalist’s Guide to Islam, an instruction manual designed to help infidels working in the media remain ignorant about the Koran's jihad imperative and other, ahem, problematic doctrine: 

…In covering Canada’s Muslim community, it is important to be aware of cultural and political differences that may affect newsgathering.

 

It is especially important for journalists to cultivate long-term contacts within the Muslim community in their area. As hosts, Muslims are extremely gracious and self-effacing. But to get beyond the surface, it is important to develop relationships and build trust in order to enhance understanding.

 

Furthermore, North American culture centres on the cult of the individual. Conversely, in Muslim culture the community takes precedence over the individual. That’s why Muslims are less inclined to be critical and outspoken about others in their community, regardless of disagreement. They are also less inclined to air their displeasure in public, particularly via the news media.

 

Certain courtesies ought to be followed when covering Islam and Muslims. For instance, when visiting a mosque, remove shoes upon entering. Further, it is inappropriate for a stranger to shake hands with a member of the opposite sex due to the Islamic etiquette of modest behaviour between genders. When taking photographs of Muslims at prayer, do not film or photograph them from behind. It is offensive. Don’t enhance racial profiling by simply running photographs and images of Muslims who, because of the way they dress, fit the stereotype. Most do not conform to the stereotype.

 

Do not seek out the Muslim community only when there is a crisis or major problem and a reaction is required. Islam offers a rich bounty of feature stories. Help the local community learn more about their Muslim neighbors. Islam offers a rich bounty of feature stories:

 

Examine the traditions around major celebrations.

Compare their marriage and funeral customs.

Outline how Muslims conduct business when charging interest is forbidden.

 

Conversely, avoid labeling extremist or terrorists groups as Islamic, even if they describe themselves as such. Journalists do not refer to white supremacists as Christian although they will cite the Bible to justify their actions. If the term is essential to the story, strive for balance and seek out an opinion and context from the local Muslim community. Be particularly careful in headlines.

 

Finally, do not rely on non-Muslims for information about Islam. And do not rely on Muslims for information about other faiths. By and large, Jews, Hindus, Muslims and Christians know little about the others’ faith and what they may know may be erroneous.

 

No problemo there. I’m perfectly happy to rely on former Muslims like Ibn Warraq, Ali Sinna and Ayaan Hirsi Ali for my info.

 

Or should apostates be considered “unreliable” too?

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:28 | link | comments

The compelling urge to purge: For months now I’ve been hearing that Ahmadinejad is out of favour with the mully-bullies and the people and that, soon enough, in no time at all, just you wait and see, the pint-sized tin-pot despot will be put in his place.

Yep, should be any minute now. By Amir Taheri in the New York Post:

September 17, 2007 -- AS millions of Iranians prepare for the new school year, the scene is being set for what could be a long hot autumn on university campuses across the nation. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has promised to "cleanse" the Iranian educational system of what he calls "the corrupt influence of the infidel" and has mobilized a special militia to crush the expected student revolts.

The radical president refers to his "academic cleansing" plan as "The Second Great Islamic Cultural Revolution." The late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini closed the universities and launched the first "Great Islamic Cultural Revolution" in 1980. A committee created to "cleanse" academia purged more than 6,000 professors and lecturers, virtually destroying Iranian academia. Dozens of academics were executed as hundreds fled into exile. The committee also expelled thousands of students on charges of monarchist or leftist tendencies. It also censored or totally rewrote dozens of textbooks to conform to the Khomeinist ideology.

When the universities were reopened two years later, the committee tried to fill them with students and teachers sympathetic to Khomeinism. The trick was to allocate special places for members of The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and children of families believed to be loyal to the regime.

Further, it established a blacklist of banned authors and writings - an index that has grown every year since, reminding one of the worst days of the Inquisition in medieval Europe. The madness of censorship, supervised by the so-called Ministry of Islamic Orientation and Culture, reached a new peak last week with the banning of a new volume of memoirs of former President Hashemi Rafsanjai - who was a member of the original "cleansing" committee!

More than two decades of purges and "cultural cleansing" didn't prevent Iranian universities from becoming bastions of opposition to the Khomeinist ideology. In the 1990s, Iran experienced the largest and longest student revolt in its history. Then-President Muhammad Khatami crushed the revolt through the Revolutionary Guard with mass arrests and the expulsion of thousands of students.

Ahmadinejad launched his second "Islamic Cultural Revolution" last year by appointing a semiliterate mullah as chancellor of Tehran University - the first time that a cleric took charge of the nation's oldest and largest center of higher education.

Ahmadinejad's purge started last July with the replacement of 20-plus college deans. In almost every case, a bona fide academic was pushed out in favor of a Revolutionary Guard member.

If Vegas is taking bets on it, I’d put my money on Ahmadinejad’s stick around for the foreseeable future.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:15 | link | comments

First nations: What do the Palestinians have in common with Maoris, Sami and Canada's First Nations people—aside from their sense of being the victims of Western interlopers who stole their land, I mean? According to the ever-helpful United Nations, they are all “indigenous people” whose “ human rights” are worthy of special recognition and protection. Such recognition was accorded last week when UN members overwhelmingly voted to adopt the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People. The only nay-sayers: New Zealand, Australia, the U.S. and Canada—Western nations with indigenous populations whose rights are already well-protected.

Why would the UN take pains to pass such a redundant declaration? It could be that UN members are so inordinately soft-hearted, kind, and determined to redress historical wrongs that they believed it behoved them to do so.

 

Then again, it could be because they hate Israel. From FrontPage Magazine:

...The Declaration’s purpose is to manufacture a synthetic global group identity among distinct, unrelated communities of people living within legally defined national jurisdictions all over the world. The characteristic that all of these folks are supposed to share in common, under the blanket title of “indigenous peoples”, is that they claim to be ‘first’ inhabitants in a given area of land whom ‘colonialist’ outsiders have sought to wipe out or exploit. The Declaration’s proponents believe that today’s globalization is nothing more than a continuation of this exploitation, which they call ‘neo-colonialism’. In their anti-Western, anti-capitalist worldview, which the Declaration embodies, technology, multi-national corporations and global markets are all driving forces in the exploitation of countless indigenous communities which stand in their way.

Although not legally binding as a treaty, the Declaration is intended by its proponents to set forth international norms to govern the collectivist rights of indigenous peoples over ‘their’ lands, resources and ‘traditional knowledge’. Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, chair of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (an advisory group under the UN’s Economic and Social Council), said that the Declaration "sets the minimum international standards for the protection and promotion of the rights of indigenous peoples. Therefore, existing and future laws, policies and programs of indigenous peoples will have to be redesigned and shaped to be consistent with this standard."[1]

Remember that you will not find any definition of “indigenous peoples” in the Declaration. It relies entirely on communities’ own self-identification as indigenous peoples, based on claims asserting historical continuity with pre-colonial and/or pre-settler societies, a strong link to territories and surrounding natural resources, and different cultural, linguistic, traditional, and other characteristics to those of the dominant culture of that region or state. That could mean just about any self-declared minority group with alleged ties to an area of land can claim indigenous status, insist on self-determination over control of huge swaths of territory and resources within national borders and demand reparations for perceived wrongs against them and their ancestors.

Not surprisingly, for example, the Palestinians are asserting with a straight face that “Palestinian rights are enshrined in the universally accepted principle that land belongs to its indigenous inhabitants”.[2] They got help in this regard from a document published as far back as 1990 by the UN’s Division for Palestinian Rights, which contrasted the ‘outsider’ Zionists who came from Europe to establish the state of Israel with the “indigenous people of Palestine, whose forefathers had inhabited the land for virtually the two preceding millennia”.[3] Of course, under the UN principle of self-identification - which the Palestinians are all too happy to exploit to their political advantage - no proof is required of any Palestinian ties by birth, continuity of land possession, language, religion or tradition to the ancient idol-worshipping Canaanites whom Muslim Palestinians now conveniently claim to be their indigenous forebears. By contrast, Jews living in Israel today are indisputably connected by common religion, heritage and language to the ancient Hebrews who inhabited the land several millennia ago.

Masters of propaganda and of playing victim, the Palestinians have shamelessly linked their situation with that of indigenous groups such as the Six Nations Indian tribes in Canada. One of their motives is to whip up as much indigenous grassroots and sympathetic Leftist support as they can for their global campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel by using the vocabulary of oppression, colonialism and apartheid that the Left loves to hear...

Just goes to show that one man's "indigenous people" is another man's (a Jew-hating anti-Zionist's, that is) oppressive, colonialist, apartheid state.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:46 | link | comments

Sheema’s con: In a small masterpiece of disingenuousness in Saturday’s Globe and Mail, CAIR-CAN founder Sheema Khan recalls how, as a girl in public school, she enjoyed hearing the Lord’s Prayer recited over the P.A. every morning. Listening to this Christian prayer made her feel all warm and tingly inside, allowing her “to relate to the spiritual calling of a faith different from my own – an experience that has served me well throughout life. And singing God Save the Queen instilled a sense of respect for authority.” Khan would like today's Muslim youngsters to have a chance to experience what she did. Oh, not by listening to an infidel prayer in an infidel public school—Allah forefend. No, Sheema wants them to be able to get their “spirtituality” and "respect for authority" at Islamic religious schools:

…Like those of other religious groups, a portion of Canadian Muslim parents wish to place their children in educational environments that imbibe religious values in harmony with their Canadian identity. There are Muslim schools in every major Canadian city, and the numbers are growing. These schools provide an environment conducive to daily prayer. During Ramadan, the schedule is eased for students who are fasting. A modicum of modesty (in dress and behaviour) is expected on the part of all students. Of course, not all is rosy. Some have financial problems, others can't find qualified teachers. Student discipline is sometimes a problem.

Despite these problems, Muslim and other religious schools seek to nurture children's spiritual and moral components. Does the public system have the luxury or the mandate to allow such exploration of spirituality, in this age of consumerism and self-indulgence? Most would answer no…

See, she only wants young Muslims to be able to explore their “spiritual” side and absorb all those Koran-based “spiritual” lessons that are the equivalent of “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those that trespass against us.”

 

The Koran has tons of “spirituality” along those lines, right?

 

And if, along the way, young Muslims also imbibe what some of us might consider to be less than “spiritual” lessons—ones in which, say, Jews are described as apes and pigs and Allah and his Prophet unleash a seemingly endless stream of curses at them—well, that’s a small price to pay for “spiritual” fulfillment. And no doubt their teachers will be able to “contextualize” such “spirituality” in order to bring it in line with the larger society’s multiculti ethos.

 

Should it come to pass, however, that Ontarians fail to embrace the Tory plan—as now seems likely—Muslim parents who can’t afford private fees have another option: they can demand that public schools make, ahem, “accommodations” for their "spiritual" beliefs. Here, for example, is a step-by-step plan (it’s American, but equally applicable in Canada) parents can use to help bring the kind of "spritituality" mandated by sharia law into the public system.

 

To review: in the public system, accommodating sharia law can be seen as multicultural and contemporary; “The Lord’s Prayer” is seen as being hopelessly passé.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:54 | link | comments (2)

Unlikely envoy: If I had to point to the last person I would expect to describe herself as an "Ambassador for Judaism," it would have to be someone whose first name is "Madonna."

Posted by: scaramouche at 22:14 | link | comments

Ramadan astronauts: Islam Online reports that two Malaysians are vying for the honour of becoming the first Islamic faster in outer space:

CAIRO — Malaysia is hopeful that the country's first astronaut will also become the first Muslim to fast in space when he blasts off during Ramadan, the Sunday Star newspaper reported Sunday, September 16.

"It will be great if our astronaut chooses to fast. We are looking forward to having him relate his experience of fasting in space. I'm sure he is equally excited and will find it a thrilling experience," Anan C. Mohd, from Malaysia's Department of Islamic Development (JAKIM), said.

Anan said the astronaut could choose to fast in space or replace his fasting days when he returns to Earth aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft...

Um, better make that two Malaysians are vying for the honour of deferring Ramadan fasting until they’re safely back on the ground.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:07 | link | comments (1)

Size matters: In a sign of the times, and a highly symbolic one at that, a hotel complex in the Arab Emirate of Dubai has surpassed Toronto's CN Tower to become the highest free-standing structure in the world

In other words, their concrete phallus is bigger than our concrete phallus.

Posted by: scaramouche at 16:54 | link | comments

Huzzahs for the Teddy Roosevelt approach: An editorial in the Boston Herald applauds the deft way Israel has handled the terror-sponsoring (and nuclear warhead-accumulating) Syrians:

Israel has just given the world a good example of the virtues of speaking softly and carrying a big stick.

This past week Israel launched airstrikes over northern Syria and said absolutely nothing. At last, Syria has to pay real penalties for its aid to terrorists.

There were not even any leaks out of the leakiest government in the Western world. What is known comes from other capitals, notably Washington.

The airstrike near the border with Turkey hit a shipment of weapons supplied by Iran and destined for the Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon, according to a U.S. military official. (It wasn’t known whether this official was relying on information from the Israelis or on U.S. intelligence such as satellite photos.)

An earlier report said Israel attacked nuclear material sent to Syria by North Korea. Another report said the attack was on sophisticated new missiles. Hezbollah said Israel was testing an air route for a later attack on Iran. Any of those would be good reasons for action.

Arab countries were mostly silent. Syria complained to the United Nations about a violation of its airspace, which took some brass since arming private groups in Lebanon like Hezbollah was forbidden by the Security Council resolution that ended Israel’s attacks on Hezbollah last year. Syria did not admit that a real target had been bombed, claiming only that Israeli planes dropped fuel tanks and munitions to enhance their getaway after Syrian anti-aircraft defenses opened up. There were indications that Syria was grateful for Israel’s silence. North Korea denounced the attack, which raises the possibility that North Korea was indeed the ultimate source of the arms.

What counts is the conclusion that Syria draws. It should conclude that it is safer to stop supplying arms to Hezbollah and to Hamas, the terror group that controls Gaza on Israel’s southern border, as it has for years. Further, it should conclude that the smart course is to return to the negotiations with Israel that were broken off in 2000. Other countries trying to destabilize their neighbors would do well to take note.

The Herald is right. A honking big hole in the ground is likely to make a far bigger impression—both literally and figuratively—than, say, talking softy about returning the Golan Heights and wielding no discernable weapon at all.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:18 | link | comments (1)

Today's funny photo: BFFs Moo and Hu demonstrate that popular Iranian folk dance, The Tube.  It's the same one performed last year by jubilant Shias at a public ceremony celebrating Iran's entry into the nuclear club. At that time revelers clutched tiny test tubes containing simulated fissionable matter, but Moo and Hu have become so adept at the dance that they don't need real tubes:

 

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:32 | link | comments

All you need is love—and a really good plan for dealing with the jihadis: At a ceremony marking the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 jihadi attack, Massachussets Governor Deval Patrick told the assembled that the reason Mo Atta and Co. hijacked  those airplanes was attributable to “a failure of human beings to understand each other, to learn to love each other."

That’s right. The Lennonesque Gov. Patrick apparently believes 9/11 occurred not because of the resurgent jihad, but due to the marked scarcity of hugging at the international level.

You won’t be surprised to learn that Mark Steyn, for one, is less than enraptured with the gov’s anachronistic, hippy-dippy message. From the OC Register:

…I was laughing so much I lost control of the wheel, and the guy in the next lane had to swerve rather dramatically. He flipped me the Universal Symbol of Human Understanding. I certainly understood him, though I'm not sure I could learn to love him. Anyway, I drove on to Boston and pondered the governor's remarks. He had made them, after all, before an audience of 9/11 families: Six years ago, two of the four planes took off from Logan Airport, and so citizens of Massachusetts ranked very high among the toll of victims. Whether any of the family members present Tuesday were offended by Gov. Patrick, no one cried "Shame!" or walked out on the ceremony.

 

Americans are generally respectful of their political eminences, no matter how little they deserve it.

We should beware anyone who seeks to explain 9/11 by using the words "each other": They posit a grubby equivalence between the perpetrator and the victim – that the "failure to understand" derives from the culpability of both parties. The 9/11 killers were treated very well in the United States: They were ushered into the country on the high-speed visa express program the State Department felt was appropriate for young Saudi males. They were treated cordially everywhere they went. The lap-dancers at the clubs they frequented in the weeks before the Big Day gave them a good time – or good enough, considering what lousy tippers they were. Sept. 11 didn't happen because we were insufficient in our love to Mohamed Atta.

 

This isn't a theoretical proposition. At some point in the future, some of us will find ourselves on a flight with a chap like Richard Reid, the thwarted shoe-bomber. On that day we'd better hope the guy sitting next to him isn't Gov. Patrick, who sees him bending down to light his sock and responds with a chorus of "All You Need Is Love," but a fellow who "understands" enough to wallop the bejesus out of him before he can strike the match. It was the failure of one group of human beings to understand that the second group of human beings was determined to kill them that led the crew and passengers of those Boston flights to stick with the obsolescent 1970s hijack procedures until it was too late.

 

Unfortunately, the obsolescent 1970s multiculti love-groove inclinations of society at large are harder to dislodge. If you'll forgive such judgmental categorizations, this isn't about "them," it's about "us." The long-term survival of any society depends on what proportion of its citizens thinks as Gov. Patrick does. Islamism is an opportunist enemy but you can't blame them for seeing the opportunity: In that sense, they understand us far more clearly than Gov. Patrick understands them…

 

Which, all in all, doesn’t bode well for our ability to turn back the tide.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:22 | link | comments

Don’t get no closer, Tiny Hitler: Can’t hardly wait till the pint-sized ‘Slamonazi arrives for his return engagement at the Turtle Bay arena. I have it on good authority that singer Elton John, who, as you’ll recall, revised his song “Candle in the Wind” for the occasion of Diana’s funeral, has kindly consented to open the proceedings with a revamped version of another of his beloved melodies:

Bearded smiler.

Jew-reviler.

Fart catcher for the boys.

Ayatollahs,

Holy rollahs,

Makin’ a lot of noise.

Bloviator, Great Satan-hater, star of the global scene.

And now he’s comin’, and folks are hummin’.

Tiny Hitler here to preen.

 

Mahdi-freak, he will speak,

Hurling his insults far and wide.

No turnin’ back now.

He’s on his track now.

Setting the stage for genocide.

 

Shia man he takes his stand

For enriched uranium.

Looking out he starts to shout

The words he knows, the tune he hums.

But how unreal it feels

Going though this déjà vu.
If only we could hear, could really hear him

When he talks loudly, clearly.

 

Swallow poison, Tiny Hitler.

Do us all a great big favour.

Lay you out in shroud of linen.

Put you in an unmarked grave there.

 

Bearded smiler.

Jew-reviler.

Fart catcher for the boys.

Ayatollahs,

Holy rollahs,

Makin’ a lot of noise.

Bloviator, Great Satan-hater, star of the global scene.

And now he’s comin’, and folks are hummin’

Tiny Hitler here to preen.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:18 | link | comments

Another Osirek: Israel’s leadership has seemed feckless, clueless and rudderless in recent days. However, credit must be paid to the Olmert regime, and especially defense minister, Ehud Barak, for pulling off a cunning bait-and switch on the Syrians. (It helps, when dealing with military matters, to have a military man in the defense portfolio--which, tragically, was not the case when Israel went to war with Hezbollah two summers ago.) According to the Sunday Times, that mysterious air strike by Israel on Syrian soil got rid of some nuclear missiles that the Allawites had been hoping to lob at the Jews. Taking a pro-active approach, and using his noodle for a change, Olmert dashed such hopes—for the moment, anyway:

…According to Israeli sources, preparations for the attack had been going on since late spring, when Meir Dagan, the head of Mossad, presented Olmert with evidence that Syria was seeking to buy a nuclear device from North Korea.

The Israeli spy chief apparently feared such a device could eventually be installed on North-Korean-made Scud-C missiles.

“This was supposed to be a devastating Syrian surprise for Israel,” said an Israeli source. “We’ve known for a long time that Syria has deadly chemical warheads on its Scuds, but Israel can’t live with a nuclear warhead.”

An expert on the Middle East, who has spoken to Israeli participants in the raid, told yesterday’s Washington Post that the timing of the raid on September 6 appeared to be linked to the arrival three days earlier of a ship carrying North Korean material labelled as cement but suspected of concealing nuclear equipment.

The target was identified as a northern Syrian facility that purported to be an agricultural research centre on the Euphrates river. Israel had been monitoring it for some time, concerned that it was being used to extract uranium from phosphates.

According to an Israeli air force source, the Israeli satellite Ofek 7, launched in June, was diverted from Iran to Syria. It sent out high-quality images of a northeastern area every 90 minutes, making it easy for air force specialists to spot the facility.

Early in the summer Ehud Barak, the defence minister, had given the order to double Israeli forces on its Golan Heights border with Syria in anticipation of possible retaliation by Damascus in the event of air strikes.

Sergei Kirpichenko, the Russian ambassador to Syria, warned President Bashar al-Assad last month that Israel was planning an attack, but suggested the target was the Golan Heights.

Israeli military intelligence sources claim Syrian special forces moved towards the Israeli outpost of Mount Hermon on the Golan Heights. Tension rose, but nobody knew why.

At this point, Barak feared events could spiral out of control. The decision was taken to reduce the number of Israeli troops on the Golan Heights and tell Damascus the tension was over. Syria relaxed its guard shortly before the Israeli Defence Forces struck…

And the befuddled Baathists, surveying the great big hole in the ground where their nuclear cache used to be, seem not to know what hit them.

Posted by: scaramouche at 09:43 | link | comments

Vilifying the truth-tellers: While reading a Mark Steyn post on NRO, I happened to notice and click on an ad listed on the side. Turns out it was for an organization that’s purportedly working to build “Muslim bridges” by “saying no to Islamophobes.”

Who are these dastardly “Islamophobes” we’re supposed to nay-say? They include Steve Emerson, Daniel Pipes, Walid Shoebat and Glenn Beck.

 

None of these men is an “Islamophobe”—defined as a bigot; someone who suffers from an unfounded and irrational fear about those who practice the religion of Islam. Rather, every one of them is sounding the alarm about the genuine threat posed by Islamo-fascists and their supremacist doctrines.

 

Coming from the likes of this website, they should wear the label “Islamophobe”—defender of Western freedom—as a badge of honour.

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:18 | link | comments (1)

Dumb smarty-pants: The other day I pretended to take great umbrage when a colleague suggested that I was “an intellectual.” “I’m not an intellectual,” I huffed. “Intellectuals are stupid!” 

Well, maybe not so much stupid as clueless. Here’s an example of what I mean: in a review in the Globe and Mail of historian Walter Laqueur’s book, The Last Days of Europe: Epitaph for an Old Continent, Jeffrey Kopstein, who qualifies as an intellectual since he heads up the Centre for European, Russia and Eurasian Studies at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies, makes the following astonishing—and, dare one say, imbecilic—assertion:

...Ultimately, as Laqueur himself acknowledges, the lure of modernity and wealth may dissolve the cultural particularism of Islam, not only outside Europe, but perhaps even more decisively, inside.

In fact, the entire matter can be viewed in a much more hopeful light. For centuries, Europe supplied the world with emigrants. Large numbers of people (including my grandparents) wanted out, and for good reason. Europeans can take it as a compliment and a commentary on their success that it is now the kind of place to which people want to move and where they want to raise their children.

If Europeans ultimately do have fewer children over the next century and are replaced by the children of Muslim immigrants, their societies will change. On this much, Laqueur is right. But change does not equal decline and, as the cases of the Amish and ultra-Orthodox Jews show, liberal democracies can easily live with minorities who live outside the mainstream. In the end, Laqueur does not prove convincingly that Europe's Muslims are unwilling to live by the basic rules of the game. The glass may not be full, but it is not nearly as empty as Laqueur would have us believe.

Now, I’m definitely no intellectual, the proof being that I know that while the Amish and the ultra-Orthodox may be throwbacks to an earlier era, there is nothing in their belief system that says God has decided that they’re supposed to be numero uno uber alles, nor that it is incumbent upon them to wage a perpetual holy war on the non-Amish or non-Orthodox until the unbelievers cry “Uncle!” and feel themselves to be vanquished.

 

But, hey, if you’re so engrossed in all those European, Russian, and Eurasian studies—as Mr. Kopstein no doubt is—and if you’ve never read Bat Ye’or’s Eurabia, among many other intellectual (though not leftist) works, it’s easy to miss those “nuances”.

 

Also, maybe I haven't been paying close enough attention, but I can't remember the last time anyone Amish or Orthodox strapped on some dyno, screamed "Allahu akbar!" and self-detonnated in the midst of a crowd of non-believers.

 

How 'bout you, Mr. Kopstein?

 

And if I'm not mistaken, the Amish and Orthodox Jewish communities are piddly; the Erabian ummah, on the other hand, is massive, and growing by leaps, bounds and bombs every day.

 

My letter to the Globe:

 

Jeffrey Kopstein says historian Walter Laqueur has grossly exaggerated the threat to Europe’s body politic of trying to absorb a large Muslim minority. After all, says, Mr. Kopstein, liberal democracies have had little trouble making room for the Amish and ultra-Orthodox Jews—religious groups who prefer to live “outside the mainstream.” He can’t think of any reason why Europe can’t do the same for Muslims.

 

Actually, I can think of several. First, the number of Amish and ultra-Orthodox Jews in the West is miniscule. The Muslim population is immense and mushrooming; soon enough, cities such as Amsterdam and Rotterdam will have Muslim majorities.

 

Next, there is nothing in Amish or ultra-Orthodox doctrine which obliges them to wage a holy war on the non-Amish or non-Orthodox and to continue that state of war until all non-believers perceive themselves to be defeated.

 

And neither the Amish nor the ultra-Orthodox expect the broader society to adapt to their beliefs, as many Muslims expect European societies to do.

 

Finally, I cannot remember the last time someone Amish or ultra-Orthodox shouted the equivalent of “Allah Akbar” and self-detonated in a crowd of non-believers.

 

Given all that, I’d encourage Mr. Kopstein to give the Laqueur thesis some sober second thought.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:28 | link | comments (1)

The Globe’s tale of woe: The Globe and Mail is très sympathique to the Moroccan-born Quebecois arrested for allegedly plotting a big kaboom over in Germany. Globe scribes Tu Than Ha and Ingrid Peritz depict him as a poor schlemiel who had little success with the ladies (until he hooked up five years ago with his much-older wife), and who was forced to take on some pretty unappetizing, not to mention un-Islamic, gigs—like sanitizing pig trucks.

No wonder he turned to something that imbued his wretched, soul-destroying life with a whole lot more meaning:

GRAND MÈRE, QUE., MONTREAL — A Moroccan-born man arrested in Quebec in connection with a bomb plot had tried several times to immigrate to Canada but wasn't successful until he married a Canadian woman nearly 18 years older than him, an ex-girlfriend says.

Saïd Namouh, 34, was detained this week on a conspiracy charge. The prosecution alleges that he plotted to detonate a car bomb in Austria, in concert with a pair of alleged al-Qaeda sympathizers in Vienna.

Mr. Namouh grew up in the coastal city of Kenitra in northern Morocco. He came to Quebec after marrying a waitress from Maskinongé, Que., who was visiting his country. She then sponsored his immigration application.

This came after Mr. Namouh had an Internet relationship with another small-town Quebec woman who tried in vain to get him a visa to Canada, said the woman, a resident of Grand Mère. Both Maskinongé and Grand Mère are in the Mauricie area, midway between Montreal and Quebec City.

For the past five years, Mr. Namouh has been in the Quebec hinterland, taking un-Muslim jobs such as washing trucks that transport pigs.

His life had gone through turmoil in recent months. He divorced the Maskinongé waitress, Carole Lessard, moved to nearby Trois-Rivières, but then couldn't renew his lease. He became jobless. He was charged with breaking into the home of the Grand Mère woman, with whom he has had an on-again-off-again relationship. His family in Morocco wasn't informed of those upheavals, however.

“He said he found joy there,” one brother said by phone from Morocco. “It's not fair,” he said of Mr. Namouh's arrest.

He confirmed that Mr. Namouh has a child in Morocco but wouldn't comment further.

The Grand Mère woman said Mr. Namouh used to be devout and pray. But more recently, he was no longer showing public signs of religious practice, she said.

“He goes on the Internet a lot,” she said. Austrian authorities say Mr. Namouh had online communications with three Viennese Muslims who were arrested this week…

According to the German magazine Der Spiegel, Mr. Mahmoud recruited in Canada by sending e-mails seeking volunteers to help on a website. “He more or less asked how you set something like that up,” a German security official says on the magazine's website.

 

RCMP Corporal Sylvain L'Heureux said police seized a computer and documents from Mr. Namouh but no bomb-making material because the plot was “nipped in the bud.”

Since arriving in Quebec after his 2002 marriage to Ms. Lessard, Mr. Namouh took odd jobs. He was hired by a woodworking plant. He also worked washing hog-carrying trucks of Gène-Alliance Inc., a firm that raises pigs for genetic research.

 

Mr. Namouh's car was still parked outside the Trois-Rivières basement flat where he resided from March, 2006, until a few weeks ago.

 

Inside, a Bible, a Jehovah Witnesses' booklet and Arabic-language printouts could be seen.

 

The landlady, Josée Boudreault, said Mr. Namouh was on welfare. He was friendly but his messiness led her to end the lease. He then moved back with Ms. Lessard in Maskinongé, and it was there that police arrested him Wednesday morning.

 

Poor lost soul. If only he’d been able to get a good education and become the kind of professional we here in the West accord a great deal of respect—like, say, a physican.

 

On second thought…

Posted by: scaramouche at 16:34 | link | comments (1)

The best defence is a good offense—and no one’s more offensive than a taqiyah-spouting flunky of the mullahs: Quick now. Can you name the brutally repressive police state where “Human rights violations include social exclusion policies, blatant racism and racial discrimination, police brutality, unlawful detention, torture and deaths in custody, violence against women and children and indigenous people, who are being treated as second class people by the…government."

Can you guess which government has been replaced by the ellipses? Why, the Canadian government, of course. At least, that’s the assessment of Iran’s envoy to the repellent UN Human Rights Council. The enjoy is miffed that Canada had the temerity to speak out at in front of the HRC on Thursday, and criticize the mullahs’ repressive brand of Islamic Utopianism. From YNet News:

 

Iran hit back at Canada on Friday for criticizing its rising number of executions and treatment of women, accusing Ottawa of racism, police brutality and treating its indigenous people like second class citizens.

 

Canada, in remarks echoed by the European Union (EU), told the UN Human Rights Council on Thursday that the human rights situation was deteriorating in the Islamic Republic.

 

Iran's envoy A. Eshragh Jahromi rejected Canada's statement, which had voiced specific concern at Iran's "treatment of women as second class citizens" and suppression of peaceful demonstrations in support of women's rights.

 

"Such unfortunate allegations clearly demonstrate the continuation of old habits of politicization and double standards which discredited the UN Commission on Human Rights," Jahromi said, referring to the previous UN rights forum which the Council replaced a year ago.

 

Instead, Canada's inability to deal with human rights violations at home should be brought to the attention of the 47-member forum, he said…

 

Iran's envoy also took issue with remarks by Diane Ala'i, representative of the Baha'i International Community, who complained of "systematic and organized persecution" of its members in Iran, including arrests and property confiscations.

 

The faith, an offshoot of Islam which claims 5 million members worldwide, is considered heresy by Iran's religious leaders.

 

"All Iranians, including the Baha'i, enjoy their full constitutional rights. In my country, all are equal before the law," Jahromi said.

 

You won’t be surprised to learn that the Baha’i would beg to differ.

Posted by: scaramouche at 15:50 | link | comments

The clear and present danger: Yesterday the Rabbi at my synagogue gave an eloquent and impassioned sermon the subject of which was what he sees as the gravest threat facing the Jewish people today: the divisiveness between fractious Jewish factions. Orthodox vs. Reform; Reform vs. Orthodox; one segment of the Jewish community dissing/dismissing/sniping at another segment: that, more that anything else, he said, threatens the future of the Jewish people.

With all due respect to my Rabbi, I see a far graver, more immediate danger than ongoing Jewish disharmony: the tsunami of hatred that is poised to wash over and obliterate the Jewish state.

 

By co-incidence, Victor Davis Hanson, a man who likely has little awareness of Jewish sectarianism, also outlined the threat yesterday. From RealClear Politics:

Who recently said: "These Jews started 19 Crusades. The 19th was World War (1). Why? Only to build Israel."

Some holdover Nazi?

Hardly. It was former Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan of Turkey, a NATO ally. He went on to claim that the Jews -- whom he refers to as "bacteria" -- controlled China, India and Japan, and ran the United States.

Who alleged: "The Arabs who were involved in 9/11 cooperated with the Zionists, actually. It was a cooperation. They gave them the perfect excuse to denounce all Arabs."

A conspiracy nut?

Actually, it was former Democratic U.S. Sen. James Abourezk of South Dakota. He denounced Israel on a Hezbollah-owned television station, adding: "I marveled at the Hezbollah resistance to Israel. . . . It was a marvel of organization, of courage and bravery."

And finally, who claimed at a United Nations-sponsored conference that democratic Israel was "much worse" than the former apartheid South Africa, and that it "undermines the international community's reaction to global warming"? A radical environmentalist wacko?

Again, no. It was Clare Short, a member of the British parliament. She was a secretary for international development under Prime Minister Tony Blair.

A new virulent strain of the old anti-Semitism is spreading worldwide. This hate -- of a magnitude not seen in over 70 years -- is not just espoused by Iran's loony president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or radical jihadists.

The latest anti-Semitism is also now mouthed by world leaders and sophisticated politicians and academics. Their loathing often masquerades as "anti-Zionism" or "legitimate" criticism of Israel. But the venom exclusively reserved for the Jewish state betrays their existential hatred.

Israel is always lambasted for entering homes in the West Bank to look for Hamas terrorists and using too much force. But last week the world snoozed when the Lebanese army bombarded and then crushed the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp, which harbored Islamic terrorists.

The world has long objected to Jewish settlers buying up land in the West Bank. Yet Hezbollah, flush with Iranian money, is now purchasing large tracts in southern Lebanon for military purposes and purging them of non-Shiites. Here at home, "neoconservative" has become synonymous with a supposed Jewish cabal of Washington insiders who hijacked U.S. policy to take us to war for Israel's interest. That our state department is at the mercy of a Jewish lobby is the theme of a recent high-profile book by professors at Harvard University and the University of Chicago.

Yet when the United States bombed European and Christian Serbia to help Balkan Muslims, few critics alleged that American Muslims had unduly swayed President Clinton. And such charges of improper ethnic influence are rarely leveled to explain the billions in American aid given to non-democratic Egypt, Jordan or the Palestinians -- or the Saudi oil money that pours into American universities.

The world likewise displays such a double standard. It seems to care little about the principle of so-called occupied land -- whether in Cyprus or Tibet -- unless Israel is the accused. Mass murdering in Cambodia, the Congo, Rwanda and Darfur has earned far fewer United Nations' resolutions of condemnation than supposed atrocities committed by Israel. A number of British academics are sponsoring a boycott of Israeli scholars but leave alone those from autocratic Iran, China and Cuba.

There are various explanations for the new anti-Semitism. For many abroad, attacking Jews and Israel is an indirect way of damning its main ally, the United States -- by implying that Americans are not entirely evil, just hoodwinked by those sneaky and far more evil Jews.

At home, there are obvious pragmatic considerations. Some Americans may find it makes more sense to damn a few million Israelis without oil than it does to offend Israel's adversaries in the Middle East, who number in the hundreds of millions and control nearly half the world's petroleum reserves.

Cowardice explains a lot. Libeling Israel won't earn someone a fatwa or a death sentence in the manner comparable criticism of Islam might. There are no Jewish suicide bombers in London, Madrid or Bali.

This new face of anti-Semitism is so insidious because it is so well disguised, advanced by self-proclaimed diplomats and academics -- and now embraced by the supposedly sophisticated left on university campuses.

When national, collective or personal aspirations are not met, it is far easier to blame someone or something rather than to look within for the source of the failure and frustration. More recently, someone must be blamed for getting terrorists (with oil and its profits behind them) mad at us.

That someone is -- no surprise -- once again Jews.

Thus, “Never Again” is on the verge of becoming “Once Again.”

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:35 | link | comments (1)

Shana Tova/Happy Ramadan: In “honour” of the convergence of the two lunar-determined holidays, Islam Online posts this heart-warming (or stomach-turning, depending on your perspective) story. It’s about an American Jewish “revert” who found the peace he was looking for in the one and only genuinely true faith:

CAIRO — American Aaron Siebert-Llera never took Islam seriously when he first began his soul-searching quest. But finally, he found in the Islamic faith all the kind of disciplined life he has always craved for.

"I felt like I finally found a house where I can place all my morals, my ideals, the way I was living," Siebert-Llera told the Chicago Sun-Times on Friday, September 14.

Siebert-Llera was born to a Jewish American father and Roman Catholic Mexican-American mother.

He used to pray wearing the Star of David in some days and the cross at others.

But the 31-year-old never found the "internal" thing he was searching for.

Then came the 9/11 terrorist attacks, changing the course of his life.

He began reading about Islam, knowing enough to differentiate between extremists who hijacked the planes on 9/11 and the majority of practicing Muslims.

He also bought a copy of the Noble Qur'an, skimming through the pages to find the passages that some claim to be preaching terrorism but he never found any.

Two years later in Chicago came the turning point in his life.

He met a young Mexican-American woman at Loyola where he had been pursuing his graduate studies.

The woman talked into the class one day, donning a hijab after she reverted to Islam.

"I definitely saw a change in her as far as comfort and general level of happiness. She was at ease with her life," said Siebert-Llera.

Siebert-Llera then began to think of Islam seriously, visiting the Mosque Foundation in Bridgeview, Illinois, where he learnt about Islam's tenets like prayers, zakah and hajj.

In 2004, he embraced the Islamic faith, praying the five daily prayers and starting fasting during Ramadan.

A year later, he met a devout Muslim of Syrian origin and got married in 2005.

The Same Man

Siebert-Llera lost most of his friends when he reverted to Islam.

His family also thought that conversion would turn him into a "terrorist" and lose him his sense of humor.

But he has never been discouraged.

I'm not changing who I am."

Siebert-Llera believes that his family has accepted his conversion to Islam.

Just before he was going to break his first fast of Ramadan on Thursday, September 13, Siebert-Llera received a phone call from his mother, wishing him a Happy Ramadan.

The young man still keeps his cell phone handy, waiting for sister and father to do the same. He knows they will.

 

I’m so glad Aaron has managed to retain his sense of humour. No doubt it has proved invaluable in coming to grips with all those passages in the Noble Koran in which the Jews are cursed/reviled/maligned/demonized/damned/equated with jungle and farmyard beasts. Personally, I would find them a major stumbling block—more like a Mount Everest—in being able to commit and submit.

Posted by: scaramouche at 09:55 | link | comments (1)

Happy New Year!: Shofar, so good.

 

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:27 | link | comments (2)

Playing to the Israel-bashers: Last year a Toronto theatre tried—and failed—to mount the play about St. Rachel of Palestine. No such luck next year. From the Toronto Star (which seems thrilled to bits that the show’s a-coming):

After a false start, controversial award-winning play My Name Is Rachel Corrie will be presented in Toronto. Edited from the writings of the late activist Rachel Corrie, the play, directed by Kate Lushington, will be presented by Theatre PANIK at the Tarragon Extra Space , May 29 to June 22.

My Name Is Rachel Corrie is a one-woman show based on the writings 23-year-old Corrie left behind that tell her story from the time she was a small child to March 16, 2003 when she was killed by an Israeli army bulldozer. British actor-director Alan Rickman and Guardian newspaper editor Katharine Viner adapted the activist's writings for the stage.

CanStage planned to mount the play earlier this year but decided against it. Despite artistic producer Martin Bragg's official statement that it was pulled because it was flat onstage, rumours surfaced that CanStage worried it would have upset prominent donors.

Rachel Corrie was initially produced by the Royal Court Theatre in London where it played to sold-out audiences and wide acclaim. It has since played the West End, Edinburgh, New York and Seattle.

Unbeknownst to the producers, I am working on a musical version of My Name Is Rachel Corrie. It’s called “Rachel, Rachel: A Young Girl’s Strange, Erotic Journey from Rome to Ramallah.” Here’s a bit of the opening number.

 

Curtain up.

Hate the Jews.

Give your all to ensure that they lose.

Startin’ here.

Startin’ now.

Yasser, ev’rything’s comin’ up Rachel.

Seethe and whine.

Burn and rage.

Just make sure that you take centre stage.

Startin’ here.

Startin’ now.

Noam, ev’rything’s comin’ up Rachel…

 

And wait’ll you get a load of the showstopper—“Let Me Entertain You (By Getting Squashed by a Jew-dozer)”.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:27 | link | comments (2)

The truth about the “occupation”: It was brutal. It was punishing. It caused heaps o’ suffering. And torment. And a Palestinian Holocaust. And…

Okay. Enough with the pack of lies. Time for the truth. By David Meir-Levi in FrontPage Magazine:

…Despite being forced by Arab intransigence to maintain its sovereignty over the newly captured territories, and to maintain a state of war with the entire Arab world, Israel undertook the economic, agrarian, medical, and infrastructural development of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, for the benefit of the Arab population, in the expectation that such development would yield what the Israeli government called a “peace dividend.”

This Israeli “mini-Marshall plan” for the West Bank and the Gaza Strip involved investment of hundreds of millions of dollars to bring these territories into the 20th century with regard to infrastructure, roads, sewerage, sewage treatment, electricity, phones, radio and TV broadcasting, water purification and water supply. World Bank records indicate that the GDP of the West Bank grew between 7% and 13% per year between 1967 and 1994. Tourism skyrocketed, unemployment almost disappeared as hundreds of thousands of Arabs worked in Israel’s economy earning far more than their counterparts in other Arab countries. Seven universities, funded in part by Israeli and private Jewish money, grew up on the West Bank in place of the three teachers training schools that existed there before 1967.

During the decades of Israeli sovereignty, there was almost complete freedom of movement throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Israelis shopped in East Jerusalem and in Bethlehem and in Ramallah, while Arabs shopped in Tel Aviv and Haifa. Arab students from the West Bank attended Haifa University’s Arab Studies department; and Arab Israelis could re-unite with relatives among the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Although Jordan was still de iure at war with Israel, Israel permitted West Bank Arabs to retain their Jordanian citizenship, in the expectation that Israel and Jordan would reach a peace agreement and most (although probably not all) of the West Bank would revert to Jordan, and even allowed West Bank Arabs to cross freely over the Jordan River in to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Thus, West Bank Arabs on Jordanian passports could travel anywhere from Israel. In 1988, King Hussein of Jordan revoked these passports and denied the West Bank Arabs their freedom of access and travel.

And, perhaps most significant of all, free and unencumbered access to Israel’s medical infrastructure resulted in a precipitous decline in infant mortality and a rise in longevity. The infant mortality rate was reduced from 60 per 1,000 live births in 1968 to 15 per 1,000 in 2000. Under Israel’s systematic program of inoculation, childhood diseases in the Palestinian population, such as polio, whooping cough, tetanus, and measles, were eradicated. A significant percentage of today’s Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are alive and well only because they had the good fortune of growing up under Israeli sovereignty.

During the two decades preceding the First Intifada, the number of schoolchildren in the territories grew by 102%, and the number of classes by 99%. Illiteracy rates dropped to 14% of adults over age 15 (compared with 61% in Egypt, 45% in Tunisia, and 44% in Syria). The rapid growth in population as a result of access to Israeli medicine, in addition to Arab immigration into the territories from “Diaspora Palestinians” all over the Arab world, resulted in a tripling of the Arab population from around 950,000 in 1967 to more than 3,000,000 in 1994.[6]

All this time the Arab nations remained formally at war with Israel. In 1979, Egypt, alone among the Arab states, agreed to sign a peace treaty with Israel. In response to Egypt’s willingness to sign the peace, Israel withdrew its forces and civilian population from the Sinai.

Prime Minister Menahem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar es-Sadat invited Arafat to their peace table, but Arafat refused, and thus squandered what could have been yet another opportunity for Palestinian statehood. Sadat was then assassinated by Muslim radicals for making peace with the Jews.

In sum, there was not only no “brutal occupation,” there was a very fast paced, broadly implemented, and extremely successful economic and educational and medical and professional development of the Arab populations of both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip under very salutary Israeli rule, all initiated by the Israeli government, as part of Israel’s vain quest for peace with its Arab neighbors. Under Israeli sovereignty, the Arabs of these territories experienced greater personal and political freedom, and greater prosperity, than ever in their entire history.

But all of this came to a grinding halt when Arafat took over…

And has been grinding down the Palestinians ever since.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:57 | link | comments

Judenhass on Ceeb radio: I’m still reeling from Anna Maria Tremonti’s interview this morning on The Current with repellent anti-Zionist, John Mearshimer. Mearshimer is the co-author, with Stephen Walt, of The Israel Lobby, a stinky piece of drek decked out in academic garb which has a good shot at becoming The Protocols of the Elders of Zion of our era. The lovely and talented Ms. Tremonti gave Mearslimer a full twenty uninterrupted minutes in which to spew, and he seemed delighted to have such a receptive forum on which to do so.

I don’t have time to go into his spiel; you can look for it tomorrow here. I will, however, share the letter of complaint I just dashed off to The Current:

 

I am disgusted--but not at all surprised--that you allowed John Mearshimer to spew his false, repugnent views on your program. As a corrective, I suggest you read this--Alan Dershowitz's debunking of Walt/Mearshimer's spurious Judenhass/anti-Zionism. You might find this "sound bite" (or what might have been a sound bite, had you allowed Dershowitz or someone else on to rebut Mearshimer and at least offer a semblance of balance) of particular interest:

 

"[A]s I will show, this study is so filled with distortions, so empty of originality or new evidence, so tendentious in its tone, so lacking in nuance and balance, so unscholarly in its approach, so riddled with obvious factual errors that could easily have been checked (but obviously were not), and so dependent on biased, extremist and anti-American sources, as to raise the question of motive:  what would motivate two well recognized academics to depart so grossly from their usual standards of academic writing and research in order to produce a “study paper” that contributes so little to the existing scholarship while being so susceptible to misuse?  [Page 6]."

 

Strong words, indeed. But I guess Mr. Mearshimer considers Mr. Dershowitz to be part of the insidious "Israel lobby" that is once again throwing its weight around and "victimizing" him and his co-author.

 

Forgive me if I fail to muster any sympathy for him. But then, he really doesn't need any from me since Ms. Tremonti and the CBC have foolishly accepted the invitation to his pity party.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:08 | link | comments (3)

Taliban trifecta: The Globe and Mail details the three little things the “increasingly confident” Taliban are demanding “in exchange for peace.” They are: 

1. All foreign troops out of Afghanistan
2. Constitutional reform, a place in government;
3. State run along Islamist lines.

Not too much for totalitarian jihadists who hope to prevail over the infidel and re-establish the Old World Order of the caliphate to ask for.

 

The Taliban spokesman is a bit fuzzy about the details re numbers 2 and 3—the better to make them more palatable for a Western audience:

The Taliban spokesman was vague about his definition of Islamic democracy. Afghanistan's constitution already defines it as an Islamic republic, but it also sets aside a quarter of seats in parliament for women and makes other provisions that give the country a more moderate character than it had under the Taliban.

"The United States brought democracy to Afghanistan, but it was un-Islamic," Mr. Ahmadi said. "We need democracy, but under the laws of Islam."

Yeah, they need some of that sharia “democracy,” where freedom is submission and peace can only come about through the final triumph of Dar al Islam.

 

It’s clear that what the old smoothie is really complaining about isn’t the paucity of democracy but the intrusion of some contaminating Western concepts (such as “observing the UN charter and respecting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—#5 of the constitution’s preamble) into his “pure” Islamic republic.

 

My letter to the Globe:

 

Can we dispense once and for all with the fiction that the Taliban are interested in “democracy, but under the laws of Islam”? The only kind of “democracy” that interests the Taliban is the stringent application of God’s law—the sharia. As Raymond Ibrahim explains in The Al Qaeda Reader, “Every form of man-made governance—democracy, monarchy, communism, etc.—is anathema to Islam since the power to legislate is Allah’s alone.”

 

Given that, it’s no wonder that the Taliban spokesman “was vague” about defining “Islamic democracy.” For him to even try to come up with such a definition would be tantamount to blasphemy.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:25 | link | comments (1)

In a (wacky, Shia) manner of speaking: The Speaker of Iran’s parliament, a man who, as you might expect has an “interesting” slant on events, lauds Iran’s in-house terror militia, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards (who have also been busy over in Iraq). Here are some of his thoughts as reported in the Tehran Times:

The IRGC reminds one of faith in God and upholding morality and justice, Haddad-Adel told the general assembly of IRGC commanders and officials.

He said the United States’ efforts to designate the IRGC as a terrorist group show that Washington is afraid that the IRGC’s ideology will spread across the world.

The revolutionary guards’ ideology is obviously not appealing to the powers that are seeking to dominate Islamic countries, he added.

The West is worried that the Islamic world will follow the example of the Islamic Republic’s defensive and cultural policy, he observed.

The enemy has realized IRGC’s international reputation: Judiciary chief

The enemy has come to its senses and realized that the IRGC has attained an international reputation, Judiciary Chief Ayatollah Mahmud Hashemi Shahrudi said.

The enemy knows that the IRGC has been one of the most active groups in the campaign against terrorism and has served Islamic nations by combating internal and foreign terrorism, Shahrudi told the IRGC commanders.

“The labels that the global hegemon places on the IRGC are all unjust and applicable to their plans and activities rather than the revolutionary guards’,” the Judiciary chief stated.

Terrorism is condemned in Islam, but the enemy is promoting a kind of Islam that is in its own interests and not in conflict with its puppet, Al-Qaeda, he added…

 

ObL is a puppet of Great Satan? That’s a new one on me (and, I’m sure, on bin Laden). You can tell that the speaker is jealous because of all the good jihadi publicity A-Q gets on this day every year.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:51 | link | comments

A “new” Vision?: VisionTV hasn’t had the best publicity this year, what with the fracas this past summer over a jihadi and a loopy conspiracy theorist getting airtime on its long-running, enigmatic Dil Dil Pakistan program. So it’s good to see that Canada’s only “multi-faith, multicultural” station has been able to put the controversy behind it and move ahead in a bold new direction. From Media in Canada:

VisionTV is putting more drama and comedy into its fall sked, and also bowing new brand positioning: "Expect More." Vision TV COO and SVP programming Mark Prasuhn says the new focus on drama and comedy is a response to viewers' demands and "may change many people's perception of the network."

Primetime drama for 2007-08 (new shows in bold) includes: acclaimed BBC series Rough Diamond (Mondays, 9 pm & 12 am ET / 6 pm & 9 pm PT, starting Oct. 1), about a struggling horse trainer in Ireland and his son (pictured); Doc Martin (returning Wednesdays, 9 pm & 12 am ET / 6pm & 9 pm PT, starting Sept. 5); Life Begins (returning Mondays, 9 pm & 12 am ET / 6 pm & 9 pm PT, starting Nov. 19); and a new season of McLeod's Daughters (spring 2008).

The net's British comedy offerings include: Waiting for God (Mondays, 8:30 pm & 1:30 am ET / 5:30 pm & 10:30 am PT, starting Sept. 3), about two elderly eccentrics who refuse to grow old gracefully in a retirement village; Sorry! (Wednesdays, 8 pm & 1 am ET / 5 pm & 10 pm PT, starting Sept. 5), about a fortysomething librarian living with his mother; the long-running Allo Allo! (Tuesdays, 8 pm & 8:30 pm ET / 5 pm & 5:30 pm PT, starting Sept. 4); Dinnerladies (Mondays, 8 pm ET / 5 pm PT), starring comedian Victoria Wood; and Eyes Down (Thursdays, 8:30 pm ET/5:30 pm PT).

Familiar shows new to VisionTV include: Dawson's Creek (Wednesdays, 7 pm ET / 4 pm PT, starting Sept. 5), Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman (Mondays, 7 pm & 2 am ET / 4 pm & 11 pm PT, starting Sept. 3) and the Billy Ray Cyrus-starring small town doctor show, Doc (Mondays, 6 pm ET / 3 pm PT, starting Sept. 3).

Documentary series include: Medicine Woman (Mondays, 10 pm ET / 7 pm PT & Saturdays, 8 pm ET / 5pm PT, starting Sept. 3), about a Canadian First Nations doctor; The Protestant Revolution (Wednesdays & Saturdays, 10 pm ET /7 pm PT, starting Oct. 10); and a new season of The Naked Archaeologist (spring 2008). A fifth season of Recreating Eden and a second season of Enigma will premiere in 2008.

Special programming events also form a part of this season's strategy as the net lines up Christmas programming and a week-long focus on faith, fact and fiction, which will include a rebroadcast of the controversial doc The Lost Tomb of Jesus.

The net will also air feature films (Tuesdays & Thursdays, 9 pm & 12 am ET / 6 pm & 9 pm PT) such as Annie Hall, Dances with Wolves, Raging Bull, and Yentl. The award-winning miniseries Prairie Giant: The Tommy Douglas Story will round out the mix.

Sorry, but I fail to see what lame old Britcoms, The Tommy Douglas Story and Dawson's Creek, for heaven’s sake (has Mark Prasuhn ever even watched this show about hyper-sexed, hyper-articulate teens?), have to do with faith. I guess they're likely to elicit far less controversy, however, than shows featuring Dr. Israr Ahmad and docs by Harun Yahya.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:12 | link | comments

Do as we say, not as we do: I don't know about you, but I think something is terribly askew when, on the anniversary of 9/11, the U.S. tells Israel to sit on its hands when a jihadist terror regime attacks it.

Update: Israel is considering how to respond to this latest attack—or, as the Telegraph puts it, whether or not "to retaliate."

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:37 | link | comments

Birds of a feather: North Korea’s diminutive, bespectacled dictator has expressed support for Syria, ruled by a tall, weak-chinned dictator. “Dear Leader” is most perturbed about Israel’s “invasion of Syrian airspace”—the recent incident of an Israeli jet flying over Syria—calling it a “dangerous provocation.” From YNet News:

North Korea commented on the incident in which Israeli planes allegedly entered Syrian airspace last week, calling it a "dangerous provocation", Chinese News Agency Xinhua reported on Tuesday.

"This is a very dangerous provocation little short of wantonly violating the sovereignty of Syria and seriously harassing the regional peace and security," a North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman said.

"The Democratic People's Republic of Korea strongly denounces the above-said intrusion and extends full support and solidarity to the Syrian people in their just cause to defend the national security and the regional peace."

Earlier on Tuesday CNN reported that the incident was actually an attack on Iranian weapons transferred to Syria.

According to the report, which was based mainly on sources in the American government, the incident involved an aerial operation that also included Israeli ground forces that were meant to mark targets or inspect the damage caused by the attack.

Hours before CNN report was broadcast, Syria appealed to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and the Security Council, and warned Israel of "the consequences of this outrageous aggression"…

 

One thing you have to say for those Baathists (state sponsors of jihadi terrorism and the Wicked Warlocks of the East’s flying monkeys)—they sure have lots of chutzpah.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:03 | link | comments

Lefty gets a clue: Novelist Martin Amis has a superb essay in the Times Online about the current totalitarian threat we face and the dementia of “moral equivalence,” which renders people incapable of fighting it:

…We are drowsily accustomed, by now, to the fetishisation of “balance”, the groundrule of “moral equivalence” in all conflicts between West and East, the 100-per-cent and 360-degree inability to pass judgment on any ethnicity other than our own (except in the case of Israel). And yet the handclappers of Question Time had moved beyond the old formula of pious paralysis. This was not equivalence; this was hemispherical abjection. Accordingly, given the choice between George Bush and Osama bin Laden, the liberal relativist, it seems, is obliged to plump for the Saudi, thus becoming the appeaser of an armed doctrine with the following tenets: it is racist, misogynist, homophobic, totalitarian, inquisitional, imperialist, and genocidal.

As I drafted this piece (in early July), Dr Kafeel Ahmed – the furious, steaming, orange-hued hulk we saw applying himself at Glasgow Airport – lay slowly and expensively dying in the burns unit of the Royal Infirmary. At that time, too, we were learning about the men who planned and botched the attacks of July 21, 2005. And certain questions could now be asked in a rather less self-reproachful spirit. It might even be that we have ceased to toady to those who proclaimedly seek our murder.

Was Ladies’ Night at the Tiger Tiger discotheque a legitimate target for Dr Ahmed’s “anger” about Iraq? Were the morose North Africans of July 21 “desperate” about Palestine? And what do all the UK jihadis have in common, these brain surgeons and jailbirds, these keen cricketers and footballers, these sex offenders, community workers, former boozers and drug addicts, primary-school teachers, sneak thieves, and fast-food restaurateurs, with their six-litre plastic tubs of hairdressing bleach and nail-polish remover, their crystalline triacetone triperoxide and chapati flour, and their “dockyard confetti” (bolts and nuts and nails)? And the answer to that question seems to be slowly dawning. What they have in common is this: they are all abnormally interested in violent death.

Let us briefly trundle through the argument for moral equivalence, and let us begin with a trio of ascertainable truths. First, the years 1947 and 1948 saw two imperialistic decisions that guaranteed an increase in hostility between Muslim and nonMuslim: the partition of India along religious lines, and the establishment of the state of Israel. (These decisions also led to, but did not invent, murderous hostility between Muslim and Muslim – in East Pakistan, in Gaza). Second, throughout the 1970s the Arab regimes sponsored by the US started to head off political dissent by guiding the opposition towards Islamic fundamentalism. And, third, in the 1980s the US backed the Mujahidin against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and also helped to fund the Pakistani madrassas, whose graduates (all of them unemployable zealots) increased from 30,000 in 1987 to well over half a million by 2001.

Thereafter, or so the equivalence argument goes, the Islamist vanguard, having wearied of seeing the battles fought exclusively on its own soil, visited a taste of this destruction on the West. Which turns out to suit the neocons and Christian Zionists, who can now place the US under military rule while they prepare their push for Islamic oil and for Israeli hegemony in the Middle East. The goals of the so-called “terrorists” (who are merely responding in kind to state terrorism from the US and its clients) are not delusive or messianic but solemnly political. So it has always been: the oppressed struggle against the oppressor; the wrongs of the past rise up to avenge themselves on the present.

The equivalence line always anticipates the usual counter-argument, which it considers to be an orientalist smear: that the Islamists are fanatics and nihilists who, in their mad quest for world domination, have created a cult of death. With each passing day, however, the counter-argument is sounding like an increasingly sober description of reality. With the 20th century so fresh in our mind, you might think that human beings would be quick to identify an organised passion for carnage. But we aren’t quick to do that – of course we aren’t; we are impeded by a combination of naivete, decency, and a kind of recurrent incredulity. The death cult always benefits, initially at least, from its capacity to astonish and stupefy…

Also, to “stupify”—to make terrified, clueless people stupid.

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

Robert Spencer’s recipe for ending “Islamophobia”: It’s a package deal. From JihadWatch:

…Want to end Islamophobia? End violent attacks committed by Muslims in the name of Islam. I guarantee that Islamophobia will then vanish utterly.

Six years after, the fact that such elementary common sense is not taken for granted, but reviled and dismissed, does not bode well for the continuation of this conflict, as continue it surely will. Unless we begin to speak clearly about what we are facing and who is making us face it, the jihadists will continue, as they do now, to take advantage of our willful ignorance.

Ignorance can be bliss—but only in the short term. And the short term expired several 9/11’s ago.

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

Oblivious to the “real war”: General Petraeus (which, I have to admit, has always sounded to me like the name of a leader on, say, Star Trek or Battlestar Galactica) told Congress yesterday that the “surge” is working—sort of. But, in a column from a few days ago, my favourite American pundit, Diana West, says that even if the surge is successfully quelling the insurgency in certain areas--as seems to be the case--it is a mistake for the president to remain so Iraqocentric in his outlook. From the Washington Times:

…But there are other, more significant questions to hash out: namely, whether the strategy behind the surge still makes national security sense for the United States. That is, should a functioning state of Iraq — the ultimate goal of the surge (aside from the president's mirage-like vision of Iraq as a "friend" and "ally") — remain the overriding objective of U.S. foreign policy?

I have long argued no, and not only because majority-Shi'ite Iraq is likely to end up a client-state of Shi'ite Iran, although that's a huge reason. There's also the fact that our gargantuan efforts to build an Iraqi society that never before existed do nothing whatsoever to ward off jihadist state threats — Iran, for instance, in the wider region.

This is the deepest chink in the president's Iraqi-centric policy. As we minutely focus on Iraq, sect by sect, tribe by tribe, and now, literally, retina by retina, we have lost sight of the big bad world beyond, not to mention what's in it for us. And "tunnel vision" doesn't begin to describe the microscopic range of debate we can expect between proponents of "surge" and "withdrawal."

In a recent interview, Michael Ledeen, author of the new book "The Iranian Time Bomb," identifies the main problem with the conventional wisdom: "What drives me crazy is that even our most brilliant analysts-among whom I count some very close friends still aren't talking about the regional war. They still talk about Iraq alone. And down that road only misery lies." As for Congress, he adds: "They're debating the wrong question. We have to win the war, but the real war, not the battle for Iraq.

And what is that "real war?"

Jed Babbin, author of "In the Words of Our Enemies," has written this formulation: "Let's be very clear: whether Iraq becomes a democracy is not determinative of our success or defeat in this war. Iraq is only one campaign in the war against the nations that sponsor terrorism. Victory isn't an Iraq that can defend and govern itself. Victory is defined as the end of state sponsorship of Islamic terrorism, which means forcing Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and others out of that business. Nothing more is needed, and nothing less will defeat an existential threat to America."…

Sage words, indeed, on this 9/11.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:36 | link | comments

The short and the long of it: Six years after the jihadi attack on American soil another Osama bin Laden videotape has surfaced. In this one, the dyed-in-the-hair totalitarian lauds the efforts of Waleed al-Shahri, one of the holy warriors involved in 9/11. In so doing, bin Laden underscores that, then and now, our enemy remains the same. The enemy: the jihad imperative as articulated by the Prophet, the first—and, as Muslims see it, the most perfect—jihadi, and the Muslims who heed its compelling call. From Reuters:

"Shehri is one of these magnificent men whom the verses of the revelation affected in the same way they affected the first Muslims and picked them up and took him from the narrow worries of this world to the spaciousness of ... the hereafter, purifying his soul, firming up his heart and enlightening his sight and perception."…

Bin Laden said that Shehri was unlucky enough to be born in a time when the world was under Christian and Jewish control and took action to restore Muslim dignity.

"So how can we sit today when the free women are in the prisons of the Nazarenes (Christians) and the Jews in Iraq, Palestine and Afghanistan?" he said.

"It is compulsory for us to help and liberate them ... repelling the enemies from the Muslims and relieving their anguish..."

An aguish which, as anyone familiar with Islamic doctrine knows, can only be relieved when Islam rules.

 

Something else to consider on 9/11/07: There is a near-overwhelming temptation to bemoan the fact that six years on—to us, an eternity—we’re still at war. But to our enemies, six years is but a blink of the eye, a nanosecond, in a war that’s been underway for some fourteen hundred years.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:09 | link | comments

Why Osama hearts Lefties: Walid Phares analyses Osama bin Laden’s apparent attempt to reach out to and make common cause with the Lefties. Phares says that while ObL’s “Trotskeyite” turn may find favour with the Klein types and sow discord in the West (which he says is the real goal), it may backfire by alienating his “core” audience. From the American Thinker:

…The Trotskyite "experiment" of Bin Laden and of his "anarcho-Jihadist" advisors [specifically, American jihadi Adam Gadahn] may not have been the greatest idea. As one can see from the reactions, many of the purest Jihadists can't absorb the Marxian theories of global corporations. They only seek the good old Jihad against the Kuffar. They have gotten too much Wahabism in their madrassa schooling. Their doctrines come from Hassan Banna and Sayid Qotb, not Noam Chomsky or the Ivy League elite.

 

In the end, the speech shows that the War of Ideas is the ultimate battlefield in the War on Terror. This is why, US leaders in both parties and all branches of power should not ignore or dismiss bin Laden's tape. To the contrary, I strongly suggest they respond to it, point by point.  All those named in the speech must answer al Qaeda directly, instead of fleeing into domestic politics.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:58 | link | comments

Today’s limerick:

A Human Rights diva, Arbour

Had judgement exceedingly poor.

She hooked up in Tehran

With a very bad man.

A beeyotch, yes,

But also a whoore.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:25 | link | comments

A lack of clarity: Canadian parliamentarians thought they had passed a law requiring an individual to uncover her/his face when voting, but the head of Elections Canada has a completely different reading of the law. From the Ceeb:

Veiled women will not have to show their faces at polling stations in upcoming elections, but they may be asked for sworn statements in some situations to verify their identities, Canada's chief electoral officer said Monday.

Marc Mayrand also challenged politicians who have voiced their criticism of the policy to change the Elections Act if they want more stringent identification requirements on election day.

"I invite Parliament to change the act," Mayrand told reporters Monday at a press conference in Ottawa.

"It's not for the administrator to settle the current societal debate. If I were to do so, I would assume the role that does not belong to me, and above all, usurp the role of Canada's elected politicians."

Mayrand's comments come a day after Prime Minister Stephen Harper accused Elections Canada of subverting the will of Parliament by permitting Muslim women to wear veils and burkas while voting.

Mayrand said the act does not contain an absolute visual recognition requirement, noting that about 80,000 voters cast their ballots by mail in the last federal election.

Veiled voters who only present one piece of government photo ID — the most basic standard of voter identification — at polling stations will be asked, but not required, to show their face, he said.

"I have asked election personnel to invite anyone whose face is concealed to uncover it in a manner that is respectful to their beliefs," Maynard said.

If they decline to do so, he said, the voters must choose one of two other means of identifying themselves, neither of which requires photo identification, as stated in the Canada Elections Act. In those cases, the act allows voters either to present two pieces of approved ID, at least one of which must state their address (but neither of which must contain a photo), or to have another voter registered in the same district vouch for them.

"I have not amended the act to require them to uncover their face," he said. "The choice remains up to the individual."

Harper said all four parties in the Commons voted "virtually unanimously" this spring to bring in a new law requiring visual identification of voters.

But Mayrand said the act was clear and it was not within his mandate to make any changes.

How can he say the act is “clear” when it’s being read so differently?

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:22 | link | comments

Climb ev’ry mountain/Make  ev’ry boast/Follow ev’ry rainbow/Till the Jews are toast: In his latest flowery, metaphor-filled outburst, the hairy li’l Hitler employs plenty of references to races and struggles. From AFP via Yahoo News:

TEHRAN (AFP) - President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Sunday lashed out at his Western foes which demand Iran halt its sensitive nuclear activities, saying they were "racing to hell".

 

“The Iranian people have climbed over difficult mountain passes on their path of progress. The enemies need to step aside from our path and give up their satanic ideas," he said, according to the semi-official Mehr news agency.

“One or two countries are refusing to accept that Iran is now mastering nuclear technology ... Some countries are racing towards hell. But this makes us sad and, for the good of their people, we will resist."

Well, since it’s only a semi-official news agency, I guess we should only semi-believe him.

Meanwhile, the mully-bully-in-chief appears to be trying to throw some hot water on the overheated Moo:

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, reiterated on Sunday that Tehran was not seeking to manufacture atomic weapons.

"While the Iranian people do not have nuclear weapons and do not wish to acquire these deadly arms, the people are respected because their grandeur is based on their beliefs and their will," he told a group of Revolutionary Guards chiefs…

A not-so-deft bit of taqiyah—that part about “their gradeur” and “their will” kind of gives it all away.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:58 | link | comments

All joking aside: I erred yesterday when I blamed Canadian parliamentarians for changing the rules and allowing Muslim women to vote with their faces covered. In fact, parliamentarians almost unanimously passed a law making it mandatory for a person to reveal their visage at the polling both. The party responsible for veiled voting is Elections Canada, a body that is not supposed to make election law but to oversee and enforce it. It is Elections Canada that has gone that extra step—and gone well beyond its mandate—to accord Muslim women this special right. Ironically, it is one that Muslims never asked for and which they say they don’t want. From the Globe and Mail:

…The identification requirements were included this year as an amendment to the Elections Act and they offer a range of opportunities for would-be voters to identify themselves, including government-issued documents that contain photographs, such as a provincial driver's licence. For those voters who decline to show such proof of residency, the law now allows a fellow resident of the riding to swear an oath confirming the individual's identity.

Elections Canada, however, applied a so-called joke standard to the law, with a spokesman quoted as saying anyone attempting to vote while wearing a Halloween mask would be asked to remove the mask or leave the voting station. And it is unclear if, for example, bandaged burn victims would be allowed to vote.

Muslim organizations were quick to condemn Elections Canada's plans to allow women to vote without removing their veils on Sept. 17.

Mohamed Elmasry, head of the Canadian Islamic Congress, which says it is the country's largest Muslim organization, said Muslim groups were not consulted about the rule change.

If they had been, he said, he would have told officials that the small minority of Muslim women - perhaps as few as just 50 of Canada's 750,000 Muslims - who wear the niqab would have no problem showing their faces to a female election worker to verify their identity.

"It is a non-issue for us," Mr. Elmasry said.

And he warned that the issue was being blown out of proportion by election officials: "The way it is being handled will raise the level of Islamaphobia in Canada."

The leader of the liberal Muslim Canadian Congress, Farzana Hassan, demanded that Elections Canada immediately rescind its decision, labelling it a "rude joke."

In a letter to Mr. Mayrand, she writes that "unless the intention of Elections Canada is to paint Canada's Muslim community in a negative light, we demand that this silly provision allowing masked women to vote be rescinded immediately."…

I’m sorely tempted to blast Elections Canada for overstepping its mandate and fomenting this uproar. On second thought, though, perhaps without meaning to it has done us a huge favour. It has forced us to focus once again on Islam’s attitudes toward women—which, here in Canada, has proven to be its Achilles Heel.

 

The reason, no doubt, why Mo Elmasry insists the whole veil controversy is a “non-issue” and wants it to go away post haste.

Posted by: scaramouche at 09:36 | link | comments (3)

Horning in on singular events: In the same way they decry “all” the Holocausts, some Muslims are now decrying “all” the 9/11s.  

BAGHDAD — As the world marks the sixth anniversary of the terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Iraqis lament having to endure daily 9/11s for not guilt of their own.

"What we experience every day is 100 times worse than September 11," Hellal Younis, 50, told Agence France Presse (AFP) on Sunday, September 9.

"Each day hundreds of Iraqis are killed."

Nearly 3,000 people were killed on September 11, 2001 when two hijacked planes plowed into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and a third flew into the Pentagon.

Days after the attacks, the US invaded Afghanistan to topple the Taliban regime for harboring the leaders of Al-Qaeda, which claimed responsibility for the attacks.

Two years later, the Bush administration invaded Iraq over a host of claims, including close links close to Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and stockpiling weapons of mass destruction.

Both allegations have since been proved ungrounded.

Iraq is gripped by a vicious cycle of violence resulting from car bombs, suicide bombers, militia, death squads and snipers.

A twin bombings against two religious minority villages in northern Iraq in July killed 400 people, the deadliest in the world since 9/11.

"We have September 11 here every minute," fumed Younis, the father of eight who lost his leg in November when six car bombs exploded simultaneously in Baghdad's Sadr City.

More than 200 people died in the blasts, in one of the deadliest days of violence since the 2003 invasion.

A statistical study by US researchers published in October 2006 estimated that some 655,000 Iraqi civilians had died from war-related causes since the start of the occupation…

Proving yet again how well victimhood plays with the faithful.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:31 | link | comments

Downplaying the threat: A Dutch terror expert says "I'm not all that worried about terrorism."

That makes one of us.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:22 | link | comments (1)

Coming soon: Islamic History Month Canada.

Can't hardly wait.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:25 | link | comments (1)

Canadian kafirs facilitate sharia: Those who are eager to see sharia become the law of the land in Canada must be laughing their heads off at our cluelessness—a new law that would allow Muslim women to vote in federal elections with their faces covered. Thing is, Muslim women never asked for this special privilege, and had been quite willing to doff their shroud when casting a ballot. What we have here is an example of Canadian parliamentarians—who know nothing about the history of Islam and its law—going that extra distance in an effort to appear nice and inclusive and multifrikkencultural.

The fools.

 

An example of the type of thinking which informed the passage of the law can be found here—a document put out several years ago by UNIFEM, the Orwellian-sounding UN women’s agency. One of the women quoted in the document, a Canadian infidel chick in the grip of moral relativism, explains that wearing the veil can be “liberating.” She writes:

Just as many Westerns fail to consider wearing high heels as oppressive, many non-Western women argue that wearing the veil liberates them because they are unshackled from being judged on outside appearances. Therefore, perhaps Westerners ought to consider how their own practices can appear backwards before concluding that women who veil need to be modernized.  Western society has a very narrow view of what female beauty entails, and this includes not only high heels for height, but also corsets for thinness.  Consequently, the veil can be very liberating for non-Western women who feel society is pushing them to conform to the beauty norms of the West.  Open-mindedness and tolerance is the key to understanding women’s rights. 

Ironically, it’s also the key to sharia law and its manifest misogyny making inroads into Western democracy.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:34 | link | comments (2)

Burqa bargains: On ebay.ca.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:12 | link | comments

Jihad? What jihad? Six years after that fateful morning, Americans are no more wised up—and a lot more delusional—than they were back on 9/10. By Mark Steyn in the Orange County Register:

…Six years on, most Americans are now pretty certain what they'll wake up to in the morning: There'll be a thwarted terrorist plot somewhere or other – last week, it was Germany. Occasionally, one will succeed somewhere or other, on the far horizon – in Bali, Istanbul, Madrid, London. But not many folks expect to switch on the TV this Tuesday morning, as they did that Tuesday morning, and see smoke billowing from Atlanta or Phoenix or Seattle. During the IRA's 30-year campaign, the British grew accustomed (perhaps too easily accustomed) to waking up to the news either of some prominent person's assassination or that a couple of grandmas and some schoolkids had been blown apart in a shopping center. It was a terrorist war in which terrorism was almost routine. But, in the six years since President Bush declared that America was in a "war on terror," there has been in America no terrorism.

In theory, the administration ought to derive a political benefit from this: The president has "kept America safe." But, in practice, the placidity of the domestic front diminishes the chosen rationale of the conflict: if a "war on terror" has no terror, who says there's a war at all? That's the argument of the left – that it's all a racket cooked up by the Bushitlerburton fascists to impose on America a permanent national-security state in which, for dark sinister reasons of his own, Dick Cheney is free to monitor your out-of-state phone calls all day long.

Judging from the blithe expressions of commuters doing the shoeless shuffle through the security line at LAX and O'Hare, most Americans seem relatively content with a permanent national-security state. It's a curious paradox: airports on permanent Orange Alert, and a citizenry on permanent … well, I'm not sure there's a Homeland Security color code for "Gaily Insouciant," but, if there is, it's probably a bland limpid pastel of some kind. Of course, if tomorrow there's a big smoking hole where the Empire State Building used to be, we'll be back to: "The president should have known! This proves the failure of his policies over the last six years! We need another all-star commission filled with retired grandees!"

And that would be the relatively sane reaction. Have you seen that bumper sticker "9/11 WAS AN INSIDE JOB"? If you haven't, go to a college town and cruise Main Street for a couple of minutes. It seems odd that a fascist regime that thinks nothing of killing thousands of people in a big landmark building in the center of the city hasn't quietly offed some of these dissident professors – or at least the guy with the sticker-printing contract. Fearlessly, Robert Fisk of Britain's Independent, the alleged dean of Middle East correspondents, has now crossed over to the truther side and written a piece headlined, "Even I Question The 'Truth' About 9/11." According to a poll in May, 35 percent of Democrats believe that Bush knew about 9/11 in advance. Did Rumsfeld also know? Almost certainly. That's why he went to his office as normal that today, because he knew in advance that the plane would slice through the Pentagon but come to a halt on the far side of the photocopier. That's how well-planned it was, unlike Iraq.

Apparently, 39 percent of Democrats still believe Bush didn't know in advance – or, at any rate, so they said in May. But I'm confident half of them will have joined Rosie O'Donnell on the melted steely knoll before the Iowa caucuses. If Iraq is another Vietnam, 9/11 is another Kennedy assassination. Were Bali, Madrid and London also inside jobs by the Bush Gang? It's no wonder federal spending's out of control…

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:04 | link | comments (2)

T-shirt for the Klein crowd:

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

Frightening Lefty-Islamist convergence: Osama slams capitalism in new video.

Same as Naomi Klein.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:34 | link | comments

Caving in to myth: For someone who lives in caves and suffers from kidney disease, Osama sure seems to be looking hale—not to mention, ahem, rather youthful—these days. That’s probably because he’s living in plusher circumstances—say like a nice split-level in Rawalpindi, peharps? From the New York Daily News:

WASHINGTON - Osama Bin Laden isn't hiding in caves. He's almost certainly living in a cozy compound in Pakistan guarded by a few loyal fanatics, a dozen terror experts and intel officials told the Daily News.

The group of veteran Bin Laden hunters say the cave-dwelling myth is one of many tall tales about the Al Qaeda kingpin, including reports that the renegade Saudi is dying of kidney disease.

Six years after the 9/11 attacks, many Americans don't understand why he's so hard to find and kill. Frustrated agents say he skulks across some of the most hostile terrain in the world and that Pakistan refuses to let U.S. troops chase him there.

The futility of efforts to permanently silence Bin Laden was brought home Friday when he released his first video message since 2004, a 26-minute, anti-U.S. diatribe.

In the jagged peaks of the Afghan-Pakistani border, a good Bin Laden hideout typically would be a simple adobe house surrounded by a high mud-brick wall - perfect for defending a monster.

"He's probably not living in a cave," said Robert Grenier, the ex-CIA Pakistan station chief who helped topple the Taliban after 9/11 and chased Bin Laden afterward.

"He's probably living in a fairly comfortable, though Spartan, compound somewhere in northern Pakistan," Grenier said.

All of those interviewed by The News - including several top intelligence officials with the highest security clearances - agreed.

President Bush and Vice President Cheney long perpetuated the legend that Bin Laden was living in a cave to support their claims the terror mastermind had been neutralized.

"Look, it's hard to plan, plot and attack if you're running or hiding in a cave," Bush said at a GOP fund-raiser last October.

The White House finally stopped using the cave-dwelling myth after that.

Paul Pillar, the CIA's top counterterrorism analyst until 2005, said, "I think 'cave' has become a metaphor."

Bin Laden is more a ghost than a bat…

I dunno. Seems pretty batty to me.

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

Utopian babe in the woods: Naomi Klein, a chick who isn’t hideously ugly but who’s hardly a raving beauty (though she is a raver of another sort) is what passes for glam among the hard-lefty crowd. Hitched to odious anti-Zionist/Ceeb spinner, Avi Lewis, Klein has been ubiquitous of late—there she is on the cover of Macleans!; look, she has a John Allemang-penned spread in the Focus section of the Globe and Mail, including large, full-colour glamour shot!—attempting to flog her latest piece of mishegas. Like her previous work, it’s one of those capitalism sucks/the-Third-Word-and-its-various-local-despots-rock type screed (Naomi and Avi seem never to have trod on a fetid backwater they didn’t adore). It is thus enormously refreshing to read Todd Gitlin’s review of la Klein’s latest in today’s Globe. One would expect Gitlin, who sees things through the same skewed lens as the Klein-Lewises, to fall in line with the other genuflectors, but, oddly enough, he refuses to do so.

Here’s his wrap-up:

..The unavoidable question that Klein eventually addresses in a brief closing chapter is: What to do with the radical's post-1989 dilemma, namely, that the only purported alternative to a system of market fundamentalism, the command economies of the East, collapsed? If the current system leaves the poor to their scanty devices in desperate times, as in New Orleans, Sri Lanka, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia and elsewhere, what's the alternative?

Klein does not have kind words for the bureaucratic monstrosities of the Soviet Union and its satellites. She is a romantic. Governance interests her less than uprisings. She wants "local people's renewal movements" and worker-controlled co-operatives that take over economies - as she thinks was possible in Solidarnosc's Poland and Mandela's South Africa, and is now under way, she thinks, in Hugo Chavez's Venezuela.

But what if workers don't want them? What if they have divergent interests that set them at odds? What if workers and peasants clash? She likes Hezbollah's "local, indigenous" community aid, but what if Lebanese feminists are not so thrilled with the roles assigned them? Where is politics, the adjudication of differences, in her "new narrative"? Having begun by denouncing fits of purification like Ewen Cameron's and Milton Friedman's, she ends up heralding her own global one-size-fits-all purge in the name of democracy.

Rule of thumb: anyone who applauds Hezbollah’s “local, indigenous community aid” can be immediately dismissed as a clueless crank—albeit a potentially very dangerous one.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:58 | link | comments (2)

Song and dance man: Grecian Formula guy has extended infidels a heartfelt invitation to “revert” to the one true faith. Or, as the Globe and Mail puts it, Bin Laden urges Americans to embrace Islam.

And to make the invitation a bit more palatable, he broke into a familiar Gershwin tune:

 

Embrace it

The perfect faith of Islam.

Embrace it

Or face the wrath of Islam.

Islam is supreme ‘cause of the Prophet’s good deeds.

It and it alone is all the world really needs.

Totally

Totalitarian, too.

It tells you whatever you need to do.

Don’t be a haughty kafir,

Come to Allah, come to Allah, chum.

Or else you’ll roast in Kingdom Come.

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

Auden’s prescient advice: To dispel any gloom engendered by the nether post, I offer these words by W. H. Auden. Though written many years ago in another dark time, they seem to be counselling those of us who “get it” today to connect with—and take heart from—each other:

Defenceless under the night

Our world in a stupor lies;

Yet, dotted everywhere,

Ironic points of light

Flash out whenever the Just

Exchange their messages;

May I, composed like them

Of Eros and of dust,

Beleaguered by the same

Negation and despair,

Show an affirming flame.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:28 | link | comments (1)

Same old Judenhass dressed up in a troofer kilt: A very pleasant-looking young Muslim who speaks with a trace of a Scottish burr invites us all to come visit him at the Edinburgh mosque. He promises that, should we do so, “no subject is taboo” (in which case, I think I’d ask him to clarify that whole Jews-are-apes-and-pigs business). It will probably come as no surprise, however, that some of those who have left comments at the nice young Muslim’s site are, shall she say, far less welcoming that he is. Here, for instance, someone named Len Giles goes off on a tear about those influential Zionists and their ambitious agenda:

• AMERICA WAS HIJACKED ON 911
  Before the creation of the Zionist State of Israel (on stolen Palestinian land), America had many true friends and only a few enemies.
  Today, America has many enemies, and only a few true friends.
  1.3 BILLION Muslims regard America as the “midwife”, the “godmother”, and the strongest, and most generous, supporter of Israel.
  It is estimated that American aid to Israel has exceeded one TRILLION dollars since 1948. Israel acquired nuclear weapons with the help of the USA. Most of Israel’s planes, helicopters, tanks, missiles, and ships, were supplied by the USA, free of charge.
  Unfortunately, America is a nation under siege. It was hijacked on the 11th of September 2001, by the Zionists.
  The world’s most powerful nation has become a province of Israel!
  The Zionists control the US Government, the Judiciary, the Defence forces, the Pentagon, the CIA, the FBI, the Police, the media, the banks, and the nation’s economy.
  BILLIONS of American taxpayers’ dollars have been squandered in the futile armed conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Thousands of American soldiers have died fighting in “proxy wars” designed to keep the Israelis safe and happy. We all know that you cannot win a guerrilla war. Hence the “VIETNAM EXIT”. But the Zionist-controlled Republican and Democrat politicians think it is possible to win a guerrilla war!
  The Zionist agenda is to spread the armed conflict into Iran, Jordan, and Syria.
  The Zionist hijackers are not worried about the serious consequences of invading Iran. After all, it is Goyim (Gentile) money, and Goyim blood being sacrificed for Israel.
  If the Iranians retaliate by “nuking” a few American cities, the Zionists will simply justify the horrible action as: “COLATTERAL DAMAGE”.
  The escalation of the Middle East armed conflict will, undoubtedly, trigger World War 3.
  Neither Russia nor China would like America to have exclusive control of the Middle East’s oil reserves.
  Weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, biological, and chemical) will be used by America, Russia, and China, around the globe. Billions of innocent people will die, needlessly, in a horrible way. The survivors of this man-made ARMAGEDDON will die slowly and painfully. The human race will become extinct.
  The former Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, made the following comments in the Israeli Knesset, on 3-10-2001:
  “Every time we do something, you tell me America will do this, and will do that……
  I want to tell you something very clear. Don’t worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America; and the Americans know it.”
  Contrary to popular belief, the Patriot Act was not introduced to protect the American citizens. President Bush introduced the Patriot Act (and a plethora of other draconian laws), to protect the Zionist hijackers.

Seems quite a charming fellow, does our Len.

 

In darker moments I despair for the furture of the world since so many of its inhabitants are ignorant, stupid, irrational, naïve and easily manipulated. You can decide for yourself into which categories the exhuberant Mr. Giles falls.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:01 | link | comments

What's up with the Grecian Formula?: A few days before the sixth anniversary of 9/11, who should appear on the scene but old ObL hisself. In this latest video--the first in three years in which the terrormeister has shown his face--Osama looks very bloated. Steroids or too much take-out from the local KFC? Only his cave-mates know for sure.

The other big change: the jihadi has gone all Rico Suave and dyed his hair jet black--although from the looks of it, the facial fungus may be a bit too luxuriant to be real.

The dye job is reminiscent of the one used by newly-deceased tenor Luciano Pavarotti, Late in life, already suffering from the ailment that ended up killing him, the singer used a tad too much black in a vain attempt to appear younger and disguise his poor health.

One hopes that's what's happening with El Puffo.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:23 | link | comments (1)

Continental drift: In a measure of how far the holy Roman Catholic Church has come vis-à-vis the Jews, Pope Benedict XVI has visited a Holocaust memorial in Austria. From the New York Times:

VIENNA, Sept. 7 — The German-born Pope Benedict XVI offered a silent prayer at the spare Holocaust memorial at Judenplatz here today, saying earlier that his visit to Austria was aimed partly at showing “repentance” for crimes against Jews during World War II.

He visited the memorial, inscribed with the names of the 65,000 Jews killed in Austria during that time, not long after arriving on a chilly and rainy morning for what he termed a three-day “pilgrimage” to a nation he visited often before becoming pope two years ago.

The central event of this trip, his seventh out of Italy, will be a visit on Saturday to celebrate the 850th anniversary of the shrine to the Virgin Mary at Mariazell, 60 miles from Vienna.

But in remarks on the plane from Rome, the 80-year-old pope made clear he had other aims as well on a visit to Austria, an overwhelmingly Catholic country with a nonetheless turbulent recent history with the church.

Using unusually emotive words, he singled out the visit to the Jewish memorial, constructed in part from a medieval synagogue destroyed in a 15th-century pogrom.

His prayer here, he told reporters, was meant “to show our sadness, our repentance and also our friendship with our Jewish brothers.”

At the memorial on Judenplatz, blooming with umbrellas against the rain, Benedict met with the chief rabbi, Paul Chaim Eisenberg, and other leaders of Vienna’s 7,000 remaining Jews. In 1938, the city was one of Europe’s thriving Jewish centers, where some 185,000 Jews lived...

I have no doubt that the Pope is sincere. However, I also have no doubt that paying homage to dead Jews will do nothing to prevent Europe’s Jew-haters/jihad collaborators and their henchmen, Europe’s useful lefty idiots from implementing the Final Solution, Part Zwei.

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:27 | link | comments

Hiding the truth in the fine print: There are two ways to decipher a just-released report by anti-Zionist NGO Human Rights Watch about the Israel-Hezbollah war—and aren’t we fortunate that the Globe and Mail gives us the choice of both? In a news article, Caroline Wheeler reports that, according to HRW, “Israeli air strikes killed civilians indiscriminately.” In a corrective editorial, however, the paper offers another—and more accurate—viewpoint:

Human Rights Watch has issued its second major report in a week on the 2006 war fought between Israel and Hezbollah.

In its initial instalment, HRW stated unequivocally that Hezbollah had intentionally lobbed thousands of rockets at Israeli civilian targets - including hospitals, schools and post offices - during the conflict. It called the attacks a violation of the laws of war, identified "criminal intent" in the statements made by Hezbollah leaders at the time, and concluded evidence suggests some were responsible for "war crimes."

In its second instalment, released yesterday, HRW turns its guns, as it were, on Israel. It accuses the Israel Defence Force of "reckless indifference" for air attacks that killed hundreds of Lebanese civilians, and says the responsibility for those deaths was not due to Hezbollah's practices of using civilians as human shields, as Israel had claimed, but "lies squarely with Israeli policies and targeting decisions."

This, too, might sound unequivocal. But the accusations directed at Israel are muted in the report's fine print - findings that "Hezbollah at times violated the laws of war in its deployment of forces in Lebanon." HRW confirmed that on some occasions the militant group "fired rockets from within populated areas, allowed its combatants to mix with the Lebanese civilian population, or stored weapons in populated civilian areas in ways that violated international humanitarian law." Further, the New York-based organization noted "a handful of instances" in which Hezbollah intentionally used civilians as "shields."

In interviews yesterday, HRW officials also said that Hezbollah fighters routinely concealed their weapons and often did not wear military-type uniforms, "which made them heard to identify."

None of this entirely absolves Israeli forces of responsibility for civilian deaths, and disturbing incidents are documented in the report. Still, it would seem to go some way toward that end.

Gee, ya think?

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

“Rights” fight: One of Pierre E. Trudeau’s “gifts” to us—along with that self-detesting, sharia-enabling doctrine of multifrikkinculturalism—was the much-ballyhooed Charter of Rights and Freedoms. A document that enshrined “rights” but ignored “responsibilities,” it continues to tear at the fabric of society, especially in Canada’s justice system. Fed up, some judges are beginning to fight back, which, not surprisingly, has resulted in their being branded scary right-wingers in the pages of the Globe and Mail:

Mr. Justice Michael Moldaver has never been one to fire warning shots across an opponent's bow. The veteran Ontario Court of Appeal judge instead aims straight amidships - as he did in a ruling on Wednesday that has riled an already angry defence bar.

Ordering a new trial for a 15-year-old Toronto schoolboy accused of carrying a loaded gun, Judge Moldaver warned against cheapening the Charter of Rights by throwing out reliable evidence and shielding gun-wielding miscreants.

One effect of the decision was to consolidate Judge Moldaver's position at the head of a judicial backlash. It echoed elements of a call to arms he issued last year in a speech that urged his colleagues to fight back against a deluge of "mind-numbing" legal manoeuvres - frequently protracted motions to have evidence excluded on grounds of Charter violations - that threaten to topple the court system.

While defence lawyers would love to dismiss Judge Moldaver as an isolated crank, they cannot. Besides being a respected mainstay of the Court of Appeal, he has considerable support from such highly regarded colleagues as Mr. Justice John Laskin, Mr. Justice James MacPherson and Madam Justice Eleanore Cronk.

A ruling last year by Judge Laskin found that, while police violated the Charter by searching a man simply because he appeared suspicious, evidence that he had a gun in his pocket was admissible since it was obviously reliable.

The two judicial statements share a common philosophical theme: simple common sense, coupled with an urgent need to curb violent crime, render it increasingly foolhardy to handcuff the police and exclude reliable evidence.

James Stribopoulos, a law professor at York University's Osgoode Hall Law School, said the judgments read "as if we are at a crisis point where we have to make a choice between civil liberties and protection against the threat of guns. But if you look at statistics, crime is actually down."

Beleaguered and weary from years of defending the Charter against attacks from the political right, defence lawyers see a horrifying new front opening up. Equally troubling to them is the source of this new attack, a highly influential court that previously has a reputation for blazing a trail when it comes to excluding evidence gained through police trickery or intimidation.

"The debate is elemental," said Frank Addario, vice-president of the Criminal Lawyers Association. "Do we enlist judges to help solve social problems, the 'danger of the day?' Or, do we enlist them to protect basic values and guard the Charter?

"Everyone is concerned about guns, but the courts can't fix that problem," Mr. Addario said.

Inevitably, liberal-minded judges on lower courts will hear that message with equal clarity.

They will be loath to venture out on a civil libertarian limb and risk a scolding from the Court of Appeal.

"There are fears that we are seeing the pendulum swing in the opposite direction," Prof. Stribopoulos said...

Well, booga booga to you, Professor. As I see it, we should be far more afraid of you human rights types than of the Judge Moldavers, who are desperately attempting to strike some balance in a system so over-freighted with “rights” that it has ceased to function.

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

The fruits of dhimmitude: Dutch Muslims are demonstrating to Dutch infidels that dhimmitude pays—a lesson that the Danes, for one, have yet to learn. From Islam Online:

THE HAGUE — Dutch Muslims are approaching religious and political authorities in different Muslim countries to persuade them against boycotting their country's products in protest against anti-Quran remarks by a rightist lawmaker.

"A boycott will hurt Muslims who are part of the Dutch society," the Dutch Muslim Council said in a message to the Egyptian People's Assembly (lower house of parliament), a copy of which was obtained by IslamOnline.net.

"The boycott won't serve Islam. Instead, it will give ammunition for hardliners to smear our faith."

A number of Egyptian MPs have called for boycotting Dutch products and lowering diplomatic ties with the Netherlands after MP Geert Wilders, the leader of the far right Freedom Party, called for banning the Noble Qur'an in the European country.

Dutch Muslims, who make up one million of the Netherlands' 16 million population, do not think this is the right response.

"This boycott will play into the hands of this isolated MP (Wilders) who is chasing limelight and votes," the council's chairman Idris El-Boujoufi told IOL.

A copy of the statement has been sent to the speaker of the parliament, the chairman of its foreign relations committee, the Grand Mufti of Egypt and Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, the highest seat of religions learning in the Sunni world.

Dutch Muslims have been under scrutiny since the killing of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh by a Muslim after a controversial anti-Islam documentary.

Following the murder, which was immediately and vehemently condemned by Dutch Muslims, the Netherland has adopted a flurry of Europe's toughest entry and integration laws.

Collective Punishment

The Muslim council said the boycott will amount to a collective punishment of the Dutch people.

"We will be punishing an entire people for something they have not done, especially that the Dutch are known for their tolerance and good ties with Muslims."

Muslim worldwide boycotted in 2006 Danish products over the publication of several cartoons lampooning Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessing be upon him).

The campaign caused Danish companies nearly $1.5 million a day in losses.

Denmark's leading dairy company Arla Foods, one of the hardest hit, issued at the time a strong condemnation of the cartoon and appealed to Arabs and Muslims to end their boycott of its products.

El-Boujoufi said Dutch Muslims do not want that to happen to Dutch companies...

Unless they start to get too uppity, that is.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:50 | link | comments

A new Moo Moo?: A lot of folks in the West have been taken in by the waxen Libyan potentate’s claims to have turned over a new leaf. Thankfully, Claudia Rosett, a wised-up broad, isn’t one of them. From the Philadelphia Inquirer:

For the civilized world, Sept. 11 was a horror once beyond imagining. For Moammar Gadhafi, the tyrant who rules Libya, it has turned out to be a windfall.

Thirty-eight years into his bloody, terror-based reign, Gadhafi is playing a wily game in which his concessions to the security-conscious West have been rewarded beyond their merits. The latest sign? A visit planned this weekend from United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

Gadhafi's big move was to surrender his illicit nuclear program, which he agreed to in late 2003, just days after Saddam Hussein was pulled from his spider hole in Iraq. All of the signs are that Gadhafi gave up his projects for mass murder not out of newfound virtue, but out of fear. Barring serious reform - which has not happened - it would have been quite enough for the democratic world to reward him merely by refraining from invading Libya.

Instead, Gadhafi has become the North African darling of the diplomatic circuit. His regime is effectively out from under both U.N. and U.S. sanctions.

Since early 2004, perched atop Libya's oil wealth, Gadhafi has received a parade of investors and high-level American and European political dignitaries. Last month, Assistant Secretary of State David Welch dropped by Tripoli. And reports have been leaking out of Libya that Condoleezza Rice is planning to visit this year - which, if it happens, would dignify Gadhafi with the first trip to Libya by a U.S. secretary of state in more than half a century. Queried about this last month, a State Department spokesman was coy, saying: "Secretary Rice has said she will visit Libya when the time is right."

The time is wrong. Curbing terror is not solely a matter of obtaining diplomatic promises or even dismantling nuclear equipment. The chief incubator of terror is tyranny, which Gadhafi has by no stretch given up…

Nor is he ever likely to, given that the rewards of tyranny are so bountiful.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:35 | link | comments (1)

Math murder: The hairy li’l Hitler says he’s crunched the numbers and, since he’s such a whiz at math, he has been able to calculate that there’s no way Great Satan is going to strike Iran. From AFP via YNet News:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has sought to justify his confidence the United States will not attack Tehran, saying the proof comes from his mathematical skills as an engineer and faith in God, the press reported on Monday.

Ahmadinejad told academics in a speech that elements inside Iran were pressing for compromise in the nuclear standoff with the West over fears the United States could launch a military strike.

"In some discussions I told them 'I am an engineer and I am examining the issue. They do not dare wage war against us and I base this on a double proof'," he said in the speech on Sunday, reported by the reformist Etemad Melli and Kargozaran newspapers.

"I tell them: 'I am an engineer and I am a master in calculation and tabulation.

"I draw up tables. For hours, I write out different hypotheses. I reject, I reason. I reason with planning and I make a conclusion. They cannot make problems for Iran.'"

Ahmadinejad has long expressed pride in his academic prowess. He holds a PhD on transport engineering and planning from Tehran's Science and Technology University and is the author several of scientific papers.

 

The deeply religious president said his second reason was: "I believe in what God says."

 

"God says that those who walk in the path of righteousness will be victorious. What reason can you have for believing God will not keep this promise."

 

Washington has never ruled out taking military action against Tehran, and its tone has sharpened again over the past week with President George W. Bush warning that Iran's nuclear programme could lead to a "nuclear holocaust."

 

Ahmadinejad said that "God willing" one day he would write his memoirs to put the record straight…

 

Don’t tell me. He’s going to call it Mein Jihad.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:19 | link | comments (1)

School daze: The public funding of religious school is an issue that extends far beyond the Ontario borders. As Daniel Pipes writes, other North American jurisdictions are having to deal with it too—and the “delightful” lessons Muslim students are being taught. From FrontPage Magazine:

New York City's Arabic-language public school, the Khalil Gibran International Academy, opens its doors this week, with special security, for 11- and 12-year-old students. One hopes that the prolonged public debate over the school's Islamist proclivities will prompt it not to promote any political or religious agendas.

Count me as skeptical, however, and for two main reasons. First is the school's genesis and personnel, about which others and I have written extensively. Second, and my topic here, is the worrisome record of taxpayer-funded Arabic-language programs from sea to shining sea.

The trend is clear: pre-collegiate Arabic-language instruction, even when taxpayer funded, tends to bring along indoctrination in pan-Arab nationalism, radical Islam, or both. Note some examples:

·        Amana Academy, Alpharetta, Georgia, near Atlanta: A charter school that requires Arabic-language learning, Amana boasts of its "institutional partnership" with the Arabic Language Institute Foundation (ALIF). But ALIF forwards the learning of Arabic as a means "to convey the message of Qur'an in North America and Europe" and thus to "help the Western countries recover from the present moral decay."

·        Carver Elementary School, San Diego: A teacher, Mary-Frances Stephens, informed the school board that she taught a "segregated class" of Muslim girls and that each day she was required to release them from class for an hour of prayer, led by a Muslim teacher's aide. Ms. Stephens deemed this arrangement "clearly a violation of administrative, legislative and judicial guidelines." The school's principal, Kimberlee Kidd, replied that the teacher's aide merely prayed alongside the students and the session lasted only 15 minutes. The San Diego Unified School District investigated Ms. Stephens's allegations and rejected them, but it nonetheless changed practices at Carver, implicitly substantiating her critique. Superintendent Carl Cohn eliminated single-gender classes and reconfigured the schedule so that students can pray during lunch.

·        Charlestown High School, Massachusetts: The school's summer Arabic-language program took students on a trip to the Islamic Society of Boston, where, the Boston Globe reports, students "sat in a circle on the carpet and learned about Islam from two mosque members." One student, Peberlyn Moreta, 16, fearing that the gold cross around her neck would offend the hosts, tucked it under her T-shirt. Anti-Zionism also appeared, with the showing of the 2002 film Divine Intervention, which a critic, Jordan Hiller, has termed an "irresponsible film," "frighteningly dangerous," and containing "pure hatred" toward Israel.

·        Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy, Inver Grove Heights, Minn.: Islamic Relief Worldwide, an organization that allegedly has links to jihadism and terrorism, sponsored this charter school, which requires Arabic as a second language. The academy's name openly celebrates Islamic imperialism, as Tarek ibn Ziyad led Muslim troops in their conquest of Spain in 711 A.D. Local journalists report that "a visitor might well mistake Tarek ibn Ziyad [Academy] for an Islamic school" because of the women wearing hijabs, the carpeted prayer area, the school closing down for Islamic holidays, everyone keeping the Ramadan fast, the cafeteria serving halal food, classes breaking for prayer, almost all the children praying, and the constant use of "Brother" and "Sister" when adults at the school address each other.

Only in the case of the Iris Becker Elementary School in Dearborn, Michigan, is the Arabic-language program not obviously pursuing a political and religious agenda. Its program may actually be clean; or perhaps the minimal information about it explains the lack of known problems.

The above examples (and see my Web log entry "Other Taxpayer-Funded American Madrassas" for yet more) are all American, but similar problems predictably exist in other Western countries…

Excuse me for a mo while I e-mail this sucker to Messers Tory and Farber.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:07 | link | comments

Tory back-pedals: Yesterday Ontario Conservative leader John Tory opined that he saw no problem with Christian schools teaching Creationism so long as they also taught the theory of evolution. Today, in serious damage-control mode, Tory has been forced to “clarify” matters. From the Globe and Mail:

THORNHILL, ONT. — Christian private schools should be allowed to teach creationism if they receive public funding, Progressive Conservative Leader John Tory said yesterday.

But six hours later, he went into damage-control mode, saying creationism should be explored only in religion class and not elsewhere in the curriculum, such as in science class.

"The Christian-based school would have to teach the Ontario curriculum," Mr. Tory told reporters in defending his plan to fund religious schools. "They teach evolution in the Ontario curriculum, but they also could teach the fact to the children that there are other theories that people have out there that are part of some Christian beliefs."…

I guess the same goes for Islam-based schools—although Mr. Tory seems unaware that Creationism is also big with the Islamic crowd (as evidenced by the many cockamannie documentaries produced by former VisionTV favourite, Harun Yahya). Chilling to consider that under the Tory plan such docs will have a place in publicly-funded classrooms.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:48 | link | comments

Disgruntled Muslims: Israel’s enemies aren’t at all pleased with Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s support of the Jewish democracy—and were delighted to have the opportunity to share their dismay with the P.M.’s emissary, Wajid Khan. A “scoop” from the Globe and Mail:

OTTAWA — MP Wajid Khan heard strong criticism of Canada's pro-Israel approach to the Middle East under the Conservative government as he toured key Muslim and Arab states in the region last fall, documents show.

Mr. Khan, Prime Minister Stephen Harper's adviser on the Middle East, was also warned that a "clash of civilizations" looms unless the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis is resolved shortly.

Mr. Khan met with a mix of government officials, professionals and non-governmental organizations, but their names are blacked out in the documents.

"There was a consensus view that, diplomatically, Canada is well-placed to play a constructive role, but also that Canada's credibility in the region has recently been damaged by a perceived shift in Canadian rhetoric on the Middle East," Foreign Affairs official Sam Hanson wrote.

The document, which summarized the views of the "interlocutors" who spoke with Mr. Khan in the Palestinian territories, also pinpointed Canada's "recent UN votes, as well as what many cast as an 'uncompromising and unhelpful' no contact policy towards Hamas."

Under the heading "Egyptian advice to Canada," Mr. Hanson reported a widely held perception that Canadian policy in the region had shifted. "Freezing out Hamas means you do not accept the need to move ahead," one Egyptian was quoted as telling Mr. Khan.

The Conservative government came to power the same month that Hamas won elections to lead the Palestinian Authority in January, 2006. The Harper government was one of the first countries to sever financial and diplomatic ties with the Hamas-led authority.

The release of the documents is the latest development regarding the Mississauga MP's fall, 2006, trip, which has been shrouded in mystery and political controversy. Elected as a Liberal, Mr. Khan was appointed by the Prime Minister in June, 2006 as an adviser and was sent three months later to tour the Middle East. Though Mr. Khan promised to release a public report on his trip, the Conservative government later said the report would not be released. In January, 2007, Mr. Khan crossed the floor to join the Tories.

Using the Access to Information Act, The Globe and Mail requested copies of any report submitted by Mr. Khan or officials in relation to the trip. Heavily redacted documented have now been released, but there is no sign of a report written by Mr. Khan.

Instead, the 48 pages contain e-mail updates sent during the trip by Mr. Hanson, a regional policy co-ordinator with the Foreign Affairs Department who accompanied Mr. Khan and his political aide as the trio visited Syria, Saudi Arabia, the Palestinian territories, Israel, Egypt and Lebanon.

The government's main reasons for redacting Mr. Hanson's e-mails were that sections contained policy advice, personal information or statements that could damage international relations.

My letter to the Globe:

You can understand why Arab and Muslim leaders gave Wajid Khan “an earful” in the wake of the Israel-Hezbollah war. After all, they had grown accustomed to Canada falling in line with the “might makes right” majority and passing endless annual anti-Israel resolutions at the UN. Prime Minister Harper’s unwillingness to get with their Israel-bashing program—or at least, to straddle the fence and play “honest broker”—must have really thrown them.

 

No wonder they dragged out the heavy artillery—fear-mongering about the lack of resolution in the Israel-Palestine issue dragging the world into a “clash of civilizations.” However, an even cursory glance at the daily news would reveal the obvious: the global “clash” they promise is already well underway, and Israel, rather than being the alpha and the omega of the conflict, is merely one of many flashpoints.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:32 | link | comments (1)

An evolving controversy: John Tory’s promise to extend public funding to all religious schools in Ontario continues to land him in deep doo-doo. Today Mr. Tory explained that Christian religious schools would be allowed to teach Creationism, as long as they adhered to provincial requirements to teach evolution. From the Globe and Mail: 

TORONTO — Publicly-funded religious schools would be allowed teach creationism and other theories alongside evolution, says Progressive Conservative Leader John Tory.

Speaking to reporters at the a Jewish day school in Thornhill, Ont., on Wednesday, Mr. Tory defended his plan to bring Jewish, Islamic and other religious schools into the public education system.

“They teach evolution in the Ontario curriculum, but they also could teach the fact to the children that there are other theories that people have out there that are part of some Christian beliefs,” Mr. Tory said at the Kamin Education Centre.

If elected premier on Oct. 10, Mr. Tory has promised to give private religious schools $400-million if they opt into the public system.

He says that move will subject the schools to provincial inspection, thereby ensuring students receive a more well-rounded education while still allowing schools to teach their core beliefs.

There are about 100 faith-based private schools across the province, with an enrolment of 53,000 students.

“If we want to be genuinely inclusive, then we have to say we're going to include all faiths in public education,” he said.

At the moment, only Roman Catholic schools get tax dollars, while other faith-based schools are left out of the funding loop. Mr. Tory said that is unfair and will change if he wins power next month.

But Education Minister Kathleen Wynne – who is running against Mr. Tory for her Toronto seat – said teaching creationism alongside evolution would be a violation of the curriculum.

She said Catholic schools are allowed to explore creationism but only in religion – not science – classes.

There’s no way madrassahs are going to “teach” the theory of evolution—which, presumably means they’d be ineligible for funding. Then again, they could always promise to teach it, but insist that the Koran’s version of events is the true one. And if they did, who’s to know?

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:41 | link | comments (3)

Hunkering in the bunker: Residents of the largely Muslim neighbourhood in Toronto which was home to the Lebanese landed immigrant/alleged letter bomber report some curious goings-on at the “house” where he lived. From the Canada Free Press:

…"I see Muslim men coming and going to and from this house all of the time, at all hours," stated one female in broken English who resides nearby and has a good vantage position of all of the activities at that location. "I've seen men coming and going all through the night, into the early morning hours, sometimes all night," she added. "One thing I noticed were the vehicles -- many are luxury vehicles and a lot have license plates from the United States, including New York and Michigan. I believe things maybe [are] not right, something going on there." When asked if she reported any of her observations to the authorities, she replied: "What you want me to tell them? It's not illegal for people to visit, is it? We're Muslim, and we don't want more problems. We don't need to create more problems for our people. They could be teaching the Qu'ran, I don't know." After being reminded that one of the occupants was just arrested for sending letter bombs and possessing explosives, she replied: "Maybe he was. We don't know what's true yet."

When asked about the unusual construction of the house that resembled a fortress with steel doors and mesh wire window coverings, this neighbor declined further comment, adding that it is up to the owners to decide what to build there, not the neighbors and certainly, not anyone else.

A second neighbor was a little more concerned about the activities at the residence, also noticing a lot of vehicular traffic by vehicles with license plates from various U.S. states. This adult male resident, also refusing to provide his name although it was labeled on his mailbox, stated that between 20-30 people either live at 176 Ashdale Avenue or stay there regularly. They receive a lot of packages delivered by private couriers, and there seems to be a constant flow of Muslim men to and from this house that has been under construction for the last few years. "I don't know what they are building there, but they sure have been doing a lot of construction," added this source. They are not outwardly friendly to others, and keep to themselves. "I believe that some of the occupants attend university, but I cannot say for certain," stated this neighbor.

A third resident, fearing repercussions, also asked for anonymity but was more vocal about the activities at the "Bombay Bunker." "In fact, I might have been one of the first to refer to that house as the Bombay Bunker," stated this long-time resident of the neighborhood. "Our neighborhood used to be much different than it is today. It used to be a place where everyone lived together, watched out for each other and helped each other. Now, there is a huge presence of Muslims who have taken over the area, segregated themselves and refuse to socialize or interact with non-Muslims." This source stated that he has expressed concerned about the activities at the "Bombay Bunker" to authorities, but declined to detail the responses he received. "Two years ago, I was told that someone would look into it, and here we are today, that's all I will say regarding the authorities."

According to this source, he has seen men using both cellular and satellite communications outside at this location. "I have seen two or three men talking on satellite phones. I know what they look like, I've used one before." This source added: "I know there are computers on constantly, and there are a lot of deliveries made to the house by private carriers like DHL and other private concerns. I don't know what is coming or going, but the house is active all of the time."…  

I’m sure nothing untoward is going on here. No doubt just a bunch of computer geeks who like to get together in their spare time to play games and quiz each other’s knowledge of Star Trek trivia.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:31 | link | comments

Are Abbas’s days numbered?: Hamas has already pushed Fatah out of Gaza. Looks like it has now set its sights on the West Bank. From israelinsider: 

Defense officials reported that Hamas is equally as strong as Fatah in the West Bank and poses a grave threat to PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas' position in the region, the Jerusalem Post reported. Terrorists in Judea and Samaria reportedly possess over 80,000 illegal weapons.

The London-based Al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper reported Monday that Fatah security forces had recently thwarted an attempted coup in the PA by Hamas, in an ongoing struggle for control of the West Bank.

Hamas had previously attempted to establish a military force in the West Bank similar to its Executive Force in the Gaza Strip, with reported plans to attack PA institutions and take over the government.

Despite Fatah's numerical and organizational superiority, defense officials stress that Hamas is far more driven -- a characteristic that could undermine Fatah's strength in numbers. Fatah had four more times the men than Hamas when Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip in a bloody coup in June.

"They have weapons and explosives and, more importantly, they are highly motivated," a senior defense official said. "It is not about manpower," he added, "but about motivating the Fatah forces to want to fight and defend the PA."

Another official added: "The security forces need to feel that they have a reason to fight. They need to feel like they have a better life to look forward to. Otherwise, they will not pose a challenge to Hamas."

Hamas is now aiming its efforts at infiltrating its men into the ranks of PA security branches - the Palestinian Police and the National Security Force. According to the official, Hamas is currently in a "waiting period" and is working towards uniting some of its splinter groups spread throughout the various West Bank cities, with terrorist hubs in the northern Samaria cities of Nablus and Jenin.

                    

So long, Moo. It’s been a slice.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:30 | link | comments

Indian Muslims approve of France’s approval: You never know what sort of flotsam is going to be churned up by google news (my home page). Case in point: this story from something called Indian Muslims about France applauding a decision of Israel’s Supreme Court to re-route a portion of the separation barrier. Note the shaky syntax and new euphemism for the barrier (new to me, anyway):

PARIS, Sept 4 (KUNA) -- France welcomed here Tuesday the decision of the Israeli Supreme Court ordering the government to re-route a section of the annexation wall it is building in the West Bank.

Spokeswoman of the French foreign ministry Pascale Andreani told reporters that France "condemns" everything that violates the international and calls for its respect.

The controversial security barrier, which large part of it is being established within the Palestinian territory, is designed to prevent suicide bombers from entering Israel through the West Bank according to Israeli claims.

The Supreme Court ordered the Israeli Government to re-route the barrier around the village of Bilin as the current route prevents the residents from reaching their farmlands on the other side of the wall.

Furthermore, the International Court of Justice considered the wall in the West Bank illegal and called on Israel to have it removed and compensate the local residents of the damage caused as a result of its construction.

The part about France condemning “everything that violates the international” gave me a chuckle. Seems to me France is mostly interested in condemning Israel, and isn’t at all concerned about violations occurring in places like, say, Iran.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:23 | link | comments

Live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse that can rake in lots of coin: In other words, be a rock and roller.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:03 | link | comments (2)

Bread, circuses and government holidays: In a desperate, pathetic and comically ill-considered attempt to buy my vote, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty’s regime (famous for its largesse towards cricketers and other needy folks likely to vote Liberal given sufficient incentive) is promising me and my fellow voters a brand new holiday—“Family Day”.

That’s right. Mark your ballot for a McSquintyite, and, should enough Ontarians follow suit, you get a government-sanctioned day off.

 

Unfortunately, it would be in February, when it’s cold and yucky in most parts of the province, and you’d likely have to huddle indoors en famile—which, depending on individual circumstances, may or may not be a good thing.

 

Then there’s the problem of cost. Who’s going to foot the bill for this lost day of productivity?

 

The McSquinters advise us not to worry our empty little heads about such petty matters. That’s a discussion they promise to get around to later on—say, after they’ve been re-elected.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:07 | link | comments (5)

Allahzilla does Europe: The beast (Judenhass) has returned to the continent with a vengeance, and this time it has morphed into a behemoth of even more monstrous proportions. By Denis MacShane in the Washington Post:

…Europe is reawakening its old demons, but today there is a difference. The old anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism have morphed into something more dangerous. Anti-Semitism today is officially sanctioned state ideology and is being turned into a mobilizing and organizing force to recruit thousands in a new crusade -- the word is chosen deliberately -- to eradicate Jewishness from the region whence it came and to weaken and undermine all the humanist values of rule of law, tolerance and respect for core rights such as free expression that Jews have fought for over time.

The president of Iran is the most odious example of this new state-sanctioned anti-Semitism. But from the Egyptian Writers Union to the notorious anti-Jewish articles in the charters of Hamas and Hezbollah, hatred of Jews is an integral element of a new ideology rising to prominence in many regions of the world.

Democracies always take their time, often too much time, to recognize and face a totalitarian threat when it is posed in ideological terms. In prewar Europe, conservatives were soft on right-wing ideologies because they were seen as being anti-communist and anti-labor. In postwar Europe, socialists were soft on the Soviet Union because the communists appeared to challenge capitalism and imperialism. Today there is still denial about the universal ideology of the new anti-Semitism. It has power and reach, and it enters into the soft underbelly of the Western mind-set that does not like Jews or what Israel does to defend its right to exist…

Human kind, in its boundless lunacy, is yet determined to finish the job Hitler started.

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

The "New" Germany: It's a lot like the "Old" Germany.

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

Pete’s belated epiphany: It took a while, but famed folk singer and lefty icon Pete Singer has finally realized that cuddly old Uncle Joe wasn’t quite so avuncular after all. By Ron Rodesh in the New York Sun:

Pete Seeger, America's best-known and most influential folksinger, wrote me a letter a few days ago. I did not expect to hear from him. Last June, I wrote in these pages about the new documentary on his life. The article ran under the headline "Time for Pete Seeger To Repent."

My complaint was that the film, good as it is, did not give a completely honest account of Mr. Seeger's politics. The filmmaker, Jim Brown, interviewed me on camera, but he did not include any of my critical remarks in the final version. In my interview, I pointed out that Mr. Seeger had been a lifelong follower of the Communist Party, changing his songs and his positions to be in accord with the ever-changing party line. He attacked the blacklist of the 1950s, which kept him off the air, but never seems to have said anything about Stalin's death list. As Martin Edlund has written in The New York Sun, Mr. Seeger has always been inseparable from his social mission. Much of it deserves praise - he was at the forefront of the struggle for civil rights - but much of it must be condemned and not hidden from sight.

In particular, I said that Mr. Seeger had supported Stalin's tyranny for so many years yet had never written a song about the Gulag. Yet some acknowledgment of his former support would have been appropriate, especially considering the songs he has sung about the Nazi death camps, which he often introduces by saying, "We must never forget."

So I felt some trepidation when I got Mr. Seeger's letter. Surely he was angry, or at the least peeved, by my article. I had been a banjo student of his in the 1950s and regarded Mr. Seeger as my childhood hero and mentor. But for decades since then, I have been publicly identified as an opponent of much of what he has believed-- that the Rosenbergs were innocent, for example, or that Fidel Castro was a friend of the poor.

I almost fell off the chair when I read Mr. Seeger's words: "I think you're right - I should have asked to see the gulags when I was in [the] USSR." For years, Mr. Seeger continued, he had been trying to get people to realize that any social change had to be nonviolent, in the fashion sought by Martin Luther King Jr. Mr. Seeger had hoped, he explained, that both Khrushchev and later Gorbachev would "open things up." He acknowledged that he underestimated, and perhaps still does, "how the majority of the human race has faith in violence."…

Lefty cluelessness in a nutshell: the inability to come to terms with the fact that a significant portion of mankind has always put its faith in violence.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:21 | link | comments

Protocols of the Elders of Tehran: First Protocol—do whatever it takes (knowing full well it won’t take very much) to bamboozle the UN’s feckless nuclear watchkitty, Mo ElBaradei.

Second Protocol: boast about how successfully you’ve pulled off the First Protocol.

 

From the Tehran Times:

TEHRAN -- The IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei’s report to the agency’s board on Tehran’s nuclear activities is a yet another success for Iran’s nuclear diplomacy, Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini said here on Sunday.

The report proved the honesty of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the international community, and made it clear that the repeated accusations and propaganda against Iran were divorced from reality, Hosseini told reporters at his weekly press briefing.

The report also showed that “our nuclear activities are not complicated per se,” and if the case would be studied according to technical and legal criteria, the problems will easily be solved and there will be no ambiguities, he stated.

In an internal report to the Board of Governors, ElBaradei said on Thursday that Iran has cooperated with IAEA inspectors to settle the outstanding issues in its nuclear program and pointed out that the agreement on an action plan, reached by Tehran and the IAEA on August 21, was “a significant step forward.”

Iran will continue its cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency, but if the UN Security Council would impose a third round of sanctions “we will reconsider our cooperation with the agency, and we will study various options.” Hosseini said.

Conditions for implementing Additional Protocol

The Additional Protocol to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty allows for surprise visits to nuclear installations by the nuclear agency.

“The implementation of the Additional Protocol by Iran in the past was a voluntary act and its implementation needs the approval of the Iranian parliament.

“The Majlis has passed another bill according to which no voluntary cooperation, including the implementation of the Additional Protocol, would be on the agenda before Iran’s nuclear dossier is returned to IAEA,” Hosseini stated…

All of which leads inexorably to the Third Protocol: Nuke the Jews.

Posted by: scaramouche at 16:52 | link | comments

Fair warning ignored: According to those predisposed to being conspiracy-minded and thinking ill of the Jews, the war in Iraq was launched at the behest—and to serve the interests—of Israel.

Another loony tune conspiracy theory bites the dust. From YNet News:

 

WASHINGTON – A senior official at the US State Department has said that political, diplomatic and military officials in Israel warned the United States against invading Iraq even before the American forces entered the country, the Inter Press Service news agency reported over the weekend.

 

According to the official, Israel tried to convince the Bush administration that the main problem in the region was Iran, not Iraq.

 

The man, Lawrence Wilkerson, was a member of the US State Department's policy planning staff and later chief of staff for Secretary of State Colin Powell.

 

In an interview with the news agency, he said that "the Israelis were telling us Iraq is not the enemy - Iran is the enemy."

 

According to Wilkerson, different sources in Israel explained to senior US officials that "if you are going to destabilize the balance of power, do it against the main enemy."

 

Wilkerson noted that the main point of their communications was not that the US should immediately attack Iran, but that "it should not be distracted by Iraq and Saddam Hussein" from a focus on the threat from Iran.

 

The message was conveyed by a large number of senior Israeli officials to their American counterparts, including political figures and intelligence sources.

 

According to Wilkerson, the Israeli advice was apparently triggered by reports reaching Israeli officials in December 2001 that the Bush administration was beginning serious planning for an attack on Iraq.

 

Journalist Bob Woodward revealed in Plan of Attack that on December 1, 2001, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had ordered the Central Command chief, General Tommy Franks, to come up with the first formal briefing on a new war plan for Iraq on December 4.  

Soon after Israeli officials got wind of that planning, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon asked for a meeting with Bush primarily to discuss US intentions to invade Iraq.

In the weeks preceding Sharon's meeting with Bush on February 7, 2002, a procession of Israeli officials conveyed the message to the US administration that Iran represented a greater threat, according to a Washington Post report on the eve of the meeting.

This is the first confirmation of the issue on the part of such a senior American official, following many hints heard on the Israeli side. The remarks were made in contrast to attempts by Israel's opposers in the US to blame Jerusalem for the American invasion of Iraq…

 

Well, ain’t that a kick in the head, Messers Walt and Mearshimer? (Not that the “esteemed” academics would ever admit it.)

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:35 | link | comments

Holier than they: Since taking the religious high ground (or more accurately, the religious low ground) has worked so well for Hamas, its rival, which is constantly represented as being a secular outfit devoid of religiously, has decided to try to occupy it too. Not surprisingly, Hamas is less than impressed with Fatah’s "new-found" embrace of that old time religion. From Ha’aretz:

Officials in the Hamas' administration in the Gaza Strip called Monday for a ban on holding Friday prayers in public, as rival Fatah has demanded.

Salleh al-Reggeb, formerly director of the Religious Affairs Ministry in the former administration of deposed Palestinian Authority premier Ismail Haniyeh, said such prayers would be "religiously illegal."

The dispute over public prayers has erupted after tens of thousands of Fatah supporters prayed last Friday in public in several locations in the Strip, in a direct challenge to Hamas and its executive security forces.

 

More than 20 people, including two journalists, were wounded in the clashes which subsequently broke out, and dozens of people were detained.

"The public prayers that Fatah called were not serious, it included ridiculous behaviour by the worshippers. Moreover, the worshippers don't come to pray, they come for riots and violations of the law," al-Reggeb said.

The Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), in a meeting chaired by PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, called on the Palestinians in Gaza to pray in public next Friday.

Haniyeh's administration accused the PLO committee and Abbas "of inciting the Palestinians to riots, violence and terror."…

 

Yeah, Mahmoud. Stop trying to be such a copy-cat. Inciting Palestinians to riots, violence and terror is Hamas's m.o.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:40 | link | comments

Earthly rewards: That kidnapping caper over in Afghanistan has proven so successful that the Taliban has decided to employ it as one of its regular tactics.

Meanwhile, some sheiks are assuring us that capturing civilians and holding them for ransom contravenes Islam.

 

Sure thing, sheiks.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:23 | link | comments

Up and at ‘em: There are those who, while on vacation, adopt a “Club Med” approach—no newspapers, no media intrusion of any kind that could potentially disrupt the vacation bliss. One reason I could never stay at a Club Med. Me, I have to have my daily print fix, even if it means having to hike to a newspaper box at the top of a very high hill, or driving into the nearest Muskoka hamlet to get it. E’er vigilant—that’s my motto.

A few days ago I happened to catch this little stink bomb, released by  Ottawa anti-Zionist Marjorie Robertson, in the letters section of the Globe and Mail (sorry, no link):

 

Apocalyptics now

 

Re Norman Cohn: 92 – Historian Compared Nazis to Apocalyptic Sects (Aug. 29): Prof. Cohn made his mark as a historian drawing parallels between the totalitarianism and genocide by Nazis to those of apocalyptic medieval sects. With whom, I wonder, would he compare today’s apocalyptic and messianic sects that beat the drums of pre-emptive and perpetual war and enjoy such favour in high places?

 

With whom, indeed? Although Marjorie doesn’t come right out and say so, we know exactly to whom she’d compare the Nazis—the word “pre-emptive” being the dead giveaway.

 

Here’s the letter I just dashed off to the Globe:

 

Marjorie Robertson wonders whether late historian Norman Cohn, who once compared the Nazis to a medieval apocalyptic sect, would have been inclined to draw a similar comparison between the Nazis and “today’s apocalyptic and messianic sects that beat the drums of pre-emptive and perpetual war”—presumably, a backhanded swipe at American foreign policy in Iraq and elsewhere.

 

Since Prof. Cohn was a scholar who focused on the history of anti-Semitism—his most famous work, Warrant for Genocide, examined the Czarist forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and its tragic impact on Hitler’s formulation of the Final Solution—and since America is a democracy and the staunchest ally of Israel, the Jewish state that arose in the wake of the Holocaust, the odds of his ever making such a linkage are extremely low, to say the least.

 

I suggest that Prof. Cohn would have been far likelier to look eastward, and might have pointed to the totalitarian nation that is currently in the grip of apocalyptic and messianic thinking—Iran. If Ms. Robertson hadn’t been so intent on slamming the U.S. and drawing inappropriate comparisons, perhaps she might have been able to discern the deafening beat of war drums emanating from that direction.

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