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

Alphabetic review: My favourite political cartoonist, the National Post’s Gary Clement, has an amusing 2007 A-Z that takes up nearly the entire front page of today’s paper. It inspired me to have my own alphabetic go at the year that ends at the stroke of midnight:

A is for Annapolis, which was supposed to be dramatic.

B is for Bush, who’s become so “pragmatic.”

C is for Condi, who hasn’t got a clue.

D is for democracy—for me and for you.

E is for effective—what the War of Ideas being waged against us has been.

F is for Foggy Bottom, where bad thinking is alive and well, and which you can always count on to come up with some loopy, dhimmified “spin.”

G is for Gitmo, where some zanies are still imprisoned.

H is for hidden—what Conservative P.M. Stephen Harper’s agenda was supposed to be, but clearly isn’t.

I is for Israel, the despised ‘Zionist entity.’

J is for Jerusalem, at the core of Jewish identity.

K is for ka-ching, the sound of Abbas counting up his mega-takings.

L is for lucrative, as in “it’s lucrative to be a two-time loser, so long as you’re willing to play along with the charade that peace is something you’re making.”

M is for mullahs, Iran’s ruling “clarse.”

N is for the NIE report, which, if there’s any justice, should be  inserted—very slowly—up Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s arse.

O is for Obama, Oprah’s beamish boy.

P is for Pakistan, which the religious zanies are attempting to destroy.

Q is for Queen Elizabeth. I’m kind of fond of the old broad.

R is for reality. If people finally managed to grasp it, wouldn’t it be odd?

S is for superpower, what the jihadists long to destroy and hope to become.

T is for the truth. It’s there if you care to see it, old chum.

U is for “Umbrella,” that unbearable, hiccoughing Rhianna hit.

V is for Viagra, the subject all the infernal SPAM, which, even with a filter, somehow manages to get through and makes me want to spit.

W is for Wahhabis, who want to make us “submit.”

X is for X-ray—of the late Benazir Bhutto’s skull. CSI Islamabad (for those who care to see it).

Y is for yesterday, what the jihadists hope to turn back the clock to.

Z is for zanies—and all the zany places (Sudan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Up-the-Wazooistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, etc.) where zanies come from and like to flock to.

And with that, I bid you all ta-ta until 2008!

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:43 | link | comments

Rampant absurdity: An editorial in the Jerusalem Post lashes out at Condi Rice’s absurd analogies and the international community’s ridiculous backlash against the “checkpoints” which save Israeli lives:

The story of the murder of Ahikam Amichai and David Rubin, two off-duty soldiers on a hike, is a reminder of the bloodthirstiness of our enemies. It is a story of terrorists who look for any opportunity to kill Jews, regardless of who or where they are.

As it happens, Amichai and Rubin were soldiers, but there is no reason to doubt that the Fatah and Islamic Jihad terrorists who killed them would have been equally eager to kill Israeli civilians, as well.

It is this context that a reported comment from a closed meeting at Annapolis comes to mind: "Like the Israelis, I know what it is like to go to sleep at night, not knowing if you will be bombed, of being afraid to be in your own neighborhood, of being afraid to go to your church," US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said.

But, according to the Washington Post, Rice's recollections as a African-American child in the South, being told she could not use certain water fountains or eat in certain restaurants, also made her understood the feelings and emotions of the Palestinians.

"I know what it is like to hear to that you cannot go on a road or through a checkpoint because you are Palestinian," she said. "I understand the feeling of humiliation and powerlessness... There is pain on both sides. This has gone on too long."

At first glance, Rice's reported ecumenical empathy may seem entirely natural and appropriate for America's top diplomat. Indeed, empathy for the suffering on both sides of a conflict is warranted. But a second moment's thought reveals part of Rice's comparison to be terribly misplaced and no guide for policy.

Just imagine, for example, that Rice were to express even the faintest degree of understanding for the barbaric killing of Pakistani leader Benazir Bhutto, as being the result of "humiliation and powerlessness." Plainly, that would be absurd and unconscionable. But so, too, is to suggest that checkpoints cause terrorism, rather than that terrorism necessitates checkpoints.

Checkpoints, the security fence and targeted killings are all security measures that some in the West consider humanitarian atrocities and have even branded as "apartheid." The Russian foreign minister, displaying just one of his government's disqualifications for any moderating role, recently called Gaza a "gigantic prison."

It is extremely disturbing that Rice, even in the context of "balanced" sympathy for Israelis, would pile on to this libel of Israel by injecting a racial element into her criticism of such security measures.

What Rice should be saying is that Palestinian terrorism victimizes both sides: Israelis directly and Palestinians indirectly, but necessitates defensive Israeli actions that would automatically cease if terrorism were to end.

If there is analogy to darker days in the American South, it is to the fear that African-Americans had of being lynched if caught alone in the wrong place, and to the complete lack of confidence that local authorities, if they bothered to catch the killers, would bring them to justice.

While the Palestinian Authority has claimed to have arrested suspects in this latest murder case, we have seen how this revolving door works. What credibility do such arrests have, moreover, when the same PA leadership bitterly condemns Israel for killing terrorist kingpins in Gaza, issues posters of Palestine encompassing all of Israel, and continues to broadcast songs describing Israeli cities such as Haifa, Acre and Jaffa as part of "Palestine?"

Either the Palestinians are struggling to eliminate Israel, or to build a state alongside Israel. How is Rice encouraging the Palestinians to build rather than destroy when she paints Israeli security measures as "racist?"

There is a way to empathize with both sides without resorting to libel against Israel. President George W. Bush did so constructively in his famous speech calling for a new Palestinian leadership in June 2002: "I can understand the deep anger and despair of the Palestinian people," he said. "For decades, you've been treated as pawns in the Middle East conflict. Your interests have been held hostage to a comprehensive peace agreement that never seems to come, as your lives get worse year by year. You deserve democracy and the rule of law. You deserve an open society and a thriving economy. You deserve a life of hope for your children."

Israel is more than ready to do its part to fulfill this vision. The international community has pledged billions to pay for it. What is necessary is to stop helping the Palestinian leadership make excuses for not doing its part.

Stop helping it? How can they do that when they keep propping up that sly fox/excuse-maker  Mahmoud Abbas by sending him gazillions in jizya?

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:43 | link | comments

Totalitarian blow job:  President (Ahmadinejad) felicitates Sudan on National Day.

Oh, wait. He's felicitating Castro, too.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:22 | link | comments

Poor deer: Poor Bilawal Bhutto. Thrust into the international spotlight at far too tender an age—he’s a wet-behind-the-ears 19—he has the stunned expression of a Bambi caught in the headlights of an oncoming Mack truck. (Which is, in fact, exactly what he is.)

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:08 | link | comments

Be afraid. Be very afraid: Reza Aslan urges us to be wary of clueless wishful thinkers—like the Democrats’ clean favored and imperially slim presidential contender, Barack Obama. From the Washington Post (link via Martin Kramer):

Every time I hear about how Sen. Barack Obama is going to "re-brand" America's image in the Middle East, I can't help but think about Jimmy Carter's toast.

When the idealistic Democrat came to Iran in 1977 to ring in the new year with Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the country's much-despised despot, throngs of young, hopeful Iranians lined the streets to welcome the new American president. After eight years of the Nixon and Ford administrations' blind support for the shah's brutal regime, Iranians thrilled to Carter's promise to re-brand America's image abroad by focusing on human rights. That call even let many moderate, middle-class Iranians dare to hope that they might ward off the popular revolution everyone knew was coming. But at that historic New Year's dinner, Carter surprised everyone. In a shocking display of ignorance about the precarious political situation in Iran, he toasted the shah for transforming the country into "an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world." With those words, Carter unwittingly lit the match of revolution.

It's just this sort of blunder -- naive, well-meaning, amateurish, convinced that everyone understands the goodness of U.S. intentions -- that worries me again these days. That's because a curious and dangerous consensus seems to be forming among the chattering classes, on both the left and the right, that what the United States needs in these troubling times is not knowledge and experience but a "fresh face" with an "intuitive sense of the world," and that the mere act of electing Obama will put us on the path to winning the so-called war on terror.

The argument usually goes something like this: Imagine that a young Muslim boy in, say, Egypt, is watching television when suddenly he sees this black man -- the grandson of a Kenyan Muslim, no less! -- who spent a small part of his childhood in Indonesia, taking the oath of office as president of the United States. Suddenly, the boy realizes that the United States is not the demonic, anti-Islamic place he's always been told it was. Meanwhile, all around the Muslim world, other young would-be jihadists have a similar epiphany. "Maybe Osama bin Laden is wrong," they think. "Maybe America is not so bad after all."…

Mind you, Republican wishful thinkers—like George W. Bush and his campaign to win “hearts and minds” by sending Karen Hughes galumphing across the Mideast with all the finesse of an elephant suffering from lumbago—haven’t done a whole lot better in that department.

Word to the un-wised up: it's not about "re-branding" the U.S. It's about "de-fanging" the jihadists.

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

The bravest woman in Canada : Her name is Homa Arjomand. She’s the Iranian-born woman who spearheaded the anti-sharia campaign that prevented the Ontario government from giving legal teeth to Islamic law. She has put herself in the crosshairs of all the zanies who don’t like uppity women or critics of sharia, and who would no doubt like her to keep her mouth shut. Here she is being interviewed by FrontPage magazine:

FP: You are originally from Iran . Can you tell us a bit about your background and how you ened up leaving Iran ?

Arjomand: I was born and raised in Iran . At the age of 17, I started my social/political activities with a group of medical students and became a dissident against the Islamic regime. I studied in England with the sponsorship of the National Iranian Oil Company. I returned back to Iran and worked as a teacher in various colleges and universities.

In the winter of 1989, I fled Iran through the mountains because my life was endangered by the Islamic Regime. I have lived in Canada since 1990 and have attended and organized countless meetings, international conferences, panel discussions and forums on issues related to women’s, children’s and gay and lesbian rights. I did many interviews with leading newspapers and TV programs in Europe and North America defending secularism.

When the Ontario Arbitration Act allowed family disputes to be resolved by faith-based arbitrations, as an advocator of secularism I formed the International Campaign against Sharia Court in Canada to oppose Sharia Court and the restrictions that political Islam was imposing on women and children and all other faith-based arbitration.

In Toronto, I ran a social talk show on Rogers Cable which dealt with such issues as children’s rights, women’s rights, gay and lesbian rights and elder abuse. Right now I am working as transitional counselor for women experiencing domestic violence.

FP: Tell us about the International Campaign against Sharia Court in Canada .

Arjomand: While living in Iran I saw the rise of political Islam and with it the application of Sharia law.

The rise of Political Islam pushed back the women’s liberation movement in Iran and lowered the standards of that society by legalizing gender apartheid and by enforcing religious family laws that openly discriminate against women and children.

As the power of political Islam grew in Iran , I witnessed the execution of all my fellow activists for their belief and work in human and women’s rights issues in Iran .

I know for a fact that discrimination and gender-based persecution in areas of marriage, divorce, child custody and so on are reasons why many women flee the societies which are ruled by Political Islam and seek refuge in Canada and the West.

For the past 12 years I have worked as a transitional counselor for abused women in Canada . Many of my clients come from so-called “Muslim communities.” I help these women and children to escape abusive and often dangerous family situations and to start a new life in a safe and secure home.

In my work I often see the unfair treatment of women and children when they use faith-based arbitration. Most of these women receive very little in the way of financial support and often have no right to see their children. Sometimes after a divorce, the father will send his children -- particularly the girls -- back to his home country to be raised by a family member and then push them to marry at a very young age even though they are Canadian Citizens.

On October 23^rd, 2003 , Mr. Syed Mumtaz Ali, President of the Canadian Society of Muslims, announced the opening of the Islamic Institute of Civil Justice. In his announcement, Mr. Ali said that to be a ‘good Muslim’, you must use Sharia law for family legal matters. This political statement was not only coercive but also a direct threat to devout Muslims who prefer to use Canadian laws.

Mr. Ali’s statement shocked me because his proposal had nothing to do with someone’s personal belief; it was in fact very political. He claimed his legal authority was based on Ontario law. Through my work as a transitional counselor, I was well aware that faith-based arbitrations were occurring. However, I had wrongly assumed it was being practiced illegally, behind closed doors.

At the time I did not believe that Canada would permit arbitration of family legal matters based on religious laws. However, when I investigated further, I discovered that in the Arbitration Act of 1991, Article 32, Conflict of Laws, did indeed permit family arbitrations to be based on religious laws. This discovery saddened and worried me and other activists. To us, as experienced defenders of women and children’s rights, the Arbitration Act of 1991 provided a green light for political Islam to widen its reach and tighten its grip on the lives of Muslims living in Canada . We felt it was our duty to inform the Canadian public of this threat to their freedoms.

All of us were motivated by a common concern that political Islam was trying to expand in Canada by promoting the use of family arbitrations based on Sharia law. We were sure that the rise of Sharia court in Canada was not just a coincident. It was part of a global move of political Islam.

Our campaign started in Toronto on October 30^th, 2003 with a handful of supporters, and today it has grown to a coalition of 183 organizations from 14 countries with over a thousand activists, who volunteer their time and skills.

FP: Your thoughts on the recent tragic honor killing of Aqsa Parvez?

Arjomand: Aqsa Parvez is obviously another victim of honor killing. She has been tried and sentenced to death by her family’s belief, for not honoring the backward culture and traditions which are promoted and guarded by religious movements -- in particular Islamic movement globally.

Honor killing is a punishment for the women who act not according to the religion, tradition and culture imposed on them. To be more precise it is a punishment for the ones who desire to run their own lifestyle and choose their own partner. The victims are women and young girls who have thirst to be free and are not willing to compromise for less than a modern and humane life style.

The death of Aqsa Parvez at the age of 16 is just a tip of the iceberg in Canada , where respect of backward cultures and religions comes before women’s and children’s rights, where cultural ghettoes have become an ideal heaven to crush any desire in women to be free.

In the case of Aqsa Parvez, a brave girl who put herself at the forefront of the struggle for a well deserved human life, the Islamic groups that promote Islamic law and Islamic schools and are looking for more shares in power should be held responsible the most. They are the ones who push for enclosed and regressive communities in the heart of Canada and have created little Irans , Afghanistans , Somalias and Pakistans . They are the ones to blame for convincing families and individuals to accept the barbaric rules and regulations, and for not having any mercy for their own children and family members.

This cruelty to our children and women should not be tolerated and must be condemned strongly. Harsh punishment must be considered for those who abuse or victimize children and women under so-called Islamic action.

FP: What is the nature of the Islamic regime in Iran ?

Arjomand: The Islamic regime of Iran by nature is Islamic based on Islamic ideology. It is well known as anti-freedom, anti–women and anti-secularism. Its brutal laws represent anti-modernism and anti all progressive social values. This regime is founded on the principles of terror, imprisonment, torture, execution, and stoning.

FP: Share with us some more of your thoughts on political Islam.

Arjomand: Political Islam as a movement is very active in politics and is after its own state and its share of power. Other aspects such as culture and laws serve its political desire and its political needs. This movement rides on the mass of people who are oppressed and isolated. They are the ones who are out of patience with discrimination and oppression and have no hope for social improvement by parties in power and have no hope for modern and progressive alternatives. This movement appears as anti-Western, not necessarily anti-‘western government’, but rather anti ‘western values and standards'. It is misogynistic and goes against modernism. It is extremely anti-secular.

This is a movement that will not hesitate to do anything in order to push back its oppositions and gain recognition by the states in the West. This is sometimes done through terrorizing people by implanting bombs in the busiest streets, cinemas, subway stations, hospitals and schools. This creates a parallel power structure within the surrounding societies. This movement will do anything to penetrate the Legal system, whether it uses a bad piece of legislation such as the Ontario Arbitration Act 1991 or by taking the law into its own hands by imposing a completely different structure of human relations within society. This is done by removing civic culture where citizens are free and equal and replacing it with ethics laid down in Sharia.

This movement has no actual economic or social plan, but it is aware that any form of democracy in countries such as Iran , Iraq , Pakistan and Egypt would end up in a mass secular uprising and the growth of labor movements. Even in Saudi Arabia no Sheik can survive more than a few days if true democracy were allowed to exist…

That’s why the Wahhabis are doing their utmost to subvert democracy around the world, funding, among other anti-freedom endeavours, what Walid Phares calls The War of Ideas. The aim: to “restore” the caliphate and establish the primacy of Allah’s law world-wide.

For 2008, the goal of all those who love freedom and bristle at the thought of having to live under the yoke of totalitarian sharia: find some way to break through the Salafis’ smoke and mirrors and our own social doctrine of multiculturalism which helps keep it in place (the self-loathing and self-abnegation at the core of the environmental movement also gives it a boost) and get out the message to as many people as possible. That’s the only shot we have at turning back the tide (more like a tsunami) that threatens to wash us away.

A very Happy and Free New Year to all!

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:17 | link | comments

The Academic jihad: I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve heard someone comment about Israel’s pathetic and inadequate “P.R.” If only the Jews, who, after all are supposed to be so clever, could figure out a way to make Israel “look good” in the media and more effectively make its case, the problems, supposedly, would melt away. (The Canada Israel Committee apparently buys this idea because it emails me an intriguing Israeli achievement on a regular basis—part of its campaign to persuade people to like Israel because it does such good things.)

How naïve these P.R.-advocates are. As Walid Phares writes in The War of Ideas, Israel hasn’t stood a chance against the Wahabi oil dollars, which have essentially bought up great swaths of Western academia, thus turning it into the whore of the jihad:

From the early 1990s, considerable Wahabi money was made available for the “academic jihad.” Both government and independent emirs offered money to be invested in the West to “teach about Islam, correct the image of it, and better explain the real problems in the Middle East.” There benign initial offers couldn’t be refused by academic institutions and think tanks hungry to better educate students and better inform them public about this complex region of the world, form which many civilizations emerged. At first sight, the “nice,” philanthropic packaging of these “grants,” in an environment stripped of the capacity to see through the ruse, enabled the subtle assault to penetrate defences smoothly. From coast to coast in North America, and from the Mediterranean to the North Sea, a wave of oil funding hit university after university, college after college, and research center after research center, as well as public libraries, museums, and other places of learning. The offers were coated as strictly “academic”—neutral, balanced, and inclusive. On the donor end, however, the objectives were fully ideological: further the cause of Islam as they envisioned it, support the Palestinian cause as the sole issue in the Middle East, and plant the seeds of the concept of the illegitimate West. This real agenda by the donors merged with the anti-American, anti-Western, and in some cases anti-Semitic elements of the extreme left and extreme right in America and other Western societies.

That mention of Wahabi money infiltrating libraries goes a long way toward explaining why, not long after 9/11, I happened upon a little video gem in the kiddie section of my local library. There, among the Disney flicks and Barney the Dinosaur tapes was a title that leapt out at me because it seemed so out of place. Its title: Osama bin Laden, a non-threating profile. I was able to trace the film back to an outfit in Boulder, Colorado. Run by former denizens of Hollywood, Bunny and Norman Strasser, the company seemed quite legit, producing films for the likes of Shell Oil and other corporate stars. I had a mostly friendly email exchange with Bunny at the time, but she would never reveal who had commissioned such a bizarrely-titled film (which, fulfilling its non-threatening mandate, made Osama look like a Muslim Robin Hood). At the time I had a hunch that Wahabis might have been involved; I have seen no reason, in the ensuing years, to amend my initial assumption.

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:42 | link | comments

 Steyn on the "line": From NRO:

It’s worth noting that Muslims next door in India are antipathetic to jihad. Yet they are ethnically and religiously indistinguishable from the fellows in Islamabad wiring up one-year old babies as unwitting suicide bombers. The only reason one’s an Indian and the other’s a Pakistani is because of where some British cartographer decided to draw the line in 1947. Since then, Indian Muslims have been functioning members of a modern pluralist democracy, while Pakistani Muslims have been mired in incompetence, backwardness and dictatorship, and embraced jihadism as the most viable escape route. Reversing that pathology would have been beyond Benazir Bhutto’s pretty face.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:29 | link | comments

Maureen Dowd, New-Age wackjob: Newsbusters  deconstructs La Dowd's embrace of crystals, tribal shamanism, rolfing and other New-agey ephemera.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:02 | link | comments

Straight shooting from Newt: Who knew that a man I used to revile (back in those living-in-a-bubble days when I was a clueless lefty) could talk such sense? Here’s part of a speech he recently gave to a Jewish organization. I found it on the CCD’s public message forum:

…Our current problem is tragic. You have an administration whose policy is inadequate being opposed by a political left whose policy is worse, and you have nobody prepared to talk about the policy we need. Because we are told if you are for a strong America, you should back the Bush policy even if it's inadequate, and so you end up making an argument in favor of something that can't work. So your choice is to defend something which isn't working or to oppose it by being for an even weaker policy. So this is a catastrophe for this country and a catastrophe for freedom around the world. Because we have refused to be honest about the scale of the problem.

Let me work back. I'm going to get to Iran since that's the topic, but I'm going to get to it eventually. Let me work back from Pakistan. The dictatorship in Pakistan has never had control over Wiziristan. Not for a day. So we've now spent six years since 9/11 with a sanctuary for Al-Qaida and a sanctuary for the Taliban, and every time we pick up people in Great Britain who are terrorists, they were trained in Pakistan.

And our answer is to praise Musharraf because at least he's not as bad as the others. But the truth is Musharraf has not gotten control of terrorism in Pakistan. Musharraf doesn't have full control over his own government. The odds are even money we're going to drift into a disastrous dictatorship at some point in Pakistan. And while we worry about the Iranians acquiring a nuclear weapon, the Pakistanis already have 'em, So why would you feel secure in a world where you could presently have an Islamist dictatorship in Pakistan with a hundred-plus nuclear weapons? What's our grand strategy for that?

Then you look at Afghanistan. Here's a country that's small, poor, isolated, and in six years we have not been able to build roads, create economic opportunity, wean people off of growing drugs. A third of the GDP is from drugs. We haven't been able to end the sanctuary for the Taliban in Pakistan. And I know of no case historically where you defeat a guerrilla movement if it has a sanctuary. So the people who rely on the West are outbribed by the criminals, outgunned by the criminals, and faced with a militant force across the border which practiced earlier defeating the Soviet empire and which has a time horizon of three or four generations. NATO has a time horizon of each quarter or at best a year, facing an opponent whose time horizon is literally three or four generations. It's a total mismatch.

Then you come to the direct threat to the United States, which is Al-Qaida. Which, by the way, we just published polls. One of the sites I commend to you is AmericanSolutions.com. Last Wednesday we posted six national surveys, $428,000 worth of data. We gave it away. I found myself in the unique position of calling Howard Dean to tell him I was giving him $400,000 worth of polling. We have given it away to both Democrats and Republicans. It is fundamentally different from the national news media. When asked the question "Do we have an obligation to defend the United States and her allies?" the answer is 85 percent yes. When asked a further question "Should we defeat our enemies?" - it's very strong language - the answer is 75 percent yes, 75 to 16.

The complaint about Iraq is a performance complaint, not a values complaint.

When asked whether or not Al-Qaida is a threat, 89 percent of the country says yes. And they think you have to defeat it, you can't negotiate with it. So now let's look at Al-Qaida and the rise of Islamist terrorism.

And let's be honest: What's the primary source of money for Al-Qaida? It's you, recirculated through Saudi Arabia. Because we have no national energy strategy, when clearly if you really cared about liberating the United States from the Middle East and if you really cared about the survival of Israel, one of your highest goals would be to move to a hydrogen economy and to eliminate petroleum as a primary source of energy.

Now that's what a serious national strategy would look like, but that would require real change.

So then you look at Saudi Arabia. The fact that we tolerate a country saying no Christian and no Jew can go to Mecca, and we start with the presumption that that's true while they attack Israel for being a religious state is a sign of our timidity, our confusion, our cowardice that is stunning.

It's not complicated. We're inviting Saudi Arabia to come to Annapolis to talk about rights for Palestinians when nobody is saying, "Let's talk about rights for Christians and Jews in Saudi Arabia. Let's talk about rights for women in Saudi Arabia."

So we accept this totally one-sided definition of the world in which our enemies can cheerfully lie on television every day, and we don't even have the nerve to insist on the truth. We pretend their lies are reasonable. This is a very fundamental problem. And if you look at who some of the largest owners of some of our largest banks are today, they're Saudis.

You keep pumping billions of dollars a year into countries like Venezuela, Iran and Saudi Arabia, and Russia, and you are presently going to have created people who oppose you who have lots of money. And they're then going to come back to your own country and finance, for example, Arab study institutes whose only requirement is that they never tell the truth. So you have all sorts of Ph.D.s who now show up quite cheerfully prepared to say whatever it is that makes their funders happy - in the name, of course, of academic freedom. So why wouldn't Columbia host a genocidal madman? It's just part of political correctness. I mean, Ahmadinejad may say terrible things, he may lock up students, he may kill journalists, he may say, "We should wipe out Israel," he may say, "We should defeat the United States," but after all, what has he done that's inappropriate? What has he done that wouldn't be repeated at a Hollywood cocktail party or a nice gathering in Europe?

And nobody says this is totally, utterly, absolutely unacceptable. Why is it that the No.1 threat in intelligence movies is the CIA?

I happened the other night to be watching an old movie, To Live and Die in L.A., which is about counterfeiting. But the movie starts with a Secret Service agent who is defending Ronald Reagan in 1985, and the person he is defending Ronald Reagan from, is a suicide bomber who is actually, overtly a Muslim fanatic. Now, six years after 9/11, you could not get that scene made in Hollywood today.

Just look at the movies. Why is it that the bad person is either a right-wing crazed billionaire, or the CIA as a government agency. Go look at the Bourne Ultimatum. Or a movie like the one that George Clooney made, which was an absolute lie, in which it implied that if you were a reformist Arab prince, that probably the CIA would kill you. It's a total lie. We actually have SEALs protecting people all over the world. We actually risk American lives protecting reformers all over the world, and yet Hollywood can't bring itself to tell the truth, (a) because it's ideologically so opposed to the American government and the American military, and (b), because it's terrified that if it said something really openly, honestly true about Muslim terrorists, they might show up in Hollywood. And you might have somebody killed as the Dutch producer was killed.

And so we're living a life of cowardice, and in that life of cowardice we're sleepwalking into a nightmare...

Indeed. As I read that line, a quote by Shakespeare popped into my head: “The coward dies a thousand times before his death. The valiant never tastes of death but once.”

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:38 | link | comments

Teeny torah: Israelis scientists, who apparently have a lot of spare time on their hands, have managed to shrink the complete Hebrew bible, vowels and all, to the size of a speck. From the Ceeb:

Scientists have succeeded in writing a full version of the Hebrew Bible — including vowel points — in a space smaller than the size of a pinhead.

Using a scientific device called a Focused Ion Beam, scientists in Israel wrote the 300,000-word tome onto a 0.5-square-millimetre chip.

Tiny particles of gallium ions were beamed onto a silicon surface covered with a thin layer of gold (20 nanometres thick) to create the etching — similar, they said, to using a stream of water to carve into soft soil.

The nano-Bible project was developed by the Russell Berrie Nanotechnology Institute as part of an educational program that asked: "How small can the Bible be?"

The project looked at how to store information using small DNA or other bio-molecules, as well as how to create nanometric structures and imaging.

"The nano-Bible project demonstrates the ability of miniaturization at our disposal," said Ohad Zohar, the institute's scientific adviser for educational programs, in a recent press release.

The team is now trying to photograph the nano-Bible using special technology in order to enlarge it 10,000 times for display on a giant wall.

"In this picture, which will be seven metres by seven metres, it will be possible to read the entire Bible with the naked eye. Near this picture, the original — the nano-Bible itself, which is the size of a grain of sugar — will be displayed," Zohar said.

The mad miniturizationists better not try that with a Qur’an—if they know what’s good for them, that is.

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

Hail the conquering (but dead) hero: A tiny minority of Jordanians, citizens of a “moderate” Arab nation, got together yesterday to honour the passing of one of their heroes. From AP via the IHT:

About 2,000 Jordanians demonstrated in the capital on Saturday to commemorate former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein on the one-year anniversary of his execution.

Some supporters in Amman's commerical downtown district waved black, white, green and red flags of Saddam's ruling Baath party and distributed a party newspaper, "al-Wahda," meaning unity, bearing Saddam's picture on the front page.

The protestors, including Jordanian Baathists, leftists and other opposition groups, shouted allegiance to the Baath party, which ruled Iraq under Saddam. The demonstration ended peacefully.

Saddam, toppled by the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, was executed on Dec. 30 after being convicted of crimes against humanity and war crimes for the killings of 148 Shiite Muslims in a 1982 crackdown on the town of Dujail, north of Baghdad.

But he remains revered by sympathizers of his regime and among some, mainly Sunni Arabs, who see his downfall as the start of the chaos in Iraq.

More than 700,000 Iraqis have fled to Jordan to escape the turmoil in their homeland, part of a wave of some 2.5 million Iraqi refugees across the region. But Saturday's protest was made up of Jordanian sympathizers.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:59 | link | comments

Hasta la vista, '07: Some valjeans for the year that was:

Amy Winehouse, one must stress,

What a talent; what a mess.

Go to rehab? Yes, yes, yes.

 

Rosie O, on a show,

Shot her mouth off, had to go.

Do we miss her? A thousand times, no.

 

Mohammed Bear, Khartoum stuffie,

Though very cute and really fluffy

Made Sudan zanies all hot and huffy.

 

That Condi Rice, she means so well.

Wants “peace” and  “justice,” you can tell.

Meanwhile paves our road to Hell.

 

Al Gore, go figure, is now a god.

Al-lah Gore—how very odd.

While some bowed down, some just guffawed.

 

Osama bin Laden natters on and on.

Holy war, encore. It’s such a yawn.

Am-scray, you bore. Vamoose!  Begone!

 

Ahmadinejad, though kind of kooky,

Hasn’t got a single nukey.

So saith the NIE. How spooky!

 

King Abdullah, compassionate dude,

“Pardoned” a gal for too much ‘tude.

The world approved—he’s got the crude.

 

George W. Bush started out fine.

Had some gumption and a spine.

Now he’s Mr. Palestine.

 

Israel’s still here, to much dismay.

They’d hoped that it would go away.

Oh, well. Tomorrow’s another day.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:42 | link | comments

Conventional wisdom: Some 15,000 Muslims have gathered in Toronto this weekend for the annual Reviving the Spirit of Islam convention. This year, the convention focuses on “the family,” but don’t expect the attendees to gain much insight into why a Mississauga teenager was murdered recently by her father. From the sounds of if, they remain firmly committed to the mass denial that is such a prominent feature of Islamic discourse. From the Toronto Star (where denial--in the name of multicultural "sensitivity"--is also rife):

The sound of the faithful rising to their feet echoed through the hall like a small wave reaching the sand.

The collective movement marked the end of Friday afternoon prayer for thousands of primarily Muslim youth at the opening of the annual Reviving the Islamic Spirit convention in the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.

In its sixth year, the three-day conference, run primarily by youth, expects 15,000 to attend to hear Muslim and non-Muslim scholars discuss world issues. This year features a topic that recently set Toronto – one of the world's most multicultural cities – on edge: the slaying of 16-year-old Aqsa Parvez.

"I think some cultural factors played into that in a very significant way, but at the end of the day I think it's an issue of domestic violence that got out of hand," said visiting scholar Imam Zaid Shakir, who spoke at the convention opening and will co-lead tonight's presentation "For the Love of our Children."

The strangled teen's father, Muhammad Parvez, 57, was charged with her murder. Her friends told reporters that she was unhappy about her family's conservative Muslim lifestyle and resisted the order to wear a hijab.

"I think it's very important to understand, in Islam there is no such thing as honour killing," said Shakir. "Muslims are not immune from many of the problems that afflict and affect other communities, and sadly, domestic violence is one of them."

For women to wear a headscarf is, in his belief, a religious obligation, but not one that someone can be forced to comply with. Modest dress is mandated for both sexes, he said.

"One of the contradictions in our community sometimes is that some men demand women to dress excessively modest ... (while) they are wearing skin-tight jeans and muscle shirts," he said.

"Those sorts of contradictions also have to be addressed and resolved."

Resolving cultural impasses in the home fits into the overall theme of the conference, "Family: The Basis of a Civil Society."

Discussions will take place on such issues as bridging the generation gap in Muslim families, preventing violence against women, Muslim divorce rates, the definition of marriage, online dating, fighting within families and the reconciliation of power between men and women within the home.

Past guests have included Mayor David Miller and Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk. A speaker this time is Pamela Paul, U.S. investigative author of Pornified: How Pornography is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families.

The convention will also include fundraisers to sponsor orphans around the world and a massive drive for the Daily Bread Food Bank.

In the crowd yesterday were two female cousins attending the conference for the first time.

"Do you see repressed women?" asked Nour Younis, 19, gesturing toward the crowd and pointing out many wearing trendy outfits.

Younis, born in the United Arab Emirates, is studying in Ottawa. She does not wear a hijab but has thought about it. The death of Parvez had nothing to do with her religion, she said. "As a Muslim, I despise that man."

Her cousin Leen Younis, 24, said, "I think parents should try to show their children the right path but shouldn't be extremists."

She does wear a hijab, a decision she calls a personal choice, saying the hijab loses its value as a religious symbol if it's not worn voluntarily. She does think Parvez should have respected her parents' wishes.

The hijab, she feels, is not something a person can wear part-time. "I don't respect people who do that," she said.

Her cousin agreed. "They are not being true to themselves. ... Why do something you don't want to?"

Both agreed that for some young people, the decision to wear a hijab can be held off simply because the idea of taking it off, and what that implies, is too daunting...

Yeah, it can be quite “daunting” to be roughed up or killed by your Dad for refusing to submit to his divinely-decreed authority, even if you know that it’s merely a domestic, and not a religious, matter.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:49 | link | comments

Power play: The UN General Assembly recently passed a resolution which aims to combat “defamation of religion.” Not surprisingly, it was brought forward by the 57 nations which comprise the Organization of Islamic Conference. The OIC has been most perturbed about those who defame their faith, especially in the wake of 9/11, when there have been so many opportunities to do so. Ostensibly, the resolution pertains to all religions, but Islam is the only one mentioned specifically. It thus seems clear that the purpose here is not to clamp down on nasty comments being made about, say, Jews (because that would be well nigh impossible, since it would entail editing a perfect text which refers to Jews as being “apes and pigs”). The true intent is to stop the kafirs from commenting on certain problematic aspects of Islam (like, for instance, the jihad).

In his most recent book, The War of Ideas, Walid Phares sheds light on why many Muslims brook no criticism of their religion:

The radical Islamists do not tolerate the principle of intiqad (criticism), of any aspect of religion, from theology to practice. Because there is not concept of civil freedom in Salafi or Khumeinist thinking, religious critical thinking is nonexistent as well. Muslims and non-Muslims alike may not argue with the core beliefs of religion, and would be sanctioned if they raised these matters. Such a “frozen” attitude of the jihadi dogma is reminiscent of the Christian Middle Ages. But, ironically, back in the tenth century, Baghdad was illumination not only with oil lamps, but also by Muslim minds looking forward and evolving their culture and sciences, in advance of the end of the Dark Ages in Europe (much like China’s eary superiority in technology). Surprisingly to many observers of the movement, twentieth-century jihadists chose to follow twelfh-century Ibn Taymiya’s narrow thinking rather than the even earlier thinking of the Arab enlightenment of the ninth and tenth centuries. An analogy can be drawn with Fascism and nationalsocialism, which opted for recent authoritarian ideologies rather than for previous (but weaker) democratic ideas. Insecure elites seeking power prefer totalitarian doctrines with intellectual rigidness over open thinking and its risky path toward pluralism. Thus a comprehensive analysis of the jihadist mind leads us to see in the Salafists and Khumeinists a move by formerly marginal segments of society who, thanks to their reviving of archaic models, have built their power base on a rigid ideology that are fully in control of. Their reliance on the purity of the doctrinal body ensures their power over it, hence their rejection of any form of criticism of their interpretation of religion. In other words, the rejection of criticism is not essentially about the core belief system as much as it is about their control of this system. The real battlefield for radicals is the tight control of the instrument of power—in this case, ideologically protected religious laws…

So you see folks, it’s all about power and control. And even though many of the 57 OIC nations are neither Salafist nor Khumeinist, but are considered “moderate,” the Salafists and Khomeinists, being the “purest,” carry the most weight. In any case, there being strength in numbers, this powerful block is seeking to control the international agenda. And all the silly kafirs are either so clueless or so fearful—or both—that they’re allowing it to do so.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:25 | link | comments

A James Frey in the making: Does the end ever justify the means? Certainly not in the case of a 6-year-old girl who used “the means” of a lie—she falsely claimed in an tug-from-the-heart-strings essay that her father had been killed in Iraq—in order to justify “the end” of winning some Hannah Montana tickets. From the Houston Chronicle:

GARLAND, Texas — A 6-year-old girl who won four tickets to a Hannah Montana concert with an essay that falsely claimed her father died in Iraq won't be going to the show after all.

The contest's sponsor, Club Libby Lu, withdrew the prize on Saturday and awarded it to another unnamed winner.

"With this decision, we hope to revive the intended spirit of the contest, which was designed to make a little girl's holidays extra special," Club Libby Lu chief executive Mary Drolet said in a statement Saturday.

Officials with the Chicago-based chain surprised the girl on Friday at a Club Libby Lu store in a suburban Dallas mall. Club Libby Lu sells clothes, accessories and games for young girls.

The girl won a makeover that included a blonde Hannah Montana wig, as well as the grand prize: airfare for four to Albany, N.Y., and four tickets to the sold-out Hannah Montana concert on Jan. 9.

The opening line in the essay was: "My daddy died this year in Iraq."

But the girl's mother admitted later Friday that the essay and the military information she provided about her daughter's father were untrue.

"We did the essay and that's what we did to win. We did whatever we could do to win," Ceballos said in an interview with Dallas TV station KDFW on Friday. "But when (Caulfield) asked me if this essay is true, I said, `No, this essay is not true.'"…

Way to teach you kid values, Ms. Ceballos. On the other hand, if your daughter keeps it up, she has a good shot at guesting on Oprah someday.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:21 | link | comments

Harpooning Musharraf: Harpoon Siddiqui really wants to see an end to Musharraf. Which leads me to believe that it might be a good idea for him to stick around right now, at least so things can calm down some and the religious zanies don't get to seize control of the 90-nuke nation.

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

What’s in a name?:  Ceeb talking head Wendy Mesley has an interview with Syed Sowahardy about Benazir Bhutto. Sowahardy appears in his capacity as the founder of Muslims Against Terrorism. Nowhere is he identified in his more familiar guise—as the head of the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada, of which M.A.T. is a sister organization; you may also remember him as the guy who complained to Alberta’s Human Rights Commission when the Western Standard published those “insulting” Mo ‘toons. The magazine has since ceased publication, and been forced to submit to the ISCC yet again, apologizing for comments that appeared on its blog.

As a rep for Muslims Against Terrorism, Sowahardy sounds most reasonable. But when he’s wearing his other chapeau as head of the ISCC,  here’s what he stands for:

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

Mission Statement

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

Major Objectives

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

 

So far, so good.

One can understand why the Ceeb may not have wanted to identify Sowahardy as the head of the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada. In the context of the murder Pakistan’s last, best hope for democracy, likely by jihadists, it might have jogged memories about the Western Standard controversy and conveyed an entirely wrong impression to viewers. Wrong, as far as the Ceeb is concerned, that is. (Mr. Sowahardy may want to think about removing the "Supreme" from the title of his organization: it tends to make some kafirs a little edgy.)

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:34 | link | comments

No sex, please, we’re Canucks: Sigh. Scandals in Canada are so un-sexy. No Profumos romping in gin-sodden orgies with luscious vixens. No zaftig young interns on their knees in the Oval Office. The sexiest we ever got was back in the 60s, when an East German “hostess” named Gerda Munsinger managed to hook up with some bigwigs in the Diefenbaker government while spying for the Soviets. (Diefenbaker—now there was a stud muffin.)

Okay, maybe that one was a little sexy. Most of the time, though, we Canadians have to settle for decidedly unsexy scandals involving crooked ad execs and free tchotchkes. The lastest scandale to hit Ottawa—l’affaire Schreiber—may be the least sexy one ever. It involves a shady German businessman named Karlheinz Schreiber who apparently gave former Tory P.M. Brian Mulroney—he had just left office—oodles of cash to help him lobby the government on behalf of Schreiber’s client, Airbus; Shreiber wanted it to buy airplanes from the company. Long story short, the scandal was big news here for a while back in the 80s, and would have been consigned to the dust heap of history but for two things: Brian Mulroney wrote his autobiography and went on a big book tour to promote it; and the Liberals, looking for a way to besmirch the current Tory P.M. Stephen Harper who, despite their best hopes has so far proven to be a Mr. Clean/Dudley Do-Right type, seized the opportunity Mulroney handed them to revive the controversy.

In today’s Globe and Mail, Rex Murphy has some amusing things to say about the scandal, which, short term, appears to be working for the Liberals, but may not be enough to unseat Harper. But the real reason I bring all of this up is so that I can post my Karlheinz Schrieber “valjean.” (A “valjean” is the three line poem I invented—my version of the clerihew.)

Karlheinz Schreiber, très Teutonic,

Had some "problems" that were chronic.

Now Brian’s like the plague Bubonic.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:31 | link | comments

Manji mangles history: In a Globe and Mail comment piece chiding Benazir Bhutto for having been such a crappy Prime Minister, Irshad Manji offers his bizarro version of history:

In the months ahead, the people of Pakistan will need to recall [founder of Pakistan Muhammad Ali] Jinnah's vision. It may be of comfort to know that Pakistanis are not alone. Countless Americans are now asking about their founders' intentions, desperate to rediscover the better angels of their country after eight years of George W. Bush. Still, Pakistan must avoid America's enduring mistake. The United States lapsed into profound divisiveness following the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. Today's politics of polarization can be traced to the unresolved trauma of the King-Kennedy murders.

It can? While you’re at it, Irshad, why not go back to the “profound divisiveness” of the Civil War? Surely that has something to do with it too. And then there was that Revolutionary War way, way back. Some--mostly in Europe, admittedly--have yet to recover from that trauma.

Or perhaps instead of toddling down memory lane, it would be more helpful to admit that “today’s politics of polarization” has nothing to do with those 60s assassinations, but is about the chasm that exists between two diametrically opposed camps—what a colleague of mine has described as “alternate realities.” On one side are those who “get it” about the jihad imperative; on the other are those who don’t “get it.”

At the moment, it’s not immediately clear where Ms. Manji fits it.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:22 | link | comments (2)

Too many fish: Who killed Benazir Bhutto? At this stage, we don’t know for certain, but it appears likely that it was Al Qaeda or some other like-minded jihadist outfit, perhaps with assistance from rogue elements within Pakistan’s security forces. However, Rami Khouri, the Palestinian who edits Lebanon’s Daily Star, thinks he knows for sure who killed her. Casting his net as widely as possible, the splenetic Mr. Khouri says “we all” did her in. From the Globe and Mail:

…We will hear passionate appeals in the next few days about courage, democracy and terror, from presidents, kings and warlords alike. These emperors appear increasingly naked as they exhort us to higher values. It is hard to take them seriously - these Asians, Arabs, Americans, Israelis, Iranians, Turks, Europeans, Africans and anyone else who wishes to stand up and be recognized. These pontificating presidents, kings, and warlords who preach about life and democracy have spent a generation sending their armies to war, overthrowing regimes, authorizing assassinations, arming gangs, trading weapons for political favours, buying protection from thugs, cozying up to terrorists, lauding autocrats, making deals with dictators, imprisoning foes, torturing at will, thumbing their nose at the UN Charter, buying and bullying judges, ignoring true democrats and blindly refusing even to hear the simple demands of their own citizens for minimum decency and dignity.

I have spent my entire adult life in the Middle East - since the 1970s - watching leaders be assassinated, foreign armies topple governments, local colonels seize power, foreign occupations persist for decades, the rule of law get thrown in the garbage, constitutions be ignored and, in the end, ordinary people finally decide they will not remain outside of history or invisible in their own societies.

Instead, they decide to write themselves into the violent scripts. They kill, as they have been killed. Having been dehumanized in turn, they will embrace inhumanity and brutality.

Who killed Benazir Bhutto? We all killed her, in East and West, Orient and Occident, North and South. We of the globalized beastly generation that transformed political violence from an occasional crime to an ideology and an addiction.

I would point out to the enraged editor that when everyone is to blame, no one is to blame. But I would venture that he already knows that, and that lobbing a blanket accusation against us all is his way of letting the real perpetrators—i.e. the jihadis—off the hook.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:52 | link | comments

NOW mired in irrelevance: It was hard to miss the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the first woman to lead a Muslim nation, but somehow, NOW, the American feminist organization, managed to do just that. You can’t fault the feminists, though. They was busy waging battle against the galloping sexism of…an American toy company. James Taranto comments on the now-misnamed NOW (given its irrelevance, it should now be called THEN) on OpinionJournal's Best of the Web:

Benazir Bhutto's assassination was a sort of grim feminist milestone. She was, as far as we can remember, the most important female political figure to be assassinated since Indira Gandhi in 1984. (Another was Safia Ama Jan, an official with Afghanistan's Ministry of Women's Affairs, who was gunned down last year.) And as silly as Hillary Clinton's "fellow mother" comment was, she was right to describe Bhutto as "a pioneering woman"--all the more notably since South Asian Muslim societies are not as forward-looking when it comes to women's roles as we in the West are.

So what does the National Organization for Women, America's premier feminist organization, have to say about Bhutto's life and death? Only this: . We did a search for "Bhutto" on NOW's Web site and it came up empty. The top item under "Hot Topics" on NOW's homepage is "NOW's Naughty List: Stereotyping Toys" Here's NOW head Kim Gandy:

Naturally the NOW office has been abuzz about the ubiquitous "Rose Petal Cottage" TV commercials. If you haven't seen these ads, count yourself lucky. Honestly, if I didn't know better, I would think they were beamed in from 1955, via some lost satellite in space. . . .

According to the makers at Playskool, the Rose Petal Cottage is "a place where her dreams have room to grow." And what might those dreams be? Well, baking muffins, arranging furniture and doing the dishes. The voiceover even declares that the toy house will "entertain her imagination" just before the little girl opens the miniature washing machine and says--I kid you not--"Let's do laundry!" . . .

Through the world of toys, girls and boys are given separate dreams to follow. Girls are prepared for a future of looking pretty, keeping house and taking care of babies. Boys are given a pass on that domain, and instead pointed toward the outside world of challenge, physical development and achievement.

NOW has a different vision. When your daughter grows up, she can follow the example of Kim Gandy: grab a broom and sweep invidious stereotypes right out of the toy aisle! International politics? That's icky, leave it to the boys!

What’s the shock and horror of “Let’s do laundry!” compared to the murder of a leader who should have been—but for some unaccountable reason, apparently was not—a NOW feminist icon?

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

Arbour’s award: Louise Arbour, the former Canadian judge who heads up the UN’s Committee for the Prevention of Vice and Promotion of Virtue in Israel, a.k.a the Human Rights Council, has been awarded the highest civilian honour of the land.

Louise is obviously resting on the laurels of her stellar judicial career, since no one with half a clue could possibly see her stewardship of the HRC, the body which sets up the most repressive, tyrannical regimes on the planet to act as the arbiters of international “human rights,” as being worthy of a prize.

Well, maybe a booby prize…

Posted by: scaramouche at 23:25 | link | comments

The Archbish of squish: Don’t expect the head of the Anglican Church, Archbish of Cant Rowan Williams, to act as much of a buttress against the onslaught of jihad. As Brendan O’Neill writes in an amusing—but unsettling—rant, the Archbish is just a big, fat post-Christian tree-loving eco-squish. Just the type to lie down like a compliant dhimmi doormat when confronted by ardent chaps screaming “Allah Akbar”. From Spiked (link via Arts and Letters Daily):

…In his Christmas sermon, delivered at Canterbury Cathedral, Dr Williams finally completed his journey from old-world Christianity to trendy New Ageism. His sermon was indistinguishable from those delivered (not just at Christmas but for life) by the heads of Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth. Williams did not speak about Christian morality; in fact, he didn’t utter the m-word at all. He said little about men’s responsibility to love one another and God, the two Commandments Jesus Christ said we should live by. Instead he talked about our role as janitors on planet Earth, who must stop plundering the ‘warehouse of natural resources’ and ensure that we clean up after ourselves.

Williams has clearly been reading the Good Books – not the Bible, but those Carbon Calculator tomes that are clogging up bookshop shelves around the country, and which instruct people on how to live so meekly that they leave no imprint whatsoever on the planet or human history. He said that Earth does not exist only for ‘humanity’s sake’; it also exists ‘in its own independence and beauty… not as a warehouse of resources to serve humanity’s selfishness’.

Williams warned that our greed – presumably our insatiable lust for warm homes, cars, cookers and other outrageous luxuries – is killing the planet. He welcomed the fact that mankind is ‘growing in awareness of how fragile [the planet] is, how fragile is the balance of species and environments in the world and how easily our greed distorts it’. In 2008, we must take more seriously our ‘guardianship’ of the Earth, he declared (1).

Williams isn’t the only leading Christian who has sold his soul to Gaia and traded in Christian morality for the pieties of environmentalism. The Reverend John Owen, leader of the Presbyterian Church of Wales, said in his Christmas sermon that everyone should remember his or her ‘duty to the planet’. He urged people to recycle leftover food, and ‘redouble [your] efforts to take action and campaign against climate change’ in the coming year (2). Meanwhile, the Vatican is taking steps to become the world’s first carbon-neutral sovereign state by planting trees in a Hungarian national park to offset the CO2 emissions of the Holy See. Cardinal Paul Poupard, head of the Pontifical Council for Culture, says that in 2008 there should be the ‘dawn of a new culture, of new attitudes and a new mode of living that makes man aware of his place as caretaker of the earth’ (3).

The reduction of man to an eco-janitor, a being who creates waste and thus must clear it up, is more than a cynical attempt by isolated Christian leaders to connect with the public. Yes, Williams, Owen, the Holy See and Co. no doubt hope and believe (mistakenly, I’m sure) that adopting trendy Greenspeak will entice people to return to the church. But the move from focusing on love for God and one’s neighbour to focusing on ‘respect for the planet’ represents more than a rebranding exercise: it signals a complete abandonment by the Christian churches of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. And in this sense, it is not only God that is being downgraded by the new nature-worshipping priests; so is humanity itself. And that’s enough to make even a committed atheist like me worry about the current direction of the Christian churches.

Me, too. And I’m a Jew.

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:19 | link | comments

Bomb(s) away: The great Claudia Rosett, on Bhutto, posthumous hagiography and the Islamic bomb(s):

Following Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, the myth-making is heading into overdrive — depicting the late Bhutto as having been a dependable friend to America, a voice of democracy and the face of salvation for Pakistan. I doubt that was ever true. There are many reasons to deplore her murder and mourn her death — but these do not necessarily imply that if she had survived and returned to power, that would have been the beginning of a better era for Pakistan, or a safer era for America. Bhutto was charismatic, determined, and courageous, and I don’t doubt that she wanted to end Islamic terrorism both inside Pakistan and emanating from it. But the gap between her words and her record was disturbing. When she actually held power as prime minister — not once, but twice — her brand of government, fraught with nepotism and corruption scandals, did not do much to help her country, or end the forces fueling terrorism (or stop Pakistan’s nuclear bomb program and network, for that matter). Rather, it was government of the kind that can give democracy a bad name.

 

Way back in 1988, I interviewed Benazir Bhutto in her hometown of Larkana, Pakistan — where her father is buried. She was then busy with the campaign that led to her first stint as prime minister, and there was plenty to admire in her determination and humor. She had just given birth to her oldest son, she was working 18-hour days, and in answer to a warmup question she confirmed to me with a laugh that she had indeed enjoyed a girlhood passion for romance novels — but had no time anymore for anything but newspapers.

 

Her politics, and priorities, however, were worrisome. Among her campaign slogans was “Socialism is Our Economy,” and her plans for Pakistan included the tired old brand of patronage and state-planning that had by then beggared the subcontinent for decades — and lends itself, anytime, anywhere, to corruption and the erosion of democratic rule. On questions about then-Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, the complex politics of Pakistan, and the Kabul-based Soviet-backed terrorist activities of her brothers (one already murdered at the time, the other killed since) she ducked and weaved in ways that left me worried enough to write at the time: “Ms. Bhutto leaves it far from clear that a new Bhutto administration would bring better times for Pakistan and its allies.”

 

It is possible that this third time around, Benazir Bhutto might have risen to the job. That is now moot. In the wake of this hideous assassination the questions facing those who believed in her, and those more skeptical, have become the same. What now?

 

For Pakistan, there are no simple answers — what was already a volatile and highly dangerous scene has become even less predictable. But there is one glaring message wrapped up in almost every piece of commentary on Bhutto’s murder, and it is this. What happens in the politics of Pakistan today is enormously important to the wider world because Pakistan is a country infested with terrrorists and armed with nuclear weapons. Those bombs are quite a prize for anyone who might seize power. Thus does America now walk a tightrope in its dealings with Pakistan.

 

Meanwhile, we have the flip side of this horrifying arrangement right next door to Pakistan, in Iran — which already has the kind of terror-dedicated government we fear Pakistan might get. Tehran’s regime is busy providing itself with everything needed to make nuclear weapons. And thanks to America’s latest National Intelligence Estimate, with its myopic conclusions, bizarre wording and patently political agenda, the Bush administration seems to have simply scrapped any serious intention of coming between Iran’s mullahs and the bomb.

 

That is a terrible mistake. And while we deplore the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, and brace for the aftershocks in Pakistan, and recite the reasons why it matters so much, the deeper message we ought to be taking from all this is that Pakistan has so far been a cakewalk compared to what we will be dealing with if Iran gets the bomb.

 

Much as I respect Ms. Rosett’s judgement, I think I have to differ with her here. I’d say that,  at the moment, Pakistan, with its 90 nukes, testy jihadists and chronic instability, may pose even more of a threat than Iran.

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:06 | link | comments

Hugh and Mark on the mess in Pakistan: Transcript from Hugh Hewitt’s radio show:

HH: …Mark, I just read your post over at the Corner on how Benazir Bhutto represented Pakistan’s past, and today’s tragic assassination of her confirms it. Do you want to expand on what you’re trying to convey with that? 

MS: Yes, I think Benazir Bhutto represented, in a sense, the embers of the Pakistan that Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the country’s founder, wanted to build, which was a country with a Muslim population that generally speaking operated to a secular, socialist, Westernized tradition. Benazir Bhutto, educated at Oxford University, I seem to know…and she was a little bit older than me…I seem to know an inordinate number of her ex-boyfriends I’ve run into at one time or another, urbane Oxford Englishmen, she was quite comfortable dating. She presided, her father was prime minister of Pakistan, not a good prime minister. Benazir Bhutto’s second term was certainly more successful than that. But the idea that this modern, Westernized, glamorous woman would be the solution to Pakistan’s problems in 2007 was a delusion of the State Department, and its logical consequence was her murder today. I weep for her. She was a wonderful woman in many ways. But she should not have gone back to Pakistan, which has profoundly changed.  

HH: I participated in a conference call with Council On Foreign Relations fellow Daniel Markey today, and it’s very depressing. It’s a nation of 160 million people, and at least millions of them are Islamists, and tens of thousands of them violent jihadists. They’ve got 90 nukes, a completely compromised intelligence service, and now a paralyzed political process. And as Stanley Kurtz, the guest next segment, argued in the Claremont Review of Books, Waziristan is sort of extending itself across the entire country of Pakistan. We’ve got a situation that is potentially worse than Afghanistan was, Mark Steyn. 

MS: Well, I think you could, in a sense, Stanley is right. But in a sense, you could say, I think, that Waziristan is extending itself across the entire world, which is that as…a lot of us regard the creation of Pakistan as one of the worst decisions of British imperial policy ever. Lord Mountbatten in 1947 should never have agreed to it. Pakistan’s founder, Jinnah, would have been dead within the year, and who knows then how much momentum there would have been. But in a sense, it developed as the complete opposite of India. India is pluralist, secular, progressive, modern, and Pakistan, instead, has regressed with each generation to the point now where as Stanley points out, what were hitherto relatively modern cities, are now taking on the characteristics of the sort of tribal cave lands, as it were, in their political character. And this is a problem not just for Pakistan, but for where those jihadists export their populations to, which is places like Scandinavia and Britain and Canada.  

HH: And I also worry about these nukes. Now in the past, when Sadat was assassinated in Egypt, Mubarak arrived and immediately clamped down with a repression so severe, people still speak of it in hushed terms. But on this conference today, journalist after journalist asked the Pakistan expert, you know, is this Bush’s fault for pushing too hard, did we push too slow, what will America do now, as though it’s our problem, Mark Steyn, as though we have any…I mean, it is our problem, but we don’t have anything to do with it right now, or very little. 

MS: Well, I think the idea that somehow a guy sitting in Washington can manage a country from thousands of miles away is what got us into this mess. You know, what is it diplomats do? What is it the State Department does? It flies into places, and a lot of the people, Congressman Dreier is a good example, a Congressman flies in, he meets with eminent persons in Islamabad or Karachi, or wherever, and he comes away thinking that these people speak for the country. They don’t. It’s the fierce, implacable young men of 18, 19 and 20, that nobody knows the names of, who never get to meet anybody important, who are Pakistan. That’s what Pakistan is. They’re the people who provide untold numbers of volunteers for the jihad, and who when you say oh, who would like to be the one who blows himself in front, and takes Benazir Bhutto with him, and the whole room puts up its hands. None of those people ever meet with Congressman or Senators, or anyone from the State Department. But they are the reality of Pakistan, and poor Benazir Bhutto, I’m afraid, was a Foggy Bottom delusion.  

HH: You know, a week from now, we might be talking about poor Pervez Musharraf as well. It seems to me that the army is the only institution on which we can have any reliance in Pakistan. And it’s deeply compromised, as everyone who studies the region knows, but the idea that we can rush off to democracy in Pakistan seems to me to be just an absolute illusion, Mark Steyn. 

MS: Yes, and I think you have to look at what has happened, which is that the one safe bet you can make is that Pakistan generally evolves into something worse. You mentioned the army, which was traditionally one of the least corrupt institutions of Pakistan. It has very much, and it honors, people like General Musharraf honor that British-Indian army tradition from which they sprang, and in which they trained. But in recent years, that army, too, has been hollowed out by not just the corruption elements that afflict the political class in Pakistan, but also by Islamism, too. So that a good bet, I would say, is that the Pakistani army, a decade down the road, will be a lot worse than the Pakistani army of the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, 80’s and 90’s. And it is the height of arrogance for people to sit around in think tanks and sort of plot courses for this kind of great seething cauldron of anonymous faces on the other side of the world.  

Pakistan has 90 nukes!?

Considering that the religious zanies need only get hold of one or two, we’re in serious flipping trouble.

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

Oh, please: A letter writer in the Globe and Mail compares Canadian leaders unfavourably with the late Ms. Bhutto:

Canada’s current political landscape might look markedly different if politicians possessed the integrity and personal courage of Benazir Bhutto. Democratic rule throughout the world, particularly in developing countries, has suffered an immeasurable loss.

How might Canada’s “political landscape” look if our politicians were more like Bhutto?  Even were it to be infused with her “personal courage,” it would probably look a lot more like Pakistan. In which case thanks all the same, but I think I’ll go with the “landscape” we have.

Globe columnist Marcus Gee offers a far less rapturous assessment of Ms. Bhutto’s political abilities:

Few world leaders have raised such extravagant expectations as Pakistan's Benazir Bhutto.

Smart, brave, glamorous, she charmed the world when she became the first woman elected prime minister of a Muslim nation at age 35 and charmed it again when she returned from exile this fall to defy death threats and campaign for democracy.

Here, dreamed the outside world, was the woman who might "fix" Pakistan, transforming a chaotic nuclear-armed nation of 160 million into a functioning, progressive Islamic state.

Fond hope. The sad truth is that in two terms as prime minister and a quarter century in the political game, Ms. Bhutto made very little difference to the feudal, often poisonous nature of Pakistani politics.

In fact, in many ways she embodied it.

Her stints as prime minister were marked by the same corruption that seems to cling to every Pakistani regime. Like every leader of Pakistan, she played footsie with Islamic extremists, helping the Taliban's rise to power in neighbouring Afghanistan. And like every civilian leader of Pakistan, she made backroom deals with the all-powerful armed forces, undermining her claims to be a bold crusader against military rule.

Imperious by nature, she ruled her Pakistan Peoples Party like a martinet, inheriting its leadership from her executed father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and calling herself "chairperson for life."

By the time she came back home in October to try for a third go-round, many Pakistanis had soured on her. Pollsters for Washington's International Republican Institute found that just 27 per cent of Pakistanis believed her when she said she was coming back to foster democracy; 47 per cent said she was only trying to "improve her personal situation."

Yet in the West, she was lionized as the Daughter of the East (the title of her 1989 autobiography) who might deliver Pakistan from the twin evils of dictatorship and extremism.

"I know that I am a symbol of what the so-called jihadists, Taliban and al-Qaeda, most fear," she wrote in a new preface to the autobiography last April. "I am a female political leader fighting to bring modernity, communication, education and technology to Pakistan."

That was a message that went down like strawberries and cream in Washington. The United States pressured Pakistan's military-backed strongman, Pervez Musharraf, to let Ms. Bhutto return to Pakistan in April, taking heart when the two negotiated over a possible power-sharing deal.

"She always told us what we wanted to hear," said Marvin Weinbaum, a Pakistan expert at Washington's Middle East Institute, "so we overestimated what she could deliver."…

We’ll never know for sure, of course, what she could or could not deliver. It seems clear, though, that Ms. Bhutto died as a direct result of her “personal courage” (inseparable from her personal ambition) as well as the Bush administration’s “misoverestimation” of what democracy—its panacea for world ills—could bring to the terminal mess that is the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:47 | link | comments

Reality check: Someone else who refuses to partake in the posthumous pieties—Andrew McCarthy on NRO:

A recent CNN poll howed that 46 percent of Pakistanis approve of Osama bin Laden.

Aspirants to the American presidency should hope to score so highly in the United States. In Pakistan, though, the al-Qaeda emir easily beat out that country’s current president, Pervez Musharraf, who polled at 38 percent.

President George Bush, the face of a campaign to bring democracy — or, at least, some form of sharia-lite that might pass for democracy — to the Islamic world, registered nine percent. Nine!

If you want to know what to make of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto’s murder today in Pakistan, ponder that.

There is the Pakistan of our fantasy. The burgeoning democracy in whose vanguard are judges and lawyers and human rights activists using the “rule of law” as a cudgel to bring down a military junta. In the fantasy, Bhutto, an attractive, American-educated socialist whose prominent family made common cause with Soviets and whose tenures were rife with corruption, was somehow the second coming of James Madison.

Then there is the real Pakistan: an enemy of the United States and the West.

The real Pakistan is a breeding ground of Islamic holy war where, for about half the population, the only thing more intolerable than Western democracy is the prospect of a faux democracy led by a woman — indeed, a product of feudal Pakistani privilege and secular Western breeding whose father, President Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto, had been branded as an enemy of Islam by influential Muslim clerics in the early 1970s.

The real Pakistan is a place where the intelligence services are salted with Islamic fundamentalists: jihadist sympathizers who, during the 1980s, steered hundreds of millions in U.S. aid for the anti-Soviet mujahideen to the most anti-Western Afghan fighters — warlords like Gilbuddin Hekmatyar whose Arab allies included bin Laden and Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the stalwarts of today’s global jihad against America.

The real Pakistan is a place where the military, ineffective and half-hearted though it is in combating Islamic terror, is the thin line between today’s boiling pot and what tomorrow is more likely to be a jihadist nuclear power than a Western-style democracy.

In that real Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto’s murder is not shocking. There, it was a matter of when, not if.

It is the new way of warfare to proclaim that our quarrel is never with the heroic, struggling people of fill-in-the-blank country. No, we, of course, fight only the regime that oppresses them and frustrates their unquestionable desire for freedom and equality.

Pakistan just won’t cooperate with this noble narrative.

Whether we get round to admitting it or not, in Pakistan, our quarrel is with the people. Their struggle, literally, is jihad. For them, freedom would mean institutionalizing the tyranny of Islamic fundamentalism. They are the same people who, only a few weeks ago, tried to kill Benazir Bhutto on what was to be her triumphant return to prominence — the symbol, however dubious, of democracy’s promise. They are the same people who managed to kill her today. Today, no surfeit of Western media depicting angry lawyers railing about Musharraf — as if he were the problem — can camouflage that fact…

I’m not so sure. It’s far more comforting for much of the mainstream media to rail against Musharraf, that scoundrel!, that Bush lackey!, than to have to look beneath the camouflage and deal with the horrifying reality of the global jihad.

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:18 | link | comments

CSI Islamabad: A gruesome report from Reuters.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:57 | link | comments

The talk cure: Ceeb opiner Georgie Binks (hard to take seriously anyone with such a name) asks whether Bhutto’s assassination means that Pakistan’s problems are too big for it to solve on its own. The perspicacious Ms. Binks, quoting a clever academic, concludes that that’s indeed the case, and offers the following by way of a “solution”:

With Pakistan’s upcoming elections less than two weeks away and the prospect that Benazir Bhutto stood a good chance of becoming prime minister, the country's political future may have appeared rosier than it had in a long time.

However, with Bhutto’s assassination comes the depressing reality the country will continue to experience the same unrest that has plagued it since it gained independence 60 years ago.

With this latest act of violence this week, it seems increasingly evident Pakistan’s political turmoil may simply be too much for the country to solve on its own, despite assertions by Mahmud Ali Durrani — Pakistan's ambassador to the U.S. — that Pakistanis are a toughened lot, have survived much turmoil and upheaval in their history, and "will get past this."

Not so optimistic

Other experts on the region said it’s time world powers stepped in to guide the country through this turbulent period, but any involvement must be conducted carefully.

"This assassination is an attack on Pakistan itself," said Carleton University Prof. Elliot Tepper, a specialist in Asian studies. "Because the region is so vital to world peace, it’s time the friends of Pakistan rallied. Those who have not had as cordial a relationship with Pakistan also need to consider their position seriously."

That means countries like the United States, Britain, China and even Canada need to step up to the plate. "The United States is the biggest single player in this whole scenario," Tepper added. "Its engagement with Pakistan, Afghanistan and India, as well being the only superpower at the moment in the global war on terror, gives it a unique position."

That doesn’t mean military intervention, but rather a strong statement from the government supporting democratic elections…

Yeah, that should do the trick.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:50 | link | comments (1)

He has come to bury Bhutto, not to praise her: Ralph Peters, speaking ill of the dead in the New York Post:

FOR the next several days, you're going to read and hear a great deal of pious nonsense in the wake of the assassination of Pakistan's former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto.

Her country's better off without her. She may serve Pakistan better after her death than she did in life.

We need have no sympathy with her Islamist assassin and the extremists behind him to recognize that Bhutto was corrupt, divisive, dishonest and utterly devoid of genuine concern for her country.

She was a splendid con, persuading otherwise cynical Western politicians and "hardheaded" journalists that she was not only a brave woman crusading in the Islamic wilderness, but also a thoroughbred democrat.

In fact, Bhutto was a frivolously wealthy feudal landlord amid bleak poverty. The scion of a thieving political dynasty, she was always more concerned with power than with the wellbeing of the average Pakistani. Her program remained one of old-school patronage, not increased productivity or social decency.

Educated in expensive Western schools, she permitted Pakistan's feeble education system to rot - opening the door to Islamists and their religious schools.

During her years as prime minister, Pakistan went backward, not forward. Her husband looted shamelessly and ended up fleeing the country, pursued by the courts. The Islamist threat - which she artfully played both ways - spread like cancer.

But she always knew how to work Westerners - unlike the hapless Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who sought the best for his tormented country but never knew how to package himself.

Military regimes are never appealing to Western sensibilities. Yet, there are desperate hours when they provide the only, slim hope for a country nearing collapse. Democracy is certainly preferable - but, unfortunately, it's not always immediately possible. Like spoiled children, we have to have it now - and damn the consequences.

In Pakistan, the military has its own forms of graft; nonetheless, it remains the least corrupt institution in the country and the only force holding an unnatural state together. In Pakistan back in the '90s, the only people I met who cared a whit about the common man were military officers.

Americans don't like to hear that. But it's the truth…

Here’s another truth: “Democracy”—or at least, going through the motions of democracy by casting a ballot for a leader—isn’t necessarily the cure for every ill in every country at every time.

One need only cast a glance at what’s been going on in Gaza and the West Bank to see the truth of that. (So why, oh why, can’t George and Condi see it too?)

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

Loony lefties: At a family Channukah party this year, a cousin who sees things as I do made this pithy observation: “The Left,” he said, “is insane.”

He’s correct—and here’s the proof.

Also here.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:47 | link | comments

Sultan’s explanation: In an interview with FrontPage Magazine, Wafa Sultan, a brave and trenchant critic of Islamic supremacism, comments on the murder of Toronto’s Aqsa Parvez:

Sultan: The crime committed by Aqsa Parvez’s father is a direct product of the Islamic education he received and the influence of the culture he grew up in. I believe that Muslim men, who adhere to these types of immoral deeds, have become criminals by their Islamic induced indoctrination. This is not an isolated case. Similar crimes have been committed daily in various Islamic countries for the last fourteen hundreds years. The Muslim community at large has been muted and has not condemned these types of crimes. Therefore, the civilized world must take strong action against these brutal offenses.

Western governments need to monitor incoming Muslim immigrants and we should also initiate a proper mechanism within the current Islamic enclaves in the west, to rehabilitate those influenced by Islamism and help them learn to cherish our own western human rights standards.

Regarding this particular crime, I am not a law expert, but it made me so furious when I read that the Canadian court has not decided yet if it is going to consider this crime as first or second degree murder. I think the defendant (the father) should be triad (sic) and convicted for first degree murder as a deterrent and a means to send a clear message to the Islamic community that the nature of these heinous crimes are unacceptable.

FP: Many Muslims and the leftist media are arguing that Aqsa Parvez’s murder had nothing to do with Islam. A father orders his daughter to wear the veil and to submit to other dehumanizing rules of Islamic gender apartheid and she resists and he kills her -- but this has nothing to do with Islam. Am I missing something here?

The last time an atheist or Buddhist or Catholic father killed his daughter because she refused to veil herself was when exactly? A father kills his daughter because he tries to force the rules of his religion on her -- but this has nothing to do with his religion? What is this pathology among many Muslims and Western leftists to absolve Islam of what it fertilizes into earthly incarnation? And if this is not about Islam, then where are all the Muslim clerics who are outraged that this has happened and are now issuing fatwas that veiling can never be forced on a woman and that it must always be her choice?

Sultan: I am not surprised that many Muslims deny correlation between Islam and honor killing. Denial is their way to conceal reality. After all, according to them, Sept 11^th as well as suicide bombing phenomenon, honor killing and the daily terror acts perpetrated by Muslims all over the world, have nothing to do with Islam. They conveniently blame Israel and American foreign policy for all miseries inflicted by Muslims, so naturally they obscure the roots of the commonly practiced murders as that of Aqsa Parvez’s. In Pakistan for example, almost daily at least two women are murdered, legitimized as honor killing. Often it’s excused as a cultural phenomenon. Islamic countries do have diverse cultures. In that case, why is honor killing so widespread in the Islamic world? For how long will Muslims mislead the world regarding the nature of Islamic teachings and its culture?

Regarding the leftist media, I wonder what they really know about Islam. What do they base their opinions on? Do they comprehend the extent of the hatred and disrespect the Quran and Hadith instill on men against their women? Are they aware of the numerous Quranic verses like Sura 4.32 where Allah permits husbands to admonish their wives, refuse to share their beds and allows beating them? It’s an utter disgrace for women, especially in the free world to defend and excuse such values.

FP: What do you think about the poll conducted last May among U.S. Muslims that revealed that one in four younger U.S. Muslims support suicide bombings? How come almost none has heard of this and the media didn’t even seem to mention it?

Sultan: I am not surprised to learn the results. I must acknowledge that young Muslims in the US who believe that suicide bombing is justified are well-versed in their religious teaching. The idea of becoming a Shaheed (martyr) by means of suicide is indeed deeply rooted in the Islamic belief system. The Quran states:

“Allah hath purchased of the believers their persons and their goods, for theirs (in return) is the Garden (of Paradise ): They fight in His Cause, and slay and are slain” (9/111).

I believe that Muslim clerics in the US have explained this verse in the same way that the clerics in Syria had explained it to me at young age. Growing up, I had always believed that suicide bombing was justified for the cause of being a martyr.

The poll results should motivate us to come up with firm ways to face this crisis. We should inspect what is being taught at Islamic schools and mosques here in the US to identify and treat properly the causing factors of this epidemic.

FP: What is your response to Muslim women who claim that it's their own decision to cover themselves? What is your opinion regarding the veil?

Sultan: Let me tell you a short story:

In 2005, I traveled to Syria with my American friend. We visited a small Syrian Island (Erwad). My friend noticed that the majority of women in that place were head covered. I asked our tour guide to explain the reasoning behind it. I asked; “are ALL women in this island covered? Without any hesitation he responded; “Yes, they are ALL covered except for few whores.”

So, yes, it might be their decision, but it’s not their choice. When you make a decision, your society does not necessarily allow you to freely choose. The decision in this case is made to avoid humiliation and reprisal by the Muslim community around these women.

Here in the west, I believe that wearing the Hijab is a way for women to identify themselves as Muslims. It is also a tool for Muslims to prove their superiority over other non Muslims and for Muslim man to control their women. Thus, it’s interesting to note that increased number of veiled Muslim women goes hand in hand with Islamic radicalization. There is a symbiotic relationship between the two. Likewise, head cover had been used to differentiate between “true” Muslim women and the inferior female slaves and it has been that way since then.

Lastly, I must mention that I find it unwise for non-Muslim western women to cover their head for show of respect when they visit Muslim lands (One example is Barbara Walters when she interviewed the Saudi King). This attempt to display their respect to Muslims would have been proper if Muslims respected western values equally. Unfortunately, it is not the case; so in essence, by this type of pacification we weaken our own resolve to demand equal respect.

We can “demand” it all we want; head scarf or no head scarf, we ain’t getting it.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:28 | link | comments

One faction pushed for a broom, while the other one wanted to go with a Swiffer: The custodians of Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity have had a bit of a dust-up—over how to clean the Church. From Breitbart:

Seven people were injured on Thursday when Greek Orthodox and Armenian priests came to blows in a dispute over how to clean the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.

Following the Christmas celebrations, Greek Orthodox priests set up ladders to clean the walls and ceilings of their part of the church, which is built over the site where Jesus Christ is believed to have been born.

But the ladders encroached on space controlled by Armenian priests, according to photographers who said angry words ensued and blows quickly followed.

For a quarter of an hour bearded and robed priests laid into each other with fists, brooms and iron rods while the photographers who had come to take pictures of the annual cleaning ceremony recorded the whole event.

A dozen unarmed Palestinian policemen were sent to try to separate the priests, but two of them were also injured in the unholy melee.

"As usual the cleaning of the church afer Christmas is a cause of problems," Bethlehem Mayor Victor Batarseh told AFP, adding that he has offered to help ease tensions.

"For the two years that I have been here everything went more or less calmly," he said. "It's all finished now."…

Well, there’s always next year.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:17 | link | comments

Egregious understatement: A Foggy Bottom spokesperson has condemned the Bhutto assassination, saying that “it demonstrates that there are still those in Pakistan who want to subvert reconciliation and efforts to advance democracy.”

No kidding.

An example of the kind of blinding insight that, alas, has become par for the course at the Foggy Bottom Golf and Pragmatist Club.

Update: Here's President Bush on the assassination. From Breitbart via AP:

President Bush demanded Thursday that those responsible for killing former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir be brought to justice.

"The United States strongly condemns this cowardly act by murderous extremists who are trying to undermine Pakistan's democracy," he said. "Those who committed this crime must be brought to justice."

The president looked tense in delivering a brief statement to reporters at a hangar near his Crawford ranch in central Texas. He took no questions. His appearance came as U.S. officials here scrambled to cope with the immense policy implications involving a nuclear-armed country that has received billions in American financial assistance and has been an ally in the war on terrorism.

Bush expressed his deepest condolences to Bhutto's family and to the families of others slain in the attack and to all the people of Pakistan. And the White House also reached out to Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, said spokesman Scott Stanzel. He said Bush planned to speak with Musharraf as soon as it can be arranged later Thursday.

"Mrs. Bhutto served her nation twice as prime minister and she knew that her return to Pakistan earlier this year put her life at risk, yet she refused to allow assassins to dictate the course of her country," Bush said.

"We stand with the people of Pakistan in their struggle against the forces of terror and extremism. We urge them to honor Benazir Bhutto's memory by continuing with the democratic process for which she so bravely gave her life," he said.

Here's me, chaneling and paraphrasing Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men, re: the prospects for Pakistan's "democratic process": They can't handle democracy.

Update: Cliff May in The Corner:

Bhutto's murder points to a lesson we (the Foreign Policy Establishment in particular) has been slow to learn:

This is not some extraordinary event. This is not the work of some lone madman. This is how militant Islamists contest elections – not just in Pakistan but also in Lebanon and Gaza and wherever they they get a foothold.

Why bother with opeds, TV commercials, high-priced campaign strategists, spin doctors and pollsters when with one suicide bomber you can eliminate your opponent entirely?

Hard to argue with the logic.

Indeed.

Update: As is usually the case, Mark Steyn "gets it."

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:57 | link | comments

A “just peace,” Arab-style: A Christian Palestinian journalist attributes American support for Israel to Bush’s evangelistic streak.

Bollocks.

But now that Bush has embraced a more “pragmatic” approach, Christian Zionists aren’t likely to be so “one-sided” in their support any more.

Double bollocks.

From the Globe and Mail (a publication that’s always pleased to offer itself up as a soapbox for Israel-bashers):

…Most Arabs don't understand the ideological underpinnings for U.S. support to Israel, which many believe contradicts overall U.S. interests in the region.

One explanation for this special relationship has to do with a strange blend of faith and politics. Mr. Bush, in particular, uses frequent references to divine calling to explain his approach to foreign policy. This unholy mix of religion and policy is best exemplified by the theology and policies of what are commonly referred to as Christian Zionists. These fundamentalist Christians (often, mistakenly, referred to as evangelicals), use their interpretation of the Bible to justify support for Israel and its hard-line policies.

But, after many years of being closely in sync, Mr. Bush and the Christian Zionists are showing signs of a falling-out.

Following the one-day meeting in Annapolis, Md., late in November, aimed at kick-starting Palestinian-Israeli negotiations, a leading pro-Israeli Christian group, The Jerusalem Connection International, stated that “the evangelical support for Israel is shrinking.”

The Jerusalem Connection, which highlights the letters USA in the middle of the word Jerusalem, is run by a retired U.S. Army brigadier-general, Rev. James Hutchens. Mr. Hutchens, who demonstrated in protest along with other Christian Zionists outside the Annapolis summit, blames the reduction in support for Israel on a handful of evangelical leaders who signed a statement supporting a two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

The 80 leading Christian evangelical leaders, who signed the statement published in the Nov. 28 edition of Christianity Today, are perhaps the best and brightest among U.S. evangelicals. They are not, as Mr. Hutchens describes them, “naive, misguided and dead wrong about Israel.” They have become more vocal of late, but their position follows years of commitment to a just peace.

Evangelical leaders, such as Prof. Ron Sider of Evangelicals for Social Action, have been joined by presidents of Christian universities (such as Wheaton College) and theological seminaries (such as Fuller), heads of major charities (such as World Vision) and editors of publications such as Christian Today and Sojourners. All are calling for a balanced solution to the conflict.

Christian Zionism has suffered of late from a strong theological attack of their hawkish ideas from fellow evangelicals. Critiques from learned leaders such as Rev. Don Wagner of North Park University and Rev. Steven Sizer of Britain have attacked what they see as the theological inconsistencies of the Christian Zionist advocates. The book Whose Promised Land? by Rev. Colin Chapman (now in its fourth edition) laid the ground for debunking religious terminology that justified aggression against Palestinians.

Palestinian Christian leaders, led by Rev. Canon Naim Ateek, director of the Jerusalem-based Sabeel Ecumenical Theological Centre, has also been a major contributor in the weakening of both theology and its application. They have rejected the warped attempts by some Christians in the West to use the Bible in defence of Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza.

The Christian Zionists also have been weakened by the failures of some of the policies put forward by their man in the White House. The failure of the Iraq occupation, a product of divine calling, according to Mr. Bush, has recently been followed by the intelligence report on Iran that contradicted arguments being made by Israel and its Christian Zionist allies. All this has had a significant cooling effect.

The rise and fall of religious fundamentalism has often paralleled political success or failures. Fundamentalist Jews were so excited by Israel's 1967 victory that they began an expansionist settlement program in the West Bank (which they called by its Biblical names Judea and Samaria). That program persists to this day. The Khomeini revolution in Iran encouraged an export of radical Islam. For Christian Zionists, the ascension of Mr. Bush and Ariel Sharon were signs from God that their radical theology was finding an executive arm.

Mr. Bush's apparent rollback from the Christian Zionists could produce a more pragmatic regional policy. That is something that peace-loving Christians, Muslims and Jews will all welcome.

And the “more pragmatic regional policy” this writer and other “peace-lovers” like him would most welcome is the end of Jewish sovereignty in Israel.  However, you’d have to read between the lines and do a little research on the Jerusalem-based Sabeel  Ecumenical Theological Centre (full name, the Sabeel Ecumenical  Liberation Theological Centre—funny  how he left out the “liberation” part—to uncover the truth). From Honest Reporting:

…(W)hy does Christian anti-Israel sentiment continue to appear in the media and elsewhere? One driving force behind this is the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center. According to NGO Monitor, Sabeel is active in promoting an extreme anti-Israel agenda in Protestant churches in both North America and Europe. Sabeel's efforts have promoted the campaign to isolate and delegitimize Israel through the divestment campaign, which have recently been adopted by some church organizations.

As noted in a detailed study by Robert Everett and Dexter Van Zile, and cited in their Jerusalem Post article of July 10, 2005 "Reawakening the teachings of contempt", Sabeel is a major factor in extremist Christian anti-Israel activism. Sabeel's statements consistently highlight Palestinian suffering and place blame on Israel, while ignoring such issues as corruption within the Palestinian Authority, violence perpetrated against Israelis and Palestinians alike by armed Palestinian militias, and attacks against Christian Arabs.

Sabeel director Naim Ateek employs classical antisemitic theological themes, as reflected in the 2001 Sabeel "Easter message": "it seems to many of us that Jesus is on the cross again with thousands of crucified Palestinians around him. […] The Israeli government crucifixion system is operating daily." In similar messages, such as a February 2001 sermon, Ateek accuses Israel of killing Jesus (the Palestinians) as infant, prophet and messiah: "Israel has placed a large boulder, a big stone that has metaphorically shut off the Palestinians in a tomb. It is similar to the stone placed on the entrance of Jesus' tomb…"

For more on Sabeel, see CAMERA's recent analysis.

The same Honest Reporting alert reveals that there may not be too many “peace-loving” Christians left in the Palestinians by the time that “one state power-sharing solution” comes into effect.  They are being treated so brutally by their Muslim “brothers” in Gaza and the West Bank, that they are expected to vacate the premises entirely within the next 15 years.

In other words, no “just peace.” Just more Islam.

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:37 | link | comments

Bhutto assassinated: A "moderate" Muslim (and I don't mean Harpoon Siddiqui) takes stock:

First they blew up the Jews,
But I wanted the Jews out of Israel so I did not speak out.
Then they blew up the World Trade Center,
But I hated the U.S. for supporting Israel so I did not speak out.
And for a long time now they've been blowing up Muslims,
But since, as they say,
It only "a tiny minority of extremists" who are doing the blowing up,
And since I can't possibly be expected to stand up to all of them,
'Cause they're likely to do to me
What the jihadists (or was it the Musharrafists?)
Have just done to Benazir Bhutto,
There is going to be no one left to speak
For me when they eventually get me too.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:57 | link | comments

Denial flows wide and deep in Germany: Yesterday I quoted T.S. Eliot’s observation that “Human kind cannot bear very much reality.” Both left and right in Germany—who refuse to accept the unpleasant truths unveiled in a recent survey—are affirming the veracity of that statement (though not, of course, on purpose). From Der Spiegel:

A study released on Tuesday by Germany's Interior Ministry raised questions about the integration of Muslims in Germany. The country's newspapers on Friday, having digested the report, reacted with skepticism and a lack of surprise.

On Tuesday a new study was released by the German Interior Ministry that polled nearly 2,000 Muslims living in Germany -- and immediately stirred strong reactions.

According to the study (more...), approximately 40 percent of Muslims surveyed had a "fundamentalist orientation," which was equated with a strongly religious worldview and moral values. The report also concluded that the vast majority of Muslims in Germany, 92 percent, reject religiously motivated terrorism and violence.

Other numbers were less appealing: Around 6 percent of those surveyed were classified as having "violent tendencies," and 14 percent of respondents had "anti-democratic" tendencies, the report says.

Dissent from the report's findings was sounded quickly. Warning of a misinterpretation of the study's conclusions, Jürgen Mansel, a sociologist at the University of Bielefeld, told the Berliner Zeitung on Friday that "there is no evidence that there is more of a violent tendency among Muslims or immigrants than there is among other groups in Germany." Meanwhile, the head of the evangelical church in Germany, Wolfgang Huber, noted in an interview with the Associated Press how dialogue between Muslims and Christians has taken on a new quality in recent years.

The authors of the report interviewed 1,750 Muslims living in Germany for the study. Of that number, around 40 percent had German citizenship.

The German newspapers on Friday reacted to the study with measured skepticism and a lack of suprise over the findings.

 The left-leaning Die Tageszeitung writes:

"Actually, the study's findings should have a calming effect. They're definitely not surprising. Some Muslim-haters may now feel justified. More generally, though, the study offers very little substance. Just the opposite, in fact: When compared with ethnic Germans and non-Muslim immigrants from the same educational and socio-economic backgrounds, one finds comparable attitudes. And an overwhelming majority of Muslims disapprove of terror in the name of Islam."

"Other findings are truly alarming: A solid majority of Muslim respondents said that they had felt discriminated against because of their ethnicity. Given this, falling back on one's religion seems a logical consequence. Like German youth who flee toward the far-right, many immigrant youth are searching for their own healing in radical Islam. It's too much for society to just go back to business as usual."

The center-left Süddeutsche Zeitung writes:

"When a Muslim gives his up his life in an armed struggle for his beliefs, he goes to paradise -- 40 percent of Muslims in the Interior Ministry's report apparently believe this nonsense. This is shocking. So is the 14 percent of Muslims who object to democracy ... In the eyes of Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, Germany therefore has an Islamism (plus a terrorism) problem."

"But 'prepared for violence' is as mushy as it is questionable. So is whether or not 'Islam' plays a more dominant role here than social problems or the effects of discrimination remain unanswered questions. And if you poll Germans about anti-democratic, xenophobic, or anti-Semitic attitudes, as the sociologist Wilhelm Hartmeyer does, one sees minimal differences. That's not good news, but it does quell some of the commotion."

The conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung writes:

"'We Know Very Little.' This is how one should summarize the results of an Interior Ministry poll of Muslims in Germany. Another title could have been: 'Who Would Have Thought?' Forty percent of German Muslims have a clear religious worldview and moral values; they are therefore supposedly 'fundamentalist-oriented.' Six percent are said to have 'violent tendencies.' That there exists a 'clear connection' between 'poor social integration and fundamentalist religious orientation' is anything but surprising -- and it's worth noting that not many Muslim terrorists originate in poverty."

"One can conclude from the study that anti-democratic attitudes are about the same for Muslims and (non-Muslim) Germans. In no way could one conclude that Islam more strongly cultivates an anti-democratic attitude. No study would be allowed to come to this conclusion, at least not publicly.”

Of course not. There would be hell to pay were one to come to such a conclusion.

Oh, wait: one just did. Hell to pay in five, four, three, two...

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:32 | link | comments

Do Bee Do Bee Do: Nahoul, Hamas TV's "adorable" killer bee is at it again, advising all the kiddies to go and nail a Jew or two (or two hundred) today.

In "honour" of Nahoul, that nutty buggins, I've revised an Old Blue Eyes hit. See if you can guess which one:

Shaheeds in the morn
There on the TV
Where it is the norm
To be so skeevy.
Nahoul cheers 'em on
To posthumous glor-ee.
Something in the air
Was really stinking.
Hatred ev'rywhere
Without much thinking.
Blind submission there
As anyone can see.

Shaheeds in the morn
Who know the Prophet sez that they will be reborn
Up there in Heaven where they’ll hook up with the chicks
Who know some sexy tricks.
Love is just a 'splode away
And life's a paltry price to pay...and

Ever since Farfour
They've been inspired
To go off some Yids,
Do what's required.
Please reserve your scorn
For shaheeds in the morn...

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:11 | link | comments

Channeling the left: What’s up with the National Post today? It picks up this repellent story from Bloomberg News about how some hippy, dippy, snippy Israelis have decamped to India, where they are bad mouthing their religion and their former country to the locals. Next, there’s this loco editorial, about how building homes for Jews in Jerusalem constitutes “A needless provocation.” (You know, like publishing those Mo 'toons.)

Why, if you didn’t know any better, you’d think you were reading the Toronto Star.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:37 | link | comments

Boo, hiss for Pallywood: Honest Reporting sent me its look at Pallywood's latest ouevre, inspiring me to write the following parody (with apologies to the late, great Johnny Mercer):

Boo, hiss for Pallywood!

Splenetic, a-Semitic Pallywood.

Where any French news guy who's of the tribe'll

Spread blood libel

By faking a report

That shows how Jews’ll

For their amusal

Shoot a Pali laddie

For their own sick sport.

Boo, hiss for Pallywood.

Demented, documented Pallywood.

Where ev'ry Zionist is so demonic

That it’s a tonic

To see them get their due.

Come on and smear the Yids,

Fun for both ‘dults and kids!

Boo, hiss for Pallywood.

 

Boo, hiss for Pallywood!

That fakey, rattle-snakey Pallywood.

Where they are tearing down a reputation                                                           

So that a nation’s

Dismantled bit by bit.

And lots of lies

Aren't even in disguise

‘Cause people’ll believe the most outrageous sh*t.

Boo, hiss for Pallywood!

It should be clear it’s up to no damn good.

It’s so determined to do dirt and damage,

All it can manage,

Till Israel’s brought down.

It’s so suffused with hate

For the “apartheid state.”

Boo, hiss for Pallywood!

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:46 | link | comments

Egypt’s dangerous game: The U.S. throws mega-bucks in jizya at Egypt every year, its reward for maintaining “peaceful” relations with Israel. In fact, Egypt is a cesspool of Judenhass and a duplicitous double-dealer, pretending to be a moderating influence in the Middle East while sneaking arms to the jihadis in Gaza. And that can only mean one thing: this year the U.S. will reward them with even more jizya. From the New York Sun:

UNITED NATIONS — On the eve of a Cairo meeting of top Egyptian and Israeli leaders, officials in Israel and Egypt are trading accusations that each is undermining peace in the region, trying to enlist the Bush administration and Congress to support their arguments.

One of Israel's most hawkish figures on relations with Egypt, the former head of the Knesset's powerful defense and foreign relations committee, Yuval Steinitz of the Likud Party, accused the foreign ministry of appeasing Cairo by concealing from the American Congress videotaped evidence showing Egyptian soldiers actively helping in weapons smuggling into the Hamas-controlled Gaza strip. Israel's foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, also accused Egypt of playing a "terrible" role in the border area known as the Philadelphi Corridor.

Israel's defense minister, Ehud Barak, is due to arrive in Cairo today, where he is expected to raise with President Mubarak issues like the Gaza weapons smuggling and negotiations for the release of an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, who is believed to be held in Gaza by a terrorist group. Ahead of the visit, Jerusalem officials attempted to lower the rhetoric.

"Egypt is the largest, most prominent, and most powerful Arab state, and we have peaceful relations with it," Israel's foreign ministry spokesman, Aryeh Mekel, told The New York Sun yesterday. "The advantage of having such peaceful relations is that you can sit down and discuss such issues. And that is exactly what Barak intends to do." But on Monday, Ms. Livni was much more pointed as she appeared in front of the Knesset's defense and foreign relations committee.

"Egypt's role at Annapolis was positive," she said. "But that does not negate the fact that that its activity in the Philadelphi Corridor is terrible and problematic." Such activity, she added, undermines more "pragmatic players" in Gaza and the West Bank…

Where are those much-vaunted “pragmatics”? As far as I can tell, they’re not even in the game, if they indeed exist at all.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:15 | link | comments

The Shtetlization of Israel: In her brilliant book, Jews and Power, Ruth Wisse examines the historical modus operendi of Jews when they had no power—after the dispersion and before the modern Jewish state came into being—and when they finally acquired some power—once Israel was up and running. Her conclusion: having power is far better than being forced to bow and scrape in an effort to placate those hate you, and who may take it into their heads to kill you or throw you out of their county. Today, however, Israel’s current crop of feckless leaders, seem to be reverting to the timid, servile modus operendi of their powerless ancestors, all in an effort to placate the superpower that keeps Israel afloat. Michael Freund of the Jerusalem Post derides this type of pandering as “shtetl diplomacy”:

…To some extent, all this back-and-forth trekking by American officials brings to mind Henry Kissinger's "shuttle diplomacy" after the Yom Kippur War, when he sought to bring about the signing of an interim agreement between Israel and Egypt.

BUT IN fact what we are witnessing now is something much worse. It is what I refer to as "shtetl diplomacy," which is when the sovereign government of the State of Israel reverts back to the age of Jewish powerlessness in 19th century Eastern Europe and acts accordingly.

Instead of doing what is in Israel's best interests, such as strengthening the Jewish presence in Jerusalem and putting an end to Palestinian rocket attacks on Sderot and the Negev, the government turns to Washington for its marching orders.

The result is that our government seems to show more concern for what the US State Department thinks than what the Israeli public deserves.

This hyper-sensitivity to the sentiments of others, even when it comes at the expense of our national security, was on clear display last week. As the Post reported, Israel has refrained from sharing videotapes with the US Congress which prove that Cairo is assisting Hamas with arms smuggling in order "to avoid infuriating the Egyptians."

That's right. We're so afraid of what Hosni Mubarak might think, that we don't want to risk offending him, even if he continues to brazenly arm our enemies.

And as if that weren't absurd enough, Israel also retreated last week from plans to revive a Jewish neighborhood in northern Jerusalem. Less than 24 hours after Haaretz revealed the Housing Ministry's proposal to build thousands of apartments in Atarot, Minister Ze'ev Boim was quick to back-track, with his spokesman admitting the idea had been shelved because of the "peace process."

The Olmert government seems to have forgotten that a sovereign state is not supposed to behave like a submissive serf, but rather like a proud and independent entity.

And that is why it is time to try something radically different. Instead of "shuttle diplomacy" or "shtetl diplomacy," neither of which has worked very well, let's take a page out of the sports sections of American newspapers and give "steroids diplomacy" a try.

As a report issued two weeks ago by former US senator George Mitchell revealed, American baseball players have produced record-breaking results over the past decade thanks in no small measure to the illicit substances, which enhanced their strength and improved their feats.

Scrawny players were transformed into muscle-bound hulks, while meek performers became fearless competitors on the field of play.

Doesn't that sound exactly like what Israel's negotiators so desperately need? Sure, steroids are illegal, but then again, matters of legality have never been this government's strongest point.

Perhaps a little injection of some "Jewish growth hormone," along with an added dose of national pride, would finally do the trick, and help our government to protect the nation's interests rather than forgo them.

Given the way in which they have been conducting themselves of late, a bit of "steroids diplomacy" might just give our feeble leaders the boost they need to stop retreating and to start fighting for what is rightfully ours.

You can’t expect Ehud Olmert, the proverbial 98-lb. weakling, to perform in a “pumped up” manner. That is clearly beyond his capacity. If Israelis want some of that “steroids diplomacy,” they’re going to have to call upon someone with some heft and some stones. I believe the name of that body builder is Benyamin Netanyahu.

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

Prog gets pasted: Progressive Jew/noted moralist Bernard Katz might be surprised to learn that not all Jews agree with him. Harold Pomerantz of Dundas, Ontario, for example, took issue with Bernie’s version of Middle East “morality.” From the Globe and Mail:

Letter writer Bernard Katz (A Question Of Morality - Dec. 24) questions the "ever-eroding morality" of Israel's defence of its country and its citizens. If the discussion is, indeed, about morality, let's discuss the morality of suicide bombers, the murder of Israeli women and children and the daily launching of rockets on Israeli towns and villages.

Whether or not Mr. Katz believes it, a state of war exists between the Palestinians and the Israelis. To believe the lack of peace rests solely with the Israelis is unconscionable. When it comes to morality, Israel has nothing to be ashamed about.

How disheartening it must be for the progs that there are still some Jews around who love Israel and refuse to climb on board the lefty/Islamist bash Israel bandwagon.

Update: A propos "morality," I offer this from the blog of the erudite Roger Kimball (my bolds):

The Australian philosopher David Stove got to the heart of the problem when he pointed out that it is precisely this combination of universal benevolence fired by uncompromising moralism that underwrites the cult of political correctness. “Either element on its own,” Stove observed,

 

is almost always comparatively harmless. A person who is convinced that he has a moral obligation to be benevolent, but who in fact ranks morality below fame (say), or ease; or again, a person who puts morality first, but is also convinced that the supreme moral obligation is, not to be benevolent, but to be holy (say), or wise, or creative: either of these people might turn out to be a scourge of his fellow humans, though in most cases he will not. But even at the worst, the misery which such a person causes will fall incomparably short of the misery caused by Lenin, or Stalin, or Mao, or Ho-Chi-Minh, or Kim-Il-Sung, or Pol Pot, or Castro: persons convinced both of the supremacy of benevolence among moral obligations, and of the supremacy of morality among all things. It is this combination which is infallibly and enormously destructive of human happiness.

Of course, as Stove goes on to note, this “lethal combination” is by no means peculiar to Communists. It provides the emotional fuel for utopians from Robespierre on down. That is the really sobering thing...that the capacity for evil so easily cohabits and feeds upon the emotion of virtue.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:55 | link | comments (2)

Israel’s raison d’etre:  To offer refuge, when needed, to their Jewish brother and sisters who are being persecuted in other lands (such as Iran). Something which, tragically, Jews were unable to do before, during and right after the Holocaust. 

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

Feel the love:  The Annapolis Conference was mostly predicated on the idea that it was a way to bring Sunni Muslims together to form a common front against the Shia threat.

So much for that one. From Fars News:

Looks like all the believers have made amends and buried the hatchet—right between the shoulder blades of Israel and the U.S.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:42 | link | comments

Drink up: Time to take a stand against the Canuki Human Nice Police, mes amis, before they have a chance to scrub our minds clean of socially “unacceptable” thoughts :

Should old acquaintance with the truth

Be something we defend

So all the barmy Thought Police

Won’t think it’s at an end.

For cheeky scribe Mark Steyn, my friends.

For cheeky scribe Mark Steyn.

Let’s drink a cup of vitriol

For cheeky scribe Mark Steyn.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:26 | link | comments

R.I.P.: Oscar Peterson, a great musician and a great Canadian.

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:47 | link | comments

A: Howls of outrage from world leaders, accusations of a"disproportionate response," and condemnatory UN resolutions: Q: What are three things you can always expect when Israel defends itself against its enemies, but which are notably absent when Muslims take on other Muslims?

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:43 | link | comments

Charlie Wilson’s jihad: I have now read Charlie Wilson’s War, the book by George Crile, and seen Charlie Wilson’s War, the movie directed by Mike Nichols that stars Tom Hanks in the title role. And my educated assessment upon taking in both is that Charlie Wilson, the whiskey-swilling, cocaine-snorting, skirt-chasing Texas congressman who was the driving force behind the CIA’s successful covert war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, was a great man. Alas, he was also a hopeless naïf who had little understanding of the long, long history of jihad, no understanding of the jihad imperative as articulated by the Islam’s prophet and recorded in the Koran, and thus next to no awareness of the long term ramifications of empowering a bunch of holy warriors and making them feel invincible.

The truth is—and here the book is a lot more informative than the movie—Charlie Wilson was in love with the jihadis, a kind of love that only a citizen of a highly advanced, decadent culture can feel for those who come from a primitive—and thus, to the “civilized” man, a more “authentic”—culture. A Lawrence of Arabia-type love that ultimately saw the six foot four American donning flowing robes and riding in the company of his beloved warriors—a photo op to beat all photo ops. (And Charlie wasn’t the only one who fell for the jihadis. His office manager, Charlie Schnabel, who didn’t make it into the movie, became so enamoured of them that he “reverted” to Islam one night while on duty in Wilson’s office.)

To Charlie Wilson, in the grip of the myth of the noble savage, these holy warriors were nothing but pure or heart and completely admirable (even if they did have a tendency to shtup the Tennessee mules he had sent to help transport supplies through narrow mountain passages and liked to slice off the arms of Russian prisoners, after endlessly shtupping them, too, of course); Wilson had such fond feelings for the mujahedeen—literally, those who wage jihad—that he shortened its name to the affectionate diminutive, “the muj” Here’s how Crile (who also to a degree has fallen prey to the same myth) describes Wilson’s feelings for his darlings:

It’s hard to fault Wilson for seeing only the good in these men. Most American reporters were also dealing in two-dimensional portraiture when they sought to describe the Afghans. But in the dream Wilson was walking through, there men were without flaws. “Goodness personified” is the way he described the Commander Haqqani, the fundamentalist mullah who guided him around Khost.

The curious thing about Wilson’s romance with these warriors is that he never got to know any one individual mujahid. Deep down, he probably understood that he didn’t dare; the magic might wear off. These were people whose language he did not speak, whose religion he did not share, and whose ordinary way of life, had it been imposed on Trinity, Texas would have turned him into a revolutionary against them. But being with them in the mountains, as they defended their way of life, put Wilson in touch with a people who existed for American in the twentieth century only in the world of myths and legends.

There was a profound calmness to these men. They didn’t move quickly, but they always moved deliberately. They turned together toward Mecca to pray to their god five times a day, but their faith was somehow an individual affair. Even young boys seemed transformed when they spoke of their religion. It was hard for Wilson not to admire and almost envy their faith. When they spoke, it was as if they were revealing divine truths. They were fighting Allahs’s battle against the atheists. They told him it was Allah who had caused Charlie Wilson to come to Pakria province to accept the hospitality of His most faithful mullah, Jalaluddin Haqani (sic)…

Is it any wonder that, after winning their jihad against the atheists, they would feel so flush with success, so convinced of Allah’s blessings, that “the muj” would want to take on and dispatch the only power standing between them and Islam’s conquest of the entire planet? From the book:

Throughout the Muslim world, the victory of the Afghans over the army of a modern superpower was seen as a transformational event. But back home, no one seemed to be aware that something important had taken place and that the United States had been the moving force behind it.

As we know, this lack of awareness ended up having fatal consequences, and we’ve been enduring the fallout from this “transformational event” ever since.

Of course, in both the book and the film, the blame is placed squarely on the Americans and not on “the muj.” If only the U.S. had devoted the same resources to rebuilding Afghanistan as they did to helping the Afghans crush the Russians; if only his Congressional confreres had acceded to Charlie’s request for a paltry $1 million to build a school in Afghanistan; the Afghans would never have fallen prey to the Taliban. (The same self-blame and delusional wishful thinking lives on today, with the West’s notions of fixing things by “rebuilding” Palestinian infrastructure.)

Blaming it all on the U.S. does have its purposes, though. It allows Charlie Wilson—who who, as evidenced by a recent interview with ABC News remains as clueless as ever about the historicity of the jihad—to let himself off the hook. (Charlie seems to think that there’s a “good” muj—the guys he dealt with during the Soviet war—and a “bad” muj—the ones that came after, even though it’s clear that it’s all the same jihad, the only difference being that, for obvious reasons, it’s awfully difficult for an American to romanticize Al Qaeda.) It also allows Americans on the both the left and right to avoid coming to grips with the awful reality of the jihadi mentality and the jihad imperative. An understandable disinclination given that, as T.S. Eliot once observed, “Human kind cannot bear very much reality.” Nonetheless, one that is bound to have dire repercussions for all those who cherish Western freedom.

After reading the book and watching the movie, I couldn’t help but think back to a cartoon that appeared in the New Yorker not long after Mo Atta’s “muj” hit the World Trade Centre. It featured a New Yorker sitting at a bar. The shellshocked customer comments to the bartender, “I miss the Commies.”

Meaning, of course, that one doesn’t really miss the Commies—they were, after all, totalitarian scumbags bent on world domination. But one does miss an enemy that was as averse to dying as we are; an enemy that doesn’t see death as a bonus because it affords the heavenly delights Allah has promised his martyrs.

Sigh. This frosty Christmas morning, I can’t help but feel kind of nostalgic for the godless Commies myself.

Update: The grim effects of "Good Time" Charlie's hearty partying and heavy drinking--especially on his heart--are described in detail in the book and only alluded to briefly in one scene in the movie. I didn't know until just now, though, that the muj-lover recently underwent a heart transplant.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:24 | link | comments

A prog’s progress: How far are “progressive” Jews prepared to go to smear, defame and delegitimize the Jewish homeland? As Caroline Glick writes, one such “prog”—Charles Enderlin, the French filmmaker who fabricated the Al-Dura blood libel and did untold harm to Israel’s reputation—was apparently prepared to go all the way. From the Jerusalem Post:

…The French court is in recess until February but the session last month incontrovertibly destroyed the myth of al-Dura. Yet the truth which took seven years to come out cannot erase the consequences of the falsehood.

Enderlin published his report two days after the Palestinians launched their jihad against Israel. The false image of the victimized al-Dura served as a moral indictment of Israel which fueled the murderous campaign against Israel and Jews worldwide which followed. Just as al-Dura's name was invoked by Palestinians as justification of their massacres of Israeli civilians, so it was invoked by Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl's executioners and by Muslim mobs in Europe as they attacked Jews and Jewish institutions.

Enderlin's alleged hoax went beyond journalistic malfeasance. He put blind faith in the reports of a cameraman who was clearly lying to him. And when faced with the facts of the deception, he aggressively dismissed them over the course of seven years. While it is hard to say how events might have unfolded if he hadn't chosen to act as he did, looking forward the murderous consequences of the al-Dura myth speak volumes about the moral imperative for journalists to get their facts straight and to acknowledge mistakes when they are discovered. So too, it underlines the need for policymakers to base their decisions on facts, even when they expose difficult and inconvenient realities…

In the same piece, Ms. Glick retracts her assertion, made in previous column, that during the Annapolis Conference, the Bush administration bowed to the Saudi’s outrageous demands (they wanted the Jews to use a separate entrance so they wouldn’t be exposed to their ape ‘n’ pig cooties). Apparently, the Saudis did indeed make such a demand, but it was ignored. I offer my sincere apologies to Bush and Condi for accusing them of treating Ehud and Tzipi like the conference’s “darkies.” However, I still think the duo is doing Israel an incalculable amount of harm by pushing for “peace” at this time.

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

John, Paul, George and...Moishe?: Hava Nagillah, as sung by those loveable Moptops.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:34 | link | comments

The real Grinches: Were Joseph and the about-to-deliver Mary to visit Bethlehem this year, they would once again find there’s no room at the inn. Despite the record number of visitors and a 100 per cent occupancy rate at Bethlehem hotels, some in the media remain determined to spin a “good news” story as a bad one.

Wouldn’t want to give the Jews a swelled head now, would they?

To all the Bethlehem grousers and their media mouthpieces, please be on notice: we’ve got your number:

Away in a manger

There’s really great news—

The tourists have come back

In spite of the Jews.

The hatred of the Arabs

Is never awoved

So ev’ry silver lining

Can be shown with a cloud.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:37 | link | comments

Polling the Saudis:  All in all, it’s a lot like polling the Nazis. From NRO’s Media Blog (which summarizes the survey as follows--"Don't like Jews and Christians, want Israel destroyed and Saudis to have nuclear weapons"):

Opinion polls among Saudi citizens are extremely rare. This survey was conducted for Terror Free Tomorrow by D3 Systems of Vienna, Virginia and KA Europe SPRL. Interviews were conducted by phone from a facility in a country neighboring Saudi Arabia.

The survey was conducted in Arabic, among a random national sample of 1,004 Saudi Arabian nationals aged 18 and older. Among the results:

Please tell me your opinion of each group of people. Is your opinion very favorable, somewhat favorable, somewhat unfavorable, or very unfavorable?

Iranians
Very Favorable 23.4%
Somewhat Favorable 27.9%
Somewhat Unfavorable 15.5%
Very Unfavorable 24.0%
Refused 2.5%
Don't Know 6.7%

Jews
Very Favorable 2.1%
Somewhat Favorable 3.9%
Somewhat Unfavorable 7.0%
Very Unfavorable 81.7%
Refused 4.1%
Don't Know 1.1%

Christians
Very Favorable 13.7%
Somewhat Favorable 25.5%
Somewhat Unfavorable 14.0%
Very Unfavorable 40.3%
Refused 2.5%
Don't Know 4.1%

If all diplomatic means fail to stop the Iranian government from developing nuclear weapons, would you favor the United States and other countries accepting a nuclear-armed Iran, or would you favor the United States and other countries taking military action against Iran to try and prevent the Iranians from having nuclear weapons?

Favor US Accepting A Nuclear Armed Iran 26.6%
Favor US and Other Countries Taking Military Action to Prevent Nuclear Armed Iran 38.1%
Refused to answer 19.9%
Don't Know 15.4%

Please listen as I read the following statements and tell me which is closest to your own opinion?

I would favor a peace treaty recognizing the State of Israel, if an independent Palestinian state is established.29.6%

I oppose any peace treaty recognizing the State of Israel, and I favor all Arabs continuing to fight until there is no State of Israel in the Middle East 51.3%

Refused to answer 13.2%
Don't Know 5.9%

Do you favor or oppose the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia developing nuclear weapons?
Strongly Favor 34.7%
Somewhat Favor 17.3%
Somewhat Oppose 12.1%
Strongly Oppose 19.1%
Refused to answer 9.3%
Don't Know 7.5

But no doubt it would only use such weapons for “peaceful purposes.”

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:28 | link | comments

Jewish Scrooges steal Christmas joy: This being Christmas and all, the Ceeb is working overtime to make the Israelis sound like the world’s worst Grinches. This morning on Ceeb radio, Margaret “The Voice” Evans informed listeners that Israel is attempting to force Bedouins into “townships” (a word which was employed—obviously and cunningly (and despicably)—to draw a parallel between Israel and apartheid-era South Africa). In another story, the Ceeb sheds copious croc tears over the sad plight of Christians stuck in Gaza this Christmas—the fault, of course, of the Jews (while the Ceeb wants you to know that Hamas, that plucky little regime of jihadists, is just doing the best it can under straightened circumstances):

Israel will let 500 Palestinian Christians living in Gaza travel to the West Bank to spend Christmas in Bethlehem. But for the 2,500 staying behind, their first Christmas under Hamas rule will be sombre.

Their priest preaches hope, but sometimes even he despairs.

"Christmas is destroyed, it's smashed in Gaza," says Father Musallam Manue of Holy Family Church. "There is no more joy in Gaza and because of that there is no more peace in Gaza."

These are tough times in the territory, the CBC's Nahlah Ayed reports.

Under an Israeli blockade imposed after Hamas fighters seized control of Gaza in June, the economy has collapsed, prices have gone through the roof and Gaza is even more isolated than in the past. That's why so many Christians want out, even if just for the holidays.

Jehad Anton hasn't seen his Canadian wife since they married last winter and hoped to be with her in the Toronto area to mark their first Christmas together.

"I tell her, I hope you [have] a merry Christmas. I promise to be with you as soon [as [possible]. Please pray for me to come."

But he is not among the lucky ones.

Border crossings are mostly sealed. Hamas denies Israel's right to exist, and under its rule militants regularly fire rockets into Israeli territory. The Israeli government has responded with military strikes.

With most imports and exports blocked, seasonal supplies bound for Husam Mourtaga's shop have been sitting in port for months, and few have come to buy his old Christmas stock.

"This Christmas is very bad, really, very bad for all people," he says. "For me, I think, and for people."

Hmmm. I wonder why that might be?

My Christmas wish for the Twilight Zoners of the Ceeb: I hope and pray you get a clue before you and all the other useful idiots (more than a few of whom, alas, are Jews) manage to put the final nail in Israel’s coffin.

Update: AP has a truer picture (words I never expected to write) of why Gaza Christians are in such a state of despair:

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — Gaza's tiny Christian community is keeping a low profile this Christmas, traumatized by the killing of a prominent activist in the wake of Hamas's takeover of the coastal territory.

Few Christmas trees are on display, churches are holding austere services, and hundreds of Christians hope to travel to the moderate-controlled West Bank to celebrate the holiday in Bethlehem. Many say they don't plan on returning to Gaza.

"We have a very sad Christmas," the acting pastor of Gaza's Baptist Church, Essam Farah, said. The church has canceled its annual children's party because of the grim atmosphere.

About 3,000 Christians live in Gaza, an overwhelmingly conservative Muslim territory of 1.5 million people. It has been virtually cut off from the world and its residents driven deeper into poverty since the June takeover by Hamas, which is considered a terrorist organization by Israel and America.

Christians and Muslims have generally had cordial relations over the years in Gaza, but that relationship has been shaky since Hamas seized control and tensions were exacerbated with the recent death of 32-year-old Rami Ayyad.

Ayyad, a member of the Baptist Church, managed Gaza's only Christian bookstore. In early October, he was found shot in the head, his body thrown on a Gaza street 10 hours after he was kidnapped from the store...

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:00 | link | comments

Christmas prezzie: Bruce singing Merry Christmas, Baby. Enjoy!

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:00 | link | comments

Progressive aggressive: Behold, the “progressive” Jew in his natural habitat. Obsessed with Israel’s “immorality”; burning with rage about the “injustice” that’s been done to the left’s designated uber-victims, the Palestinians (they do suffer so); brimming with disdain for any Jew who dares to stand up for the Jews’ right to live free and sovereign in their homeland. Here he is, bloviating in the Globe and Mail:

A question of morality

BERNARD KATZ

Toronto -- Letter writer Mindy Alter (Christmas In Bethlehem - Dec. 22) must be kidding when says the Jewish people are "one of the planet's most endangered species." Ratcheting up the rhetoric, she seems to align all Jews with Israel's acts of brutality at checkpoints, murderous disregard for non-combatants, ongoing expansion of illegal West Bank settlements and unconscionable imprisonment of Palestinians in Gaza. I care deeply about Israel's ever-eroding morality, and I reject Ms. Alter's trivialization. She may be surprised at how many Jews agree with me.

 

Actually, I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t be at all surprised. Nor would she likely be surprised that Bernie’s commitment to the progressive viewpoint has prompted him to expectorate at Israel’s “immorality” on at least one previous occasion. From NOW Magazine:

Jews on disastrous path

Considering the usually nuanced reflection and understanding in his work as a journalist, film critic and former director of programming for the Toronto Jewish Film Festival, I was amazed at letter-writer Shlomo Schwartzberg's brief rant (NOW, October 26-November 1) on Glenn Wheeler's excellent report on the conference hosted by the Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid.

Schwartzberg should know that "progressive Jews" can see the forest and the trees clearly – the path Israel has been taking has led and will lead to nothing but disaster for itself and its Palestinian neighbours.

As the great Yeshayahu Leibowitz predicted in 1967, occupying Palestinian lands has eroded the true spirit of Judaism in Israel, bringing with it deep moral corruption. Those who are inured to the suffering Israel has wrought are the real "deluded Jews" and Israel's inner enemies.

Way to go, fellah! The Palestinians and their many, many, champions in the international community applaud your ongoing efforts, and are counting on “progressive” Jews like you to step forward and help them fight the “good” fight.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:51 | link | comments (2)

The Brother Karimov: It’s election day in Uzbekistan.  The only reason I mention it is because the current leader—now “vying” for re-election—has an eye-catching name (at least it caught my eye on Google News just now). From AP:

OSH, Kyrgyzstan (AP) - Uzbeks are voting today in a tightly controlled presidential election that's expected to extend the rule of 1 of the most anti-Western leaders in strategic Central Asia.

President Islam Karimov (EES'-lahm kah-REE'-mahv) is running for a new term in office against three little-known challengers who publicly say they support his policies. State run news says the contested election is "a proof that our country has built a democratic state." Critics are labeling the opposition candidates as puppets meant to create the illusion of a free contest.

During Karimov's 18-year-rule, he has jailed or exiled all his political rivals and has faced wide criticism for human rights abuses.

Karimov has taken a hostile stance toward the west since ordering the shutdown of a U.S. air base in 2005.

EES’-lahm kah-REE’-mahv: catchy moniker. My question: why is the AP correspondent reporting from Osh and not Tashkent?

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:20 | link | comments

Lefties enraged: The Israelis want to build some housing in Jerusalem, a move that is causing the usual suspects in the lefty media to have a conniption on behalf of their favourite “victims.”  From the Ceeb (headline: New Israeli settlements will cloud peace talks: Abbas):

The confirmation of an Israeli plan to build 740 apartment units in areas the Palestinians view as their own will complicate planned Mideast peace talks, officials and observers warned Sunday.

The Israeli government plans to allocate $25 million to build 500 new units in East Jerusalem and 240 nearby in the West Bank, Rafi Eitan, the cabinet minister for Jerusalem affairs, said Sunday.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, whose Fatah party controls the West Bank, said building the apartments will breach Israel's agreement to halt construction while the two sides try and work out a peace deal.

"We can't understand these settlement activities at a time we're talking about final status negotiations," Abbas said.

Reporting from Jerusalem, the CBC's Peter Armstrong said "this will undoubtably cloud the new negotiations." Palestinians are "outraged" about the building, and the U.S. has already expressed "serious objections" to settlement expansions, he added…

Stick it in your ear, Pete.

From the New York Times (Google headline: Israeli Housing Plans Casts Pall Over Peace Talks):

JERUSALEM — Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel on Sunday rejected overtures by Hamas, the militant Islamic group that rules Gaza, for discussions about a temporary cease-fire.

At the same time, Mr. Olmert’s government raised the ire of Palestinian representatives from the West Bank, with whom Israel is embarking on negotiations for a permanent peace, by seeking budget approval to build more housing for Jewish residents in areas that the Palestinians claim for their future state.

Israeli officials said that a Housing and Construction Ministry budget proposal for 2008 included plans to build 500 apartments in Har Homa, a Jewish development in a hotly disputed part of East Jerusalem, and 240 apartments in Maale Adumim, the largest Jewish settlement in the Israeli-occupied West Bank with a population of more than 30,000.

Israeli officials tried to play down the significance of the request. Mark Regev, a spokesman for Mr. Olmert, said that the budget still had to be approved by Parliament, and that “there have been no new decisions authorizing building in Maale Adumim.” It was unclear whether the budget request was for new projects that had not yet been approved or for units already approved but not yet built.

Either way, the action is likely to cast a pall over a meeting of the Israeli and Palestinian negotiating teams set for Monday, the second since last month’s American-sponsored peace conference in Annapolis, Md…

…With regard to the budget proposal for additional housing units in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, both Israel and the Palestinians have committed to fulfill the first phase of the road map, a long dormant 2003 peace plan that calls on the Palestinians to act to halt all violence, and the Israelis to cease all settlement construction.

Mr. Olmert has pledged not to build new settlements or to expropriate additional land. But Israel has always reserved the right to build in major settlement blocs like Maale Adumim, which it intends to keep as part of any permanent deal with the Palestinians, and Israel contends that Jerusalem has a separate status.

Har Homa, known to the Palestinians as Jebel Abu Ghneim, was established in the late 1990s in an area of Jerusalem annexed by Israel after the 1967 Middle East war. It has been a point of particular contention between Israel and the Palestinians.

Days before the first meeting of the negotiating teams in December, the Israeli government issued a tender for the construction of 307 apartments in Har Homa. In an unusually forthright condemnation, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the construction would “not help build confidence” for peace talks.

After the Dec. 12 meeting, the Palestinian negotiators said they expected Israel to present answers at the next meeting as to whether it was ready to stop settlement construction or not…

Get stuffed, Palestinian negotiators.

You too, Condi.

(Sorry. The lefties—and Condi— have a deleterious effect on my eloquence.)

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

Yack attack: Not content with enshrouding women in black sacks so as to keep their disturbing presence out of plain sight, the misogynistic nutbars in Iran now apparently want to silence them, too. From the Tehran Times:

TEHRAN – Men love silence whilst women are interested in talking.

Men, generally like to have about 2-3 hours of silence and relaxation per day while women love to speak about daily events when their husbands come home. It is estimated that this difference in taste causes about 90% of marital disagreements, IWNA quoted Dr. Seyed Mahmoud Anousheh in a congress of pathology here last week.

According to six year’s of research, girls crave attention and it can prove to be a destructive attribute, Anousheh expressed.

“I myself, as a representative of the male gender, assert that the thing that disturbs our minds and destroys our mental files is the voice, tone and the tactics which you girls use unwittingly in our presence.” Dr Anousheh said in his speech to 1000 boy and girl students.

“What do you think? How does a society deviate? Does it need any theory? Does it need any philosophy? No. deviations are created by simple things,” he noted while many of the boy and girl students listening to him were standing due to a shortage of seats.

The curiosity factor in girls is 1/7 times more than in boys and they enjoy daydreams 1/3 times more than do boys. Girls, due to their greater curiosity and pleasure in daydreaming face far more problems in our society, he maintained.

Girls, from the age of 14, like to know who they are and what abilities they possess. Generally from this age they should not be prevented from vice as this will actually cause its promotion, he emphasized…

The man is obviously a complete mental case—which no doubt means he was in his element at the “congress of pathology.” (Come to think of it, wouldn’t that be a perfect nickname for the mullahs’ regime?)

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:13 | link | comments

Claudia Rosett on Durban II: As if Durban I, which played out in the days leading up to 9/11, wasn’t bad enough, another Fiesta of Antisemitsm (with Israel as the international community’s designated piñata) is looming. Claudia Rosett expresses the appropriate contempt, disgust and disdain for the UN’s upcoming Jew-bash:

About three layers deep inside its vast bureaucracy, the UN is now gestating a repeat performance of its notorious 2001 conference in Durban, South Africa. That was billed as a meeting to fight racism, but — thanks to careful planning sessions in places such as Tehran and under the care of the UN’s former “Human Rights” Commission — it was actually all about vilifying Israel and America. Things got so bad that midway through the conference, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell yanked the U.S. delegation.

 

All the portents are that the next round, Durban II, will be just as bad, or worse. Libya is chairing the preparatory committee, with Iran, Cuba, Russia, and Pakistan (fronting for the Organization of the Islamic Conference) gathered round the table. The whole thing is being shepherded by the new UN “Human Rights” Council — which really deserves to be called “The UN Chronically-Condemning-Israel Council.” This thing has one outrage slathered on top of the next, more details in my column today on NRO, and more on EYEONTHEUN and more on the entire twisted scene on UNWATCH.

 

Among the array of perversions involved in the preparations for Durban II, the planners listed above want the UN to pay for it out of core budget funds, for which the U.S. picks up 22% of the tab. And in looking at plans for some of the money (the sum now being discussed is almost $7 million — what would YOU do with that much money?), I have been amazed by the amount of conferencing which the UN now deems normal in order to produce… a conference. They haven’t even picked the actual venue yet for Durban II. But already they have spent days meeting in Geneva this past August. There have been discussions in committees in New York. There is supposed to be a ten-day “preparatory” session in Geneva (10 days! What do they do for 10 days? That needs 10 days of meals and hotels and … maybe some shopping… and… well, whatever, with all those cafes and private banking facilities, Geneva can be nice in the spring). And then there are supposed to be a series of three days of preparatory meetings in each of five different locations around the world… leading to 800 pages of “pre-session” documentation. And that’s just a sample of the plans envisioned for 2008. The conference itself isn’t supposed to take place until 2009.

 

If America is going to help bankroll this stuff, seems like it would be simpler and much better for the world to just give these delegates from Libya and Russia and Cuba and Pakistan (and Norway… somehow, Norway always seems to be in on these things) a handful of shopping and air travel vouchers, and tell them to take a vacation and let the rest of us worry about fighting racism…and anti-Semitism, and anti-Americanism, and you name it. And for that, do we need the UN at all?

In a word, “nope.”

A preview of what's in store for "Sponge Bob Jew Pants" (Israel) at Durban II

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:42 | link | comments

Power player: The San Francisco Chronicle has a profile of Yusuf Bey, the charismatic (but now deceased) Black Muslim bakery owner who got away with raping and impregnating young girls—many of whom became his “wife”--and preaching a message of violence because he did so in the name of empowering “victims.” And in American society, no one has higher moral authority than someone who can to be empowering victims—even if he is a violent, racist, male chauvinist swine.

Yusuf Bey stood before his followers at the headquarters of Your Black Muslim Bakery in Oakland one Sunday in 2002. In his familiar double-breasted suit, bow tie and fez, he delivered an emphatic sermon.

His message that afternoon was a vow of defiance in the face of his arrest on charges of raping young girls entrusted to his care - defiance, and a refusal to submit to any authority other than himself.

The message was at the core of Bey's gospel of black empowerment and self-determination, a creed to live by.

"You do me wrong, I'm going to fix you up," he told the dozens of men and women attending the speech at the bakery, the business and religious seat of the multimillion-dollar empire Bey had founded. "I'll send some fearless soldiers out here.

"You lock me up if you want to, but I'm not going in with my head down," he declared in a videotape of the sermon obtained by The Chronicle.

"I'll be fighting all the way. I'll be scratching and fighting and putting anything in my hand for a weapon to defend myself. I want you to understand that. You ain't playing with no Uncle Tom and no house Negro. ... I don't turn no damn cheek."

Less than a year later, Bey was dead at 67, succumbing to cancer before his trial on sexual assault charges. But during his last year, while free on bail, he preached a new vision for his community, while seeking to reassure his worried followers in the face of unprecedented pressure from prosecutors and the press.

In his final sermons, Bey told his followers that God had specially sanctioned his actions and ideas. He said he was not answerable to anyone for his conduct - certainly not the police, whom he said no black person should ever trust. He railed at the media - "the powers at hand that destroy you," he called them. He said he was entitled to retaliate with violence if he was threatened with prison. And he expected his followers to help him fight.

"See, I can teach peace, or I can teach war," Bey declared. "I got young men behind me. If I say something, they will do it."

The final sermons of Yusuf Bey were followed by a bitter power struggle within the family. Bey's handpicked successor was mysteriously killed, and the successor's second-in-command was nearly assassinated.

A 19-year-old son ultimately rose to the top. He and his young followers, prosecutors say, would commit a series of violent crimes that culminated in the Aug. 2 assassination of Oakland Post editor Chauncey Bailey, who was working with another Bey family member on stories about the power struggle.

Bailey's brazen, execution-style slaying in downtown Oakland prompted extraordinary new scrutiny of the bakery, revealing the degree to which it had insinuated itself into the fabric of the city, gaining the blessing of politicians at every level - including the City Council, the mayor's office, county Board of Supervisors, state representatives and a member of Congress - even as some bakery members allegedly engaged in massive welfare fraud and, police say, the business operated as a front for organized crime.

A POWERFUL IMAGE

For more than three decades, Bey attracted followers, especially the poor and disenfranchised, with a message of black self-empowerment. He offered them a society unto its own, where black people could live free from what he saw as the crushing oppression of whites. At the bakery, he fed, housed and put dozens to work to help create this world, a realm he ruled with unquestioned authority.

But the bakery allegedly had a darker side. Bey beat, raped and impregnated girls at the bakery and forced them to become his "wives," prosecutors charged. He was suspected of ordering his followers to commit acts of violence, including homicides; and the bakery sustained itself financially by systematically defrauding county welfare and federal housing-subsidy programs set up to help poor people, three of those former wives testified in a lawsuit.

To the outside world, Bey projected an image of the bakery as a haven of black self-respect and self sufficiency. That powerful image resonated, even after his death, with both his followers and some of Oakland's most powerful political leaders.

Born Joseph Stephens in 1935 in Greenville, Texas, in the midst of the Depression, Bey moved with his family to Oakland when he was 5 years old, attended local schools and then served four years in the Air Force. He became attracted to the Nation of Islam, a black separatist religion founded in Detroit in the 1930s by the preacher W.D. Fard and popularized by Elijah Muhammad.

By 1968, Joseph Stephens had taken the name Joseph X and was second-in-command of the first Nation of Islam mosque in Oakland. His brother, Billy X., was minister. From the beginning, the brothers had a flashy style, according to former members of their mosque and other Nation of Islam members at the time.

Smooth-talking and slick, the brothers wore sharp suits, drove fancy cars and seemed to embody the "Superfly" image popularized by the 1972 movie about a flamboyant drug dealer with "a plan to stick it to the man," said Askia Muhammad, who at the time was a student minister at the Nation of Islam mosque in San Francisco.

The former Stephens brothers urged their followers to read the Mafia novel "The Godfather" to help explain their leadership style, said Muhammad, who later became editor in chief of Muhammad Speaks, the official Nation of Islam newspaper.

Eventually, Yusuf Bey, as he came to be known, broke both with his brother and with the Nation of Islam, and founded Your Black Muslim Bakery as an independent movement.

But his religious views were still strongly rooted in the Nation of Islam, as his sermons showed. To his last days, Bey was reciting the writings of Elijah Muhammad. And behind his lectern were large photographs of Elijah Muhammad and W.D. Fard, who Nation of Islam believers say was the messiah.

The sermons themselves were delivered at the bakery at 3 p.m. on Sundays, then rebroadcast as "True Solutions," paid programming on various cable channels, particularly the now-defunct Soul Beat channel in Oakland. Few video copies exist. According to a former Soul Beat producer, bakery members always picked up the master tapes, not letting copies be made. The Chronicle obtained videos of several sermons from a confidential source.

A VIEW OF SLAVERY

Bey preached that black people were divine and white people were "devils." The core of his sermons revolved around slavery.

He told his followers that the ravages of centuries of brutal mistreatment at the hands of whites - through slavery, Jim Crow segregation and lynch mobs - still had a powerful psychological effect on black people. These effects were worst in the community's most wayward - drug addicts, felons and the downtrodden. Bey said society had "designed" them to go astray...

 

Sounds eerily similar to the words of the black community activist—the one who twice quoted Amiri Baraka—at the 2007 Combating Hatred whinge-fest.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:33 | link | comments

Power player: The San Francisco Chronicle has a profile of Yusuf Bey, the charismatic (but now dead) Black Muslim bakery owner who got away with raping and impregnating young girls—many of whom became his “wife”--and preaching a message of violence racism because he did so in the name of empowering “victims.” And in American society, no one has higher moral authority than someone who can claim to be empowering victims—even if he is a violent, racist, male chauvinist swine.

Yusuf Bey stood before his followers at the headquarters of Your Black Muslim Bakery in Oakland one Sunday in 2002. In his familiar double-breasted suit, bow tie and fez, he delivered an emphatic sermon.

His message that afternoon was a vow of defiance in the face of his arrest on charges of raping young girls entrusted to his care - defiance, and a refusal to submit to any authority other than himself.

The message was at the core of Bey's gospel of black empowerment and self-determination, a creed to live by.

"You do me wrong, I'm going to fix you up," he told the dozens of men and women attending the speech at the bakery, the business and religious seat of the multimillion-dollar empire Bey had founded. "I'll send some fearless soldiers out here.

"You lock me up if you want to, but I'm not going in with my head down," he declared in a videotape of the sermon obtained by The Chronicle.

"I'll be fighting all the way. I'll be scratching and fighting and putting anything in my hand for a weapon to defend myself. I want you to understand that. You ain't playing with no Uncle Tom and no house Negro. ... I don't turn no damn cheek."

Less than a year later, Bey was dead at 67, succumbing to cancer before his trial on sexual assault charges. But during his last year, while free on bail, he preached a new vision for his community, while seeking to reassure his worried followers in the face of unprecedented pressure from prosecutors and the press.

In his final sermons, Bey told his followers that God had specially sanctioned his actions and ideas. He said he was not answerable to anyone for his conduct - certainly not the police, whom he said no black person should ever trust. He railed at the media - "the powers at hand that destroy you," he called them. He said he was entitled to retaliate with violence if he was threatened with prison. And he expected his followers to help him fight.

"See, I can teach peace, or I can teach war," Bey declared. "I got young men behind me. If I say something, they will do it."

The final sermons of Yusuf Bey were followed by a bitter power struggle within the family. Bey's handpicked successor was mysteriously killed, and the successor's second-in-command was nearly assassinated.

A 19-year-old son ultimately rose to the top. He and his young followers, prosecutors say, would commit a series of violent crimes that culminated in the Aug. 2 assassination of Oakland Post editor Chauncey Bailey, who was working with another Bey family member on stories about the power struggle.

Bailey's brazen, execution-style slaying in downtown Oakland prompted extraordinary new scrutiny of the bakery, revealing the degree to which it had insinuated itself into the fabric of the city, gaining the blessing of politicians at every level - including the City Council, the mayor's office, county Board of Supervisors, state representatives and a member of Congress - even as some bakery members allegedly engaged in massive welfare fraud and, police say, the business operated as a front for organized crime.

A POWERFUL IMAGE

For more than three decades, Bey attracted followers, especially the poor and disenfranchised, with a message of black self-empowerment. He offered them a society unto its own, where black people could live free from what he saw as the crushing oppression of whites. At the bakery, he fed, housed and put dozens to work to help create this world, a realm he ruled with unquestioned authority.

But the bakery allegedly had a darker side. Bey beat, raped and impregnated girls at the bakery and forced them to become his "wives," prosecutors charged. He was suspected of ordering his followers to commit acts of violence, including homicides; and the bakery sustained itself financially by systematically defrauding county welfare and federal housing-subsidy programs set up to help poor people, three of those former wives testified in a lawsuit.

To the outside world, Bey projected an image of the bakery as a haven of black self-respect and self sufficiency. That powerful image resonated, even after his death, with both his followers and some of Oakland's most powerful political leaders.

Born Joseph Stephens in 1935 in Greenville, Texas, in the midst of the Depression, Bey moved with his family to Oakland when he was 5 years old, attended local schools and then served four years in the Air Force. He became attracted to the Nation of Islam, a black separatist religion founded in Detroit in the 1930s by the preacher W.D. Fard and popularized by Elijah Muhammad.

By 1968, Joseph Stephens had taken the name Joseph X and was second-in-command of the first Nation of Islam mosque in Oakland. His brother, Billy X., was minister. From the beginning, the brothers had a flashy style, according to former members of their mosque and other Nation of Islam members at the time.

Smooth-talking and slick, the brothers wore sharp suits, drove fancy cars and seemed to embody the "Superfly" image popularized by the 1972 movie about a flamboyant drug dealer with "a plan to stick it to the man," said Askia Muhammad, who at the time was a student minister at the Nation of Islam mosque in San Francisco.

The former Stephens brothers urged their followers to read the Mafia novel "The Godfather" to help explain their leadership style, said Muhammad, who later became editor in chief of Muhammad Speaks, the official Nation of Islam newspaper.

Eventually, Yusuf Bey, as he came to be known, broke both with his brother and with the Nation of Islam, and founded Your Black Muslim Bakery as an independent movement.

But his religious views were still strongly rooted in the Nation of Islam, as his sermons showed. To his last days, Bey was reciting the writings of Elijah Muhammad. And behind his lectern were large photographs of Elijah Muhammad and W.D. Fard, who Nation of Islam believers say was the messiah.

The sermons themselves were delivered at the bakery at 3 p.m. on Sundays, then rebroadcast as "True Solutions," paid programming on various cable channels, particularly the now-defunct Soul Beat channel in Oakland. Few video copies exist. According to a former Soul Beat producer, bakery members always picked up the master tapes, not letting copies be made. The Chronicle obtained videos of several sermons from a confidential source.

A VIEW OF SLAVERY

Bey preached that black people were divine and white people were "devils." The core of his sermons revolved around slavery.

He told his followers that the ravages of centuries of brutal mistreatment at the hands of whites - through slavery, Jim Crow segregation and lynch mobs - still had a powerful psychological effect on black people. These effects were worst in the community's most wayward - drug addicts, felons and the downtrodden. Bey said society had "designed" them to go astray...

 

Sounds eerily similar to the words of the black community activist—the one who twice quoted Amiri Baraka—at the 2007 Combating Hatred whinge-fest.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:30 | link | comments

Songs of the season: Some of my favorites:

·         Coolest “Frosty” ever, courtesy Leon Redbone and Dr. John;

·         Louis Armstrong celebrates “Christmas in New Orleans”;

·         Meanwhile, Bing is in Kilarney...;

·         ...as Eartha purrs her gift requests to her X-mas sugar daddy;

·         And, of course, Judy in St. Louie tries to cheer up that morbid little Tootie--a song that gets me every time.

Posted by: scaramouche at 15:03 | link | comments

Islam’s Qatif Girls: As an act of “mercy” prompted by merciless bad press, King Abdullah “pardoned” the woman who has come to be known as “Qatif girl.” But, as Jeff Jacoby writes, there are untold numbers of Qatif girls out there—one of them being Toronto’s own Aqsa Parvez—who find themselves on the receiving end of the Islamic partriarchy’s savage “mercies.” From the Boston Globe:

THE "QATIF GIRL" won a reprieve last week. On Dec. 17, Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah pardoned the young woman, who was sentenced to 200 lashes and six months in prison after she pressed charges against seven men who had raped her and a male acquaintance in 2006. Two weeks earlier, Sudan's president extended a similar reprieve to Gillian Gibbons, the British teacher convicted of insulting Islam because her 7-year-old students named a teddy bear Muhammad. Gibbons had been sentenced to prison, but government-organized street demonstrators were loudly demanding her execution.

In January, Nazanin Fatehi was released from an Iranian jail after a death sentence against her was revoked. She had originally been convicted of murder for fatally stabbing a man when he and two others attempted to rape her and her niece in a park. (Had she yielded to the rapists, she could have been flogged or stoned for engaging in nonmarital sex.)

The sparing of these women was very welcome news, of course, and it was not coincidental that each case had triggered an international furor. But for every "Qatif girl" or Nazanin who is saved, there are far too many other Muslim girls and women for whom deliverance never comes.

No international furor saved Aqsa Parvez, a Toronto teenager, whose father was charged on Dec. 11 with strangling her to death because she refused to wear a hijab. "She just wanted to look like everyone else," one of Aqsa's friends told the National Post, "and I guess her dad had a problem with that."

No reprieve came for Banaz Mahmod, either. She was 20, a Kurdish immigrant to Britain, whose father and uncle had her killed last year after she left an abusive arranged marriage and fell in love with a man not from the family's village in Kurdistan. Banaz was choked to death with a bootlace, stuffed into a suitcase, and buried in a garden 70 miles away.

More than 25 such "honor killings" have been confirmed in Britain's Muslim community in recent years. Many more are suspected.

There has been no storm of outrage about the intimidation and murder in Basra, Iraq, of women who wear Western-style clothing. Iraqi police say that more than 40 women have been killed so far this year by Islamists; the bodies are often left in garbage dumps with notes accusing the victims of "un-Islamic behavior."

By Western standards, the subjugation of women by Muslim fanatics, and the sometimes pathological Islamist obsession with female sexuality, are unthinkable. Time and again they lead to shocking acts of violence and depravity:

In Pakistan, a tribal council ordered a woman to be gang-raped as punishment for her brother's supposed liaison with a woman from another tribe.

In San Francisco, a young Muslim woman was shot dead after she uncovered her hair and put on makeup in order to be a maid of honor at a friend's wedding.

In Tehran, a father beheaded his 7-year-old daughter because he suspected that she had been raped; he said he acted "to defend my honor, fame, and dignity."

In Saudi Arabia, the Islamic police prevented schoolgirls from leaving a burning building because they were not wearing headscarves and abayas; 15 of the girls died in the inferno.

The president of Cairo's Al-Azhar University, a renowned center of Islamic learning, described the proper method of wife-beating in a television interview: "It's not really beating," Sheikh Ahmad Al-Tayyeb explained on Egyptian television. "It's more like punching."

When the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan in 1996, the repression of women was among their first priorities. They issued a decree forbidding women to leave their homes, with the result that work and schooling for women came to a halt, destroying the country's healthcare system, civil service, and elementary education.

"Forty percent of the doctors, half of the government workers, and seven out of 10 teachers were women," Lawrence Wright observed in "The Looming Tower," his Pulitzer Prize-winning history of Al Qaeda. "Under the Taliban, many of them would become beggars."

Women are not the only victims of this rampant misogyny. Mohammed Halim, a 46-year-old Afghan schoolteacher, was dragged from his family and horribly murdered last year - disemboweled and then dismembered - for defying orders to stop educating girls.

All these are only examples - the tip of a dreadful iceberg that will never be demolished until Muslims by the millions rise up against it. As for the rest of us, we too have an obligation to raise our voices. It took a worldwide outcry to spare "Qatif girl" and Nazanin. But there are countless others like them, and our silence may seal their fate.

Not “may.” “Will.”

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:29 | link | comments

Economic jihad: Some decades ago, a quirk of geology made a bunch of backward desert dwellers outrageously, unimaginably wealthy—and don’t think they aren’t going to continue to capitalize on it. Why, that quirk is what’s allowing them to buy up a good portion of Dar al Harb at bargain rates. From the Financial Times:

Saudi Arabia plans to establish a sovereign wealth fund that is expected to dwarf Abu Dhabi’s $900bn and become the largest in the world.

The new fund will be a formidable rival for other government-owned investment funds in the Middle East and Asia, which are playing an increasingly active role in channelling capital to western companies, particularly financial companies hard hit by the US mortgage meltdown.

News of the Saudi plan comes as Temasek of Singapore is in “preliminary” talks with Merrill Lynch concerning a multibillion-dollar stake in the ailing investment bank, according to a person familiar with the matter.

“Merrill and Temasek have been talking for a while about this, although there are no indications that a deal is imminent,” the person said. Temasek was also approached as a possible investor in UBS and Morgan Stanley, although the investment banks later struck deals with Government of Singapore Investment Corp and China Investment Corp respectively, the person said.

These stakes have avoided a serious political backlash but potential investments from the Saudis are likely to be subject to greater scrutiny.

The effort is likely to be spearheaded by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which has a mandate to invest only internally. Previously, the Saudis’ oil wealth had gone partly to the kingdom’s central bank, the Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority, and partly into the coffers of the ruling family.

While the balance sheet of SAMA is public information, bankers say the figures capture only a small percentage of the total wealth of the country. The myriad investment vehicles of the various members of the royal family have never been transparent…

Now there’s an understatement and a half. Not only are the myriad vehicles not transparent, they are opaque, murky, and about as clear as mud. Of course, when you have that much money, a little opacity never seems all that problematic.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:38 | link | comments

Nunsense: Glossy Islamic rag, Islamica Magazine, has an interview with an infidel who’s one of the most effective shills for Islam this side of John Esposito (who’s also featured in the current issue). I speak, of course, of none other than ex-nun and the completely nonsensical Karen Armstrong. The author of a hagiography of Islam’s founder, Karen is of the opinion that Islam has gotten a bad rap, and that, all “fundamentalism” being more or less the same, any misunderstanding between believers and non-believers is entirely attributable to “politics” and what you might call “bad faith” on the part of the kaffirs:

ANDREA BISTRICH: 9/11 has become the symbol of major, insurmountable hostilities between Islam and the West. After the attacks many Americans asked: "Why do they hate us?" And experts in numerous round-table talks debated if Islam is an inherently violent religion. Is this so?

KAREN ARMSTRONG: Certainly not. There is far more violence in the Bible than in the Qur'an; the idea that Islam imposed itself by the sword is a Western fiction, fabricated during the time of the Crusades when, in fact, it was Western Christians who were fighting brutal holy wars against Islam. The Qur'an forbids aggressive warfare and permits war only in self-defence; the moment the enemy sues for peace, the Qur'an insists that Muslims must lay down their arms and accept whatever terms are offered, even if they are disadvantageous. Later, Muslim law forbade Muslims to attack a country where Muslims were permitted to practice their faith freely; the killing of civilians was prohibited, as were the destruction of property and the use of fire in warfare.

The sense of polarization has been sharpened by recent controversies — the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, over the Pope's remarks about Islam, over whether face-veils hinder integration. All these things have set relations between Islam and the West on edge. Harvard-Professor Samuel Huntington introduced the theory of a "clash of civilizations" we are witnessing today. Does such a fundamental incompatibility between the "Christian West" and the "Muslim World" indeed exist?

The divisions in our world are not the result of religion or of culture, but are politically based. There is an imbalance of power in the world, and the powerless are beginning to challenge the hegemony of the Great Powers, declaring their independence of them-often using religious language to do so. A lot of what we call "fundamentalism" can often be seen as a religious form of nationalism, an assertion of identity. The old 19th-century European nationalist ideal has become tarnished and has always been foreign to the Middle East. In the Muslim world people are redefining themselves according to their religion in an attempt to return to their roots after the great colonialist disruption.

What has made Fundamentalism, seemingly, so predominant today?

The militant piety that we call "fundamentalism" erupted in every single major world faith in the course of the twentieth century. There is fundamentalist Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Sikhism, Hinduism and Confucianism, as well as fundamentalist Islam. Of the three monotheistic religions-Judaism, Christianity and Islam-Islam was the last to develop a fundamentalist strain during the 1960s.

Fundamentalism represents a revolt against secular modern society, which separates religion and politics. Wherever a Western secularist government is established, a religious counterculturalist protest movement rises up alongside it in conscious rejection. Fundamentalists want to bring God/religion from the sidelines to which they have been relegated in modern culture and back to centre stage. All fundamentalism is rooted in a profound fear of annihilation: whether Jewish, Christian or Muslim, fundamentalists are convinced that secular or liberal society wants to wipe them out. This is not paranoia: Jewish fundamentalism took two major strides forward, one after the Nazi Holocaust, the second after the Yom Kippur War of 1973. In some parts of the Middle East, secularism was established so rapidly and aggressively that it was experienced as a lethal assault.

The fact that fundamentalism is also a phenomenon in politics was stressed only recently by former US president Jimmy Carter when he voiced his concerns over the increasing merging of religion and state in the Bush administration, and the element of fundamentalism in the White House. Carter sees that traits of religious fundamentalists are also applicable to neo-conservatives. There seems to be a major controversy between, on the one hand, so called hard-liners or conservatives and, on the other, the progressives. Is this a typical phenomenon of today's world?

The United States is not alone in this. Yes, there is a new intolerance and aggression in Europe too as well as in Muslim countries and the Middle East. Culture is always-and has always been-contested. There are always people who have a different view of their country and are ready to fight for it. American Christian fundamentalists are not in favour of democracy; and it is true that many of the Neo-Cons, many of whom incline towards this fundamentalism, have very hard-line, limited views. These are dangerous and difficult times and when people are frightened they tend to retreat into ideological ghettos and build new barriers against the "other". Democracy is really what religious people call "a state of grace." It is an ideal that is rarely achieved, that has constantly to be reaffirmed, lest it be lost. And it is very difficult to fulfil. We are all-Americans and Europeans-falling short of the democratic ideal during the so called "war against terror."...

Yeah, ain’t we awful? We lowly infidels (who, you'd never know from Armstrong's words, are trying to fend off a holy war) can never hope to measure up to the perfection of the one and only true faith—not unless we’re prepared to embrace it ourselves. Or, at the very least, become its apologist/champion, like the clueless Karen.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:15 | link | comments

Jihadi heavyweight title fight: The decadent Saudi royals had hoped that exporting all their lovely Wahhabism to mosques and madrassahs around the globe would inoculate their Magic Kingdom against the wrath of the holy warriors. However, since when you sow the wind, you reap the whirlwind, it hasn’t quite worked out that way. From the Jerusalem Post:

Saudi Arabian police have arrested 28 men for allegedly planning to attack holy sites around Mecca and Medina during the recently finished Muslim haj pilgrimage, the kingdom's Interior Ministry said Sunday.

The ministry said 27 of the men were Saudi nationals and one was a foreign resident.

"Thanks to God, the security forces managed to detain members of the deviated group who have links with elements outside (the kingdom) while planning to carry out criminal acts inside," a statement by the Interior Ministry said.

Saudi authorities often use the term deviated group to describe terror suspects linked to al-Qaida.

It’s the “deviates” vs. the decadents—and it’s a toss-up at this point as to who’s going to win the title (although at the moment the decadents appear to have an edge).

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

Don't miss: A round up in the Sunday Times of the year's most amusing/cringe-inducing quotes by and/or about the literary set. Of special note: a really bad sex scene as penned by Norman Mailer (who died a few weeks ago); the exchange between Mailer and that other phallus-obsessed Jewish American writer, Philip Roth, about the dire effects of aging on male bathroom habits; and the rejection letter sent to a writer who had submitted a few sample chapters from Pride and Prejudice (apparently, the publisher didn't recognize their provenance).

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

Shipwrecked!: That's what freedom of speech—and the freedom to speak unpleasant truths—in Canada is going to be if the HRCs are allowed to have their way with Maclean's Magazine and Mark Steyn. (To the tune of The Ballad of Gilligan's Island; hat tip—Stu):

Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale,

A tale of Maclean’s and Steyn,

And how they got in trouble when

They wouldn't toe the line.

 

The skipper was a lobby group,

The famous CIC.

Four law students signed on to board

The "good" ship HRC.

(That leaky HRC.)

 

The mag, they said, had done 'em wrong,

Had made them hopping mad

By claiming that some “radicals”

Were “hot for the jihad.”

 

The words (though true)

Abridged their “rights,”

Engendered fear and hate.

A thought “crime” that the HRC

Would now "adjudicate."

 

So tune in as the Thought Police

Pursue their fav’rite sport—

Compelling folks to toe the line

There in kangaroo court.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:34 | link | comments

Haj conundrum: Decisions, decisions. Whether ‘tis nobler to “stone the devil” from the ground level—and risk being crushed in a melee of pilgrims—or to “stone the devil” from higher up.  From Arab News:

MINA, 22 December 2007 — Interior Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Mansour Al-Turki yesterday admitted that pilgrims of certain nationalities had put in a request with the Saudi authorities for them to be allowed to carry out the stoning-of-the-devil ritual from the ground floor of the massive Jamrat plaza.

“Yes, that is true,” said Al-Turki. “But we explained to them that we don’t decide who performs this particular ritual from which floor of the complex. All floors are open to pilgrims of all nationalities. They decide, not us.”

According to Al-Turki, the new Jamrat complex is designed in such a way that only certain roads lead to certain floors or ramps. “For example, three central roads in Mina, namely Jawhara Street, Souq Al-Arab Street and New Street, lead to the ground floor of the Jamrat complex. If any pilgrim intends to perform stoning from the ground floor he or she will have to be on one of these three streets,” he explained.

The three streets mentioned above run through the center of the tent city. And these are the ones widely used by pilgrims. “On all three days of the stoning, there is a huge density of people on these streets,” he pointed out.

Al-Turki said in the event of the pilgrim being on any other street, the flow of pilgrims will automatically take him or her straight to other ramps of the complex. “During our preparatory meetings we explained this all to representatives of the various pilgrim establishments and also to members of the international Haj missions,” he said.

According to sources, it was suggested during these meetings that pilgrims who prefer to stone the devil from the ground floor and who do not find themselves in one of those streets should be given access to them through the interconnected lanes. All these interconnected lanes are tightly sealed by security forces because they fear, and rightly so, such a cross movement of pilgrims would lead to chaos…

The logistics of haj are indeed confounding, requiring an understanding of crowd control and traffic flow that would put even lesser mortals (i.e. kafirs) to the test. Luckily, we don’t have to worry about such matters, us being lowly infidels and all.

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:41 | link | comments

A preview of coming attractions?: A clueless freshman Democratic Congressman from—what are the odds?—Vermont, who clearly doesn’t know the first thing about the mullahs or the jihad, is calling upon the U.S. to “engage” (hmmm, where have I heard that before?) Iran. And, quel surprise, one of  the mullahs’ media mouthpieces approves. From the Tehran Times:

WASHINGTON (Reformer) – Representative Peter Welch is urging President Bush to engage in “direct, unconditional and comprehensive” diplomacy with Iran.

The freshman Vermont Democrat cites a recent National Intelligence Estimate, which determined that Iran has no nuclear weapons program. He also says Iran had no weapons shipments to Iraq.

“The release of the National Intelligence Estimate… clearly demonstrates that our nation’s differences with Iran can and must be resolved diplomatically,” Welch wrote in a letter to the president this week.

A report issued by UN nuclear watchdog Mohamed ElBaradei on November 8 confirmed the transparency of Iran’s nuclear program and said it found Tehran to be generally truthful about key aspects of its nuclear history.

He was joined by Representative Peter DeFazio. So far, 13 House members have signed onto the letter.

“We urge you to build upon the progress made by our own intelligence agencies’ positive assessment of Iran’s responsiveness to diplomacy,” he adds. “It is time to begin direct, unconditional, and comprehensive negotiations with Iran.”

Welch spokesman Andrew Savage said the letter stems from the congressman’s “profound distrust with the president, in particular on the issue of Iran and foreign diplomacy.”

A preview of what’s likely to occur should Barack Obama, a similarly clueless foreign policy neophyte, be elected President.

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:29 | link | comments

Shilling for Islam: In an article about the horrific massacre of worshippers at prayer in a Pakistan mosque, the New York Times manages to slip in a promo for the one and only true faith:

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A suicide attacker detonated a powerful bomb inside a crowded mosque in northwestern Pakistan on Friday, killing 48 people and wounding 100 as they celebrated one of Islam’s major holidays with the country’s former interior minister, state-run media reported.

Skip to next paragraph The bombing was the second assassination attempt in eight months on the official, Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao, who was the country’s top law enforcement official until last month and who is running for Parliament in elections planned for January.

 

He was unhurt, but his son and two grandnephews were among the wounded. The local police estimated that hundreds of people had been inside the mosque, a modest white building constructed by the former minister’s family in his ancestral village, Sherpao.

 

In a telephone interview, Mr. Sherpao said he believed that Islamic militants linked to Al Qaeda were responsible. He said that the bomb exploded as he and his relatives prayed in the front row of worshipers.

“It was a massacre,” Mr. Sherpao said, his voice shaking with anger. “I can tell you that.”

After the bombing, police and intelligence agents raided an Islamic school in the nearby village of Turangzai and arrested seven students, some of them Afghans, The Associated Press reported, citing two police officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly. The police officials declined to say whether the raid was connected to the suicide bombing.

The blast was the latest in a series of attacks that suggests that a state of emergency declared by President Pervez Musharraf last month has largely failed to halt terrorist attacks. From Nov. 3 to Dec. 15, Mr. Musharraf suspended the Constitution and ruled by decree in what he said was an effort to curb terrorism.

Mr. Musharraf’s opponents said he used his emergency powers to suppress his political opponents and remove the country’s Supreme Court before it could rule him ineligible for a third term in office.

Mr. Musharraf has cited an ongoing offensive by 20,000 Pakistani soldiers in the Swat Valley, a famed tourist area in northwestern Pakistan, as a sign of progress. Military officials say they have routed militants who have seized control of the area, killing 300 and driving the remainder into surrounding hills.

But suicide bombings have continued in northwestern Pakistan, possibly in response to the offensive. On Dec. 9, a suicide bombing in the Swat Valley killed six civilians and a police officer. On Dec. 10, a suicide bomb attack on a military truck carrying schoolchildren outside a Pakistani Air Force base in Kamra wounded five children and two adults.

On Dec. 15, a suicide bomber riding a bicycle killed two soldiers and three civilians outside an army camp in Nowshera. On Dec. 18, 12 soldiers were killed when a suicide bomber detonated explosives near a sports field used by the Pakistani Army in Kohat.

The mosque attack, with its high toll and its timing on a major holiday, represented a stepping-up of the violence. The holiday, Id al-Adha, the Islamic Feast of Sacrifice, marks the end of the annual hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca, and celebrates the willingness of Ibrahim, or Abraham, to sacrifice his son when ordered to do so by God. Islam honors Abraham, like Jesus and many other biblical figures, as prophets…

It “honors” them by declaring them and other figures from the Jewish and Christian scriptures retroactively Muslim (because if you’re doing religion correctly, you are ipso facto a true blue submissive). No mention of the fact (Allah forefend) that the Koran doesn’t even get Jesus’s name right—it calls him “Issa,” the equivalent of “Esau”—or that it has rewritten Christian doctrine such that as there is neither a crucifixion nor a rapture

Some “honor.”

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

Immigrants amuck: Oh, those violent refugees. Can’t live with ‘em. Can’t deport ‘em.  Here’s an editorial on the subject in the Globe and Mail:

Even after federal Auditor-General Sheila Fraser raised the alarm about potentially dangerous and deportable immigrants roaming Canadian streets, Mohamed Hagi Mohamud lived in freedom – and a young woman who missed her Skytrain in Surrey, B.C., was made to pay for that freedom. The Canadian government bears a share of responsibility for what happened to Erika Martyn.

Mr. Mohamud, a refugee from Somalia, is a violent predator who committed a series of crimes of increasing severity. That string of crimes could have been interrupted. In 1997 he pulled a knife on a Toronto-area taxi driver and was convicted of assault with a weapon. In 2002, he attacked a woman in her apartment, punching her in the face repeatedly and kicking her. He was convicted of assault causing bodily harm, and spent 30 months in custody before sentencing, and six months after. He certainly should have been deported after that second offence, as the law calls for. But immigration authorities were slow to set a date for an immigration hearing.

His case was far from exceptional. As Ms. Fraser reported in April, 2003, Canada had a mountainous backlog of deportation orders. In just six years, it had grown by 36,000 cases, and Ms. Fraser questioned the “priority accorded to control activities.” If Mr. Mohamud's case is an indication, the priority remained low. Even after he was charged in 2003 with allegedly stabbing a woman in the neck with a knife (a charge dropped because of trouble identifying the assailant), immigration authorities did not schedule a deportation hearing until May of 2004. He didn't show up, but no warrant was issued for him until December of that year.

On March 14, 2005, when Ms. Martyn missed her Surrey train and decided to walk home, Mr. Mohamud held a knife to her throat, dragged her home and raped and beat her for 21/2 hours. She later asked a judge to remove the publication ban on her name so she could speak out. “Why did this extreme incident have to happen before they started doing anything?”

The question today is how much of a priority are other dangerous and deportable criminals. The 2006-07 annual report of the Canada Border Services Agency provides little useful information – not even mentioning the size of the backlog or whether it has shrunk or grown. Not good enough, especially considering that the Conservative government campaigned in last year's election on rapidly reducing the backlog. Ms. Martyn's question is as pertinent as ever.

It’s indeed a small world, after all, here in multiculti Canada. Especially when we get to import--but can't seem to get rid of--all sorts of colourful chaps, like Mr. Mohamud, the Somali slasher.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:13 | link | comments

The P.A.’s Xmas booty, er, bounty: You’ve got to hand it that old Silver Fox, Mahmoud Abbas. A two-time loser and the world is still beating a path to his compound, trying to see who can pony up the most shekels for his benighted Palestinian Authority (a misnomer if there ever was one, since “authority” over Palestinians is something Abbas clearly lacks). Washington Times columnist Diana West makes note of this bizarre phenomenon, and comments as follows:

Christmas came early to the Palestinian Authority when the "international community" decided not only to meet PA President Mahmoud Abbas' request for $5.6 billion in aid, but to throw in almost $2 billion more. Why? Did the PA end its terrorist ways? Stop state-sanctioned incitement against Israel and the West? Change Fatah's charter (forget about Hamas) calling for Israel's destruction?

 

Alas, no, no and no. We are heaping riches on the PA for other reasons, one of which I discuss below.

 

But first, a digression: Christmas, obviously, doesn't come to the PA, even if Western billions do. Despite a tiny (and decreasing) number of Christians, the PA is a land of Islam-Dar al-Islam. That makes Israel, the object of the PA's destructive animus, Dar al-Harb, land of war, right?

 

Right. But not according to the PC script of the "international community." We never, ever discuss the Islamic context of "Arab-Israeli" conflicts. But how else can we hope to understand them? Jihad ideology inspires the Arab struggle against Israel. It also explains it. As the only non-Muslim country amid Middle Eastern Dar-al Islam, as the only "dhimmi" nation to reclaim its land once conquered by Islam, Israel's very existence is a religious offense to the "umma," or Islamic community. In this same context, what we call "foreign aid" to the PA may be understood as a form of "jizya," the protection money paid to Muslims by non-Muslims.

 

But the non-Muslim world prefers not to think like that. We avert our collective eye from the goals of jihad, from the history and teachings of Islam. Instead, we see ourselves as villains — Israel for its existence, and Israel's supporters for, well, their support for Israel's existence.

 

In so doing, we create a sinkhole of Western guilt and responsibility for suffering Muslims, in this case in the PA. They suffer not as a consequence of their religio-political bloodlust to destroy the Jews in Israel (the nearest infidels), but because there are Jews in Israel. In other words, it's everyone else's fault but their own. Islam — particularly, jihadist ideology — is not to blame. Throw more money down the hole…

 

Far easier to throw money down the hole than to have come to terms with the awful truth about the jihad. In the short-term, at least. Over the long haul, such blindness will eventually prove fatal.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:38 | link | comments (2)

 Boychicks in the hudna: A curious story in the Jerusalem Post. It seems Hamas, the military arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, may have offered their detested enemies an “unconditional ‘hudna’” (the term for a temporary ceasefire in the jihad). Then again, maybe it didn’t make such an offer:

Hamas could offer Israel an unconditional 'hudna' - meaning temporary ceasefire - a senior Gaza official from the group was quoted as saying Saturday.

However the official, who chose to remain anonymous, denied that the group had already made an official offer to Israel, Ashark Alawsat reported.

"The discussion over the 'hudna' has resurfaced in a serious manner, both within Hamas and between Hamas and Palestinian factions. We hope the discussions will prove successful," said the official, adding that "there will be no conditions to it - it would be a ceasefire on our part and on Israel's part."

Meanwhile, Hamas representative in Lebanon, Osama Hamdan, said the Palestinian side would consider Israel's proposal to renew the 'hudna.'

Nevertheless, in an interview with the Kuwaiti newspaper A-Rai, Hamdan clarified that Hamas was opposed to a peace agreement with Israel and that Israel's existence in the Middle East "endangers the entire region, not just the Palestinians."

Also Saturday, Amos Gilad, head of the Defense Ministry Diplomatic-Security Branch, confirmed that Defense Minister Ehud Barak would travel to Cairo next week to meet Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, the country's intelligence chief Omar Suleiman and Egyptian Defense Minister Mohammad Tantawi.

Nevertheless, Gilad said that the talks would not deal with the Hamas 'hudna' offer and said that a ceasefire was not even on the agenda.

"As far as I know, there is no contact with Hamas and the group is only interested in a break in order to replenish their weapons supply," Gilad told Israel Radio…

Whether or not the offer was made, it’s heartening to know that at least one Israeli official understands the meaning of “hudna.”

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

Human sacrifice: It's all the rage among Muslims.

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

On sharia, rape, and King Abdullah’s “mercy”: The other day, to show how “modern” and “compassionate” he is (but really because he’d been catching a whole lot of flak from outsiders), the unctuous Wahhabi  in charge of the two holy shmoley mosques “pardoned” a young woman who’d run afoul of his kingdom’s primitive “justice” system. Her “crime”: she had been abducted and brutally gang-raped by a bunch of horny Wahhabis (couldn’t wait for their virgins up in Paradise, I guess). During the course of the attack, she had been forced to ride in car unaccompanied by a male relative—a big no-no in the Magic Kingdom. The riding, not the raping, I mean.

The Globe and Mail’s prolix opiner, Rex Murphy, offers this insight into “Justice, Saudi-style”:

…The headline [“Saudi king pardons gang-rape victim”], as I'm sure most readers already know, springs from the story of a most unfortunate 19-year-old who was charged with the "crime" of being in a car with another man who was not a relative, when both were set upon by seven men, both raped - she most violently, for two hours, by all seven, and more than once. She was reduced to numbness, shock, near-suicide and suffered horrific psychological and physical trauma.

But in the Alice in Wonderland meets Kafka meets 1984 world of Saudi Arabia's sharia jurisprudence, the gang-raped 19-year-old had to appear before her Islamic judges and be tried for the crime of sitting in a car with a male. At first, her sentence was, by the standards these judges set for themselves, considered lenient - a mere 90 lashes and some months in jail.

She, poor tormented woman, it seems had both the dignity and simple force of character to protest this monstrous verdict, and sought appeal with the help of a lawyer of some courage and resource. He, brave soul, protested the infamy of putting to the lash a woman who had been gang-raped. For this noble and worthy exertion, he earned for himself severe reprimand and the threat of removing his right to practise law - such as the law is, and such as it is practised there - in Saudi Arabia.

She, for the temerity of appealing a mindless and barbaric sentence, and for the publicity that was the result of her appeal, had her sentence increased to 200 lashes. Sharia justice is very scrupulous of its own honour, and the tenets of Islamic law as it applies to the monstrous horror of a woman being in the company of a man not her relative, will not be mocked by appeals to mercy or sense. Hence 200 lashes and six months in jail, the six months presumably to give the stripes from the whip time to burn into scars.

The world at large found this excessive and, to be truthful, both odd and cruel too, beyond even the odd and cruel bounds of the ancient codes that, sadly, still are imposed on so many of the women in so many countries.

Through her lawyer, with the help of some genuine human rights organizations, the case was not allowed to rest on the pronouncements of the three-man tribunal that upped her lashes from 90 to 200. I expect the Saudi king felt the wave of revulsion and contempt that followed on the world's press coverage of this outrage and thus it came to pass that a 19-year-old who had been raped, shamed and tormented by seven men was relieved of the further shame and torment of 200 lashes and incarceration in a Saudi jail for half a year of her young sad life.

But, "King pardons gang-rape victim" remains, in my mind anyway, an atrocious declaration, a simultaneously absurd and mean statement. He has no pardon to give her; she none to receive from him.

An apology certainly - that he presides over a kingdom where laws still exist to punish a woman who has been brutally raped, and where they multiply the lashes if she has the strength or character to decry such insanity. Such a king should be seeking clemency, not confusing himself with the delusion of exercising it.

Pretty hard-hitting stuff. I’d watch it there, Rex. Some local Wahhabi may take offence at such brazen “insults” and seek redress from Canada’s Komissars of Enforced Niceness.

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

St. Louis blues: I watched Vincente Minnelli’s Meet Me in St. Louis the other day on one of the movie channels, and all I can say is that that Tootie—the death-obsessed moppet played by a very young Margaret O’Brien—was one freaky little tot. These days if a five-year-old had evinced such a morbid bent of mind—her favourite pastimes included burying her dolls in the backyard (after they'd had a proper funeral, of course), breaking up a snow family (literally), and trying to derail a trolley by placing a fake body on the tracks (clang, clang, clang, indeed)—she’d be hauled into therapy, pronto. Moreover, the Children’s Aid Society might be inclined to send a case worker by to see why her family considers it "cute" for their youngest to behave in such an odd, disturbing and anti-social manner.

Anyway, I mention all this (mostly tongue-in-cheek) by way of introducing an update of what is probably the movie’s most famous and memorable song, "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" (since, unlike some of the movie’s other notable tunes--“The Boy Next Door," "The Trolley Song" and the title song--it’s the only one that comes around like clockwork every year; it also happens to have a gorgeous melody and ever-potent lyrics):

Have yourself a scary little Christmas.

Think about Iran.

And what’s next should things go as the mullahs plan.

Have yourself a scary little Christmas.

Look at the jihad.

Some folks seem to think it's just a passing fad.

 

Once again as as in olden times.

Not such golden times of yore.

Blind to what is in store for us

The horror for us, and more.

 

Through the years inspired by the Prophet

They’ve a tale to tell

‘Bout how Allah’s promised that they will prevail.

So have yourself a scary Christmas, infidel.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:14 | link | comments

Hark, hark, the Partiarch doth bark: It took a while, but the Catholic Church finally got around to acknowledging the role it played in formenting Judenhass over the centuries—a hatred that reached its apogee in the genocide of Europe’s Jews. That contrition lasted for, oh, at least a good several months. Now the Vatican seems to be reverting to its default setting, as outlined in an alert I just received from the Simon Wiesenthal Center (the bolds are Wiesenthal’s):

Yesterday, December 19th, the Vatican’s chief cleric in Jerusalem declared that Israel discriminates against non-Jews by calling itself a Jewish State. In response, The Simon Wiesenthal Center called on the Vatican to reject Patriarch Michel Sabbah’s demand for Israel to "discard its identity as a Jewish State".

Patriarch Sabbah, who has been a frequent critic of Israel, once said of the Israelis, "In the end we will send them away just as we did to the Crusaders."

"Patriarch Sabbah’s denial of the State of Israel as a Jewish State is nothing less than a campaign to de-legitimize her and is fodder for those with a long-held dream of a Middle East without a Jewish State," said Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean of the Wiesenthal Center.

Further, Sabbah’s latest outburst contradicts both Pope John Paul II’s 1987 declaration that, ‘The Jews have a right to nationhood as do all other peoples according to international law’ and the United Nations Declaration of 1947 that called for an Arab and Jewish State.

"Israel does not need lessons from Patriarch Sabbah on how to treat citizens of other faiths and religions," said Hier. "He would better serve the Christians in the Holy Land by going to Gaza and defending the beleaguered Christian minority there from Hamas extremists. We call on Pope Benedict to reject Sabbah’s demand and all those supporting this insidious campaign to de-Judaize the State of Israel," Rabbi Hier concluded…

One might point out that Vatican City discriminates against non-Catholics by describing itself as a Catholic entity and that Saudi Arabia similarly discrimates against non-Muslims--but that's neither here nor there. Suffice it to say that if the Vatican’s leading cleric in Jerusalem really believes Catholic interests--in Israel and in general--would be better served if there were no Jewish state, he’s really one big, dumb dhimmi.

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:16 | link | comments

Safe to say?: A bunch of “radical Muslims” who are “hot for jihad” have been prevented by Belgian authorities from unleashing a terror attack aimed at killing U.S. air force personnel stationed at a Belgium air base.

Can I say that without getting hauled in front of Canada’s Human Rights Polizei?

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:46 | link | comments

Away in a manger: The people of Bethlehem are grousing again, and the Globe and Mail’s Mark MacKinnon, who’s never been what you could call a big fan of the Jewish state, is on the scene to record every grumble:

BETHLEHEM, WEST BANK -- A dove wearing a bulletproof vest is hardly a traditional Christmas image, but when the mysterious artist showed Maha Saca a sketch he wanted to do, she let him paint it on the wall outside her small museum and handicrafts store.

The image, which confronts visitors soon after they cross the concrete barrier separating Israel from this part of the West Bank, has become symbolic of the kind of year Bethlehem is having. Peace prospects are up and, with them, tourist numbers here in the birthplace of Christianity. But optimists remain hard to find.

"I chose this picture because it really affects us," said Ms. Saca, the director of the Palestinian Heritage Centre. "This is what happens to peace in Palestine. Even the bird of peace cannot protect himself."

The mysterious artist behind the dove painting was Banksy, a renowned British graffiti artist whose urban art has earned him a clutch of celebrity admirers and the ire of many an English city councillor. Thanks to controversy, his work, such as his signature rat wielding a slingshot, often sells for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Initially, Bethlehem residents were thrilled that Banksy and a group of fellow graffiti artists had chosen to make this economically depressed town, and the giant wall that Israel has built around most of it, their latest canvas.

The artwork has given Bethlehem an added draw this year beyond the Church of the Nativity, the site revered by Christians as the birthplace of Jesus Christ.

Inspired by the elusive Banksy, who is rarely seen and whose real name is not known, other graffiti artists have poured into the city. The eight-metre-high barrier around the city - which Israel says it built for security reasons, but Palestinians call the "apartheid wall" - is covered with images such as a walled-in Christmas tree and a young girl in a pink dress frisking a soldier. An exhibition of works by Banksy and other alternative artists was set up in a disused chicken restaurant perpendicular to the church on Manger Square, under the brash title Santa's Ghetto.

Tourists and mass media followed, contributing to what looks set to be Bethlehem's busiest Christmas season in seven years, since the outbreak of the recent intifada against Israel's occupation of the West Bank.

Some 60,000 tourists visited Bethlehem last month, capitalizing on perhaps the calmest year since the outbreak of the fighting, roughly three times the figure of a year ago. Expectations are high for the coming Christmas week, with many hotels in the city reporting full occupancy for Christmas Eve for the first time in years.

I can see why the locals are so ticked off.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:59 | link | comments

A Zionist Muslim prays for the Jews: And he's a cleric, yet.

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

Teen terrorist: Der Spiegel has an article about an angry young man—a 16-year-old “insurgent” in Iraq:

Many of the insurgents building bombs and carrying out attacks in Iraq are hate-filled teenagers. Diya Muhammad Hussein, 16, is one of them. He spoke with SPIEGEL ONLINE about his desire to kill the American occupiers -- and his dreams of emigrating to the United States.

It was on a Wednesday a few weeks ago when Diya Muhammad Hussein went out to kill Americans. It was shortly after one o'clock in the morning and the curfew had just begun in the western Iraq town of Rawah. Diya crept out of his brother's house and walked to the tree where he had hidden the explosive device three days before.

He carried the hand-made mine to a gravel road nearby and buried it. Then he put the batteries for the remote-controlled detonator into a charger he had attached to a car battery, hid and waited.

It was a cold night, the 16-year-old recalls as he sits on the sofa of the police chief in his home town. After several hours a patrol of US Marines approached but Diya couldn't get the batteries back in the remote control unit fast enough. The Marines drove past unharmed.

It's men and youths like Diya Muhammad Hussein who are waging the war in Iraq. It is they who lay the mines and arrange the ambushes that kill soldiers and civilians. Diya calls himself a mujahedeen, a freedom fighter. The Iraqi government, the coalition troops, and the population exhausted by years of violence call him a terrorist. Diya's bomb could have killed several people, the US Marines say.

The young man has been held for the last 18 days in a police cell in Rawah, a small town in the Iraqi province of Al-Anbar. He was alone in the cell at first, but it gradually filled up as Diya came clean and led the Iraqi police and US Marines to his accomplices and to their secret weapons stashes.

Didn't Want to Kill His Countrymen

Six of them are now awaiting trial which will take place in their home town for the first time; until recently, terrorism suspects have gone on trial in courts run by the US-led coalition. That task has now been handed over to local Iraqi judges as part of the handover of power to Iraqi authorities.

Diya had tried to detonate his mine again, the day after his first attempt, but when he saw that Iraqi police had joined the Marines on their patrol, he decided not to push the button. He didn't want to kill his countrymen, he said.

A few hours later he was sitting in an Internet café with his friend Ahmed and was angry. The man who had incited him to commit the attack called him a coward in an Internet chat room conversation. Diya was unaware that the police has started monitoring such Internet contacts by local youths.

He was arrested as he left the Internet café to play football with Ahmed. He still had the remote control detonator in his coat pocket.

There are a number of possible reasons why the police chief of Rawah allowed us to interview Diya. For one, the US Marines asked him to, and they support the Iraqi police with a special training program as well as occasional equipment supplies, paying for an air conditioning unit here or a flashlight there. When the American friends make a request, it's hard to turn them down.

But the police chief is also proud of the arrest his officers made. Diya may look like just an ordinary teenager as he answers questions with his hands stuffed under his armpits, but his capture has averted a lot of harm. Diya led the police to an unusually large arsenal of weapons stored in plastic barrels buried in gardens. They contained a number of explosive devices, more than a dozen detonators, two precision rifles for snipers, Kalashnikovs, three grenades, 10 rockets, rocket launchers, TNT and a hundred hand grenades…

“And a cartridge in a pear tree…"

Posted by: scaramouche at 22:17 | link | comments

Duck and cover: Ehud Olmert is apparently having his residence outfitted to withstand a chemical or nuclear attack.

Talk about a waste of time. If Iran drops “the big one” and Israel is incinerated, Olmert is going to be a captain without a ship—and, frankly, who could even bear to look at him if the not-so-unthinkable should occur?

I can hardly bear to look at him now.

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:47 | link | comments

U of T’s “Animal House” gets tamed: From Reuters:

TORONTO (Reuters Life!) - The University of Toronto's last all-male residence, famed for inspiring the 1978 comedy "Animal House," is going coed after years of "flagrant acts of defiance," the president of its governing college said.

Gate House is notorious for its "frat-boy" traditions and stunts such as toga parties, streaking, hazing rituals and wild beer bashes. Dorm members recently placed a cooked pig's head in a women's washroom.

One of the ivy-covered stone buildings of the school's Victoria University, Gate House, built in 1913, will accept new male and female residents next term.

"Continued behavior reasonably seen as disparaging and demeaning of women will not be tolerated and must be met with firm response on the part of the university," said Victoria University President Paul Gooch in a statement, referring in part to a 2.5-metre (8-foot) penis fashioned out of snow in November.

The first-year student responsible for the sculpture, Grayson Lee, said the stunts were not meant to offend.

"Many people walked by me as I was building it and I didn't get a single disgusted look. Everyone started laughing as they walked away," the 18-year-old told Reuters.

"The pranks we do are all intended to be spirit-raising," Lee said. "We're known for being the 'House of Brotherhood'... We were, at least."

The 28 students who have had to relocate are heartbroken over the decision, which comes during winter exams, he said…

In a way, it’s too bad. The Gate House goofballs are involved in the kind of innocuous campus hijinks that harken back to a more innocent era of goldfish-swallowing and phone booth-stuffing. Such exploits are far less disturbing than, say, U of T students targeting Heather Reisman’s book empire because the proprietress supports an Israeli charity, or going ape-sh*t with indignation over “the Zionists” during the university’s annual anti-Israel bash, Israeli Apartheid Week.

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

Moot court: The four Osgoode Hall law students whose feelings were hurt by Mark Steyn’s cover story in Maclean’s Magazine alleging that “The future belongs to Islam”  practise their nascent legal skills by making their case in the National Post:

On Dec. 4, the four of us announced that we had launched human rights complaints against Maclean's with respect to its October, 2006 article, "The Future Belongs to Islam," written by Mark Steyn. In light of the attention our complaints are receiving -- most recently, through an article by Ezra Levant published on these pages ("Censorship in the name of human rights," Dec. 18)--clarifications are in order.

First, it is important to examine the actual content and thesis of Mr. Steyn's article. Its basic premise is that, just as the "white man settled the Indian territory," Muslims in the West are poised to take over entire societies, and the "only question is how bloody the transfer of real estate will be."

Perhaps the Maclean's article is best summed up by the following extract, in which Mr. Steyn inserts what he terms the "obligatory" of courses: "Of course, not all Muslims are terrorists -- though enough are hot for jihad to provide an impressive support network of mosques from Vienna to Stockholm to Toronto to Seattle. Of course, not all Muslims support terrorists -- though enough of them share their basic objectives."

What should we do when a Canadian magazine publishes an article alleging that many Muslims are "hot for jihad," and that they share the same basic goals of terrorists? True to Canada's tradition of free speech, we decided to engage Mr. Steyn in a debate about his views.

We decided to follow the example of the Muslim Canadian Congress (MCC), a small but strident group of self-described "liberal secular Muslims," which has come to the defence of Maclean's. In its most recent media release, the MCC advised: "Mark Steyn's article was definitely alarmist, but the answer to his challenge is to write a counter piece and demand that Maclean's publish it."

Unfortunately, the MCC's advice came about nine months too late. On March 30, 2007, we met with Maclean's senior editors and proposed that they publish a response from a mutually acceptable source. The response was negative, which resulted in our human rights complaints.

In his National Post article, Mr. Levant devotes much attention to the importance of freedom of expression in Canadian society. We agree, which is why we asked Maclean's for an opportunity to debate Mr. Steyn. It is also why Mr. Steyn is not a party to any of our human rights complaints. We haven't asked him for an apology or a retraction. Neither have we filed hate-speech complaints against him. He is free to do and say as he pleases.

What we did ask for, however, was an opportunity for the Muslim community to participate in the "free marketplace" of ideas. It is our belief that in its truest form, freedom of expression results in a lively debate among all interested parties -- not just among those who play by their own exclusionary rules. If Maclean's wants to publish articles alleging that many Muslims are "hot for jihad," it has to provide an opportunity to respond...

The “free marketplace” of ideas? That’s rich. Seems to me what they really want to is to do locally what Saudi Arabia seeks to do globally: shut down all criticism of Islam. (To show how this “free marketplace” works at the international level: the Saudis sided with a recent UN Human Rights Council resolution which aims to eliminate “all forms of discrimination based on religion or belief”—chilling thought. The Saudis explained that “shari’a law should not be criticized and…Islam was a religion of fraternity, tolerance and equality, without discrimination whatsoever.”)

As for the law students’ line about “alleging that many Muslims” are “hot for jihad”—puh-leeze. That’s not an allegation. That’s the reality of what happens when you follow to the letter the example of a certain perfect Prophet as set out in a certain perfect book. If these students are so upset because it’s become evident post-9/11 that the “many Muslims” are heeding the Prophet’s call to wage a holy war against infidels until they feel themselves subdued, their best bet is to lodge a complaint with the HRC about the publication that’s fanning all the heat—the holy Qur’an.  

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:44 | link | comments (1)

Go ahead. Ask him anything: Guess who’s been so inspired by the sight of people questioning American presidential candidates during televised debates that he’s decided to open himself up to unfettered queries from the public? None other than the thug with the prayer icky on his forehead, Osama’s #2,  Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri. From the Beeb:

Al-Qaeda's media arm, al-Sahab, has invited individuals, organisations and journalists to submit questions for an open interview with Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Advertisements posted on Jihadist websites said questions sent to them over the next month would be passed to al-Qaeda's deputy leader for his reply.

It said the questions would be sent "without alteration, whether it comes from someone who agrees or disagrees".

The offer also came at the end of an interview by Zawahiri posted on Sunday.

In the video, also produced by al-Sahab, Zawahiri said the US-led coalition in Iraq was "defeated and looking for a way out" and said the decision of UK forces to "flee" Basra showed insurgents were gaining strength.

Iraq took formal responsibility for security in Basra province on Sunday, four-and-a-half years after the invasion.

'Brief and focused'

The adverts published by al-Sahab invited "individuals, organisations and media establishments" to submit questions for an "open interview" with Zawahiri by sending them by 16 January to the websites where it usually posts its messages.

"Care should be taken in making the questions brief and focused," the advert asked.

"We also ask the brothers, the supervisors [of the websites] to collect the questions and transmit them without alteration, whether it is comes from someone who agrees or disagrees," it added.

The advert finished with al-Sahab saying that "with God's help and support" it will try to publish Zawahiri's answers to the questions "as soon as possible".

Egyptian-born Zawahiri has emerged as al-Qaeda's most prominent spokesman in recent years, appearing in at least 16 videos and audiotapes this year - four times as many as its leader, Osama Bin Laden.

The two have evaded capture since US-led forces overthrew the Taleban in Afghanistan following the 11 September 2001 attacks on the US. They are thought to be hiding on the Afghan-Pakistan border.

IntelCenter, an organisation which monitors Jihadist websites, said the invitation was the first to have been issued by a high-ranking al-Qaeda leader.

Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University in Washington DC, said al-Qaeda wanted to "look more cutting-edge and give the perception of greater legitimacy".

"It shows how this group with 7th Century ideology is exploiting 21st Century media capabilities," he told the Associated Press.

Mr Hoffman said it also revealed that Zawahiri was trying to portray himself more like a true leader than a "homicidal thug" by opening himself up to questioning in a similar fashion to televised political debates.

I can’t understand why. The “homicidal thug” thing seems to be working so well for him.

Posted by: scaramouche at 23:49 | link | comments

Flatliners: Michael Freund on the moribund Bush Doctrine. From JWR:

Will the real George W. please stand up?

After seven years of fearlessly confronting evil, both rhetorically and militarily, the Bush administration in Washington seems to have faded away, replaced instead by a meek shadow of its former self.

Firm resolve has given way to disappointing frailty, as the shape and direction of US foreign policy increasingly resembles something taken straight out of Bill Clinton's playbook.

Across the board, on nearly every major issue of the day, from Iran to Syria to North Korea, the Bush administration is in retreat, abandoning the principled stands of yesteryear and replacing them with the unscrupulous and inexplicable policies now being pursued by the Department of State.

The turnabout is breathtaking in its scope, rivaled only perhaps by Britney Spears' rapid descent from pop superstar to tabloid curiosity. But unlike the blonde starlet's fate, this is something that actually matters.

Take, for example, the donor conference held in Paris this week, where the nations of the world unashamedly gathered to prop up the corrupt, incompetent and ineffectual Palestinian regime headed by Mahmoud Abbas.

Leading the charge, the US pledged more than $550 million in aid to the Palestinians in 2008. But while American diplomats were busy filling out checks to Abbas, Palestinian terrorists in Gaza continued to target Israeli civilians. On Sunday, they fired a rocket which struck an Israeli home in Kibbutz Zikim and wounded a 2-year old child. Needless to say, neither the toddler nor his parents will be receiving any Western assistance.

Watching the news on television, I thought back to a bright summer day five years ago, on June 1, 2002, when a man named George W. Bush gave a stirring speech to the graduating class at the West Point military academy. In clear and unequivocal terms, the president said, "All nations that decide for aggression and terror will pay a price… We will lift this dark threat from our country and from the world." Then I thought to myself: just what "price" have the Palestinians been made to pay for using violence and terror against the Jewish state? Instead of paying a price, they are being rewarded for their actions with American largesse and support. Isn't that exactly what Bill Clinton sought to do when he convened the Camp David talks at the end of his presidency?...

Sadly, Washington now seems all too ready to yield on matters of principle. Or, as former US ambassador to the UN John Bolton told the German magazine Der Spiegel this week, American foreign policy "is in free fall. The president is acting against his own judgment and instincts under the influence of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice."

 

The result has effectively been a quiet coup, as George W. Clinton replaces Bush. And that spells trouble, big trouble, in the War on Terror — not only for Israel, but for America too.

 

It is not that the Bush Doctrine is dead — it most certainly isn't. But the way things are going of late, it sure seems to be in need of resuscitation.

I fear it’s even worse than that. Let’s just say that if the Bush Doctrine was a patient on a hospital TV show—on ER, say, or House—someone would have noticed that it lacked a pulse some time ago.

Posted by: scaramouche at 22:53 | link | comments

Kudos to the Harper government: It has dared to speak truth to power in the unlikeliest place imaginable--the decadent Star Chamber of the internationalists.

Can’t remember  the last time a Canadian government had such balls. From the Ceeb:

The UN General Assembly approved a Canadian draft resolution Tuesday expressing "deep concern" at alleged human rights violations in Iran, including torture, flogging, amputations, stoning and public executions.

The 192-member world body adopted the resolution by a vote of 73-53 with 55 abstentions.

The resolution is not legally binding, but carries moral weight and reflects the majority view of world opinion.

The resolution was introduced by Canada and backed by the United States and other Western countries. It was opposed by many countries whose human rights records have been criticized and who object to the General Assembly targeting specific countries, including Cuba, North Korea, Sudan, Syria and Zimbabwe.

The resolution expresses "very serious concern" that despite previous assembly resolutions on human rights in Iran, there have been "confirmed instances" of violations including the use of stoning as a method of execution, "torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, including flogging and amputations," and multiple public executions.

The resolution calls on the government "to eliminate, in law and practice, all forms of discrimination and other human rights violations" against minorities.

It also calls on Iran to abolish public executions and stoning and "to end the harassment, intimidation and persecution of political opponents and human rights defenders, including by releasing persons imprisoned arbitrarily or on the basis of their political views."

A harassment, intimidation and persecution which, as the Ceeb and the Toronto Star will assure you, have nothing to do with Islam.

Posted by: scaramouche at 22:09 | link | comments (2)

Extry! Extry!: Al-lah Gore is not TIME Magazine's Person of the Year.

Vlad "the Impaler" Putin is.

Update: The Man of the Year speaks--and he sounds sort of cranky.

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:18 | link | comments

Are they like chia pets?: Google News headline--Bush Lawyers Discussed Fate of ciatapes

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

It is written: Robert Spencer on the Koran, multiculturalism, moral blindness and the murder of Aqsa Parvez:

Aqsa Parvez is dead, and the main thing that many analysts want you to know about her death is that it had nothing to do with Islam.

Aqsa Parvez was sixteen years old; her father has been charged with strangling her to death because she refused to wear the hijab. Shahina Siddiqui, president of the Islamic Social Services Association, declared: “The strangulation death of Ms. Parvez was the result of domestic violence, a problem that cuts across Canadian society and is blind to colour or creed.” Sheikh Alaa El-Sayyed, imam of the Islamic Society of North America in Mississauga, Ontario, agreed: “The bottom line is, it’s a domestic violence issue.” Nor was this denial limited only to Muslims. Lorne Gunter said in the Edmonton Journal: “I see nothing uniquely Muslim in her death. If, indeed, her father killed her, her death is his doing, not Islam’s.”

Gunter explains: “Of course, other cultures are also prone to intergenerational clashes and Muslim fathers have so far shown no more predilection for murder than fathers of other cultures.” Quite so. Is, then, any linkage of Islam with the murder of Aqsa Parvez simply a manifestation of bigotry? Or is an examination of some elements of Islamic theology and culture necessary in order to try to prevent more young Muslim girls from being similarly victimized in the future?

Toronto radio host John Oakley has declared: “No one is on a witch hunt here trying to demonize an entire faith, but rather to get to the bottom of what seems to be a nasty little secret within a certain segment of the community; women are treated as second-class citizens. If that is, in fact, at the root of violence and abuse meted out by some Muslim men, it’s high time to take ownership and confront the elephant in the room….Denial is not an option.”

Are women indeed treated as second class within Islamic culture? Certainly there is plenty of divine sanction for their being thus treated. The Qur’an declares that a woman’s testimony is worth half that of a man: “Get two witnesses, out of your own men, and if there are not two men, then a man and two women, such as ye choose, for witnesses, so that if one of them errs, the other can remind her” (2:282). It allows men to marry up to four wives, and have sex with slave girls also: “If ye fear that ye shall not be able to deal justly with the orphans, marry women of your choice, two or three or four; but if ye fear that ye shall not be able to deal justly (with them), then only one, or (a captive) that your right hands possess, that will be more suitable, to prevent you from doing injustice” (4:3). It rules that a son’s inheritance should be twice the size of that of a daughter: “Allah (thus) directs you as regards your children’s (inheritance): to the male, a portion equal to that of two females” (4:11).

Worst of all, the Qur’an tells husbands to beat their disobedient wives: “Men are in charge of women, because Allah hath made the one of them to excel the other, and because they spend of their property (for the support of women). So good women are the obedient, guarding in secret that which Allah hath guarded. As for those from whom ye fear rebellion, admonish them and banish them to beds apart, and scourge them” (4:34).

Numerous hadiths even have Muhammad informing a group of women that their gender will populate hell: “Once Allah’s Apostle went out to the Musalla (to offer the prayer) of ‘Id-al-Adha or Al-Fitr prayer. Then he passed by the women and said, ‘O women! Give alms, as I have seen that the majority of the dwellers of Hell-fire were you (women).’”

When they ask him why, he explains, “You curse frequently and are ungrateful to your husbands. I have not seen anyone more deficient in intelligence and religion than you. A cautious sensible man could be led astray by some of you.”

Muhammad’s assessment of their deficiencies comes from his Qur’an, as he explains further: “Is not the evidence of two women equal to the witness of one man? [cf. Qur’an 2:282, above]...This is the deficiency in her intelligence. Isn’t it true that a woman can neither pray nor fast during her menses?...This is the deficiency in her religion” (Bukhari 1.6.301). The idea that hell will be filled with more women than men occurs frequently in the hadith. According to Muhammad, “I looked at Paradise and saw that the majority of its residents were the poor; and I looked at the (Hell) Fire and saw that the majority of its residents were women” (Bukhari 7.62.126).

These traditions demonstrate why some Muslim men have so often fit the stereotype that they treat women with suspicion, disdain and derision. When they deal with women, they are dealing with a group that suffers from severe moral and intellectual deficiencies, not to mention all sorts of physical impurities in a religion obsessed with ritual cleanliness. Women are, consequently, headed for hell.

In light of all this, think for a minute about what Muslim spokesmen in Canada could be saying. They could acknowledge that the divine sanction given to the beating of disobedient women by Qur’an 4:34 has created a culture in which such abuse is accepted as normal. They could call for a searching reevaluation of the meaning and continued relevance of that verse and other traditional material that reinforces it, and call in no uncertain terms for Muslims to reject definitively its literal meaning, now and for all time to come. They could acknowledge the prevalence of honor killing in Islamic culture, which has no sanction as such in Islamic theology but nonetheless enjoys enough Islamic approval that the Jordanian Parliament a few years ago rejected on Islamic grounds attempts to stiffen penalties for it. They could call for sweeping reform and reexamination of the status of women in Islam.

For any of this to happen, Muslim leaders in Canada would have to adopt an unfamiliar and uncharacteristic stance of self-criticism, and Canadian leaders would have to abandon their ongoing infatuation with multiculturalism.

It’s never going to happen. Muslim leaders have a vested interest in ensuring Canadians remain ignorant about Islam, presenting the same sanitized version of the religion that’s regularly featured on the Ceeb and in the Toronto Star. And Canadians have swallowed so much multiculti-flavoured Kool-Aid over the years that they have neither the acuity to know when they’ve been sold a bill of goods, nor the gumption to be able to reject it.

Posted by: scaramouche at 15:48 | link | comments

Ka-ching!: Mahmoud Abbas is in the money. Let's sing:

Silver Fox,

Silver Fox,

Mahmoud Abbas is a smoothie.

“Moderate,”

Shmoderate.

Lost twice but he’s still around.

 

Counting dollars,

Counting euros,

From his patrons out there.

In the air there’s a feeling

Of lucre.

See him laughing,

See him smiling,

As the money rolls in

And he thinks of how wealthy he’ll be.

 

Silver Fox,

Silver Fox,

Mahmoud Abbas is a smoothie.

Kleptocrat,

Diplomat.

Lost twice but he’s still around.

 

Bush’ll visit

It’s exquisite

See them chewing the fat.

In the air there’s a ton of denial.

Wishful thinking.

What’s Bush drinking?

Thought he gave that stuff up.

Guess he’s just “high” on democracy.

 

Silver Fox,

Silver Fox,

Mahmoud Abbas is a smoothie.

Peace’ll come.

Say, "Salaam."

Soon all the Jews’ll be gone.

Posted by: scaramouche at 15:11 | link | comments (2)

Mail call: In its ongoing effort to whitewash the murder of Aqsa Parvez, the Toronto Star prints the following letter to the editor:

Keeping the faith for the sake

of all our Aqsa Parvezes

Column, Dec. 15

Islamic literature speaks of the "era of ignorance" when it addresses pre-Islamic Arab society – a time in which some of the men would bury their own infant daughters alive. Islam rid pagan Arabia of such practices, and raised women to a high status in days when they were considered property.

 

There are people today who fail to grasp the concept of the hijab. It is a right that Muslim women have fought for, some even spending time in prisons in so-called Muslim countries.

 

Although Islam is related to Judaism and Christianity, how Islam treats women is completely different. From its beginnings, Islam rejected the concept of original sin and the idea that the fall of mankind was due to a woman, Eve. Instead, the Qur'an says that man and woman committed the sin together, and that God forgave them when they asked for forgiveness. Islam gave women the right to property, inheritance and the vote 1,400 years ago. Even a simple statement in the Qur'an that women are human beings and have a soul was unthinkable in its time and cannot be found in other scriptures.

 

Islam has and will continue to flourish, and many more women will continue to wear their hijabs proudly. Let us stop patronizing them and respect their rights. In the meantime, if a criminal takes a life, let us treat him like a criminal.

Mohamed Aidid, Thornhill

“Era of ignorance,” huh? Don't you just love it when true believer refers to jahilya (the Arab word for the period of "ignorance" that existed before Mo arrived on the scene to enlighten everyone)? Makes me go all weak in the knees.

My letter, most definitely not a whitewash (which is why you’ll never see it in print):

It was fascinating to read Mohamed Aidid’s interpretation of what “Islamic literature” has to say about the treatment of women. Fascinating, but also disturbing. Aidid seems to have made a concerted effort to highlight the most appealing aspects of what the Koran has to say on the subject, waxing poetic about how Islam has always rejected the concept of “original sin” (which, to correct him, is solely a Christian, not a Judeo-Christian, concept). However, he seems to have left out the following passage, the Koran’s final word on the subject of men, women and their disparity of power: Men have authority over women because Allah has made the one superior to the other, and because they spend their wealth to maintain them. Good women are obedient. They guard their unseen parts because Allah has guarded them. As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them and forsake them in beds apart, and beat them. Then if they obey you, take no further action against them. Allah is high and supreme.  (Surah 4:34)

As Irshad Manji, a rebellious daughter not unlike Aqsa Parvez, explains in her book, The Trouble With Islam, one of Islam’s “troubles” is that too many Muslims take the Koran literally. And the above-quoted passage, which literally endows men with the God-given right to bend “the weaker sex” to their will, is taken literally by untold numbers of men around the world, who use it as an excuse to validate their dreadful treatment of women. It is why women in Saudi Arabia are flogged for the “offence” of having been raped. It may have been a motivating factor in the murder of a Mississauga teenager who balked at having to wear a hijab.

 

Mohamed Aidid claims it is “patronizing” and disrespectful to question a Muslim woman’s “right” to wear a head scarf. I would suggest it is far more patronizing—and more than a little disingenuous—to ignore the obvious religious underpinnings of Islamic male chauvinism.

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:07 | link | comments (2)

Give it a rest: George W. Bush is about to embark on a mission to the Middle East. His aim: to figure out a way to finally get the poor, deprived Palestinians their state, by gum. As Bush and than Foggy Bottom minx Condi, see it, that's the only way to solve most of the world's problems (and as a by-product, burnish the old Dubya legacy).

In "tribute" to this noble pursuit, I've updated John Lennon:

Two, one, two, three, four.

Ev’rybody’s talking about Zionists, lyin-ists,

Hegemony, acrimony, civil rights, unfair fights,

Martin Luther King.

All he is saying is give “P”s a state.

All he is saying is give “P”s a state.

 

Nobody’s talkin’ about Sunnis, loonies, Eye-ran, its plan,

Mullahs, fool us, the jihad ‘gainst the Jews.

All he is saying is give “P”s a state.

All he is saying is give “P”s a state.

 

Let me tell you now

Democracy, theocracy, autocrats,

Diplomats, acrobats, tin-foil hats,

Negotiations, recriminations,

United Nations,

Ev’rybody’s talking about

George and Condi, Nic Sarkozy, Hillary,

“Mod’rate” Abbas, “extreme” Hamas,

King Abdullah,

Ehud Omert, Allah Akbar,

Allah

Akbar.

 

All they are saying is give “P”s a state…

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

Consciencious objector: They tried to make him go to jihad and, like talented f**k-up, Amy Winehouse, he said, "No, no, no." (link via LGF)

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:21 | link | comments

Like it or not: Today’s example of “don’t write like this, kids”—the lede in this New York Times article about Hillary Clinton’s new bid to get people to like her:  

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has embarked on a warm-and-fuzzy tour, blitzing across Iowa - here with her husband and Magic Johnson - to present herself as likable and heart-warming.

The above is unfortunate on two counts. From the standpoint of political writing, there’s far too much happening in this sentence. From the standpoint of political strategy, it’s simply a bad plan. “Blitzing” at the same time you’re being “warm-and-fuzzy” is apt to make the fuzz fly everywhere—which is unlikely to endear you to, say, the finicky folks of  Davenport, Iowa.

The story about Hillary's "Likablility Tour" reminds me of another American politician who had "likability" issues: Richard M. Nixon. No matter how hard he tried--and at various times he tried very hard, indeed--he couldn't get people to love him. I recall a poignant/comic scene in Joe McGinniss's book about Nixon's 1968 presidential campaign. McGinniss describes how, in an effort to appear carefree and spontaneous a la the Kennedys, Nixon, with cameras rolling, strolled along a California beach. In his office shoes.Wearing a suit.

There are certain politicians who, despite all their best efforts, are simply unlovable. Nixon was one. Hillary Clinton is another. In Hillary's case, though, her unlovablity is even more pronounced because she is married to a guy who, no matter what he does, remains stubbornly, horn-doggedly "likable."

Kind of a liability when you're trying to appeal to the voters. Mind you, his lack of inherent likablity didn't prevent Dick Nixon from eventually rising to the top.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:10 | link | comments (3)

Oops!: A correction in the Globe and Mail:

A study by research analyst Steven Stolsky suggests the annual Palestinian homicide rate since 1999 rises and falls in co-relation to the amount of Western aid given to the Palestinian Authority. A graphic yesterday on the editorial page reversed the relationship.

Glad they cleared that up.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:26 | link | comments

Do as we say, not as we do (if you know what's good for you): That could well be the motto of the Arab press. By Joel Brinkley in JWR:

Two recent incidents in or near the Middle East have highlighted a noxious bit of hypocrisy for anyone to see. Next time you hear Arab leaders complain about the portrayal of Islam in America, think twice before you sympathize.

Consider that unfortunate British teacher in Sudan who mistakenly agreed with her students' suggestion to name the class teddy bear Mohammed. Last month, a court sentenced her to 15 days in jail for offending Islam. Reacting to international outrage, Sudan's dictator-president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, pardoned her — but not before hundreds of Sudanese called for her execution before a firing squad.

A few months earlier, Sheik Ahmad Bahr, a Hamas leader who was speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council at the time, gave a sermon in a Khartoum mosque in which he called for the annihilation of both Americans and Jews.

"Oh Allah, vanquish the Jews and their supporters," he preached. "Oh Allah, count their numbers and kill them all - down to the very last one. America and Israel will be annihilated."

Sudan broadcast his sermon on national television. But did the Sudanese offer even a murmur of complaint about that? No. Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, is quite upset about Western outrage over the court order to flog a 20-year-old Saudi woman who was gang raped last year. She was sentenced to 90 lashes, but when her lawyer appealed her conviction, the judge more than doubled the sentence, to 200 lashes.

The White House called this "outrageous," and Canada described the woman's treatment as "barbaric." In response, Saudi officials are painting themselves as the victims, saying the West has no right to criticize Saudi law.

"What is outraging about this case is that it is being used against the Saudi government and people," Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, complained early this month.

Many Americans, meanwhile, would likely consider the vile cartoons in the Saudi press depicting Americans, and Jews, as rapacious killers as "outraging." One, titled September 11th, in the Saudi paper al-Yawm, showed an Hasidic Jew, the look of a crazed killer on his face, milking cow's teats hanging from the bottom of each digit in the number 11.

Vicious anti-American and anti-Semitic cartoons are a staple of the Arab press. Often they show American soldiers, or Jews, drinking Arab blood or planning an Arab "holocaust." Quite often they depict Jewish control over America.

Arab cartoonists drew with a special zeal, paradoxically, in the months after the publication of the Mohammed cartoons in a Danish newspaper two years ago. Riots erupted throughout the Islamic world in reaction to cartoons that depicted the Prophet Mohammed unfavorably.

"We are angry — very, very, very angry," a Palestinian legislator, Jamila al-Shanty, said at the time. "No one can say a bad word about our prophet."

That same month, a cartoon in Ash-Sharq, a Qatari paper, showed a western cartoonist drawing an Arab peacefully at prayer, then in the next panel bowing before a toilet bowl labeled "zionism." Behind it stood a leering devil holding a menorah and a star of David.

Academics and Middle East analysts have been debating this obvious hypocrisy for years. And it turns out, on close examination, to be a manifestation of Arab government control.

Anti-Semitism has been rife in Arab countries for generations. More recently, anti-Americanism has taken root, driven in large part by American support for Israel -- and the Iraq war.

Most every Arab country, except Lebanon and Iraq, is ruled by a king, president or other unelected dictator. Given the widespread poverty, inequality and lack of economic development in many Arab states, the leaders learned quickly that the best way to subdue a restive population was to focus the people's ire elsewhere.

The most obvious target was Israel and its mistreatment of the Palestinians. Most every Arab leader professes to be so concerned about the Palestinians that settling the problem remains the government's key objective.

Rhetorically, it comes up in every context, while practically, little is actually done — except to whip up popular anger at home.

The newspapers that publish these nauseating cartoons are generally state organs whose editors know precisely what their leaders want to see. If they falter, the leaders tell them…

Not unlike what Human Rights Commissions do here in Canada, except they tell people what they don’t want to see.

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:44 | link | comments

Like a virgin: One of the great attractions of incorporeal virgins up in Paradise, aside from their alleged hotness and willingness to have sex with a horny young lad who's blown himself up for Allah, is that they magically “revirginize” after every use—kind of like a self-cleaning oven. Real live Muslim women down here on Earth, on the other hand, don’t have that advantage. They have to resort to painful surgery if they hope to return to their previously intact condition (and save themselves from being murdered by their “dishonoured” menfolk). From FOX News:

On her wedding night, Aisha Salim will hand her blooded sheets to her in-laws as proof of her virginity, according to a story in The Daily Telegraph of Australia.

But there’s one problem. Being a modern English university graduate, she is far from the traditional untouched Muslim bride.

Like most woman her age, Salim has smoked, drank, had sex and even lived with one of her past boyfriends.

However, if the devout Muslim family of her soon-to-be husband – or even her own family – knew this, she could be murdered.

Aisha has opted to have her virginity surgically restored in a delicate but painful surgery called hymenoplasties -- where the hymen is re-created from the already torn tissue, or a new membrane is inserted.

"If my husband cannot prove to his family that I am a virgin, I would be hounded, ostracised and sent home in disgrace,” Salim told England’s Daily Mail.

“My father, who is a devout Muslim, would regard it as the ultimate shame. The entire family could be cast out from the friends and society they hold dear, and I honestly believe that one of my fanatically religious cousins or uncles might kill me in revenge, to purge them of my sins. Incredible as it may seem, honour killings are still accepted within our religion.

“Ever since my family arranged this marriage for me, I've been terrified that, on my wedding night, my secret would come out. It has only been since my surgery last week that I've actually been able to sleep properly. Now, I can look forward to my marriage."

Salim is far from alone in seeking such drastic -- and almost barbaric -- surgery.

The rise in Islamic fundamentalism has seen 24 women in the U.K. have the procedure between 2005 and 2006....

Almost barbaric? Let's see what Dr. Weird Al has to say about that, shall we?

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

Check, mate: The Globe and Mail’s Mark MacKinnon has another of his patented tug-from-the-heart strings reports about poor, suffering Palestinians. This time, it’s a whinge-a-thon about Israeli security checkpoints, and how they amount to a “daily exercise in humiliation.”

My letter to the Globe:

The checkpoints that Palestinians complain about so loudly weren’t set up willy-nilly; nor were they put in place to “humiliate” them. The checkpoints are there for one reason and one reason alone: to prevent terrorists from entering Israel and detonating themselves in a crowd of people.

There is no question that Palestinians have suffered as a result of this measure. However, there is also no doubt that the checkpoints, as well as Israel’s security barrier (decried as an “apartheid wall” by Palestinians and their supporters) have proven highly effective in deterring incidents of terrorism.

Those who call for an end to these defensive measures—without any clear evidence that the terrorism would likely cease—are putting the lives of Israelis at risk.  For that reason, the measures must remain in place, even if it means some Palestinians are likely to be inconvenienced and feel “humiliated”: that kind of “humiliation” pales in comparison to the “humiliation” of being blown to bits by a suicide bomber.  

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:32 | link | comments (4)

Good P.R.: The news that a young Saudi woman who was brutally gang-raped was going to be on the receiving end of harsh Wahhabi justice (her “crime”—riding in cars with unrelated boys) resulted in a P.R. catastrophe for the guy in charge of the two holy shmoly mosques. That situation has now been rectified, as the woman has been “pardoned” and the holy shmoley custodian hailed for his compassion by the victim’s grateful (and grovelling) husband. (I have a feeling the poor chap didn't grovel nearly so much as reported, though, since the words quoted in the following Arab News story sound as though they were put in his mouth by some Saudi P.R. flak):

JEDDAH, 18 December 2007 — The pardon by Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah of the 20-year-old rape victim known as “Qatif Girl” yesterday was well received by her husband who wanted to say nothing on the case except to thank the king. Meanwhile, human rights activists also welcomed the news but are calling for specific measures to avert sentencing rape victims in the first place.

“On behalf of my wife and myself we would like to sincerely thank King Abdullah, the king of humanity, for his fatherly gesture,” said the husband whose name has not been published in the media. “That is not strange from King Abdullah who is known for his generosity to his citizens and the Islamic world.”

The husband said he received the good news yesterday morning through a phone call from one of his friends who spotted the news in the early morning. He said that his wife, whose name is also being withheld from publication because of the nature of the crime, is totally relieved now even though she is physically ill and scheduled to have surgery next week.

Human rights activist Fawziya Al-Oyoni, who is based in the Eastern Province, said that the king’s pardon brings some relief to women, but it doesn’t clear the rape victim from being blamed.

“The case should have been looked at again in another court that clears the girl of all charges,” said Oyoni. “A pardon means that she did something wrong and was kindly pardoned later.”

Yesterday, Justice Minister Abdullah Al-Asheikh defended the Higher Court’s decision to increase the punishment of the rape victim to 200 lashes and prison time after her lawyer disputed the Qatif General Court’s original sentence of 90 lashes.

King Abdullah used his authority, said Al-Asheikh, “to diminish people’s suffering when he is sure that such verdicts might leave psychological effects on those who received Shariah sentences, although he is convinced and trusts that the verdicts are just and fair.”…

An informed source told Arab News that the Qatif Girl’s 36-year-old lawyer, Abdul Rahman Al-Lahem, would have his law license returned to him after the Eid Al-Adha holidays. Al-Lahem had his license revoked by the Qatif General Court after being accused of taking the case to the media to “confuse the judicial establishment’s image and thus harming the country.”…

In other words, the more we shine a light on these outrageous abuses, the better for all the Qatif girls. Unfortunately, the Saudi reign of terror against women is going to continue as long as sharia remains the law of the land.

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

Two minus one: Who needs a “two-state solution” when there’s an even neater “solution”—one predicated on Jews and Palestinians sharing power harmoniously within the bosom of a single state?

This "post-Zionism" vision is “final” a solution for the Jews as anything Hitler could have come up with, but it's designed to make the useful idiots, like these ones in the Guardian (actually, one sounds like a useful idiot; the other sounds like a head scarf) feel good about eliminating Jewish sovereignty, since it would be done in the name of ensuring Palestinian “human rights.”

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

First they came for Maclean’s…: Ezra Levant, a gentleman who’s had his own run-in with Canucki Thought Police, has a superb dissection of the HRC phenomenon and how it endangers free discourse in Canada. From the National Post:

…You don’t need to be a lawyer to know that a magazine article is not what the founders of human rights commissions had in mind. As Alan Borovoy, the general counsel of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association — and one of the architects of modern Canadian human rights law — wrote last year, “during the years when my colleagues and I were labouring to create such commissions, we never imagined that they might ultimately be used against freedom of speech.” Censoring debates was “hardly the role we had envisioned for human rights commissions.”

Borovoy’s warning has gone unheeded. The opposite, actually — it signalled to the CICs of the world that human-rights commissions are the perfect instrument to pursue their agenda of censorship. At the federal Canadian Human Rights Commission, for example, one single activist — a lawyer named Richard Warman, who used to work at the commission himself — has filed 26 complaints, nearly 50% of all complaints under that commission’s “hate messages” section. He’s turned it into a part-time job, winning tens of thousands of dollars in “awards” from people he’s complained about in the past few years. Warman is a liberal activist, who likes to complain against Web sites he calls racist or homophobic. He’s had the common sense to stick to suing small, oddball bloggers who can’t fight back. But surely the CIC [Canadian Islamic Congress] has observed Warman’s winning streak, and will use his precedents to go after Maclean’s…

It surely will—and, once successful, it will likely be encouraged to call upon the Human Nice Commissions (dedicated to ensuring that Canadians behave like good little girls and boys and are “nice” to each other) to chastise other meanies.

Enforced niceness—what an utterly terrifying concept.

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

The hellaciousness of good intentions: The benevolent folks who are funding the Palestinian Authority are doing so because they sincerely believe that bolstering so-called moderate Mahmoud Abbas will help him get rid of “extremist” Hamas. (Also because some are in the grip of what historian Bat Ye’or calls “Palestinianism”—but that’s another story.) However, as Daniel Pipes observes, throwing money at the Palestinians seems to have the opposite effect from the one intended. Instead of persuading them to set aside their enmity and pull together to build their own state, it seems to result in more violence.

Go figure.

From JWR:

Lavishing funds on Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority to achieve peace has been a mainstay of Western, including Israeli, policy since Hamas seized Gaza in June. But this open spigot has counterproductive results and urgently must be stopped.

Some background: Paul Morro of the Congressional Research Service reports that, in 2006, the European Union and its member states gave US$815 million to the Palestinian Authority, while the United States sent it $468 million. When other donors are included, the total receipts come to about $1.5 billion.

The windfall keeps growing. President George W. Bush requested a $410 million supplement in October, beyond a $77 million donation earlier in the year. The State Department justifies this lordly sum on the grounds that it "supports a critical and immediate need to support a new Palestinian Authority (PA) government that both the U.S. and Israel view as a true ally for peace." At a recent hearing, Gary Ackerman, chairman of the House Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia, endorsed the supplemental donation.

Not content with spending taxpayer money, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice launched a "U.S.-Palestinian Public Private Partnership" on Dec. 3, involving financial heavyweights such as Sandy Weill and Lester Crown, to fund, as Rice put it, "projects that reach young Palestinians directly, that prepare them for responsibilities of citizenship and leadership can have an enormous, positive impact."

One report suggests the European Union has funneled nearly $2.5 billion to the Palestinians this year.

Looking ahead, Abbas announced a goal to collect pledges of $5.8 billion in aid for a three-year period, 2008-10, at the "Donors' Conference for the Palestinian Authority" attended by over ninety states on Monday in Paris. (Using the best population estimate of 1.35 million Palestinians on the West Bank, this comes to a staggering amount of money: per capita, over $1,400 per year, or about what an Egyptian earns annually.) Endorsed by the Israeli government, Abbas immediately raised nearly that amount for 2008 at the donors' conference.

Well, it's a bargain if it works, right? A few billion to end a dangerous, century-old conflict - it's actually a steal.

But innovative research by Steven Stotsky, a research analyst for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) finds that an influx of money to the Palestinians has had the opposite effect historically. Relying on World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and other official statistics, Stotsky compares two figures since 1999: budgetary support aid provided annually to the Palestinian Authority and the number of Palestinian homicides annually (including both criminal and terrorist activities, and both Israeli and Palestinian victims). Graphed together, the two figures show an uncanny echo:

The correlation is even clearer when the aid of one year is superimposed on the homicides of a year later:

In brief, each $1.25 million or so of budgetary support aid translates into a death within the year. As Stotsky notes, "These statistics do not mean that foreign aid causes violence; but they do raise questions about the effectiveness of using foreign donations to promote moderation and combat terrorism."…

The Canadian Coaltion for Democracies has issued  a media release condemning the no-strings-attached beneficence:

Ottawa, Canada - Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier said today that Canada would commit $300 million over the next five years in foreign aid to the Palestinian Authority (PA). This commitment is on top of the nearly 500 million Canadian tax dollars that have already been given to the Palestinians.

"Our funding is not unconditional," Minister Bernier said in a media release. "We will need to see a viable Palestinian state that is democratic, accountable, and living in peace and security as a neighbour to Israel."

"Many Canadians have welcomed the more principled foreign policy of the current government," said Alastair Gordon, president, Canadian Coalition for Democracies (CCD). "Hopefully, Minister Bernier's funding conditions will assure that our tax dollars no longer go to a regime whose governing charter calls for the destruction of a neighbouring democratic state and its people."

"Further, Canadians have poured close to half a billion tax into the Palestinian regime, only to see it spent on ever-increasing incitement and hatred, and disappear in corruption, theft and a bloated bureaucracy" added Gordon.

The governing charter of the Palestinian Authority clearly states that "Armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine" (article 9) and "Nor do Jews constitute a single nation with an identity of its own" (article 20).

The Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade -- an affiliate of Fatah, the party of the Palestinian Authority -- is an illegal terror organization under Canadian law, and has proudly claimed credit for the murder of Israelis, Americans and fellow Palestinians, all in keeping with Fatah's charter. The Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade was among the first to take credit for a suicide bombing by a female. A Canadian who directly or indirectly funds such an illegal organization can be prosecuted and jailed, and the same prohibition must apply to our foreign aid.

"Without tough and transparent conditions, Canadian aid will continue to move the Middle East further from peace," said Naresh Raghubeer, CCD's executive director. "Until the PA changes its governing charter to recognize Israel, until violence against Israel stops for at least two years, and until the PA ends genocidal incitement in its schools and media, Canada must withhold its funding."

"The argument is made that the government of Israel supports our funding of the PA," added Gordon. "Canada's foreign policy must be determined by elected representatives in Ottawa, not in Jerusalem.

"Billions in foreign aid to the Palestinians have succeeded only in creating more violence, hatred and dependency. We hope that the tough conditions set by Minister Bernier will mark the end of an aid strategy that has for decades denied the Palestinians their right to modernity, self-sufficiency, dignity, and peace."

Don’t count on it. There’s nothing the international community loves more (save for bashing Israel) than squandering billions of dollars on deserving Palestinians--and having nothing positive to show for their largesse.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:39 | link | comments (1)

He’s baaack: And ignorance, as they say, is still Blix. From Der Spiegel:

…SPIEGEL ONLINE: Had the [NIE] intelligence report not come out, would the US have attacked Iran?

Blix: There are many indications that the White House was in fact planning an attack. It was said that the Bush administration wanted to complete this military strike as its last act before it left office. The most recent US intelligence report now makes war an impossibility. The United States traditionally justifies its attacks with its doctrine of pre-emptive self-defense. But now that the official word is out that Iran neither has nor is developing weapons of mass destruction, this is no longer an option.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Despite the defused situation, US President George W. Bush warned against interpreting the intelligence report as a reason to let our guard down. Is such a warning justified?

Blix: Yes. The report changes nothing about the fact that Iran is in the process of acquiring the capacity to enrich uranium, even if Tehran isn't interested in military objectives at the moment. It is important to continue trying to convince Iran to give up its uranium enrichment program.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: You have proposed offering security guarantees to nations that could be seeking to acquire nuclear weapons, instead of imposing sanctions. Is this feasible in the case of Iran?

Blix: If you want to influence behavior, you can do it with a carrot or a stick -- or both. The Europeans tried it with carrots at first. Their goal was to make it easier to invest in Iran, and to help the country develop peaceful nuclear power and join the World Trade Organization. These were all good approaches, but then, unfortunately, the stick dominated once again.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Isn't it naïve to assume that carrots are enough to convince a country like Iran to abandon its nuclear program? President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has continuously threatened to wipe Israel from the map.

Blix: There are many more incentives available that have yet to be offered to Iran.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: The United States gave North Korea the assurance that it would not be attacked and, together with Japan, the promise of aid when relations normalize. How can Iran be contained in the long term? You often mention regional solutions. Would that be an option?

Blix: The best thing would be for the entire Middle East to become a WMD-free zone. Of course, Israel wouldn't play along without substantial progress in the peace process. But what would be possible today, politically speaking, is a zone in which neither uranium is enriched nor plutonium reprocessed. We also hear that countries like Egypt and Jordan want nuclear power. A regional solution would mean that the finger is not being pointed exclusively at Iran.

I say we point the finger at old Hans, for being as clueless as ever.

Posted by: scaramouche at 23:00 | link | comments (1)

Tiny Hitler's taunt: The NIE report concluded that, for the time being at least, the mullahs are no longer making nukes. Their front man—and a power in his own right—Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, had this to say on the subject this past weekend: “Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah.” From Reuters:

TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran's president said on Sunday the publication of a U.S. intelligence report saying Iran had halted a nuclear weapons program in 2003 amounted to a "declaration of surrender" by Washington in its row with Tehran.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad also dismissed in an interview with state television the prospect of new U.N. sanctions against Iran over its refusal to halt sensitive atomic work.

"It is too far-fetched," he said when asked whether he expected the U.N. Security Council to impose fresh sanctions on Iran following two such resolutions since last December.

Ahmadinejad, who often rails against the West, told a rally earlier this month that the December 3 publication of the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate was a "victory" for Iran.

He said on Sunday: "It was in fact a declaration of surrender ... It was a positive action by the U.S. administration to change their attitude and it was a correct move."

Washington is still pushing for more sanctions on Iran despite the U.S. intelligence report, which also said Tehran was continuing to master skills needed to make nuclear weapons. U.S. President George W. Bush said Iran was still a danger.

An exiled opposition group, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), last week said Iran shut down its nuclear weapons program in 2003 but said restarted it a year later, dispersing equipment to thwart international inspectors.

Iran insists its nuclear program is peaceful and designed to make electricity. It says it has never had a nuclear weapons program.

"It would be beneficial for both Iran and them (the West) to cooperate with Iran," Ahmadinejad said. "Of course it would be more to their benefit than Iran's."… 

Of course.

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

Don’t miss: Just in time for the holidays, the Ceeb offers  a “very special” episode of Little Mosque on the Prairie, its critically acclaimed sitcom about funny Muslims and silly infidels all getting along in a small Saskatchewan town. On tonight’s show—and no, I’m not making this up—“The festival of Eid falling in late December, Rayyan adds a few yuletide touches to the celebration to please Sarah, who’s feeling nostalgic for Christmas.”

Sure to become a holiday classic like, say, “Crush the Pilgrims” and “Stoning the Devil.”

Or, for those feeling nostalgic for Chrismas, “Frosty the Snowman” and “Bad Santa.” 

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

Funny photos: Looking even more addlepated than usual (too much Botox or an unusually high dosage of psychotropic meds?), Libyan potentate Moo Moo Khadaffy (for obvious reasons, my preferred spelling) visits Versailles.

Please note the bizarre chapeau--part Cossack, part Mohammed bear.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:51 | link | comments

Gunning for Steyn (and you’re next): You’ll never run afoul of the Canucki thought police if you repeat the following mantra: “Jihad is a personal, internal struggle; there’s absolutely no connection between terrorism and faith; every aspect of Islam is as peaceful and lovely as raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens.”

Mark Steyn forgot the words to that refrain, much to his—and our—chagrin. David Warren, via Real Clear Politics, describes the fate that has befallen him as a result of this lapse:

In the olden days, in this country, people who were hurtin' sang a country song. I remember my little sister, when she was eight years of age, singing one in the kitchen, while affecting to wash some dishes. The lyrics were, as I recall: “My daddy hates me. / My mommy hates me. / My brubber hates me. / Everybody hates me and I'm / not very happy.” It needed at least a banjo.

These days in Canada, if you're feeling down and blue, and you think somebody hates you, you bring your case to a Human Rights Tribunal. And the people you think hate you get that knock on the door, celebrated in the literature of the Soviet Gulag, and wherever else ideology triumphed over humanity in the 20th century's painful course. Your daddy, your mommy, your brubber, or more likely some newspaper pundit gets dragged before a committee of smug, leftwing, humourless, jargon-blathering adjudicators. After long delays that are costly only to the defendant and the taxpayer (and justice delayed is justice denied), you will have the satisfaction of making your enemy squirm, in a kangaroo court where he is stripped of the right to due process, in which there are no fixed rules of evidence, in which the ridiculously biased “judges” make up the law as they go along, and impose penalties restricted only by their grimly limited imaginations -- such as ruinous fines, and lifetime "cease and desist" orders, such that, if you ever open your mouth again on a given topic, you stand to go to prison.

Then finally, on “some autumn night of delations and noyades” (I am quoting Auden), the unrepentant practitioners of free speech will be sequestered by their litigator, and “those he hates shall hate themselves instead.”

Alan Borovoy, one of the pioneers of these star chambers in Canada, now expresses himself aghast at their powers, and how they are being used to bring an end to Canada's heritage of free speech and free press. As he wrote in the Calgary Herald, recently: "During the years when my colleagues and I were labouring to create [these] commissions, we never imagined that they might ultimately be used against freedom of speech."

Against him, it must be said that he and his colleagues simply weren't listening when I and mine explained, decades ago, why this would be their inevitable effect. I think back, for instance, to the dismissals we received when I published Ian Hunter's important article, “What's Wrong with Human Rights,” in the Idler magazine of April 1985. Everything that has happened since has confirmed our darkest predictions.

Including the darkest of those predictions: that intellectuals and the Canadian media simply would not care about defending even their own freedom. They would see it as a Left-Right issue, and being overwhelmingly people of the Left themselves, would actually approve the stifling of “racists” and “misogynists” and “born again crazies.”

But to paraphrase the late Pastor Martin Niemöller: “First they came for the redneck trolls, and I did not speak out because I was not a redneck troll. Then they came for the male chauvinist pigs, and I did not speak out because I was not a male chauvinist pig. Then they came for Mark Steyn, and I did not speak out because I was not Mark Steyn. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak out for me.”…

It's like that Billy Mumy Twilight Zone episode all over again. You have to keep telling Mo Elmasry, "That was a really good thing you did, Mo." Otherwise he's apt to "think" you into the cornfield (or the Canadian equivalent, haul you in front of a human rights commission, or two, or three).

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:30 | link | comments (2)

Mo' bear: The real one is locked up in some Sudanese vault. But you can purchase a reasonable facsimile here.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:03 | link | comments

The money pit: Once upon a time there was a regime of lucky Arabs who won an international lottery. Its name: the Palestinian Authority. From YNet News:

The Palestinian Authority will soon be receiving $800 million in European and Japanese aid funds and another $550 million from the United States, the Conference of Donors announced Monday.

 Delegations from the world's powers met in Paris to agree on an aid package worth billions of dollars to stabilize the Palestinian economy and give political impetus to the newly re-launched peace process with Israel.  

The one-day Paris conference was attended by 90 international delegations, making it the biggest of its kind since 1996.

 Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas hopes to win pledges for $5.6 billion – the sum he says is needed to underwrite a Palestinian state and stave off severe hardship in the territories.

 The amount the Palestinians needed for 2008 was "around $1.6 to $1.7 billion," said US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, adding the US will shoulder one third of the financial burden, while the German government, meanwhile, promised $200 million by 2010.

 "This is an historically large figure. I think this is the largest assistance package that we have ever done for the Palestinians," a senior US official said.

 Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni headed the Israeli delegation to the Conference of Donors. Israel was not named an official member of the conference, but it presence, Ynet was told, helps legitimize the process.

 "The creation of a Palestinian state and the modernization of the Palestinian economy are in the interests of Israel, just as stopping terrorism is in the interests of the Palestinians," she said.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy opened the conference, with Abbas at his side: "It is urgent to stabilize the Palestinian economy and implement measures on the ground that will improve the daily lives of Palestinians," said Sarkozy.

 

Some 70% of the pledged funds will go to stabilizing the Palestinian budget, and the rest on development projects….

It should be abundantly clear by now that you could throw all the cash in the world at the Palestinians, spruce them up, modernize them and try to turn their territory into, well, Israel. But theirs is a “problem” that cannot be “solved” with more shekels; if anything, that only makes things worse as the funds end up in unnumbered bank accounts of corrupt officials or to purchase weapons and propaganda that are turned against Israel.

Here’s Barry Rubin on why funding Abbas is a colossal waste of time and money. From JWR:

My favorite sentence of the week is: "Asking for record $5.8 billion in aid through 2010, Palestinians promise fiscal reform." Karen Laub wrote on this subject for the AP, December 5, 2007. The request came from "Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas" to double projected aid to the Palestinian Authority (PA).

What is funny about that opening sentence is that the PA has received so much money before and squandered it. Reform promises have been made and broken for more than 13 years. It is hard to remember the PA has existed that long with so little positive achievement. If Palestinians have such a bad economy it is not due to the "occupation" or to Israel but to their own leaders' greed, incompetence, failure to end violence, inability to present an attractive investment climate, and unwillingness to impose stability on their own lands...

But I’m sure that is destined to change with this new infusion of cash (says scaramouche, channeling Abbas’s clueless international benefactors).

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:17 | link | comments

A genuine sense of loss: Britain’s Chief Rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks, is concerned that the U.K. is losing its identity. From the Telegraph:

Britain is losing its identity because of over-zealous political correctness and a failure to deal with immigration, the Chief Rabbi has warned.

Sir Jonathan Sacks said that the drive for a multi­cultural society had left Britain increasingly intolerant and that too many people were embarrassed about their history.

In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph, he stressed that the historic Union with Scotland and the concept of Britain must be preserved.

Echoing the Telegraph's Call Yourself British campaign, he endorsed plans for a British Day, suggested a more inclusive national anthem should be created and urged the Government to give people a "British dream".

Sir Jonathan said that people should be proud to call themselves British. A poll conducted by this newspaper last week found that more than six out of 10 English voters shared his view, but had growing concerns about the future of the Union.

The Chief Rabbi said that there was a climate of intolerance that threatened to destroy the country's identity and had pushed faith to the margins.

"I think we are seeing a new intolerance," he said. "There is an extravagant over-zealousness in trying not to offend anyone and little do these people realise that other faiths would like Britain to be a Christian country."

Sir Jonathan added: "A tolerant society is one that ignores difference and a multi­cultural one is one that highlights them. It is confidence in your own heritage that allows you to be generous to those of another heritage."

His new book, The Home We Build Together, argues that the experiment of multiculturalism has failed.

Sir Jonathan predicted that ending the Union would lead to further fragmentation.

"I am concerned about the rise in nationalism in England and Scotland," he said. "We have so much history in common, some of it painful, but all of it contributing to this sense of being together. These bonds of belonging are so important, particularly as we have this splitting into ever smaller fragments, an increased tribalism, in this global age."

He also said that the plan to set aside one day to celebrate Britishness was a good idea, suggesting it should be the equivalent of Remembrance Sunday, "but looking at the future not the past".

While he likes the national anthem, the Chief Rabbi argued that it might be time to introduce something more "inclusive". He said: "We always sing God Save the Queen, but I don't think many other people do."

He also expressed his concern that children were not gaining a sense of identity.

"What we have lost in British culture is Sunday lunch, dedicated family time. How many families sit together around the table to enjoy a meal together? We come in and stick the pizza in the microwave and eat watching television.

"I think that's one reason why the deregulation of Sunday was a mistake. It gave us one day in seven where who you are is not determined by how much you spend."

Two things strike me as being rather odd here. First, that a Rabbi would bemoan the deregulation of Sunday, the Christian Sabbath, but say not a word about Jews observing their Sabbath. Second, that in a statement criticizing “political correctness,” Rabbi Sachs is so p.c. that he can’t even bring himself to utter the words “Muslims” or “Islam.”

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:44 | link | comments

The snow in T.O.: It's a blizzard out there--in more ways than one:

Oh, the weather outside is crappy

And the spin is oh so sappy:

“It’s a teenager thing, you know.”

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.

 

Oh, the Ceeb and Star are ‘splaining

And their feints are self-sustaining:

“It happens wherever you go.”

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.

 

When Harpoon got a hold of the tale

Said ‘twas nothing to do with sharia.

Then he climbed a soapbox and railed

‘Bout the kafirs’ unfounded fears.

 

Oh, the snow is clear up to our eyes, now.

And it comes as no surprise now

That they’re shovellin’ it high and low.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow…

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:38 | link | comments

The killing of rebellious daughters: Phyllis Chesler comments on this heinous phenomenon.  From the Chesler Chronicles:

The sixteen year old was “too modern” for her fundamentalist Muslim family. She craved forbidden North American freedoms which, if practiced, would shame her immigrant family. The struggle over this issue was hot and abusive. The girl was continually attacked and closely monitored. Her own sisters envied and hated her not only because she was allowed to attend school but because her choice of modern dress could harm their own young daughters’ future marriage chances.

I am not talking about Toronto’s Aqsa Parvez who was just slaughtered by her father (may she rest in peace), but about another sixteen year old: Palestina Isa, who was honor-murdered by her father and her mother in St. Louis Missouri on November 5, 1989. Palestina (“Tina”) was murdered with primal ferocity. The forensic pathologist reported “thirteen wounds, six of them mortal. The worst one plunged into her chest wall, breaking her sternum and ribs and piercing her heart. A second gash ripped her left lung. Her liver had been slashed five times fatally.” Her breasts had been punctured seven times.

Ellen Harris wrote an important book about this one case: Guarding the Secrets: Palestinian Terrorism and a Father’s Murder of His Too-American Daughter. Palestina was clearly being physically abused at home. She attended school with visible bruises. She asked for help. She got none. The only reason her parents were prosecuted and sentenced was this: Her father, Zein Isa, was under federal surveillance. Why? Because he was a member of the Palestinian Abu Nidal terrorist group. Thus, the jury got to hear the horrendous twenty minute murder on tape and convicted her parents.

In case anyone has forgotten: At one time, the Abu Nidal group had been classified by the American government as the “most vicious terrorist group in the world.” On Christmas Eve, 1985, they were responsible for the simultaneous attacks at the El Al counters in the airports in Rome and Vienna in which 18 people died and 101 were injured. In 1986, they attacked an Israeli bus on the West Bank; they also attacked a group of Sephardic Jews as they prayed in a synagogue in Istanbul, machine-gunning 22 worshippers to death and then killing themselves.

Back then—and even more so today—Islamist terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism means that women will be savagely restricted and even more savagely punished if they stray, even a millimeter, even by accident, from the laws and customs of Islamic gender apartheid.

Back to St Louis. Zein Isa’s second wife (a first wife lived on the West Bank), was Palestina’s mother. She held her daughter down while her husband slaughtered her as if she were an animal—as if she were a woman who had provoked her own murder. Indeed, her parents never showed any remorse. Zein Isa told the police that she “deserved it, that she attacked me.”

I wrote about this case in The Death of Feminism: What’s Next in the Struggle for Women’s Freedom (HERE and HERE). I also wrote about many other European- and North American based honor-murders.

In each instance, with a few exceptions, most western intellectuals, including liberals, leftists, and feminists, remained uneasily silent. They feared they would be viewed as “racists” or as “Islamophobes” if they criticized such Muslim customs. They said that such barbarism was mainly due to historical colonialism and imperialism; that the bikini is as exploitative as the burqua; that western moralism or intervention would only make things worse for women.

The West has not intervened in Iran—and yet as of yesterday, in addition to being stoned and publicly hung when they allege rape, Iranian women have just been forbidden to wear boots (!) and hats. (Not modest enough). The West has not intervened in Saudi Arabia—and yet a young woman who was gang-raped has also been stripped of her lawyer and sentenced to two hundred lashes. (Let’s not forget the awful case of the Saudi High School girls who were pushed back into their burning schoolhouse because, in their rush to escape, they had forgotten to put on their black sheets). The West has not intervened in Egypt—and yet, at the end of Ramadan, a mob of a thousand men indulged in an episode of “sexual wilding” in which they randomly attacked women on the street.

True, in Iraq, where the West has most definitely intervened, forty women were recently slaughtered and their bodies dumped because they refused to veil. And female police officers have just been ordered to turn over their guns to their male counterparts. But this might also be due to the Iranian and Saudi influence.

Just this morning, I was contacted by a young North American professor. When she spoke up for Muslim women, other feminists attacked her as “racist.” A kind friend slipped her The Death of Feminism. She wrote to thank me for writing it and to ask me for advice. Her quandary: She wants to assign the book to her class but fears that doing so might end her career. Here is what I wrote:

“While your career concerns are crucial, we are also talking about the end of western civilization and the mortal peril faced by Muslim women. I would suggest taking the risk—but perhaps you might talk about it to your superiors (not to your peers) and the way to present this book is in terms of the importance of tolerance and true intellectual diversity. We now have an opportunity to put our feminist ideals and analyses into vigorous practice when it comes to Muslim immigrants and to women in Muslim countries. In the name of this slaughtered Toronto sixteen year old—if for no other reason—the “good” people have got to take a stand against Islamic gender apartheid. ”…

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:09 | link | comments

Wishful eco-thinking: Mark Steyn is in hot water up here in Canada for pointing out that Europe has some testy radicals who like to blow up infrastructure, and that the birthrate of “native” Europeans is declining while the birthrate of Muslims in Europe is mushrooming. Luckily, he can still write about demographics in a publication that’s subject to the Second Amendment and not to Human Rights Commissions. Yesterday Steyn once again took note of the disparity in birth rates, tying it into the birth of the baby Jesus and the disdain that eco-zealots evince for any kind of human birth:

...Last week, in the Medical Journal of Australia, Barry Walters went further: To hell with this wimp-o pantywaist "voluntary" child-reduction. Professor Walters wants a "carbon tax" on babies, with, conversely, "carbon credits" for those who undergo sterilization procedures. So that'd be great news for the female eco-activists recently profiled in London's Daily Mail who boast about how they'd had their tubes tied and babies aborted in order to save the planet. "Every person who is born," says Toni Vernelli, "produces more rubbish, more pollution, more greenhouse gases and adds to the problem of overpopulation." We are the pollution, and sterilization is the solution. The best way to bequeath a more sustainable environment to our children is not to have any.

 

What's the "pro-choice" line? "Every child should be wanted"? Not anymore. The progressive position has subtly evolved: Every child should be unwanted.

 

By the way, if you're looking for some last-minute stocking stuffers, Oxford University Press has published a book by professor David Benatar of the University of Cape Town called "Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence." The author "argues for the 'anti-natal' view – that it is always wrong to have children … . Anti-natalism also implies that it would be better if humanity became extinct." As does Alan Weisman's "The World Without Us" – which Publishers Weekly hails as "an enthralling tour of the world … anticipating, often poetically, what a planet without us would be like." It's a good thing it "anticipates" it poetically, because, once it happens, there will be no more poetry.

 

Lest you think the above are "extremists," consider how deeply invested the "mainstream" is in a total fiction. At the recent climate jamboree in Bali, the Rev. Al Gore told the assembled faithful: "My own country, the United States, is principally responsible for obstructing progress here." Really? The American Thinker's Web site ran the numbers. In the seven years between the signing of Kyoto in 1997 and 2004, here's what happened:

 

•Emissions worldwide increased 18.0 percent;

•Emissions from countries that signed the treaty increased 21.1 percent;

•Emissions from nonsigners increased 10.0 percent; and

•Emissions from the United States increased 6.6 percent.

 

It's hard not to conclude a form of mental illness has gripped the world's elites. If you're one of that dwindling band of Westerners who'll be celebrating the birth of a child, "homeless" or otherwise, next week, make the most of it. A year or two on, and the eco-professors will propose banning Nativity scenes because they set a bad example.

Mention of the eco-fanatics’ disdain for nativities has dredged up an old Peanuts aphorism from the recesses of my memory vault. I believe it was uttered by security blanket-toting Linus, but it could just as easily emerge from the mouth carbon credit-toting Al-lah Gore or some other shrill eco-bully: “I love mankind; it’s people I can’t stand.”

Or in their case, bambinos.

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:06 | link | comments

Don we now our gay apparel: Whatever you do, thought, don’t don it in The Hague, where such sights are apt to offend, insult or otherwise aggrieve the usual suspects. From NIS News (link via Butterflies and Wheels):

THE HAGUE, 04/12/07 - The Gemeentemuseum (Municipal Museum) in The Hague denies that it has allowed itself to be influenced by threats from Muslims. It was a voluntary choice to drop a work of art concerning the prophet Mohammed, a spokesman claims.

The museum decided last weekend to withdraw a number of items by the Iranian artist Sooreh Hera from an exhibition, because "certain sections of society found these offensive." A spokesman explained that museums have the freedom to choose for themselves what they display.

The Gemeentemuseum was to exhibit pictures of two gay men wearing masks of the Islamic prophet Mohammed and his son-in-law Ali. "As museum director, I do not maintain any political criteria. I am not stopped by possible security risks. I simply found it exceptional work," director Van Krimpen said last Friday. But he changed his mind over the weekend and banned the pictures.

"Muslims have threatened the museum," Hera claimed. "But the museum is not willing to admit that this is the reason why they do not wish to exhibit the works." The Iranian artist is convinced that fear is behind the rejection.

The Socialist Party (SP) on the city council of The Hague wants Hera's controversial photos displayed as planned from 15 December. SP councillor Hiek van Driel has asked the city executive to discuss with Van Krimpen what security conditions must be satisfied in order for the photos to be exhibited after all.

In the Lower House, the SP has maintained silence, like almost all the other parties. Only the Party for Freedom (PVV) has asked for a reaction from Culture Minister Ronald Plasterk.

Hera said yesterday that she is considering withdrawing all her work in protest. The decision by the Gemeentemuseum was "censorship", in her view. "The only conclusion I can draw is that Allah is indeed very great in the Netherlands and that fear rules."

I’d say that was a fair assessment of the situation.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:42 | link | comments

“Justice” in the “new” Iraq: It sounds a lot like the kind of “justice” on display in the "new" Iran. From the times online:

IT WAS just after 11pm and the shopkeeper was closing up for the night when a van screeched to a halt outside. The back doors flew open. “Someone inside threw a woman onto the street,” he said. “She was lying on the road but she was still alive. A man lent out and shot a machine-gun into her body.”

As the van raced away, the shopkeeper ran over to her. She was aged 25 to 30 with long dark hair and was lying face up. “There was so much blood,” he said. “The police just took a photograph and put her in the back of a van.”

There have been 48 women killed in six months for “un-Islamic behaviour”. The murders in the teeming southern port of Basra have highlighted the weakness of the security forces and the strength of Islamic militias as Britain prepares to hand over control to Iraqi officials today.

In another case, two teenagers saw a woman beaten to death by five or six men from the Mahdi Army, Basra’s most powerful militia. One picked up a rock and crushed her skull. The teenagers were told that their home and family would be destroyed if they betrayed the killers.

Gordon Brown told the Commons last week that Iraq was now a democracy, that violence in Basra had fallen by 90% and that the Iraqis were “taking control over their own security”.

However, Major-General Jalil Khalaf, the police chief, said the city’s 28 militias were better armed than his men. “They control the ports which earns them huge sums of money” he said.

As well as skimming profits from oil exports, they were importing weapons from Iran.

“You could smuggle a tank across that border if you wanted to,” he added. ..

And this differs from the brutality and corruption of the Hussein regime…how?

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

Harpoon’s old soft shoe: I had a feeling that Harpoon Siddiqui, the Toronto Star’s beloved editorial page editor emeritus and all-round shill for the Islamic way would weigh in to the Aqsa Parvez controversy, and, what do you know?, I was right. Harpoon does his customary tap dance—attempting to confuse the infidels by throwing in all sorts of stuff that’s clearly irrelevant. But it’s all for naught. Aqsa’s murder has exposed Islam’s Achilles Heel in all its wretched glory, and, try as he might, Harpoon cannot cover up this distressing glimpse of ankle*:

No sooner had the news of the Aqsa Parvez murder filtered out than cultural warfare broke out.

Some said the killing proved the backwardness of Muslims, indeed Islam, that retrograde and violent religion which subjugates women.

Quebecers complaining about the wretchedness of the hijab were right, after all: "These people" do not share "our" values.

Others said that the isolated incident was a family tragedy, an intergenerational feud gone horribly wrong, leaving a 16-year-old dead and her father charged with murder. No religion teaches dads to kill their daughters.

The media – forever entangled in clichés about immigrants, especially Muslims – seemed incapable of rising above mob mentality.

Left unexplored were the issues most pertinent to public policy. What measures can be implemented to help avoid a recurrence? If the hijab is indeed a matter of great public import, what should the government's response be?

Violence against women knows no bounds of race, religion, culture or class.

The Parvez murder was also a clash of immigrants' old country cultural/religious values versus their children's evolving ones in Canada.

That has been so throughout our history and will be in the future.

Intergenerational clashes, too, transcend race, religion and ethnicity, notes Vivian Rakoff, former director of the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry, and an eminent author.

"It's the story of almost every single immigrant group adhering to the strict values of their past or indeed their present. I've heard this from Greek families, Italian families where the daughter wants to go and be with friends on the Yonge St. strip and the father calls her a whore and kicks her out and she gets beaten up."

The Parvez case parallels one in British Columbia, where a Sikh was convicted two years ago of killing his daughter for pursuing an interracial relationship.

The law will take its course in the Mississauga case as well…

It is a matter of great, grim satisfaction that Parvez’s murderer will have to answer to Canadian law, not sharia law. And much as he’d like to, not even the Star’s Order of Canada-winning shill for Islam can take that satisfaction—that opportunity for true justice—away from us.

My letter to the Star:

Haroon Siddiqui claims that the death of Aqsa Parvez has set off “cultural warfare” between Muslims and non-Muslims. If that’s the case, it’s a very odd war indeed. On one side of the battle lines are non-Muslims who are shocked and horrified that a father could allegedly murder his daughter for defying his authority and refusing to wear a Muslim head scarf. On the other side are…Muslims who say they are similarly shocked and disturbed by the crime.

 

If there’s a “war” going on here, it’s the one occurring within the Muslim community—the war for Islam’s soul. Is their faith going to remain grounded in age-old precepts which deprive women of rights and demand their unquestioning submission to the will of their fathers, brothers and husbands? Or will Canadian Muslims jettison ideas that don’t mesh with modern Western concepts of freedom and gender equality?

 

Aqsa Parvez was a casualty of that war. Despite Haroon Siddiqui’s attempt to broaden the field of conflict to encompass all Canadians, it is an internal struggle that Muslims will have to fight—and resolve—for themselves.

*reference to my update of Cole Porter’s song “Anything Goes”—“In olden days a glimpse of ankle/Was something that’s bound to wrankle/Now, Allah knows/Nothing goes.”

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:38 | link | comments (2)

Dissed in life; dissed in death: Aqsa Parvez’s funeral was supposed to be held yesterday afternoon, but her family pulled a fast one and buried her in a private ceremony earlier in the day. Mourners who’d been deprived of the chance to see her life (and death) acknowledged in public were understandably upset, lashing out at media photographers who had shown up to capture the event on film. Their ire was misdirected. They should have lashed out at her family, which, having disrespected her in life was responsible for this final indignity. From the Toronto Star (still spin, spin, spinning about how this is a case of “domestic abuse” predicated on a difference of opinion over a head scarf):  

MISSISSAUGA, Ont. – Mourners who sought to pay their respects to a slain teen who had reportedly clashed with her family over traditional Islamic dress were shocked to find the girl's family changed funeral plans at the last minute.

On Saturday afternoon, dozens of emotional mourners arrived at the Islamic Centre mosque in Mississauga, Ont., for the funeral, only to discover that 16-year-old Aqsa Parvez had been buried earlier in the day at a private location.

"I came down to pray for her and pray for God's mercy on her," said Fazal Kalyani, who was aware of the change ahead of time, but came to the mosque for Saturday prayers.

"Strictly for privacy reasons, they didn't' want a media zoo inside. They just wanted everything private."

Parvez, who friends say was embroiled in a long-standing dispute with her family over her apparent reluctance to wear the traditional Muslim head scarf, died late Monday in hospital.

Her father, cab driver Muhammad Parvez, 57, has been charged with murder. He is currently being held in custody and has not entered a plea.

Her 27-year-old brother Waqas was granted bail at a Brampton, Ont., courtroom Friday afternoon. He faces a charge of obstructing Peel police in their investigation into the girl's strangulation death.

While some left the mosque disappointed at the news, others cried and said they were denied the chance to pay tribute to Parvez's life.

The emotional scene was punctuated by sadness and in some cases, anger.

Theresa Lee, who attended Applewood Heights Secondary school with Aqsa before her death, lashed out at reporters and photographers who were waiting outside the mosque.

"What else do you want?" a visibly upset Lee shouted, with tears in her eyes.

"Her family moved this funeral because of you. Just get out of the mosque."

Later in the day, a handful or mourners grieved publicly for Parvez at a vigil held at Mississauga City Hall, which was in part organized by the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-CAN) and the Council for the Advancement of Muslim Professionals.

Parvez's death has made headlines around the world and has stoked a feverish public debate about the status of women within Islamic communities.

Muslim leaders say the tragedy has exacerbated tensions between Canadian Islamic communities and the greater society due to ignorance and misunderstanding.

Maryam Dadabhoy, a community relations worker with CAIR-CAN, said the tragedy is a case of domestic abuse and not a religious issue.

"There's a lot of speculation going on and I think it's premature. We need to leave that up to police and focus on the fact that someone died very young," she told The Canadian Press.

"Everyone deals with grief in their own way," she added. ``Some people like to see the support of the community, some people just want it to be a private thing."

Sorry, Maryam. Once Mohammed placed his hands on her neck and squeezed the life out of her for refusing to submit, it leaped out of the private, domestic arena and became a public thing. And, much as you and others would like it to go away so it won’t lead to further “ignorance” and “misunderstanding” (i.e. enlightenment about and understanding of Islam’s credo vis a vis the weaker sex), let’s just say it’s too late for that. The cat—or, in this case, the hijab—is out of the bag.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:55 | link | comments

Totalitarians on parade: A VOA news report seems awfully impressed by what it calls a show of strength by Hamas on the occasion of its 20^th anniversary:

The Islamic militant group Hamas in the Gaza Strip has put on a show of strength. As Robert Berger reports from VOA's Jerusalem bureau, Hamas is sending a tough message of opposition to Israeli-Palestinian peace talks which resumed this week after a seven-year break.

Chanting "Allah is great," tens of thousands of Palestinians gathered in Gaza City to mark the 20th anniversary of the founding of the Islamic militant group Hamas.

It was a defiant show of support, even though Gaza has plunged further into poverty under Hamas rule and there are shortages of food, raw materials and fuel. Hamas has been crippled by Israeli and international sanctions since it violently seized control of Gaza six months ago.

Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh told the crowd that the group will never renounce violence or recognize Israel.

Mr. Haniyeh said jihad, or holy war, is the shortest way to liberate Palestine and Jerusalem. He also condemned the Annapolis peace conference in the United States, where western-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas agreed to resume peace talks with Israel.

Hamas routed the Fatah forces of Mr. Abbas from Gaza in June, and now he heads a more moderate government in the West Bank.

Mr. Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert have agreed to try and reach a final peace treaty by the end of next year, but Hamas poses a major obstacle. At Annapolis, Mr. Olmert said Israel would not agree to a Palestinian state unless it includes Gaza under the control of Palestinian moderates.

By bringing a huge crowd into the streets, Hamas has shown it is a force to reckon with and that it intends to remain in power.

Big whoop. Typical totalitarian rallying-gathering-muscle flexing, designed largely to make the media swoon.

Seems to have worked.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:06 | link | comments (2)

A warning to Brits: In coming days, be on the lookout for heads and torsos that appear to have gone their separate ways. From the times online:

ISLAMIC terror cells in Britain have been instructed to carry out a series of kidnappings and beheadings of the kind allegedly planned by the nine terrorist suspects arrested in Birmingham last week.

 

The “strategic” assassination instruction was issued by Al-Qaeda’s leaders in Pakistan and Iraq to dozens of their followers in this country. It was uncovered by MI5 last autumn, senior security sources say.

As a result police are on standby for multiple attempts by terrorists to kidnap and then behead people across Britain. MI5 is conducting a counter-terrorism surveillance operation to prevent such an attack.

The alleged attempt to kidnap and behead a Muslim soldier or soldiers in Birmingham was just the first of a series of planned attacks, security sources say.

The revelation explains the recent deployment of a permanent SAS unit to London. The unit has been placed on 24-hour standby to respond to a terrorist attack in the capital. It would aim to carry out a hostage rescue mission within minutes of being alerted.

Muslim police officers serving in London may also be given extra protection. The Association of Muslim Police is in talks with the Met, which is expected to carry out a risk assessment of the dangers.

One well placed source said: “Cells in the UK have been alerted to carry out this type of attack as opposed to the more sophisticated type of bombing in which you place a large number of volunteers at risk. All you need for a beheading is a bit of courage and a sharp knife.”

The order to encourage “low-tech” assassinations is said to follow a review by senior Al-Qaeda planners after an alleged plot to smuggle bombs onto airlines was foiled by police last August.

The order encouraged followers to adopt the tactics used by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the former Al-Qaeda leader in Iraq, who was behind the abduction, torture and beheading of Ken Bigley, a British engineer, in Iraq in 2004…

They are so flexible, those jihadi terrorists, switching from high-tech to low-tech with nary a second thought.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:57 | link | comments (1)

It isn’t at all relative: Rosie DiManno, the Toronto Star’s token non-loon, has a powerful let’s-cut-though-the-crap piece about Aqsa Parvez’s murder. Unfortunately, Rosie briefly gets off track when she strays into moral relativism territory:

…The religious strand, the cultural strand – these can't be pulled from the tightly woven fabric of proscriptions against females, too often viewed as a proprietary adjunct to their fathers and brothers. Faith and communal pressures allowed an insular society to tolerate, and then rally protectively around, a cult-like Mormon "prophet'' convicted as accomplice to rape, the Utah charlatan recently imprisoned. Faith, an adherence to doctrine that cringes at the messiness of bodily functions, sends orthodox Jewish women to purify themselves after menstruating. Faith, exploited by a sometimes-ignorant clergy, has steeped the Catholic Church in misogyny so profound the Madonna/Mary Magdalene dichotomy has seeped into pop culture, virgin versus whore, with precious little in between.

It's all grist for debate. But when the issue is Islam, debate – or disagreement – is hazardous…

Sorry, Rosie, but I don’t think mikvahs, Mormons and Madonnas have anything to do with Aqsa’s death.

Meanwhile in another part of town, Michael Coren makes mincemeat of the moral relativism argument:

It's the episode of Little Mosque on the Prairie that I missed. The one where the father is so angry with his teenage daughter for not wearing the hijab that he strangles her to death. Perhaps it will be in the special features section of the DVD version, released just in time for the holiday that used to be known as Christmas, but not any longer because the word might hurt someone's feelings.

Not that we know why, or even if Muhammad Parvez killed his 16-year-old daughter Aqsa last week in Mississauga, Ont. But we do know that he has been charged with the crime and that friends told reporters there had been terrible arguments about Aqsa's refusal to wear Islamic head covering and that she wanted a different path from that of her family.

Most Canadian Muslim leaders immediately condemned what had happened but it didn't take very long for the usual suspects to explain on radio and television that the tragedy had nothing to do with the Muslim faith and that all religions contain extremism. Islam, we were told, is a religion of peace.

Which is probably just what the owner of a Christian bookstore in Gaza thought three months ago as he was murdered and his shop firebombed. Or Danny Pearl, shortly before the American journalist had his head cut off by Islamic terrorists -- who, naturally, filmed the whole thing and made sure their chants from the Koran were loud and clear.

Or the wretched gang-rape victim in Saudi Arabia sentenced to 200 lashes for daring to be in a car at the time of the crime with a man to whom she was not married or related. Or the women stoned to death for adultery. Or the Iranian men hanged because they were homosexual.

Or the women who lived and died under the Taliban. Or the Christians persecuted and killed in Pakistan, Egypt and Sudan.

Or the young women in France, Britain and all over Europe killed by fathers and brothers for leaving Islam, dressing like other girls or dating non Muslims.

Or the teacher who allowed a student to name a teddy bear Muhammad, or Salman Rushdie's translator whose throat was cut from ear to ear, or movie director Theo Van Gogh who was slaughtered like an animal in the middle of a Dutch street.

And on and on. On until the denial is sickening. It's cultural, it's because of colonialism, it's because of Palestine, because of Iraq, because of misunderstanding. Because of anything other than Islam.

Only a bigot would argue that every Muslim was violent or opposed to Western freedom. But only a coward or a liar would argue that there was not a profound and deeply worrying link between conservative Islam and myriad acts of terror, intolerance and hysterical anger.

It is not I who say this but the countless Muslims who take to the streets at the drop of a cartoon to scream for blood and war; or the Muslims who preach jihad in North America and Europe, where they enjoy open societies founded on Christian enlightenment.

They may represent a minority, but the harm they do is incalculable. This dysfunctional venom does not come from Christian, Jew, Hindu or Buddhist and fatuous relativism will only blind the foolish. It is time for free discussion in this free country, whether it offends or not.

Good luck with that “free discussion,” Michael. That kind of “freedom” is likely to get you an appointment with one or other of the provincial/territorial Thought Police.

And if you don’t believe me, just ask Mark Steyn, who hurt a lot of feelings and will likely soon pay the price for his brazen “insensitivity.”

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:42 | link | comments (1)

Two bracing rants: One by blogger Morgaan Sinclair:

Aqsa Parvez, 16, murdered by her father over an ISLAMIC head scarf.

Sadly, it’s all too typical. Another Muslim woman — this one very young — is dead at the hands of a father, brother, uncle, gang or Islamic government, with the typical in-your-face double-speak that we are not allowed to believe this is a problem with Islam.

Yes, it is. That’s not a Bolivian head scarf or a Japanese head scarf or a Prada head scarf or a Chanel head scarf, it’s an ISLAMIC head scarf. That’s what it’s called. That’s what it’s called by the imams who preach it for girls as young as ten from mosques that hold a woman without one a source of shame for her family. That’s what it’s called by imams that preach that Allah made a woman deficient.

They preach this violent screed — with all its dangerous implications for the safety of young woman — to not the slightest cultural protest, and then some young woman dies. And then they can’t get their faces on TV fast enough to tell us just how wrong and bigoted we are to think it could possibly be Islam.

It’s Islam. It wasn’t to begin with. The headscarf was originally worn by the prostitutes in Sumerian temples as a sign of their profession. But it’s Islamic now. It’s the Islam these people are preaching every Friday in mosques all over the world. And the double-speak around it is right out of 1984.

A case in point, from Canada, where this murder occurred, features Sheik Alaa El-Sayyed, imam and head of Mississauga’s Islamic Society of North America — that’s the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) that has been declared an unindicted co-conspirator in terrorist financing, a small point left out of every single account of this event.

Speaking at a press conference, as reported by CTV, El Sayyed said that Islam teaches that women have the right to choose hijab or not. The double-speak came in the next sentence when he said, however, that a child who doesn’t wear it brings shame to the family, and that the parents could be viewed as failures in the community.

So what’s the real message inside this double-speak? Is it that it’s really quite OK if you don’t wear your ISLAMIC head scarf? or that your family will be vilified in the community until you do?

Obviously, the REAL message is that you ARE to wear your ISLAMIC head scarf, and that if you don’t you are shaming your family. Read on, this gets worse.

If it’s not an ISLAMIC head scarf, then why is there any preaching whatsoever about it in any mosque?

If it’s not an ISLAMIC head scarf, why does ISLAMIC shari’a law in Saudi Arabia and Iran and Afghanistan demand that you wear it? Why have more than 300,00 women in Iran been detained since May for breaking Islamic law by not having strict enough dress? Why are women in Basra being beaten into cover by religious police, and why have more than 40 of them been murdered for it in recent months for breaking dress codes?

No, it is Islamic. Yet every time some woman dies over a head scarf, over choosing her own mate or boyfriend, over alleged sexuality outside marriage, we get the hordes of Islamic representatives coming forward in a deliberate attempt to deflect any and all responsibility — and therefore block any and all change. We get a deliberate attempt to prevent the an end to the violence and insane control of women issuing straight from the misogynist imams preaching from half the mosques in the United States and Canada by denying that it has any source in the religion at all. There was never blacker lie told.
What we get instead is the Islamic double-speak that a girl is dead because it’s just “domestic violence” — with the point endlessly being made that if we even allow ourselves to think otherwise we’re being bigoted — that if we point out that there have been more than 11,000 Islamic terrorist attacks since 9/11 by people who say they are Islamic attacks, we are being culturally or spiritually intolerant. [Apparently they can say it, advertise it, put out recruiting videos about it, but if we say it, we’re Islamophobic. Oh, yeah, right.]

No, we’re not being bigoted. The bigotry here is happening in Islamic mosques where an exoneration of control of every aspect of a woman’s life, thought, freedom and sexuality is preached every day — backed up by hadith that have overtaken any initial impulse within Islam that would have given women equality — an impetus lost, Bernard Lewis says, within 50 years of the Prophet’s death. Whatever was there effectively died as abrogation destroyed more and more of the spiritual side of Islam, replacing it with spurious hadith that pleased the Muslim male, to whose pleasure and control the entire religion has now been bent…

One by John Oakley in the National Post:

To all those Muslims bent out of shape over the characterization of the murder of a sixteen year old Mississauga girl as an “honour killing,” chill. Your complaint of collective character assassination by an irresponsible media bent on sensationalism is a little rich; kind of a case of “methinks thou doth protest too much.” No one is on a witch hunt here trying to demonize an entire faith, but rather to get to the bottom of what seems to be a nasty little secret within a certain segment of the community; women are treated as second-class citizens. If that is, in fact, at the root of violence and abuse meted out by some Muslim men, it’s high time to take ownership and confront the elephant in the room. Those of us who are Catholics were made to feel guilt by association over the scandal of some brothers abusing young boys, even when the vast majority of priests were exemplary models of their calling. The Church had to deal with it. Now it’s your turn. Denial is not an option.

I’m sure Sheik Alaa El Sayyd and his abetters at the Ceeb and the Toronto Star would beg to differ.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:24 | link | comments (1)

Three from the Ceeb: Muslim leaders are still insisting, of course and as per usual, that Aqsa Parvez’s murder had nothing to do with religion. (That’s their story and, with the Ceeb’s assistance, they’re stickin’ to it.) Meanwhile, her brother has been charged with “obstructing police.” It isn’t clear how he obstructed them, since a publication ban has been imposed on court proceedings. The Ceeb is pretty sure, however, what the real problem is here. To paraphrase the Bard, the fault, dear readers, is not in the crescent moon and stars, but in—you guessed it—ourselves:

The tragedy has underscored a heated public debate about women's rights within Canada's Islamic communities, and inflamed existing tensions resulting from what Muslim leaders say is ignorance and misunderstanding in Canadian society.

Actually, we understand their doctrines concerning women quite well at this stage. Hence, no doubt, their concern.

In a shocking turn of affairs, the Ceeb has actually allowed a Muslim chick to speak truth to powerful imams and their powerful media apologists (a catergory that includes her employer). In a “J’accuse”-type expression of outrage, Natasha Fatah, a Ceeb producer, asks “Who will speak for Aqsa Parvez”:

Sixteen-year-old Aqsa Parvez did not want to wear the hijab.

The Middle Eastern head covering has become the most significant icon for Islam in the West, which is unfortunate, since 90 per cent of Muslim women in this country don't wear one. By extension, they get dismissed as not being authentic Muslims.

The CBC's own Little Mosque on the Prairie plays into this stereotype by showing every prominent Muslim woman in a hijab. This superficial measurement of Muslim-ness has become so prevalent that a small but increasing number of families are pushing it on their daughters.

Aqsa, a Pakistani-Canadian, was just one of the victims of this growing obsession.

Now that Aqsa is dead, who will speak for her? Who will speak for the countless Muslim girls who lead double lives and who suffer in silence in their homes? Who will make sure they aren't abused or killed?

Who chooses?

Most Islamist men and women say that a woman chooses to wear the hijab. But, all too often, that choice is taken away from young Muslim girls.

They are being told by their parents and their imams that if they don't wear the hijab, they are no longer Muslim. This occurs even though the Koran, Islam's holy book, does not say that a woman has to cover her hair.

Take a walk in downtown Toronto, Montreal, Windsor or other cities with large Muslim populations. You will see little girls, as young as four, five and six, wearing hijabs on their way to school.

Did these little girls really make a choice to wear the hijab? Did they make a declaration to their parents that they want to be religiously pious and sexually modest? Common sense indicates that these children did not choose for themselves.

The innuendo

Meanwhile, the mullahs and Islamists are busy dismissing the idea that Aqsa's alleged murder had anything to do with religion. They are circulating rumours on-line that she had a black boyfriend, that she was sexually promiscuous, that she was a drug pusher. These are cited as reasons why her family was strict with her.

Why are they so afraid of acknowledging that obsession with a religious ritual may have been a factor? It is because they fear their own culpability in this horrible tragedy.

Before their congregations, these religious leaders tell men to control their daughters, wives and sisters.

They have brought into Canadian homes the radical Islamist notion that a man's honour is encompassed in the sexual and physical body of the women in his family, that's why they must be covered up and kept inside.

Muslim fundamentalists have made a woman's body the fighting ground for their religious wars, and it is unfortunately women who pay with their lives for the sake of their men's honour.

A wall of silence

Women's advocacy groups have played mute on the issue. When Canadian feminists are asked for their reaction to Aqsa's murder, they decline to respond and instead suggest that it would more appropriate to turn to Muslim women's groups for reaction.

Advocates are willing to speak up for all other women in Canada, from women who need cancer treatment because of radioisotope shortages to the dozens of prostitutes murdered in British Columbia, but they will not speak for Aqsa.

Even social pundits and critics are making excuses. They say that this isn't something unique to the Muslim community. They bring up examples of honour killings in Christian, Sikh and Hindu families.

Just because there are religious fanatics in every group doesn't take away the need to investigate what is happening to young Muslim women.

So far, the only ones who have spoken honestly are the young girls that attend Applewood Heights Secondary School in Mississauga.

The friends and classmates of Aqsa, who aren't concerned with political correctness, have said without hesitation that Aqsa was abused and threatened at home because of the religious fanaticism of her family. They have said she was killed because she wanted to be herself.

The rest of Canadian society could take a hint from these girls. We hesitate to condemn this behaviour because we don't want to be seen as racist. Are we going to allow cultural relativism to be the scapegoat for abuse and murder in this country?...

I believe the Ceeb response to that query would be, “You’re darn tootin’ we are.”

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:05 | link | comments (1)

Insanity takes hold: Caroline Glick on the irrationality of Israel’s rationalizing leadership.  From JWR:

Life in southern Israel is unbearable. Since last January, on average, 6.3 mortars and rockets have been fired from Gaza on southern Israel every day. As Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilna'i warned the heads of the communities around Gaza last week, due to the improvements in the Palestinian arsenal since Israel vacated Gaza two years ago, the Palestinians now field missiles and rockets with extended ranges that place 130,000 Israelis under threat of missile attack.

Wednesday, IDF Chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi made clear that if Israel wishes to secure its citizens there is only one thing it can do. It can conquer Gaza.

In a speech at Tel Aviv University Ashkenazi explained, "It is impossible to defeat a terrorist organization without eventually controlling the territory. The good situation in Judea and Samaria is the result of our control over the area and we will not be able to achieve victory in the conflict [in Gaza] simply with indirect fires and attacks from the air."

Presumably Ashkenazi made this point Wednesday morning at the security cabinet meeting. But apparently, he was no match for his competition.

Squared off against Ashkenazi was Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni. Livni warned her colleagues that securing southern Israel will destroy the peace process. If Israel secures the south, the Arabs and the Bush administration will get really mad. And "moderate" Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas will turn his back on the peace process and reunite his US-trained Fatah forces with the Iranian-trained Hamas forces. Livni's message was clear: The government must choose between security and the peace process.

Livni won the argument. The peace process won out against the security of southern Israel.

The Olmert government's preference for process over substance is not unique. Indeed, it is malady shared governments throughout the free world. The philosophical foundations of this malady are similarly common ones.

The September 11 attacks on the US intensified a dispute that had been brewing since the end of the Cold War about the definition of rationality. The two warring factions in the debate, which has raged throughout the free world, can be referred to as the rationalizers and the rationalists. Each side has given its own definition of rationality and those competing definitions have formed the basis of the camps' competing policy prescriptions for contending with the threat of Islamic terrorists and their state sponsors ever since.

The rationalizers include politicians like Olmert and Livni and US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and security and policy apparatuses like the CIA, the State Department, the Foreign Ministry and their counterparts in Europe.

The rationalizers define rationality as susceptibility to foreign pressure and willingness to be appeased. According to this view, if your antagonist is willing to negotiate with you, then he is rational. And since he is rational, he is capable of being appeased. And since he is willing to be appeased, he isn't really your enemy.

The US intelligence community's National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear capabilities and intentions is a textbook example of the rationalizers' view. The NIE, which asserts that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 as the result of the program's exposure and the international scrutiny that followed, concludes that "Teheran's decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic, and military costs."

And since Iran is rational, the NIE recommends that the US and its allies make Iran an offer which entails, "some combination of threats of intensified international scrutiny and pressures, along with opportunities for Iran to achieve its security, prestige, and goals for regional influence in other ways."

The rationalizers' view of rationality is alluring for two main reasons. First, its essential argument is that the West is solely responsible for determining whether the world will enjoy peace or suffer the ravages of war. If Western states cough up a proper package of concessions, then the terrorists and their state sponsors will negotiate with them. If Western nations refuse to make the necessary concessions then the terrorists and their state sponsors will attack them and the nations of the West will have only themselves, and their obstinacy to blame.

Beyond that, since the Arab and Islamic world's rationality is solely a function of Western will, the ideology of jihad which informs terrorists and their state sponsors is immaterial. As far as rationalizers are concerned, there is no reason to close down jihadist websites or indoctrination centers. Indeed, there is no reason to challenge the validity of jihadist doctrines and values as all...

The rationalizers are killing us. Where, oh where, are the non-rationalizers who can save us?

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:09 | link | comments (1)

Media infamy: A piece by Stephen Brown on the FrontPage site deals the media’s shameful (and shameless) whitewash of Aqsa’s murder:

A Canadian Muslim teenager was murdered this week for trying to establish her own identity by moving out of her family home and for reportedly defying her father’s command to cover her head. Meanwhile, Canada’s largest daily newspaper, the Toronto Star, disgracefully hid its own head in the sand.

Pakistani-Canadian Aqsa Parvez, 16, was strangled by her father in an honor murder last Monday in the Toronto-area city of Mississauga. Refusing to wear the Islamic hijab, Parvez, who was herself born in Pakistan, wanted to live the normal lifestyle of a Canadian teenage girl, but ran into conflict with her strict, religious father. One friend and schoolmate said the Canadian teenager was afraid of her father and often came to school wearing bruises, the result of his violence.

“She was scared of her father; he was always controlling her,” the friend told the National Post, a Canadian national newspaper. “She wasn’t allowed to go out or do anything.”

Nevertheless, the Grade 11 student, according to friends, would leave home wearing the hijab but arrive at school in western-style clothes, having changed on the way. This was part of her courageous desire to live her own life and overcoming the fear in which she lived.

Despite the Canadian public’s disgust and outrage over this murder and in contrast to Parvez’s courage, the Toronto Star avoided tackling head on the issue of Muslim male intolerance and violence toward female family members who wish to establish their independence and lead their own lives. Instead, the Star published a story that, incredibly, accuses a supposedly racist Canadian society for being equally responsible for the cultural “tension” in Muslim families concerning the issue of head coverings. In the story, two young Muslim women say some Muslim families do not want their daughters to wear the hijab because it will make them “the targets of racism.” If only Aqsa Parvez could have lived in such a family! Not surprisingly, no Muslim women or girls were interviewed who are forced to wear the Islamic clothing.

But this unbelievable attempt to detract people’s attention from the real issue of Muslim intolerance, even hatred, towards females’ desire for freedom and to establish a moral equivalency between a tolerant Canadian society and an Islamic culture that has seen dozens of Muslim women perish in honor killings in Western Europe (48 in Germany alone between 1996 and 2006) should not come as a surprise to anyone who has ever read the left-leaning Star.

The politically correct Star, you see, is Canada ’s paper of multiculturalism. Hardly an issue ever comes out without the word "racism" appearing somewhere on its pages. (multicultural societies always have racism as their rallying cry). As a result of its support of, and belief in, the possibility of establishing a multicultural country, left-wing media organs like the Star and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation will never deeply investigate any negative aspects of cultures newly arrived in Canada. Such revelations, they fear, may damage their unrealizable multicultural dream.

By the way, in the Star’s and CBC’s world, racism does not exist in the newcomers’ cultures. And if it does, it is the fault of the host Canadian society. In fact, the same day the blame-racist Canadian society story appeared, a Toronto Star columnist wrote that English Canadians, one of the Canada’s two founding peoples who now make up only about fifteen per cent of Toronto’s population, do not welcome immigrants with enough love -- again the host country’s fault.

Leftist Canadian women’s groups are also passengers in the same see-no-evil-in-new-cultures, hear-no-evil-in-new-cultures boat as the Star, since they also support multiculturalism. Their hypocrisy does not even allow them to criticize and intervene to help oppressed Muslim females let alone oppose the polygamy some Muslims are practicing here in Canada. For this, western feminists are criticized by Muslim feminists both in Canada and in Western Europe. These Muslim feminists say they can’t get over the fact that western feminists pretend they care so much for the rights of women in some land thousands of miles away but ignore the oppression of Third World women right in their own societies. The silence of their western sisters, these Muslim feminists point out, facilitates this oppression.

But if left-wing Canadian media ever investigates the Parvez killing properly, they will most likely have to face some hard, cold and uncomfortable cultural facts. While the refusal to wear the hijab has been reported to be a significant contributing factor in her murder, the main reason for the brutal killing, they may discover, is that the terrified Muslim teenager had moved out of her home two weeks earlier and was living with a friend. In fact, one newspaper quoted another of Aqsa’s friends who said her father threatened to kill her if she left the family home. Moving out, western European social workers say, is a death sentence for these woman. In a strict, religious Muslim family, no woman is allowed to establish an identity of her own outside of her family, religion and culture.

Aqsa Parvez’s death, they will learn, may also have been a family decision. The high school student, one of eight children, lived, according to one newspaper report, in a house with eleven other people in an extended family. Like the Hatun Surucu murder in 2005 in Germany that awoke the people of that country to the suffering of Muslim women in their midst, police are investigating Parvez’s killing as a premeditated one that involved the concurrence of several family members, possibly even including female ones.

After all, one newspaper reported Aqsa’s older sister used to spy on her at school for the family and Aqsa only discarded the hijab after her sister had graduated. The dead teenager had even established her own Facebook site with her photo and uncovered hair on it accompanied by comments about popular culture. Tragically, this also may have led to her demise as her non-traditional, independent lifestyle was now visible to everyone.

Moreover, the unfortunate teenager was probably also, like Hatun Surucu, lured to her death by her brother, possibly her favorite one. The police are currently investigating this angle. The independent Surucu was lured to a bus stop to meet a brother who murdered her to restore the family’s honor because she was “living like a German.” Parvez was picked up by her brother at a bus stop, saying he would bring her home to get a change of clothes, where she was then killed, for living like a Canadian. At this point in time, the brother has been charged with obstruction of justice.

What will probably be the most sickening discovery is that none of the people involved in Aqsa’s killing will express any regret or remorse. On the contrary, they will be happy because they believe they have restored their family’s honor and will be respected for having done so by like-minded others in their community who, like them, practice an anti-civilizational legal and cultural apartheid in the country hosting them and their families. The Star will never investigate why such people come to Canada and other western countries but never really live here.

But unlike the Star, not everyone has their head in the sand. Tarek Fatah, founder of the Canadian Muslim Congress, calls Parvez’s murder a blight on Islam.“In my mind, this was an honor killing,” said Fatah, adding its going to get worse before it gets better…

Who are we kidding? It’s never going to get better. Not with the Toronto Star and the Ceeb doing their utmost to shill for Islam, the hijab and the multicultist way.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:16 | link | comments

A “choice” of one option: A leading Islamic leader says the decision to wear a hijab is entirely up to an individual girl or woman. However, if she chooses not to wear one, she should know that it constitutes a complete rejection of Islam.

I believe that’s what’s called a “Hobson’s choice.” From the National Post:

MISSISSAUGA, Ont. - Muslim leaders on Thursday denounced as un-Islamic the slaying of a Toronto-area teenager who had clashed with her family, but said some parents would view themselves as having failed in their duty if their daughter chose not to wear the hijab.

The comments came at a tense news conference at the Islamic Society of North America Canada headquarters in Mississauga, held three days after the alleged strangling death of 16-year-old Aqsa Parvez. Her father, Mohammad Parvez, is accused of killing her and friends say the family had argued over the girl's refusal to wear the hijab, or traditional Muslim head-scarf.

While stressing the sanctity of human life, denouncing the crime and describing it as a case of domestic abuse, religious leaders insisted on the hijab's importance to parents - even if a daughter rejects it.

"They were believing that part of their culture was hijab, and it is their duty to convince their kids that this is part of their culture," said Mohammad Alnadvi, who sits on the Canadian Council of Imams. "So if the daughter makes the decision, then they have failed."

Still, Imam Alnadvi said that judging from the information he received, hijab was only one of the issues.

"This girl she refused to stay at home," he said. "There were feelings that she is going in some wrong direction ... going with some other boy or some other thing."

After he made those comments, two females in hijabs interrupted him and started to disagree, before abruptly leaving the gym where the conference was held.

In an interview afterward, the women - a mother and daughter - said they had taken Aqsa into their home on various occasions, but would not offer any more information.

The convener of the event, Sheikh Alaa Elsayed, said that one of the keys to getting daughters to wear the hijab is teaching them about religion at a young age. The other, he said, is "a proper spouse."

In his introductory remarks filled with religious references, Arabic flourishes and abundant blessings, Elsayed stressed that parents should teach the benefits of the religious clothing. "We have to be successful teachers," he said, adding later in the dialogue that parents should encourage daughters "to do the right thing."

Still, he said, words and deeds were more important than clothing.

Citing the Koran, Elsayed said it is forbidden to hit anyone, adding that taking away a human life is an act against all humanity. "No religion condones such an act," he said.

He also spoke out against moving away from faith.

"We cannot let culture supercede religion," he said. "If we stay away from the teachings of Islam, we will pay for it."…

Aqsa certainly paid for “the teachings of Islam.” At the cost of her young life.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:06 | link | comments (3)

An open letter (pun intended) to CUPW: First off, thanks for the mail. It arrives at my home every day at more or less the same time and usually in excellent condition. So kudos to you on a job well done!

Which leads to my next point. Since the mail, the collection and delivery thereof, is your one—indeed, your only—mandate, what the heck are you guys doing sticking your noses into international affairs?  Don’t tell me, let me guess. Because, as citizens of the wider international community, you are genuinely alarmed that the poor and downtrodden Palestinians are being treated so poorly and continue to be deprived of their—what’s that phrase that’s so often used as a hammer with which to bludgeon the world’s one and only Jewish state?—oh yeah, “human rights.”

Don’t you just love that phrase? Doesn’t it speak—no, sing—to humanitarian battles past?  To the civil rights struggle in the American south, marching to Selma, Alabama with Martin Luther King? To Nelson Mandela, locked away for decades on Robin’s Island while Winnie kept the home fires burning until “truth and reconciliation” could wash away the stain of apartheid? To the struggle to free Saudi Arabian women from the bondage of gender apartheid, feminists around the world storming the ramparts will calls to “ban the burqa” and “let my sisters go”?

Oh, wait. Strike that last one. That battle has yet to occur, and most likely will never come to the fore since you and other easily gulled, tender-hearted lefties have been drafted by cunning Muslim Jew-haters to help them wage their jihad against the Jews.

Yes, I know, I know. They’ve told you it’s all about the poor, suffering, downtrodden Palestinians. How their land was “stolen.” How the Jews have deprived them of a “home” for nearly six whole decades. How they long only to "return." How they need champions, like you, to come to their aid and redress the grievous wrong that’s been done them, the world’s capital “V” Victims. Well, try to wrap your squishy heads around this one: it’s all a big pile of stinking offal. Sure, the Palestinians are suffering, but it’s mostly because of their own hatred and fecklessness (did the Jews elect Hamas?) and because those who call themselves their brothers and weep crocodile tears for them couldn’t give a fig for their suffering and have been using them as pawns in their ongoing existential war against Israel.

Israel. See it there on the map?  It’s that teensy speck in the all-Muslim landscape, a.k.a. dar al-Islam. Now, keep your eyes on that miniscule speck and consider all the fuss and bother that’s been stirred up because of it. It should become clear that it couldn’t possibly be due to the dearth of land available to Arabs. The Arabs are swimming in land. Awash in land. In fact, aside from the oil, they have little else. They have so much land they don’t know what to do with it all, and leave much of it empty and unused. Unlike, say, the Jews, who have so little land that they have been forced to cultivate every last scrap of it and have even made their tiny desert—the Negev, a region where Hamas continues to lob its “Betty Crocker” rockets—bloom.  (Gaza used to bloom, too, before Hamas got hold of it and turned it into yet another Islamist wasteland.)

So if it’s not about the land, and it’s not about “justice”, what is it about? The best way I can explain it is as follows: Remember the incident in Sudan (Sudan, where the zany Islamic government has been slaughtering Black citizens for more than half a decade—ring any bells?; spark any desire for a boycott?) when a British school teacher caught all kinds of flack for allowing her moppets to dub the class teddy “Mohammed.” Of course you do. It was in all the papers. Well, in the grand scheme of things, Israel is Mohammed bear. Its very existence is an “insult” to Islam. And the Arabs want to make the Jews apologize for it, dammit, as school marm Gillian Gibbons was made to apologize for her “insult.”

So if you want to compel the Jews to cry “uncle” a la Gillian, I’d advise you to sign on to the international insult-expunging campaign; lots of fun Jew-haters have already climbed on board the bandwagon. If, however, you don’t want to be played for chumps by those who at this very moment are putting the finishing touches on Adolf Hitler’s half-completed Final Solution, you’ll come to your senses and get back to that mountain of correspondence that, despite the wretched Canadian weather, must arrive at its destination.

Best wishes for the holiday season, and good luck delivering all that mail to Santa (postal code HOH OHO),

scaramouche

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

Piece o’ crap: So pathetic, so ludicrous is the NIE “intelligence” report that even some Democrats are dubious about its conclusions. From VOA News:

Some lawmakers in the U.S. Congress continue to caution that the recent U.S. intelligence report on Iran's nuclear program does not support a conclusion that Iran has given up its ambitions to develop a nuclear weapon. VOA's Dan Robinson reports from Capitol Hill.

In the two weeks since the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) was issued, Brad Sherman has been busy issuing statements drawing attention to what says are two important facts.

First, says the California Democrat, the 3,000 centrifuges at Iran's Natanz nuclear facility can provide enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon by the middle of the next decade.

Second, suspension of weapons development, occurring according to the intelligence report in 2003, does not mean Iran ceased efforts to develop fissile material and will not decide at some point to resume.

Joined by four other House lawmakers, Sherman used a news conference to drive home these points, asserting the media has paid too much attention to Iran's suspension, and not enough on remaining risks posed by Iranian ambitions.

"It is going to take them several years to get the fissile material. It does them no harm to wait. So they get a huge diplomatic, press and public relations advantage by suspending that program and it does not delay their nuclear efforts by a single day," he said.

Republican Representative Ed Royce agrees with Sherman's assertion that media reporting has been dominated by the suspension issue. "I would argue that the interpretation that we are seeing reported, in magazines like TIME magazine, is misrepresenting the actual facts on the ground in Iran and the development of their program as they increasingly develop the inventory of enriched uranium and plutonium that they need for their program," he said.

Congressman Pete Hoekstra, a former Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee frames the issue in terms of the overall level of confidence Congress has in intelligence reporting. "Maybe we ought to encourage the [intelligence] community to be a little bit more cautious about making definitive statements to us, as policy makers, to the American people, and to the world about what we do and don't know and what we believe about some of the threats that we face as a nation," he said.

Hoekstra says there must be a general improvement in U.S. intelligence-gathering, particularly human methods as opposed to technical intelligence-gathering capabilities.

Citing the large gap between the reported 2003 Iranian suspension and the issuing of the latest intelligence finding, Democratic Congresswoman Diane Watson suggests that the U.S. intelligence system has failed. "I would say to all of us that we must move with caution. We must demand better and more effective intelligence, and we the policy makers must know as much as we can so we can frame our foreign policy where the rest of our European allies and those few that we have in the Middle East can support us. We have lost a great deal of our credibility," she said.

This week, Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad pointed to the U.S. report as proof that President Bush was wrong in his assertions about Iranian nuclear weapons efforts. On Wednesday, President Bush called Iran a danger and repeated his call for it to explain why it had a nuclear weapons program in the first place.

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino had this response when asked about the Iranian leader's suggestion that the report could be a step forward toward improvements in the U.S.-Iranian relationship. "I just think that is fanciful thinking on his part, [by] (Mahmoud) Ahmadinejad. I refer you to Secretary Gates' comment on Saturday. If they are now saying that our intelligence report is correct, this was like the first time in history that Iran has said that is true, and if that is the case, do they also agree that they are enriching uranium for a possible nuclear weapon in the future? Are they also testing these ballistic missiles which would be a delivery system for a future nuclear weapon?," she said.

The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Democrat Ike Skelton, has said while the finding that Iran suspended weapons efforts in 2003 is encouraging and a sign international pressure may have been an important factor, Iran still has the capacity to eventually produce nuclear weapons, and the United States must remain vigilant.

Ongoing controversy over the Iran intelligence report makes it certain that Democratic-led committees are likely to hold hearings in the new congressional session that begins in January about the confidence of U.S. intelligence officials in their findings about Iran's nuclear program.

About the only good thing you can say about the report—it can be safely flushed down a loo without a single person deploring the “insult.”

Posted by: scaramouche at 23:22 | link | comments

Neither rain nor sleet nor snow nor gloom of night..: Will deter Canada’s postal union from siding with genocidal Jew-haters and behaving like blooming  idiots. From the Canadian Jewish News:

TORONTO — A regional conference of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) has passed a resolution supporting the boycott of Israel and pledging an educational campaign about “the apartheid nature of the Israel [sic] state.”

 

The resolution, which also called for research into Canadian involvement in “the occupation” and for support for sanctions until Israel recognizes Palestinian self-determination, was presented by the Scarborough local and adopted at the union’s 23rd Ontario regional constitutional conference in London. It will be presented for consideration to the union’s national convention in April.

Jeff Levinson, a letter carrier for 24 years and a member of the Scarborough local, said he learned of the resolution from a colleague who attended the conference and told him it passed by a substantial margin, despite some opposition from the floor.

The resolution “is pretty biased to the Palestinians,” he said. “It distresses me. I’ve been working with these guys for years.”

Levinson, who lived on an Israeli kibbutz for a time and calls himself a Zionist, said passage of the resolution “bothers me in that it’s a political issue that is outside the mandate of the union. It should stick to union and labour issues.”

He called the resolution “one-sided” and said he planned to write to CUPW national president Deborah Bourque to ask her to oppose adoption of the resolution at CUPW’s national convention.

Levinson brought his concerns to Canadian Jewish Congress, which has been meeting with a number of Canadian unions and churches in a bid to moderate their statements on the Middle East.

Pointing to similar anti-Israel resolutions passed by the Canadian Union of Public Employee’s (CUPE) Ontario wing and a regional unit of the Ontario Federation of Labour (OFL), Congress CEO Bernie Farber said “CUPW is the latest labour body to contemplate a one-side anti-Israel resolution.

“Such unbalanced resolutions are not helpful nor in the best interests of the membership,” he said.

Large unions such as CUPW have members who try “to advance whatever agenda they have,” whether it be the environment, the Middle East or health and safety issues.

Farber noted that CUPE National and the OFL were both faced with anti-Israel resolutions from locals and neither entertained the motions at their conventions. As well, the United Church of Canada, at its summer session, rejected a biased resolution for one that was more balanced, he said.

Gerry Deveau, national director for the Ontario region of CUPW, said, “I understand that from looking at the resolution alone, it may appear to be lopsided. But if you look at [the union’s] other policies, they don’t talk about Palestine, but they do talk about terrorism and peace.

“We’re saying Israel is assembling the wall and it’s causing social, economic and medical hardship to the people in the area.

“If you look at our constitution as a whole, while this looks like it’s one-sided for Palestine, we’re not saying that Israel doesn’t have the right to self determination,” he said.

Deveau said there were no CUPW resolutions advocating Israeli self-determination, adding, “I don’t think anybody on the national executive board would disagree with that.”

Farber said Congress hopes to meet with CUPW’s national officers and ask that any union resolution passed in April be “balanced and fair. CUPE National understood that message and took it to heart. So did the OFL.”

We shall see. The leftist perspective is so distorted, so thoroughly compromised, that it is all but incapable of discerning the truth. Indeed, as a colleague of mine suggested not too long ago, the left exists in an alternate reality—and no thinking, freedom-loving person would ever want to go there.

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:30 | link | comments

Nasrallah in the dog house: Here’s a semi-amusing story: According to the Jerusalem Post, Iran’s holy rollah-in-chief was so outraged by the feckless way his winged monkey, Hellzbollocks head, Sheik Nasrallah, waged war against the Jews that he's decided to “demote” him:

Some of Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah's responsibilities have been taken away by the organization's backer Iran, the pan-Arabic daily Asharq Alawsat claimed Thursday.

Reportedly, Nasrallah is no longer in control of the organization's military wing, which is now headed by Nasrallah's deputy Sheikh Na'im Kassem.

The Iranian official Asharq Alawsat cites as the one who demoted Nasrallah is none other than Iran Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The report follows a similar report by Israeli daily Ma'ariv Wednesday, but none of the reports have been officially confirmed by Iran.

Western intelligence sources cited by Asharq reported that Teheran was furious over Nasrallah's conduct during the Second Lebanon War and that was the reasoning behind the decision to diminish Nasrallah's authority.

Sources close to Iran's Revolutionary Guards quoted an officer in the Iranian elite force as saying Kassem was chosen after he and Nasrallah had disagreements regarding the organization of Hizbullah's military wing. Khamenei's representative in Lebanon.

"Kassem isn't only Hizbullah's second-in-command but also Khamenei's representative in Lebanon and Palestine."

Hizbullah's budget in the last 18 months has been $1 billion, to compensate the organization for the losses it suffered during the war. Hizbullah's yearly Iranian budget stands on $400 million, the officer added.

Reportedly, Khamenei appointed a committee of top Revolutionary Guards commanders and entrusted them with restructuring Hizbullah's military and intelligence wings. Among the commanders in the committee is the Kuds Brigade commander Kassem Suleimani and the former head of Hizbullah's intelligence wing Imad Mughnia, who is one of the top names on the US's most wanted terrorists list.

It couldn’t happen to a nicer, er, nastier, genocidal jihadi.

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

Newt on the money: Was it really only a few years back that I loved the Clintons and despised that quintessential Republican blowhard (at least, according to the mainstream media) Newt Gingrinch?

Reading the following Gingrich speech, as quoted by Melanie Phillips, all I can say is, “Wow, was I ever clueless”:

…What's the primary source of money for al Qaeda? It's you, re-circulated through Saudi Arabia. Because we have no national energy strategy, when clearly if you really cared about liberating the United States from the Middle East and if you really cared about the survival of Israel, one of your highest goals would be to move to a hydrogen economy and to eliminate petroleum as a primary source of energy.Now that's what a serious national strategy would look like, but that would require real change.

So then you look at Saudi Arabia. The fact that we tolerate a country saying no Christian and no Jew can go to Mecca, and we start with the presumption that that's true while they attack Israel for being a religious state is a sign of our timidity, our confusion, our cowardice that is stunning. It's not complicated. We're inviting Saudi Arabia to come to Annapolis to talk about rights for Palestinians when nobody is saying, ‘Let's talk about rights for Christians and Jews in Saudi Arabia. Let's talk about rights for women in Saudi Arabia.’

So we accept this totally one-sided definition of the world in which our enemies can cheerfully lie on television every day, and we don't even have the nerve to insist on the truth. We pretend their lies are reasonable. This is a very fundamental problem. And if you look at who some of the largest owners of some of our largest banks are today, they're Saudis.

You keep pumping billions of dollars a year into countries like Venezuela, Iran and Saudi Arabia, and Russia, and you are presently going to have created people who oppose you who have lots of money. And they're then going to come back to your own country and finance, for example, Arab study institutes whose only requirement is that they never tell the truth. So you have all sorts of Ph.D.s who now show up quite cheerfully prepared to say whatever it is that makes their funders happy – in the name, of course, of academic freedom. So why wouldn't Columbia host a genocidal madman? It's just part of political correctness. I mean, Ahmadinejad may say terrible things, he may lock up students, he may kill journalists, he may say, ‘We should wipe out Israel,’ he may say, ‘We should defeat the United States,’ but after all, what has he done that's inappropriate? What has he done that wouldn't be repeated at a Hollywood cocktail party or a nice gathering in Europe?...

What truly bothers me is the shallowness and the sophistry of the Western governments, starting with our own. When a person says to you, ‘I don't recognize that you exist,’ you don't start a negotiation. The person says, ‘I literally do not recognize’ and then lies to you. I mean the first thing you say to this guy is ‘Terrific. Let's go visit Mecca. Since clearly there's no other state except Israel that is based on religion, the fact that I happen to be Christian won't bother anybody.’ And then he'll say, ‘Well, that's different.’

We tolerate this. We have created our own nightmare because we refuse to tell the truth…None of our enemies are confused. Our enemies don't get up each morning and go, ‘Oh, gosh, I think I'll have an existential crisis of identity in which I will try to think through whether or not we can be friends while you're killing me.’ Our enemies get up every morning and say, ‘We hate the West. We hate freedom…

Newt “gets it.” Newt has likely always “gotten it.”

A lot more than I can say for myself. Alas.

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:02 | link | comments

Blowing smoke…and softening the blow: The Toronto Star prints a whole slew of letters from Muslims assuring everyone that Islam is—what’s that tried and true phrase again?—a “religion of peace,” and the decision to wear wear a hijab is “the result of spiritual growth and inspiration,” an idea which gibes with the assertion in “The Holy Qur’an (that) there is no compulsion in religion.”

Good to know. Here’s my response:

Much of the hand-wringing in the wake of Aqsa Parvez’s murder seems to have less to do with her tragic fate and more to do with a desire to distance it from anything pertaining to her religion. How ridiculous! The fact is that Aqsa died because she ran afoul of a culture that adheres to a particularly stringent version of Islam, one which demands complete and unquestioning submission. As a female, Aqsa was required to be doubly submissive. She had to submit to God. She also had to submit to the men in her family—to her father, her brother, and, when the time came, to her husband.

Not every rebellious daughter in such a household suffers Aqsa’s fate; some are physically and emotionally abused; some give up their rebellion and become compliant; a few, perhaps, break away, as Aqsa was trying to do before she returned home to gather some belongings. It is impossible to know for sure though, since, understandably, there is enormous reluctance to discuss such matters. And when a spotlight is suddenly shone on them, denial immediately takes hold and the religious aspects are downplayed—or dismissed entirely.

Ironically, those who are so bereft about Aqsa’s murder, but who remain so intent on distancing it from Islam, are helping perpetuate the status quo. Until such time as they and others are willing to confront the role religion plays in keeping girls like Aqsa in line, the brutalization of young girls and woman at the hands of male family members who insist on their God-given right to impose their authority will likely continue.

Not in a million, billion years will you see that in print.

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:05 | link | comments

You may say he’s a dreamer/But he’s not the only one: British P.M. Gordon Brown thinks there’s a place at the table for the Taliban, provided they renounce the jihad and resolve to be good little boys and girls who play by the rules. From the Ceeb:

Taliban fighters can win a role in Afghanistan's future if they renounce violence, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Wednesday as he pledged a long-term troop presence and aid commitments for the country.

Brown told lawmakers in London that Britain would support efforts by Afghan President Hamid Karzai to bring former insurgents into mainstream politics.

"If they are prepared to renounce violence and abide by the constitution and respect basic human rights, then there is a place for them in the legitimate society and economy of Afghanistan," Brown told the House of Commons.

He said Britain would not hold direct talks with ex-Taliban fighters, but would support the attempts by Karzai's officials to widen Afghanistan's political sphere.

Brown also urged neighbouring countries to do more to help political reconciliation in Afghanistan.

"Iran, too, must start to play a more constructive role," he said…

Sure thing, Gordo. Soon as it gets all that “de-constructive” stuff out of its system, there’s no reason why that couldn’t happen—so long as it doesn’t interfere with the timetable for the re-arrival of the Shia messiah, of course.

Posted by: scaramouche at 00:21 | link | comments

Teen angel: Mo Elmasry of the Canadian Islamic Congress claims the tragic murder of Aqsa Parvez at the hands of her father has nothing to with religion. Actually, says Mo, "it's a teenage issue."

In response, all the fathers having similar problems with their teenage girls have banded together to sing this update of an old  Dion and the Belmonts tune:

Each time we have a quarrel

I almost break her neck.

‘Cause when she starts to sass me

I have to give her heck.

Each night I ask Allah up above

Why won’t my teenage daughter wear her hijab?

 

One day she listened to me.

Next day she gave me lip.

What is a Dad to do now

When daughters won’t submit?

Each night I ask Allah up above

Why won’t my teenage daughter wear her hijab?

 

I am in charge.

It’s understood.

How can I marry off

Such damaged goods?

Well, if she just won’t listen

There’s one thing left to do.

It’s not about “religion”—

It’s “teenage” through and through.

Each night I ask Allah up above

Why won’t my teenage daughter wear her hijab?

Posted by: scaramouche at 23:49 | link | comments

Kiddie porn: I dedicate the following post, a MEMRI translation of a recent Hamas kiddie show, to Mr. Bahija Reghai. In this morning’s Globe and Mail, Mr. Bahija urged an end to “the crippling immoral siege against the civilian people in Gaza” so that “the rule of law” could be restored, thus setting the stage for Israel and Hamas “talking real peace.”

This one’s for you, Mr. R.:

Children on Hamas TV Children's Show: 'Liberate' Al-Aqsa by Force, 'Wipe Out' Zionists to the Last One

The following are excerpts from a children's show which aired on Hamas Al-Aqsa TV on December 3, 2007.

To view the clip, visit: http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/1625.htm. To view the MEMRI TV page devoted to Al-Aqsa TV clips, visit:http://memritv.org/content/en/tv_channel_indiv.htm?id=175

Boy: "My beloved brothers, as you know, today the Al-Aqsa Mosque is crying out: 'Where are the people of the frontline, the Palestinian people?' Yes, my dear brothers, that is the Al-Aqsa Mosque. The subject of our lesson today is Jerusalem, to where your Prophet made his nocturnal journey - the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

"Yes, my beloved brothers, as you know today, and as you knew yesterday and the day before, the Al-Aqsa Mosque has fallen into oppressing and malicious hands, the hands of those who know nothing but injustice. But let me tell you how the Al-Aqsa Mosque will be returned, how we shall rescue it from the shackles of the occupation, from the shackles of the Zionist entity.

"Will it be through conferences? No, not through conferences, but by means of force, because the Zionist entity, your enemy, the enemy of Allah, the enemy of Islam, knows nothing but injustice and the killing of Palestinians, the persevering people on the frontline. Indeed, the [mosque] will be returned only by means of force.

"In 1917, the Balfour Declaration was issued. Balfour decided on the cleansing of the Al-Aqsa Mosque. But look what the Zionist enemy has done, look what Israel and America have done. Look what the allies of Israel and America have done. They have dug tunnels underneath the Al-Aqsa Mosque, but the sheikhs and mujahideen of the Al-Aqsa Mosque have exposed these tunnels and called upon the Palestinian people: 'Look what has happened, look what has happened.'

"These calls have gone unheeded, my beloved brothers. But is it too late? No, it is not too late. If we all unite, the Al-Aqsa Mosque will not remain in the hands of the Zionist enemy, it will not remain in the hands of your enemy, despite all their conspiracies against the Palestinian people."

[...]

Girl: "To Al-Aqsa, to Al-Aqsa - we shall unite our ranks. We will wipe out the people of Zion, and will not leave a single one of them."

Aren’t they precious?

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:19 | link | comments

A tragic tale unfolds: On tonight’s episode of Ceeb Islamophilic fantasy, Little Mosque on the Prairie, Mohammed is driven into a frenzy by his daughter Aqsa’s refusal to wear a hijab to school. He enlists the aid of her older brother to teach the brazen girl a lesson.

Oh, wait. This ain’t no sitcom.

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

Two views: Jonathan Kay of the National Post advises us not to read too much into Aqsa Parvez’s murder:

…It is important to emphasize that nothing has been proven in regards to Ms. Parvez’s death. Even if her father did confess to the crime during a phone call to police, as alleged, the killing may have been an accident — or the result of some unknown dispute entirely unconnected to religion and culture. And even if the dispute was over Ms. Parvez’s Western-style demeanour, there is no evidence that this was an “honour killing” of the type we read about from overseas — that is to say, a pre-meditated assassination plotted and perpetrated by father and sons to avenge a renegade daughter who “disgraces” the family name by dating an unapproved mate or otherwise violating the patriarch’s edicts.

Since 9/11, Western societies have begun to closely scrutinize the toxic cultural practices of unassimilated Muslims in Europe and elsewhere. These practices include not only honour killings, but also anti-Semitism, support for terrorism, misogyny, forced veilings and forced marriages. Certain high-profile conservative columnists have been particularly vigorous about highlighting these pathologies. And so when a young Muslim girl gets killed by her father, there is a natural tendency to see it as an indicator that Canadian Muslims are about to follow the radicalized path of militant, unassimilated co-religionists in Paris, London and Stockholm.

In truth, however, Canada’s Muslim community is moderate by world standards. The sight of a woman in a full burqua is an extraordinary rarity outside of a few small urban pockets. And such horrors as that allegedly visited upon Ms. Parvez remain almost unheard of. Moreover, for all our elites’ overwrought emphasis on Canada’s “multicultural” character, the concept of cultural relativism has not advanced so far that it is taken to excuse domestic abuse, let alone murder.

This may change. But for the moment, we should not read too much into this family tragedy…

A commenter named “pumpkineater” begs to differ:

While all violent acts against Muslim women do not lead to death; this act of violence did. Callers to radio shows today indicated that this is but the tip of the iceberg in that community.

Two different Muslim women spoke on radio today (CKTB and CBC) and noted that many young Muslim women are coming under extreme pressure to conform to the values of the country of their parents' origins with the resultant disruption of family relationships. One of the Muslim women even noted that she is concerned that some in the Muslim community will see this latest act of barbarism as justice directed towards one who would not keep the faith.

Attempts  by Western educated, insulated liberals/libertarians to mitigate this outrage perpetrated on a young woman who was trying to adapt to the norms of her new land will not assist the Muslim community in going forward to exhibit the courage to question the advocacy of medieval practices by those who hold sway over their community.

Advantage: pumpkineater.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:29 | link | comments

Bombs away: The jihadis have been busy: in Algeria, and in Lebanon.

Update: Also in Iraq.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:19 | link | comments

The epitome of cluelessness:  I hereby nominate Bahija Reghai, who wrote this letter to the Globe and Mail:

Ottawa -- Shira Herzog and other prominent Israelis' recommendation that "Hamas [be engaged] independently of Israel's Iran-related concerns" makes sense (Palestine Issue Now Trumps Iran - Dec. 11).

What doesn't make sense is to treat the West Bank and Gaza as separate entities, one of them "enemy": They are part of one occupied territory, and home to one people.

Lifting the crippling immoral siege against the civilian people in Gaza should be the first step toward any attempt at restoring the rule of law, and thus the conditions for talking real peace.

Bahija is right that it makes no sense to treat Gaza and the West Bank separately, but for the wrong reason—both are “enemy.”

Update: I take it back. Mr. Reghai isn't clueless. He's an Arab who knows exactly what he's doing.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:07 | link | comments

Nasty, brutish and short: A description of height-challenged zealot, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

His blog, however, is annoying, perplexing and weird.

Here’s a typically bizarre entry, filed under "Gifts from Visitors":

Numerous letters, which are written by people to me everyday, contain remarks, suggestions and effective criticism and I know them like divine blessing.

In one of recent examples, a message from one of readers contained a valuable point about government trip to different provinces.

Recommend by a young person who only mentioned his name, created an effective shift in administrative process of next government’s prudential trips.

I , as the nation,s representative, appreciate and thank dear Mohammad and  also other home mates that grant theirs notes and suggestions to ninth government and probably never will know that how they became the origin of a positive change.

I ask Almighty God that holy month of Ramadan be gushing of bless, grace and abundance for our nice and patient nation of our dear county, Iran. I also hope people don’t deprive their servants from praying, in these days which are the time of materialization of a prayer and especially in holy nights of Ghadr.

I, too, ask Almighty God that holy month of Ramadan be gushing of bless—but only because saying so makes me giggle.

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

Power play: Aqsa Parvez refused to submit—to her father’s authority and to her family’s religion. For that she was abused, beaten and, finally, murdered. The Toronto Star has swallowed so deeply of the purple multiculti Kool-Aid, however, that it wants you to know that Aqsa’s problems with her family had nothing to do with a faith that demands total submission but were attributable to—you guessed it—“immigration”:

…This sad case is almost a shorthand for the flipside of the immigrant experience.

To say immigration is transformative is a gross understatement. Families leave everything and everyone they know and move to a foreign place where they become blank slates. The support of the extended family is gone, the cocoon of well-understood social norms is cast off, and parents and their children stand out in the open, waiting for a new life to start.

And just as a new life rife with possibilities is open to the parents, so too is it for the children. But while parents want economic opportunities and a solid education for their children, they are wary of the siren call of "the West." They want change but not too much change. But for kids, the desire to fit in, to be "normal," is tough to ignore.

Aisha Asghar's parents immigrated to Canada in the 1970s. She says the struggle of Muslim kids, especially girls, to fit in with their new Western lives isn't anything new. She remembers it from her own days in high school. Asghar says while most girls who wore hijab at her Scarborough high school wanted to do it, it was always clear which girls didn't.

"You could pick out the girls who wore hijab because they had to. They would wear revealing clothing and be walking around with their boyfriends but they had the "symbol" of Islam on their head. A lot of parents are concerned with putting a cloth on their daughter's head because they think it'll protect them," says Asghar.

She says at root is the clash between what parents perceive as being their culture and what kids feel is their own. "A lot of this is the disconnect between parents and their kids. These days you have to be your kid's friend to some degree, you can't just dictate all the time. You need to know what they want, what interests them."

Nevin Reda knows well that struggle between old and new. The mother of four daughters is originally from Egypt and came to Canada 14 years ago. Reda, of Mississauga, says she struggles with her girls – they don't want to speak Arabic, they don't like the food, and, most difficult for Reda, they don't like going to the mosque.

She says part of the problem is certainly a cultural one – she's more Egyptian, her daughters more Canadian – but a large part of it is also the messages Muslims get about hijab.

"There needs to be more information out there about a girl's choice to wear hijab and not about wearing it as a religious duty. In the mosque it's equated with morality and modesty," says Reda.

She says reading about Aqsa in the paper made her immensely sad. She thought immediately about her own 16-year-old daughter. "This is anger and emotion gone out of control," says Reda.

Aisha Asghar says it's inevitable that children will rebel if parents aren't tuned in. "It could be that she hates everything her parents stand for and she was totally rejecting all that. That's what happens when people force things on you."

Hmmm. Sounds like “immigration” isn’t the problem here after all. Sounds like it’s really about power and control and how much more difficult it is for men to enforce their authority when women are uppity and refuse to be hidden away in purdah.

Update: Aqsa's dad appeared in court today and will likely be charged with second degree murder. We won't be able to hear about any court proceedings, though, because there's a publication ban (so as not to stir up any "Islamophobia," no doubt).

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:20 | link | comments

 The Star’s fiction: Despite the fact that a Mississaugua teen appears to have been murdered by her father because she refused to submit to his authority and wear a hijab, multicultist rag the Toronto Star wants you to know that most Muslim girls who wear a headscarf do so because they want to, and not because of family pressure:

The suggestion of violent disputes between a 16-year-old girl in Mississauga and her father over her desire to show her hair and live a "normal" lifestyle raises questions about tensions between parents and children in the Muslim community.

But members of the community – particularly young Muslim women – say the tension can exist both ways.

Ausma Khan, the editor-in-chief of Toronto-based Muslim Girl magazine, said research into the readership of her publication shows that the decision to wear the hijab – the traditional Muslim headscarf – is almost always a choice the girl makes on her own.

"We have also heard from other girls saying that they don't know if they want to wear it and that they're unsure and that there is community or family pressure to wear it," she said, but stressed that type of response was in the minority.

Maryam Rana, 20, a student at the University of Toronto's Mississauga campus, said she has been wearing the hijab since she was in Grade 3 and was not very receptive to it at first.

"I remember when I was little, I found it weird because I was the only one who wore it so sometimes I would `forget' it at home," she said laughing. "Not really `forget,' but leave it at home."

When she grew older she wore it of her own accord and recently chose to begin covering her face as well. She said that in her experience the tension more often exists the other way around – when girls who want to wear the hijab are discouraged by their families because they fear it will make them the targets of racism.

Fariha Naqvi-Mohamed, 24, is one of those young women.

"With my family initially it was really tough, because they didn't want me to wear it and they didn't understand right away why I was going to wear it," said Naqvi-Mohamed, a freelance journalist and stay-at-home mom who lives in Ajax.

She described wearing the hijab as a liberating experience and said the fact her parents never forced her to wear it made her choice more meaningful.

"I do know many people who were forced to wear it and as a result they had very little appreciation for it," she said.

"I would never think to force my child to wear it," Naqvi-Mohamed said. "I would just explain why I wear it and if they choose to do so, then great and if not then that's great."

The Star would have you believe that choosing to wear a hijab can cause as much family friction as refusing to wear one. What a crock! While the sight of a daughter with her head covered may indeed cause a “modern” “moderate” Muslim some grief, I can guarantee one thing: it’s not going to drive him to kill her.

My letter to the Star:

In light of the tragic killing of Aqsa Parvez, it was interesting to read that most Muslim girls who wear a hijab do so out of personal choice, and that this decision—like Aqsa’s decision to not wear a headscarf—can also “divide families.”

 

Interesting, but largely irrelevant.

 

There’s a huge difference between the kind of family conflict Miss Parvez was embroiled in, and the kind faced by those other Muslim girls. Miss Parvez was apparently strangled for defying her father’s authority and refusing to dress in a traditional manner. Those other girl may raise an eyebrow or two in their “modern” families should they decide to take up the hijab, but I guarantee that no male family member is going to become so enraged by her “act of defiance” that it’s going to motivate him to want to kill her.

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:45 | link | comments

“Ambien” Herzog: I don’t know why the Globe and Mail persists in publishing Shira Herzog. She keeps writing the same soporific nonsense over and over and over again:

Headline: Palestine issue now trumps Iran

Coming soon after last month's Middle East summit in Annapolis, the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate, re-evaluating the threat of Iran's nuclear development, has reshaped the Israeli-Palestinian dynamic.

At Annapolis, Israelis and Palestinians were the sideshow in a larger plan: U.S. President George Bush wanted to obtain visible regional support for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations as part of building a broad coalition against Iran and its militant proxies -- Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Now, American military action against Iran is off the table for the foreseeable future, and some of the key assumptions that guided Annapolis are being questioned.

Until now, for example, Hamas's leadership was guided by the likelihood of a U.S. attack against Iran and the organization's role in Iran's anti-American sphere of influence. This meant putting on hold any idea that Hamas may had had of talks with Fatah, the Palestinian movement headed by Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas.

A Palestinian unity government has been Hamas's strategic goal since it won a majority in last year's election to the Palestinian Legislative Council. Talks aimed at establishing such a government broke off when fighting erupted between the two camps earlier this year. Following that, Hamas established its supremacy in Gaza, and Fatah in the West Bank. For his part, Mr. Abbas took advantage of the regional anti-Iranian front to shore up international support for his position at the expense of Hamas.

Mr. Abbas is scheduled to sit down tomorrow with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to begin their peace negotiations. And just as soon as the NIE was made public last week, Hamas put out a series of feelers signalling a renewed interest in talks with Mr. Abbas. The Islamist group won't formally recognize Israel, has so far refused to forgo violence and, at best, will agree to no more than a long-term ceasefire with Israel. But it has been weakened by Israeli military strikes and economic sanctions.

Why should Fatah listen to such overtures? Because only an internal Palestinian understanding will give legitimacy to an eventual Israeli-Palestinian agreement. International largesse toward the Abbas-led Palestinian Authority can't compensate for Mr. Abbas's isolation from Gaza and his inability to speak for the Palestinian territories and people as a whole.

Egypt and Saudi Arabia, two of the countries Mr. Bush paraded at Annapolis, are helping Hamas make its case…

How thoughtful of them.

I stayed awake long enough to pen this letter to the Globe:

If, as Shira Hirzog writes, “Palestine” looms larger than Iran, may I suggest it’s because people are looking through the wrong end of the telescope. A quick glance at a map might serve to put things back into perspective. That tiny shred of land clinging to the Mediterranean that takes up no more than .02 per cent of the land in the region—that’s Israeli. The remaining 99.98 per cent—that’s Islamic.

That George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice and others have chosen to magnify the Palestine issue out of all proportion, and have placed far more pressing matters—such as Iran’s state sponsorship of terrorism, the continuing unrest in Pakistan which has the potential to put nuclear weapons in rogue hands, as well as the ongoing global jihad—on the back burner is a sign that their “vision thing,” as the first President Bush liked to call it, is seriously askew.

It would also be helpful if Ms. Herzog would remove her rose-coloured specs, the ones which further distort reality such that she sees it as being in Israel’s interest to “bargain” with Hamas. Hamas has its own “vision thing,” as do the majority of Arabs, including the nation of Saudi Arabia (whose king came to the Annapolis summit, but who refused to shake hands with—or even come in contact with anything that may have been touched by—the Israelis; a question of cooties, I guess). They envision an end, once and for all, to the pesky .02 per cent that, for going on sixty years, has stubbornly refused to blend in with the landscape.

Hmmm. I seem to be writing the same thing over and over and over, too.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:54 | link | comments

Recalcitrant daughter: A “religious” father whose teenage daughter balked at his authority exercised control over her in the only way he could—by trying to squeeze the life out of her. From the Globe and Mail:

A 16-year-old woman was clinging to life in hospital last night after police in Mississauga received a call from a man claiming he had killed his daughter.

Peel Regional Police said a 57-year-old man at the home was arrested and will appear in court today, but declined to reveal the name of the teenager or the man arrested, and offered few details about what might have happened.

Students at nearby Applewood Heights Secondary School in Mississauga identified the teen as Aqsa or Axa Parvez. Some claimed she had clashed with her family after ceasing to wear a hijab and adopting a more Western style of dress.

According to police, the chain of events began yesterday morning with a phone call from a home near Hurontario Street and Eglinton Avenue.

"At 7:55 a.m. we received a 911 call from a man claiming that he had just killed his daughter," said Constable J.P. Valade of Peel Police.

Constable Valade said when paramedics arrived at the single-family detached home on Longhorn Trail they found a 16-year-old suffering from life-threatening injuries. The teenager was taken immediately to Credit Valley Hospital and later transferred to the Hospital for Sick Children where she was in critical condition last night, according to police.

Police would not release the name of the man arrested at the home, or give his relationship if any to the young woman. A search of property records shows the house was purchased in October of 2005 and is registered under three co-owners, all designated joint tenants: Muhammad Parvez, 57, Muhammad Shan Parvez, 30, and Ahtisham Parvez, 27.

One neighbour who asked not to be named said she thought there were "at least two" families living in the house.

"There were people always coming and going from that house," said another neighbour, Vince Commisso, a four-year area resident. "It looked like quite a big family."

Some of the teen's schoolmates said the Grade 11 student had rebelled against her parents recently by refusing to wear a hijab.

Ms. Parvez ran away from home at the end of September, said classmate Kate Daykin, 15.

"It's been happening for a while and she kept going back and forth. ... She said that it was too complicated living at home and her dad was hard to deal with."

Another classmate told The Globe and Mail "her family was really religious and I think her dad was angry because she never wore religious clothing."

Four cars sat in the driveway of the Longhorn Trail home yesterday, including a dark Dodge caravan with a Blue and White Taxi sign on its roof and a black Honda Civic with a for sale sign in the back window. Old Christmas lights dangled from the roof of the front porch and all the window blinds had been pulled.

Neighbours said they were stunned to see police cruisers and a police command centre vehicle parked in front of the five-bedroom home.

"This is usually such a quiet neighbourhood," said a next-door neighbour who asked not to be named. "My thoughts and prayers are with the family."

One of the young woman's classmates communicated a more desperate view.

"Sixteen-year-old girls worry about makeup and boys, not about surviving," another classmate said. "It's not right. She's 16, damn it."

Regular sixteen-year-old girls, perhaps. Sixteen-year-olds whose fathers have imported their old world baggage have different concerns—like trying to have a life outside the home when your male kinfolk are convinced your family’s “honour” is positioned between your thighs.

Update: Just heard on the radio (10:07 E.S.T.) that the girl has died.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:06 | link | comments (1)

The Vajayjay dialogues: A Shia true believer explains the manifest delights of being a chick living under sharia. From Press TV:

Following is an exclusive interview with the head of the Iranian Parliament's Committee for Women and Family Affairs, Mrs. Fatemeh Alia, who is also an active member of the Majlis Cultural Commission.

Q. Islam encourages women to be active members of the society while considering them important pillars of families. Islam also places the central responsibility for the upbringing of children upon women. How can women in today's world balance family matters against social responsibilities?

A. Women can have social responsibilities without necessarily being employed. The society can greatly benefit from women who voluntarily take part in social activities and influence the culture, politics and economics of their country. What is important is that the position of the family as the main building block of the society should always be cherished.

When employed, women can benefit from features such as flextime and maternity leaves. They can also use technologies like the Internet to continue to work at home while caring for their families.

The main issue here is that the family, which is an abode where love and friendship rule, should never be transformed to a mere dwelling deficient in the spirit of companionship.

Q. Does such balance exist in the world today?

A. In most parts of the world, in the West in particular, women are merely objects of collective materialistic values. The notion of complete equality between men and women with no consideration for their biological and emotional differences has distanced women from their inborn nature.

Many women have traded in family values to be able to work. In the West, people are changing the laws of nature such that family values have been forgotten and even same-sex relationships are emerging.

The modern world seems to be greatly concerned about women and makes favorable promises to them. It promises them freedom from slavery, male-domination, and even the established institution of marriage, but what does it actually have in store? Nothing but exploitation, injustice, oppression, aggression, harassment, neurosis and indignity.


Q. What measures have been taken in Iran for women to be able to have an active role in the society while fulfilling their duties at home?

A. The Iranian Parliament (Majlis) has approved a series of rules to allow women to fulfill both their social and familial responsibilities and facilitate their active participation in Iran's social arena. We have passed an act increasing maternity leave from 4 months to 6 months. We have also reduced compulsory working hours for women, and working mothers have been entitled to compensation for working environments which don't provide kindergartens.

However, meager laws are not enough and the main factor lies within the assistance and encouragement that a woman receives from her family.

Q. One of the indices of sustainable development is the rate of employed women. What is Iran's viewpoint in this regard?

A. The Islamic Republic of Iran considers the employment of women from the viewpoint of Islam, which puts great importance on the family, as the main building block of the society and the major institution that can pass on a county's culture and ideology to the next generation.

In addition to women who have opted to work outside the home, many have chosen to continue professions as writers, translators or artists who, besides managing the household, pursue their dreams and passions professionally. This sort of work is not considered in the data pertaining to employment.

Another issue which is also a major index in the economy and development of every society is the domestic work that every woman engages in. Unpaid productive work such as domestic work and child care ought to be included in satellite national accounts and economic statistics.

Q. Can you please give us your viewpoint on the notion of equality between men and women that is propagated in today's world?

A. One cannot assume that equality always results in justice. We believe in justice, but justice is not always the same as equality.

Although men and women have been created equal in the eyes of God, they are not created alike and their differences require a different approach to their roles and responsibilities within the society. Men and women in Islam are not antagonists but separate entities created to complement and complete one another. Islam considers each sex unique in its own sphere of activity and allots significant roles best suited to each according to its own nature and needs.

According to Iranian law, therefore, the two sexes enjoy equal rights and the Qur'an differentiates among human beings only based on the quality of their deeds in this world.

Q. In a meeting with Iranian women, leader of the Islamic revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei said that Iran objects to the West's record on women's rights. In your opinion what does his comment mean?

A. The West has oppressed women and has not recognized their real rights according to their intrinsic nature and creation. We consider the manipulative treatment of women in the West as oppression against humanity and betrayal of women rights.

The West should be held accountable for degrading woman to mere means of promoting consumer goods and perpetual sexual slavery.

The Islamic culture challenges the West and demands that the status of women be restored to its rightful and dignified position…

Thanks, Fatema, but if it’s all the same to you I’ll stick with  the “indignities” of living in the West—including the freedom to dress as I please and not having to submit to the dictates of fascist fashion police.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:28 | link | comments

Stupid spies: British intelligence is far from impressed with American intelligence. From the Telegraph:

British spy chiefs have grave doubts that Iran has mothballed its nuclear weapons programme, as a US intelligence report claimed last week, and believe the CIA has been hoodwinked by Teheran.

The timing of the CIA report has also provoked fury in the British Government, where officials believe it has undermined efforts to impose tough new sanctions on Iran and made an Israeli attack on its nuclear facilities more likely.

The security services in London want concrete evidence to allay concerns that the Islamic state has fed disinformation to the CIA.

The report used new evidence - including human sources, wireless intercepts and evidence from an Iranian defector - to conclude that Teheran suspended the bomb-making side of its nuclear programme in 2003. But British intelligence is concerned that US spy chiefs were so determined to avoid giving President Bush a reason to go to war - as their reports on Saddam Hussein's weapons programmes did in Iraq - that they got it wrong this time.

A senior British official delivered a withering assessment of US intelligence-gathering abilities in the Middle East and revealed that British spies shared the concerns of Israeli defence chiefs that Iran was still pursuing nuclear weapons.

The source said British analysts believed that Iranian nuclear staff, knowing their phones were tapped, deliberately gave misinformation. "We are sceptical. We want to know what the basis of it is, where did it come from? Was it on the basis of the defector? Was it on the basis of the intercept material? They say things on the phone because they know we are up on the phones. They say black is white. They will say anything to throw us off.

"It's not as if the American intelligence agencies are regarded as brilliant performers in that region. They got badly burned over Iraq."

A US intelligence source has revealed that some American spies share the concerns of the British and the Israelis. "Many middle- ranking CIA veterans believe Iran is still committed to producing nuclear weapons and are concerned that the agency lost a number of its best sources in Iran in 2004," the official said.

The Foreign Office is studying a new text of a third United Nations Security Council resolution that would impose tough travel bans on regime figures and penalise banks that do business with Iran.

But diplomats say the chances of winning Chinese and Russian support for the move are in freefall. A Western diplomat said: "It's created a lot of difficulties because of the timing, just as we were about to go for a third resolution."

Bruce Reidel, who spent 25 years on the Middle East desks at the CIA and the National Security Council, said: "By going public they have embarrassed our friends, particularly the British and the Israelis. They have given our foes insights into our most secret intelligence and taken most of the options off the table."...

Seems to me that was the whole point of the exercise.

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

Paleos and "progressives":  Hold onto your head coverings, folks (toques, yarmulkes, hijabs, berets, turbans, what have you). There’s been another Utopian “reawakening” in the Islamic world. And you know what that means—more seethin’, screamin’, ragin’ and misty-eyed nostalgia about a “perfect” era that never was and might yet be again. From the Tehran Times:

There is a general reawakening taking place in the Islamic world.

A number of groups are associated with this reawakening and one of them is the Neo-Andalucian movement, which is a progressive pan-Islamic movement.

They use the appellation Neo-Andalucian because Muslim Andalucia was a center of learning and, at least for a time, a very tolerant place where Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived in peace and harmony for the most part.

Muslim scholars like Ibn Arabi and non-Muslim scholars like Maimonides arose in Andalucia.

Islam teaches Muslims to seek out knowledge and to be tolerant toward non-Muslims who are not at war with Islam.

Also, the fall of Andalucia in 1492 marked the beginning of the 500-year decline of the Islamic world.

The Neo-Andalucians want to start an Islamic revival to end this 500-year decline, hence the identification with Andalucia.

Of course, the ideal Islamic state was Medina during the time of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him and his household).

However, we don’t have the Prophet now, just as the Andalucians didn’t have the benefit of the presence of the Prophet.

This is a parallel between modern times and the era of Muslim Andalucia.

The Neo-Andalucians are seeking to start a new Islamic Renaissance, unite the Islamic world, and uplift the oppressed Muslim masses.

Since the U.S. neoconservatives are enemies of Islam, many people believe there will be a clash between the neocons and the Neo-Andalucians.

However, the neocons are the straw dogs of the paleocons, who will discard the neocons when they have outlived their usefulness.

The real clash will be between the Neo-Andalucians and the paleocons of the Henry Kissinger school of realpolitik.

The paleocons view any progressive pan-Islamist movement as a serious threat.

As a matter of fact, the spies of the paleocons have been providing covert support to every backwards, intolerant movement that calls itself Islamic in order to sully the image of Islam.

They are doing this in a futile attempt to hinder the expansion of Islam…

Ah, yes. The “perfection” of Al Andalus. When Muslim, Jew and Christian got along famously—because, famously, Islam ruled and Jews and Christians knew their place, accepted their second-class status and embraced their dhimmitude without complaint. Let’s all be “progressive” (i.e. regressive) and return to that glorious time, shall we? First things first, though. In order to re-capture the spirit of Al Andalus the neo-Andalucians are going to have to find some way to recapture the Spanish region of Al Andalus. Until then, the whole effort is just a pipe dream.

My question: aside from Henry Kissinger (Henry Kissinger?!—is he still alive?) who the heck are the other “paleocons”? Pat Buchanan? John Bolton? Mark Steyn? Non-lefty infidels in general? At least, despite the Flinstonian prefix, the “paleocons” aren't likely to have minds stuck back somewhere in the “perfect” 9^th—or even the “perfect” 7^th—Century, and have thinking that's grounded in an age that has modern contrivances--like, say, electricity and that new-fangled invention, the telephone.

Not that that’s likely to help in their futile attempt to hinder the expansion of Islam. (I hear the neo-Andalucians are even thinking of pitching a "new" sitcom to the Ceeb: "I Love Al-Andalucy.")

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:53 | link | comments (1)

Another crackpot theory bites the dust (we can only hope and pray): Jonathan Tobin notes that while the NIE report is a crock, it kicks the wind out of Annapolis. From the Jerusalem Post:

…The rationale behind the recently completed Middle East summit in Annapolis was that opposition to Iran throughout the region would be the impetus for support for a renewed peace process. With the nuclear question now off the table - and with Europe almost certainly dropping out of the argument - how exactly do Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice propose to convince the so-called moderate Arabs to remain interested in isolating Iran?

ALL OF which leaves us with a Mideast policy that, at present, consists almost solely of an irrational belief in the peaceful intentions of the Palestinians and their leaders.

It was one thing for Bush to push hard for Israel to go to Annapolis and to start final-status talks with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas as part of a global vision that had, as its centerpiece, the goal of stopping Iran.

With that central prop torn away from our foreign policy - and without belief in the nuclear peril from Iran that both Washington and Jerusalem have been promoting - all that's left is faith in Abbas and the allegedly moderate Arabs who back him…

In other words, Bush and Condi have staked Israel’s future on a whole lotta nada.

Posted by: scaramouche