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

It’s the crude, dude: Janet Levy on the American Thinker site says Libya’s black gold has allowed former terror rogue Moo Moo Ghadafi to rehabilitate his image and buy his way onto the UN Security Council:

On Tuesday, the United Nations, with at least tacit U.S. approval, elected the former terrorist state, Libya, to serve a two-year term on the U.N. Security Council. The prospect that Moammar Gaddafi, once the target of U.S. and U.N. sanctions, would participate in the U.N. Security Council decision-making process is part of the charade that relations between Libya and the U.S. are, in the words of Libyan diplomat Giadalla Ettalhi, "back to normal." In truth, the acceptance of oil-rich Libya on the international body charged with maintaining worldwide peace and security, reveals how the need for oil can cleanse even the most heinous of atrocities committed by terrorist states and nullify the suffering of its victims.

With oil and gas prices climbing, Libya's plentiful oil and gas resources, have provided incentives for foreign investments. Energy firms worldwide have been anxious to do business with Libya and the governments of many European countries acted several years earlier to remove economic restrictions placed on Libya because of its past actions. U.S. companies have also pressured the U.S. government to normalize relations to stay apace with their European rivals. The U.S. desire to explore alternative sources for oil and gas may well have influenced the decision to normalize relations and paved the way for Libya to serve on the Security Council.

 

With Libya on the U.N. Security Council, the stage is truly set for a theater of the absurd. That's because the Security Council is charged with maintaining international peace and security, which Libya has a well-known history of violating. Under the provisions of its charter, the Security Council can investigate any conflict that may lead to international friction and take a full spectrum of actions ranging from recommendations and political pressure to deploying peacekeeping forces or authorizing military action. The council may also choose to institute economic sanctions, sever diplomatic ties or refer cases to the International Criminal Court for arbitration.

 

Five permanent members sit on the Security Council -- the United States, France, Britain, Russia and China -- and have veto power over resolutions. Ten temporary members serve for two-year terms. The office of the president, responsible for setting the council's agenda and overseeing crisis situations, rotates monthly among all of the member countries. 

 

Thus, in an abundance of irony, it could potentially fall to Libya to oversee a world crisis, the very country which has been anti-American since 1969 when Gaddafi came to power and which was responsible in 1988 for blowing up Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people from 21 countries, including 189 Americans. The Lockerbie bombing was the deadliest terrorist attack against the United States until the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

 

As a result, Libya until recently was under U.S. and U.N. sanctions that hindered its ability to develop its energy sector. In 2003, when Libya announced that it would dismantle its program for weapons of mass destruction, the United States and the European Union agreed to restore diplomatic relations. At the time, the Libyan government ratified a series of nominal, human rights treaties.

 

But these actions were instituted purely for political expediency and didn't reflect the situation on the ground, according to an investigation by Amnesty International, a far left-leaning, non-governmental organization known for selective criticism of human rights violations. Amnesty International found that significant numbers of Libyans were being incarcerated for non-violent political activities and the death penalty was in place for cases of political dissent. Publicly, Colonel Gaddafi denounced capitol punishment and denied human rights violations but, according to Amnesty International, death sentences, unfair trials and the use of torture to extract confessions continued to be reported by Libya's Internal Security Agency…

 

Who cares if the new Moo Moo’s not all that different from the old Moo Moo, so long as his gushers are flowing.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:54 | link | comments (1)

Trick or treat: In honour of Halloween, here’s an updated version of Bobby “Boris” Pickett’s “Monster Mash” as sung by Mahmoud “Adolf” Ahmadinejad and the Maniacal Mullahs:

I was down at the reactor late one night

When my eyes beheld a wond’rous sight.

For my mahdi from his watery grave did rise

And suddenly to my surprise

 

He did the mash,
He did the mahdi mash.
The mahdi mash,
It was a Shia smash.
He did the mash,
It made a great big splash.
He did the mash.
He did the mahdi mash.

He said, “From the blue Med sea to Tehran’s skyline
I see a lovely vista that’s Judenrein.

Thought I, now’s the time to come again ‘n’

Help you launch that Armageddon.”

 
He did the mash,
He did the mahdi mash.
The mahdi mash
It was a Shia smash.
He did the mash,
It made a great big splash.
He did the mash,
He did the mahdi mash.

The Shias were rockin', all were digging the sounds.
The mullahs were kvelling, baying like hounds.
They’d finally got revenge, you see

For the dirt that was done to their man, Ali.

They played the mash,
They played the mahdi mash.
The mahdi mash
It was a Shia smash
They played the mash.
And they had such a bash.
They played the mash
They played the mahdi mash.

 

No one was more thrilled than me, 'Madinejad.

‘Cause I knew all along I wasn’t mad.

It’s just that I'd a special job to do—

To usher in the you-know-who.

It's now the mash.
It's now the mahdi mash
The monster mash
And it's a Shia smash
It's now the mash.
It's caught on in a flash
It's now the mash
It's now the mahdi mash

Posted by: scaramouche at 16:53 | link | comments

That old apes and pigs thing, again: The speaker of the Palestinian legistlative council  uses an all-too familiar reference from the Koran to describe how he and other members of his faith view the Jews.

Personally, I think it's time for Jews to take custody of the whole ape 'n' pig slur--in the same way that African-Americans have taken ownership of the "n" word--and thereby remove its sting. To that end, I'm thinking of creating a line of merchandise--t-shirts, calenders, mugs and stuffed animals--featuring an adorable cartoon ape and pig.

My only quandry: should I call the line "ape 'n' pig" or "pig 'n' ape"?

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:44 | link | comments (4)

What gives?: Accused Madrid bombing mastermind acquitted. Even though he had boasted about his role in the terror attack which snuffed out 191 lives, his lawyers successfully argued that he'd been mistranslated.

Looks like a major setback for the War on Terror.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:24 | link | comments

Refugees heart Israel: It’s such an embarrassment when refugees from places like Sudan and Eritrea attempt to bypass Egypt and high-tail it into the Zionist entity. No wonder Egyptian authorities are trying to clamp down on the practice. From the Jerusalem Post:

Egyptian authorities detained eight Eritreans and two Sudanese early Wednesday in two separate incidents as they tried to make their way to Israel, a security official said.

The Eritreans were caught trying to take a boat across the Suez Canal to the Sinai Peninsula, to reach the border with Israel in northern Sinai, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak to the media.

An Egyptian human trafficker was arrested along with the eight Eritreans, the official said.

In a separate incident, two young Sudanese refugees from the war-torn western Darfur region were arrested early Wednesday as they tried to sneak into Israel south of the official Rafah border crossing point, according to the official.

The Sudanese said they were seeking political asylum in Israel.

Israel estimates that 2,800 people have entered the country illegally through its border with Egypt in recent years searching for jobs. Most have come from Africa.

Hmm. Now why do you suppose they’d want to get into Israel, a tiny Jewish nation, when there are so many wonderful Arab and Muslim ones in the region to choose from? Don’t they know that the Zionist entity is ee-vil?

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:09 | link | comments

Abdullah’s defenders: Some true believers upset with a report linking Saudi Arabia to extremist literature found in U.K. mosques are dismissing it as “a PR stunt.” From Asian Image:

An Islamic organisation has condemned the opportunist release of a report by the Policy Exchange.

It has been reported agencies linked to the Saudi government have distributed extremist literature to mosques and Islamic centers in Britain.

The Policy Exchange said the material expressed a deep-rooted antipathy toward Western society, calling for violence against enemies of Islam, including women and gays who demand equal rights.

The Federation of Student Islamic Societies (FOSIS)hit back however claiming that whilst the report is an important contribution to the academic literature on Mosques it Britain, it is actually nothing more than a PR stunt aimed to gain publicity on the back of the controversy surrounding the visit of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.

Faisal Hanjra, spokesman for FOSIS, said, "It is severely reprehensible for any organisation to attempt to gain short-term publicity at the expense of damaging community relations in the UK.

"The Policy Exchange document does nothing more than present single sentences, from often large documents, out of context.

"The report also fails to adequately define the term extremist literature' instead applying this label to anything outside of the authors' own personal realms of social acceptability.

"Finally, the report arrives at the illogical conclusion that this literature is in part responsible for terrorism, something not supported by the actual contents of the report."

He further added, "For the release of a year-long research report to coincide with the arrival of King Abdullah into this country is certainly suspicious…

Not “suspicious.” Propitious.

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

More than skin deep: Ever wonder why Marxists are so riddled with self-loathing? Well, it could be because their guru, Karl Marx, had really bad skin. From Reuters via the Globe and Mail:

LONDON — Karl Marx, who complained of excruciating boils, actually suffered from a chronic skin disease with known psychological effects that may well have influenced his writings, a British expert said on Tuesday.

Sam Shuster, professor of dermatology at the University of East Anglia, believes the revolutionary thinker had hidradenitis suppurativa (HS) in which the apocrine sweat glands – found mainly in the armpits and groin – become blocked and inflamed.

"In addition to reducing his ability to work, which contributed to his depressing poverty, hidradenitis greatly reduced his self-esteem," said Dr. Shuster, who published his findings in the British Journal of Dermatology.

"This explains his self-loathing and alienation, a response reflected by the alienation Marx developed in his writing."

While HS is linked to boil-like lumps, the painful condition also causes more widespread infection, swelling, skin thickening and scarring.

It could also explain a number of Marx's other complaints, not previously linked, such as joint pain and a painful eye condition that often stopped him working.

Dr. Shuster based his diagnosis on an analysis of Marx's extensive correspondence, in which he wrote to friends about his health and described his skin lesions as "curs" and "swine."

"The bourgeoisie will remember my carbuncles until their dying day," Marx told Friedrich Engels in a letter from 1867…

And we have, we have. One can only imagine how different the planet might have been had old Karl been carbuncle-less and blessed with a complexion as smooth as a baby’s behind.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:30 | link | comments

Wahhabi Judenhass: Melanie Phillips is appalled by what she calls the “grovel-fest” now taking place in London. She quotes a post by blogger David Conway, who describes some of the revolting Saudi-produced fare that’s been polluting Arab airwaves:

On May 7, 2002, wearing her customary body-length robe and fashionable head scarf, Doaa Amer -- a professional TV anchor who hosts Muslim Woman Magazine on IQRAA-TV, a satellite channel broadcasting throughout the Arab world … based in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia – announced to her viewers that she had a special guest. Broadcasting from Egypt, she beg[a]n: “Our report today will be a little different, because our guest is a girl, a Muslim girl, but a true Muslim.”

‘The camera pans slowly down and to the right as Ms Amer greets her guest who turns out to be a small child. [Their conversation goes thus:]

Amer: Peace be upon you.
Child: Allah’s mercy and blessing upon you.
Amer: How old are you?
Child: Three and a half.
Amer: Are you a Muslim?’
Child: Yes
Amer: Are you familiar with the Jews?’
Child: Yes.
Amer: Do you like them?
Child: No
Amer: Why don’t you like them?
Child: Because…
Amer: (prompting): Because they are what?
Child: They’re apes and pigs.
Amer: Because they’re apes and pigs. Who said they are so?
Child: Our God.
Amer: Where did he say this?
Child: In the Koran.
Amer: Right, he said that about them in the Koran…. Did they love our master Mohammed?
Child: No.
Amer: No, what did the Jews do to him?
….
….
Child: There was a Jewish woman who invited the Prophet and his friends. When he asked her, "Did you put poison [in my food]?” she said to him, “Yes.” He asked her, "Why did you do this?" and she replied: “If you are a liar – you will; die and Allah will not protect you: if you speak the truth –Allah will protect you.”
Amer: And our God protected the Prophet Muhammad, of course.
Child: And he said to his friends: “I will kill this lady.”
Amer: Of course, because she put poison in his food, this Jewess.
Child: Oh.
Amer: (speaking directly into the camera):
Basmallah [the girl’s name], Allah be praised, Basmallah, Allah be praised. May our God bless her. No one could wish Allah could give him a more believing girl than she… May Allah bless her and her father and mother. The next generation of children must be true Muslims. We must educate them now while they are still children so that they will be true Muslims.’

‘Shortly before this programme aired on IQRAA-TV, the station’s owner, Prince al-Waleed bin Talil [a Saudi royal] contributed $27 million to a government-organised telethon in Saudi Arabia that raised $109 million for the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. Saudi King Fahd and Crown Prince Abdallah [now King] each contributed $1 million, with their wives kicking in separate cheques of close to $1 million. …

‘The telethon was hosted by a prominent Saudi government cleric named Sheikh Saad al-Buraik, who took the opportunity of the live television coverage to …[tell] his audience: “I am against American until this life ends, until the Day of Judgment. I am against America even if stone liquefies…. She is the root of all evils and wickedness on Earth… Oh Muslim Ummah, don’t take the Jews and Christians as allies… Muslim Brothers in Palestine, do not have any mercy. Neither compassion on the Jews, their blood, their money, their flesh. Their women are yours to take. Legitimately. God made them yours. Why don’t you enslave their women? Why don’t you wage jihad? Why don’t you pillage them?”

‘Like the al-Ibrahim brothers, whose Middle East Broadcasting Network aired the telethon, Sheikh al-Buraik is closely tied to Prince Abdul Aziz bin Fahd, the king’s youngest son. The sheikh hosts a regular show on MBC and the government’s Channel One called Religion and Life.’
[Kenneth Timmerman, Preachers of Hate: Islam and the War on America (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2003), pp. 117-120 passim]

Melanie’s comment: “Just remember this when you look at the pictures of Britain’s Royal Family, Prime Minister and higher establishment bowing and scraping today to the House of Saud.”

Will do, Mel.

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

Saudi mischief:  As the unctuous Wahhabi royal (accompanied by Bush family fave Prince Bandar, no less) continues to be feted by British dhimmis, a new report reveals the malign influence the Saudis continue to exert over U.K. mosques. From Malaysia Sun:

…Meanwhile, new research by think-tank Policy Exchange has found that hate literature calling for jihad, beheading of apostates and stoning of adulterers is freely available in several important mosques in Britain.

The research, published Monday in a report titled 'The Hijacking of British Islam', is based on visits to nearly 100 places of 'important Islamic religious institutions', including leading mosques, in various parts of Britain.

The report has been criticised by Muslim groups who fear that it will further contribute to the spectre of Islamophobia evident in Britain after the Sep 11 terror attack and July 7 London bombings.

The Policy Exchange report said: 'Extremist literature enjoys a potency through its availability in prestigious sites of Islamic religious instruction across the UK. This makes it a major impediment to efforts by Muslims to integrate into mainstream British society.

'On the one hand, the results (of the research) were reassuring: in only a minority of institutions - approximately 25 percent - was radical material found. What is more worrying is that these are among the best-funded and most dynamic institutions in Muslim Britain - some of which are held up as mainstream bodies.

'Many of the institutions featured here have been endowed with official recognition. This has come in the form of official visits from politicians and even members of the Royal Family; provision of funding; 'partnership' associations; or some other seal of approval.

'Much of the material is (thus) infused with a strident sectarianism, in which many Muslims - particularly the very large number of Sufis in this country and around the world - are placed beyond the pale.

'More widely, Muslims are urged to separate themselves from people and things that are not considered Islamic; a separation that is to be mental, emotional, and at times, even physical.

'Western society, in particular, is held to be sinful, corrosive and corrupting for Muslims. Western values - particularly concerning the position and rights of women and in the realm of sexuality generally - are rejected as inimical to Islam.'

Criticising the report, Iqbal Sacranie, a former secretary general of the Muslim Council of Great Britain said: 'The majority of Muslims will totally dismiss this because it is written by the Policy Exchange, who have an agenda to denigrate the mainstream of Islam in this country.

'If there is any material which falls foul of the law, then the law should take its course. We cannot accept messages of hate - there is zero tolerance on that. But it is irresponsible to target religious texts and take them out of context. These texts can be found not just in mosques but in ordinary bookshops - the report overlooks that.'

The research found that 'most of the extremist literature is published and distributed by agencies linked to the Saudi Arabian government'. It recommended that 'there needs now to be a proper audit of the costs and benefits of the Saudi-UK relationship'.

The report recommended that the hate literature be immediately removed, and that Islamic religious institutions should be subject to greater regulation aimed at establishing a 'gold standard' for genuinely moderate Islam.

The report recommended: 'Islamic organisations to which the 'offending' institutions are currently linked - notably groups such as the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) - must categorically repudiate the extremist, separatist and often sectarian material uncovered in this report and exert pressure for change.

'Women in Muslim and other minority communities must have their human rights upheld; consideration should be given to what steps can be taken to ensure this. British Muslim women cannot be consigned to a position of inequality. Nor should the British government fail to act against the oppression of a segment of its population - whether this is 'justified' on religious grounds or otherwise'.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:32 | link | comments

Porous borders: According to Sheila Fraser, Canada’s Auditor General, the nation’s borders are as leaky as a sieve. From the Canadian Press:

OTTAWA - Weaknesses at Canada's border agency allowed many potentially dangerous people and goods to slip into the country earlier this year, says the federal auditor general.

In a report Tuesday, Sheila Fraser said border officers failed to take a closer look at numerous travellers and shipments flagged as possible risks on watch lists.

Overall, the auditor found the Canada Border Services Agency's threat-assessment systems "are not satisfactorily supporting" its efforts to manage entry to the country.

In other chapters of her latest report, Fraser found that the military has failed to validate the medical licences of its doctors and nurses; that government secrets have been allowed to fall into the hands of private contractors who lack security clearances; and that a major native land-claims deal has been shoddily administered.

But the most damning finding in this fall's report to Parliament is the lax security at the border.

Each year, the Canada Border Services Agency's officers allow 96 million people into Canada - tourists, immigrants and refugees, business people and returning Canadians. They also approve entry of more than $400 billion in goods.

The agency uses lookouts, or electronic notifications, based on intelligence information, past customs seizures, immigration violations and national security risks.

The auditor found that an average of 13 per cent of customs lookouts and 21 per cent of immigration lookouts from January to March of this year were not referred for further examination.

The border agency investigated some missed lookouts and has acknowledged that improved training of its officers was necessary, the report says.

"The agency does not have consistent monitoring in place to know the extent to which this is happening and take remedial action."

Agency officials said some lookouts may be missed or admitted to Canada at primary inspection because of incorrect matching of the lookout to a traveller or shipment.

Furthermore, the report says policies and procedures for creating lookouts vary considerably, and the agency is currently developing a new formula.

This would meet a recommendation of the federal inquiry into Maher Arar, the Ottawa engineer shipped to a Syrian prison by the United States after Canada mistakenly labelled him an Islamic extremist.

Fraser said the agency must do spot inspections. "They are focusing all of their inspections now on cases that they identify as high risk, and the only way to really ensure the system is effective is if you do these random checks."

The auditor general also noted that while the agency has created programs intended to speed the passage of low-risk people and goods across the border, these initiatives rely mainly on voluntary compliance at many border points.

Further, an internal agency evaluation recently concluded that limited screening of applicants leaves pre-approval programs potentially vulnerable to infiltration by criminals - a finding with which Fraser agreed.

Fraser also found:

-No electronic document readers at land ports of entry considered high risk.

-The agency could not provide assurance it conducts risk assessments of all air and marine cargo in advance of arrival.

-Border officers see weaknesses in new automated screening systems and therefore continue to rely more on their own analysis and judgment to select shipments for examination.

Fraser said weaknesses in the agency's data prevent it from confirming which risks are most important. "The agency has not established its desired levels of border openness and security and, as a result, cannot know whether it is achieving them."

The agency accepted the auditor's recommendations, adding it faces "considerable resource constraints" as it tries to fulfil its mandate.

In other chapters, Fraser said:

-Secret government information is leaking out to private contractors who do work for Ottawa but have not been given proper security clearances...

Doesn’t exactly inspire a feeling of confidence in the government’s ability to protect us from the bad guys, does it?

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:09 | link | comments

The Wheeler version: Carolynne Wheeler, of the MacKinnon-Wheeler tag-team of married Israel-bashers, has a double header in the Globe and Mail. In piece #1 she expounds on the subject of Ehud Olmert’s prostate cancer, and the impact it may or may not have on the upcoming peace blather in Annapolis. She goes on to examine the situation in Gaza, which as everyone knows, pretty well sucks and blows. As Carolynne sees it, the reason why things are so dire is because Israel is up to its old tricks—being mean and bloody-minded for no particular reason.  Here, for instance is how she describes Israel’s most recent dealings with Gaza:

…The Israeli government is also intensifying its campaign against Gaza, which it last month declared a hostile entity. On Sunday, officials made good on threats to cut the strip's fuel supply, reducing shipments of benzene and diesel and causing lineups at Gaza's gas stations. Israeli officials have said the cuts will be up to 14 per cent of the regular weekly allotment, while Palestinian officials said shipments were down as much as 50 per cent and likely to affect the fuel supply for Gaza's only power plant.

Israel's Attorney-General told the government yesterday it could not cut electrical power to the Gaza Strip as part of its sanctions against the Hamas-controlled territory, as it had planned to do, although he did approve other measures, Reuters reported.

Israel's supreme court has told the government to explain its planned actions against Gaza. Attorney-General Menachem Mazuz said that the plan to reduce power to Gaza needed further scrutiny because of the possible impact on the population.

The Sufa cargo crossing into Gaza, used for humanitarian shipments of food, fuel and medicines, has also been closed, leaving just one cargo crossing capable of handling about 55 supply trucks a day, down from 100 to 120 daily.

Got that? For some unknown, unmentioned reason, Israel has decided to “intensify its campaign in Gaza” and seems to be antagonistic toward an entire region, which it has declared “a hostile entity.” Why, it’s almost as if, to Wheeler, there’s no Hamas bent on exterminating the Jews of Israel and raining down a relentless volley of mullah-supplied rockets on the folks of the Negev and Sderot; almost as if Israel is acting out of sheer spite.

Wheeler’s second article is equally biased. In this one, her object of sympathy is Fatah, Hamas’s rival over in the West Bank. Stout-hearted men that they are, Fatah higher-ups are doing their level best to restore law and order to the lawless town of Nablus. At the moment, though, it’s unclear if they’ll be able to fulfill their goal since Israel has put up all sorts of roadblocks that are making it well nigh impossible:

…Welcome to Nablus, population 170,000, once known as the Palestinians' economic engine and a cosmopolitan centre of architecture and poetry. Today it's a city with an economy largely cut off by Israeli checkpoints and a population demoralized by unemployment; it is also subject to frequent raids by Israeli soldiers, who see it as a hotbed of terrorism.

Now, with crime rates skyrocketing, gunfire in the streets and vigilante justice rampant, Nablus poses a critical test for Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, who is under heavy pressure to prove that his forces are in control of the West Bank ahead of an anticipated peace conference in Annapolis, Md., next month.

In the four months since Hamas wrested control of Gaza, Mr. Abbas's forces have clamped down on Islamist movements in the West Bank; his Preventative Security troops have been criticized by Amnesty International for arresting more than 1,000 suspected Hamas members, many of whom Amnesty said were tortured in prison.

But that campaign has now been extended to a general effort to impose law and order, starting here, by cracking down on car theft, armed robberies and other gangland-style crimes. For the first time since most people can remember, the region's estimated 3,000 police officers are flagging cars, checking documents, seizing weapons and arresting wanted men.

"We have to create a positive atmosphere for our political leaders," said new Nablus police chief Colonel Ahmad Sharkawi, a long-time associate of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat who was installed here shortly after Hamas's takeover of Gaza.

"We had to start with Nablus ... because we believe strongly that if Nablus is under control, this will be positively reflected in other places," he said.

To boost their efforts, the U.S. security co-ordinator for the Palestinians, Keith Dayton, visited Nablus last week, calling the security plan a "first real test" for a future Palestinian state.

But the task ahead is daunting: Nablus is a strong base for the Fatah-affiliated al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a violent organization that claimed full or shared responsibility for 22 suicide attacks against Israeli targets between 2001 and 2006.

There are also dozens of criminal gangs and family clans, all of them having amassed large quantities of guns.

Already there are stumbling blocks. Israel granted approval more than a month ago for the deployment of an additional 500 police officers in Nablus to help bring its chaotic streets under control. But their arrival, now expected within the next 10 days, has been delayed in part by a shortage of equipment.

More alarming, the optimism surrounding a program of amnesty for nearly 200 men wanted by Israel, mainly gunmen with the Martyrs Brigades, is also fading. The program, announced in July to much fanfare, required each man to surrender his weapons and remain in informal Palestinian Authority custody for three months on a promise of being removed from an Israeli wanted list.

But three months on, an al-Aqsa member waiting furtively on a street corner for a journalist says he is unconvinced that his name has been cleared, and is again packing a pistol on his hip. He is not the only one to rearm, he said.

"For the last three months we have committed ourselves to law and order, we have not used our weapons in any way. And Israel has not responded," said the gunman, identifying himself only as Sari…

Still, these first steps are giving the ordinary residents of Nablus, who have dared not stir out of doors at night for fear of being robbed or shot, hope that some sense of normalcy will return.

Hey, who doesn’t want that, Sari?

Now, I’m no ace reporter for Canada’s newspaper of record, but even I can see that Sari is taking the credulous Ms. Wheeler, who’s already predisposed to think ill of Israel, for a ride in the dumb dhimmi bus. Does she really believe that this “gunman” (Wheeler-speak for “terrorist”) has been sitting around for three months waiting for the Jews to take him off some list? I don’t think so. More likely he picked up a gun again at the first opportunity, as resolved as ever to kill as many Jews as is humanly possible so that the map can be restored to its pristine, pre-Israel condition.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:55 | link | comments

Rolling out the red carpet for an oily royal: A blistering exposé of British hypocrisy in—of all places—lefty rag the Independent:

This week, Gordon Brown and David Cameron will welcome the leader of one of the world's most vicious dictatorships to Britain. Both men will embrace King Abdullah al-Saud, who heads a regime in which, according to Amnesty International, "Fear and secrecy permeate every aspect of life. Every day the most fundamental human rights of people in Saudi Arabia are being violated."

In his Labour Party conference speech last month, the Prime Minister declared that he would oppose dictatorship everywhere: "The message should go out to anyone facing persecution from Burma to Zimbabwe ... human rights are universal." He has refused to even attend the same summit as the Zimbabwean dictator, Robert Mugabe, on the grounds that "there is no freedom in Zimbabwe, and there is widespread torture and mass intimidation of the political opposition." David Cameron has also just promised to put "human rights" at the heart of his "foreign policy vision".

Yet both political leaders refuse to make a commitment to even mention human rights to the king. Instead, he will ride in a golden carriage with the Queen, and be guest of honour at a Buckingham Palace banquet. It is the start of a three-day state visit, funded by the British taxpayer. The decision to lavish large sums and the rare prestige of a state visit on King Abdullah has attracted severe criticism in Westminster. The Liberal Democrats' acting leader, Vincent Cable, has refused to attend the banquet. The Labour MP John McDonnell said: "We are feting this man because Saudi Arabia controls 25 per cent of the world's oil, and because we sell him billions of pounds' worth of weapons. It is an insult to everything Britain stands for to put these geopolitical concerns ahead of the rights of women, trade unionists and all Saudi people."

While King Abdullah is cheered by our political leaders, many of his victims will be protesting outside. Sandy Mitchell, 52, went to Saudi Arabia to work as an anaesthetic technician at a hospital in Riyadh more than a decade ago – and got a rare outsider's glimpse into how the king maintains his power. He explains: "One day in 2000 I was getting out of my car at the hospital when I was pounced on. I was battered to the ground, a hood was put over my head, and they manacled my hands and feet. I thought – I'm being kidnapped."

He woke up in the Madhethe interrogation centre, where the Saudi police demanded he confess to being a British spy ordered to plant bombs in the country. He told then the bombs were obviously the work of Saudi Islamists – a view now accepted to be true – so they hung him upside down and began to beat his feet and buttocks with an axe handle for eight days. All the while, he could hear his friend Bill Sampson being gang-raped in the next room.

Mr Mitchell was eventually released after 32 months, when he was swapped for several Saudi citizens being held in Guantanamo Bay. But he warns: "The torture chambers in Saudi weren't created for me. These rooms were like a human abattoir. There was years' worth of blood on the floor that nobody bothered to clean. It was all over the walls. We were lucky we survived, but there are countless Saudi people who we never hear about who don't survive those chambers." Mr Mitchell will be joined at the protests by many refugees who have narrowly escaped this fate, including the trade unionist Yahya al-Faifi.

But life in Saudi Arabia is worst of all for women. While King Abdullah offers praise for Britain's female head of state, in his country all women are kept in effect under house arrest. They are banned from driving, from leaving the house without a male guardian, even in a medical emergency, or from holding a passport. Whenever women try to struggle free from these rules, the "Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice" – a posse of uniformed thugs who stalk the streets – beat them with batons.

There was a rare glimpse into how this system of gender apartheid works last year when a female Saudi writer called Badria al-Bisher authored a plea for change. She wrote: "Imagine being a woman, and being subject to harassment, beating, or murder, then when your picture is published in local newspapers, along with the criminals' in all their murderousness, there will still be those who ask if you, the victim, were veiled ... Imagine being a woman whose nose, arms, and legs are now broken by your husband, and when you submit a complaint to a judge saying: He beats me! He'd casually reply by saying: Yes? What else? ... Imagine being a woman, and this "guardian" of yours is your 15-year-old son."

The website on which this appeal appeared has since been shut down. The House of Saud's dysfunctions are not contained within the Arabian peninsula; they are burning their way out across the world – and backfiring on Britain.

In order to appease their own internal Wahabbi-Islamist extremists, the Saudi dictatorship is handing them tens of billions of oil-dollars to promote their vision across the globe. As the dissident ex-CIA agent Robert Baer says: "Never forget that it is the al-Saud who sign the cheques for these extreme mosque schools all over the world. It's hush money to divert Muslims' attention from the [activities of] the al-Saud [royal family]." The Saudi dictatorship is slowly poisoning global Islam, ensuring the most austere and fanatical desert vision liquidates the softer, more mystical strands – and we are already seeing this backfire on to the streets of London and New York.

Privately, government ministers claim King Abdullah is slowly reforming the kingdom. They contrast him to the Interior Minister, Naif al-Saud, who blames the September 11 attacks on the Israeli security services and is even more hard line. But Human Rights Watch says that under King Abdullah, "reform has been more cosmetic than real". For example, two of the country's leading liberal reformists, Abdullah and Isa al-Hamid, are currently awaiting trial. Their "crime" was to support a totally peaceful protest organised by mothers of men who have been seized without explanation by the Saudi state and held for years, without contact, lawyers or trial. Their names will not be uttered by Brown or Cameron this week.

The truth is that the British Government – and all Western societies – are so addicted to Saudi Arabia's oil that they feel they can't speak back. They are terrified of seeing the petrol that lubricates our economy (or the arms deals that butter it) being turned off, as it was in 1973 oil crisis. It is only by making a rapid transition away from our dependence on fossil fuels that this depraved relationship with a tyranny can be unpicked – but the Government shows no sign of doing this, preferring to stick to the old exchange of sycophancy, arms deals and crude oil.

As The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman puts it: "Addicts don't tell the truth to their dealers." That's why this week the torturer will be inside Buckingham Palace, and his victims left outside, alone…

You know things are getting way too surreal when the wife of the president who’s spearheading the War on Terror dons a hijab, while the Independent offers clarity on the subject of the Wahhabis.

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

Humaniterrorism: It may have resulted in a hung jury, but as Steve Emerson writes, the trial of the Holy Land Foundation clearly exposed the organization’s terrorist roots. From the New York Post:

October 29, 2007 -- THE trial of four key figures with the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development ended last week with a hung jury. Holy Land's defenders and allies are trumpeting the mistrial as a huge victory. Yet the defendants remain in legal jeopardy, with a new trial almost assured - and the prosecution has, at a minimum, closed a lucrative funding channel for the Palestinian terror group Hamas.

Prosecutors in the Northern District of Texas deserve praise for bringing this case in the first place. The trial record conclusively demonstrated that Holy Land and several of its unindicted co-conspirators - including the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) - grew out of Hamas. Moreover, it showed that they spent the better part of 15 years deceiving government agencies and the media, hiding their true goals under a mask of work for charity and civil rights.

To be sure, the mistrial was portrayed as another in a series of setbacks for the government's anti-terror prosecution strategy. Notably, several jurors seemed to discount the testimony of an Israeli security expert, testifying under an assumed name, apparently on the belief that Israelis cannot be trusted on Palestinian matters.

Some jurors may even have bought the defense argument that anti-Israel terror isn't truly terrorism, but merely "resisting the occupation." One juror told the Dallas Morning News of his difficulty in describing Hamas as a terrorist group, stating, "Part of it does terrorist acts, but it's a political movement. It's an uprising."

The highly technical nature of some evidence likely also played a role. Whatever the reasons, prosecutors failed to persuade the jury, unanimously and beyond a reasonable doubt, that Holy Land and its officials deliberately routed money to Hamas through a set of Palestinian charities. But the jury was also unable to fully exonerate the defendants, and the government has announced its intent to retry the case.

Moreover, the trial uncovered numerous ugly secrets of Holy Land and its leaders. For starters, it exposed as lies their oft-made claims to not be supporting Hamas. The evidence clearly linked Holy Land and CAIR to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, the hard-line Egyptian Islamist umbrella group and godfather of every Sunni terrorist group from Hamas to al Qaeda…

 

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:58 | link | comments

Knight moves: Here’s Claudia Rosett, deliciously scathing, on the subject of the benighted Kofi Annan receiving a knighthood.

Yup, you read correctly. The silly-ass Brits up and knighted the blighter:

Yes, in the giddy afterlife of his departure from the UN Executive Suite, Kofi Annan has now received an honorary knighthood. In a private ceremony at Buckingham Palace, he was made an honorary Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St. Michael and St. George. We are at least spared the prospect of referring to him as “Sir Kofi.” Unlike Annan’s former deputy, Mark Malloch Brown, who is now both “Sir” and “Lord,” it seems that Annan, not being British, is not entitled to be a “Sir.”

 

But honestly, who can keep up? Regardless of performance, UN high officials — past and present — seem to move these days through an endless shower of prizes and awards, Nobels and knighthoods, accolades and directorships (Annan has also just joined the board of Ted Turner’s UN Foundation).

 

Why? Annan by the account of the UN’s own investigation into Oil-for-Food turned in a substandard performance in his administration of the biggest relief program the UN had ever run — failing to blow the whistle on a global gala of corruption that reached multi-billion dollar proportions on his watch (and was reaching its peak right about the time he accepted his 2001 Nobel Prize). Annan failed to acknowledge his own responsibilities, failed to exercise adequate oversight when questions were raised about the UN-related business activities of his own son, and in a series of so-called sweeping “reforms” during his decade in the executive suite, he failed abysmally to reform the UN — bequeathing his successor a minefield of scandals still going off, and leaving U.S. federal prosecutors to sift through assorted cases of UN-related bribery, money-laundering and fraud which inadequate UN oversight and poor management had (to put it generously) failed to stop.

 

Were there awards for such behavior as bureaucratic passivity in the face of genocide (Annan as head of peacekeeping during the Rwanda slaughter), or hypocrisy in lecturing the world on good governance (Annan’s “Global Compact”), or evasion and obfuscation (how did the family of Kofi Annan’s brother end up with the lease on Kofi’s spacious old NY-state-taxpayer-subsidized apartment?), there might be arguments for an endless cascade of trophies. That might sound less desirable than the current bonanza of decorations and awards, but the way these UN door prizes keep piling up regardless, I’m not sure the prize-winners, or for that matter, the prize-givers, could tell the difference. By now, it’s all part of the ritual.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:30 | link | comments

 Idiotic confab: Melanie Phillips weighs in on the assininity of Annapolis:

…So much is dismally obvious from the most casual acquaintance with the facts of this conflict over the decades. Yet the Bush administration, Europe, Britain and Olmert himself (to what extent this is because he is under the American cosh is unclear) insist on behaving as if Fatah can and will make the peace. While they persist with this lethal fantasy, they guarantee the persistence of the conflict. By ignoring the fact that Abbas has not complied with one single precondition for negotiations laid down in the ‘road map’, namely that he must dismantle the infrastructure of terror and indeed has refused point blank to combat Hamas, they only ensure that terror will grow.

This is not, as they imply, a fight between two parties equally responsible for a terrible conflict. It is a war to exterminate the Jewish state that is being waged by Arabs and Islamists with differing strategies and agendas on the same continuum of annihilation – and with not one single credible interlocutor on their side who genuinely wants to live in peace with Israel. The western refusal to acknowledge this inconvenient truth gives this conflict its surreal dimension, in which a country that has been under exterminatory attack for the past six decades is expected to make reparations to its assailants and reward them with a state of their own even while they continue with their war against it; to provide food, power and other supplies to its attackers in Gaza in order that they can continue their murderous assault upon it; and to treat a leader who refuses to stop the war as an apostle of peace simply because no-one can think of a better idea.

Well here’s a better idea – fight and defeat terror and aggression by all possible means, economic, political, diplomatic and military, and exclude all those who promote it from the community of civilised nations until they renounce it forever. The alternative approach – appeasement – not only doesn't work but it ensures that the violence and aggression will only increase. As has happened everywhere this doctrine has prevailed.

This above all else is the reason why the Israel/Arab conflict seems to resist all attempts to bring it to an end. It is because, from the early years of the last century ownwards, the western world has consistently shown that it is all too willing to give terror its victory.

Once again the Jews are left to chirp furiously in the coal mine as the forces of darkness get set to take down the entire Western world.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:53 | link | comments

 Laura Bush’s muddled thinking: She’s “inspired” by Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese freedom-fighter who’s been victimized by a harsh, totalitarian regime, but has no problem donning a totalitarian symbol during a visit to one of the most repressive regimes on the planet. From VOA News:

During an appearance on Fox News Sunday program, Mrs. Bush acknowledged that part of the reason for her trip was to help improve America's image in the Arab world by highlighting concern for women's health. But she stressed that she learned as much about Arab women as they did about her. She said stereotypes were broken on both sides - especially in Saudi Arabia, where she met women who were fully veiled.

"I told them that I had always felt that they were closed to me that I would not be able to reach them because of the way they are covered," added Mrs. Bush. "And one of the women said to me - she said 'You know, I may all dressed in black, but I am transparent.' And what they were saying to me is they want to reach out, they want American women to know what they are like."

The first lady said she has come to realize that her role as the wife of the President of the United States gives her a platform to speak out when she thinks she can make a difference. That has been particularly true when it comes to Burma.

In a VOA interview last month, she voiced support for the pro-democracy movement and urged Burmese soldiers to refrain from violence against those seeking freedom.

She told FOX News Sunday that she has long been inspired by the leader of the Burmese opposition, Aung San Suu Kyi, noting she is the only Nobel Peace Prize winner living under house arrest.

"When I learned about her story, then I learned about Burma and how repressed they are by this military junta that leads Burma - that is the government," she continued. "In fact, I just learned about 90 percent of the people in Burma make less than a dollar a day. Burma was the breadbasket of Asia, it was known for its intellectual people, its wonderful culture and now it is just in total shambles.

Mark Twain published his book The Innocents Abroad in 1869. Laura Bush is the modern-day equivalent—a sweet, clueless innocent who can’t see that describing oneself  as "transparent" is a bad thing, since such "transparency" can only occur in a society which perceives a woman as a nullity, a blank, a void, and dresses her accordingly. By donning her head gear, silly Mrs. Bush, the wife of the leader of the free world, has only served to validate that dismal status.

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

Bizarre list: What do you get when you ask a bunch of Brits to identify the “top 100 living geniuses”? They compile a list that—go figure—includes 26 Brits and more than a few “genius” lefties (like George Soros, #3, Harold Pinter, #31, and “Avrum Noam Chomski”, #32).

Also making the grade: one terrormeister (Osama bin Laden, #43), one deranged Jew-hating Jew (Bobby Fisher, #32, although some might say that “Avrum Noam Chomski” qualifies as one too), several names that leave one scratching one’s head at their inclusion (Dolly Parton? Mohammad Ali? Morrisey?), and many names that require googling to discover who the heck they are.

Only two Canucks made the list—physicist Nima Arkani Hamed, #32, and novelist Margaret Atwood #49; Canadian-born poet Leonard Cohen, #58, is listed as “American”.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:27 | link | comments

As easy as 1-2-3: An infidel gets a lesson in putting on a hijab:

Mrs. Bush defends her decision to don this symbol of political Islam. As she told Fox News, "[T]hey saw this as giving me a gift from their culture, and it was the scarf with the pink ribbons and the pink edging on it, the breast cancer scarf, that I put on..."I think we all have these stereotypes of each other, Americans and Arabs, and it's a really good thing to be able to break those stereotypes down and get to know each other."

Yeah, right. And, sorry Laura, but unless my eyes deceive me, I don't see a trace of pink on that shmatta.

On the plus side, Mrs. Bush has inspired me to update an old Irving Berlin classic:

In your Saudi head scarf

You’re makin’ us want to barf

When we recall Mo Atta

And his Saudi “shahids”.

 

Virgins, they would answer,

Don’t ever get breast cancer.

Unlike those real life women

With their very real needs.

 

Racked by ignorance,

So racked by ignorance,

That they’d rather die quickly

Than tell a male they’re sickly.

 

Oh, I could begin to sob

To see her in that hijab

Since it’s a symbol that Wahhabis

All love to see…

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:48 | link | comments (3)

Har dee har: Maureen Dowd, the New York Times’s dependably lame chick columnist, imagines a high-larious exchange between Tim Russert and Dick Cheney:

…RUSSERT: Conservatives are tossing around some lock-and-load language. The president is talking about Iran sparking a “nuclear holocaust” and World War III. Giuliani adviser Norman Podhoretz thinks we’re in World War IV. Shouldn’t you at least give the new sanctions against Iran a chance to work?

CHENEY: Oh, we have, Tim. The sanctions were announced Thursday. It’s now Sunday. I think things have gotten so bad inside Iran, from the standpoint of the Iranian people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.

RUSSERT: But what if your analysis is not correct — again? Let’s put up on the screen part of an interview The New York Times’s Thom Shanker did with the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen: “With America at war in two Muslim countries, he said, attacking a third Islamic nation in the region ‘has extraordinary challenges and risks associated with it.’ The military option, he said, should be a last resort.” Your own chairman of the Joint Chiefs does not think the military can handle a third war.

CHENEY: If Admiral Mullen wants to be Admiral Sullen, that’s his business. I’m not going to be a defeatist or question the courage of our fighting men.

RUSSERT: Critics say that if you attack Iran, there will be riots in every Muslim capital, the Iranians will flood Iraq with more explosives and money for the Shiite militias. They say you’ll only end up making more enemies for America, and our troops.

CHENEY: Why don’t we just give the Islamofascists Sudetenland, Tim? Peace in our time.

RUSSERT: The Europeans are upset that you might start another war in their backyard.

CHENEY: (Rolling his eyes and muttering under his breath) Eurappeasers.

RUSSERT: An Iranian spokesman dismissed the new U.S. sanctions as “worthless and ineffective” and said they were “doomed to fail as before.” And Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari, the head of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards — a group you have accused of proliferating weapons of mass destruction — also warned that his forces would respond with an “even more decisive” strike if attacked.

CHENEY: Don’t worry about General Ali Baba, Tim. We gave the Israelis his home address.

RUSSERT: How will you even know where to bomb, given that all the experts say the Iranians have hidden their real nuclear facilities underground?

CHENEY: Can you say magic carpet bombing, Tim? We didn’t build those bunker busters just to stack ’em up in a warehouse in North Dakota.

RUSSERT: It’s so close to the next election, Mr. Vice President, shouldn’t you just keep on the diplomatic track and let the next president make this decision?

CHENEY: You really want Rudy Giuliani playing with the nuclear button, Tim? Now, that’s insane.

La Dowd’s Clueless lefty “logic”: Nukes? In Iran? How ridiculous. How can there be nukes in Iran when there were never any nukes in Iraq? As for all that stuff about Ahmadinejad wanting to nuke Israel so his Messiah can have his return engagement—just a bunch of Islamophobic fear-mongering. The real reason the U.S. wants to bomb Iran is for the, um, oil.

It’s always about the oil, isn't it?

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:27 | link | comments

Quel relief! : Clueless nuclear watchthingy Mo ElBaradei says he's pretty sure the mullahs are"a few years away" from building a nuke.

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

Panic disorder: The oily custodians of the two holy mosques have more or less come to expect that, come Haj time, a number of pilgrims—sometimes numbering in the hundreds—may  lose their lives in the crush. It's the all but inevitable result of cramming far too many people into far too small a space. Now, however, the Wahhabis are turning to German expertise to help them cut down on the casualties, which are being attributed not to greedy sheiks cramming far too many people into fall too small a space, but to a phenomenon that's been dubbed “escape panic”. From Der Spiegel:

...Every Muslim is required to make the pilgrimage to Mecca once in his life in order to prove his obedience to God. The pilgrimage, known as the hajj, takes place every year on five days during the last month of the Islamic lunar calendar. The Prophet Muhammad originated the hajj tradition in the seventh century. First, hundreds of Muslims came -- then thousands, then tens of thousands. By January 2006 the number had climbed to 3 million.

That makes Mecca, the place of redemption, a place of risk. Nowhere else in the world do as many people crowd onto as small an area. The valley at Mina is about three kilometers by three kilometers (1.9 miles by 1.9 miles) large. Every year, it's as if Berlin's entire population were to converge on the city's Schönefeld airport.

The pilgrims arrive from more than 100 different countries. For most, it is the first time they have flown in an airplane. They land at Jeddah airport by the Red Sea, which opens a special terminal during the hajj. Hundreds of thousands of them are illiterate, and they speak dozens of different languages. In some of their countries of origins, the custom is to walk on the right side of the street; in others, the custom is to walk on the left. The situation involves "many uncontrollable variables," Dirk Helbing notes soberly.

 

Researchers have learned from computer simulations that people who want to escape from a room may block each others' way in a phenomenon known as "escape panic." When those at the back push and the exit at the front is blocked, people are crushed to death. But the case in Mecca presented the scientists with a puzzle: People have died even in open areas there.

In order to evaluate the 2006 videos, Anders Johansson developed a computer program to count the pilgrims. When people crowd into a subway or an elevator, three or four of them can fit onto one square meter (10.8 square feet). In scenarios developed by researchers studying pedestrian behavior, based on the size of the average European, the maximum density was six people per square meter. In Mecca, the number per square meter was 10.

Helbing and Johansson scanned the video material for early warning signals announcing the start of a mass panic. When they viewed the film at 10 times the normal speed, they found what they were looking for: Twenty minutes before the catastrophe, the first patterns of irregular movement appeared in the crowd, which had previously been flowing at an even pace. Shortly before the catastrophe, blocks of hundreds of people suddenly began jerkily drifting in every direction. What had appeared fluid just a moment before was now behaving "like the earth during an earthquake," Helbing explains. Crevices appear between blocks of people. Some people lose traction. Those people who fall down may never stand up again…

As far as I can tell, there’s only one sure fire way to avoid falling prey to “escape panic”—apostasy.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:32 | link | comments

The Jews’ lose-lose situation: If you want to enjoy the rest of your day, I’d strongly caution you not to read the following by Melanie Philips:

Norman Podhoretz, the grand-daddy of neoconservative foreign policy and now an adviser to Republican presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani, has repeated his statement that bombing Iran is now unavoidable – an argument laid out in detail in his Commentary article last June. Those, however, who believe the wicked but currently fashionable canard that warmongering neocons are pushing America into another war that will endanger the world solely to further the interests of Israel would do well to ponder the appalling prospect for both Israel and the Jewish diaspora that a strike on Iran may unleash. The most likely immediate outcome of an American strike would be a pincer attack on Israel from Iranian proxies in Lebanon, Syria and Gaza.

As Amir Taheri reported last month in Gulf News, Iran has been busily buying up land in Lebanon to overcome the fact that since last year’s Lebanon war, Hezbollah missiles pointing at Israel have been pushed back behind the Litani river. So now Iran is creating a string of missile bases north of the Litani instead:

 

If the scheme is fully implemented, Lebanon's Shi'ite could end up as the only one of the country's 18 communities to have a contiguous area of their own from the Syrian border to the frontier with Israel, and passing by southern Beirut. That would give the Hezbollah, considered as a state within the Lebanese state, a clear territorial expression as well.A chunk of Lebanon controlled by Hezbollah plus Gaza under Hamas control would form the two arms of a pincer that the Islamic Republic could use against Israel in case of a broader conflict in the region.

 

In addition to this expected pincer attack on Israel, it is feared that Iran will unleash Hezbollah to attack Jewish targets around the world -- of which the attacks on the Jewish community centre and then the Israel embassy in Buenos Aires in 1994 and 2003 (pictured) were a foretaste. Everything that the Iranian regime, Hezbollah and Hamas say makes crystal clear that, while their ambitions are to create a regional and global Islamic hegemony, both the Jewish state and the wider Jewish people are the objects of a particularly deranged malevolence. And Iran and its proxies are well aware – how could they not be? – that the western world, having so dismayingly absorbed some of that malevolence, is ambivalent about the fate of Israel and Jewish peoplehood.

The consequences for the Jews of a strike on Iran are therefore fearsome. But the alternative, a nuclear Iran, is worse -- not just for Israel but for the world, which from that time forth would be held hostage to nuclear blackmail by an Iran hell-bent on regional and global Islamic domination. This is not a choice between a good outcome and a bad outcome. This is a choice between a terrible outcome and a cataclysmic one. It is the choice between a rock and a very hard place; and those who now advise that there is no alternative but war with Iran do so with the heaviest of hearts…

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:58 | link | comments

Sock puppies: Couldn't resist this one from the Telegraph:

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

A choice of enemies: The leader of the Jewish community in Switzerland elucidates the dilemma of Swiss Jews: which political party should they support since the ones on the left despise Israel and the one on the right is borderline anti-Semitic. From EJP:

GENEVA (EJP)---The populist and xenophobic right-wing Swiss People’s Party (SVP), which was the biggest winner of general elections on Sunday, is bordering on what can be considered as anti-Semitism, Alfred Donath, president of the Swiss Federation of Jewish communities (FSCI), told European Jewish Press on Monday.  

The anti-Europe party, led by Justice Minister Christoph Blocher, consolidated its position as the country’s leading force after a bitter campaign marred by charges of racism.

Commenting on the results of the vote, Donath told EJP: "They are not anti-Semitic because they care to avoid any outburst but their victory is certainly a kind of encouragement for anti-Semites to express themselves."

The SVP, also known as the Democratic Union of the Centre (UDC), gained seven parliamentary seats to 62 in the 200-seat National Council or lower house of parliament, while the Green party added five.

The Socialists, the second largest force in the country, were set to lose nine seats, leaving them with 43, while the business-friendly Radical Party, which has made anti-Semitic statements, was also set for sharp losses, shedding five seats to 31.

Donath said the Federation of Jewish communities has strongly reacted in the press against the SVP’s anti-foreigners positions.

One of the party's campaign rallies ended in a riot, while a poster showing three white sheep booting out a black sheep drew accusations of racism.

“For us Jews, foreigners are playing a very important role in Switzerland,” Donath said. He referred to Torah, the first five books of the Bible, in which one can read: "Remember that you were a foreigner in the land of Egypt."

"On the other side, this party has shown towards Israel a position which is the closest to ours,” Donath added.

"Not because they love Israel but because they believe that Israel and the Mideast are not Switzerland’s business."

The Swiss Jewish leader acknowledged that Jews have had problems with all the Swiss political parties.

With the Greens, for example, when two of their MPs retuning from a trip to Iran said they do not believe Tehran had any intention to use the atomic arm.

He also pointed to the "strong pro-Palestinian position" of the Greens.

"They organize and attend almost all anti-Israel demonstrations," he said.

The Jewish community, he added, has had the same problem with the Socialist party, in particular with Foreign Minister Micheline Calmy-Rey whose statements "are always unbalanced and pro-Palestinian." "At every occasion, the Greens and Socialists call for a boycott of Israeli products," he said.

Sadly, what you have in Switzerland (and elsewhere in Europe) is old nativist Judenhass on one side and new Islamic-leftist Judenhass on the other. Which leaves the Juden out in the cold—again.

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

Intrepid truth teller: What happens when an Arab breaks ranks with his landsmen and tells the truth about Israel? Why, it’s freak-out and death-threat time, of course. From albawaba:

The Union of Islamic Communities in Italy has urged all Muslims across the country to express their views following a new book which hails Israel and slams Palestinian resistance groups. According to a Saudi newspaper, the leaders of the Islamic community in Italy are furious about the new book which amazingly was edited by an Egyptian-born Italian writer and journalist!

 

Magdi Allam, 55, deputy chief editor of Italy’s most influential newspaper Il Corriere della Sera, is again at the center of the storm following his seventh book, dubbed “Viva Israele” (Long Live Israel). The subtitle of the book reads “From the ideology of death to the civilization of life: my story.”

 

“Long Live Israel” is the tale of his life ever since his youth under the republican regime of late Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser.

 

According to Allam, Nasser is responsible for having turned Egypt - and the rest of the Arab world - into the cradle of the "ideology of death". Allam claims Nasser brought about an aggressive pan-Arabic dream based on the denial of Israel’s right to exist.  The need for the destruction of Israel is the dominant theme that, Allam states, made death and destruction the core values of a once liberal Islamic culture.

 

Thus, the new book defends the existence of Israel and terms armed Palestinian groups as "dangerous terrorist threats." In addition, Allam wrote that during their operations in the Palestinian territories, Israeli forces have been trying to avoid hitting Palestinian civilians and only aim to defend Israeli citizens….

 

Furthermore, Allam added that the main cause for the Israeli – Palestinian dispute stems form the Palestinian terror.

 

Allam says that "Israel - along with Pope Benedict XVI - represents the residual hope for Western civilization, which, more than other civilizations, embodies the sacredness of life and personal freedom."

 

Allam also slams the Arab calls for the killing of Jews. In the past, Allam also criticized resistance groups in Lebanon and Iraq.

 

Muslims in Italy have been claiming that Allam is an unreliable person who spreads suspicion and hatred against Islam and Muslim people by reporting undocumented, unverified or even utterly false news, just to flatter to the West.

 

It should be noted that during his adolescent years, Allam maintained completely different views. Allam was raised as a Muslim and attended the Italian school of Cairo. In Italy since 1972, Allam started his stay there as an enthusiastic activist for the Palestinian cause. At that period, Allam thought of Israel as a racist and aggressive state "invented by the Western world as some kind of compensation for the horrors of the Jewish Holocaust".

 

Years later, his interest in the history of Zionism and a meeting with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat brought him to realize that "Arafat was responsible for Palestinian terrorism" and that "the predication of the ideology of death eventually hit and harmed the Palestinians themselves."

 

The latest book has changed Allam's life. The Saudi newspaper reported that following threats to his life, the Italian police decided to intensify his security escort. Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that many Muslims in Italy denounce Allam as a new "Salman Rushdie", the British writer who was forced into hiding in the 1990s after Iran's religious leaders issued a fatwa (religious edict), calling for his death.

 

Viva Allam, a Righteous Muslim. If only Condi Rice were soliciting his advice instead of him Jimminy's and James "Eff the Jews" Baker's.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:15 | link | comments

Looking for clues in all the wrong places: Condi Rice remains as determined as ever to foist a pointless and potentially deadly Peace in Our Time process on Israel. And to help ensure she’s on the right track, she’s getting pointers on P.I.O.T. talks from a noted Israel-detester as well as from the man who sought to turn that sow’s ear of a kleptocrat, Yasser Arafat, into a silk purse of a statesman, and who, to that end, turned him into the most frequent sleep-over guest at the White House. From the New York Sun:

WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Rice is looking to the past for lessons on how to make next month's Mideast peace conference a success.

As she prepares to host the international meeting in Annapolis, Md., Ms. Rice has delved into the history of American attempts to mediate peace in the region, plunging into the diplomatic annals and seeking out the major players responsible for both successes and failures.

"She's trying to draw on the historical record and the experiences of others to see what she can glean and how that may be applicable to the current day," a State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack, said yesterday, ahead of Ms. Rice's November 4-6 trip to Israel and the Palestinian Authority, her second in three weeks to organize the Annapolis gathering.

Most recently, she met this week with President Carter, sitting down in her office on Wednesday for a talk with the former president who brokered the 1978 Camp David peace accord between Israel and Egypt, the first between the Jewish state and an Arab nation.

Mr. Carter has been a vocal critic of the Bush administration's Middle East polices and wrote a recent book, "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," that some believe is anti-Israeli. Mr. McCormack said the differences in approach were not a subject of her conversation.

Ms. Rice has also spoken by phone with President Clinton about his work on the 1994 Israel-Jordan peace deal. She discussed with both Mr. Clinton and a former Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, the unsuccessful 2000 attempt in Shepherdstown, W.Va., to mediate an Israeli-Syrian agreement and their bid later that year at Camp David to forge an Israeli-Palestinian Arab pact.

Others she has reached out to include former secretaries of state, Henry Kissinger and James Baker, and to one-time American peace negotiators like Dennis Ross, who played a key role in the Clinton administration and the administration of President George H.W. Bush…

Since Condi’s unlikely to glean anything of value from these guys (although no doubt James “Eff the Jews” Baker had a few choice thoughts for her), I have decided to cut through the crap and give her all the pointers she’ll need. Here they are:

·         Don’t give the Arabs any more land. They’ve already screwed up all the land they have.

·         To regain your senses, repeat after me: Mahmoud Abbas is not Martin Luther King, Mahmoud Abbas is not Martin Luther King…

·         Fuggedaboutit! The only kind of “peace” the Arabs are interested in is “dar al salaam”—the peace that will exist once Israel is eliminated and Islam rules uber alles.

My consultancy bill is in the mail.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:54 | link | comments

“Peace”-mongers: You gotta love the juicy totalitarian-speak of this Tehran Times piece—sabre-rattling and belligerence ill-disguised as talk of “peace”.

TEHRAN -- Defense Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najjar said here on Saturday that Iranian missiles pose no threat to any country.

“Iranian missiles pose no threat to any country, and they will only come down on the heads of those who violate the territorial integrity of Iran,” Najjar told Defense Ministry Diplomatic Committee members at a meeting in the capital.

The defense capabilities of the Islamic Republic of Iran are at the service of regional peace and can be regarded as a part of the Islamic world’s defense force, he added.

President Bush said recently that Iran’s missiles would pose a threat to the United States and Europe by 2015.

“Our intelligence community assesses that, with continued foreign assistance, Iran could develop an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching the United States and all of Europe before 2015,” the defense minister said.

Bush’s statement was only a pretext for the plan to establish a U.S. missile shield in the Czech Republic, Najjar observed.

U.S. officials are also angry about the positive outcome of the recent gathering of Persian Gulf countries, which focused on establishing security in the region without the presence of foreign forces, he pointed out.

Elsewhere in his remarks, he stated that the United States’ decision to unilaterally impose sanctions on Iran is a sign of the U.S. government’s desperation.

“Such sanctions will only add to our determination to become more self-sufficient and united against enemy threats,” he asserted.

“Instead of concentrating on such propaganda and imposing sanctions and pressure on Iran, White House officials should respect the Iranian nation’s right to use this God-given energy,” he said in reference to Iran’s nuclear program.

The Europeans should also be on guard against the tricks of the warmongering U.S. government, he added.

What, no warnings about tricky, warmongering Zionists? Some little fascist flak’s falling down on the job.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:24 | link | comments (1)

Shocking!: A review in the New York Review of Books, a lefty intellectual rag, which actually seems to “get” the jihad:

…The word sharia, usually translated as "law," refers to the "path" or "way" governing the modes of behavior by which Muslims are enjoined to seek salvation. The way may be known to God, but for human beings it is not predetermined. A famous hadith (tradition) of Muhammad states that differences of opinion between the learned is a blessing. Sharia reasoning is therefore "an open practice." In Islam's classical era, up until the tenth century, scholars exercised ijtihad—independent reasoning—in order to reach an understanding of the divine law. Ijtihad shares the same Arabic root as the more familiar jihad, meaning "effort" or "struggle," the word that is sometimes translated as "holy war." Ijtihad is in effect the intellectual struggle to discover what the law ought to be. As Kelsay remarks, the legal scholars trained in its sources and methodologies will seek to achieve a balance between the rulings of their predecessors and independent judgments reflecting the idea that "changing circumstances require fresh wisdom." The Sharia is not so much a body of law but a field of discourse or platform for legal reasoning. Recently, it has become an arena for intellectual combat.

It is therefore open to question whether the hijackers and the terrorists automatically put themselves beyond the bounds of Islam by killing innocents, as statements by Bush, Blair, and dozens of Muslim leaders and scholars suggest. With no churches or formally constituted religious authorities to police the boundaries of Islam, the only universally accepted orthodoxy is the Sharia itself. But the Sharia is more of an ideal than a formally constituted body of law. While interpreting the law was once the province of the trained clerical class of ulama, any consensus governing its correct interpretation has broken down under pressure of regional conflicts and the influence of religious autodidacts whose vision of Islam was formed outside the received scholarly tradition.

None of the three most influential theorists behind Sunni militancy, Abu'l Ala Maududi (1903–1979), Hasan al-Banna (1906–1949), and Sayyid Qutb, (1906–1966), received a traditional religious training. Yet both they and the authors of the landmark texts examined by Kelsay in his admirably lucid book (including the Charter of Hamas, which calls for the destruction of Israel, and bin Laden's 1998 Declaration) claim the mantle of the Sharia, as did the terrorists responsible for the atrocities in New York, Madrid, and London.

Like it or not, these terrorist campaigns were inspired by the example of the Prophet's struggle—his "just war"—against the Quraysh, the pagan tribesmen of Mecca. In the context of the original conflict between the early Muslims and the Meccans, the sources, including the Koran and the narratives of Muhammad's life, suggest that "fighting is an appropriate means by which Muslims should seek to secure the right to order life according to divine directives." In militant readings of the Sharia, the historical precedents are not so much interpreted as applied. For ultra-radicals such as bin Laden's deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri there is, as Kelsay observes, "little room for a sustained process of discerning divine guidance" along the lines enjoined by traditional scholars. An even more striking absence is evident in the criticisms of militant readings advanced by official Islamic authorities, including the widely respected Sheikh al-Azhar, head of the mosque-university in Cairo and once the single most important voice in Sunni Islam. While questioning the methods of the militants on grounds of practical ethics—will the "actions taken in the service of justice yield more harm than good?"—their criticisms usually fall short of challenging them on the grounds of political legitimacy. Conservative Muslim critics of militancy do not in fact dissent from the militant judgment that current political arrangements [in most Muslim majority states] are illegitimate.... In its broad outlines, the militant vision articulated by al-Zawahiri is also the vision of his critics.

The core of this consensus—shared by traditionally trained scholars and more populist leaders such as al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Maududi, his South Asian counterpart, is the belief that the abolition of the caliphate by Kemal Atatürk in Turkey in 1924 must not mean the end of Islamic government. In this vision, which is also shared by Shia jurists such as the late Ayatollah Khomeini, parliaments and elections are only acceptable within the frame of Islamic supremacy. They "cannot compromise on Muslim leadership," Kelsay writes. Full-blown democracy, where the Muslim voice might simply be one among many, implying a degree of moral equivalence between Islam and other perspectives, would be "dangerous, not only for the standing of the Muslim community, but for the moral life of humankind."…

Wonders never cease.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:44 | link | comments

Survival 101: Being a reporter in the Middle East is fraught with peril—eating an iffy falafel, being in a shadid’s line of fire when he/she decides to self-detonate, etc. There’s also the chance that you could be kidnapped by a bunch of crazed jihadis and held for a long period of time. Now reporters in that volatile region can take a seminar being offered in Jerusalem that may provide them with the skills they’ll need to survive such an ordeal. From the Toronto Star:

…If the worst happens and you are taken against your will, your overriding goal, apart from escaping at the first good opportunity, must be to maintain as much control over your circumstances as you possibly can.

"You'd be surprised how much of your environment you can control," says Abramson. "Every time you are told to do something, you do something a little different. They say, `Don't move,' you move your toe."

Or, if your captors attempt to bind your wrists behind your back, you immediately place your hands out in front, so they are more likely to be tied there.

During four hours of skits, card tricks, monologue and discussion, Abramson offers a wealth of tips for coping with captivity. For example:

If you must venture into dangerous situations where kidnapping is a possibility, do so in a group, rather than on your own, because there really is strength in numbers.

If faced with capture, try to resist passively, a tactic that will at least buy extra time and may confuse your captors.

During interrogation, insert a lengthy pause before answering any question, even the most straightforward – a tactic aimed at preventing your interrogators from determining which subjects you are most reluctant to address.

Do not initiate casual conversation with your captors.

If your captors try to chat with you, do not reciprocate until you obtain some benefit, no matter how small – a loosening of your bonds, some food or drink, anything that increases your sense of control.

When speaking in your native language, try to enhance your control of the conversation by using lots of slang or rarefied constructions in order to make it difficult for your captors to understand you (assuming they do not speak your language well).

You are more likely to be hit or physically abused if you slouch, so try to maintain an erect posture with your head held high.

Make it clear to your captors that you are willing to co-operate with them but only if they do not hurt you.

Do your best, surreptitiously, if possible, to disconnect the wires from any explosive device placed near or on you; don't worry about which wires to pull out, because it is only in the movies that bombs are designed to detonate if the hero cuts the wrong strand (real bombs don't work that way).

Think – constantly – about a means of escape…

One “tip” not mentioned, but one which former captive, Beeb reporter Yvonne Ridley, found to be most effective: You could take Stockholm Syndrome to its ultimate conclusion and “revert” to one true faith of your captors (after which you could become a willing shill for Islam).

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:44 | link | comments

Islamic History Month a bust: Organizers in Toronto are trying to figure out why the locals didn’t bite. From the Ceeb:

Organizers of Islamic history month are mulling over why their project has failed to achieve the same success in Toronto that it's found in other parts of the country. 
 
The Canadian Islamic Congress declared October to be Islamic history month and received support from many cities and school boards, including Ottawa, Vancouver and Kingston, but not Toronto.
 
Zafar Bangash, director of the Islamic Society in York Region, said the success of black history month inspired his community to try something similar.

"Muslims have made a tremendous contribution to the development of science, geography, astronomy and so on. Which I believe is not very well known," he said. 
 
Bangash had hoped Islamic history month would spur a series of topical lectures and assignments in Toronto schools. But he said organizers were late getting started, which may explain why the Toronto school board was reluctant to jump on board.
 
Lloyd McKell, a senior official with the board's equity department, said the late start was just one part of the problem.
 
"What we have to be careful about," said McKell, "and this is why we need to discuss these initiatives and these events with these groups, is to ensure that such activities do not involve proselytizing about those faiths, specific faiths."

McKell said he's open to meeting with representatives from the Islamic community to discuss how they can get together and make the concept work next October.

Sounds like Mr. McKell ain’t no fool.

You  win some, you lose some. Even though Islamic History Month failed to fly, the CIC's Pink Hijab Day appears to have been a roaring success.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:56 | link | comments (2)

Women’s Lib in Iran: The Isalmofascist fashionistas can chuck a woman in jail should a stray hair emerge from her head covering or for a shocking glimpse of stocking, but according to this AFP piece in the Daily Star, mullocracy chicks are the most “liberated” in the Middle East. How so? They’re allowed to play rugby—as long as they’re wearing the proper garb, of course:

TEHRAN --  Elham Shahsavari, a 24-year-old Iranian woman, believes she has found her perfect sport, undeterred by a strict Islamic dress code and the long commute to training.

Shahsavari is a member of the Tehran women's rugby team.

Rugby and women may not seem an ideal combination in Islamic Iran, but girls are taking to one of the toughest sports with enthusiasm, amid greater official encouragement for them to participate in physical activities.

"In early 2006, Gorgan University advised me to play rugby because of my physical power," said the well-built Shahsavari, who overcame objections from her family, who worried about her traveling to training from a Tehran suburb.

"Rugby Union was just my thing," she said.

All women must cover their heads and bodily contours in Iran. The rugby field is no exception.

The players dart around the pitch wearing the maghnaeh, a garment that fully covers the head, shoulders, and neck, as well as a loose blue waistcoat, long-sleeved dark T-shirts, and loose tracksuit trousers.

Hardly uniform designed for a sport like rugby. But the players don't seem to mind, especially when the game allows them to let off steam in a way that is unimaginable elsewhere in their lives.

Iranian women proudly see themselves as the most emancipated in the Middle East, but still have to combine their careers and leisure activities with traditional expectations of childbearing, cooking, and cleaning.

Rugby Union, though, offers the excitement and physical activity that is sometimes lacking elsewhere. "Pass the ball ... tackle her ...catch it!" shout the women as they run and tumble around the field like their male counterparts.

"I am extraordinarily interested in rugby, and it does not matter what I wear. It is not uncomfortable," said Sahar Azizi, 16, a high school student.

It would have been inconceivable a quarter of a century ago, in the early years of the 1979 Islamic revolution, when competitive sports for women were strongly discouraged, for Iranian women to play so physical a sport as rugby.

But much has changed since then, even if Iranian women's sports still have a long way to go before they are truly competitive on the international arena.

It was in the 1990s that women in Iran started to play sports again, largely thanks to the encouragement of Faezeh Hashemi, daughter of then-president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.

Initially, women mainly took part in stationary sports like archery and shooting, but now they compete in a wide range of activities, including strength-based disciplines like rowing, martial arts, and ... rugby.

"This is not a violent sport for women at all, despite what people think. We need to discharge our energy," said Zahra Nouri, the team's captain, who is a student of mechanics at Qazvin University west of Tehran.

The mother of one of the players, the 16-year-old Azadeh, was happy to see the level of physical activity, saying this would make it easier for her to deal with her energetic daughter at home.

"It is good for us that she has the chance here to discharge her energy," said Pouran Taherabadi. "I have nothing against it."

However, their coach, Alireza Iraj, admitted that their Islamic dress would make it impossible for the women to play against Western teams, as "the long sleeves and loose clothes gives the opponents an easy chance to grab them.

"They have to play with Muslim countries who have similar clothes."…

You’ve come a long way, baby.

The article is headed "Rugby provides outlet for women in Iran." From the looks of the photo, it is providing an outlet for really butchy women, if you catch my drift.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:37 | link | comments

Don’t shoot the messenger: That’s my message to all those whose noses are out of joint because their fearless leader, Osama bin Laden, criticized their efforts in Iraq, and Al Jazeera went ahead and broadcast it. From AP via the Toronto Star:

CAIRO–Al Qaeda sympathizers have unleashed a torrent of anger against Al-Jazeera television, accusing it of misrepresenting Osama bin Laden's latest audiotape by airing excerpts in which he criticizes mistakes by insurgents in Iraq.

Users of a leading Islamic militant Web forum posted thousands of insults against the Qatar-based pan-Arab station for focusing on excerpts in which bin Laden criticizes insurgents, including his followers.

Analysts said the reaction highlighted militants' surprise at bin Laden's words, and their dismay at the deep divisions among Al Qaeda and other Iraqi militants that he appeared to be trying to heal.

"It's not about Al-Jazeera, it's about their shock from bin Laden," said Diaa Rashwan, an Egyptian expert on Islamic militant groups. "For the first time, bin Laden, who used to be the spiritual leader who gives guidance, became a critic of Al Qaeda and is confessing mistakes. This is unusual.''

"God fight Al-Jazeera," railed one militant Web poster, calling the station a "collaborator with the Crusaders" for suggesting the tape showed weakness in Al Qaeda and reflected splits among Iraq insurgents.

The recording aired Monday contained unusually strong criticism of insurgents in Iraq from bin Laden, who urges them to admit mistakes and unify. Bin Laden even acknowledges that he advises himself not to be "fanatical" in his stances.

"Some of you have been lax in one duty, which is to unite your ranks," bin Laden said. "Beware of division ... Muslims are waiting for you to gather under a single banner to champion righteousness. Be keen to oblige with this duty.''

"I advise myself, Muslims in general and brothers in Al Qaeda everywhere to avoid extremism among men and groups," he said.

The Al-Fajr Media Center, which usually posts Al Qaeda video and audio tapes on the Web, accused Al-Jazeera of "counterfeiting the facts" by making the speech appear as exclusively critical of insurgents.

"Al-Jazeera directors have shamefully chosen to back the Crusaders' side, and the defenders of hypocrites and the thugs and traitors of Iraq," Al-Fajr said in a statement.

The 30-minute audio has long sections hailing Iraq insurgents for their "holy war." Al-Jazeera editor-in-chief Ahmed Sheik had no comment on the criticism but said the tape hadn't been misrepresented.

So remember, jihadis: Don’t shoot the messenger. But by all means feel free to go ahead and shoot the terrormeister.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:53 | link | comments

Grinch Salutin: My mother always told me to never attribute to malice that which could be explained by stupidity.

I repeat these words every time I steel myself to read a piece by the Globe and Mail’s battiest moonbat, Tricky Rick Salutin. In today’s column, Rick works himself into a lather at the sight of capitalism on the uptick. Socialist Rick’s much happier, of course, when things aren’t going so well, and people are more willing to let the government step in and micro-manage the economy (and maybe redistribute some of the wealth):

First we had to put up with the burbling from business reporters such as Newsworld's Jeannie Lee, as our dollar rose to parity with the U.S. dollar, like a team moving up in the standings. In fact there's been a huge downside: As the dollar rises, jobs depart, from auto-making to film shoots, because it gets costlier to produce here. Even if some prices fall, you can't buy if you aren't paid. In the same way, they cheer each rise in the stock market. Why is up good and down bad? It's like rooting for the temperature. Go global warming.

Then, as if not wanting to look boosterish, or just getting bored, they look for something to criticize: Hey, there's no fall in prices! As if the only effects people understand, or that count, lie in shopping. As if all we are is consumers, not citizens, workers or producers, God forbid. How come those stickers stay the same? Retail is all. I keep track of prices, therefore I am.

Peter Mansbridge furrows his brow but doesn't wonder why a country without workers who make anything has to pay higher markups on iPods than America does. We're on the way back to producing only what we always did: unprocessed resources like oil, wheat and wood. But the knowledge purveyors prefer to focus on the cost of Levis, obscuring rather than exploring any connection between making and buying.

What will an all-retail economy look like, when that day arrives? My stretch of College Street in Toronto is pretty much restaurants and cafés, rarely broken by even a futon store or 7-Eleven. Can a society survive by serving each other lattes? People rise in the morning, go to their posts and start feeding the customers. But everyone does it, so they're all running in and out, serving and being served. I have to finish this croissant so I can rush back and make you a falafel. I extend the metaphor to those who serve information or entertainment. That's the shell of an economy left when you produce almost nothing for basic need. Not to mention the small matter of dignity involved in making things you need and use each day.

There's nothing else on the horizon, just less of the same. This week in Winnipeg, an 86-year-old glove-making firm said it would shift all production to Asia, sending the last of its skilled workers into the latte pits, due to "global forces battering Canadian manufacturing, led by a rising Canadian dollar." The economic policies of all governments, almost everywhere for 20 years, have been on a continuum: Thatcher-Blair, Reagan-Clinton-Bush, Mulroney-Chrétien/Martin-Harper. They all back free trade and the pressure it puts on workers; plus markets, privatization, deregulation. There's no point whining about the "left" ones betraying their roots, it's what they're about now. There's been no economic alternative for decades. People searching for a better way find themselves flailing. I was on a panel with some youngish academics last week: They said it was time to revisit the classics, by which they meant Lenin! I take this as a sign of desperation.

Meanwhile, the economy continues to boom, according to the same sources pumped about parity for the dollar, even if, on the gap between rich and poor, Canada now trails Egypt and Pakistan, thanks to Paul Martin's tax gifts to the rich, soon to be outdone by Stephen Harper. I suppose in the days of Robin Hood, the economy did well too, but then as now, almost all the increase went to the sheriff and the barons…

Repeat after me: stupid, not malign, stupid, not malign…

Here’s the letter I sent the Globe. (I haven’t been keeping track, but it seems to me I’ve written more letters in response to Rick’s execrable musings than anyone else’s):

Rick Salutin is terribly upset because the economy is booming, our dollar is strong, and people are out spending money. As he sees it, the boom is actually a bad thing because it does nothing to address the growing disparity between rich and poor, which is apparently even wider here than it is in Egypt and Pakistan.

I can understand the appeal of such Grinch-like gloom, but even a Grinch must realize that living below the poverty line in the Third World is a lot different than being poor in Canada, which, being part of the First World, has a far higher standard of living and where there’s an effective social safety net in place.

As for condemning the boom, it’s hard to see how the alternative—a flagging economy, people out of work and unwilling to part with a dollar—serves anyone’s interests, least of all the poor.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:15 | link | comments (1)

Conscientious objectors: There’s been much hand-wringing in Canada of late because many Canadians seem to have become disenchanted with multiculturalism, our prevailing social dogma. They have woken up to the disconnect between how multicultism is supposed to work—ensuring that every group is acknowledged to have something equally worthwhile to contribute to the larger society—and how it really works—helping religious laws and customs that are antithetical to our way of life make inroads into the public sphere. This epiphany has resulting in much soul-searching into whether Canada has become “a nation of bigots” (the phrase most often used in connection with the soul-searching).  I think it’s fairly safe to say that there are probably a few folks who balk at multiculturalism because they are “bigots.” Most, however, reject it because it is based on false premises and because they can see it undermining Canadian society.

A letter to the editor of the Globe and Mail expresses the feelings of this larger segment:

Hérouxville's code of conduct opposes stoning and has drawn accusations of intolerance (Quebec Town Defends Conduct Code For Minorities - Oct. 25). Canada must renounce this terrible ritual, which is still carried out in some parts of the world, as forcefully as it has condemned female genital mutilation, which some immigrants still impose on their young daughters.

It is right to condemn cultural practices that we never want to see in Canada. We can no longer pretend that we are inviting immigrants to bring their culture with them. We are asking them to leave objectionable practices behind, so we are really saying that we want them to comply with Canada's customs.

We need to share the same values if we are going to co-exist.

The gentleman who wrote this letter objects, as should we all, to a doctrine that compels us to tolerate intolerance and the intolerable. No doubt the Globe will receive a letter or two objecting to this objection, and labelling the objector a bigot.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:40 | link | comments (1)

Separation anxiety: The EU strategy for disarming (in both senses of the word) the mullahs: talk, coddle, and in the case of Germany, France and Russia, take oodles of moolah to pay for your expertise and materiel so that “bombs away” day draws e’er closer. And, oh yeah, pretend that at some point down the long and winding road, the UN will get its act together and do something. The American strategy for dealing with the mullahs, walk softly and carry a twig; you don’t want them to get angry and cause even more of a ruckus in Iraq. Until now, that is. Yesterday, the U.S. finally—finally!—took steps that could (but likely won’t) persuade the mullahs to knock it off. And of course, because the U.S. acted independently of Europe, the whinging began as soon as the sanctions were announced. Here, for example, is the Los Angeles Times, mighty concerned because the U.S. has forged a separate path:

WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration's new package of sanctions against Iran widens the gap between the United States and its European allies over how to confront Tehran.

For two years, the administration has sought to work closely with Europeans and other world powers, convinced that collective action offered the best chance to pressure Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions.

But efforts to push through a third round of United Nations sanctions snagged and prospects for a new international coalition to impose economic penalties appear unlikely, so the administration decided to strike out on its own Thursday.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. announced unilateral sanctions that aim to cut off Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps, three key Iranian banks and others from any contact with the worldwide U.S. financial system.

The State Department designated Iran as a state sponsor of terrorism in 1984. The sanctions imposed Thursday are aimed at any remaining financial ties.

Although few such ties are left between U.S. firms and Iranians, officials hope that the effect will be powerfully amplified with other international companies and banks shunning the Iranians to avoid jeopardizing their contacts with the United States.

Advocates say this approach will hit the Iranian elite where it most hurts. But it also puts the United States on a separate track from the Europeans. And U.S. intervention in European business interests could deepen the unwillingness of European countries that already are reluctant to take part in any U.S. actions.

Rice stressed that the United States was committed to a diplomatic solution, although she followed that comment with a warning to Tehran, saying if it chose a path of confrontation, the U.S. and other countries would "resist these threats."

The new steps are bound to appeal to administration and congressional hard-liners, led by Vice President Dick Cheney, who favor a tough U.S. approach to Iran. However, some Democrats criticized the announcement as an indication that President Bush considers military action a first resort.

The U.S. move was praised by the British government, but was considered unlikely to be welcomed by others, such as Germany.

"Those [in Europe] who were reluctant yesterday will probably be more so tomorrow," said one senior European official in Washington, speaking on condition of anonymity in keeping with diplomatic protocol...

Hello, ’39. This time, though, Hitler is shorter, hairier and believes he’s been tapped by God to meet ‘n’ greet the Messiah.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:46 | link | comments

Faulty vision: Condi Rice is reportedly afraid of losing "the window" for a two-state solution.

Look again, Condi. That ain't no window. That's what you call a brick wall.

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:43 | link | comments

Sun Tzu sez: “If you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles... if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.”

Too bad the Chinese general wasn't on that Holyland Foundation jury. By Cal Thomas in JWR:

A federal judge in Dallas declared a mistrial in the case of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF) when a jury was unable to reach a verdict on 197 counts brought by the government that accused the Muslim charity of funding terrorism.

A hung jury, however, is not an acquittal and even if the Holy Land Foundation eventually is acquitted (the government has indicated it will retry the case) it doesn't necessarily mean the accused is innocent (think O.J. Simpson's murder trial).

Anyone in doubt about the game plan for infiltrating, undermining and attacking America from within our borders had better sober up. Our enemies know our ways and they are using them to gain a strategic advantage over us. From the rapid construction of mosques and Islamic schools across the country — many of which are financed by Saudi Arabia — to the use of front organizations as conduits to channel money to terrorist groups abroad, a "fifth column" has been opened in the United States. For those who are unfamiliar with the term "fifth column," it usually refers to a group of people who are assumed to have loyalties to countries other than their own, or who support some other nation in war efforts against the country they live in. We used to call such people traitors before the term was submerged in a wave of political correctness.

Despite the hung jury, a lot of useful information came out at the trial that people with terrorist intent would just as soon have remained hidden. Moving under the radar and hiding your real intentions is essential for fifth column members. Among the evidence revealed in court is the connection of Holy Land Foundation and a number of other Islamic groups, such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Islamic Society of North America and the Islamic Circle of North America, to the radical Muslim Brotherhood organization. Read a thoroughly researched and documented essay at Website http://www.nefafoundation.org/hlfdocs.html.

The Holy Land Foundation is not an unfairly persecuted charity. While it exhibits some charitable work as window dressing, evidence presented at the trial show its connections with known terrorist groups.

Although scores of examples from the government's case show what we face, I offer just one found in a recent Nine/Eleven Finding Answers Foundation report: "On Aug. 16, 2007, a Miami jury convicted Adham Hassoun, Jose Padilla and Kifah Jayyousi of conspiring to provide material support to terrorists. A Department of Justice press release announcing the initial indictment against Hassoun, a Palestinian national living in Florida, stated, 'As part of the conspiracy, Hassoun allegedly wrote a series of checks over several years — from 1994 to late 2001 — to unindicted coconspirators and organizations, including the Holy Land Foundation and the Global Relief Foundation, to be used to support violent jihad.' Further, Raed Awad, HLF's Florida representative and fund raiser, served as the Imam at Jose Padilla's mosque.'"

There is much more, including this from the government's case: "HLF is also mentioned in The 9/11 Commission Report in connection with the investigation of Anwar Aulaqi, an Imam in San Diego and Falls Church who allegedly had a 'close relationship' with hijackers Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar. Investigators probing Aulaqi prior to 9/11 learned that he 'knew individuals from the Holy Land Foundation and others involved in raising money for the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.'"

That the government was unable to convince a jury of this is either the fault of the prosecutors or the blindness of the jurors. I suspect it is the latter. Americans are extremely reluctant to brand a class of people and put them in categories. Our enemies know this, so they trade on our sorry history of slavery and racism and wrap themselves in the image of civil rights workers seeking only the same freedoms everyone else enjoys...

And that, my friends, is why they’re winning.

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:25 | link | comments

Today's eco-alarmist headline: Earth is reaching point of no return, says major UN environmental report.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:27 | link | comments

The madness of C. Rice: She’s convinced herself that Mahmoud Abbas is Martin Luther King and the Palestinians are pre-civil rights-era negroes in the American South.

Could someone please put this crazy woman in a straitjacket and lock her in a padded cell before she has a chance to unleash the lunacy of Annapolis?

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:24 | link | comments

Louise Arbour and human wrongs: Toronto Sun editorialist Paul Berton wants Canada to listen up and take its medicine when that supreme moral authority, Louise Arbour, doles it out:

It should be embarrassing for Canadians that our very own Louise Arbour says we aren't as committed to human rights as we like to portray ourselves.

Arbour, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, says it is "astonishing" Canada has refused to support the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which passed the General Assembly last month by a vote of 143-4.

Not surprisingly, we joined in our opposition the likes of the United States, Australia and New Zealand, all nations with large aboriginal populations.

The refusal to sign, explains the Tory government, was based on the fact the UN declaration is too broad and conflicts with the Canadian constitution.

Perhaps, but most Canadians know our record on human rights is vulnerable indeed with regard to First Nations issues. We know it in our hearts, and we've been told -- warned -- by various native leaders and protests that it is unfair and cannot persist.

The issues are complex, the complainants are not without many faults of their own, and solutions take time, but there is ample evidence that governments across Canada can move more quickly to solve various roadblocks and settle disputes, and better indicate that progress is being made.

It's not just a reluctance to sign the UN declaration, it's an inability by all Canadians to act -- to do the right thing.

What's more, says Arbour, a former Supreme Court justice, the refusal -- and lukewarm support for other related UN initiatives -- is indicative of a nation reluctant to live up to its flagging international reputation as a leader in human rights and peacekeeping.

So, either we're serious about that reputation, or we're not. Many would say it's outdated, old-fashioned, unrealistic, impractical and who cares anyway?

But many Canadians are proud of our reputation on the international stage, we believe it's more relevant than ever before, and we know it helps us politically, socially and economically. We know it can make us an important player in the new global order.

And we can't pretend to maintain the reputation internationally if we don't live up to it at home.

In fact, Canada is to be commending for refusing to fall in line with lady Lou and her Human Rights fascisti. Here’s my letter to the Sun:

According to Paul Berton, we’re supposed to snap to attention when Louise Arbour waggles a disapproving finger at our failure to back the UN’s declaration on indigenous rights. He’s got to be kidding. Ms. Arbour heads up what is arguably the UN’s most ludicrous body, the comically misnamed Human Rights Council. The Council, formerly the Human Rights Commission, was supposedly revamped to prevent it from being a laughingstock wherein some of the world’s most repressive regimes—including Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Syria—were deemed fit to judge who in the world was abridging the rights of others. It didn’t work. Both incarnations of the Rights Police have focussed obsessively and almost exclusively on one supposed violator—Israel—meanwhile ignoring the horrible violations occurring in the rest of the planet, including the nations from which Council members hail.

To cite Ms. Arbour, who heads up this rouge’s gallery of rights-abridgers, as a moral authority is not only absurd. It is an insult to everyone on the planet who is being bullied, battered and brutalized by the gang of thugs and tyrants over whom she is so proud to preside.

Posted by: scaramouche at 15:02 | link | comments

Mullah mobile: Move over, Toyota. There’s a new car in town. From Fars News:

You know I couldn’t resist adapting the appropriate oldie:

Well, we’re all braggin’ ‘bout the new car in town

‘Cause we got the coolest set of wheels around.

Don’t guzzle gas and it don’t pollute,

And best of all, it’s really cute.

She’s our little nuke coup.

You should know what we got.

 

Just a little nuke coup comes in all sorts of hues.

Puttin’ pedal to the metal chase away the blues.

A souped up, spruced up mullah machine.

She’ll go flat out, if you know what I mean.

She’s our little nuke coup.

You should know what we got.

 

She’s earning coin to pay for the Mahdi’s return

And to build all the bombs so the kafirs’ll burn.

And if that ain’t enough to make you flip your lids

We ain’t gonna ship it to no Yids or Yankees.

 

How ‘bout we give a bunch to the IAEA

‘Cause it helped us get to where we are today?

When Mo ElBee gets behind the wheel

He will never know how great he’s made us feel.

She’s our little nuke coupe

You should know what we got.

She’s our little nuke coupe.

You should know what we got.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:27 | link | comments

Bombs away: At a lunchtime lecture yesterday, Ilan Berman, a noted expert on Iran’s nuclear program, informed the assembled that the mullocracy is maybe a year away from being able to build its nuke . Should the world continue to sit on its collective thumbs and do nothing to dissuade the Mahdi men from going nuclear, Iran will become empowered to an intolerable extent, and the consequences will likely be grim.

Ah, but Israel/America will bomb the bejeesus out of them before that can happen, right? Well, perhaps, but  the Iranians, observing how easy it was for Israel to take out Saddam’s nuclear program, have cunningly scattered their many sites hither and yon across the vast expanse of their country, and buried a great deal of it underground. So even if, say, six or seven were taken out, that wouldn’t even put a dent in the program.

That being said, it was still interesting to read this on FrontPage Magazine—Ralph Peters on the implications of Israel’s not-so-super-secret strike in Syria last month:

* The Syrian reactor was at a very early stage, but neither Israel nor the United States called Damascus out before the world community. This reflects exasperation with the United Nations' unwillingness to do anything meaningful to stop rogue states from acquiring nukes. Instead of complaining, the Israelis just hit the target.

* Israel also acted because its military (especially its air force) is still smarting from its embarrassment during last year's confrontation with Hezbollah. The IDF needed to renew its image as supremely capable - and the raid sent a no-nonsense message that Israel's back in form.

* The biggest question is how much Washington knew about the attack in advance: Was it a joint plan with plausible denial built in or only a matter of shared intelligence - or did Tel Aviv wait to tip off Washington at the last minute (the minimum requirement)?

* Even excluding the nuke issue, Israel had to get Syria's attention. Since its Hezbollah client "won" last year's war, the Assad regime has continued to assassinate Lebanese politicians, to re-arm Hezbollah (while providing start-up funds to alternative terror groups), to encourage Hamas, and to facilitate the passage of terrorists and weapons into Iraq, further destabilizing the region.

* The attack also put Iran on notice that neither Israel nor the United States means to tolerate nuclear weapons in the hands of rogue regimes in the Middle East. This was, to a great extent, an attack on a proxy target. Whether Iran's leaders are capable of rational analysis is another matter.

* As a number of military analysts have pointed out, if Israeli aircraft were able to operate with impunity deep inside Syria, which fields state-of-the-art, Russian-supplied air defenses, it suggests a startling breakthrough in crippling an enemy's surveillance system and his command-and-control mechanisms.

Other states, such as Iran, that splurged on made-in-Russia air-defense systems must be panicking - while the Kremlin's generals have some explaining to do to Czar Vladimir.

* If the Israelis did, indeed, employ next-level military technology, the obvious question is: Why tip off your enemies that you've got new, paradigm-shifting tools just to blow up a cluster of buildings under construction, when any serious threat remained years - probably a decade - away?

There's a gaping hole in the logic - unless that, too, was a signal to Tehran.

* North Korea's involvement is a serious embarrassment for the Bush administration, which needs a geostrategic win.

The White House has counted on marking down a no-nukes deal with Pyongyang as a major achievement. The administration's refusal to recognize that the North Koreans just don't honor agreements doesn't reflect naivete but political desperation.

* Most worrisome of all, Syria's quest for nuclear weapons (a very expensive proposition, in more ways than one) confirms the spread of the world's most dangerous fad - the obsession among anti-Western regimes with getting nuclear weapons.

It signals that players such as Iran and Syria have realized the limits of terrorism: While terror is a painful inconvenience to Israel, America and other civilized countries, sponsoring it doesn't produce decisive results.

This doesn't mean that such regimes will abandon terrorism, which they find seductive and useful. Rather, it indicates that their visions of the future have taken on an apocalyptic hue - you can talk about deterrence value all through the poker game, but nukes aren't defensive weapons.

The killed-in-the-cradle Syrian nuke program tells us (that fad again) that nukes are viewed as the only possible equalizer in a face-off with superior Western militaries. It indicates an emotional belief in nuclear weapons as a solution to the Middle East's self-inflicted problems.

The bottom line? We should be even more worried about Islamist terrorists seeking nukes than we already were. Yes, nukes are very difficult to transport, arm and use. But keep an eye on Pakistan, where a multisided civil war is only a well-aimed bullet or two away.

On Sept. 6, Israel did the right thing by defying the lawyers crippling our civilization and striking a terrorist state's nuclear program before it could gain the de facto protection of the United Nations and its satellite organizations. Unfortunately, that attack was only a beginning, not an end.

Iran in December 2008?

From the sounds of it, September might be a better bet.

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

Human Oreo:

Posted by: scaramouche at 22:07 | link | comments (1)

Identity theft: Not long ago on Steve Paikin’s TVO program The Agenda, I listened, mouth slack with incredulity, as Globe and Mail pundit John Ibbitson touted the success of multiculturalism in Canada. The reason why the doctrine has worked so well here, said the Ib, is because, unlike, say, the Netherlands, with its windmills, wooden shoes, and plucky little lad stuffing a digit in a leaky dike, we have absolutely no sense that being “Canadian” betokens anything special. This utter lack of any discernable identity is supposedly a big plus because it means you can come from just about anywhere on the planet and not have to worry about assuming a pre-fab and burdensome Canadian identity. In fact, should you so desire, you can remain exactly as you were in Somalia or Mauritius or Lower Slobovia--same clothes, same grub, same mindset. Canada is merely a blank page, an empty vessel, a cupboard with nothing in it save a shelf for exotic headgear and a pole with plenty of spare hangers.

It doesn’t occur to the Ibbitsons that that’s actually a huge negative, that an absence of a national ethos makes it awfully hard to build a strong and cohesive society. Mark Steyn—no fan of the multiculti—explains what’s on tap for folks who lack a strong sense of identity: they end up ceding ground to those who know exactly who they are:

These stories turn up so routinely you hardly notice them anymore:

Vancouver’s hookah-parlour owners are celebrating after winning an exemption Thursday from a proposed new bylaw that will ban smoking on most sidewalks in commercial districts, in bus shelters and even in taxis passing through Vancouver.

In giving the bylaw unanimous approval-in-principle, Vancouver city council members bowed to arguments that hookah lounges provide an important cultural space for the city’s Muslims and granted them a temporary exemption.

Can that be right, even in Canada? Infidels can’t smoke but Muslims can? Apparently so. As the Vancouver Sun report continued, Emad Yacoub “said hookah lounges are essential for immigrants from hookah-smoking cultures, because it helps them deal with the depression common for newcomers and gives them places like they have at home.”

Once upon a time English and Irish and French immigrants to Vancouver used to find “places like they have at home” – pubs and bars and so forth. But not anymore. In fact, if you’re at the Legion Hall and can no longer light up a fag (whoa, relax, I’m just talking about cigarettes, not another lively Muslim cultural tradition), you might be forgiven for getting the impression that fewer and fewer places seem like home anymore.

It’s good to know the state is still prepared to trust adult citizens to be able to weigh the health risks of smoking against the “cultural” value (ie, the pleasure), even if they have to convert to Islam enjoy the right. Veterans, barflies, cigar aficionados and free-born Canadians in general can no longer enjoy this responsibility. But Muslims, uniquely, can.

Well, not entirely uniquely. For as The Vancouver Sun also reported:

The one foggy point in the new bylaw was whether it will apply to crack cocaine and crystal-meth smoking.

Ah, right. If you’re taking a limo from Squamish to Richmond, you can’t light up a Craven A. But, if you do feel the need the smoke, just stop off at the nearest crack house or meth lab. It’s good to know that some aspects of infidel culture are still celebrated in Vancouver.

At casual glance, this decision by the city council breaches one of the most fundamental principles: equality before the law. Either smoking is illegal, or it’s not. But it can’t be illegal for some citizens, and not for others. But, of course, most of us don’t give that casual glance to this story, or to the gazillions that like it that bubble up at the foot of the “News In Brief” section every day of the week across the western world. And, of those who do give it a casual glance, the general blasé reaction was pithily distilled by one correspondent of mine as follows: “We’re rich enough to afford to be stupid.” Yeah, sure, it’s idiotic but it’s harmless. Don’t get your panties in a twist. Ours is such a wealthy, powerful, confident culture it can jab untold numbers of screwdrivers into its own head, and still survive. Death by a thousand cuts is not for us, even if (or just because) the cuts are self-inflicted.

I wonder. In Vancouver city council’s action, what was once dimly discerned is made explicit. An Englishman or Irishman has no culture. Indeed, Canada has no culture, save what others bring to it. Which is the logical reductio of multiculturalism: If coming to Canada causes “depression” among “newcomers”, it behooves us to bring Canada into line with “places like they have at home”. Instead of the immigrant assimilating with the host society, the host society assimilates with the immigrant. Which makes sense, given that he seems to value his inheritance more than Canada values its own. And so we confront the limits of political correctness. It’s fine for a pliant citizenry sedated by decades of propaganda, but not for Muslims or crackheads who don’t yield quite so easily. When the nanny state runs up against the unnannyable, it crumples like a cheap roll-up.

When I wrote my book about Europe and demography, dissenting critics wanted to argue about the rate of change – specifically, the date at which Islam becomes a majority on the Continent. It won’t be 2025 or 2050, they scoff. It might not even be by the end of the century, as Professor Bernard Lewis says. Maybe. Maybe not. My book has very little to say either way about the precise day on which Islam claims 50.00001 per cent of the European population. What matters is the point at which it becomes the key determining feature of a society’s political disposition. And that day will not be 2100 or 2050 or 2025, but, as we see in Vancouver, some time rather sooner.

Let us zip across the Dominion, to Etobicoke, a corner of Toronto I know well. Or I thought I did. The other day a reader sent me the list of candidates for the Etobicoke North riding in this month’s provincial election. They are as follows:

Shafiq Qaadri, Liberal
Mohamed Boudjenane, NDP
Mohamed Kassim, Progressive Conservative
Jama Korshel, Green
Teresa Ceolin, Family Coalition

“Teresa”? What kind of cockamamie name is that for an Etobicoke politician? This is the first riding in Ontario in which every major party is running a Muslim candidate. But not the last. To the casual observer, this would seem to be statistically improbable. Etobicoke is not 80 per cent Muslim, nor even 50 per cent Muslim. Yet every major national party already feels obliged to defer, in its candidate selection process, to Islam’s political muscle. I write in my book that, historically, Islam has never needed to be a statistical majority in order to function as one. At the height of its power in the eighth century, the “Islamic world” stretched from Spain to India yet its population was only minority Muslim: Islam conquered and ruled an empire of non-Muslim subjects. But, a millennium and a bit on, it’s not even necessary to conquer – not when everyone’s so eager to concede pre-emptively, all in the name of “tolerance”. As Douglas Farrow told a conference at McGill recently, tolerance is a negative: it implies a kind of passivity. “You can’t build a society on that negative principle,” he says. But you can rot and enfeeble the one you have, and in its ruins something new will be built.

Let’s zip east another few thousand miles, from Etobicoke to Brussels. The mayor of the city is a rather dreary Belgian leftie called Freddy Thielemans. He is the head of the governing Socialist Party. Of his 17-member caucus, ten are Muslim. Again, Brussels is not majority Muslim. Sure, the most popular baby boy’s name is Mohammed, but then, in western Europe, it would be easier to list the cities where it isn’t. Yet Brussels, the capital of the European Union, already has a Muslim-majority governing party.

It’s been faintly surreal following the recent ructions about the usual instabilities of the Belgian state: Is this it? Are the ancient differences between the Walloons and Flemings about to tear the kingdom apart? Etc, etc. The traditional warring tribes of Belgium are irrelevant to its future. Brussels will be a Muslim city, and so will Antwerp, and Ghent, and even my mum’s quaintly parochial Flemish backwater of St Niklaas. And the disputes of the future will be between Belgian Turks and Belgian Algerians, or Belgian Sunni and Belgian Shia, or some other variant thereof.

Twenty years ago, in The Closing Of The American Mind, Allan Bloom wrote, “As an image of our current intellectual condition, I keep being reminded of the newsreel pictures of Frenchmen splashing happily in the water at the seashore, enjoying the paid annual vacations legislated by Leon Blum’s Popular Front government. It was 1936, the same year Hitler was permitted to occupy the Rhineland. All our big causes amount to that kind of vacation.”

Yes, indeed. “Tolerance”, “multiculturalism”, splashing in the shallows – or so we think. Those Muslims who frequent Vancouver hookah parlours because they’re “depressed”, because Canada is not like “home”, won’t have to be depressed much longer. Here, as in much of the west, the state is happy to dismantle its own inheritance. And in the vacuum of multiculturalism it’s those groups most fierce in defence of their culture who will build the future...

Which means, Mr. Ibbitson, tomorrow belongs to them.

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:49 | link | comments

The Ceeb in action: So obvious has the Ceeb become in pursing an agenda of slamming Israel while simultaneously shilling for Islam that it may be time to rename it the Caliphate Broadcasting Corporation. Thus almost every time Margaret “The Voice” Evans brings us yet another ain’t-Israel-awful report from the frontlines, you can just about bank upon there also being a tug-from-the-heartstrings tale of some poor unfortunate Islamic supremacist--bonus points if he has wife with a little shahid-to-be in the oven--squawking about how Canadian authorities are violating his “human rights.”

The linchpin of this multiculti “We heart Islam” agenda: the Ceeb fantasy sitcom about funny Muslims and silly infidels in Saskatchewan. On tonight’s episode of the purportedly high-larious show, the comedic hijinks continue as one of the funny Muslims—the chick “revert”—gets in trouble for maintaining her infidel habit of playing the lottery (gambling being un-Islamic, ‘cept of course if you’re an egregiously rich Wahhabi royal who thinks nothing of dropping  gazillions in Monte Carlo); in a subplot, “Amaar struggles to hip-ify Muslim youth day by re-branding it “Islamapalooza.”

Or as it's known in my neck of the woods, “Israeli Apartheid Week.”

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:41 | link | comments

Burying the lede: Condi Rice did it, when she talked about Iran being “an obstacle to U.S. goals.” (An obstacle? More like a flipping Mt. Kilimanjaro.) The AP reporter did it, when she finally got around to mentioning it at the end of the article.

For the benefit of Condi and the AP scribe--and at no charge to either--I have taken it upon myself to point out the bit that should have come first. From the Washington Post:

WASHINGTON -- Iran is a major obstacle to the U.S. vision of a Middle East in which nations will "trade more, invest more, talk more and work more constructively to solve problems," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says.

"The Iranian government is pursuing policies which are detrimental to the long-term interests of its neighbors, of the region, and of the Iranian people themselves. It need not be this way," Rice said in remarks prepared for delivery Wednesday to a House panel.

The Associated Press obtained a copy of her testimony.

Rice's testimony, before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, comes amid increased frustration by Republicans and Democrats alike that the Bush administration is not doing enough to deter Iran's nuclear ambitions.

Last month, the House passed, by a 397-16 vote, legislation aimed at blocking foreign investment in Iran, in particular its lucrative energy sector. The bill, sponsored by Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Rep. Tom Lantos, D-Calif., would specifically bar the president from waiving U.S. sanctions.

Rice said the administration shares Congress' goal of making sanctions tougher on Iran, but urged caution.

"We simply want to be certain that our collective efforts do not undermine our multilateral strategy, where we will have a maximum chance of success," she said.

President Bush says a U.S.-linked missile defense system is urgently needed in Europe to protect against a potential Iranian strike. Plans for such a system have strained U.S. relations with Russia, which estimates Iran's capability to be less mature and has close financial ties with Tehran.

On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the Bush administration has told Moscow it may delay activation of the system until it has proof that Iran poses a missile threat.

"We would consider tying together activation of the sites in Poland and the Czech Republic with definitive proof of the threat _ in other words, Iranian missile testing and so on," Gates said.

Rice planned to tell the House committee Wednesday that in addition to nuclear ambitions that undermine stability in the region, Tehran has provided "lethal assistance" to extremist groups in Lebanon, Afghanistan and the Palestinian territories, as well as Iraq.

In particular, she noted, activities in Iraq by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps' Quds force "are inconsistent with the Iranian government's obligations and stated commitment to support the Iraqi government."

Tiny Hitler wants to unleash a big kaboom so his Messiah can return from the watery depths (he fell down a well some centuries ago) and preside over the final days of planet Earth. Condi Rice wants to discuss trade, investment and working constructively. One has to wonder which one is truly delusional.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:59 | link | comments

Running on entity: Had a giggle at the headings on the Al Manar TV site: "Lebanon"; "Europe"; "Turkey"; "Zionist entity"; "Palestine"...

You mean people in the media actually still use that clunky, archaic expression?

It's soooo 1973.:

That whole “entity” thing is passé.

It never made sense anyway.

Call it “Fred”; call it “Joe”;

There’s one thing they should know:

"Israel’s" here to stay.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:12 | link | comments

A test of faith: Remember when the left spoke truth to power and stood up for freedom and democracy?

No? Me neither. Sarah Baxter on the times online site has devised a fool-proof test to determine whether someone is a genuine freedom-lover, or merely one of those useless useful idiots who pays lip service to freedom:

A glorious culture clash took place in Iran recently that made me laugh out loud. The children of Che Guevara, the revolutionary pin-up, had been invited to Tehran University to commemorate the 40th anniversary of their father’s death and celebrate the growing solidarity between “the left and revolutionary Islam” at a conference partly paid for by Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president.

There were fraternal greetings and smiles all round as America’s “earth-devouring ambitions” were denounced. But then one of the speakers, Hajj Saeed Qassemi, the co-ordinator of the Association of Volunteers for Suicide-Martyrdom (who presumably remains selflessly alive for the cause), revealed that Che was a “truly religious man who believed in God and hated communism and the Soviet Union”.

Che’s daughter Aleida wondered if something might have been lost in translation. “My father never mentioned God,” she said, to the consternation of the audience. “He never met God.” During the commotion, Aleida and her brother were led swiftly out of the hall and escorted back to their hotel. “By the end of the day, the two Guevaras had become non-persons. The state-controlled media suddenly forgot their existence,” the Iranian writer Amir Taheri noted.

After their departure, Qassemi went on to claim that Fidel Castro, the “supreme guide” of Guevara, was also a man of God. “The Soviet Union is gone,” he affirmed. “The leadership of the downtrodden has passed to our Islamic republic. Those who wish to destroy America must understand the reality and not be clever with words.”

Don’t say you haven’t been warned, comrade, when you flirt with “revolutionary Islam” as if it were a mild form of liberation theology. But it is time, too, for Che to lose his secular halo. If he were still living, the chances are he would be another dictator like Castro, who has ruled Cuba with an iron fist for half a century but gets a pass from liberals because he provides a modest health service.

There used to be a clear dividing line between conservatives and liberals. It defined the culture wars of the late 20th century, which pitted reactionary fuddy-duddies against tolerant, enlightened types, who believed in equal rights for women, minorities and gays. That fault line is becoming as dated as the flower power of the 1960s.

By the time Terry Eagleton, a Marxist professor of literature – how quaint and old-fashioned that sounds – is laying into Martin Amis, the Mr Cool of British fiction, for remarks on Islam that supposedly make the son as racist as his father, Kingsley, “an antisemitic boor, a drink-sodden, self-hating reviler of women, gays and liberals”, it is obvious we are into a wholly different culture war, between phoney and real progressives.

Wasn’t one of Amis fils’s main complaints about Islamic militants that they were “antisemites, psychotic misogynists and homophobes”? Confused? You are not the only one.

My own test for spotting a phoney liberal is as follows. If you think Bush is a fascist and Castro is a progressive, you are not a democrat. If you think cultural traditions can trump women’s rights, you are not a feminist. And if you think antisemitic rants are simply an expression of frustration with American and Israeli policy, you have learnt nothing from history.

Works for me.

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

Eco-alarmist report of the day: Oh, no. Looks like not even Kyoto can save us from the dreaded CO2 monster (Carbonstein? Carbonzillah?).  From AP via the Ceeb:

Just days after the Nobel Prize was awarded for work that documents global warming, an alarming new study finds that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is increasing faster than expected.

Carbon dioxide emissions were 35 per cent higher in 2006 than in 1990, a much faster growth rate than anticipated, researchers led by Josep G. Canadell, of Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, report in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Increased industrial use of fossil fuels coupled with a decline in the gas absorbed by the oceans and land were listed as causes of the increase.

"In addition to the growth of global population and wealth, we now know that significant contributions to the growth of atmospheric CO2 arise from the slowdown" of nature's ability to take the gas out of the air, said Canadell, director of the Global Carbon Project at the research organization.

The changes "characterize a carbon cycle that is generating stronger-than-expected and sooner-than-expected climate forcing," the researchers report.

Kevin Trenberth of the climate analysis section of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. said the "paper raises some very important issues that the public should be aware of: Namely that concentrations of CO2 are increasing at much higher rates than previously expected and this is in spite of the Kyoto Protocol that is designed to hold them down in Western countries."

Alan Robock, associate director of the Center for Environmental Prediction at Rutgers University, added: "What is really shocking is the reduction of the oceanic CO2 sink," meaning the ability of the ocean to absorb carbon dioxide, removing it from the atmosphere.

The researchers blamed that reduction on changes in wind circulation, but Robock said he also thinks rising ocean temperatures reduce the ability to take in the gas.

"Think that a warm Coke has less fizz than a cold Coke," he said.

Neither Robock nor Trenberth was part of Canadell's research team.

Carbon dioxide is the leading greenhouse gas, so named because the accumulation of such gases in the atmosphere can help trap heat from the sun, causing potentially dangerous warming of the planet.

While most atmospheric scientists accept the idea, finding ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions has been a political problem because of potential economic effects. Earlier this month, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and former U.S. vice-president Al Gore for their work in calling attention to global warming.

"It turns out that global warming critics were right when they said that global climate models did not do a good job at predicting climate change," Robock commented. "But what has been wrong recently is that the climate is changing even faster than the models said. In fact, Arctic sea ice is melting much faster than any models predicted, and sea level is rising much faster than IPCC previously predicted."….

No doubt about it. We’re doomed.

Let us all join hands and pray for the polar bears.

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

The kiss of death: J.R. Dunn, tongue semi-lodged in cheek, says that giving Fat Al and his gang of UN gasbags the Nobel Peace Prize all but puts the final nail in the coffin of the eco-alarmist movement. From The American Thinker:

Al Gore's Nobel may very well turn out to be the beginning of the end for global warming.

How's that, you say? Surely Al and the International Panel on Climate Control, armed as they now are with the great cachet of the Nobel, will sweep away all oil-company-inspired opposition and bring the Green revolution to completion. We'll all be riding unicycles to work and recycling our nail clippings come next Tuesday, and be happy doing it, lest Al, watching from the big house in Nashville, be made unhappy and give orders to have us sent to Prudhoe Bay to feed moss to the caribou.

 

Isn't that how the Nobel's supposed to work? But in fact does it? A glance at how the causes of some recent prizewinners have fared may prove enlightening.

* In 2005, the prize went to Mohamed elBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, for his efforts in discouraging nuclear proliferation. Evidently, the word hasn't reached Iran, North Korea, Syria, or Pakistan yet.

* In 2004, the winner was Wangari Maathai, for her efforts on behalf of "sustainable development, democracy, and peace", which appears to amount to planting trees in Kenya. Last year Prof. Maathai began a campaign against the menace of plastic bags. Good for her, I say.

* The 2003 winner was Shirin Ebadi, "for her efforts for democracy and human rights". Everywhere but her home country of Iran. She'll get around to it eventually, though.

* For 2002, it was our own Jimmy Carter, for peace, democracy, human rights, and I don't know what all. Two weeks ago, Jimmy was given the bum's rush by a pack of Sudanese security thugs.  I guess they hadn't heard about his Nobel.

* The 2001 prize went to Kofi Annan. Kofi has more or less dropped out of sight after leaving the UN. I wonder why?

* In 1997, it was Jody Williams of the International Campaign to ban Landmines. Haven't heard of them recently either. Did they dig ‘em all up?

* And in 1988, the nod went to the United Nations Peacekeeping Forces. You didn't know there was a Nobel for well-run whorehouses, did you?

But  enough. It's clear from this list that not a single cause -- from nonproliferation to land mine clearance -- has prospered recently since the major figure involved won the Nobel Peace Prize. It's true that some of these awards have been transparent efforts at PC ("We need an African woman. Any African woman."), and some have been attempts at interfering with domestic politics that the Norwegians simply don't understand and should keep out of (all four of the most recent awards can be interpreted as attacks on the Bush administration, which is four too many). But other, far more worthwhile efforts including Tibet (the Dalai Lama, 1989), and Burma (Aung San Suu Kyi, 1991) have suffered as well. 

We need to ask whether the prize itself could be a factor. Some of these campaigns, for instance, land mines, were going great guns right up until the prize was awarded. Then began a slow spiral into irrelevance, marked by neglect from the media, governments, and the public at large. Is the Noble committee unwittingly acting as undertakers to some of its favored causes?...

One can only hope and pray.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:51 | link | comments

Head counts: This morning on Ceeb radio, Margaret Evans had one of her patented “voice barely able to choke back the emotion” reports. The subject of her report: a new census that’s about to be conducted by the Palestinians. Seems the warring factions in Gaza and the W.B. have resolved to set aside their differences long enough to do a head count. The purpose of the count, said Margaret, was to get some ammo in their ongoing struggle against Israel’s security barrier which they see as a blatant “land grab.” Margaret made sure to incorporate some other buzz words that the Ceeb and other lefty media types use to summon up sympathy for the Palestinian cause, including “refugee camp” and “’67 borders.” And just so’s you won’t think that the story is really about the Arab’s desire for a land grab—a land grab of Jerusalem and the rest of Israel, that is—Margaret made sure to omit the reason why to barrier was constructed in the first place (as a last resort, to keep Palestinians from entering Israel and blowing up Jews) and painted Israel as being stiff-necked and just plain mean for failing to recognize the booming Palestinian demographics and handing over East Jerusalem post haste. (By contrast, this report on Yahoo! isn’t nearly as critical of Israel.)

Isn’t it interesting how everyone is so obsessed with the burgeoning demographics in Israel and the Palestinian territories, while over there in Turkey the reality of Kurdish demographics elicits one gigantic ho hum?

Here’s Ralph Peters in USA Today on the subject of Kurdish numbers:

The eastern quarter of Turkey isn't Turkish. It's inhabited by Kurds, the descendents of tribesmen whom the Greek soldier and author Xenophon encountered in those mountains 2,500 years ago — more than a thousand years before the first Turk arrived.

If a referendum on independence were held today, Turkey's Kurds, who make up about 20% of its 73 million people, would vote overwhelmingly to secede from the shrunken empire Ankara inherited from the Ottomans. That's part of what Turkish saber-rattling on the border with northern Iraq is about — the fear that even an autonomous Kurdistan-in-Iraq threatens Turkey's territorial integrity because the region's Kurds might view it as the core of a Kurdish state.

For its part, Washington fears a Turkish-Kurdish conflict that would further destabilize the entire region — just when Iraq shows glimmers of hope.

No regional government ruling over a Kurdish minority has ever allowed an honest head count, but estimates give the Kurds a population of 27 million to 36 million, spread across portions of Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria and the Caucasus. Up to 14 million of these people without a state reside in Turkey.

In addition to its determination to preserve its eastern frontier, Turkey faces internal political challenges that propel the huge Turkish military — with more than 500,000 active-duty troops — toward an intervention in northern Iraq.

The immediate justification for a parliament-authorized move across the border is Turkey's allegation that the PKK (The Kurdistan Workers' Party), a Marxist organization that has employed terror, continues to attack soldiers and civilians inside Turkey. The remnants of the defeated PKK, a few thousand men and their families, have taken refuge in Iraq. Turkey claims it wants them handed over — knowing such a course is politically impossible for any Kurdish leader.

The Palestinians are seen as being singularly deserving of statehood, although to date they have proven singularly unfit to rule themselves. The Kurds, who have shown themselves quite capable of ruling themselves, and whose claim to autonomy predates the Palestinian one by almost two and a half millennia, are denied the same right.

You can be sure that if Jews had declared sovereignty over part of Kurdistan, the world would be on it like ugly on Arafat.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:28 | link | comments

Money makes the world go around: You know that canard about how the Jews are in control of the world’s finances?  T’aint so. The religion that actually has firmed up plans for global domination and is using the financial sector as one of the means to do so is…well, let’s let the all-wise Caroline Glick divulge its identity. From JWR:

…THE ESTABLISHMENT of charitable front organizations is merely one of many ways in which jihadist groups have raised funds. Today terror analysts fear that a new means has been found to skirt anti-terror laws and finance terror while rendering the financial systems of the West vulnerable to Islamic manipulation and control. The fear is that through the burgeoning presence of Shari'a-compliant investment houses, jihadist groups and financiers will be able to raise enormous sums of money to fund their nefarious activities aimed at global domination.

Islamic clerics tout Shari'a-finance as one of the central components of Islam. But this is untrue. Shari'a economics did not exist until the founders of the Muslim Brotherhood Maulana Abul Ala Mawdudi and Sayyd Qutb invented it them in the 1940s and 1950s. As Alex Alexiev explained in a recent paper on the subject published by the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC, the purpose of Shari'a economics was to mobilize Muslim support for radical Islam by promoting Muslim exclusivity and separatism. That is, the purpose of Shari'a finance is religious and political, not financial.

Shari'a finance became a significant factor in the Muslim world in the aftermath of the 1973 OPEC oil embargo which raised Arab oil revenues a hundredfold in under a decade. The first Shari'a-compliant banks were established in 1975 with the opening of the Saudi-controlled Islamic Development Bank and the Islamic Bank of Dubai. Today the International Monetary Fund estimates that there are some 300 Shari'a-compliant banks operating in some 75 countries. Arab estimates place the number at 400. Close to a trillion dollars are under Shari'a-compliant management.

ASIDE FROM these Shari'a-based financial institutions in the Islamic world, the new trend in the West is for Western financial institutions to offer Shari'a-compliant investment opportunities. So excited is Britain, for instance about the financial benefit to be gained by attracting oil-rich Islamic investors that in January Britain's Treasury Minister Ed Balls announced his government's intention to turn London into the center of global Islamic finance.

Given the religious rather than financial aim of Shari'a-compliant investing, it isn't surprising that Shari'a-compliant investments are little more than a word game. Paying lip service to the Koranic prohibition on interest-based transactions and risky investments, Mawdudi and Qutb invented various means to cover the fact that Shari'a-compliant investments involve both interest payments and risk.

UNDERSTANDING that Shari'a-compliant investments are the same as regular investments, banking and other financial institutions in the West that are naturally interested in attracting Islamic investors have enthusiastically opened Shari'a-compliant portfolios. Unfortunately, the banks' enthusiasm is raft with security and perhaps even criminal implications.

In order for investments to be defined as Shari'a-compliant, they must receive the approval of Shari'a advisors. Only certain Islamic entities are entitled to issue religious rulings or fatwas that can recognize investments as Shari'a-compliant. These entities include the Fiqh Academy in Jedda, Saudi Arabia, which is associated with the Saudi-dominated Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC); the European Council for Fatwa Research, and the Fatwa Council of North America. All of these entities are associated with the radical pro-jihadist Wahabi and Salafi schools of Islam adhered to by groups such as al-Qaida and Hamas.

Similarly, the groups that these organizations spawned for the express purpose of overseeing Shari'a-compliant investments and the people authorized and recognized as Islamic authorities capable of declaring an investment Shari'a-compliant are identified with political Islam and, in several cases with terror financing and support…

So the West is handing the Islamic supremacists carte blanche to fund the jihad and control a significant portion of the world’s finances.

I’m sorry to say it, but they are much smarter than us.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:27 | link | comments

Not teacher’s pet: Louise Arbour, the “human rights” czarina who presides over what is arguably the UN’s most ludicrous body (and that’s saying something, considering the multiplicity of wretched entities in contention for that title) is “profoundly disappointed” with Canada. What did we do to upset the high and mighty Lou? Isn’t it obvious? We up and installed a Conservative government which, unlike previous Liberal ones, has refused to march in lockstep with the world’s despots and their enablers—Lou’s constituency.

Yesterday the Toronto Star had an article in which Louise scolded us for voting against that UN declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples; the report made her sound like a testy school marm with the Harper government her recalcitrant student. Today the Star reports that Louise is still “profoundly disappointed” and is questioning Canada’s “commitment to individual rights.” Arms folded and lips pursed, school marm Lou is concerned that Canada is falling under the influence of the class juvie—the U.S.—and wants to nip this malign peer pressure in the bud:

OTTAWA–Louise Arbour, the Canadian who leads the United Nations on human rights, said Ottawa's commitment to individual rights globally appears to be shifting as the Harper government grows closer to the United States.

"There is a sense that Canada is moving away from its total commitment to multilateralism and is now, I think, advancing other forms of either national or regional alliances," said Arbour, a former justice of the Supreme Court of Canada.

In a speech to a human rights group, she hammered Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government for siding with the U.S., Australia and New Zealand last month to vote against a UN declaration upholding human rights among the world's indigenous people.

"I have to register my profound disappointment," said Arbour, now the UN Human Rights Commissioner. She said Canada's position was incomprehensible since Canadian representatives spent decades "of progressive involvement" on that issue.

"I found it rather astonishing," she told a meeting organized by the Canadian Human Rights Commission.

Arbour criticized the Harper government for failing to maintain Canada's stature as a champion of individual rights and freedoms in the world.

"Canada has to work very hard to maintain what historically has been the perception internationally that it's a consensus builder and that it's a valid interlocutor to all," the former UN war crimes prosecutor told reporters.

Asked why this is happening, she alluded to the Conservative government's closer ties with Washington and its close allies on issues of security, the environment and foreign aid.

You can be sure that if Louise is agin’ it, it’s a sign that we’re definitely on the right track.

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

Dotty Doris: Doris Lessing just received the Nobel Prize for Literature for what the prize committee described as her “scepticism, fire and visionary power.” (Thus sparing themselves the ordeal of having to say something nice about her prose, a tough assignment since it’s turgid, humourless and largely unreadable.) The new laureate has put some of that “fire” on display, opining to a Spanish magazine that, all things considered, 9/11 wasn’t such a big deal. From Breitbart:

MADRID, Spain (AP) - Nobel laureate Doris Lessing said the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States were "not that terrible" when compared to attacks by the IRA in Britain.

"September 11 was terrible, but if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible," the Nobel Literature Prize winner told the leading Spanish daily El Pais.

"Some Americans will think I'm crazy. Many people died, two prominent buildings fell, but it was neither as terrible nor as extraordinary as they think. They're a very naive people, or they pretend to be," she said in an interview published Sunday.

"Do you know what people forget? That the IRA attacked with bombs against our government; it killed several people while a Conservative congress was being held and in which the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, was (attending). People forget," she said.

Nearly 3,000 people were killed in the Sept. 11 attacks. About 3,700 died and tens of thousands of people were maimed in more than 30 years of violence in Northern Ireland. The Irish Republican Army guerrilla group, which caused most of the deaths, disarmed in 2005.

Attempts by The Associated Press to reach Lessing in London for comment Monday were unsuccessful. Her agent's office said the author was unavailable because she was not feeling well.

In the El Pais interview, Lessing had sharp words for both President Bush and his ally, former British premier Tony Blair.

"I always hated Tony Blair, from the beginning," El Pais quoted Lessing as saying. "Many of us hated Tony Blair, I think he has been a disaster for Britain and we have suffered him for many years. I said it when he was elected: This man is a little showman who is going to cause us problems and he did."

"As for Bush, he's a world calamity," added Lessing. "Everyone is tired of this man. Either he is stupid or he is very clever, although you have to remember he is a member of a social class which has profited from wars."

Iran also came in for a lashing from Lessing, who was born to British parents who were living in what is now Bakhtaran, Iran.

"I hate Iran, I hate the Iranian government, it's a cruel and evil government," she was quoted as saying.

"Look what happened to its president in New York, they called him evil and cruel in Colombia University. Marvelous! They should have said more to him! Nobody criticizes him, because of oil."…

Oh that Doris. Pushing 90 and still as batty as ever. (Then again, perhaps it's a function of age since, as she makes clear in this interview from 2000 in Salon, this former communist clearly "gets it" about the perils of Utopian thinking and political correctness.)

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:28 | link | comments

How the English language submitted: A linguistics lesson, courtesy Mo Elmasry of the Canadian Islamic Congress. Mo wants us all to know the great debt the English language owes to Arabs:

For 1000 years, Arabic was the primary international language of commerce, scholarship and politics, much as English is in today’s world. In fact, over the centuries English adopted many words that were either borrowed directly from Arabic, or were absorbed indirectly through other languages, especially Spanish.

Even today, Arabic still accounts for the greatest number of Eastern elements in English. The lists of examples that follow are only a brief sampling of the many more words available; perhaps some will surprise you!

No computer, nuclear plant or microchip design could have been possible without the words and concepts we know as algorithm, algebra, and zero - all of which come from Arabic.

The names of many musical instruments -- like lute and guitar - as well as a number of technical performance terms and styles, are also from Arabic roots.

Many names of familiar animals, plants, spices, herbs and drinks began as Arabic nouns: saffron, henna, camphor, cotton, apricot, lemon, lime, orange, tamarind, lilac, sherry, mango, coffee, artichoke, spinach, jasmine, ginger, tulip, lotus, shrub, giraffe, gazelle, cobra, zebra, cheetah.

If you have ever taken a chemistry course, the word chemistry itself originates with Arabic, as well as nitro, alkali, alcohol, calibre, antimony, arsenic.

In your household and daily life, you might easily run into Arabic words that are so common we never give them a second thought: shampoo, sofa, cable, atlas, magazine, pie, pajama, bungalow, mattress, sack, khaki, candy, caramel, jar, sherbet, sugar, syrup, cinnamon, ribs, silk, cheque, chatty, sandal.

And, as you might expect, Arabic is very present in slightly more exotic or emphatic English words and proper names: tycoon, carat, chess, checkmate, Sahara, almanac, rum, musk, sesame, tariff, cashmere, mummy, coral, sapphire, jubilee, jargon, thug, Satan, fake, jungle, alchemy, zenith, safari, talc, tartar, zircon, chiffon, amber, Bedouin, Ariel.

In military vocabulary, frequently-used terms like hazard, admiral, arsenal and assassin all owe their use to Arabic.

But reference books devoted to tracing the English words borrowed from Arabic are rare. Most were written some time ago and do not include contemporary scholarship or changes in our language. The most recent is more than three decades old -- Arabic Contributions to the English Vocabulary, by James Peters and Habeeb Salloum (1973). Two other useful, but dated, titles are: A History of Foreign Words in English, by Mary S. Serjeantson (1935) and Arabic Words in English, by Walt Taylor (1933).

Words are much like organic living creatures whose character and meanings evolve over time and circumstance. Those Arabic words that made it into English must have had a fascinating history, much of which has been lost over the centuries. It makes one wonder; Who used the original Arabic words and what were they like? How did these words first come to be spoken by non-Arabs? How many variations did they go through before appearing in English dictionaries? Why are some much easier to trace back to their Arabic roots than others? Linguists have answered some of these questions but there is still much more to be known. Here is a project worthy of far greater attention. Any takers?

Merci buckets for the verbiage, Mo, but there’s only one word that’s really pertinent here—jihad. And for that one you ain’t gettin’ any thanks.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:06 | link | comments

Dangerous arts and statecraft:  Nicolas Sarkozy is urging Ehud Olment to get "creative" in an effort to strike a peace deal with Abbas.

As if he hasn't been plenty "creative" already. If he's allowed to get any more "creative," he's likely to finesse the Jews plum out of their home.

Posted by: scaramouche at 16:25 | link | comments

Le mot juste: David Bellamy says that when it comes to global climate change, he’s a heretic, not a denier.

Me too.

From the times online:

Am I worried about man-made global warming? The answer is “no” and “yes”.

No, because the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction has come up against an “inconvenient truth”. Its research shows that since 1998 the average temperature of the planet has not risen, even though the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has continued to increase.

Yes, because the self-proclaimed consensus among scientists has detached itself from the questioning rigours of hard science and become a political cause. Those of us who dare to question the dogma of the global-warming doomsters who claim that C not only stands for carbon but also for climate catastrophe are vilified as heretics or worse as deniers.

I am happy to be branded a heretic because throughout history heretics have stood up against dogma based on the bigotry of vested interests. But I don’t like being smeared as a denier because deniers don’t believe in facts. The truth is that there are no facts that link the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide with imminent catastrophic global warming. Instead of facts, the advocates of man-made climate change trade in future scenarios based on complex and often unreliable computer models.

Name-calling may be acceptable in politics but it should have no place in science; indeed, what is happening smacks of McCarthyism, witch-hunts and all. Scientific understanding, however, is advanced by robust, reasoned argument based on well-researched data…

Let’s turn to Al Gore’s doom-laden Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth. First, what is the point of scaring the families of the world with tales that polar bears are heading for extinction? Last year Mitchell Taylor, of the US National Biological Service, stated that “of the 13 populations of polar bears in Canada, 11 are stable or increasing in number. They are not going extinct, or even appear to be affected at present.”

Why create alarm about a potential increase in the spread of malaria thanks to rising temperatures when this mosquito-borne disease was a major killer of people in Britain and northern Russia throughout the Little Ice Age?

Despite the $50 billion spent on greenwashing propaganda, the sceptics and their inconvenient questions are beginning to make their presence felt.

A recent survey of Klaus-Martin Schulte, of Kings College Hospital, of all papers on the subject of climate change that were published between 2004 and February of 2007 found that only 7 per cent explicitly endorsed a “so-called consensus” position that man-made carbon dioxide is causing catastrophic global warming. What is more, James Lovelock, the author and green guru, has changed his mind: he recently stated that neither Earth nor the human race is doomed.

Yes, melting sea ice around Greenland has recently opened up the fabled North West passage. And, yes, the years 2006 and 2007 have seen massive flooding in Europe. However, a quick dip into the records of the Royal Society – which ranked alongside Dr Lovelock as arch doomsters, before his change of mind – shows that dramatic fluctuations happened long before the infernal combustion engine began spewing out carbon dioxide…

 Seems to me a lot of the hot air is being belched out by the Goracle and his accolytes.

Posted by: scaramouche at 16:11 | link | comments

Two sermons: The American Thinker has the text of a sermon delivered by Richard Baehr, the site’s political director, at a Chicago synagogue. The sermon’s theme: “Why I am a Jewish Conservative.” (Baehr gave the same address to students at an Arkansas Christian college, where I suspect it may have been better received.) Here’s some of why Baehr says he aligns on the right:

Today we have a conflict that some neocons have called World War 4.  This war, like the Cold War, which by this logic must have been World War 3, is not a single battle on a single front, but one that may last decades. The Cold War lasted almost five decades. The neocons believe, as I do, that Israel is a front in the West's war with a global jihad. That jihadist threat comes from  Shiite Iran, on the verge of becoming a nuclear power, and from Sunni Al Qaeda and its financiers and proselytizers, who are either members of the Muslim Brotherhood, or wahhabists miseducated by Saudi Arabia.

 

Today this country faces serious challenges in Iraq and the Middle East, in dealing with Iran's nuclear program and its destabilizing effort in Lebanon, in battling the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, in keeping Pakistan, a nuclear power,  from collapsing and falling to Al Qaeda and the radical Islamists, with North Korea and their nuclear and missile programs , and even in our own hemisphere from Venezuela. It is certainly not a time to pull in our horns, and make believe the world would be a better place if we just left it alone.

 

Whatever one's views on the wisdom of the Iraq invasion, at this point, the debate needs to be on policy going forward. The neocon view is that the Middle East region will become far more dangerous for the US and its allies, including Israel, if it is perceived that we are withdrawing from Iraq before our job is done, hanging our heads in defeat. Our enemies in the current struggle and Israel's enemies keep probing to find weakness, to see if our side can deal with pain and fight on.  This country has a history of doing just that: of getting off the canvas and taking the fight to our enemies. 

 

In the case of Israel, the risks of inaction are higher. 40 % of the world's Jewish population is in Israel, and Iran is continually calling for the destruction of the Jewish state.  Of all the world's people, we Jews should know to take threats of annihilation seriously. The Jewish population worldwide is today 4 million below the level in 1939.  Could a second holocaust, this time perpetrated against Israel, be the final blow for our people? Would we have the strength to go on in a diaspora already reeling from a 50% intermarriage rate and a low birthrate?

 

It seems obvious to me that the Jewish future is in Israel, and the protection of  Israel has to be a primary concern of American Jews. I am a conservative at this moment, because I sense greater understanding of Israel's peril among conservative Jews than among liberal Jews, who sometimes seem embarrassed by Israel, and think it is Israel that has been the principal obstacle to achieving peace with the Palestinians and it neighbors.  A serious study of the history proves conclusively that this is not the case.

 

Israel needs to be high or at the top of our agenda, not way down the list after the minimum wage, stem cell research, no child left behind and Al Gore's new movie. So yes, I favor a foreign policy that does not shy away from action. And the brand of conservatism I have described here, I believe offers our best hope to expand our freedoms and continue our economic progress  at home, and to protect our freedom and Israel's from threats from abroad. And with that, I thank you, and say Amen. 

Amen.

On Saturday I heard another political conservative—Ranan Gissin, formerly, Ariel Sharon’s media spokesman—deliver an equally impassioned sermon at a synagogue. So impassioned, in fact, that he was frequently forced to catch the pink kippah he had failed to anchor with a clippy when, in the throes of rhetoric, it threatened to fall off his head. Even with all the kippah retrieval, however, he never missed a beat as he told the assembled (and here I’m boiling his words down to essentials) that Israel is a winner, that Israel’s enemies will not be allowed to destroy it, and that the Jewish claim to sovereignty over their ancient, ancestral homeland can never be legitimately be called into question, even though the media and others seem bent on doing so.

The most brilliant part of his sermon: He recounted how, at some point, he found himself in South Africa, the country that had hosted the infamous fiesta of Judenhass in Durban and the country, of course, that used to be reviled for its apartheid practices. Gissin recalled how he was set to address the smear that had branded Israel as the new “apartheid state” when, a couple of minutes prior to his talk, he was struck by a brainwave. Israel, he realized, “isn’t a state.” It’s a wildlife preserve--like Krugerpark, the renowned South African national park. Krugerpark was created to protect endangered species from the outside world. Similarly, Israel was created to protect what may well be the most endangered species on the planet: the Jews. And since the outside world wouldn’t build us such a park, we took it upon ourselves to build our own. In our preserve, as in Krugerpark, there are fences to keep out hunters and poachers. But there are also gates, so that people who don’t mean us harm can get in and out. And while we are perfectly willing to share our preserve, there is no way we will allow anyone to take it from us, and we plan to hold onto it for the sake of our species.

Amen to those words, too.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:27 | link | comments

Clueless on Newsnet: On CTV Newsnet’s The Verdict last evening, there was a replay of the Oct. 18 show wherein host Paula Todd and guests grappled with the issue of whether Canada “is a country of bigots.” The consensus seemed to be that it is, since what else save bigotry could explain why Canadians often react negatively to the sight of a woman encased head-to-toe in a black shroud, with only her eyes and hands exposed. After all, it’s her “free choice” to wear such a garment, isn’t it?

Well, maybe it is for some women some of the time. More often than not, however, it’s an obvious symbol of oppression and control—the real reason, I venture, why ordinary Canadians, who are often far less clueless than their elites, feel an almost visceral revulsion for it.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:03 | link | comments (1)

My favourite headline of the morning: Kid Rock jailed in Georgia waffle house brawl.

Yeah, you have to watch out for those waffle houses. They can get pretty rowdy, what with all the beaten eggs and whipped cream.

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

Bye bye Jaziri: Today may be the day we get to bid adieu to Said Jaziri, a “controversial” (the Ceeb’s word) Montreal imam. Jaziri is one of those supremacist types who wants sharia to become the law of the land, but that’s not why he’s about to be shown the door. No, being a multiculi Utopia, we here in Canada have rien de probleme embracing people who despise us. Jaziri was caught telling a big fat lie, though, which means there are valid grounds to ship his sorry keester back to Tunisia. Not that he isn't pulling out all the stops--including impregnating a local and embarking on a hunger strike--to try to stay.

The usual suspects--The Ceeb and Amnesty International--sound awfully sorry to see him go:

A controversial Montreal-based imam faces deportation Monday after efforts to get the Federal Court to intervene and stop border officials from removing him from Canada failed.

A lawyer for Muslim cleric Said Jaziri — who fervently supports the creation of faith-based sharia law for Canadian Muslims and has publicly denounced homosexuality as a sin — said the court rejected his application to stay in the country following a teleconference late Sunday afternoon.

Jaziri's last resort was an appeal to Citizenship and Immigration Minister Diane Finley, who could have used her discretionary authority under federal law to let him stay on humanitarian grounds. But officials at her office have made it clear that won't happen, the CBC's Rosemary Barton reported.

Jaziri and his supporters, including Muslim organizations and Amnesty International, have said he will likely be tortured or killed if he returns to his native Tunisia. But government lawyers maintain that Jaziri is exaggerating the dangers he faces if he returns there.

The Muslim cleric, who heads the Al-Qods mosque in Montreal, was ordered deported last year when officials revoked his refugee status, which was obtained in 1998.

The Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada claimed Tunisian-born Jaziri presented false information to get into Canada, and lied about having a criminal record in France, where he served jail time.

Tunisian Ambassador Abdessalem Hetira has said Jaziri will not be in any danger in Tunisia because his country respects human rights.

Jaziri has been on a hunger strike at an immigration centre in Laval since he was detained last week by authorities. His deportation may be delayed depending on whether officials feel he's healthy enough to travel, Barton reported.

Jaziri's wife, Nancy-Ann Adams, who is pregnant with the couple's first child, says she hopes Finley will intervene in the case.

Better yet, Nancy-Ann. Why not join him in Tunisia? I hear the weather’s lovely this time of year—and it’s a great place to raise the kids.

Oddly enough, the Ceeb report doesn't mention the impetus for the deportation. Seems Jaziri was more or less flying below the radar until  he was the victim of what was described as a “hate” attack. The attack—which was widely covered at the time—had the unintended consequence of getting people to ask questions about how he'd managed to finagle his way into Canada in the first place, and  the rest, as they say, is history. And if things go according to plans, Jaziri will soon be, too.

Update: Jaziri has left the building.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:37 | link | comments (1)

Kofi's new job: Just when you were counting on him shufflling off into well-deserved obscurity, the Kofinator comes roaring back:

Kofi Annan, that  eminence grise,

Looked around for a job that would please.

And blow me down! Zuts alors!

He’s pulling a Gore!

And all's I can say’s, “quel surprise.”

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:35 | link | comments

Auf Wiedersehen, Londonistan: Phyllis Chesler interviews Carol Gould, an American-born Jew who’s been living in London for the past thirty years. As Gould tells Chesler, she has decided to leave the metrolpolis that has morphed into Londonistan because the Judenhass has become unbearable:

Q: Why did you move to London from America in the first place?

A: I moved to London in January 1976 to do a postgraduate course in theatre and film studies with Temple University’s London campus. I was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Temple and wanted to have the ‘European experience’ as my sister had done in Italy as a music scholar.

Q: Why, after nearly 30 years, are you planning to leave London?

A: I am leaving because I find the level of Jew-hatred and America-loathing too much to handle now. Over the years I have allowed the nasty comments from British friends and work colleagues to roll off like water off a duck’s back, but since 9/11 the comments have been tinged with a visceral anger. I feel that ugly ‘You damned Jew; you bloody Yank’ hatred rising to the surface to such a degree that I could see myself being physically attacked very soon.

This is not paranoia; just this past week I was told by a man at my storage facility that he had taken a visiting American friend into a London pub and that the verbal abuse from ordinary English people was so severe that they had to leave. To be specific, this abuse takes the following shape: ‘How does it feel to be responsible for our British lads dying every day in Iraq so your friends in Israel can have some more guns to kill Palestinians?’ or ’ How many Americans can spell ‘dog?” or ‘Who are you and your Israeli friends going to slaughter next?’

Q: What kind of life did you have there, culturally, politically, professionally, and socially?

A: In my early years in the UK I have to say I had a rich life. I worked in the top echelons of theatre and TV and was highly respected by my colleagues. In recent years, however, I have found work hard to come by; when I have been in the workplace I have been at the receiving end of nasty comments about my Jewishness, about Americans and about being a ‘Zionist.’

When I defend my heritage, otherwise intelligent media colleagues tell me to ‘get that Holocaust chip off your shoulder.’ I was asked to leave a high-profile women’s video collective way back in 1999 when the Board - women from Britain and Africa — decided I was ‘too Zionist’ to be a ‘trusted member of the team.’

Q: Tell me about your plays, films, and other writing work.

A: In 1977 my very first plays, ‘Virgo Rising’ and ‘Barking to the Angel,’ were produced in London. I was all of twenty-three! In 1980 I had a very successful play at the Edinburgh Festival. After that I was taken on by Anglia Television as Associate Head of Drama and for ten mostly happy years was Commissioning Editor and Associate Producer/Script Editor on international Drama seen on PBS. I worked with John Rosenberg (American) and Sir John Woolf (British), who were true geniuses.

Some of my credits included ‘Tales of the Unexpected;’ ‘Cause Celebre’ by Sir Terence Rattigan; six PD James thrillers; adaptations of Somerset Maugham and of Eric Ambler.

Q: Tell me about your new-found fame as a media pundit.

A: I think I have achieved notoriety in Britain because I am the only Jewish American woman writing with passion and pride. Janet Daley is a superb Jewish-American pundit but she plays it safe and does not deal with the issues that I confront.

I have provoked the ire of the Anglo-Muslim community (not intentionally) by complaining about the virulent hatred I have witnessed at Islamic events in the UK. I also write about anti-Americanism in the UK and have upset a lot of Britons. I even invoked the ire of the famous British photographer Sally Soames because I happened to write about the disgraceful behaviour of the Manchester United fans when Jewish - American tycoon Malcolm Glazer bought that English football club.

Fans were wearing ‘Die, Glazer, Die!’ t-shirts at the first match after he sought to buy the club. I felt this was anti-Semitic and anti-American. Sally wrote to me that she was outraged that I had dared write about something I ‘know nothing about.’ As it happens, in one of my many lives I was once a professional tennis writer and photographer and I am also a sports nut! I stay up all night watching matches on TV.

I make lots of people angry, but I have also been honoured with an appearance on the legendary BBC ‘Any Questions?’ show hosted by Jonathan Dimbleby, and in November will be debating Shami Chakrabarti, Helena Kennedy QC and Trevor Phillips in Newcastle for the British-American Project on the issue of Faith and Justice.

Q: What frightens you?

A: I am frightened by the anger shown me by ordinary Brits. Yesterday, I went to mail a letter and an elderly Englishwoman came up to me and started shouting at me when I told her that perhaps we were not being told the whole story about the current national postal strike. She accused me of saying ‘My country is full of liars’ and then when I reminded her I was British, too, she scoffed and quite angrily said I could never be British. This is Brit-speak for ‘you fat little Jew Yank bitch, how dare you say you are one of us? ’

She then appeared in the pharmacy and shouted at me about sponging off the NHS (our health system.) It is hard to explain to Americans the anger provoked by Jews and Americans in the UK but I suggest your readers go to my website, Current Viewpoint, and read some of my recent articles about confrontations in London…

 

Thanks, Carol. I’ve just added it to my “favourites”. 

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:39 | link | comments

Nazis and Islamists: Put this one on your “must-read” list. From City Journal:

…Better than anyone before him, [German historian] Matthias Kuntzel [in his book Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11] makes sense of the deep and entangling historical ties between European National Socialism and the Muslim Brotherhood. “The idea of using suicide pilots to obliterate the skyscrapers of Manhattan originated in 1940s Berlin,” he notes. “Hitler envisioned having kamikaze pilots fly light aircraft packed with explosives and with no landing gear into Manhattan skyscrapers.” Like the 9/11 bombers, Hitler wanted “not merely to fight a military adversary, but to kill all Jews everywhere.”

Tariq Ramadan’s grandfather, Hassan al-Banna, founded the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 in the wake of the collapse of the Ottoman caliphate. The Brotherhood became to Islamism what the Bolsheviks were to Communism: “the ideological reference point and organization” for future radical movements. Al-Banna’s famous article, “The Industry of Death,” argued that “to a nation that perfects the industry of death and which knows how to die nobly, God gives proud life in this world and eternal grace in the life to come.”

Al-Banna and the Muslim Brotherhood were a profound influence on the founder of the Palestinian political movement—Haj Amin el-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, who, drawing on the underworld-come-to-the-surface that [historian Norman] Cohn described [in his 1957 book, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages] was “the first to translate European anti-Semitism into an Islamic context.” Kuntzel explains that “although Islamism is an independent, anti-Semitic, anti-modern mass movement, its main early promoters—the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the Mufti. . . . in Palestine—were supported financially and ideologically by agencies of the German National Socialist government.”

The Mufti, who spent the Second World War in Berlin broadcasting propaganda for the Nazis while recruiting Bosnian Muslims for the SS, translated Palestinian political interests into an extension of Hitler’s intentions to wipe out the Jews. The Mufti pointed to passages in the Koran referring to Jews as dangerous and inferior, as well as to Mohammed’s own behavior in beheading the entire male population of a Jewish tribe and expelling the other Jewish tribes from Medina. The Mufti and al-Banna exemplify the fanaticism that Harris writes about. Kuntzel describes how they relentlessly killed off liberals and moderates who might impede their Islamic agenda. Their success has been the tragedy of the modern Middle East.

Apologists for Islamism argue that, if only we can resolve the conflicts in Chechnya, Palestine, Kashmir, Nigeria, Southern Thailand, the southern Philippines, East Timor, and the cities of Europe for that matter, all will be well. But what’s at the heart of the Islamic conflict with modernity is the unvarnished political theology of Islam, which assumes that Muslims are destined to rule the earth. Hassan Butt, a former British Islamist, explains in his memoirs: “When I was still a member of what is probably best termed the British Jihadi Network . . . I remember how we used to laugh in celebration whenever people on TV proclaimed that the sole cause for Islamic acts of terror like 9/11, the Madrid bombings, and 7/7 was Western foreign policy . . . they also helped draw away any critical examination from the real engine of our violence: Islamic theology.”…

Memo to the West: It’s the theology, stupid.

This truth was self-evident more than nine decades ago to another academic: C. Snouck Hurgronje, a professor of Arabic at the University of Leiden in Holland. In his book Mohammedism: Lectures On Its Origins, Its Religious And Political Growth And Its Present State, published in 1916, Hurgronje wrote the following:

In the first years of the strife yet another duty was most emphatically impressed on the Faithful; jihad, i.e., readiness to sacrifice life and possessions for the defence of Islam, understood since the conquest of Mecca in 630, as the extension by force of arms of the authority of the Moslim state, first over the whole of Arabia, and soon after Mohammed’s death, over the whole world, so far as Allah granted His hosts the victory.

Hurgronje was writing at the time when Islam was definitely not in ascendence—before Wahabbi oil wealth; before the Muslim Brotherhood and its monstrous offspring Hamas, Al Qaeda, Islamic Jihad et al; before the Ayatollah Khomeini and the glorious Shia revolution and the revival of apocalyptic Messianism—when Islam was weak and defeated and in disarray. And yet he had no trouble pinpointing the essential, immutable crux of the faith—the jihad imperative and its agenda to Islamize the globe. You would think that we, who live in a far different age, and who see evidence of this agenda being played out on a daily basis, would be able to see what was plain to this Dutch academic all those years ago.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:34 | link | comments

Lost in translation: As Islam sees it, there’s a master copy of the Koran somewhere up in Heaven that’s been there, well, forever. When the Prophet finally hit the planet much later, and the Angel Gabriel divulged the contents of the book to him, he was merely recording something that had always been there, but had not yet been made public. Thus, he was privileged to receive God’s last—but, when you think about it, also his first—word to mankind (since the word was there, though unrevealed, from the get-go): Allah's final, perfect thoughts as dictated word for word to his final, perfect Transcriber.

Now, lo these many centuries later, an uppity chick who takes issue with some of the perfect contents—especially with the passage in which the Prophet enjoins men to raise a hand to “disobedient” wives—has taken it into her inferior little head that she has the right to tamper with perfection. From the Toronto Star:

For seven years Laleh Bakhtiar laboured over her English translation of the Qur'an, a version that is written from a woman's point of view and is also welcoming to non-Muslim readers.

Of all the 90,000 words she translated, there is just one, in chapter four, verse 34, that led to sharp criticism and controversy. It's from the section on women and describes how to deal with one who is "disobedient."

Most translations of the Qur'an, which Muslims believe to be the word of God revealed to Muhammad, say the woman should first be admonished, then left alone in her bed and then beaten, albeit lightly.

"When I got to chapter four I had to really look at this carefully," says Bakhtiar, a Chicago Islamic scholar who is the featured speaker at the 25th annual conference of the Canadian Council of Muslim Women, which opens on Saturday at Toronto's Noor Cultural Centre. "It took a lot of research time to see what it means.

"It's a command in the Qur'an, an imperative and the point is the Prophet never did it, it meant something else to him," continues Bakhtiar, 68, one of seven children of an American nurse and Iranian doctor. She concluded that the word idrib, which she found could have 26 different meanings, was best translated as "to go away" or "to leave," not some form of "to beat."

"Why choose the word to harm somebody, when that's not what the Prophet did? He was a model for humanity."

This new understanding was particularly important to Bakhtiar, who was trained as an educational psychologist and has worked as a counsellor with young Muslim women who were abused by their families. A practitioner of Sufism, the mystical stream in Islam, she looked on her interpretation as a "blessing" and welcomes, even encourages, the debate that comes with it.

"I just hope we keep the dialogue going so that one less Muslim woman is beaten in the name of God," she says. "That's my prayer, to get more women aware that there is an alternative. This has not been sanctioned by God; it's a criminal act."

Born in Tehran and raised in Washington, D.C., Bakhtiar returned to Iran with her husband, an Iranian architect, where she ran a publishing company and learned classical Arabic. (Raised a Christian, she converted to Islam in 1964.)

A mother of three, she returned to the U.S. in 1988 and earned a doctorate at the University of New Mexico. She has since written 20 books on Islam and translated 25 books about the faith.

Besides giving the text a female perspective, another strong motivator was her desire to offer a new English translation for non-Muslims and new Muslims. Instead of Allah, she uses God; instead of Isa, she uses the more familiar Jesus. Non-Muslims are not infidels or disbelievers, words she says are "loaded," but instead are those who are "ungrateful to God for his blessings."

"I tried to develop an inclusive translation so people from other faiths may read it and feel like it speaks to them as well, as a sacred text."

Some of her critics have cited her lack of fluency in modern Arabic as a shortcoming, a criticism that has not been applied to other translators who also are not native speakers, she maintains. "It's not a valid criticism, because the Qur'an is written in classical Arabic ... If you go through all the criticisms, when it comes down to it, the only difference is because I'm a woman. Obviously."

Some who study the Qur'an, including Nevin Reda, a University of Toronto doctoral student, have welcomed Bakhtiar's translation for the consistency of her language. Bakhtiar translated each Arabic word into an English equivalent and then stuck with that translation throughout the text as long as it worked in context. "That's something new and for me, it's really outstanding," said Reda.

Meanwhile, the head of one of Canada's leading Muslim organizations said he would not permit Bahktiar's book, The Sublime Quran, to be sold in the bookstore of the Islamic Society of North America (Canada). "Our bookstore would not allow this kind of translation," says Mohammad Ashraf, ISNA's secretary general. "I will consider banning it."

His objection is not that Bakhtiar is a female scholar, but that she was not trained at an academic institution accredited in the Muslim world – he cites the University of Medina in Saudi Arabia as such a place.

"This woman-friendly translation will be out of line and will not fly too far," he says. "Women have been given a very good place in Islam."

Walid Saleh, an associate professor of religion at the University of Toronto, notes that Bakhtiar's work is not unique, but is one of many attempts on the part of Muslims living in a changing world to come to terms with a text they still hold dear.

"She belongs to a long line of Muslim feminists, since the late 19th century, who have been attempting to make the Qur'an and Islam far more, in a sense, gender-equal than people think it is."…

There’s a word for women who mess with perfection and attempt to make the Qur’an and Islam far more, in a sense, gender-equal: blasphemer. One might as well try to translate the Koran from a Jew’s point of view, removing all the passages in which Jews are cursed, reviled, demonized, consigned to eternal Hellfire, or transformed into lowly beasts.

Of course, that would leave a gaping chasm in the text.

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

A serious disturbance of the brain: David Beidlin suggests that Condi Rice’s derangements may be the result of “Jerusalem Syndrome.”  I think she’s come down with a dreadful case of foggybottomosis. From israelinsider:

 US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's mediation in Jerusalem has caused many people to question her judgment. There is a recognized clinical condition known as "Jerusalem Syndrome", which causes some people here to lose their rational judgment when they arrive in Jerusalem, the cradle of the world's three great monotheistic religions, the place where Jewish prophets once flourished and the Christians relive the story of their Savior.

Deeply religious, Rice studies portions of the Bible every day, and no one can disturb her while she studies. Nothing is wrong with Bible study, except when Rice suddenly proclaims that she is on the ultimate mission of peace , that she herself is going to foster a peace settlement in the Middle East, and that the Palestinian state must be created immediately, and she seems mysteriously disconnected from the reality of the Arab war that continues against Israel, unabated, since 1948, spawned by the Arab League whose purpose, to this day, remains Israels obliteration.

Speaking to reporters while en route to Israel, Ms. Rice told the media that her goal was to achieve "security for the Israelis and dignity for the Palestinians", as if these are the characteristics of the Middle East conflict that has lasted for the past sixty years between Israel and the Arab world.

Meanwhile, as Ms. Rice says over and over she wants the Palestinian state to be created now, she also mentions to people around her she feels that the Palestinian cause is reminiscent of the civil rights struggle, which dominated the formative years of Rice's life. Rice was the daughter of a black clergyman whose life was on the line in the 1960's in a small Alabama town. Some of her close childhood friends were, indeed, murdered in a brutal attack on a local church.

Yet it seems Ms. Rice's seminal civil rights experience has distracted her from the reality.

While Ms. Rice may imagine the PLO is a spontaneous Palestinian Arab grass roots civil rights movement, she apparently never relates to the fact that that it was the Arab League that fostered the PLO in 1964, three years before the 1967 war, in order to incite the indigenous Arab population to join their war to liquidate Israel and liberate all of Palestine.

Ms. Rice never mentions the PLO covenant to destroy Israel remains in tact as the mandate for the PLO and its progeny, the Palestinian Authority, and that the PLO covenant has not changed, except for the 1974 amendment that allows the PLO to destroy Israel in stages, which allows the PLO to use diplomatic means to that end.

Perhaps the unkindest cut of all was Rice's comment to her colleagues that she compares Machmud Abbas to Martin Luther King, because they are both committed to peace.

If Ms. Rice had paid more attention to the guidelines the US State Department, she could have paid more attention to the fact Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades of the Fatah, commanded by Abbas himself, was designated by the US government on March 23rd, 2002, as a terrorist organization and that Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades was and is an integral part of Fatah, whose members regard Abbas as their leader. Ms. Rice could also relate to the fact that Abbas simply refuses to disband the Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades.

Instead, Ms. Rice lauds a terror organization which her own government defines as a terrorist group, while repeating, over and over, that she respects this same organization as a "moderate" entity. A symptom, perhaps, of Jerusalem Syndrome, since such a description bears no connection to reality…

 

Foggybottomosis it is.

Posted by: scaramouche at 22:28 | link | comments

You've got to be kidding: Liberal MP proposes "Pierre Trudeau Day."

I think even Margaret Trudeau Day would be a better idea.

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:59 | link | comments

Fat Al’s Cozy Carb’n Credit Cab’n: Tony Blankley explains those cockamamie offsets. From the Washington Times:

…Before reviewing Mr. Gore's various inanities that won him the Nobel, it is worth taking a look at one of his related projects: carbon offsets. As chairman and founder of Generation Investment Management — a firm that purchases carbon-dioxide offsets, Mr. Gore stands to further profit from what he sees as mankind's misery — which is OK by me. I'm glad to see he has finally developed the capitalist instinct (like his dad did with Occidental Petroleum and Armand Hammer).

 

But carbon offsets are a rather strange concept. Let me use a simple metaphor to explain it. Let's suppose that Mr. Gore goes to an Italian restaurant and eats a loaf of garlic bread, a plate of lasagna, a bowl of spaghetti and meatballs, an extra large pizza with seven toppings, a couple or three bottles of chianti and a large assortment of pastries. As a result he puts on another 10 pounds. But he is deeply concerned that mankind is getting too fat. So, he pays 10 peasants in Asia 10 dollars each to eat nothing for a week. Although they are already thin, by starving themselves for a week they each lose a pound. As a result, after a week, mankind is weight neutral. Mr. Gore weighs 10 pounds more, 10 Asians weigh 10 pounds less — and Mr. Gore gets another Nobel Peace Prize for his leadership in keeping mankind's waistline in check.

 

Of course, this example is not quite fair to Mr. Gore, because that imagined humanitarianism actually cost him cash money. In the real carbon-offset business, he looks forward to being paid for directing other carbon consumers to invest in carbon-neutral projects. But when Mr. Gore is personally using carbon, as when he flies in a Gulfstream jet belching carbon into the atmosphere, one of his companies would pay some other fella not to fly or to plant a tree or do something to offset Gore's carbon belching…

It strikes me that Al’s a lot like "Music Man" Harold Hill, who’s breezed into town to terrify folks into giving him lots of moolah:

"Well, you got trouble, my friends.

Right here, I say trouble right here on Planet Earth

With a capital "T" and that rhymes with "C"

And that stands for “con.”

We surely got trouble!

Right here on Planet Earth.

Lemme tell you ‘bout a way

That I can get your carbon ‘prints withdrawn…"

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:08 | link | comments

Take the money and run: The Brits are so desperate for failed “unassimilated” asylum seekers to return from whence they came that they’re going to bribe them to am-scray. From the Daily Mail:

Failed asylum seekers are to be offered up to £4,000 to go home voluntarily, it was revealed yesterday.

The support packages - which can include help towards private school fees - are intended to arrest an alarming slump in the number of bogus refugees being removed from the country.

But the proposals were last night attacked as an act of desperation by a Government failing to clear a backlog of 400,000 cases.

The deal includes money for housing, childcare fees and even help setting up a business. There is also a cash payment of £500 at the airport.

But the part of the increased package which provoked the most comment was the possibility that failed asylum seekers could claim money towards private school and university fees for their children.

It is estimated that only 7 per cent of British children attend a fee-paying school.  

The total budget for the scheme - to be met by the taxpayer - is £22million a year, officials said.

The Home Office has been offering £1,500 support packages to failed refugees since 2002 but the number taking the money is falling.

Last year, 5,327 accepted the payment and went home voluntarily but in the first half of this year the number fell to 1,883.

Shadow Home Secretary David Davis said: "It is extraordinary that the Government, having so patently failed to do its job, now has to bribe asylum seekers to return by paying for private schooling in their country of origin.

"If these people are able to be sent back, they should be sent back. No questions."

Every bogus refugee will be entitled to around £2,500 under the deal, while some can bid for up to £4,000.

Those who agree to go home hold a meeting with officials to agree the level of support they will receive.

The list of what's on offer includes "schooling fees, state or private". Officials will agree to the payment if they are satisfied it will "best suit" the needs of the family.

For example, failed asylum claimants could argue that their children - who may have been in the UK for many years - need extra help learning the language of their home country to help them catch up with other pupils.

The claimants would not receive any cash for the schooling themselves. Instead, it would be paid direct to the school by the International Organisation of Migration, which runs the scheme.

Any payments would have to be within the £4,000 total offered…

Sounds like the asylum-seekers are running the inmates.

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

Boo flippin’ hoo: Islam Online has a tear-jerking tale of a poor, unfortunate Gazan who is stuck in Hamastan because—get this—Israel won’t affirm his identiy:

JABALYA, Gaza Strip — Palestinians in the isolated Gaza Strip have almost lost any shimmer of hope to get official identity cards or documents issued by Israeli occupation authorities, who scarcely do it.

"I am Mr Nobody," Mahmoud Jnaid, a Gazan returnee who failed to get an ID after 12 years of his return to Gaza, told Reuters Saturday, October 20.

Earlier this month, frustrated Jnaid doused himself in petrol and tried to set himself alight before onlookers overpowered him.

Jnaid said he tried to end the nightmare he lives since his return to Gaza as he tried in vain to get official documents from Israel, which he needs to travel as well as for daily basics like opening a bank account or getting a driving license.

"When I poured the petrol on my body I felt life was the same as death."

Jnaid was born in Jordan after his family fled their home in the coastal Strip after the 1967 Six-Day War.