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

It ain't no Chanukkah bush:  As far as I know, Christmas, which celebrates the birth of Christ, is the only religious holiday during which people display and decorate trees in their homes. For that reason, the trees have traditionally been known as Christmas trees. 

When the trees are part of a public display on public property, though, and the politcally correct elves get involved, the issue become a bit dicey. These elves, busy little gremlins that they are, have decided that even though it looks like a Christmas tree and smells like a Christmas tree and is only there in the first place because of the holiday called Christmas, it is exclusionary to non-Christians to describe a Christas tree as a Christmas tree. Far more sensitive and embracing to call it something less specifically Christian, like, say, "a holiday tree"--and let people figure out exactly which "holiday" is involved.

Such has been the case for the last six years with the immense Christmas tree which adorns the Capitol building in Washington D.C. The speaker of the House, who's set to illuminate the immense tree during the annual tree-lighting ceremony, has had it with such nonsense, and wants to, gasp, call it a Christmas tree once again. From the Chicago Sun-Times:

If it's a spruce tree adorned with 10,000 lights and 5,000 ornaments displayed on the Capitol grounds in December, it's a Christmas tree and that's what it should be called, says House Speaker Dennis Hastert.

Hastert (R-Ill.) in a letter to the Architect of the Capitol, recommended that the annual Capitol Holiday Tree, as it has been called the past several years, be renamed the Capitol Christmas Tree.

''I strongly urge that we return to this tradition and join the White House, countless other public institutions and millions of American families in celebrating the holiday season with a Christmas tree,'' Hastert wrote to Architect Alan Hantman.

Reasons for 'Holiday' title unclear

His office said the tree began to be referred to as the Holiday Tree in the 1990s. Spokesman Ron Bonjean said the reasons were unclear.

On Dec. 8 Hastert will flip the switch to light the tree, a 65-foot Engelmann Spruce from the Santa Fe National Forest in New Mexico.

On Tuesday workmen were erecting the tree on the West Front of the Capitol.

I'm a firm believer in the separation of religion and the state. But if you're going to the trouble of erecting a Christmas tree in a public space, it's a ridiculous charade which protects no one's sensibilities to pretend it's there for some non-specific seasonal celebration.

Update: At least someone has some sense. CNN just showed the President lighting what was clearly identified as a the White House Christmas tree.

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

Blessed--but dumb--are the Peacemakers: Christian Peacemaker Teams is an organization full of well-meaning, soft-headed pacifists--most associated with the Quakers and Mennonites--who go around the world bringing a message of peace to war zones. The agency's motto is "Getting in the way", and, asone of its websites explains, that means, putting themselves in the way of the violent folks wreaking all the havoc "through direct nonviolent intervention, public witness and reporting to the larger world community to make a difference."

In other words, the CPT wants to wrap the world in a great big hug so that everyone will get along.

Me too. But that doesn't mean that, like the CPTers, I'd be so foolish as to race to the world's most violent arena of war and get in the way of jihadis striving violently in the the path of Allah by turning themselves into human bombs, and Saddamite Baathists trying to reclaim lost glory. You see, a hug and a kiss and a rousing chorus of "We Shall Overcome" is no match for the wrath of the true believer. In fact, the true believer, whether jihadi or Baathists, sees it as a sign of pitiful weakness and is apt to squash you like a bug. (One recalls the scene in the movie Animal House when John Belushi, playing mega-boor Bluto Blutarsky, happens upon a folkie singing one of his limp tunes and "gets in the way" by taking the folkie's guitar and smashing it over his head. You can think of the CPTers as the folkie, and Iraq's true believers as Bluto.)

The other day, four CPTers had their hugs and kisses rebuked by angry true believers who kidpapped them in Iraq. Two of the four have already been displayed on al Qaeda's TV affiliate, al Jazeera, so there's a chance they're all still alive. It's unclear if their captors will ever release them; God is merciful but, as everyone with half a brain knows, jihadis--not so much. In fact, jihadis don't care if you're a peace-loving treehugger who drives a hybrid vehicle and donates a tenth of his salary to Amnesty International, or if you're a war-loving Republican who drives a Hummner and danced at the White House with Laura Bush. To them, an infidel is an infidel, and all are fair game for Mo's sword.

The CPTers have yet to realize that, however. They've released a statement blaming the kidnapping of their colleagues on--get this--the U.S. occupation of Iraq. Sorry guys, that duck won't fly. First off, if there were no so-called occupation, your peaceniks wouldn't be there "getting in the way"--or does your mandate extend to "getting in the way" in peaceful places? And if you want to blame someone for the horrible situation, how about blaming the jihadis and Baathists (what you guys probably call "rebels" and "insurgents")? They're the ones who seem immune to your hugs. They're the ones who hold the fate of your people in their hands. And while we're dividing up the blame pie, why not serve yourselves a heaping helping for being so hopelessly naive--and so downright ignorant--as to think you could get in the way of a holy war.

May God help those poor people, and may they come home safe and sound--and wiser.

Update: FrontPage Magazine has a piece about the CSM. While mainstreamers like the Ceeb and The Globe and Mail refer to those kidnapped as "aid workers", the article exposes them for what they really are: self-righteous busybodies who loathe America and Israel:

...Founded in 1986 by a collection of left-wing churches, the group greeted 9/11 with recriminations against the Great Satan. Channeling Ward Churchill, activist Jerry Levin – who literally wrote the book on CPT – classified 9/11 as “violent chickens coming home to roost,” citing “the complicit link between the September 11th tragedy and the U.S.’s decades long knee jerk support of Israel against Palestine.” “Why does the United States treat the Palestinians like its Native Americans?” he asks. “Because that’s what America does!” Al-Qaeda’s “freelance” terrorism, he claimed, hardly scratched the surface of “infinitely more pervasive” U.S., British, and Israeli “state sponsored or state directed terrorism.”

CPT quickly turned its attention to preventing Operation Iraqi Freedom, then to sabotaging the war itself. During the “Shock and Awe” campaign, CPT members acted as human shields, opting to “use their bodies to protect critical civilian infra-structure.” [sic.] They also disseminated anti-American news releases to “provide an alternative voice to the reporters ‘embedded’ with Coalition forces.”

Once major military operations ended, activists stayed on to “document abuse of detainees by Coalition forces.” There, they soaked up far-fetched atrocity tales circulated for the credulous. Such tales, like erroneous reports of Koran vandalism at Guantanamo Bay, are pulled from the al-Qaeda handbook, but CPT’s useful idiots circulated them without regard for the impact they would have on soldiers’ morale. In a 12-page litany of supposed abuses, CPT member (and raving moonbat) Peggy Gish wrote that Abu Ghraib prisoners slept “about a hundred men in each tent.” When these prisoners started shouting “Freedom,” evil Americans opened fire, killing four innocent terrorists. Others pretend the Geneva Conventions require the U.S. government “release all detainees in Iraq as of June 30, 2004.”

One of the four abductees, 41-year-old Canadian James Loney, spread exactly these tall tales. The CPT website states Loney “is currently the Program Coordinator for CPT Canada. On previous visits to Iraq, his work focused on taking testimonies from families of detainees for CPT's report on detainee abuse, and making recommendations for securing basic legal rights.”

However, the organization went beyond PR into outright advocacy for accused “insurgents.” CPT operated an “Adopt-a-Detainee Program” for 18 months, in which it paired up suspected terrorist prisoners with American sponsors, who would write to the authorities on their behalf. Although the organization claims a measure of credit for cleaning up post-Abu Ghraib Iraq, it curtailed the adoption program this September, because it found following the transfer of sovereignty to the Iraqis, officials became “increasingly unresponsive.” ...

If things don't go well for the kidnap victims, that "adopt a cuddly terrorist program" is going to be a much tougher sell.

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

Funding terror: One of the most crucial ways to stop terrorism, we've been told, it to sever the terrorists from their source of funding. It's fairly obvious: no moolah, no materiel; no materiel, no violent jihad. The problem, of course, is locating the money that's hidden away in  offshore or numbered accounts, and finding a way to turn off the "humaniterrorism" spigots (i.e. money that's been raised for humanitarian efforts that's really going to fund  the jihad).  Finding and confiscating the terror money has been a linchpin of the Bush Administration's anti-terror measures. However, according to a soon-to-be-released Congressional report, not nearly enough is being done to ensure that such efforts are co-ordinated with other nations nor, for that matter, that efforts between different agencies and bodies within America are co-ordinated. And because the co-ordination is so piecemeal and haphazard, the terror money is still getting through. From the New York Times:

The government's efforts to help foreign nations cut off the supply of money to terrorists, a critical goal for the Bush administration, have been stymied by infighting among American agencies, leadership problems and insufficient financing, a new Congressional report says.

More than four years after the Sept. 11 attacks, "the U.S. government lacks an integrated strategy" to train foreign countries and provide them with technical assistance to shore up their financial and law enforcement systems against terrorist financing, according to the report prepared by the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress.

The findings expand on earlier concerns raised by that agency and others in the past few years about the government's ability to cut off money to terrorists. The report is to be released Wednesday, and an advance copy was provided to The New York Times.
The findings produced sharp dissent from American government officials, who said Congressional auditors overstated the bureaucratic problems in curbing terrorist financing overseas and the level of dissension between agencies. They described the intergovernmental effort to cut off the flow of terrorist money as one of the hallmarks of the Bush administration's campaign to fight terrorism since the Sept. 11 attacks.

"No interagency process is without flaws," the State Department said in its official response. But it said "there is much evidence" that the working group set up by the administration to combat terrorist financing "is one of the most successful examples of interagency cooperation."

The government has identified 26 "priority" countries that it considered particularly vulnerable to exploitation by terrorist financiers, who may take advantage of lax financial controls and loosely regulated or nonexistent laws to launder money in support of terrorist attacks, officials said.

But officials at the State and Treasury Departments cannot even agree on who is supposed to be in charge of the effort to shore up defenses in vulnerable countries, the accountability office report concluded.

In at least one case, the State Department refused to allow a Treasury official to enter an unidentified foreign country last year to help with strategies to fight terrorist financing because of turf battles, investigators found. Because the country had recently been upgraded to a priority, State Department officials wanted to do their own assessment first before allowing the Treasury Department to conduct its work, causing a delay of several months.

Investigators found clear tensions between officials at State, Treasury, Justice and other departments.

One unidentified Treasury official quoted anonymously in the report said that the intergovernmental process for deterring terrorist financing abroad is "broken" and that the State Department "creates obstacles rather than coordinates effort." A State Department official countered that the real problem lies in the Treasury Department's reluctance to accept the State Department's leadership in the process.

In another problem area, private contractors used by the Treasury Department and other agencies have been allowed to draft proposed laws in foreign countries for curbing terrorist financing, even though Justice Department officials voiced strong concerns that contractors should not be allowed to play such an active role in the legislative process.

The contractors' work at times produced legislative proposals that had "substantial deficiencies," the report said...

Even with that large grain of salt one must consume before reading anything in the New York Times these days--the paper having such a clear animus against anything to do with the Bush administration--it appears that turf wars, jurisdictional issues, lack of funding and plain old inertia are allowing the shekels to reach the terror-masters and their foot soldiers. Until and unless the anti-terror powers-that-be get their act together, that scenario is unlikely to change.

Then again, boulder of salt now safely down my gullet, this is the New York Times, so I'm not sure how accurate this report really is; the Times is apt to give things a spin so they often have little bearing on reality.

Posted by: scaramouche at 16:30 | link | comments

Rite of passage: It's that time of year again. The time when the international community sets aside its fractiousness and comes together in a spirit of harmony and co-operation. The time when the Arab and Muslims nations (what are there 300, 400 or them--or does it just seem that way?) get to sit down within the warming embrace of the UN General Assembly and have everyone vote on resolution after resolution condemning Israel. Never mind that the annual ritual is as hateful as it is ridiculous. It seems to soothe the savage breast of those who feel they've been aggrieved by the Jewish state--by its very existence, in fact--and who enjoy receiving yearly approbation from this international forum.

Usually, Canada, ever the Rodney-King-please-can't-we-all-get-along of nations, has no problem participating in the annual pile-on. Like most of the world's nations, it votes yes, yes, yes, to all the anti-Israel mishigas. (Last year for the first time, it voted down two of six--an aberation which occasioned much rage among Canada's Muslim community, which gets its collective nose out of joint when Israel is shown even minor consideration.) But this year, Prime Minister Paul Martin finds himself in a bit of a quandry. You see, his government has just lost a non-confidence vote, which means Canadians will soon be going to the polls. As The National Post reports today, Martin has to find a way to please both Muslim and Jewish voters--an obvious impossibility. If his government votes  for all the resolutions, he may alientate many Jewish voters. If it votes against even one of the resolutiosn--one or two pro-Israel votes offered as a sop to placate the Jews--he will enrage Muslim voters. Much as he'd like to please everyone, Martin is canny enough to know that, to paraphrase old Honest Abe (admittedly, not one of Martin's role models) you can't please all the people all the time.

What to do? Here's my prediction. Canada will fall in line, perhaps vote against the odd resolution or two, knowing full well that it won't make a whit of difference to the outcome of the election. The Jews, for the most part will vote Liberal, because they always vote Liberal. Ditto for the Muslims. Ditto for most of the voters, who will likely return the wretched man to office despite the sponsorship scandal and the ensuing Gomery flummery; despite the obvious and endemic corruption of his party, which has ruled uninterupted for far too long.

In that respect--the corruption, I mean--the Liberals are a lot like the United Nations. Perhaps that's one of the reasons they feel so at home in that international cesspit.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:38 | link | comments

What's wrong with this wording: The two day summit between EU leaders and leaders of Mediterranean nations (most of which are Muslim but also includes the Jewish state, that blot on an otherwise impeccable Muslim landscape, ) seemed to be fast heading off the rails. The leaders hadn't been able to come up with a defintion of "terrorism" which was palatable to all. At the last moment, however, catastrophe was averted, and all--even Israel and Pakistan (which, up till now, I hadn't considered especially Mediterrnean)--signed on. Here's the agreed-upon wording. See if you can spot the problem with it:

We (the delegations) confirm that we will: implement in full all (U.N.) Security Council resolutions addressing the issue of terrorism; condemn terrorism in all its manifestations without qualification; reject any attempts to associate terrorism with any nation, culture or religion, and prohibit and prevent the incitement of terrorist acts.

Now, it may be true that terrorism per se is not restricted to one group, culture or religion. As we are constantly reminded, Catholics (like the IRA), Tamils, Protestants (or at least, one Protestant--Timothy McVeigh) and Jews (Baruch Goldstein and the the settler who recently went berzerko on a bus in Israel, shooting several people he thought were Muslim) have all been involved in terrorism. But it is also true that the type of terrorism most plaguing the world at the moment usually involves one particular religion. I won't mention which one, of course, because lots of folks who belong to that religion lead perfectly law-abiding lives and would never dream of tucking dynamite into their skivvies and detonating themselves in a public place. And lots of these same kind of folks get all miffed when you dare mention that the people perpetrating these anti-social acts are doing so because they are either religious fanatics who believe they are doing exactly what their God commands, or lost souls who've been persuaded by clever terror masters that they can redeem their miserable lives by committing such crimes. It would be bigoted, politically unacceptable and just downright nasty to point out that Wiccans, Buddhists, Seventh Day Adventists and even Scientologists are not trying to strike terror into the hearts of infidels, er, generic citizens (although that Tom Cruise has been acting a little strange lately--might be best for the spooks to keep an eye on him for a while.)

I will also refrain from saying that the above defintion is mostly window dressing which refuses to acknowledge the that most of today's terrorism is totalitarian in nature--totaliterrorism--and there's no getting around the fact that one religion--admittedly one which encompasses many ethnicities and cultures--is responsible for it. And until such time as leaders like the ones who just met in Barcelona are willing to admit the obvious, the writing and adopting of such statements will be largely meaningless. 

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

Who's afraid of the Brotherhood?: That's the title of a piece on the Al-Ahram site.  The writer, Amira Howeidy, looks at the electoral success of "outlawed" group the Muslim Brotherhood, with the aim of finding out if there's anything to worry about should the MB (who, by the way, are committed to jihad, although you may not know that from reading the article) come to power.

As a convoy of buses packed with supporters of the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) approached the Damanhour polling station to allegedly swing the vote in favour of the NDP candidate a human chain brought the vehicles to a halt. Members of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) lay across the road and refused to move and as a result the convoy did not reach its destination.

The scene, commented one secular intellectual, "is reminiscent of Bernardo Bertolucci's anti-fascist epic 1900 "Like most of Egypt's left-leaning intelligentsia the intellectual in question was concerned by the MB's success in the elections, yet she spoke admiringly of the way the group had protected the ballot, comparing it to the way the peasants in Bertolucci's film resisted fascism.

Such scenes are set to haunt the political spectrum as the MB continues to score notable victories in the ongoing parliamentary elections...

The sudden change in Egypt's political life, which for decades remained stagnant, is provoking vibrant debate, and to many secularists and left-wing intellectuals the seemingly inexorable rise of the MB is cause for worry. The latest issue of the independent Al-Fagr (Dawn) weekly newspaper carried a front page cartoon of the group's supreme guide dressed in a Nazi uniform over the caption "Faithful President Mohamed Mahdi Akef". In the same issue Salah Eissa, left-wing historian and editor of the Ministry of Culture-funded Al-Qahira newspaper, predicted the group's transformation on the back of its electoral success into a kind of Egyptian Taliban.

Egypt's eight million-strong Coptic community seems to share the concern. According to Wednesday's issue of the daily independent Al-Masry Al-Yom the Coptic Orthodox Church has already voiced its worries to the authorities over the MB's election gains. While the church has not confirmed the reports, some Coptic intellectuals have been vocal in expressing their concern: earlier in the week prominent Coptic intellectual Milad Hanna was widely quoted as saying he will "leave Egypt" if the Brotherhood come to power. Speaking to AFP on Tuesday Hanna went further: "The day the Muslim Brothers win more than 50 per cent" he said, "rich Copts will leave the country while poorer Copts will stay... maybe some of them will be converted... I hope I die before this happens."

Repeated assurances from the MB that it is committed to religious diversity and respects the rights of non-Muslims have yet to convince secularists, let alone Copts. It is a situation that may well have informed the decision by the MB's Deputy Supreme Guide Khairat El-Shater to publish a commentary in the London-based Guardian newspaper on Wednesday under the title "No need to be afraid of us". No political, religious, social or cultural group should be excluded from Egypt's political life, he wrote. The MB's goal must be to "end the monopoly of government by a single party and boost popular engagement in political activity," El-Shater wrote, further adding "We simply have no choice today but to reform."

Not everyone is afraid. Wael Khalil, a die-hard socialist activist in the anti- Mubarak Egyptian Movement for Change (Kifaya) said he voted for the MB. "I'm elated by their performance," he told Al-Ahram Weekly. "The MB is, without question, my ally [in the battle for reform]... [Government] thugs attacked voters and innocent citizens and we're pontificating about the MB's commitment to a civil state," Khalil continued. "Where did the thugs come from if not today's civil state? Is this the right time to worry about the MB?"...

Well, Mr. Khalil, if your choice is between government thugs and MB jihadis, I'd say now is as good as time as any to worry. I suggest you not put it off until they're actually running the place, because by then it'll be too late.

But it's not only the MB's honesty and integrity that's hooking voters. It's also their snazzy website:

No wonder, wrote Al-Ahram 's Sayed Ali in his column on Wednesday, people are voting MB. "Just look at their website and look at the NDP's."

If he wants to improve his appeal among voters, Hosni better find himself a new site designer, and fast.

Posted by: scaramouche at 16:38 | link | comments

Grab your shovels: Today's unintentionally amusing headline comes from our friends at Islam Online: Snow grips France, Muslims racing to help.

Guess it's easier to shift snow than put out fires.

Posted by: scaramouche at 16:05 | link | comments

Democracy in Gaza: It's on hold for the moment. Not because too many freedom-seeking Gazans have left the joint to taste all that freedom said to be available over in Egypt. Nope. It's been postponed because masked gunmen burst into polling stations to voice their dismay that some names had been left off the voters list.

What, you mean there's some other way to complain about voting irregularities? From aljazeera.com:

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah party suspended its primaries in the Gaza Strip on Monday after armed men stormed some polling stations, Fatah officials said, according to Reuters.

"The Fatah General Committee... decided to freeze the election," the group said in a statement after an urgent meeting.

It said Monday's results would be void and the primaries would be rescheduled.

Reports say all polling stations in central Gaza and some in the southern town of Khan Younis were shut after gunmen burst in.

Some burned tyres in the streets, while others seized or set fire to ballot boxes. There were no reports of casualties.

The men complained that names of thousands of eligible voters were missing from election rolls.

Fatah members in the Gaza Strip are holding the second phase of primaries for January's legislative election.

The first stage took place in the West Bank on Friday with a strong showing for jailed Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti.

Fatah candidates are being elected by a vote for the first time. In the past they were appointed by party leaders.

More than 463,000 people have registered to vote in the selection process.

There are 463 candidates in the West Bank and 311 in Gaza competing for a place in the final list to be presented to the electorate on January 25.

Despite the violence, Mohammed Dahlan, a cabinet minister and Fatah strongman in Gaza who represents a younger generation of leaders, said primaries would deepen democracy in Fatah.

"We need a positive internal revolution that would guarantee the dignity of our senior leaders but give a chance to ... (those) who had no actual role in decision-making although they sacrificed their blood," he said.

I think what the articulate Mr. Dahlan is saying is that Palestinians should get rid of the corrupt remnants of the Arafat regime and let in some fresh young terrorist blood (although if those who have "no actual role in decision-making" have already "sacrificed their blood", that would make them dead voters--which entails a whole 'nother kind of voting irregularity). In any case, it's hard to see how democracy can ever take hold among the excitable youths (who, like the ones over in France, can never seem to pass up a good conflagration) when it's so much more immediate and gratifying to torch a polling station.

Posted by: scaramouche at 15:36 | link | comments

Conversation about Jew-hatred: The following conversation took place yesterday evening:

 "Did you read the latest newsletter from the Simon Wiesenthal Center?"

"No, it's still on my kitchen counter, wrapped in plastic. You read it?"

"Yup."

"And?"

"And it was depressing as hell. It's not like I haven't read the stories before--all the crappy stuff going on in Europe--but there's something about reading them collected in one place that makes it seem even more horrible. That and the quote by Simon Wiesenthal about how he never expected to live to see the resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe, site of the Holocaust. Know what I think?"

"No, what?"

"After all my reading and research and websurfing, this is what I've concluded: The world has never come to terms with the fact of the Jews. If you think about it, everything in history--all the hatred, the massacres, the progroms, the blood libels,  the Holocaust, even what's happening today with Israel--it's all a function of that failure.

"(Sigh), I think you're right."

"I also think that when the Jews signed up for that covenant, they forgot to read the fine print."

"You mean the part where it said that being "chosen" would earn you the emnity of the world?"

"Yeah, that part. And you know what else? There was a picture of the new "Tolerance" museum they're building as part of the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem. But I think building a monument to tolerance of Jews is a pretty empty gesture right now. All you have to do is read the newsletter to know there is no real tolerance for the Jews. The big concern these days is "tolerance" for those complaining about Islamophobia. That's the "tolerance" du jour.

"Okay, now I'm really depressed."

"Me too. I'm going to watch Desperate Housewives so I can see someone else's tzuris for an hour."

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:27 | link | comments (1)

Trial of the century (so far): Betcha thought it was the one involving an alleged pedophile and former superstar who suffers from body dysmorphic disorder (and who has hightailed it from Peter Pan-land in SoCal to a new fantasy land in Bahrain). Nuh-uh. The real trial of the young century is the one over in Bagdhad, where the former would-be caliph is being tried along with some of his lackeys for crimes against humanity.

The trial got underway several weeks ago, but was forced to recess because witnessess and defence lawyers seemed to be dropping like gassed Kurds. Now, Saddam has a new team--including former U.S. attorney general Ramsay Clark--seated as his table, and is set for a riproaring ride.

The delay hasn't improved Saddam's mood any--he's still the same arrogant, combative bully he's always been. At the moment, though, someone else is in charge, and he's having some difficulty acknowledging the change in pecking order. Every though he relocated from a palace to a prison months ago, old habits die hard and the former potentate tried to boss around the Judge: From the Guardian:

A combative Saddam Hussein today picked up his trial for crimes against humanity where he had left it off, making a series of heated outbursts against the chief trial judge.
Evidence of the former dictator's antagonistic attitude towards the court - put on full display when the hearing began on October 19 - was sparked by Judge Rizgar Amin asking him why he was eight minutes late.

Saddam blamed the delay on a malfunctioning lift and the insistence of guards that he wear shackles, which he said made it hard to climb the four flights of stairs to the court while carrying papers.

When Judge Amin, who won praise for his handling of a truculent Saddam during the opening session, said he would he tell the guards not to let it happen again, Saddam rebuked him. "You do not tell them. You order them. You are an Iraqi, they are conquerors and occupiers," he said.

In later exchanges, television footage was cut to show the court's emblem after Saddam complained that his pen and paper had been taken from him.

"Why would you confiscate my papers and the pen that I need? How should I defend myself," he asked Judge Amin.

Wearing a white shirt and charcoal jacket, Saddam had earlier strolled cheerfully into the court in Baghdad's green zone carrying a copy of the Koran and uttering the Arabic greeting, "Peace to the people of peace"...

That's our Saddam--a holy man of peace who presided over a nation of peacemakers: bloodthirsty, murderous peacemakers who left hundreds of thousands in pieces. 

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:36 | link | comments

Zoo heist: Warning to freedom-loving residents of Gaza: Be on the lookout for one lion, size large, and two white Arabic-speaking parrots.They were nabbed two weeks ago from the Gaza zoo and haven't been seen since. Speculation is rife that they, like may Gazans, may be heading for the Egyptian border and their first taste of freedom in almost 40 years.

Authorities believe the lion was stolen as a trophy by thieves who perceive themselves to be the king of the jungle.

And the talking birds?

They were taken, of course, so they wouldn't squeal.

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:45 | link | comments

Borat fights back: Last month, British comic Sasha Cohen, also known as Ali G, got in trouble with the republic of Kazahkstan. During the MTV Europe Music Awards, Cohen, in the guise of a  a boorish, anti-Semitic Kazakh named Borat Sagdiyev, a character who often appears on his TV show, made all sorts of fanciful assertions about the backwardness of his "homeland". The Kazakhs, who have never been known for their sense of humour, took offense at Borat's broadsides, and threatened to take legal action against him, er, Cohen.

Now, Borat is hitting back. He has released a taped response--in character--in which he answers his Kazahk critics. From the CBC:

"I'd like to state that I have no connection with Mr. Cohen and fully support my government decision to sue this Jew," the comic (who is Jewish) says in the video.

He goes on to say that after recent reforms, "Kazakhstan is as civilized as any other country in the world. Women can now travel on inside of bus, homosexuals no longer have to wear blue hats and age of consent has been raised to eight years old."

Somehow, I don't think that's the kind of apology the Kazakhs had in mind.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:22 | link | comments (1)

Democracy in Egypt: So what if they're voting for jihadis who want to sink apostates (like the autocrat in Cairo) as well as all the infidels. As long as they're exercising their democratic option, right?

Posted by: scaramouche at 15:32 | link | comments

Curbing his enthusiasm for "Judiasm": I know many people who are convulsed by the hilairity of Larry David's semi-improvised sitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm. I don't happen to be one of them, but I figure it has something to do with the fact that I'm a chick, and we're often perplexed by they kind of comedy which tickles the other gender's comedy bone (so to speak)--things like the Three Stooges, Howard Stern, and The Larry Sanders Show. On those rare occasions when I have tuned into C.Y.E., I've haven't been struck by how funny it is, but by how crabby, petty, self-absorbed and unappealing the character Larry David is.

Whether or not the real Larry David is as mean as the character he plays on TV is moot. However, it seems that both Larry Davids--the fictional one and the real one--seem to have a bit of a problem with Judaism. As long as David was funny, writes Arye Dworkin in the Jerusalem Post, he was willing to swallow the consistently negative way David portrayed Judaism on the show. But this year's episodes have been both negative and unfunny--and that's where he draws the line:

...In his most recent season - the fifth and perhaps weakest - David has been teetering on the tightrope that separates humor from self-hatred. "The Seder," an episode that ran last week, was almost respectful of the age-old tradition - except for the fact that the villain of the episode, a snitch, is also the only man at the table wearing a yarmulke. Traditionally, during the Seder, the host hides a piece of matza known as the afikomen for the children to find. David, as the host, conceals the afikomen in an armoire, but on leaving the bathroom, the skullcapped Jew (his agent's brother-in-law) spies David putting the matza in his carefully considered hiding place. Not coincidentally, the son of the yarmulke-wearer later finds the matza and wins the prize (a whopping dollar bill). David becomes suspicious and refuses payment, making wild accusations. "Hilarity" ensues.

The most recent episode, "Skiing," is not only unfunny but also wildly inaccurate. David not only makes fun of his own religion, he also makes up half of its customs, thereby misinforming viewers. His portrayal of Orthodox Jews (who feature prominently in this episode) is reminiscent of the cartoons published by the Germans and French during World War II (the only thing missing were the grossly exaggerated noses). Not only does David ridicule religious observance, he also succeeds in making Jewish people sound like aliens throughout the episode. When the actors were quoting Yiddishisms, they were mostly clearing their throats, rarely saying anything decipherable. If you tried translating the guttural "chuh chuh chuh" you would find that it means "chuh chuh chuh."

The Orthodox girl in "Skiing," named Rachel, keeps her hair covered, but with a little research you would find that single girls do not cover their hair; only married women do. Moreover, her character is dismissive, angry, judgmental, antagonistic and ungrateful. While such people do exist, one can't help but wonder if this is how David sees all Orthodox females.

Similarly, a couple of seasons back, David cast Gina Gershon as an Orthodox dry cleaner who would willingly have sex with David, despite being married, as long as it was done through a hole in the sheet (which is also a myth). Gershon's character, which must have been based on a shtetl whore from the 1920s, acts morally bankrupt and speaks in an awful faux-Yiddish accent that further re-enforces David's apparently low opinion of observant women.

So why take offense at Curb Your Enthusiasm when, after all, it's just a half-hour comedy? A few years ago, I remember meeting someone in Australia who insisted that all New York Jews act like Seinfeld. While the titular comedian was a disarmingly funny man, he was also a whiner, a frequent complainer, unethical, paranoid, selfish and uncaring. Not the sort of person you want representing a population of 11,000,000. Watching the most recent Curb, one might walk away with similar impressions. I was saddened by David's obvious self-hatred and disrespect for his own tradition, but even sadder for the viewers who watch the show (albeit with a grain of salt) and are left with a false impression of Orthodoxy...

Actually, I don't know if I agree with Dworkin. As cranky and unappealing as he may be, Larry David is a comedian, and the only "population" he represents is a population of one: himself. Moreover, it's not like David is singling out Judaism for his scorn. He's an equal opportunity derider who hates everyone, including Muslims, African-Americans, the disabled, Republicans--if fact, anyone who has the poor judgement (he thinks) not to be exactly like Larry David.

As to whether or not he's funny--that's entirely a matter or taste.

Posted by: scaramouche at 15:23 | link | comments

No way to fight a jihad: Leaders of the Commonwealth, the group of nations like Canada with historical ties to England, have been meeting in Malta for the past few days. High on their agenda: how to tackle the troublesome isse of terrorism. After cogitating and feasting for a while, the leaders are inching toward the conclusion that the best way to combat terrorism is to become--get this--more tolerant. From BBC News:

Commonwealth leaders are to discuss ways to increase tolerance in order to fight extremism at the close of their three-day summit in Malta.
The talks are expected to include proposals to share information and boost co-operation against terrorism.

The heads of state and government hope to issue a strong final statement.

This comes after "no holds barred" talks on global trade issues ended with a statement asking rich nations to make sacrifices at upcoming trade talks.

The 53 Commonwealth members are due to discuss ways to work together to prevent and investigate terrorist attacks.

Illegal migration, an issue both for rich and poor nations within the Commonwealth, is also on the agenda.

The BBC's Mike Wooldridge, in Malta, says encouraging better understanding between people of different faiths and fostering inclusion rather than alienation is the bread and butter of an organisation like the Commonwealth.

Personally, I prefer a crumpet with some raspberry jam. But then, unlike these brilliant tacticians I recognize the limits of "tolerance" as a means of fostering allegiance to one's new home; in fact, I believe it's fair to say that "tolerance", as codified in the ideological doctrine of multiculturalism, has made the problem of terrorism worse, not better, because it tolerates the intolerance of those who hate us. I also have a healthy respect for the enduring appeal of the jihad, an appeal which has little to do with how willing we are to embrace and understand people of different faiths. It's easy to understand, though, why the Commonwealthers would glomb on to  "tolerance" as the solution.  It is, after all, a most appealing concept. And it allows you to succumb to the comforting delusion that you have it within your power to make people like you because you're so goshdarned nice.

It doesn't bode too well for the future of the Commonwealth--or the West in general--if that's the best they can come up with.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:15 | link | comments (2)

Frenzy at the border: Some Palestinians were so keen to taste freedom for the first time after decades of occupation that many of them rushed to the border. A few too many, as it turns out. From Zaman Online:

Palestinians Stampede as They Cross Rafah Gate Freely

As the Rafah Gate, which is a key point in the Gaza Strip, opened, Palestinians flocked to the border to cross over to Egypt.

It was an interesting scene as a Palestinian moved convulsively to get his passport at once. The border gate was for the first time handed over to Palestinian control the previous day. The Gaza Strip, a 1.5 million populated region, was considered to be one of the “biggest jails of the world” during the 38-year occupation period.

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

If nominated, I can't run; if elected, I can't serve: You have to admire the way Palestinians have taken to the alien concept of democracy. Why, even hardened terrorists serving lengthy, concurrent prison terms are eager to run for political office. From israelinsider:

Jailed Palestinian uprising leader Marwan Barghouti and other younger activists swept Fatah primaries, signaling a change of generations that could make the corruption-tainted ruling party more attractive to voters in Jan. 25 parliament elections, according to preliminary results released Saturday.

The Barghouti-led "young guard" had long pushed for a greater say, especially after last year's death of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who founded Fatah and controlled it for four decades.

Arafat's successor, the reform-minded Mahmoud Abbas, agreed to hold internal elections for the list of parliament candidates and, under pressure from the young guard, blocked demands by Fatah oldtimers to be assigned secure spots on the slate. However, Abbas will still have some say about who gets on the final list.

"The old guard has failed politically and administratively, and in running their organization in a democratic way," said Palestinian analyst Hani al-Masri. "It's time to go home."

The Fatah veterans -- Arafat contemporaries who returned with him from exile in the early 1990s -- are widely considered as corrupt. Barghouti's generation rose through the ranks during the first Palestinian uprising, from 1987-1993, but was kept out leadership positions by the oldtimers.

Barghouti, 46, is seen as a potential successor to Abbas even though he is serving multiple life terms in an Israeli prison for involvement in shooting attacks that killed five Israelis.

Barghouti supports peace negotiations with Israel and before the outbreak of fighting in 2000 had close ties to Israeli leaders. However, he also advocates the use of force, including shooting attacks on Israeli settlers and soldiers, to try to drive Israel out of the West Bank.

Barghouti's wife, Fadwa, said her husband's strong showing is a message to Israel that "Marwan is not a terrorist, he is a leader of his people and his people will not abandon him."

Israeli officials said Saturday there is no chance Barghouti would win early release...

A cynic might suggest that it isn't exactly a great leap forward to want to install a new, younger terrorist leader in office; more like a nod to the murderous old reprobrate who "forged" your identity. But I suppose there's always a tendancy for people to want to go with what works.

Too bad for Barghouti he's in jail instead of soaking up the rays in Tunisia. At least then he might have had a shot.

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

Urban renewal: The Brits may build a humungous mosque in London, just in time for the summer Olympics. From the Times Online:

A MASSIVE mosque that will hold 40,000 worshippers is being proposed beside the Olympic complex in London to be opened in time for the 2012 Games.

The project’s backers hope the mosque and its surrounding buildings would hold a total of 70,000 people, only 10,000 fewer than the Olympic stadium.
Its futuristic design features wind turbines instead of the traditional minarets, while a translucent latticed roof would replace the domes seen on most mosques. The complex is designed to become the “Muslim quarter” for the Games, acting as a hub for Islamic competitors and spectators.

“It will be something never seen before in this country. It is a mosque for the future as part of the British landscape,” said Abdul Khalique, a senior member of Tablighi Jamaat, a worldwide Islamic missionary group that is proposing the mosque as its new UK headquarters.

Tablighi Jamaat has come under scrutiny from western security agencies since 9/11. Two years ago, according to The New York Times, a senior FBI anti-terrorism official claimed it was a recruiting ground for Al-Qaeda. British police investigated a report that Mohammad Sidique Khan, leader of the July 7 London bombers, had attended its present headquarters in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire. In August, Bavaria expelled three members of the organisation on the grounds that it promoted Islamic extremism.

Defenders of Tablighi Jamaat say that it is not political and confines itself to humanitarian work. It was founded in India under the British Raj and has many members in Pakistan and Bangladesh.

The east London complex would have by far the largest capacity of any religious building in Britain. The biggest at present is the Baitul Futuh in Morden, Surrey, which holds about 10,000 worshippers. Liverpool’s Anglican cathedral, the largest Christian place of worship, has a capacity of 3,000...

If the mosque is given the go-ahead, London's future will be set. It will become the "Muslim quarter" for the new Eurabia, a hub for Islamic competitors, spectators and conquerors.

And aside from the odd riot and transit explosion, they won't have had to fire a shot.

Update: An article from the January, 2005 issue of Middle East Forum describes Tablighi Jamaat as "Jihad's stealthy warriors". Not exactly the benign humanitarians its "defenders" make it out to be, nor the kind of folks you want setting up shop in the heart of your city.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:40 | link | comments

The Baathists back down: After insisting they wouldn't co-operate with the UN investigation into the murder of Lebanese politician Rafik Hariri, Syria's Baathist brigands have suddenly caved. It was either that or face sanctions, something Syria can ill afford given its desperate economic circumstances.

This is a humiliating volte face for the chinless wonder who supposedly runs the joint. We can only pray it marks the beginning of the end for his revolting regime.

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:14 | link | comments

Moral illiteracy: A terrific piece in the Telegraph by Charles Moore which excoriates the Brits for their misreading--and consequent villification--of Israel:

...If one stands back from the moral argument that rages round Israel, and just looks at this as a story, it reminds one intensely of that of ancient Israel's enemy, the Roman republic. An austere nation builds its power in the face of enemy neighbours. It does so by great feats of arms, and so its soldiers often become its political leaders. The commitment those leaders must give to the nation is absolute, lifelong, life-threatening. The deeds done in the nation's defence are frequently brave, sometimes appalling. Some would see Sharon as Milosevic, but might he not be Caesar?

But there's also an important difference from Rome: the purpose of victory has been more about security than conquest for its own sake. Israeli politics for the past dozen years has been the attempt to reconcile extrication from territory with security. That is what Sharon thinks about all the time, as did his Labour predecessors, Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak.

In the history of the West, such a narrative used to command fascination and respect. Many could apply it to their own people. British people whose convict cousins had built Australia out of their barren exile could understand; so could Americans, who had overcome hostile terrain and hostile inhabitants, and forged a mighty nation. So could any country formed in adversity, particularly, perhaps, a Protestant one - with its idea of divinely supported national destiny and its natural sympathy for the people first chosen by God. The sympathy was made stronger by the fact that the new state was robust in its legal and political institutions, free in its press and universities - a noisy democracy.

Anti-imperialists and the Left also found much to admire. They admired people whose pioneer spirit kept them equal, who often lived communally, who fled the persecution of old societies to build simpler, better ones. If you read Bernard Donoughue's diaries, just published, of his life as an adviser to Harold Wilson in the 1970s (a much better picture of what prime ministers are like than Sir Christopher Meyer's self-regarding effort), one difference between then and now that hits you hard is Donoughue's (and Wilson's) firm belief that the cause of Israel is the cause of people who wish to be free, and that its enemies are the old, repressive establishments.

As a boy, I loved this narrative. I cheered as Israeli courage swept away the outnumbering Arabs who tried to destroy it again and again. I bought books about the Six-Day War, many of which carried pictures of glamorous female Israeli soldiers.

But then a different narrative supervened. People called "the Palestinians" began to be mentioned. Once upon a time, the word "Palestinian" had no national meaning; it was simply the description on any passport of a person living in British-mandated Palestine. During the 19 years to 1967 when Jordan governed the West Bank, the people there had no self-rule, and no real name. UN Resolution 242, which calls for Israel to leave territories it occupied in 1967, does not mention Palestinians; it speaks only of "Arab refugees". Palestinian nationality came along, as it were, after the fact, a nationality largely based on grievance.

Since then, the story has grown and grown. Israel, which was attacked, has come to be seen as the aggressor. Israel, which has elections that throw governments out and independent commissions that investigate people like Sharon and condemn him, became regarded as the oppressive monster. In a rhetoric that tried to play back upon Jews their own experience of suffering, supporters of the Palestinian cause began to call Israelis Nazis. Holocaust Memorial Day is disapproved of by many Muslims because it ignores the supposedly comparable "genocide" of the Palestinians.

Western children of the Sixties like this sort of talk. They look for a narrative based on the American civil rights movement or the struggle against apartheid. They care little for economic achievement or political pluralism. They are suspicious of any society with a Western appearance, and in any contest between people with differing skin colours, they prefer the darker. They buy into the idea, now promoted by all Arab regimes and by Muslim firebrands with a permanent interest in deflecting attention from their own societies' problems, that Israel is the greatest problem of all.

Well, some will say, that is the way it is: Israel has abused power, and is reaping the whirlwind. I don't want to argue today about the rights and wrongs of Israel's actions, though I think, given its difficulties, it stands up better than most before the bar of history. All I want to ask my fellow Europeans is this: are you happy to help direct the world's fury at the only country in the Middle East whose civilisation even remotely resembles yours? And are you sure that the fate of Israel has no bearing on your own? In Iran, the new President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad makes the link. The battle over Palestine, he says, is "the prelude of the battle of Islam with the world of arrogance", the world of the West. He is busy building his country's nuclear bomb.

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:02 | link | comments

The Odious Fisk: Anyone remember an old British movie (first a play, I believe) called The Admirable Crichton? As I recall, it was about a bunch of Brits shipwrecked on an island, and how the resourceful butler saw them through their difficulties while his upper class twit of a boss proved uttely useless. It was designed to show that class was no indication of capablity, and that, by virtue of innate leadership and organizational talents, a person on a lower rung of the social ladder could be a better leader than his supposed "superior".

The Admirable Crichton represented the best of the British character as it was perceived back then--clever, eternally optimistic in the face of adversity, able to prevail under the harshest conditions. I recall him only to suggest his polar opposite, a man I have dubbed "The Odious Fisk".  The Odious Fisk is none other than British journalist Robert Fisk, a man who has done his darndest to persuade people that the West is vile, Osama rather loveable, and Zionists beyond the pale of civilized behaviour. For this he has become a verb: "to fisk", meaning to parse an article (either one written by Fisk or another Fiskian) line by line so as to expose the writer's inherent biases and refute what he or she has to say.

In today's Globe and Mail, Marcus Gee has an article about The Odious Fisk, a man whom he says could use a good 'fisking':

...With his past mistakes behind him, Mr. Fisk is riding high. Praise for his rants against American arrogance and brutality echoes around the Internet, where he is a hero to Bush bashers. He lectures to adoring university students around North America and the world. At the University of Toronto this week, a packed hall hung on his words.

His new book, a 1,366-page toe crusher called The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East, is coming out in Norwegian, Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, French, Swedish, Finnish, Greek, Turkish, Urdu, Persian, Japanese and even, he marvels, Slovenian.

In Toronto on promotional tour that takes him from France and Australia to Japan and Brazil, the 59-year-old veteran is full of boyish spirits and happy to share his sweeping opinions.

The reason for the Iraq war? "It's obviously all about oil, isn't it? If the major export of Iraq was asparagus, do you really think the 3rd Infantry Division would be in Baghdad?"

Western hopes for democracy in the Arab world? "I don't think we want democracy in the Middle East. We want to keep our dictators and soften their image."

On the American empire: "Superpowers have a sort of visceral need to project military strength. To stay behind frontiers makes them look neutered and impotent."

On the sanitizing of war: "Television is very complicit, They won't show the scenes of torn-up bodies being eaten by dogs that I see. If you saw what I see, you would never, ever support a war again."

The Fisk formula mixes vivid reporting on the horrors of war with wild denunciations of those who are to blame -- often, in his view, the Unites States and its allies. The atrocity story (American bomb levels Afghan village; Israeli missile kills Palestinian civilians) is his stock in trade. He has traipsed through hospitals, morgues, cemeteries and bombed-out ruins from Beirut to Baghdad.

No one doubts his courage. He stayed in his Beirut base through the Lebanese civil war. He was in Baghdad when the bombs started falling in 2003. He is one of few Western journalists who still venture out in Iraq, avoiding the safe, U.S.-held Green Zone and travelling in a beat-up car with no guards, so he won't attract attention.

His daring has won him a shelf full of awards (he has been named British International Journalist of the Year seven times) and made him one of the world's more famous and controversial journalists, loathed and loved with equal heat.

No one doubts his story telling skill, either. His new book begins with a riveting tale of his trips to the wilds of Afghanistan to interview Mr. bin Laden.

Over tea in a canvas tent, the terrorist mastermind tells "Mr. Robert" that a bin Laden follower has had a dream about him. In it, a bearded Mr. Fisk rode a horse and wore a flowing robe.

"This means you are a true Muslim," Mr. bin Laden says. Fearing his host wants to recruit him, he replies: "Sheik Osama, I am not a Muslim. I am a journalist. And the job of a journalist is to tell the truth."

But does he? Critics say his fame has grown, he has become less reporter than polemicist, a thinking man's Michael Moore who chooses only the facts that fit his world view. In the Fiskian universe, Arabs are almost always the victims, their plight almost always the fault of Western colonialism, American greed or Israeli brutality.

In a review of The Great War for Civilization, Ethan Bonner of The New York Times writes that "for all the awards he has garnered, and despite his rare combination of scholarly knowledge, experience and drive, Mr. Fisk has become something of a caricature of himself."

In one widely ridiculed article, Mr. Fisk wrote about feeling "self-disgust" when a mob of Afghans beat him about the head with rocks near the border with Pakistan during the U.S.-led attack of 2001. "If I was an Afghan refugee in Kila Abdullah," he wrote, "I would have done just what they did. I would have attacked Robert Fisk. Or any other Westerner I could find."

His critics have even invented a new word: fisking. Popular among Internet bloggers, it means refuting an argument by pointing out its errors of fact or logic one by one. His critics believe that his own journalism always needs a thorough fisking.

He, however, shrugs off such attacks. In person, the renowned prophet of doom is open, energetic and quick to laugh, a round elf of a man in the uniform of a middle-aged Brit: corduroy trousers, blue cardigan and old duffle coat.

He makes no excuse for having opinions. Anyone who reads history, he insists, must see that "we've been involved in assisting this curtain of oppression that lies over the Middle East. We've appointed many of the kings and presidents. We supported Saddam right through the Iran-Iraq war."

He insists that many of the region's problems spring from Western powers' colonial machinations. "In the 17 months that followed the First World War, we, the victors -- Britain and France -- drew the borders of Ireland and Yugoslavia and most of the Middle East, and I've spent my entire professional career watching the people in those places burn" -- a ringing quote that matches, almost word for word, a sentence in the book's preface.

It also happens to match the historical analysis of Osama bin Laden, who delivers jeremiads on the damage Western "crusaders" have done to the Muslim world.

So it's understandable that Mr. bin Laden did Mr. Fisk the dubious honour of mentioning him by name in a speech last year, advising people to read "my interviews with Robert Fisk" because, said the world's most wanted man about the world's most opinionated reporter, "I consider him to be neutral."

I won't bother fisking the above: I'd say it pretty much fisks itself. I do, however, have one comment--"asparagus"?!? I kinda like that one. Puts a whole new twist on that UN Asparagus-for-Food program which would likely still be going on had America not invaded Iraq.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:18 | link | comments (4)

M&Ms bite the dust: Here's the scene: Thanksgiving day. Katie Couric and Matt Lauer, taking the morning off from their hosting duties on The Today Show, are providing the colour commentary for NBC's coverage of the Macy's Parade. Katie and Matt ooh and ahh over the assorted floats and inflatables, reading the inane "off the cuff" blather typical of these kind of shows. As the hosts await the arrival of the next animated dirigible--immense M&M candies (whether plain or peanut it's still unclear), something seems to be holding up the proceedings. Unbeknownst to the perky hosts, the rogue candy has broken free from its moorings and has fallen to earth, unfortunately on an 11-year-old girl and her disabled older sister; both are injured. NBC producers fail to inform Matt and Katie about the incident, and get them to narrate a video of last year's M&M parade appearance. It's described--and I'm not making this up--as showing "the candies in distress." Whereupon Katie, in what is perhaps the most inopertune quip in the history of TV, explains that "...because of today's windy conditions, these characters are on video, and if we told you they were not in a panic, we'd be full of hot air."

It's a shame about the girl and her sister getting injured. But really, that's the funniest parade story I've heard since Chuckles the Clown dressed up as Peter Peanut and met his demise when a near-sighted elephant tried to shell him.

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

Does it smell like a falafel or a shwarma?: Today's unintentionally amusing headline comes from Chinese news service Xinhua. Since English is not its first languge, perhaps we should cut them some slack for this one: Palestinians smell freedom, but hardly, gradually.

Hope they don't gulp it down too fast and get a bad case of indigestion.

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:08 | link | comments

Dutch treat: Holland is one of those European countries which divested itself of Jewish semites and invited in Muslim ones to take their place--and them some. The Dutch, who are famous for their live and let live attitudes, have discovered to their horror that that's no way to assimilate people who despise you precisely because of their loosey-goosey approach to social mores. In the past, they've allowed Muslim clerics in to the country without making any demands on them. That didn't work too well, because some of these clerics preached messages which were antithetical--not to mention fatal--to the people of Holland. Now, the Dutch are trying to exert some control over what's being preached by offering "science" classes to student clerics at Dutch universities.  From Mehr News:

The Dutch government and five Islamic organizations recently signed an agreement to set up a curriculum for Islamic sciences in order to educate and train Muslim clergymen at universities in the Netherlands, the Persian service of the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) reported on Saturday.

Dutch Minister for Immigration and Integration Rita Verdonk and Dutch Minister for Education Maria van der Hoeven have authorized the allocation of almost 375,000 euros for the program.

Mosques in the Netherlands are still in charge of appointing prayer leaders. However, Islamic authorities have allowed the Netherlands to establish a program to train Muslim clergymen in accordance with international standards in Islamic sciences.

Since September 2004, the University of Amsterdam’s Faculty of Theology has been training 20 students who were interested in becoming prayer leaders and taking courses in Islamic sciences.

The students will gain prayer leader status after four years. However, they will not be allowed to serve in mosques and will only be allowed to visit Muslims in hospitals or in prisons.

There are about 150 foreign prayer leaders in the Netherlands, mostly from Turkey and Morocco.

The Dutch government is currently implementing a plan according to which all the prayer leaders in the country’s mosques will have to be Dutch citizens by 2008.

I have no idea what "Islamic sciences" are, but I have a feeling they have nothing to do with algebra. In any case, it's unclear how studying these sciences will acclimatize would-be clerics from Islamic cultures to life in the free-wheeling West. Moreover, the notion that the Dutch can protect themselves by keeping these science students away from mosques for four years while setting them loose in the prison population--the ripest of pickings for Islamic "reversions"--would be laughable if it weren't so pathetic.

All I can say is, enjoy your hash brownies at the Milky Way bar while you can, folks. In short order, all your fun will be over.

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

Lame comparision: An Iranian filmmaker makes a documentary about poverty-stricken women in his country having no other recourse but to turn to prostitution. The New York Times sees this as somehow akin to a cut-and-paste hatchet job by an American mockumentarian whose most famous (or infamous) film included that scene where the President reads a goat tale to moppets as jihadis are crashing into the Twin Towers.

A bit of a stretch, as far as I can tell. Unless, of course, there's a goat or two in the prostitution flick.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:42 | link | comments (2)

Everything old is new again:  In the old days, conspiracy theories were ugly little things. Printed in smeary ink on cheap newsprint, they could be passed around for only a short time before that paper turned to dust. Occasionally, they'd be spruced up sufficiently to find their way between two covers (like the various editions of  that Czarist fabrication, Protocols of the Elders of Zion). Even so, the sprucing up couldn't disguise the loathsome sentiments contained within.

So it is today, in the age of the Internet. No longer must Jew-haters send away for crappy volumes of their favourite conspiracies. At the click of a mouse, a hater can find everything he's looking for and never worry about his fingers getting smudged with ink.

Take this site, thoughfully compiled by the folks who run the Arab CNN. On a single page, the conspiracy-minded can find the most up-to-date information about the latest fantastical Jewish/American outrage. Click: Israel behind the bombings in Amman. Click: Hijacked 9/11 airplanes were piloted by robots, not jihadis. Click: Israel influenced appointment of UN investigator who wrote report blaming Syria for murder of Lebanese politician. Click: Iraq invaded so lucrative oil contracts could be handed to "colonialists" Britain and the U.S. Click: New U.S. strategy in Iran--get them to kill each other instead of American soldiers.

And there's more. Much more. Far too much to peruse at a single sitting. If you were so inclined you could spend hours, even days, pouring over this stuff. And at the end of it, your head would be so full of wool that you could knit a very long, very ugly scarf--and use it as a noose to hang the Jews.

See, even though today's technology may smooth out the rough edges and make it look a lot more polished, behind the veneer of professionalism, it's still the same old hate.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:04 | link | comments

Martin's numbers game: Rock star and Nobel Peace Prize wannabe Bono is "crushed." Seems his good amigo, P.M. Paul Martin, has failed to come through with the cash he promised for poverty-stricken Africa.

"I am personally not just disappointed, I'm crushed actually, because I really believed that the Prime Minister would do that. I felt, as a former finance minister, he would be able to make the numbers work."

Hey, Bono: Didn't we all?

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:00 | link | comments

Orwell on Jew-hatred: In the closing days of the Second World War, George Orwell wrote an essay about British anti-Semitism. Although his green and scepter'd land had a long history of disliking Jews  and nasty things about them, the British were not given to the kind of racial hatred which had gripped the Germans. The British version was, like the English themselves, polite, low-key, civilized.

Times have changed, Mrs. Miniver is dead, and that kind of understated Jew-hatred has been replaced by an overheated and unhinged loathing of the Zionists and their state (a loathing made all the more piquant by the realization that it was one of their own--Lord Balfour--who set the whole detestable ball rolling with that Declaration). And it's clear that while Orwell's essay was a product of its time and was hampered by a somewhat simplistic assessment of what was at the root of it all (Orwell said Jew-hatred was the result of nationalism, with a chaser of  irrationality), it still resonates with us today.

For example, Orwell writes that many people in England hate the Jews for dragging them into an unneccessary war meant to serve their own purposes:

It so happens that the war has encouraged the growth of antisemitism and even, in the eyes of many ordinary people, given some justification for it. To begin with, the Jews are one people of whom it can be said with complete certainty that they will benefit by an Allied victory. Consequently the theory that “this is a Jewish war” has a certain plausibility, all the more so because the Jewish war effort seldom gets its fair share of recognition. The British Empire is a huge heterogeneous organisation held together largely by mutual consent, and it is often necessary to flatter the less reliable elements at the expense of the more loyal ones. To publicise the exploits of Jewish soldiers, or even to admit the existence of a considerable Jewish army in the Middle East, rouses hostility in South Africa, the Arab coun tries and elsewhere: it is easier to ignore the whole subject and allow the man in the street to go on thinking that Jews are exceptionally clever at dodging military service. Then again, Jews are to be found in exactly those trades which are bound to incur unpopularity with the civilian public in war-time. Jews are mostly concerned with selling food, clothes, furniture and tobacco — exactly the commodities of which there is a chronic shortage, with consequent overcharging, black-marketing and favouritism. And again, the common charge that Jews behave in an exceptionally cowardly way during air raids was given a certain amount of colour by the big raids of 1940. As it happened, the Jewish quarter of Whitechapel was one of the first areas to be heavily blitzed, with the natural result that swarms of Jewish refugees distributed themselves all over London. If one judged merely from these war-time phenomena, it would be easy to imagine that antisemitism is a quasi-rational thing, founded on mistaken premises. And naturally the antisemite thinks of himself as a reasonable being. Whenever I have touched on this subject in a newspaper article, I have always had a considerable “come-back”, and invariably some of the letters are from well-balanced, middling people — doctors, for example — with no apparent economic grievance. These people always say (as Hitler says in Mein Kampf) that they started out with no anti-Jewish prejudice but were driven into their present position by mere observation of the facts. Yet one of the marks of antisemitism is an ability to believe stories that could not possibly be true. One could see a good example of this in the strange accident that occurred in London in 1942, when a crowd, frightened by a bomb-burst nearby, fled into the mouth of an Underground station, with the result that something over a hundred people were crushed to death. The very same day it was repeated all over London that “the Jews were responsible”. Clearly, if people will believe this kind of thing, one will not get much further by arguing with them. The only useful approach is to discover why they can swallow absurdities on one particular subject while remaining sane on others.

While few are accusing Jews of being craven these days--more likely, they're calling them agressive and overly belligerant--much in that paragraph sounds familiar. The charge that it's a Jewish war", not a civilizational one; the conspiracy theories that spring up like toxic mushrooms and spread their spores throughout the populace; even the attempt to tiptoe around the sensitivties of Jews-haters in "South Africa, the Arab countries and elsewhere"--all of it sounds depressingly up-to-date.

I'm reminded of a line from one of my favorite TV shows of the past, Hill Street Blues. The line went something like this: "Some people change; other people mutate."

A description which could easily apply to Jew-hatred and those who suffer its derangements.

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

Mr. and Mrs. Smith in quake country: The one thing--some might argue the only thing--the UN is good at is optics. It doesn't matter if you're useless, ineffectual and endemically corrupt (not to mention an Israel-loathing laughingstock in thrall to cads and despots). As long as you can send a babelicious movie star (and her hunkalicious consort) in to a war and/or natural disaster-ravaged site, you can appear to be doing some good. And in a world consumed by appearance, isn't that what really counts? From ABC News:

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan Nov 25, 2005 — Hollywood star and refugee advocate Angelina Jolie appealed Friday for the swift delivery of promised aid to Pakistan, saying a new disaster threatens earthquake survivors when winter hits devastated mountain areas.

Jolie, a goodwill ambassador for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, spoke a day after touring quake-devastated areas with actor Brad Pitt. A donor conference last week raised international aid pledges to $5.8 billion.

"The pledges that were made need to materialize soon, because from what I'm understanding, there are so many wonderful pledges of money that could come in the next few years but this winter is in the next few weeks, and so many people are in danger of possibly freezing to death," Jolie told a news conference in Pakistan's capital...

I have no doubt that the earnest Angelina is as sincere as she is beautiful. Otherwise, she might think twice about being parachuted into all those wretched places.Also, she adopted those two adorable orphans, and seems like a very devoted mama. Still, there's something that sticks in the throat about being lectured to on a regular basis by one of the most privileged women on the planet. And it's made no more palatable by the unpleasant aroma of santimony which seems to have settled in for good--like stale Chanel No. 5--around the fetching Ms. Jolie.

Furthermore, one can't help but think that the UN is using her as a diversionary tactic--and a very superficial one at that. By focusing on Angelina--look folks, ain't she purty?--it can distract attention away from its utter failure to tackle some deep-seated problems. Like Darfur, the Congo, terrorism, its own rape-loving peacekeepers and many more too numerous to name.

Posted by: scaramouche at 15:22 | link | comments (1)

As if we don't have our hands full with the jihad...: Paul Hellyer, a former Liberal cabinet minister during the Trudea era, is warning us to be on guard for a new threat. And this one is intergalactic. (link via Drudge)

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:52 | link | comments

De-"fence"-less: A heartwarming ceremony just took place, one which symbolizes the new freedom being enjoyed by members of the incipient Palestinian state. From Ireland Online:

With a ribbon-cutting ceremony, the Gaza-Egypt border was reopening today – a milestone for the Palestinians who for the first time take control of a border crossing without Israeli veto powers and gain some freedom of movement.

The Rafah terminal on the Gaza-Egypt had been closed by Israel as its troops withdrew from the Gaza Strip in September.

After two months of international mediation and a final push by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Israel agreed that the Palestinians would run their side of the border, with the help of European monitors.

The crossing will open to Palestinian travellers tomorrow morning, initially for four hours a day until the European monitors get settled. After the test period, opening hours will be expanded.

“From this moment, we feel we are free,” said Fathia Najar, 55, one of a group of Palestinian travellers waiting near Rafah to cross the next day. “Before this, we lived in a jail.”

Before the Israeli pullout, travel through Rafah was often difficult. The terminal was repeatedly closed on security grounds, and at times travellers waited for days to get through.

Heavy security ringed the terminal during today’s ceremony, with police setting up roadblocks on access roads. Police officers also lined the main north-south road from Gaza City to Rafah.

The opening of the terminal is expected to give a boost to Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, as his Fatah movement heads into fierce competition against the Islamic militant group Hamas in January 25 parliament elections.

The border deal backs Abbas’ message that Palestinians can only gain independence through negotiations with Israel. Hamas says such talks are pointless and that it drove Israel out of Gaza by force.

“This is a historic day,” Palestinian Cabinet Minister Mohammed Dahlan said at the start of the ceremony. Dahlan was key to negotiating the border deal with Israel and is a strong contender in the parliament election.

Despite the Abbas-Hamas rivalry, Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar attended the opening ceremony. “Our presence here does not mean we support this agreement,” the Hamas leader said after hugging Dahlan.

The opening ceremony was held under a large tent, with 1,200 guests attending. After Muslim prayers, guests stood for a moment of silence for Palestinians killed in fighting with Israel.

In preparation for the opening, the terminal was refurbished. It got a new coat of paint, workers replaced the ceiling tiles and installed new lighting. Rows of blue and orange chairs filled the arrivals and departure halls, along with batteries of computers, X-ray machines, metal detectors and security cameras...

Nice to see that at least some of that EU money went for infrastructure didn't end up in the pockets of Palestinian terrorists.

Update: For some reason Ireland Online neglected to mention that during the ceremony, a bunch of elated terrorists performed the following song:

Oh, give us land, lots of land
Unimpeded by the Jews.
Don’t fence us in.
There are guns, there are bombs,
There are tunnels we can use.
Don’t fence us in.
We can now operate
Without consequences
And work to subvert Israel’s defences.
We can’t stand the Jews and all their hateful fences.
Don’t fence us in.
Just let us crow
How we know
That Hamas forced the Jews to run away.
Since terror’s key we agree
It’s the way to make ‘em pay.
And someday soon we’ll reclaim
Our hegemony
And rule from the Jordan to that azure sea.
The fence is a symbol of what’s yet to be.
Don’t fence us in…

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:27 | link | comments

Word to the (un)wise: In the courage department, the EU mice-men (see post below) have nothing on the IAEA nuclear chihuahuas. After backing down to the mullahs for--what, the 20th, 30th time? (I seem to have lost count)--they have earned the approbation of a grateful cleric. The IAEA go-slow approach, avers mully-bully Rafsanjani is a sign of "wisdom". From Reuters:

Influential Iranian cleric Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani said on Friday the U.N. nuclear watchdog's latest statement on Iran's disputed atomic program was a step in the right direction but still had elements of "harassment".

The International Atomic Energy Agency decided on Thursday not to refer Iran to the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions in order to give Russia time to broker a compromise deal under which Moscow would enrich Iran's processed uranium.

"This time a kind of wisdom, precaution, and an avoidance of adventurism prevailed over the IAEA meeting," Rafsanjani told worshippers at Friday prayers in Tehran.

The mid-ranking cleric heads the powerful Expediency Council which arbitrates in constitutional disputes...

To quote that brilliant fictional musician Nigel Tufnel (who would have fit right in at the IAEA), "It's such a fine line between clever and stupid." And the IAEA crossed it a long time ago.

Update: In a bold restatement of the obvious, a Reuters AlterNet headline informs us that "EU diplomacy fails to dent Iran's nuclear ambitions."

Here's another self-evident statement: If we leave the fate of the world up to mice and chihuahuas, we are all well and truly doomed.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:07 | link | comments (1)

Meanwhile, over in Sudan...:As the EUnuchs turn their attention once again to the world's one and only hot spot (at least, the only one they're willing to acknowledge) a blistering "J'accuse" in Dissent Magazine underscores what happens when the world is unduly gripped by the Jewish state: they ignore brutal realities occurring elsewhere:

Two and a half years after major conflict began in the Darfur province of far western Sudan, it is perversely clear how the future history of this tortured region will be written. Any meaningful account will be guided by a chronology that includes readily discernible signposts of genocidal destruction, beginning in spring 2003; various occasions for empty international condemnation of accelerating ethnically targeted destruction of non-Arab, or “African,” tribal populations throughout Darfur; the numerous, belated stages in an inadequate humanitarian response to rapidly growing concentrations of vulnerable civilian victims; serial failures by the UN and Western democracies to confront Khartoum’s génocidaires; and desperately expedient reliance upon a glib notion of “African solutions for African problems.”

The protagonists in this history will be many, but are again readily identified: Khartoum’s National Islamic Front regime, which continues to dominate Sudan’s new “government of national unity,” formed in July 2005; the Janjaweed, Khartoum’s savagely destructive Arab militia force in Darfur; both of the main insurgency groups in Darfur, which emerged from decades of political and economic marginalization, as well as in response to more recent Arab militia raiding, only to become blind to the massive civilian suffering their increasingly callous actions occasioned; and the African Union (AU), particularly those countries such as Nigeria, Libya, and Egypt that so adamantly refused to acknowledge either the scale of Darfur’s security requirements or the desperate need for non-African humanitarian intervention.

The UN is also culpable, with the manifest failures of both its humanitarian and political organizations—China in particular has paralyzed the UN Security Council, ensuring that no effective actions have been taken against a regime that has allowed Chinese oil companies to become dominant in Sudan’s burgeoning petroleum industry; blame also falls on the United States, the United Kingdom, and Denmark—all of which muted their criticism of Khartoum’s genocide in Darfur for much of 2003–2004 in the interest of securing a north/south Sudanese peace agreement; and particular disgrace falls to those wealthy nations—such as Germany, France, Italy, Japan, and the oil-rich Arab countries—that failed to respond meaningfully to desperate funding appeals for starving and acutely vulnerable civilians...

Guess they didn't have enough money left over after cabling all that cash to the P.A.

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

Of mice and men: When it comes to admonishing Iran, a totalitarian mullocracy with genocidal tendancies, the EUnuchs act like a "wee...cow'rin,tim'rous beastie" (to quote the Robert Burns poem about a mouse). But the mice-men grow a mane and start to roar whenever there's a chance to chastise that truly threatening entity. From Reuters:

European Union diplomats have said Israel's policies in Arab East Jerusalem are hurting the prospects of a final agreement on the city with the Palestinians, U.S. and British newspapers said on Friday.

The New York Times said a report by EU diplomats in East Jerusalem and Ramallah to the 25-member group's foreign ministers recommended a more aggressive policy toward Israeli actions in East Jerusalem.

The report accused Israel of boosting illegal settlement in and around East Jerusalem and of using the route of its separation barrier "to seal off most of East Jerusalem, with its 230,000 Palestinian residents, from the West Bank" and to create a "de facto annexation of Palestinian land", the paper said.

Israeli policies "are reducing the possibility of reaching a final-status agreement on Jerusalem that any Palestinian could accept," said the report, which the Times said it had obtained "from someone who wanted to publicize it".

Several British newspapers also carried the report.

"Israeli measures also risk radicalizing the hitherto relatively quiescent Palestinian population of East Jerusalem," the Times quoted the report as saying.

The authors of the report recommended that the EU ask Israel "to halt discriminatory treatment of Palestinians in East Jerusalem, especially concerning working permits, building permits, house demolitions, taxation and expenditure", it said.

Commenting on the report, an Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman said:

"We have accepted the principle that there has to be a viable and contiguous Palestinian state and nothing that we are doing excludes the possibility of reaching that outcome."

On the West Bank barrier, he said:

"The security fence is a remarkably successful tool in preventing the penetration of suicide bombers into Israel."

The New York Times said EU foreign ministers meeting in Brussels on Monday decided not to publish the report and instead asked for a "detailed EU analysis on East Jerusalem to be adopted and made public" at their next meeting in mid-December.

Israel seized East Jerusalem, along with the rest of the West Bank and Gaza, in the 1967 Middle East War and claims the city as its "united and eternal capital". Palestinians want East Jerusalem as the capital of a future state of their own.

You can't really blame the EUnuchs. They're starting to get a bit desperate themselves, what with all those angry masses in their midst and no clear indication that they will ever be able to transform them into "Europeans". It must be comforting to fall back on old habits--to look at Israel's problems as self-contained and having little to do with their own. If only we could resolve that tricky situation with the Palestinians, give those deserving folks back their land and put the brakes on that Jewish "land grab", all would be well. The restive hoards would settle down and watch soap operas. Strapping young lads would stop strapping on bombs. The lion would lie down with the lamb. There'd be peace in the valley and love in the world.

A familiar refrain from Europe: If only if weren't for the Jews...  

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:19 | link | comments

Turkey time: Steve Bell, the Guardian's graphic propogandist, hits a new low with his Thanksgiving cartoon.

Bell, whose sense of humour is as impaired as his pen, manages to make Bush look marginally less demonic than he usually does, but only because the President is being shtupped by a turkey.

Posted by: scaramouche at 22:29 | link | comments

Spencer in Israel: Robert Spencer, one of a small of band of the world's truth-tellers. visited Israel recently. Spencer, a devout Catholic, lives in an undisclosed location on the Eastern seaboard because many don't like what he has to say and would like to silence him--permanently. For others, however, he remains a fearless critic of the forces of darkness which seek to destroy our way of life.

Here's some of what he has to say about Israel, but, as he is apt to remark on his own site(s), "read it all":

...Israel stands virtually alone in the world not only because of lingering antisemitism, but because Palestinian Arabs and their allies have succeeded in convincing opinion-makers that their land was taken illegitimately by Israel, and that they are oppressed there. The facts are otherwise, as I have discussed in a previous article here. The state was established legitimately and with the approval of the United Nations, and even the "occupied territories" were obtained according to what have been universally recognized throughout history as the rules of war. (Or should the United States give up the "occupied territories" of California, Texas, and other Western states? Should Russia withdraw from its "occupied territories" in Konigsberg, eastern Finland and eastern Poland? Should Muslims across North Africa, the Middle East, Iran, India and Southeast Asia withdraw from those "occupied territories" back to Arabia?) While I am sympathetic to genuine Palestinian Arab refugees, and with my friends from Ramallah and Jenin, I can't help but notice the role of the neighboring Arab states in exacerbating and prolonging the refugee problem for political reasons that are ultimately rooted in the jihad ideology. I can't help but notice that I was able to visit the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, Mount Tabor, and other Christian holy sites in Israel, which mean a great deal to me personally, while Bethlehem, under Palestinian Authority control, has become a dangerous place from which Christians are fleeing as quickly as they can. I can't help but notice that there was no call to establish a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza between 1948 and 1967, when those territories were under Jordanian and Egyptian control respectively -- despite the alleged difference of nationality between Palestinians and Jordanians and Egyptians.

Ultimately, if the nations of the world are interested in defending universal human rights and the equality of dignity of all people, they need to stand with Israel. Misdiagnosis of the problem -- that is, the unwillingness or inability of Western governments to acknowledge the motives and goals of the jihadists who want above all to destroy them -- has largely prevented this...

Posted by: scaramouche at 15:27 | link | comments (1)

Ho hum: Another day; another warning from the EU to Iran. This time, with clear evidence in hand that the Islamic dystopia intends to build some nukes (if it hasn't built them already), the EUnuchs are once more waggling an arthritic finger in the mullah's direction. Cease and desist at once, they say, or we'll be forced to refer you to the UN.

Ooooo. Scary!

Update: Mo ElBee and his kennel of gonad-less nuclear "watchdogs" have decided to give Iran "more time."

Update: "Mick" Ahmadinejad and the Mully-Bullies sing:

Time is on our side, yes it is
Time is on our side, yes it is

Now we always say 
It's for ‘lectricity.
But don’t come runnin' round.
Don’t come runnin' round.
Don’t come runnin' round to see-ee-ee.

Oh, time is on our side, yes it is
Time is on our side, yes it is.

You’re searching for silos
We buried ‘em deep.
So you call all go back
You can all go back
You can all go back to slee-ee-eep…

Update: Another one from Mick and the boys:

A life without the Jews
Would be just grand.
They’re squatting there atop
Our sacred land.
Always coming back
From every new attack
And our rebukes.
How ‘bout some nukes?

Chorus:

Goodbye, Zionist ent’ty.
Wipe the map plum clean of you.
When it reverts to its old ident’ty
No one’s gonna miss you.

ElBaradei and crew present no threat.
They’re ‘bout as feckless as a dog can get.
Always backing down
And spinnin’ round and round to miss a fight—
No bark, no bite.

Chorus:

Goodbye, Zionist ent’ty.
Wipe the map plum clean of you.
When it reverts to its old ident’ty
No one’s gonna miss you.

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

What's wrong with this picture?: The Globe and Mail illustrates a story about an Israeli paraglider who accidentally drifted into Lebanese airspace with a completely unrelated AP photo. The photo (no doubt a completely spontaneous shot--aren't they always?) shows an Israeli soldier pointing his weapon at a gaggle of sweet-faced, hijab-wearing Palestinian moppettes as they approach, what else?, a checkpoint.

Since there's nary a paraglider in sight (paragliding being one of those activities that might compromise a tender moppette and imperil her family's honour) one must conclude that this "unposed" photo serves another purpose: to show the fairy tale (very phallic, if you care to read your Bettleheim) of the big, bad Israeli wolves baring their teeth at defenceless Palestinian Red Riding Hoods.

Don't you just hate the Zionists?

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:01 | link | comments

The psychopathology of "peace in our time": Dr. Kevin Levin, an instuctor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the author of The Oslo Syndrome, explains that living under seige for so long can delude otherwise intelligent people into believing in dangerous nonsense--like the idea that your life-long enemy, a murderous Arab supremacist, has suddenly become a warm and fuzzy "peace partner". Dr. Levin describes this faulty thinking--the triumph of false hope over reason--in medical terms, as a kind of collective derangement (like Jew-hatred?). From FrontPage Magazine:

FP: Tell us how and why people under siege often end up internalizing the hatred against themselves and delude themselves about the malicious intentions of their enemies?

Levin: They do so because they are eager to feel some control over a painful situation which is, in reality, out of their control. Chronically abused children - more specifically those subjected to parental abuse - typically blame themselves for their victimization because to do so supports a fantasy that if they reform, if they become "good," their parents will treat them differently. To look at their predicament more realistically would force them to accept their helplessness to change their terrible circumstances, and children, and adults as well, prefer to fend off acknowledging such bitter realities.

Similarly, within populations under chronic siege - whether minorities marginalized, demeaned and attacked by surrounding societies or small nations besieged by their neighbors - some will invariably seek either to avert their gaze from the severity of the threat or rationalize the threat and blame themselves or others within their community for the danger. Their doing so reflects wishful thinking that if only they would reform sufficiently the danger would be alleviated.

Israel has, at best, a capacity to respond effectively to attacks by its neighbors; it does not have the capacity to end the Arab siege, to force peace upon the Arabs. Peace, if and when it comes, will do so on the Arabs' timetable, not Israel's. Unfortunately, all the evidence indicates the Arab world is not about to choose genuine peace with Israel in the foreseeable future. This lack of control over a painful situation led many Israelis to embrace delusions of control; delusions that the right concessions could not help but win peace from the Arabs.

Hence, the pointlessness of the Road Map to Nowheresville and the Peace in Our Time process.

But don't tell Ariel Sharon. He thinks he can somehow maneuver past the jihadis and sign a binding agreement with "secularists" who are no less determined than the jihadis to supplant the Jews on what they consider to be eternal Arab land. As such, another kind of derangement seems to be at work here.

Dare we call it "a messiah complex"?

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:03 | link | comments

Sisterhood is powerful: Especially when you're an African-American coed wearing a hijab. From the Los Angeles Times:

Tottering on stilettos, Amira Shalash, a freshman at the University of Kentucky, tossed back her long, tousled hair and tugged at the neckline of her sweater, which had slipped off her shoulder.

Giggling, her friends — who wear hijabs, traditional Muslim head scarves — teased her that she was not dressed modestly enough.

The nine young women were gathered to learn about the nation's first Islamic sorority.

The motto of Gamma Gamma Chi: "Striving for the pleasure of Allah through Sisterhood, Scholarship, Leadership and Community Service."

The sorority, whose national chapter is in Greensboro, N.C., hopes to establish its first campus chapter at the University of Kentucky.

Taking a seat at the introductory meeting, Boushra Aghil, a 20-year-old junior in an olive green shirt and black hijab, studied the sorority's gold brochure. She was curious about how Gamma Gamma Chi would reconcile Islamic morals with sorority life — and the party atmosphere associated with it.

"My parents would never, ever let me join a regular sorority," Shalash said. "I don't know any Muslim sorority girls."

Yet many young Muslim women are intrigued by the concept. Since Gamma Gamma Chi was founded seven months ago, Muslim students from 14 states — and from Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates — have e-mailed the sorority's national headquarters in Alexandria, Va. The biggest response came from the University of Kentucky in Lexington, a city with a Muslim population of about 2,500.

The idea for Gamma Gamma Chi came from Imani Abdul-Haqq, a 34-year-old business administration major at Guilford College in Greensboro. She hopes to establish chapters in every region of the United States by 2015.

An African American who converted to Islam in 2000, Abdul-Haqq considered joining an established black sorority but worried that she would have to compromise her Muslim beliefs. Even the nickname for the nine predominantly black fraternities and sororities — the Divine Nine — makes her uncomfortable. Only Allah, she says, is divine.

"As a Muslim who dresses modestly and does not drink, I wouldn't want to set myself apart from the people I was pledging with," she said. "I want to feel the unity."

The Muslim women at the University of Kentucky said they also wanted that feeling of connection.

"The American white-bread sorority girls wouldn't always understand our issues," Aghil said. "We already wear a scarf, we recognize we are the odd people out, but we need a support system, a group that can support us ...

Posted by: scaramouche at 23:24 | link | comments

The IHT notes a "new" old trend: The International Herald Tribune has a story about two Jordanian jihadis, related through marriage and a murderous ideology. The first jihadi, a male, is described as an unassuming if aimless young man who took up jihad after he was in a car accident in Amman--alcohol was involved--in which two of his friends were killed. The second jihadi, his wife's sister, was none other than the infamous Mrs. Suicide, the woman who strapped on a dynamite belt so she could accompany her similarly-attired husband to Paradise. They then crashed a lavish wedding where his bomb went off but hers didn't, thus scotching their best laid vacation plans.

The IHT, always quick on the uptake (i.e. as slow as chilled molasses compared to the blogosphere), explains why the two in-law outlaws may have acted this way:

Nidal Arabiyat and Rishawi were connected not just by family, but by devotion to the most extreme interpretation of Islam, called the salafi jihadi trend. Salafis believe that society should be governed solely by the Holy Koran and that any other form of governance amounts to a usurpation of divine authority. They believe in an austere, fundamentalist Islam and they want to unite Muslims under its rule.

But there are several factions, and the jihadis view their quest as part of a war to rout those they view as infidels from Arab lands, a war in which they believe they alone have the right to decide who should live and who should die.

And now, because of this new trend (a variation on a very old theme), one is dead and the other is in jail.

Posted by: scaramouche at 23:18 | link | comments

A rude awakening: For those who think it can't happen here because we refused to partake in the War in Iraq or because we're so much nicer and more tolerant than our southern neighbours, here's a chilling report to the contrary. From the CBC:

Montreal police are scrambling to reassure commuters after a Spanish newspaper said a man arrested in the wake of the 2004 Madrid bombings had detailed information about the Quebec city's subway system.

Moroccan Abdelhak Chergui, 32, right, is led away by a policeman in Granada, Spain, after his arrest for allegedly being involved in the Madrid train bombings. (AP file photo)

El País daily newspaper reported Tuesday that Spanish police found information about the Montreal subway system as well as data on Spanish trains and a map of the London system on Abdelhak Chergui's personal laptop computer.

It allegedly included detailed plans of Montreal's Metro, such as route information, station locations – even details on passenger capacity and the system that opens and closes the doors on the subway cars.

But RCMP Insp. Tom O'Neill said Wednesday that an early investigation showed there wasn't any specific threat to the Montreal system – or anywhere else in Canada.

"The credibility of the threat is unknown. I'd say at this point, it has been quite some time since the information has been known by the Spanish authorities."

O'Neal said those authorities passed the information on to RCMP liaison officers in Europe, but it seems it never went any further.

Both the RCMP and police force in Montreal said they only found out about the information through the media...

Nice to know that the Mounties and Montreal's gendarmes are on top of things.

Posted by: scaramouche at 22:23 | link | comments (1)

Lust for death: We all know that jihad is the internal struggle to be strive in the path of the Big Guy Upstairs. But for teenagers in Saudi Arabia with raging hormones and no socially acceptable way to co-mingle with the opposite sex, it's also being positioned as a way to work off some of their sexual tension.  MEMRI, that invaluable service which provides a window into the Arab world, has a translation of a recent article in a Saudi newspaper which recounts how Saudi Arabian markets are full of "religious cassettes" designed to entice horny Saudi teens into becoming martyrs. The payoff: lots and lots of posthumous nookie:

Religious Cassettes Promoting Jihad

"So ubiquitous are the religious cassette shops that they are outnumbered only by groceries… The bulk of cassettes sold in these stalls are motivational. On closer scrutiny, you will realize that their contents are confined to a system of thought that serves to prepare youth to accept its ideas, yield to them, and adopt its Jihad program.

"These cassettes mostly urge people to carry out Jihad through taking up arms, without specifying the zero hour or the Jihad battlefield. As such they advocate Jihad for Jihad's sake. It's a mobilization campaign in which Jihad becomes a state of mind, a mode of living. They want you to give up this foul and mean earthly life, renounce worldly pleasures, devote your life to Jihad, and seek to die in the Jihad battlefield so as to win martyrdom."

Spiritual Martyrdom is Reduced to Jihad for Lust

"The basic Islamic issue - carrying out Da'wa (Islamic propagation), calling people to Allah, spreading monotheism (Tawheed), security and Islam, establishing justice, and treating people on equal terms - is reduced to a marginal matter in comparison to the pleasures in the Hereafter that the martyr can win, pleasures that supersede worldly pleasures and must be given up.

"The modern martyr has thus reduced spiritual martyrdom [for the sake of Allah] to a Jihad for lust, for the utmost pleasure and intoxication a Nirvana state of mind.

"The Jihad cassette describes the path that must be followed in order to win martyrdom and deserve the Hoor Al-Een fair females with wide, lovely eyes. It reduces the lofty objective of spiritual martyrdom to mere lust and a selfish search for sexual pleasure, regardless of what martyrdom can achieve for the public interest or for upholding Allah's word.

"In their call for giving up this world in preparation for the hereafter, and through their description of the martyr's reward - they are trying to program the mind to accept as principle the idea of committing suicide by blowing up oneself. Whoever is convinced of the reward of lust awaiting him will not hesitate to commit suicide: He will seek death with no fear, focused on the pleasures of the hereafter as compensation for the worldly pleasures abandoned.

"The sweetest thing for a teenager, especially in a conservative society like ours, is sex, and the discourse of the religious cassettes is directed toward these very youngsters in their sexual peak of life. They access these youth through the Hoor Al-Een, just as how the youth of our time were drawn to slide pictures of actresses and female singers. So should we not consider sexual suppression in conservative societies as one of the factors leading to such deviation?…"

Memo to Karen Hughes: How about trying to win their "hearts, minds and hydraulics" by convincing them that corporeal coupling is much more enjoyable than the posthumous kind?

Posted by: scaramouche at 22:02 | link | comments

Chris recants: Bloviating Hardball host Chris Matthews had a few choice words for some political science students at the University of Toronto yesterday. According to the Canadian Press account, Matthews was perturbed about the "crazy zeitgeist" that has infected the nation since 9/11, making it next impossible to have a rational discussion about why America is so thoroughly hated in the Muslim world. "The period between 9/11 and Iraq was not a good time for America. There wasn't a robust discussion of what we were doing," Matthews is quoted as saying. Moreover, "If we stop trying to figure out the other side, we've given up. The person on the other side is not evil--they just have a different perspective."

Today, notes James Taranto on Best of the Web, Matthews insists he was misquoted: 

I told the students that my way to deal with terrorists was to do what Golda Meir did after the killing of Israeli athletes at the Olympics: track them down and kill them one by one and be rough about it.

I don't know why the reporter chose to ignore my clear statement was the appropriate response to terorism [sic], why he chose to skip to my strong belief that we need to get behind this massive hatred we're facing in the Muslim world.

Check with the University for confirmation. I was invited by the political science students. I'm pretty sure they taped it because that had an audi-visual [sic] person there putting on my microphone.

Anyway there were many witnesses who can recall what I said if somebody asks.

Well, now I'm really confused. Does that mean Chris doesn't think America has fallen prey to a "crazy zeitgeist"? And if it hasn't, can we at least blame it on the Jews, er, neo-Cons, er, same difference?

As for "getting behind this massive hatred"--yeah, that's a real head-scratcher, Chris. I  suggest you pay a few visits to Jihad Watch. I think Robert and Hugh can help you figure it all out.

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:13 | link | comments (1)

A Spaniard in the works: A young Moroccan-born Frenchman from the no-go Paris suburb of Saint-Denis has found a way to get around the prejudice of French employers. From Islam Online:

"Abdel Rahim" has changed his name to "Peres" and no longer brags about his Arabic roots in public to spare himself police and employers' discrimination, and dozens have opted for the new lease of life to escape the harsh reality.

“Neither my family in Morocco nor my Muslim colleagues in France knew that I changed my name on official papers,” the 23-year-old French-naturalized Moroccan told IslamOnline.net Monday, November 21.

“The new name gave me a job and put me on an equal footing with my work colleagues, who knew nothing about my background.”

He said that his dark complexion further represented a stumbling bloc to his ambitions.

“But I found a way out by pretending that I was of Spanish origins,” he said, with a bitter laugh on his face.
“When I was Abdel Rahim, I never received any response from five companies for which I had applied,” he added. “But Peres was accepted now in two jobs and has to choose.” ...

Abdel Rahim says he now has nothing to worry about when stopped by police on the streets to check his ID.

“They treat me as a first-class citizen with no discrimination at all,” Abdel Rahim said...

Karim, 22, choose Christophe to make life easy in highly background-conscious France...

I know the whole point of the story is to show how horribly prejudiced the French are, refusing to consider Abdel for a job until he changed his name and impersonated a Spaniard. But I can't held but derive a different message. Abdel Rahim and those like him are self-starters. Rather than sitting around and griping about the unfairness of their lot, they took it upon themselves to do something. Let's call them the Horatio Algers of Saint-Denis who, unlike most of their confreres, chose to hoist themselves up by their own bootstraps instread of finding the kind of pride that comes from torching lots of French-made cars. I'd say Abdel and those like them have a good chance of making a life for themselves beyond the confines of the Arab ghetto, one which is as much a state of mind as it is a physically-confining entity.

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

Today's unintentionally amusing headline: From the New York Times: Training for Balloon Handlers at Parade Is Said to Be Light.

Hurray for that. 'Cause the last thing you'd be wanting in a Thanksgiving Day Parade is a bunch of heavy-handed ballon handlers to weigh the behemoths down.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:50 | link | comments

Jacko's ugly rant: Michael Jackson, the former King of Pop who vamoosed to Bahrain in the wake of his aquittal for molesting a child, has been blaming his monetary woes on an eerily familiar target. I think you can probably guess which one. From the New York Daily News:

Michael Jackson picked a familiar target to blame for his mounting money problems - the Jews.

In phone messages obtained by ABC News, the apparently prejudiced pop star likens them to "leeches" and claims they conspired to leave him "penniless."

"They suck...they're like leeches...I'm so tired of it," Jackson tells former adviser Dieter Wiesner in one of them. "The Jews do it on purpose."

The ugly message, which was made two years ago and aired yesterday on "Good Morning America," was one of several provided by Wiesner's lawyer, Howard King.

Wiesner and another former Jacko adviser, Marc Schaffel, were fired by the singer and are suing him to recoup the millions they say he owes them.

Jackson had to apologize to Jewish groups a decade ago after he included lyrics like "Jew me/Sue me/Everybody do me/Kick me/Kike me" on the song "They Don't Care About Us."

Jackson, who relocated to Bahrain after he was acquitted of child molesting charges, did not respond to the revelations...

"Apparently prejudiced"? What would he have to say to be accused of being "obviously prejudiced"--call them apes and pigs instead of leeches?

No, that wouldn't do it either.

In case you don't recognize it, Jacko actually borrowed his witty lyrics "Jew me/Sue me" from that famous Broadway show Guys and Dolls (which I hear he was planning to rework as "Guys and Lads").

Jew me, sue me,
What can you do me?
I hate you.
Kick me, kike me
Don’t even like me.
I hate you.
Enough already,
You Jews are all leeches.
Enough already with you.
So nu?
So Jew me, screw me
Enrich yourselves through me
‘Cause I hate you!

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:40 | link | comments

Strange sheetfellows: Jew-hatred brings the oddest people together. Take, for example, KKKer David Duke and the Syrians. The white supremacist who once had legitimite political aspirations is visiting the Baathist backwater to schmooze with the Assad-lickers about their joint interests: namely, loathing the Chosen People. From Arabic News (an excellent wrap-up of daily derangements in the Arab world):

Former US Louisiana Representative David Duke on Monday expresses solidarity with Syria in face of the pressures and threats against the country.

Duke told a news conference at the 'Nation's Tent' at Rawda Square in Damascus that "I have come to Syria to express my support to the Syrian people and their just stances...it's the duty of every free man to reject the conspiracies and threats Syria is exposed to."

He added that the pro-Israel neoconservatives in the US have influence on their country's foreign policy and have been working behind the scenes through their mass media in the US to hide "the reality of Israeli terrorism against the Arabs."

On the war on Iraq, the former US Senator said the war has created a crisis in the world, adding that those who advised the American administration to go into this war have been working to widen the scope of the crisis to spread it to other countries in the region.

Former Representative Duke said Iraq war cost the US 300 billion dollars, more than 2000 dead, and between 20,000 to 30,000 wounded, pushed America into a real crisis and raised hatred against its foreign policy in the world.

He added that Israel has been practicing state terrorism against the Arabs, and the American people know this reality which "Zionist-controlled mass media seek to distort."

Duke questioned why nobody has so far talked about the Israeli mass destruction weapons and its violation of more than 50 UN resolutions while it continues to occupy Arab territories and increase the number of its settlements in the West Bank. He added that Iraq was invaded under false allegations, that the country had WMD which never existed.

Duke expressed appreciation of Syria under the leadership of President Bashar al-Assad, saying he would do his bets to convey "the real peace-loving Syrian" stances to peoples across the world.

The news conference was attended by President of the World Charity Fund for Cooperation and Tolerance Among Religion and member of the Russian Union of Writers Valerie Borokhova, Professor of the Diplomatic Relations at the Academy of politics in Moscow, Director General of Islamic Furqan in Moscow Mohammad al-Rashid, several members of the Syrian Parliament and Arab and foreign correspondents.

I told you Jew-hatred corrodes the brain.

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

More "checkpoint-mania": The AP (via the JPost) reports that a school teacher has persuaded his contingent of Palestinian moppets to protest the "intrusive searches" they've been subjected to as they pass through the checkpoint to school every day:

Palestinian schoolteachers taught pupils in the road outside an IDF checkpoint in the West Bank city of Hebron on Wednesday to protest what they consider to be unnecessarily intrusive searches of the children on their way to school.

Israeli soldiers search bags and make children lift their shirts before passing through the checkpoint on the way to school. The IDF says the high-tech checkpoint, which includes metal detectors and an X-ray scanner, is in an area where terrorist activity has been high.

About 200 children and 10 teachers began protesting at the checkpoint at 7 a.m. Some took part in the classes, and dozens of others tried to burst through the checkpoint, but soldiers shoved them back. The military said protesters hurled a firebomb and rocks.

No injuries were reported.

Pupils carried signs reading, "We have the right to learn," We have the right to pass to our school," and "We want to go to school." Others carried posters of the late Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat.

On Tuesday, soldiers fired tear gas to disperse some 300 schoolchildren who protested at the checkpoint.

Palestinian Education Minister Mohammed Qawasmeh said pupils regularly arrive late for classes and are forced to stand outside in poor weather while waiting to clear the checkpoint's gates every morning.

(Fist shaking in the air) if only they'd end the foul occupation, none of this would be necessary.

Of course, the Palestinians would also have to stop booby-trapping their kids.

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

Dead ringers: Is it just me, or does Amir Peretz, the leader of Israel's Labour Party look a lot like this famous left-leaning leader? (One major difference: the second guy seems better goomed.)

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:47 | link | comments (1)

Same old, same old at the Ceeb: I couldn't bear to watch Checkpoint, the CBC documentary about Palestinians being subjected to "humiliating" Israel security proceedures. Frankly, I didn't think I could stomach it. Looks like my hunch that it would have been unbearable viewing was right. HonestReporting Canada just sent me an email detailing the documentary's appalling onesidesness--par for the course at the Ceeb:

What happens when a movie crew drops into a conflict zone for three years and produces an 80-minute, narrowly-focused documentary lacking context or narration?

On November 20, CBC Newsworld presented the film "CHECKPOINT" on the documentary program "The Passionate Eye." Shot between 2001 and 2003 by Israeli filmmaker Yoav Shamir, Checkpoint shows poignant and disturbing images of Israelis with weapons controlling the movements of unarmed Palestinians. Without context or narration, the film leaves viewers to draw their own conclusions: Are checkpoint restrictions prompted by legitimate security concerns, the arbitrary whim of individual soldiers, or the cruelty of a military bent on inflicting misery and humiliation?

A story in a vaccum

The story of Israel's security checkpoints is one of competing narratives. The Israeli consensus holds that checkpoints are a necessary and effective tool to impede terrorists' movement and prevent their infiltration into Israel. The Palestinian position is that checkpoints are designed to humiliate and oppress Palestinians.

Filmmaker Yoav Shamir, who described the movie as "my part in the struggle against the injustices of occupation," steered away from the political and historical context in which the checkpoints exist. The resulting film is a narrowly focused documentary that conveys the Palestinian narrative while ignoring the existence of other perspectives. The film never touches upon the terror attacks that led to the checkpoints, never explores the intelligence warnings that led to their closure, and never reveals their effectiveness in preventing terror attacks...

God save us from the skewed perspectives of self-loathing Jews like Yoav Shamir. They are as dangerous to Israel's long-term survival as the jihadis.

Update: My friend E. informs me that I wouldn't have tossed my cookies at all; that, in fact, the whole thing was one big snoozeathon. She says she watched the first hour of the 90 minute documentary, and  was most struck by how young the Israeli soldiers were. They occasionally received mixed messages from their superiors, and took it upon themselves to make arbitrary decisions as to who to allow to pass and who to be more stringent with. And once in a while they commented about the comliness of a Palestinian woman, but that was more a function of their age and gender than they're being "brutal, oppressive, Zionist occupiers."

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

Another "big lie": Daniel Pipes writes about "the new racism", and how it's being used as weapon to discredit those who don't tow the leftist  line. From FrontPage Magazine:

Racism is now increasingly used to mean something far beyond its dictionary definition. The director of the influential London-based Institute of Race Relations (IRR), A. Sivanandan, has been pushing the concept of a “new racism” which concerns immigration, not race:


It is a racism that is not just directed at those with darker skins, from the former colonial territories, but at the newer categories of the displaced, the dispossessed and the uprooted, who are beating at western Europe’s doors, the Europe that helped to displace them in the first place. It is a racism, that is, that cannot be colour-coded, directed as it is at poor whites as well, and is therefore passed off as xenophobia, a “natural” fear of strangers.

Alain Finkielkraut makes the same point in his interview with Ha'aretz:

We live today in an environment of a `perpetual war on racism' and the nature of this anti-racism also needs to be examined. Earlier, I heard someone on the radio who was opposed to Interior Minister Sarkozy's decision to expel anyone who doesn't have French citizenship and takes part in the riots and is arrested. And what did he say? That this was `ethnic cleansing.' During the war in Yugoslavia I fought against the ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Bosnia. Not a single French Muslim organization stood by our side. They bestirred themselves solely to support the Palestinians. And to talk about `ethnic cleansing' now? There was a single person killed in the riots. Actually, there were two [more], but it was an accident. They weren't being chased, but they fled to an electrical transformer even though the warning signs on it were huge.

But I think that the lofty idea of `the war on racism' is gradually turning into a hideously false ideology. And this anti-racism will be for the 21st century what communism was for the 20th century. A source of violence. Today, Jews are attacked in the name of anti-racist discourse: the separation fence, `Zionism is racism.'

"It's the same thing in France. One must be wary of the `anti-racist' ideology. Of course, there is a problem of discrimination. There's a xenophobic reflex, that's true, but the portrayal of events as a response to French racism is totally false. Totally false."

Totally false, but extremely comforting for those who like to flagllate themselves for the shortcomings of the West--and those, like the director of the Institute of Race Relations who are eager to help them do it.

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

La vie en rose: The excitable lads of Saint-Denis, one of those no-go suburbs of Paris, are still torching some cars. Oh, not as many as they were during the height of the rampage, but in what the Ceeb refers to as "frustrations over employment and discrimination"--and with far too much time on their hands--what else is a downtrodden youth to do than act out against the society oppressing him? (And when they run out of cars, they can always torch scooters, as "youths" in the eastern city of Colmar did on Sunday. And when they run out of scooters, better lock up your bicycles and baby carriages, 'cause the lads seem to consider anything on wheels fair game for their pyromania.)

Anyway, the French have come up with a way to motivate these angry layabouts, and make them feel like they have a stake in the larger society. The answer: jobs, jobs, jobs. Addressing an audience in Saint-Denis, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin said discrimination was "unacceptable" and promised to help more youths find gainful employment. (And by "youths" he specifically means male youths, because the female ones are kept locked up by their families and kept in line by their angry brothers; ironic that the "oppressed" are also oppressors in their own right, but don't expect the state to intervene on the girls' behalf--it's not afraid of them.)

I'm not sure why de Villepin thinks that lads who live a life of leisure on the state's coin would be interested in a white or even a blue collar job that would require them to punch a clock and conform to unfamiliar standards of behaviour. But, apparently, he does. The alternative is far too unpleasant to consider: that France is going to be stuck with masses of angry, unassimilable young men who spit on France and all it stands for, and who have neither the desire nor the will to become French.

In a particularly poignment moment, de Villepin referred to a line from a song--the most famous song--sung by that quintessentially French chantuese, Edith Piaf. He told an audience in Saint-Denis that France's improving economic situation meant there would be more jobs availbable. "I am not asking you to see things through rose-tinted glasses, you are too close to the realities, you know too well the difficulties of everyday life, but all these indications are cause for optimism."

Ah, yes: La vie en rose. Precisely what the French have been living up till now.

I wonder how many in the audience even knew who Edith Piaf was.

Update: You know that "rosy" economic outlook? Looks like it's on hold until the rail strike--the one said to be causing chaos throughout France--is over.

Update: Dominique "The Little Sparrow" de Villepin warbles:

When I open up my eyes
And tell myself some lies
I look through rosy glasses.
As they torch one more Renault
We don’t know how to go
And comport ourselves like asses.
Bonaparte on his best day
Would not know what to say
To calm the rabble down.
Give them a hug and some TLC
So things can go back to
How they used to be-ee.
Put my specs on once again.
It feels like way back when—
La vie en rose.

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

The terrorist fly in the "peace in our time" ointment: Four jihadis from terror outfit Hezbollah were killed in a clash with Israeli soldiers today. The jihadis, said to be "pro-Syrian", swooped down from Lebanon. According to the Ceeb report, they were looking to capture a few Israelis to trade for Palestinians and Lebanese being in Israeli prisons.

In other news, people who have little understanding of jihad, past, present and future,  and who think the Israel-Palestinian issue is one of thwarted nationalism, occupation and finding just the right formula  for giving back land are convinced that the recent seismic changes in Israel's political scene--Peretz in, Sharon out of Likud-- will provide new opportunies to hot wire the "peace in our time" process.

Oh yeah? Tell that to Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, al Qaeda....

Posted by: scaramouche at 23:48 | link | comments

Telling tales: The riots in France may have lasted for three weeks, but much of the media decided on the narrative much earlier in the proceedings, and stuck to this story throughout the frenzy. It goes something like this: excitable lads, looking for but being denied their rightful place in French society, derided, ignored, hassled by police, warehoused in ugly suburbs where they could only catch a glimpse the Emerald City--so near and yet so far. What else could they do but left off some of their pent-up anger and frustration that by rampaging through the streets and torching cars?

In FrontPage Magazine, Don Feder looks at how some well-known mainstreamers employed the accepted narrative, mostly because to do otherwise would have been at odds with their p.c. viewpoint:

"Rage of French Youth Is a Fight for Recognition," read the headline in a Washington Post story. The New York Times’ Craig Smith informed readers that in France "a significant portion of the population has yet to accept the increasingly multiethnic makeup of the nation. Put simply, being French, for many people, remains a baguette-and-beret affair." No, don’t tell me the French actually expect these immigrant families to assimilate? Incroyable!

Smith argues that le rampage is rooted in "growing inequalities," "discrimination" and an "overly aggressive police presence in the country’s immigrant-heavy housing projects" -- which, of course, is why immigrant rioters have torched those symbols of inequality and discrimination, synagogues and churches, to shouts of "Allahu akbar!" (God is great!)

We are told the rioting was sparked by the deaths of two immigrant teens, who were electrocuted in a power station while eluding the gendarmes.

In a hilarious malapropism, CNN’s Carol Lin referred to the deceased as "African-American teenagers." While the lads were of African origin (namely, Tunisian), I don’t believe Parisian suburbs have been annexed by the United States. Or – perhaps Lin was making the youth honorary African-Americans, in tribute to their victim-hood.

But it was a USA Today story ("La belle France: A Country of equality and exclusion") that scaled the heights of political correctness.

Writers Steven Komarow and Rick Hampson began by wondering if the mayhem would "mark the beginning of social change, as the U.S. urban riots did four decades ago?" Read: Things began getting better for black Americans when they started burning down their neighborhoods.

The article approvingly quotes the assistant mayor of a town north of Paris, who insists the vandals "are asking for dignity. They don’t want make-work jobs. They want real opportunities – jobs, education and respect." The riots are a proverbial cry for help. By firebombing 40 schools, the disenfranchised were pleading for better educational opportunities. And how can one not respect thugs who emulate storm troopers in going after synagogues?

A lady who runs a community playhouse (probably not a National Front-voter) says the current turmoil "is just the beginning. I work with people who don’t even have socks and live 10 people in a room." But they do have petrol for Molotov cocktails, not to mention the cell phones and computers used to coordinate attacks.

In case you missed the point, after being bludgeoned with it for several hundred words, USA Today summarized its case: "The same complaints that fueled the fires in inner-city Detroit and Los Angeles – unemployment, discrimination, despair – are behind the arson and rioting in suburban France."

But French-Jewish intellectual Alain Finkielkraut sees it differently. In an interview with Ha’aretz—perhaps the most cogent, clear-eyed account of the crisis I have read—Finkielkraut attributes the situation in France to a number of factors. Among them: a culture which is incapable of introspection, one which is incapable or owning up to its problems and determined to pin the blame for them on someone—anyone, everyone—else.

Toward the end of the interview, which is full of insights that are completely new to me, Finkielkraut manages to sum up the situation in one astonishing sentence:

"This problem is the problem of all the countries of Europe. In Holland, they've been confronting it since the murder of Theo van Gogh. The question isn't what is the best model of integration, but just what sort of integration can be achieved with people who hate you."

Exactement! But don’t expect to read that observation in the pages of New York Times or the Washington Post.

Or, for that matter, in Le Monde.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:22 | link | comments

A face not even an umma could love: Terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi may or may not be toast--the Americans are checking the DNA of some jihadis who self-incinerated in Baghdad yesterday--but he's already dead to his family. Seeking to distance themselves from their murderous spawn, the Zarqawi clan took out ads in three Jordanian newspapers on Sunday. The Zarqawis want their countrymen to know that, like them, they don't approve of hateful idiots who send exploding zombies to crash a wedding party--even if, as the zombie master later claimed, his minions has been misdirected. (They had meant to blow up Israelis but the witless bombers apparently had trouble telling the difference between broad-shouldered Jewish intelligence-gatherers and Palestinians in black ties and ballgowns--at least, that was Zarqi's feeble explanation post-attack.)

So now, if he's still alive (and I suspect he is) Zarqawi will no longer feel the loving embrace of his mamma but will have to depend on the residual good feelings--should there be any left after the wedding fiasco--of the umma. (Ba dup bum)

Update: A valjean for Zarqi:

Abu Musab, terror master,
Wanted jihad to go faster.
Oops! A big P.R. disaster.

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

Special treatment: With little fanfare and almost no publicity, a totalitarian theocracy which exports a toxic ideology throughout the planet has quietly taken its place among the world's industrial leaders. Saudi Arabia is about to become a member of the WTO.

You may not have heard about it because the U.S. and the EU--hypocrites both--wanted it that way. While they subjected China to a rigorous going over and extracted certain important concessions when it wanted in to the club, no such demands were made of the Saudis. From Newsweek:

...Hardly a peep was heard from Congress, for example. And the result is unambiguously disappointing. While Saudi Arabia has made market-opening concessions in manufacturing, agriculture, insurance and telecommunications, more than 90 percent of its exports are in the petroleum sector. And here it is hard to discern any softening in the kingdom's longtime prohibition against foreign participation in oil exploration and production.

When it comes to accounting transparency—a critical feature of any market-oriented economy—Saudi Arabia gets a flunking grade. One of the great mysteries of the world economy is how much oil the kingdom has in the ground and how hard it will be to get it out. The International Energy Agency recently pointed out that the answers will help determine future oil prices and everything associated with them, including economic growth rates all over the world. Yet a fierce debate between outside experts rages today over Saudi Arabia's actual petroleum reserves, creating uncertainty that helps drive prices up. What's the problem? Saudi Aramco—the monopoly state oil company that is larger than Exxon, BP, Chevron and Total combined—refuses to allow a third-party audit of its reserves, in contrast to Shell and all the other publicly traded oil companies. Nothing about its upcoming membership in the WTO will compel Saudi Arabia to change its secretive policy.

Saudi Arabia is also the linchpin of the world's most important cartel—OPEC. Whether you think this club of oil exporters has been a force for price moderation or for gouging consumer nations, there is no doubt that OPEC's mission is to allocate export quotas among its members and thereby control prices. Such behavior would be considered an illegal conspiracy within the United States or Europe. In the past, Washington has at least tried to use its antitrust policies to break up cartels in such areas as vitamins, uranium and glass.

But the U.S. and other governments have given OPEC a free pass on its anticompetitive behavior for decades, and there is no record that they even tried to use the WTO negotiations to loosen the cartel's stranglehold. This is hardly for a lack of opportunity to talk: As a precondition to membership Saudi Arabia has had to negotiate bilateral deals with nearly 40 governments, including those in Brussels and Washington.

The United States and the EU didn't have to take a sledgehammer to Riyadh before granting it WTO membership. Given that Saudi Arabia is in the middle of a political earthquake zone, I can understand why too much pressure to change its economic structure right now could have been ill advised. But Washington and Brussels could have demanded liberalizing economic changes that would unfold over the long term, thereby laying down markers to which they could eventually return, and giving all WTO members the political cover to keep pressing Saudi Arabia to open up its system. Instead they chickened out and made a mockery of their professed support for an increasingly open world economy. No wonder they kept the talks below the radar screen...

Indeed.

Posted by: scaramouche at 15:16 | link | comments

Jewish bigotry: I'm a middle-of-the-road kind of Jew, one who has friends and relatives who range through the entire spectrum of belief--from completely non-observant to extremely observant, and everything in between. Personally, I have no problem with how a Jew understands and practises his/her Jewishness--or even it they practise it all at. As far as I'm concerned, that's their business, not mine. What does concern me is when a Jew on one end of the spectrum calls Jews on the other end of the spectrum "Nazis". From insraelinsider:

The leader of the largest branch of American Judaism blasted conservative religious activists in a speech Saturday, calling them "zealots" who claim a "monopoly on God" while promoting anti-gay policies akin to Adolf Hitler's.

Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the liberal Union for Reform Judaism, said "religious right" leaders believe "unless you attend my church, accept my God and study my sacred text you cannot be a moral person."

"What could be more bigoted than to claim that you have a monopoly on God?" Yoffie told a friendly audience of about 5,000 in his keynote address during the movement's national assembly in Houston, which runs through Sunday.

Yoffie used particularly strong language to condemn conservative attitudes toward homosexuals. He said he understood that traditionalists have concluded gay marriage violates Scripture, but he said that did not justify denying legal protections to same-sex partners and their children.

"We cannot forget that when Hitler came to power in 1933 one of the first things that he did was ban gay organizations," Yoffie said. "Yes, we can disagree about gay marriage. But there is no excuse for hateful rhetoric that fuels the hellfires of anti-gay bigotry."...

To refresh Rabbi Yoffie's memory, the Nazis murdered homosexuals for being homosexuals, just as they murdered Jews for being Jews. It's wildly innaccurate--not to mention completely unhinged--to compare those crimes against humanity to Orthodox Judaism's refusal to countenance same-sex marriage. It's bad enough when a non-Jew calls Jews Nazis; it's unconscionable when the charge is made by a Jew against other Jews. In making this disgusting and specious comparison, Rabbi Yoffie reveals himself to be every bit as bigoted as he claims the "zealots" are.

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:48 | link | comments (1)

Exit strategy: An excellent piece by the Ottawa Citizen's David Warren (via Real Clear Politics). Warren says it's high time Bush and crew started fighting back against the specious charge that they "misled" the nation into war, but it may be too late. Americans are wearying of their role as the world's hyperpower and seem inclined to retreat back into the shell of isolationism. That, writes Warren, would be calamitous for the world:

...Neither a Marxist, nor a neoconservative (whatever that means), but still a militant Tory, I don't believe in sides of history. It's just one gigantic palpitating mess beyond the possibility of human comprehension, but we try to make the best of it as we go along. Principles there are, and none are relative, but there is the frequent embarrassment of competing principles, and sorting through their hierarchy of the moment requires something like prudence or tact. From the beginning, a major and sometimes necessarily military effort to eliminate radical Islamism from the available pool of the world's ideological resources, has struck me as both prudent and wise. (It was ditto with Nazism and Communism.)

What I'm getting at here, is that the Bush Doctrine of physical intervention against the worst evils, while seeding democracy on Mesopotamia's irrigated plain, can be defended or attacked from several points of view. The doctrine's principal defence has lain with its author, however, and over the last few years, he has done a good job of keeping it to himself.

In the last week, both Mr. Bush and his vice president have, suddenly, counter-attacked their domestic opponents. They have called the Democrats on the floor of Congress for using facts and arguments against the U.S. intervention in Iraq which are neither true nor, strictly speaking, sane. Their idea that Mr. Bush dragged his unwilling country into war, by means of some fraudulent intelligence data, is absurd. He in fact made good on a Clinton administration policy (get rid of Saddam), and on the basis of pretty much the same murky intelligence we all had. Moreover, many of the same Democrats (and now, a couple of unhinging Republicans) who supported him every step of the way, now claim either they didn't, or they were fooled. Take your pick, either claim is false.

There are other issues clouding the political field; but in the main, the administration's current effort to call the Democrats' bluff has not caused the latter to crawl back into their holes. It has instead driven them further into cloud cuckooland, with the mainstream media chasing behind. It has resulted in a level of shrieking the like of which I cannot recall in the august Senate chamber. And this, perhaps, was the reason Messrs Bush and Cheney hesitated to try it on before. They thought, perhaps, that just "being presidential" might finally carry the day. Better, anyway, than provoking a kind of bipartisan nervous breakdown.

I look at this business from abroad. I note that polls now show the American isolationist impulse being triggered. On both Right and Left, something approaching half the electorate want to take their marbles and go home. For some unaccountable reason, Americans sometimes respond to being abused and slandered all over the world by turning in on themselves. And this, in the present unsettled state of the world in question, would be nearly the worst thing that could happen. It would leave all of America's allies -- corresponding very roughly to the side of the angels -- up a certain creek without a propulsive device.

The world has left the United States to do too much heavy lifting. It is an urgent matter for countries like Canada to stop mouthing off and heave ho.

Faint hope. Mouthing off is far easier and more satisfying than heaving ho. 'Sides, we're "peacekeepers" who aren't up to any heavy lifting.

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:05 | link | comments (1)

Democracy in Egypt: Here's how it works: People get to go to the polls to "elect" the party headed by the man who's been their autocrat for many, many years. You can't offically vote for his unofficial opposition--The Muslim Brotherhood--because the organization has supposedly been banned for the past 50 years. To get around the ban, Muslim Brotherhood candidates run as, wink, wink, nudge, nudge, independents, although everyone knows who they really are. That includes the Egyptian government, which is all for giving lip service to the concept of democracy, so long as it's not obliged to actually function as one. To ensure it maintains its hold on power--and ensure that the wink, wink, nudge, nudge, independents don't continue to make gains in the democratic election and possibly imperill the autocrat's hold on power--the government is prepared to take whatever action it deems necessary. The other day, for example, it rounded up hundreds of "independents" who were set to run in the upcoming round of parliamentary elections and threw them in the slammer. In so doing, it reneged on promises to let elections take place with out this kind of interference.

Oh, well. Democracy doesn't blossom overnight. And given the kind of timetable much of the Middle East operates on, it may well take a century of two to really take hold.

Provided the jihad doesn't triumph, of course.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:01 | link | comments

False advertising: The religion that brought you dhimmitude, jizya, and jihad is actually completely dedicated to the concept of equal rights for all humanity. At this very moment, a group of the faithful have gathered to enshrine it in writing. From Arab News:

The Intergovernmental Group of Experts (IGGE) of the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC), which is chaired by Saudi Arabia, is drafting an Islamic covenant on combating racial discrimination. It will highlight the inherent tolerance of Islam and the religion’s rejection of all forms of discrimination. The IGGE recommendation will be submitted to the ordinary session of the Islamic Conference of Foreign Ministers (ICFM) in Azerbaijan next year.

“This provides the IGGE with a rare opportunity to make it clear to the whole world that Islam, with its noble tenets and lofty ideals represents a significant turning point in the history of humanity,” OIC Secretary-General Professor Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu said addressing the 11th session of the IGGE at OIC headquarters here. In the speech, read by Ambassador Izzat Mufti, assistant secretary-general for political affairs, Ihsanoglu explained that bigotry and racial discrimination against Muslims were still rife and were now and then fuelled by attempts to defame the religion. There were double standards in international relations, foreign occupations, arbitrary economic measures and embargoes against certain countries, and exploitation of technology to disseminate Islamophobia.

“Colonial settlements and foreign occupation constitute a form of discrimination, xenophobia, exclusion and bigotry,” he said.

He stressed that in such a situation the international community must build relations based on upholding equality and dignity and making this century a time for establishing human rights for all, eliminating all forms of discrimination, and fostering a new climate for equal opportunities.

The secretary-general said it was a good sign that the international community today was more than ever aware of the need for dialogue between civilizations and cultures. “This will naturally lead to the recognition of diversity and acceptance of the other until the phenomenon of racial discrimination has been eliminated,” he added.

Ihsanoglu reaffirmed that the OIC was determined to pursue its efforts in order to achieve the objectives enshrined in its charter which include the elimination of racial discrimination. “The OIC considers the whole of humanity as one family of equal members in the original sense of human dignity ... ,” he explained.

As always in these smoke and mirror affairs, the emphasis is on how Muslims have been discriminated against and never--never--on how they might be discriminating against non-Muslims, otherwise known as infidels. The mere fact that this Conference is being chaired by one of the most xenophopic, racist regimes in the world is an indication that the people drafting this document have what can only be called a tenous grasp of reality. It's essential to look beyond the smoke. The OIC may say it considers all of mankind as one big, happy equal family, but anyone with a passing acquaintance of Islam and its holy book knows that some people are thought to be inherently more equal than other people, and you'll always be considered second best unless you "revert" to the one true faith.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:01 | link | comments

Welcome back, Willy Scissorhands: Johnny Depp is returning stateside after a lengthy and most pleasant sojourn in France. Depp might have stayed till he croaked if those excitable lads hadn't started all that ruckus and torched every vehicle in sight. Suddenly, the appeal of good baguettes and unpasturized cheese--not to mention all that anti-Americanism--has worn thin, and Johnny is marching home. (link via Drudge):

When Johnny comes marching home again,
From France, from France,
He’ll give us a lot of blather
And a song and dance.
Oh, the girls will cheer,
Paparazzi roar,
And the schadenfreudists won’t ignore
When Johnny comes marching home…

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

Au revoir et Bienvenue: The French, as we know, aren't too fond of Semites, of either the Jewish or Muslim variety. Jewish anti-Semitism is woven deeply into France's history, and France was most co-operative when Jew-haters in jackboots asked them to ship their Jews east for systematic slaughter. Muslim-hatred is of newer vintage, arriving concurrent with waves of immigrants from former French colonies from North Africa. Still, it's clear which Semities the French believe are more expendable--les Juifs. There are far fewer of them, and you needn't worry that they'll burst out of their suburban ghettos and torch your new Peugot. For some time now, French authorities have allowed these excitable layabouts, who've locked out of mainstream French society because of their provencance, to work off some of their frustrations by doing despicable things to French Jews--desecrating cemetaries, torching synagogues, beating people up, and sometimes killing them. The French turned a blind eye to this Semite-on-Semite violence because, well because the Jews were the ones being targeted, and don't we hate them all anyway because of those horrible things the Zionists do to the oppressed Palestinians, with whom every thinking, Le Monde-reading Frenchman/woman must show solidarity? (So sorry when that lovely Yasser Arafat died. He was such a dashing rebel...They say he was killed by his Jewish doctor, you know.) Also, because who wants to deal with all those angry sauvages in their no-go suburbs? Those guys are scary.

And so we see the results of France's "out-of-sight-out-of-mind" policies--weeks of rioting by an angry underclass, who weren't sated by their acts of Jew-hatred and decided to turn their attentions to the larger society. And, as Mireille Silcoff in the National Post reports, a steady stream of French Jews who no longer see a future in France and are quietly leaving for Israel, Florida and, not surprisingly considering they speak the same language, for Quebec.

Took them long enough:

The poor, disenfranchised Muslim youth who were rioting throughout France this month are the brothers of those who for years have been attacking France's Jewish population. Almost invariably they are members of a largely North African subculture of extremism -- a blister on the skin of France's overwhelmingly moderate and peaceful Muslim community of six million -- a subculture rising up after decades of marginalization, poverty and abuse.

According to the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Anti-Semitism and Racism at Tel Aviv University, there were 517 anti-Semitic incidents in France in 2002. In 2004, the French authorities recorded 298 anti-Semitic acts between Jan. 1 and Aug. 20 alone.

There have been dozens of synagogues and community centres firebombed, Jewish schools covered with anti-Semitic graffiti and set on fire, kosher shops peppered with bullets, and tombstones toppled and desecrated, a domino effect of nauseating proportions. In Paris, on the statue of Alfred Dreyfus, the words "sal juif" -- "dirty Jew" -- were painted in 2002, an epithet that has made a comeback in parts of France, although perhaps not spray-painted on brick or stone as often as "Jews Get Out."

And so they are. The actual number of people moving into Quebec seems small on its own: Last year Jewish Immigration Aid Services (JIAS) helped about 550 French Jews relocate to Montreal. An estimated 200 or 300 arrived without the help of JIAS. But the number of incoming French Jews has been doubling annually, and JIAS believes 2005 might end with the association having helped close to 1,000 French Jews settle in the province. Add to that number those who have come this year on their own (often the more moneyed, who enter Quebec through business, the purchase of property or university transfer programs), and what becomes clear is that this is an infusion that will have a massive effect on Montreal's Jewish community of 85,000, a community that has for decades been steadily ageing and shrinking due to low birth rates, intermarriage and several waves of Anglo flight.

But for Jews in Quebec, resettling French Jews is, according to Victor Goldbloom, a former Quebec Cabinet minister who is about to become the new head of JIAS in Montreal, "a delicate task". Delicate, because Quebec Jews don't want to be seen enticing French Jews away from France. No, says, Mr. Goldbloom, a man who is clearly averse to rocking any boats, "it has to be passive encouragement. It must be clear that we are not on a recruiting campaign to draw people away from their home communities."

And no wonder. As Silicoff points out, France "has a special relationship with Quebec." Not only is there a historical connection, Quebec being part of la Francophonie, but the two are similar in many ways. For example, in the past, Quebec has had some issues with the Jews, too, ones rooted in the Catholic religion and their discomfort with having "the other", i.e. Jesus-killers, in their midst. (On a personal note, my mother's family is from Ottawa, right across the river from Quebec. Her family lived in a neighbourhood that had a lot of French people from Quebec, and they used to chase my uncle and beat him up for killing Baby Jesus and being a "maudit juif"--their preferred epithet. The only reason the beatings ended was because my grandmother--a tiny woman who, having evaded hoards of marauding Jew-haters during the Kishinev pogroms, wasn't afraid to stand up for herself, went to talk to the local Monseigneur. A decent man, he quickly put a stop to it.) Although the Church no longer wields the influence it once did, many Quebecers are still aware of who's "pur laine"--that is, of old "pure wool" French stock--and who isn't. And the Jews--isn't.

And if French Jews think think that leaving France means leaving the problem of North African Jew-haters behind, they may be in store for an unpleasant surprise. The same population has settled in Quebec and, while they may be somewhat better integrated than their fellows in France, they brought along the same anti-Jewish, anti-Israel attitudes with them. And, often, they act out. Maybe not as frequently as they do in France, but enough to make Quebec Jews like Victor Goldbloom want to tread softly so's not to stir them up.

Something else Quebec Jews seem to have in common with French ones.

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:18 | link | comments (1)

Abu boo boo: I don’t know who coined the phrase, “Never complain; never explain.” When I googled it, it was attributed to everyone from Katharine Hepburn to Benjamin Disraeli to John Wayne. Whoever said it, the expression seems to have escaped the attention of terrorist leader abu Musab al Zarqawi. His team of suicide zombies disrupted a lavish Palestinian wedding, bringing the roof down on some of the of the crème de la crème of Palestinian society, and now the Jordanian-born terrroist leader has lots of complainin' and  'splaining to do.

The complainin' is about the King of Jordan, who Zarqawi thinks is too palsy-walsy with the Americans. The 'splaining is to Jordanians, who didn't take too kindly to the  Muslim-on-Muslim violence that sabotaged the wedding, and who took to the streets by the thousands to voice their outrage. Now he's attempting to do what's known in the P.R. game as "damage control". He's claiming the wedding fiasco was an accident. Or the Jews did it. Or the Jews did it accidentally. Or something like that. From the Ceeb website:

An audiotape in the name of "al-Qaida in Iraq" threatened on Friday to chop off King Abdullah's head and bomb more hotels and tourist sites.

The speaker on the tape, identified as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, also said the group's suicide bombers did not intend to bomb a Jordanian wedding party at an Amman hotel last week, killing about 30 people. "Your star is fading. You will not escape your fate, you descendant of traitors. We will be able to reach your head and chop it off," al-Zarqawi said, referring to the king.

Al-Zarqawi told Jordanians to stay away from bases used by U.S. forces in Jordan, hotels and tourist sites in Amman, the Dead Sea and the southern resort of Aqaba and embassies of governments participating in the war in Iraq, saying they would be targeted.

He underlined that "al-Qaida in Iraq" is not targeting fellow Muslims.

"People of Islam in Jordan, we want to assure you that we are extremely careful over your lives . . . you are more beloved to us than ourselves," he said.

The authenticity of the audiotape, posted on an Islamic militant web forum, could not be confirmed independently, but the voice resembled that of al-Zarqawi on previous tapes.

The tape was posted following widespread outrage over the Nov. 9 bombings against three Amman hotels that killed 59 people, 30 of them in a Jordanian-Palestinian wedding party held in a ballroom. Even contributors to militant web forums who lionize al-Zarqawi and praise his attacks criticized the bombings, saying he should avoid civilians.

Al-Zarqawi insisted that the striking of the wedding party at the Radisson SAS hotel was a "lie" and a "forgery" by Jordanian security officials.

The Radisson bomber struck a hall where Israeli intelligence officials were meeting at the time, al-Zarqawi claimed. But part of the roof fell in on the wedding hall, either from the blast or even, he said, from a separate bomb placed in the roof, though not by al-Qaida.

"Our martyred brother's target was halls being used at the time by intelligence officers from some of the infidel crusader nations and their lackeys," he said. "Our brothers knew their targets with great precision."

"God knows we chose these hotels only after more than two months of close observation (that proved) that these hotels had become headquarters for the Israeli and American intelligence," he said.

"People of Jordan, we did not undertake to blow up any wedding parties," he said. "For those Muslims who were killed, we ask God to show them mercy, for they were not targets. We did not and will not think for one moment to target them."

Al-Zarqawi accused the Jordanian government of hiding casualties among Israeli and American agents.

"I defy the renegade government to show us the losses among the Jews," he said...

There were no losses among the Jews, Zarqi (you don't mind if I call you Zarqi, do you? I like to give all my least-favourite terrorist leaders diminutive names in order to cut them down to size). Everyone knows they were alerted to stay home prior to the attack.

Update: An article in, of all places, Hotel, a trade publication of the international hotel industry, explains that until the ill-fated attacks, Zarqawi enjoyed a degree of popularity among Jordanians:

But about 60 per cent of the Jordanian population is of Palestinian descent, some still living in the ramshackle refugee camps which serve as a constant reminder of Jordan's humiliation in the 1967 war against neighbouring Israel; others on the meaner, tattier streets of what otherwise is one of the region's most prosperous countries.

Zarqawi in particular and Al-Qaeda in general have attracted a measure of support from the Jordanian underclasses, creating a dilemma for the Government of King Abdullah II as he attempts to build on the softly-softly work of his late father, King Hussein, in simultaneously forging ties with the Jewish state, appeasing Jordan's chief foreign aid donor, the US, with limited democratic reform, lifting living standards for its have-nots while retaining credibility on the Arab street. Yet in the battle for hearts and minds which runs parallel to the hot war on terror, Zarqawi might have over-reached himself with the Amman attacks.

Earth to Abdullah: How 'bout dismantling those "refugee camps"? I"d say 38 years is long enough to keep people festering in swamps which serve as breeding grounds for the jihad.

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

Kids say the darndest things: Tony Blair met up with some p.o.'d young British Muslims who were delighted to, in the words of Islam Online "a piece of their minds". The young-'uns are angry because of Blair's continuing support for the war in Iraq, a war, they say that's despised by Muslims and non-Muslims alike.  These high-spirited kids had some ways that Tony could educate the Brits about Islam and help buff up its tarnished image. From Islam Online:

"Making Eid a public holiday for all would delight the non-Muslims and make them examine what the festival means", an optimistic young woman told Blair.

Her male colleague added that a compulsory course on comparative religion would also have the same effect, according to the daily.

Aneela Mather, one of the few white faces in the room, said divorcing the concepts of terrorism and Islam would also be a step forward.

"Every time there is a picture of the suicide bombers on the television, it is followed by people praying at a mosque," she told the Prime Minister.

Her colleague further suggested that divorcing nationality from religion would also help.

"I'm Muslim but that has nothing to do with my Britishness, which is about being free to go out for a drink and to dance."

Delighted with the suggestions, Blair promised to attempt to convert some of these thoughts into practice.

"I'll need to set up a government committee to answer that," Blair replied.

Blair, on his part, said that the young Muslim group represented the real voice of the young British Muslims, according to the daily.

"The extremism that grows up within communities, the only way ultimately it can be tackled is when people like yourselves are going back in there and standing up to it."

He said that the media tended to give a platform only to the "loudest and most extreme" voices.

"I'm not blaming you guys, that's just the way it is," he said, turning to the press corps...

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

The two faces of Prime Minister Paul Martin: There's the face he shows to Jewish audiences, and there's his true face, the one in which he reveals his government's ongoing anti-Israel agenda. From Israpundit:

Prime Minister Paul Martin is no friend of Israel. Even by the standards of politics, Paul Martin’s willingness to lie to a Jewish audience, especially when it is certain that he will be caught out a few days later, beggars the imagination.

On November 13, Paul Martin spoke to an overwhelmingly Jewish audience at the General Assembly of the United Jewish Communities (UJC) in Toronto. He said [view video 1,2]:

“Canada has for many years supported Israel’s rightful place in the international community, including at the United Nations. And we will continue to press for the kinds of reforms that will eliminate the politicization of the United Nations and its agencies, and in particular, the annual ritual of politicized anti-Israel resolutions.” [my emphasis]

Three days later, Canada voted in the 4th Committee of the UN General Assembly on this year’s ritual of 9 “politicized anti-Israel resolutions”. Unbelievably, Canada voted against Israel 7 times, abstained once, and supported Israel only once.

Does that mean that Paul Martin lied to a Jewish assembly, or had he just forgotten to instruct his foreign minister as to the government’s new direction? To answer that question, we need to go back a year to November 30, 2004 when Canada's ambassador to the United Nations, Allan Rock, announced that "resolutions [against Israel] are often divisive and lack balance" and hinted that he would improve the situation. Those who heaped praise on this foreign policy breakthrough didn’t seem to notice that, the following day, Canada voted against Israel 5 out of 6 times on that year’s first batch of “politicized anti-Israel resolutions”, including one declaring that Israel has no legal, jurisdictional or administrative rights to any part of Jerusalem [3].

Is there a pattern here? Thunder with indignation before a Jewish audience as if the travesty is someone else’s doing, and then continue the anti-Israel agenda unchanged. It worked in 2004, so why not try it again in 2005?

Did the cheering UJC audience notice that the only specific act of terrorism that Paul Martin highlighted in his speech last Sunday was the killing of Yitzhak Rabin by a Jewish assassin? He spent more time on this item than any other. The ongoing atrocities committed by Palestinians against Israelis did not warrant so much as a mention.

Paul Martin’s UJC speech is not the first time he has lied to a Jewish audience. In his speech at the inaugural parliamentary dinner of the Canadian Council for Israel and Jewish Advocacy (CIJA) on November 1, 2004, he declared:

"We must respond to every act of anti-Semitism! ... We must vigorously combat hate! ... THIS IS NOT OUR CANADA!!!"

For this, Martin received a standing ovation from the mostly Jewish audience, despite the fact that he had failed to respond in any meaningful way to growing anti-Semitism. When Mohamed Elmasry declared on television his support for killing all Israelis over the age of 18, Martin was silent. When Sheikh Younis Kathrada called Jews “the brothers of monkeys and swine” and incited Muslims to die as martyrs killing infidels, Martin was silent. When David Ahenakew, a recipient of the Order of Canada, praised Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust and referred to Jews as "a disease”, Martin was silent. When Palestinian thugs and their supporters denied Ehud Barak the right to speak at Concordia University, Martin was silent. Martin was worse than silent when he personally appointed Yvon Charbonneau, a long-standing and well-known anti-Semite, to be Canada’s ambassador to UNESCO. Was Paul Martin telling the truth when he said he would "respond to every act of anti-Semitism", or was he playing the Jewish community for fools?

Even if he is playing the Jewish community for fools, it's a commuity that is more than eager to go along for the ride. In the upcoming election, you can pretty well count on the majority of Jews to vote for the Liberals. Again. Always.

Jews are gluttons for Paulfoolery because the thought of voting for a cowboy like Stephen Harper makes most of them break out in hives. They'd sooner abide Liberal hypocrisy and corruption than contemplate the Tories in office.

And I wouldn't blame Martin for this appalling state of affairs: you can only be played for a fool--again and again and again--if you give the fool-player permission to continue.

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:08 | link | comments

Hard to swallow: Iran claims it wants a nuclear program becuse, though drowning in petroleum, it needs to go nuclear to meet its energy needs. And to meet those needs, it was just revealed by the IAEA's toothless nuclear Chihuahua, Mo Elbaradei, Iran secretly bought the expertise of a rogue Pakistani science, the man who enabled Pakistan to build nuclear weapons.

But I'm sure he only taught them how to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes.

Update:

Mo ElBee, much applauded and prize-d,
Failed to sniff out how the mullahs had lied.
When they nuke Tel Aviv he’ll be very surprised.

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:32 | link | comments

Bizarre story of the day: Here's the scoop: Aussie fashion model on assignment in Bali is caught with two tabs of ecstasy. Model is arrested, coverts to Islam, is brought to trial, recieves a light sentence and will soon be winging her way back to Australia, with hopes of resuming her career.

Not so fast, says Aussie Islamic leader. You can't be a Muslim and continue to parade in your scanties. From the Brisbane Courier-Mail:

AN Islamic leader has warned convicted drug user Michelle Leslie not to continue living as a Muslim if she plans to go back to modelling underwear.

But even as an Indonesian court imposed a three-month sentence which will see her out of jail as early as today, the Australian fashion industry was preparing for her return, with claims she already has two assignments booked.

Leslie's final appearance in the Bali court yesterday was without the Muslim headdress she adopted at the start of her trial after announcing her conversion to Islam.

As she was told of the three-month sentence which will be her ticket to freedom, there was barely a flicker of emotion or relief on her made-up face...

But her behaviour has already earned her two reprimands – one from Australian Justice Minister Chris Ellison, who said any attempt to sell her story could be in breach of Australian laws which prevent criminals from profiting from their crimes, and one from a religious leader who said her lingerie modelling would conflict with her professed Islamic faith.

Australian Federation of Islamic Councils president Dr Ameer Ali said: "If she is a practising Muslim, I don't think she should go back to her job as an underwear model – because Islam is all about modesty. "She can't have it both ways . . . either practise Islam and do something decent, or don't practise it at all."

According to the Islamic faith, a practising Muslim must observe a set of rules including being honourable, dignified, gracious, law-abiding, modest, clean – and not consuming drugs or alcohol... 

And that, my friends, is why there aren't a heck of a lot of practising Muslims who are also practicing fashion models: The two "practices" are incompatible.

Hey, maybe Kate Moss could clean up her act by "reverting" to Islam. 

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:06 | link | comments (1)

What a relief!: Well, after weeks of rioting, car-torching and unbridled rage, it's back to normal in the republic of France.

And by "normal" I mean that violence has dropped back to acceptable levels: a mere 98 vehicles torched per night versus the hundreds upon hundreds incinerated every evening during the height of the rampage.

Now they can bid each other bon nuit and fall back to sleep--until the next set of riots stirs them from their pleasant dreams.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:50 | link | comments

School daze: The bad news in Iraq and the constant anti-war, Bush-bashing pile-on in the media, is taking a toll on American confidence, at least according to a new survey. The Pew survey (no relation to animated French skunk "Pepe le") asked two groups of Americans--opinon leaders and ordinary folks--how they felt about the War in Iraq and how the rest of the world views their country (among other questions).

Guess what? They're not too keen on it. But opinion leaders seem even less keen than the general public. From the International Herald Tribune:  

Shaken by the Iraq war and the rise of anti-American sentiment around the world, Americans are turning inward, according to a Pew survey of U.S. opinion leaders and the general public.

The survey, conducted this autumn and released Thursday, found a revival of isolationist feelings among the public similar to the sentiment that followed the Vietnam War in the 1970s and the end of the Cold War in the 1990s.

At the same time, the survey showed, Americans are feeling less unilateralist than in the past, in what appeared to indicate a desire for a more modest foreign policy.

Forty-two percent of Americans think the United States should ''mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own,'' according to the survey, which was conducted by the Pew Research Center in association with the Council on Foreign Relations.

That is an increase of 40 percent since a poll taken in December 2002, before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq; at that time only 30 percent of Americans said the country should mind its own business internationally.

The result appeared to represent a rejection by the public of President George W. Bush's goal of promoting democracy in other nations, a major focus of his administration's foreign policy.

We're seeing a backlash against a bumbled foreign policy," said Stephen Van Evera, political science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He said Americans were concerned over failures to make progress on North Korea and Iran, and in the fight against Al Qaeda, but he added, "The American people in particular are looking at Iraq and seeing nothing's working."

In its analysis of the poll, Pew said that the war in Iraq ''has had a profound impact on the way opinion leaders, as well as the public, view America's global role, looming international threats and the Bush administration's stewardship of the nation's foreign policy.''

The survey also found the following:

Nearly three-quarters of Americans say the United States should play a shared leadership role, and only 25 percent want the country to be the most active of leading nations....

Two-thirds of Americans say there is less international respect for the United States than in the past. When asked why, strong majorities - 71 percent of the public, 88 percent of opinion leaders - cite the war in Iraq...

Guess it's time to beat a hasty retreat--you know, so they can regain their "popularity". At least that's what the IHT and other mainstreamers are angling for. Because the world is like a great big high school. There's the in-crowd--who are having all the fun--and those on the outside, who everyone loathes. Israel and the U.S.are the schools dweebs--and no one wants to invite them to the prom.

Then there are the jihadis, who study a different curriculum. They want to blow up everyone--both "outs" and "ins."

But maybe if we ignore them, they'll leave us alone.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:33 | link | comments

The Ceeb's unhinged moral relativism: No, my ears did not decieve me: the fill-in host on CBC radio's "The Current" just called it "Bush's holy war in Iraq".

That's right. According to the Ceeb, it's George Bush and not the Islamic-fascists who are waging jihad.

Does that mean it's not about the oil anymore?

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

Paradise, No: Liam Lacey, the Globe and Mail's movie critic, gives Paradise Now a so-so review:

Taking place over 48 hours, Palestinian filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad's Paradise Now is intended as both a thriller and a provocative political film that sheds a light on the psychology of suicide bombers.

As a thriller, it's only fitfully suspenseful, and despite the ticking bomb premise, meanders a good deal in its plot convolutions. As a portrait of the absurdity and humiliation of life under occupation, the story is heartfelt but predictable. The director's two impulses — to keep the audience hooked while illuminating the Palestinian plight — never feel entirely compatible.

The principals are two young mechanics, Said (Kais Nashef) and Khaled (Ali Suliman) working in Nablus on the West Bank. Friends since childhood, they are members of an unidentified terrorist cell, which is planning its first major operation in two years. One the same day Khaled gets fired from his job for offending an overbearing customer and Said meets an attractive young woman, Suha (Ludna Azabal), the two are given their mission for the next morning: One will blow himself up in a public area in Tel Aviv and when police flood the area, the other will trigger his explosives.

They take this news of their deaths with apparent calm. "If it is God's will," says Said. Their leader, a religious teacher tells them there will "be two angels waiting" to take them to paradise.

But before the angels arrive, there are pragmatic details to see to. Each man bathes, shaves and cuts his hair, for they are to be dressed to look as guests at a wedding — with a belt of explosives under their jackets. They must each make a farewell videotape, declaring their dedication to the Palestinian cause.

The preparations are filled with missteps: The camcorder operator has trouble turning the machine on so Khaled must repeat his well-rehearsed speech, with his gun in hand. On his second take, he remembers a shopping suggestion he wants to leave for his mother.

Finally, on the day of mission, the two men slip through a fence into Israeli territory, but things run afoul. The two men become separated and the other members of the cell panic, assuming one of them has turned traitor. The mood is less suspenseful than absurd, as the two well-dressed men wander around in an unknown country, with bombs wrapped around their stomachs, before sneaking back across the border, their mission briefly postponed.

There is a good deal of back-and forth, as one man, and later the other, questions his commitment. What begins as suspense transforms into a debate about the justification for suicide bombers.

Said, the explosive still taped to his body, finds time to engage in lengthy didactic speeches that justify murdering civilians for their cause. Because the Palestinians feel imprisoned, while the Israelis have claimed the victim role to the world, suicide bombings are not only an expression of despair, but an attempt at "equality in death."

The reprieve also allows Said to meet again with Suha, who, in contrast, abhors violence and believes that taking the higher moral ground is the only option for Palestinians facing Israel's military superiority.

The film is not only cumbersome in including these debates, but in its overcalculated dramatic structure as well. We learn that Said's father was executed for collaborating with the enemy, so he feels social pressure to redeem his family honour. Suha, in tidy contrast, is the daughter of a dead resistance hero.

Though Abu-Assad's sympathies are clearly with Suha, he offers no clear-cut answers. The perverse interchangeability of the martyrs and traitors is shown in a scene where the couple visits a local shop that markets the final videotapes of the pledges of martyrs and executions of collaborators. The latter, the video store clerk explains, are a slightly more popular item.

Such scenes are among the richest in Paradise Now, not because they explain or justify a culture of despair and revenge, but they show how, in the right pressure-cooker of shame and social pressure, even the unthinkable can seem normal.

Good review, Liam, better than some I've read. But you forgot to mention the three "Js" which heat up the pressure-cooker and ensure that it stays on the boil: Jihad, jealously and Jew-hatred.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:41 | link | comments

Historical valjean: I'm reading a biography of Girolamo Savanarola (Rachel Erlanger's The Unarmed Prophet). It's to provide me with background for Sarah Dunant's novel The Birth of Venus, because I have to facilitate the discussion at the next meeting of my book group (which is not really my book group but the book group to which I happen to belong).

Savanarola was the charismatic monk (a hideously ugly one) who raged against sin and its assorted pleasures at the end of Lorenzo di Medici's days as head honcho of Florence (the final years of the 15th C.). He convinced the Florentines, who, though still quite religious had strayed from the staight and narrow and indulged themselves in all sorts of licentiousness, that he was God's messanger and that the end time was drawing nigh. So persuaded, they tossed all their fripperies--wigs, books, clothing, all the symbols of their lavish but spiritually empty lives--into a huge fire. This immense conflagation was called "the bonfire of the vanities" (and centuries later Tom Wolfe swiped the name for his novel about vapid rich folks in the 1980s). Sadly for Savonarola, but happily for the fun-loving Florentines, the appeal of fire, brimstone and a life devoid of pleasure soon paled. Savonarola was forced to admit that he lied about being God's prophet (of course, he was subjected to some persuasive torture to extract the confession), and soon enough he--like Florence's other vanities--was burnt (at the stake, not in a pile of tchochkes).

All in all, a fascinating tale, one which also served as the basis of George Eliot's novel Romola (which I have, but haven't read; apparently, it's supposed to be quite a slog, though I plan to get to it--someday.) Here's a "valjean" for those who prefer an abreviated version:

Savonarola, frenetic friar,
Tossed all the vanities into the fire.
Then he was burnt for being a liar.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:02 | link | comments

Thought for the day: There are three traits that distinguish human beings from all other animals: our ability to laugh; our capacity to reason; our propensity to give.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:23 | link | comments

Casting doubt: Islam Online reports on the arrest in Austria of David Irving for denying the Holocaust, an offense in the birthplace of Adolf Hitler. In so doing, it indulges in a little Holocaust denial and historical revisionism itself:

British historian David Irving has been arrested in Austria on denying the Holocaust, an interior ministry spokesman said on Thursday, November 17.

Irving was arrested near the town of Hartberg in the southern province of Styria under a warrant issued in 1989, Reuters quoted interior ministry spokesman Rudolf Gollia as saying.

"He is on remand in Vienna," Gollia said.

Asked what Irving had been arrested for, Gollia said: "It is to do with ... Holocaust denial."

The spokesman declined to comment on whether or when he would be charged.

Denying the holocaust is a crime in Austria which carries a sentence of 1-10 years.

Sympathy

A British High Court ruling in 2000 rejecting Irving's libel action against an American professor and her publishers declared Irving "an active Holocaust denier ... anti-Semitic and racist".

During the trial Irving, who specializes in Nazi military history, was accused of sympathizing with Adolph Hitler and of holding racist views towards Jews and blacks.

"He has portrayed Hitler in an unwarrantedly favored light, principally in relation to his attitude towards and responsibility for the treatment of Jews," Justice Charles Gray wrote in his judgment.

Irving denied the accusations, although he admitted he had made racist remarks towards Jews and blacks.

According to Encyclopedia Britannica, the Holocaust refers to "systematic state-sponsored killing of Jewish men, women, and children and others by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II."

The commonly used figure for the number of Jewish victims is six million.

However, the figure was questioned by some historians and intellectuals, chiefly French Muslim author Roger Garaudy.

Muslim activists have said that Holocaust commemoration should not eclipse crimes against humanity committed in such areas as the occupied Palestinian territories, Bosnia and Chechnya.

The "commonly used figure" of six million refers to the number of Jews who were murdered in the pan-European endeavour known as the Holocaust. Tell me, how many Palestinians were killed in the occupied territories because of a racist program promulgated by the Jews?

How about none. Many Palestinians have been killed, of course, but not, as I.O. and other Israel-haters would have us believe, because of the spurious and disgusting notion that the Jews have become the new Nazis.

But not just the numbers are being denied. What's also being refuted is the unique nature of the Holocaust, an act of human depravity that differs qualitatively from all other crimes against humanity. There are those, Islam Online being among them, who seek to deny that the Holocaust was unique; who would like to collapse it into a larger category of and thus strip it of its specificity. In this way, they would remove Israel's raison d'etre: to serve as a haven for Jews who need protection from the emnity of other peoples, like the ones in Europe who perpetrated the genocide.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:32 | link | comments

Ceeb bias rears its ugly punim--again: The CBC, in its ongoing efforts to shine light on the murk that is the Middle East, has one of its probing, incisive investigations. This time its a documentary on The Passionate Eye about the hardships imposed on the Palestinians by having to submit themselves repeatedly to the indignities of Israeli checkpoints. The documentary, not surprisingly, is called "Checkpoint". Here's how  it's described on the Ceeb website:

CHECKPOINT
Sunday November 20, 2005 at 10pm ET/PT
repeating Saturday November 26, 2005 at 10pm ET/PT

Over two hundred military roadblocks are spread throughout the country.
Roadblocks that thousands of Palestinians and Israelis cross every day as they make their way between the different areas: A, B and C- the terminology used to define control over the land. Each division represents a different category of Israel's occupation of the Palestinian Authority. These roadblocks are the first meeting point between the two sides of the conflict, a crucial meeting point with rules and laws of its own.

CHECKPOINT documents the daily events that constitute the microcosm known as the Israeli military roadblock over an extended period of time. These roadblocks, essentially the first points of contact between the two peoples, have an enormous significance in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

These anonymous, one-time encounters between both sides have a lasting political, social, and cultural effect. On the Israeli side, the almost unlimited position of power influences the shaping of the Israeli ethos and public persona. Young soldiers, still in their adolescence, find themselves faced with impossible situations. Reserve army soldiers, who just a day before were functioning as parents and spouses, wage earners and business owners, are faced with situations that their daily lives did not prepare them for. The cumulative effect of these day to day encounters, which is forced upon both sides, is unbearable.

On the other side, the day-to-day struggle and humiliation the Palestinians endure as they pass through the roadblock, fuels the hatred towards their Israeli neighbors. Much has been written about the corruption of the conqueror brought about by extended occupation, and still the daily reality of the roadblock illustrates this in shockingly tangible scenes. A pregnant woman on the way to the hospital, a Palestinian politician on his way to an important meeting, or just someone trying to get to work - the fact is that all of them have to go through roadblocks in order to reach their destinations.

Hmm. Sounds like the Ceeb has left something out. Like the reason the "roadblocks" were set up in the first place, i.e. to prevent "humiliated" Palestinians from entering Israel to blow up Israeli civilians, which may include a pregnant women on her way to the hospital, or an Israeli politician on his way to an important meeting, or just someone trying to get to work. The Ceeb spin--and I plan to watch the documentary to confirm it--seems to be that the checkpoints sprung up spontaneously, like mushrooms in a forest, our of sheer Israeli bloody-mindedness, instead of in response to genuine and continuing threats.

It is indeed tragic that young Israelis have been placed in the position of having to protect their own people from those who mean them harm. But to condemn Israel for taking these steps, and to frame the issue as one of powerful "conquerers" and powerless victims is egregiously biased, even for the Ceeb.

Update: Over at Jihad Watch, Hugh Fitzgerald is holding a contest. Readers are asked to identify which member of the MESA-Nostra--the semi-tongue-in-cheek designation for academics who belong to the Middle East Studies Association, and who see everything through the same distorted Israel/America-hating lens--made the following unhinged, jargon-ridden, quasi-coherent remarks:

In conclusion, I feel that this work of analysis, by focusing on the implications of the phallic hegemony of Wehrmacht-helmeted Israeli troops and their supporters throughout the American empire, both equally unappeasable in their demonstrable need for "the Other," does what in a quasi-heuristic sense it was intended to do, as it manages to break away from all Eurocentric approaches to discourses of postcolonial subalternity, or even of meta-alterity, and comes so subversively close in its disjunctive interrogation of the counter- or, more exactly, anti-mimesis which is inherently essential to Mesopotamian or indeed to Cairene, Abbasid, Jordanian or Palestinian thought for, as a native of (Amman, Baghdad, Beirut, Cairo, Damascus, Islamabad, Ramallah, Teheran, etc. – choose one) and hence a non-European, I am of necessity self-assigned to that category of people best placed to perform such a mission of interrogating all postcolonialist as well as narrativised specificity, but of equal necessity, not as one obviously intent on de-undermining or rather meta-determining the poststructuralist or post-postmodern universalism, with its customary relativised discourse analysis which seldom lends itself to anticipatory prolepsis, but on the other hand my critique is quite meta-consciously deeply para-rooted within, as well as up-rooted out of, and obviously from, Western thought with its inalienably alien constructions of meta-identity and hypersexuality, which necessarily give rise to post-essentialism which, in a larger sense, serves merely to violate all the strategic critiques of hegemonic historiographical constructions of essences, whether of the Orient or of scholars who deny the self-referentiality of all postcolonialist essentializing.

I can't identify who wrote it, but I can say without hesitation that whoever's responsible for this lamentable piece of prose should go back to school to re-learn how to write. He or she is de-de-undermining the English language.

In any event, the reason I post the above quote is not to show that academics don't know how to write--although, clearly, this one doesn't--but to suggest that the above is an example of the same type of thinking that informs a documentary like "Checkpoint". All that stuff about "the phallic hegemony of Wehrmacht-helmeted Israeli troops" is just a fancier, somewhat more inflammatory way of talking about "the almost unlimited position of power influences the shaping of the Israeli ethos and public persona" and "the corruption of the conquerer". In fact, I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that the filmmaker had studied at university under a professor who spoke and thought almost exactly the one quoted above.

Update: Here's how MESA describes itself on its website:

The Middle East Studies Association (MESA) is a non-political association that fosters the study of the Middle East, promotes high standards of scholarship and teaching, and encourages public understanding of the region and its peoples through programs, publications and services that enhance education, further intellectual exchange, recognize professional distinction, and defend academic freedom.

To quote that noted Jewish intellectual, Cher Horowitz: "As if."

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

Who was that masked man?: That's the question Australians are asking when a tape of this guy

 

showed up threatening them with a new round of Bali-style terror.

 

Who is he? Why, he's none other than the Unknown Jihadi, the man in the black balaclava:

 

A man in a black balaclava
May have tanked up on far too much java.
He nerves seem all frayed
From the threats that’s he’s made
And all his jihadi palaver.

 

And, hey, if that career in the jihad turns out to be a dead end, he could always follow in the footsteps of this guy:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

We have a winner: For two years in a row, the Swedish Academy has awarded its literary prize not on the basis of literary merit but for reasons of politics. Both Elfriede Jelinek, the bashful Austrian who won last year's prize, and Harold Pinter, the brash Brit who won it this year, have been vocal--one might even say deafening--opponents of America and it's purported imperial designs. The authors' body of work, a mixed bag at best, pales in comparison to their anti-Americanism--just what the Swedes seem to be looking for these days in their prize winners.

With that in mind, I think I can save the Swedes a whole lot of trouble zeroing-in on next year's recipient. I nominate a man who is second to none in his opposition to American policies, and whose body of work (one which, funnily enough, has been responsible for thousands of dead bodies) has just been published in Saudi Arabia. Ladies and gentlemen of the Academy, I give you that stellar prose stylist--Osama bin Laden. From the Telegraph:

Osama bin Laden wants the United States to convert to Islam, ditch its constitution, abolish banks, jail homosexuals and sign the Kyoto climate change treaty.

The first complete collection of the Saudi's statements published today portrays a world in which Islam's enemies will take the first steps towards salvation by embracing the "religion of all the Prophets".

Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden is billed as the first accurate compendium of the terrorist leader's words, threats and ruminations from 1994 to 2004.

Its editors have rooted out many statements which they identified as forgeries and retranslated to correct "horrendous" errors.

His terms for America's surrender appeared after the September 2001 suicide attacks and include demands that amount to the abandonment of much of western life.

Alcohol and gambling would be barred and there would be an end to women's photos in newspapers or advertising.

Any woman serving "passengers, visitors and strangers", presumably anyone from air stewardesses to waitresses, would also be out of a job.

The West must "stop your oppression, lies, immorality and debauchery that has spread among you" and has become the "worst civilisation witnessed in the history of mankind".

The publisher Verso said it expected criticism for releasing the thoughts of a terrorist but denied that the volume would be the jihadis' equivalent of Mein Kampf.

According to Gavin Browning at Verso, disapproval "is something that we're anticipating".

"The idea is to have an annotated, scholarly collection of bin Laden's words," he added. "Until now, his words have only been available in poor translations or soundbites."

Mr Browning emphasised that publishing his views did not imply any approval of them by the publishers.

The book's introduction is written by Prof Bruce Lawrence who teaches Islamic studies at Duke University, North Carolina and describes the terrorist as "one of the best prose writers in Arabic"...

I'd say Osama's deft way with words puts him one up on other literary totalitarians like Hitler and Saddam. Mein Kampf, for example is positvely turgid, while Saddam's Arabian Nights-type farragos, much-touted by his biggest fan, daughter Raghad, are likely to cause indigestion. Both writers include heaps of riveting Jew-hatred, of course, always a hit with devotees of this kind of work.

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

Forsythe puts on his thinking cap; chapeau short circuits: James Forsythe in The New Republic writes about Europe's failure to integrate its Muslim populations. Forsythe examines how Spain, Holland, Britain and France have each used a different approach to incorporate the masses--and how each has failed miserably. He then offers the following as a possible remedy:  

Europe must demonstrate that it believes Islam and democracy are compatible by speeding up Turkish accession talks with the European Union. Then, Europe should consider why Muslims are so much more integrated and successful in the United States. Arab families in America (though not all Muslim) are on average better off than the rest of the U.S. population: Their median family income is $52,300, 4.6 percent higher than average; the opposite is generally true in Europe. One reason is that Muslims who migrated to the United States were usually better educated and better off than those who went to Europe. But another is that the United States is far more welcoming to people of faith than a Europe where the dominant religion is, to use Timothy Garton-Ash's phrase, "evangelical secularism." Europeans should also follow the American lead on citizenship tests, which a growing number of countries are introducing. Unfortunately, unlike the U.S. version, they are geared more toward imparting the kind of knowledge you find at the beginning of a Lonely Planet guide than inculcating future citizens with the values on which the state is founded. While the U.S. test asks about the American Revolution, the British one wants you to know what P.G. stands for. (Parental Guidance, a cinema classification, since you ask.)

So the solution is for Europe to open its gates to more Muslims and give them free reign to roam around the Continent, but give them tougher, American-style test questions, and hope that that somehow assimilates them as well as the millions of Muslims Europe already has?

Yeah, that'll work.

Update: From "The Islamization of Europe" by David Pryce-Jones, Commentary Magazine, December 2004:

...As Yves Charles Zarka, a French philosopher and analyst, has written: "there is taking place in France a central phase of the more general and mutually conflicting encounter between the West and Islam, which only someone completely blind or of radical bad faith, or possibly of disconcerting naivete, could fail to recognize." In the opinion of Bassam Tibi, an academic of Syrian origins who lives in Germany, Europeans are facing a stark alternative: "Either Islam gets Euopeanized, or Europe gets Islamized." Going still further, Bernard Lewis has speculated that the clash may well be over by the end of this century, at which time, if present demographic trends continue, Europe itself will be Muslim.

If Turkey is allowed to join the EU, you can probably cut Lewis's estimate by a good 50 years.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:14 | link | comments

The world diddles which Iran enriches (uranium): I'm so glad Mohamed ElBaradei got a Nobel Peace Prize for being such a feckless nuclear watchdog. It gives hope to other hapless, useless functionaries that someday, they too could win such an august award.

Meanwhle, the mully-bullies continue to cock a snook at the world and move ahead with their nuclear schemes. From VOA:

Diplomats say Iran has started a new round of uranium conversion, despite international calls for it to halt sensitive nuclear work.

Officials close to the International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed Wednesday that conversion had resumed - an initial step in preparing nuclear fuel.

Iran conducted an earlier round of nuclear work in August, prompting the European Union to break off talks with the Islamic Republic about its nuclear program.

The United States has accused Iran of secretly trying to develop nuclear weapons, and has called for the country to be referred to the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions.

The U.N. atomic agency is to meet next week to consider the request.

Iran says its nuclear program is peaceful and intended to generate electricity.

And I say the Moon is made of blue cheese. Let's send in a UN lunar inspector to investigate.

I hear Hans Blix is free.

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

The rotten fruits of disengagement: It's been--what?--a whole eight weeks since Israel skedaddled from Gaza, and the residents are already griping about the slow progress of the economic rebound they'd always been promised once the Jews left. Fortuntately, Globe and Mail reporter Mark MacKinnon is there to record their every last gripe--and assign blame where he and they think it's due:

Life was always hard here for Subhiyah Nassar and her six children -- so bad that she never believed it could get worse.

Residents of the Gaza Strip endured a lot during the often brutal, 38-year Israeli occupation. One of most densely populated stretches of earth anywhere, it is also one of the poorest and the most violent.

When the Israelis left this summer, however, life was supposed to get better. Ms. Nassar's family joined the rest of Gaza for several days of exhilarating celebrations in September, hailing the long-awaited withdrawal of Israel's soldiers and settlers from this tiny finger of land. Life, most believed, was about to get better.

Somehow, things deteriorated. Two months into Gaza's groundbreaking experiment with something approaching self-rule, it's hard to find anyone who will say their life has improved, and impossible to find much excitement about the ballyhooed deal brokered this week by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that will see Gaza's border with Egypt opened for the first time since the Israeli pullout.

A failing economy, an explosion in inter-Palestinian violence and actions by the same Israeli military that was supposed to have left have combined to almost entirely snuff out the optimism of just eight weeks ago.

"We were extremely happy when the Israelis left, we were feeling hopeful. My cousin, who lives near Netzarim [a former Jewish settlement in central Gaza] slaughtered a bull in celebration," Ms. Nassar said, sitting in the living room of her family's home in the Beach refugee camp.

She was just 10 years old when the Israeli army arrived in 1967, and had come to believe that when the Israelis left, many of Gaza's problems would also disappear. "But Gaza is just a big prison now. . . . "Life is more difficult than before. We're bored with poverty."

One of her two sons is a member of the embattled Palestinian police corps, a force he freely admits is incapable of maintaining basic law and order in the streets and that is outnumbered and outgunned by Islamic militant groups such as Hamas. Her other son is an engineering student thankful that he's attending the university that remains open, and not the one shut by violence.

Of her four daughters, one of the two old enough to get married and move out has moved back in because neither she nor her husband can find enough work to feed their family. And her youngest, 11-year-old Naheel, had the windows of her school blown out by the sonic boom from what Israel describes as a mock air raid. She's now terrified to sit in class.

Medics here say such sonic booms -- a tactic Israel also uses in the skies over Lebanon -- are responsible for a more than 30-per-cent surge in the number of miscarriages last month.

Palestinians talked brashly this summer of building a Mediterranean paradise once the Israelis finally left. Instead, the Gaza Strip has, improbably, slid further into the abyss.

In a sign of how far awry things have gone in that time, the price of tomatoes has nearly tripled since the Israeli withdrawal, while the price of ammunition has plummeted. "Supply and demand," shrugs Haitham, Ms. Nassar's 25-year-old policeman son. "The wealthiest people in Gaza are the arms smugglers and dealers."...

I'd say that about says it all: you know your society is in the crapper when tomatoes are exorbitant but ammo is cheap. At least you can still blame the Jews for your woes, ones which, no matter how many bulls you may slaughter in your short-lived euphoria at their departure, you're eventually going to have to solve yourselves.

As for sonic booms leading to a rise in miscarriages, given the high birth rate and the shortage of space, I'd say Israel was doing them a favour. (I say that, of course, tongue in cheek. Unlike the gullible Mr. MacKinnon, I don't accept as authoritative the word of unnamed Palestinian "medics".)

Update: Interesting that I have yet to read a piece in the Globe about the complaints of the Jews living in Gaza who were displaced from their homes. I hear many of these "refugees" are still living in tents and waiting for their country to fulfill its promises to them. I guess that story isn't as colourful and doesn't carry the same emotional weight as Gazans, their pricey tomatoes, and the fact that they're still lingering in the "refugee camps" decades after seeking refuge and months after the end of their hated "occupation". At what stage do they lose their refugee designation and finally become plain old Palestinians? When Palestine declares statehood? Or when the Jews are finally chased off all the "occupied" land?

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:16 | link | comments

Blaming the victim: The road map to nowheresville--remember that old thing?--requires that the P.A. disarm Hamas and the other Murder Inc. outfits before final negotiations can proceed. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinians' metrosexual leader (can't you smell the Paco Rabanne just by looking at his photo?) would prefer to treat the terrorists with kid gloves, mostly because he's afraid if he tries to take away their guns they will turn them on him. So he's been trying to defang them by inviting them to partake in politics, with the aim of keeping his body bullet-free and/or intact for the time being.

It won't work, of course. If Abbas and other Palestinians really want what they say they want, i.e., their own sovereign state, they're going to have to do something about the Islamoloonies who want to, in the words of Iranian jihadi Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, wipe Israel off the map.

Abbas has yet to make that mental leap. At the moment, he's still mired in the blame game, accusing Israel of forcing the Palestinians into a civil war. From the Penninsula (Qatar):

President Mahmoud Abbas accused Israel yesterday of trying to avoid peace talks and push Palestinians into civil war by insisting that radicals be disarmed ahead of any negotiations on statehood.

Abbas said in a televised address that Israel was acting as though it had “no peace partner”, shortly after a visit by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice meant to encourage peacemaking following Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.

It was not the first time that Abbas had said that disarming radicals could risk civil war, but it was some of his strongest criticism of Israel since the Gaza pullout in September.

He accused Israel of “a determination that Palestinians pass through a civil war” because of its insistence that negotiations cannot start before the disarming of radical groups waging an uprising since talks failed in 2000.

His speech marked the anniversary of a Palestinian declaration of independence from exile in 1988. Palestinians are meant to start disarming militants under a US-backed peace “road map”. Israel also says it is committed to that plan, though it has failed to meet its own pledge to freeze settlement building in the West Bank.

Powerful factions, such as Hamas, say they will not give up their weapons and have occasionally clashed with security forces. Some also have strong popular support because of their fight against Israel. Most groups agreed with Abbas to abide by a truce with Israel, though violence has flared sporadically.

Israeli officials reiterated that there could be no statehood talks before militants are disarmed. “These conditions are clear and these are their obligations from the first stage of the road map,” Zeev Boim, Israel’s deputy defence minister, told Israel Radio. During her visit, Rice renewed US pressure on Abbas to act against the armed groups. She also pushed Israel on the question of settlement building.

“(Israel) is seeking to impose a very dangerous option, and that is a long-term solution based on setting up a state with provisional borders controlled by the Israelis, divided by settlements into isolated cantons,” Abbas said.

I know Abbas is a history buff--Holocaust denial being a particular specialty--but he seems not to have read up on the American Civil War. If he had, he would know that when a "nation" is riven by two distinct and irreconcilable mindsets, a war for the soul of that nation is all but inevitable. What Abbas has to decide is if he wants his side to be victorious.

It's always possible, though, that he has read about the American Civil War, and since his aims and those of the armed terrorists aren't all that different--more a matter of style than of substance--he realizes that the model doesn't apply to the Palestinians.

Posted by: scaramouche at 23:42 | link | comments

Brain drain: Anne Applebaum, a columnist with the Washington Post, considers the "puzzle" of Mrs. Suicide, the woman who took marital togetherness to such an extreme that she was hoping to detonate herself at the same time as her husband so both could rendezvous in Paradise. Mr. and Mrs. Suicide (they have real names, of course, but I prefer the nicknames coined in an article about the couple in FrontPage Magazine, who were apparently associated with al Qaeda in Iraq, an organization helmed by Jordanian abu Musab al-Zarqawi, had crashed a wedding in Iraq--literally. Mr. Suicide's belt exploded, and brought the ceiling down on the assembled, a number of whom were killed. Mrs. Suicide's, alas for her posthumous vacation plans, was a dud (with the added nusiance of there being no refunds for suicide vacations booked on the Internet). She was able to escape, however, in the post-bombing panic. In short order, she was apprehended by authorities, and forced to make a lengthy confession on Jordanian TV. In cold, remorseless words, she described how the bombing was planned and implemented--a recitation which astonished the Jordanians both for its heartlessness and because she was describing an attack by Muslims on Muslims, to them an unthinkable and unforgiveable act.

Ms. Applebaum, while unable to crack the enigmatic nut of suicide bombers--admittedly, a feat which is impossible in the space a 700 word column--concludes with these observations:

By definition, suicide bombers are harder to deter than ordinary criminals. Normal punishments don't work: The execution of Rishawi might serve her ends, creating a new martyr. Normal prevention doesn't work either: After all, she looked just like the other wedding guests. The impossibility of distinguishing between bombers and ordinary people is part of the horror of suicide bombing and adds to the damage of such attacks too. In Iraq, the suicide bombing campaign has made every American look at every Iraqi -- male and female, old and young -- with suspicion.

There is a solution, of course, but it isn't one that can be applied by the American military or even the Jordanian police. To stop the Rishawis of the future, her community -- her family, her compatriots, the Jordanians marching in the streets last week -- must change the culture that celebrates self-immolation and that sick form of honor and pride. If the desire for murderous glory is what makes suicide bombers act as they do, then scorn from all across the Muslim world on whose behalf she thought she was acting is the only lasting deterrent.

While I agree that a sick culture that bathes "martyrs" in murderous glory is part of it, by no means is it all of it. You can't talk about people like Mr. and Mrs. Suicide--people who's actions contradict the basic human drive to live--without talking about hatred. Suicide bombers, lost, lonely souls though they often are, are thrumming with hatred. For the infidel. For the Zionist. For the other, which, as we have seen in Iraq and as we saw in Jordan, can mean other Muslims.

As to why they hate--certainly, an ideology that teaches them that their kind were put on the earth to dominate has a lot to do with it. But I suggest that, at a certain point, if you hate hard enough and long enough, it does something to your brain. It alters its chemistry--like it does to the brains of anorexics who start out as dieters and reach a point where their brains compel them to starve themselves.

I have no evidence for this conjecture, apart from the observation that anti-Semitism, a particularly nasty, virulent and contagious strain of hatred, seems to corrode the brain.

I await for scientists to play catch-up, and to conduct the studies that will verify my suppositions.

Posted by: scaramouche at 22:59 | link | comments

Sleepwalkers: I picked up a back issue of Commentary Magazine (March 2004) at my local library because I wanted to read Nidra Poller's article "Betrayed by Europe: An Expatriate's Lament" in light of the current situation in France. Here's a bit of what Ms. Poller, an American-born writer who has lived in France since 1972,  had to say back then:

Jews are being persecuted every day in France. Some are insulted, pelted with stones, spat upon; some are beatenor threatened with knives or guns. Synagogues are torched, schools burned to the ground. A little over a month ago [December, 2003], at least one Jew was savagely murdered, his throat slit, his face gouged with a carving knife. Did it create an uproar? No. the incident was stifled, and by common consent--not just by the authorities, but by the Jews.

Some Jews are simply frightened; they are reluctant to take the subway, walk in certain neighborhoods, or go out after dark. Others, clearly identifiable as Jews, are courageous and defiant. Many, perhaps the majority, show no outward signs of Jewishness and do not seek to know the truth about the rampant and increasingly violent anti-Semitism all around them. If you are Jewish but do not defend Israel or act too religious or look too different, you are not yet a target--so why insist on monitoring the danger when daily life is so delicious?

And the lies so tantalizing. A thick, hand-knit comforter of prevarication spreads itself over the French population. Every morning, instead of waking people up, the press tucks them in. Fance has become a nation of sleepwalkers. You sense it with particular sharpness after a visit to the U.S. How is anyone to face the truth about anything when the truth is hidden by 19th-century-style posturing, pretentious humanitarian hoodwinking, and low down village tomfoolery?

You'd think that after more than two weeks of urban violence the French--and especially French Jews--would have finally woken up. But if French leaders--with the obvious exception of Nicolas Sarkozy--are any indication, the French have yet to shake the cobwebs from their brains and face the harsh realities of life in Eurabia.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:49 | link | comments (1)

Today's infinitesimal fringe update: From the Khaleej Times:

Police in Bangladesh are hunting about 2,000 potential suicide bombers from three banned militant groups, a senior officer said on Wednesday as more threats were made.

He said many of the militants had trained in Afghanistan under the Taleban and might be preparing more attacks after two judges were killed in a bomb blast this week.

“They have assembled in the country to destabilise democracy,” said the police officer, who asked not to be named.

“All the country’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies have been ordered to put concerted efforts into capturing the members of the suicide squad,” he told Reuters.

Bangladeshi police acknowledged for the first time the presence of home-grown potential suicide bombers after the two judges were killed on Monday by a bomb thrown at their car in the coastal town of Jhalakathi, 250 km (155 miles) from Dhaka.

In a letter intercepted by police on Wednesday, militants threatened to kill another judge in northern Pabna district and an administrative official in the southwestern Paikgachha area.

“Judges and their courts will be blown up if Quranic laws and Islamic administration are not implemented,” said the letter, which a police officer said was signed by Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen, an outlawed militant group...

Good thing there's so few of them. Can you imagine the troubles we'd be having if more of the angry lads decided to become insentient human  bombs?

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:16 | link | comments (3)

Football folly: Once again, Cox & Forkum are worth a thousand words:

Change of Possession

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

Today's question--How do you turn democracy into a "demockery"?: Answer: You elect crazed jihadis as your government's loyal opposition.

Posted by: scaramouche at 16:40 | link | comments

The pen is mightier than the sword: Amnon Rubenstein writes that there's more than one way to wipe Israel off the map. There's the Ahmadinejad way, which involves weapons of mass destruction. Then there's a quieter method, which involves writing anti-Israel polemics. The latter may ultimately prove to be the real threat to Israel's continued existence. From the Jerusalem Post:

On bookshelves in the West, you can see quite a number of books which wipe Israel off the map, and it is almost impossible to find any book - apart from Alan Dershowitz's writings - which refute their arguments.

These books are not attacking the occupation, but the very idea of a Jewish state. Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, by former BBC foreign correspondent Alan Hunt, is a lengthy - 600 pages in the first volume - diatribe against Zionism, the Balfour declaration and the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine.

The title is taken from a motion discussed in a symposium organized by London's Evening Standard, in which the mainly Jewish audience voted for the motion. Hunt, quite rightly, sees this debate and vote as an event of historical significance and develops this thesis into a two-volume treatise.

Jacqueline Rose's The Question of Zion and John Rose's Myths of Zionism are two similar attacks against Zionism. Professor Tony Judt of New York University also wiped Israel off the map in the New York Review of Books in October 2003 by writing that "Israel is an anachronism" and by proposing that it be replaced by a binational state.

Perhaps following Judt's lead, Prof. Ilan Pappe of Haifa University eradicates Israel in his article in the French L'Essentiel (summer 2005) in which he hopes that the return of the Palestinian refugees will give rise to "one unitary secular and democratic state" which would replace Israel. Naturally, Pappe surmises, the Jews will live happily ever after as a minority in a secular democracy, of which there are so many in the Middle East.

There are also those who do not advocate eradicating Israel, but work to remove any shred of justification for supporting the Jewish state. To the long list of Israeli academics who vilify their country, is now added a new opus: Suppressing the Guilt by Daniel Dor of Tel Aviv University. The source of guilt, of course, is Israel's actions in the West Bank and the suppressors are the Israeli media, who conceal the truth from their readers.

All of them? Yes, even Haaretz is reprimanded: its editors "misled their readers in a very fundamental way" on events in Jenin.

Why? Because they did not give more prominence to their own reporter Amira Hass - who had flown to London to defend the Evening Standard's motion defaming Zionism - by relegating her reports from Jenin to section B of the paper. For her part, Hass's blurb praises the Dor book for giving "ample evidence of how the Israeli free press easily turned into an instrument of propaganda."

Indeed, these, and similar attacks, have reached such force that Josef Joffe, editor and publisher of the German Die Zeit was let to write in Foreign Policy (February 2005) an article entitled "A World without Israel." The article explains that the disappearance of Israel will not solve the world's problems: suicide bombers and hate of America will not disappear with the elimination of Israel. It is significant to note that this question is asked only about Israel. Nobody writes an article entitled "A World without Syria" or without Iran...

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

S.N.A.F.U. in France: The rioters have run out of steam for the moment. We know because the nightly tally of torched vehicles is way down--to a mere and more manageable 163. The French government sees this as a sign that things have returned to "an almost normal situation everywhere"--"normal" in French parlance, apparently, referring to a situation in which the agrieved youths have expended sufficient energy for now and have returned to their lawless, no-go suburbs.

Another facet of "almost normal": 10,000 police and gendarmes are still being deployed to fight the violence in city streets.

There's no indication how long the new normal might last, but, were I French, I might heed the words of Canadian folk singer Bruce Cockburn: "The trouble with normal is it always gets worse."

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:36 | link | comments

Quel surprise!: Headline: Hamas, Jihad reject deal on Gaza crossings.

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

Web crimes: Word today that the Brits are getting ready to extradite a "'Jihad' computer whiz" (the Times Online's description) to the U.S. Seems the clever nerd was raising lots of shekels to help fund the jihad in Chechnya.

For me, the most salient part of the story is that his name is Babar and he comes from Tooting. Frankly, that's a combo I couldn't resist:

Babar, a non-elephant from Tooting
Was a whiz when it came to computing.
For eg., in a flash
He raised oodles of cash
For some Chechens who often went shooting.

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

Just asking: How come we're told about our Western governments can't find enough bird flu vaccine for our measly millions while China is preparing to vaccinate 1.4 billion birds?

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

Received "wisdom": Despite evidence to the contrary to anyone who cares to look for it on the Internet, the majority of Americans are convinced that the war in Iraq is just like that other unpopular war. From USA Today:

There are enormous differences between the war in Iraq and the one in Vietnam that defined a generation. The current conflict hasn't lasted as long, taken nearly as many American lives or sparked the sort of massive protests that became common in the '60s and '70s.

Flowers are laid at a memorial to the Kent State University shootings, one of the divisive events of 1970.
Mark Duncan, AP

But when it comes to public opinion, Americans' attitudes toward Iraq and the proper course ahead are remarkably similar to public attitudes toward Vietnam in the summer of 1970, a pivotal year in that conflict and a time of enormous domestic unrest.

Some political scientists and Vietnam War historians predict the Iraq war, like the one in Southeast Asia a quarter-century ago, will shape American attitudes long after it's over.

"This war is probably a really big deal historically in terms of America's perspective on the world," says John Mueller, a political scientist at Ohio State University. "What you're going to get after this is 'We don't want to do that again — No more Iraqs' just as after Vietnam the syndrome was 'No more Vietnams.' "

A USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll taken Friday through Sunday found that just more than half of those surveyed wanted to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq within the next 12 months. In a Gallup Poll in July-August 1970, just less than half wanted to withdraw U.S. troops from Vietnam within 12 months.

In both surveys, about one-third supported withdrawing troops over as many years as needed, and about one in 10 wanted to send more troops.

I attribute this misperception to several factors:

1. The slant of the mainstream media, which perceives events entirely through a Left/Lib filter, discounting any other interpretration as unworthy of consideration.
2. Creepy nostalgia for the 1960s and longing to participate in the same kind of earth-shaking, exciting protests that marked the era. This nostalgia is compounded by the continued dominance of the Boomers, that self-infatuated generation, who continue to be so influential. (I myself am a Boomer. At this stage, in name only, of course.) For the Boomers, the Vietnam War is the only war, the paradigm, in fact, of all wars.
3. Ignorance, indolence, apathy. The willingness of most people to recieve their opinions from "experts" (who, in our era, can be anyone from a rock musician like Bono to a film star like Cameron Diaz to a talent-free poet like Harold Pinter to hoary old dirigible like Jimminy Carter). It easier to let the experts tell you what to believe than to log on to the Web and find some opposing views. Especially when all the "cool" kids like Als Franken and Gore, and Sean Penn, and Larry and Laurie David, and John Cusack, and Susan Sarandon's life partner whatsisname share your views.

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:39 | link | comments (5)

Confonting unpleasant truths:  A superb, brave and hard-hitting cri de coeur about how Muslims have tried to duck responsibility for what's being done in the name of their religion, and an urgent call  to put a stop to it right now. By a Palestinian, no less. From the Daily Star:

Last week's suicide attacks against innocent civilians in Amman shocked us all. It is unclear what message the suicide bombers were conveying and there is no logical cause justifying such insane acts. What could the aim of such attacks be, and what were the mad executioners aiming to achieve? For some time, they have claimed they are defenders and combatants of Islam and the Muslim world. However, Islam has no use for such people and their acts and ideologies - if we believe they have any ideology at all. They promote nothing more than killing and aim only to bring about a state of lawlessness and instability in the Middle East.

The targets are no longer just the West, its ideologies and other foreign cultures; no longer only imperialism and American global domination. The targets are now Muslims themselves, Arabs and Palestinians - not to mention Iraqis. These actions represent killing for the sake of killing and destruction for the sake of destruction.

When actions target innocent civilians - regular people celebrating the wedding of their children and friends - what are the aims and targets of such suicide actions? It is now more obvious than ever that whoever was responsible for the attacks against civilians in other parts of the Arab world, let's say a few months ago the hotels at Sharm al-Sheikh, was also responsible for the attacks in Amman. All these attacks serve only one purpose: to undermine security and stability in the region.

Muslims, the Islamic countries and Arab states now face a crucial challenge. There should be no excuse for neglecting and denying the dangerous reach of the carriers of a new and mad disease of violence. For that, serious actions should be undertaken to exterminate this spreading disease from our Muslim societies and from Islam itself. Muslims and Arabs should not only have better condemned the terrorist acts carried out everywhere around the world, but also should move to isolate the destructive, invented beliefs promoted by a group of insane people and carried out in the name of defending Islam.

Now is the time for us Muslims and Arabs to take over this responsibility. All Muslim and Arabs should unify in one mission, which is to fight the mad ideologies defended by those who have separated themselves from what Islam has really brought to the world and what Islam really wants to promote. Their acts only cause severe damage to Islam and Muslims. The false messages they are presenting in the name of Islam have resulted in a global misunderstanding about real Islamic belief. The evil belief of these mad people has sentenced Islam and Muslims to be tainted as evildoers, terrorists, savages and people with no mercy.

Islamic governments and scholars shouldn't stay passive. They should assume their responsibilities now and think and plan how to cure and secure our families and societies from this widely spreading disease. They must not close their eyes and ears to the growing danger and say it isn't our problem. The insane missionaries of death are now knocking at our doors. Governments should act immediately to uproot them from our societies. Serious action should include preparing plans to cripple these people and their freedom of movement, to impede their receiving shelter, to draw plans to cut them off from their financial sources and to deny them the capabilities to recruit people. The authorities should also prevent mosques from being misused. Islamic scholars should draft plans on how to defend real Islam from the distorted allegations of those wrongfully acting in its name, and should raise public awareness that today our enemies come from among us. Society should also act in ensuring their children don't join such groups, while also isolating the latter.

As a Palestinian, I also accuse such bombers of damaging our cause and destroying our struggle for freedom. They can't be allowed to take our cause as an excuse for their evil and insane beliefs. No matter where they are acting - in Baghdad or New York, in Istanbul or Paris, in Madrid or Amman, in Cairo or London, in Beirut or Jerusalem - their acts only do us harm; especially at a time when we Palestinians are searching for international support to bring to life to a Palestinian state.

Our condolences are not just for the four senior Palestinians killed in the last suicide attack in Amman; not just for the people we knew or for the families of the innocents whose only crime was attending the weddings of loved ones. Our condolences are for Islam and for what Islam should really represent. Our condolences are for ourselves, who have fallen into the mud of madness.

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:17 | link | comments

Nic at night: The Beeb expresses admiration, albeit grudgingly,  for the only French leader with any stones:

His name appears scrawled among the graffiti on housing estate walls in untranslatable terms.

Mr Sarkozy wants to replace Mr Chirac as president in 2007
Young people cite him as the cause of their troubles and demand his resignation.

He was pelted with bottles and stones in one Parisian suburb. On the Champs-Elysees he was jostled, booed and insulted.

Political opponents, religious leaders and newspaper columnists have accused him of aggravating the tension on the streets.

A fellow minister was scathing about him. His two bosses, the most senior men in France, are political rivals seeking to block his progress.

Nicolas Sarkozy's language and tough stance on law and order have made him many enemies.

Yet the interior minister says he does not feel politically weakened.

Last weekend an opinion poll in one Sunday newspaper suggested that more than half of French people had confidence in his ability to bring solutions to the problems in the suburbs.
Another survey found many voters, even on the left, thought him "realistic" and "more than ever a potential presidential candidate"...

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

The Phantom of the Euphrates: Let's see: There's Sasquatch. And the tooth fairy. And the Loch Ness monster. And, oh yeah--that mythical creature from Jordan.

What's his name again?

From aljazeera.com:

The recent attacks in that targeted three hotels in the Jordanian capital Amman killing 57 people, said to have been carried out by four Iraqis, including one woman, have been used to further strengthen Washington’s claims that the Middle East harbors terrorists and thus justify interference.

Hours after Jordan bombings, numerous Western media outlets reported, citing unauthentic statement posted by an anonymous website, that Al Qaeda in Iraq organisation, led by Jordanian militant Abu Mus’ab Al Zarqawi, was behind the attacks.

The Associated Press claimed that Al Qaeda in Iraq carried out the attacks in Jordan simply because “Jordan has become a haven for Christians and Jews”, and they want to stop that, again linking the matter to Islam and animosity towards “Non Muslims”.

Loretta Napoleoni, a terrorism expert and author of “Insurgent Iraq”, says that Abu Mus’ab Al Zarqawi, the alleged leader of armed groups in Iraq, is nothing but a myth created by the United States.

Al Zarqawi’s myth was born on February 2003, when then-Secretary of State Colin Powell presented to the UN Security Council the case for war with Iraq, said a United Press International editorial.

Speaking to reporters last week, Napoleoni said that Powell's argument falsely exploited Zarqawi to support a fake link between the toppled Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda network.

She said that through fabrications of Zarqawi, born in October 1966 in the Jordanian city of Zarqa, "the myth became the reality" - a self-fulfilling prophecy, the editorial said.

"He became what we wanted him to be. We put him there, not the Jihadists," Napoleoni said...

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

Walk this way: You know that old saying: "If you really want to know how someone feels, walk a mile in his shoes"? Well, as Daniel Pipes notes, with the recent bombings in Amman, Palestinians, who comprise a sizeable percentage of Jordan's population, finally know how it feels to walk a mile in Israel's sandals. And guess what? Now that the stiletto's on the other foot, they find they prefer the feel of  their own Manolos. From FrontPage Magazine:

A suicide bombing in Hadera, Israel, on October 26 that killed five people inspired the usual Palestinian joy: some 3,000 people took to the streets in celebration, chanting Allahu Akbar, calling for more suicide attacks against Israelis, and congratulating the “martyr’s” family on the success of the attack.

But Palestinians were uncharacteristically morose after three explosions went off on November 9, killing 57 persons and injuring hundreds, in Amman, Jordan. That’s because, for the very first time, they found themselves the main victim of those same Islamist “martyrs”

The massacre at a wedding in the Radisson SAS hotel ballroom took the lives of 17 family members attending the nuptials of what the London Times called a Palestinian “golden couple, beloved of their prominent Palestinian families and friends.” The bombing also killed four Palestinian Authority officials, notably Bashir Nafeh, head of military intelligence on the West Bank.

After two decades of doling out this horror against Israelis, some of whom were also attending festive events (a Passover dinner, a Bar Mitzvah), Palestinians, who form a majority of the Jordanian population, unexpectedly found themselves at the receiving end.

And, guess what: they did not like it.

The brother of a woman injured in the attack told a reporter, “My sister, I love her. I love her to death, and if something happened to her, I’d be really . . .” Choked, he stopped speaking and cried. Another relative called the terrorists “vicious criminals.” A third cried out, “Oh my God, oh my God. Is it possible that Arabs are killing Arabs, Muslims killing Muslims?”

I extend my deepest sympathy to the family. I also hope that Palestinians, who have established a worldwide reputation not just for relying heavily on suicide murder but for doing so enthusiastically, will benefit from this unique learning opportunity.

No other media and school system indoctrinates children to become suicide murderers. No other people holds joyous wakes for dead suicide bombers; no other parents hope their children will blow themselves up. None other receives lavish endorsement and funding for terrorism from the authorities. Nor has another people produced a leader so inextricably tied to terrorism as was Yasir Arafat, nor so bountifully devoted its allegiance to him.

(The memorials of his death on November 11 were marked by effusive statements how “he will remain alive in our hearts” and reaffirmations to continue his work.)...

As they say, "if the shoe fits"...

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:16 | link | comments

No laughing matter, part III: British comedian Ali G is in hot water with Kazakhstan. Seems the comic, whose real name is Sacha Baron Cohen, poked fun at the Islamic republic during the MTV Europe Music Awards, something which no despotry of any religion can tolerate: From the Sydney Morning Herald:

Kazakhstan's Foreign Ministry threatened legal action against a British comedian who wins laughs by portraying the central Asian state as a country populated by drunks who enjoy cow-punching as a sport.

Sacha Baron Cohen, who portrays a spoof Kazakh television presenter Borat in his Da Ali G Show, has won fame ridiculing Kazakhstan, the world's ninth largest country yet still little known to many in the West, on British and US channels.

Cohen appears to have drawn official Kazakh ire after he hosted the annual MTV Europe Music Awards show in Lisbon earlier this month as Borat, who arrived in an Air Kazakh propeller plane controlled by a one-eyed pilot clutching a vodka bottle.

"We do not rule out that Mr Cohen is serving someone's political order designed to present Kazakhstan and its people in a derogatory way," Kazakh Foreign Ministry spokesman Yerzhan Ashykbayev told a news briefing.

"We reserve the right to any legal action to prevent new pranks of the kind." He declined to elaborate.

Cohen's earlier jokes about the Central Asian state include claims that the people would shoot a dog and then have a party, and that local wine was made from fermented horse urine.

"We view Mr Cohen's behaviour at the MTV Europe Music Awards as utterly unacceptable, being a concoction of bad taste and ill manners which is completely incompatible with ethics and civilised behaviour," Ashykbayev said.

Mr. Asykbayev seems to be implying that Cohen, an observant Jew in real life, may be following the marching orders of some unspecified elders; whether Zioinists or American, it's not clear (not that it matters). It appears, however, that the Kazakhs aren't the only ones who found Ali G's spiel offensive. From Radio Free Europe:

Posing as Borat, he claimed the tune was a national song of Kazakhstan called "In My Country There Is Problem." He then got bar patrons to sing: "Throw the Jew down the well so my country can be free. You must grab him by the horns. Then we have a big party."

Even though Cohen is an observant Jew in real life, the Anti-Defamation League condemned that stunt as anti-Semitic -- saying that his irony would be lost on most of the TV program's audience.

Guess sometimes the ADL doesn't have much of a sense of humour either. In this instance, the League seems to have unfairly defamed Ali G's fans. I have it on good authority that some of them are highly intelligent. In fact, I am happen to be related to at least two of them.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:57 | link | comments

Voluntary remedy: French President Jacques Chirac emerged from his bunker deep within the bowels of the Elysée Palace to weigh in on the riots that have been racking his nation for the past 18 days. Looking sheepish and shellshocked, Chirac, who hasn't seen daylight for so long he could only squint in front of cameras, says he's come up with a way to finally assimilate the masses of angry young immigrants. He's going to send in some volunteers to train them.  From Monsters and Critics:

Speaking to the nation for the first time after 18 nights of destructive violence, French President Jacques Chirac late Monday announced the creation of a volunteer civil service to aid disadvantaged minority youths who have been largely responsible for the urban unrest around the country.

Appearing on national television, Chirac said that the volunteers would be working working with 50,000 young people by the year 2007 in neighbourhoods beset with poverty and unemployment. Their focus would be on assistance and training.

Chirac also defended the government's intent to extend the state of emergency by three months, saying that 'respect for the law' was at stake.

However, other than the volunteer initiative and his stated intention to meet with trade union and media representatives in the coming weeks on the issue of discrimination, Chirac's speech was surprisingly empty of concrete proposals.

The disturbances, which were sparked by the accidental deaths of two minority teenagers on October 27, 'illustrated a deep discontent', Chirac said. 'The children, the teenagers, need values, reference points. Parental authority is of capital importance.'

Here's my question: Who's going to "volunteer" for such a difficult assignment? Wouldn't they rather be Candy Stripers at the local Hôtel-Dieu?

I have an idée. Instead of sending in some timorous volunteers, why doesn't Chirac set up a special division of the civil service devoted to incineration? The disadvantaged minority youths have already had plenty of on-the-job training in that area, and could rechannel their rage by getting rid of France's garbage by torching it, thereby turning their negative energy into a positive social endeavour.

Alternatively, he could always let them declare their independence and fend for themselves.

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

Kentucky fried in Karachi: Yesterday, Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf asserted that he wasn't worried about being assassinated because radical elements in his country were calming down.

Musharraf was responding to those who disapproved of his outreach to the Jewish state, shaky and tentative though it may be. He assured them he has no intention of establishing full diplomatic ties until there's an official Palestinian state. And he planned to live long enough to witness that wondrous event because he'd effectively sidelined Pakistan's extremists.

That was then; this is now: Some excitable folks in Musharraf's country have aimed their sights at another KFC outlet, this one in Karachi. And no, they weren't interested in the extra crispy, at least not the kind pertaining to poulty. They wanted to show their disdain for a symbol of Western decadence and dominance by deep frying the entire store. It "blowed up real good", as they used to say on SCTV.

Looks like it's time to put on your flak jacket, Pervez.

Pakistanis are rightly concerned about this latest instance of urban terrorism, though not in the way you might think. It's not that they fear such tactics may deter tourism, because, let's face it, vacationers aren't exactly making a beeline for Karachi and other Pakistani hot spots.  It's that they might prevent an English cricket team from coming to play a Pakistani cricket team. And that, as they say, ain't cricket.

Nice to see that Pakistan has its priorities straight.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:51 | link | comments

Chirac fiddles as France burns: Cox and Forkum graphically roast French multiculturalism.

Arc de Multiculti

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:50 | link | comments (2)

High-tech hooligans: As I keep trying to explain to my son, the Internet is just a tool. You can use it for good stuff, like getting information about dinosaurs of the Late Cretaceous period or finding a recipe for coq au vin. Or you can use it for bad purposes, like using your blog to keep your buddies aprised of locations of upcoming car-B-ques. The choice is yours. From the NY Daily News:

A modern-day agent provocateur is fanning the flames in France: the Internet.
Tech-savvy rioters, many of them young men and teenage boys, are relying on cell phone text messages and Web logs, or blogs, to spread the word about the violence that has destroyed thousands of cars and countless buildings, cops said yesterday.

Paris prosecutors yesterday were investigating two teen bloggers arrested Monday for using the Net to call for attacks on cops, French Justice Minister Pascal Clement said.

If found guilty, they could face up to five years in prison.

Michel Gaudin, the director general of the national police, characterized some blog messages as "veritable calls to revolt."

He said that although there didn't appear to be any kind of global organizing influence in the violence by predominantly Muslim minorities, the riots were well-organized in each city - something he attributed to cell phone and Internet networks.

The blogs are under an umbrella Web network run by a popular hip-hop radio channel called Skyrock.

Skyrock officials did not comment but the newspaper Le Monde reported that the sites had been taken off-line.

One blog was reportedly called "Hardcore" and another "Sarkodead," referring to hard-line Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, who infuriated rioters by labeling them "scum."

The popular "Skyblogs" Web sites are patterned after similar sites in the U.S., such as MySpace.com. But instead of personal musings about prom dates and parties, a number of the most popular Skyblog sites are focused squarely on the riots.

Some sites are tributes to the two teens whose death in a Paris suburb Oct. 27 triggered the rioting - the worst street violence France has seen in 37 years. The teens were accidentally electrocuted as they reportedly hid from police in a power station in Clichy-sous-Bois.

Other sites, like one titled "Violence Urbaines," detail the riots, hour by hour, highlighted with photos of flaming cars and cops and drawings of bombs and Molotov cocktails. One site rails, "Mieu vaut mourir que de vivre a genoux," or better to die than live on your knees.

The sites are peppered with typical Internet shorthand, teenage misspellings and French slang that started in the young minority communities and has been adopted by much of French youth.

Some of the sites refer to lost comments because of censorship. At least one site linked to the riots was blocked, according to a Skyblog message, for failing to follow Web site "regulations." ...

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:36 | link | comments

No laughing matter: Last week FrontPage Magazine had a piece on Albert Brooks's new film, Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World. Brooks's mission in making the film was to get Muslims to lighten up, chuckle at their foibles, and persuade them to stop taking themselves so goshdarned seriously.

Looks like Brooks has a tougher job on his hands than he may have thought. From AKI:

A Saudi secondary school teacher has been jailed for three years for mocking religion, and sentenced to 750 lashes, to be delivered - 50 a week - in the public market of the town of al-Bikeriya. Chemistry teacher Muhammad al-Harbi was charged with mocking Islam, favouring Jews and Christians and studying witchcraft, after a lawsuit was filed against him by a group of students and teachers from his school who he says were out for revenge.

Al-Harbi told Saudi newspaper Arab News in a phone interview that it was "a very cruel sentence". He said the students who reported him had all failed the monthly chemistry test and complained to the school principal when he refused to let them sit the exam again.

Al-Harbi said they were encouraged to report him by some Islamic studies teachers at the school, who were angry that he had taken it on himself to warn students of terrorism and its consequences following the attack on the Al-Hamra residential compound in Riyadh in 2003. After being appointed school activities organiser he held talks with students speaking against terrorism and hung anti-terrorism signs around the school.

"The Ministry of Education has recently ordered all schools to lecture students on the danger of extremism and terrorism in general, but I was a step ahead of their decision," he told the newspaper.

He said one of the teachers had also stopped him from speaking out against Abdul Aziz al-Muqrin, who the Saudi government has identified as a terrorist, and one of the students' fathers had admitted to him that the Islamic studies teachers used to visit students at home and encourage them to disobey al-Harbi...

Those Wahabis. They're a barrel of laughs.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:18 | link | comments

Religious doctrine of the day: Frisbeeterianism. Frisbeeterianists--worshippers of a flat plastic disc first manufactured by Wham-O--believe that when you die, your soul gets stuck on a roof where it remains for all eternity. (And no, I didn't make it up.)

All in all, a much more believable and less dangerous dogma than that one about virgins in Paradise.

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

Cartesian torchers: The caretaker of a Muslim community centre in Paris (quoted in a FrontPage Magazine article about France's Muslim gangs) says the rioters are trying to break through French ennui and shout, loudly and proudly, "here we are". This collective "hineni"--Hebrew for the singular of the phrase (i.e. "here I am)--is the modern day equivalent of Rene Descartes' "I think, therefore I am." The rioters have merely taken it out of the passive mode--inoffensive cogitation--and put it into the active mode--"I torch, therefore I am."

I can't wait for them to discover Jean-Paul Sartre's observation in his book No Exit (a title which could also describe France's current problems): Hell is other people.

Posted by: scaramouche at 16:55 | link | comments

Paradise Lust: I just noticed this blurb for the movie Paradise Now in my copy of Inside Entertainment, a glossy magazine that comes once a month with my National Post. The film, which has already been acclaimed at the Berlin Film Festival, where it won three awards, including Best European Film and the Amnesty International Prize, depicts the final two days in the lives' of two suicide killers. Sure, they have the love of their families to keep them warm, but that's not enough to prevent them from 'sploding lots of Jews. "As long as there's occupation, there will be a need for sacrifice," explains one.

Inside Entertainment assures us that the director, a Netherlands-based Palestinian filmmaker named Hany Abu-Assad, "does not take sides in the matter." No, I'm certain Mr. Assad has absolutely no axe to grind either way, and has presented an unbiased account of lads on the cusp of martyrdom. These are, after all, human being--angry, brainwashed, delusional, Jew-hating human beings, who know their culture will applaud their barbaric actions and turn them into heroes once they've blown themselves to smithereens--but human beings nonetheless. (Am I the only one to be offended that the filmmaker borrows and twists the name of a great work of Western literature, Milton's Paradise Lost, a book that is the antithesis of a film about Islamic supremacists who turn themselves into human bombs? The whole concept of "Paradise Now"--looking for the instant gratification which can only come through "martyrdom", and which, not incidentally, results in an everlasting payoff of 72 re-virginizing virgins who only have eyes for you--is thoroughly revolting. Maybe the filmmaker could have suggested that it's a better idea to defer one's pleasure, you know, until one died of natural causes and made one's way to Paradise through a lifetime of devoutness and good deeds. But I suppose that would be displaying "bias" of another sort, the kind that would be unlikely to elicit the same rapturous response from German film judges.)

None of this, however, occurs to Kendon Polak, the Inside Entertainment hack reviewing the film. Ken says the whole point of the "unbiased" flick is to show how "occupation and wartime trauma breeds desperate measures and loss of perspective."

Point taken, Ken. But you obviously haven't noticed: so does the jihad.

Update: The Beeb, ever-admiring of those trying to roll back the occupation, has a photo essay on the making of this acclaimed film. (link via LGF)

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

Wedded blitz: Here's the heart-curdling saga of Mr. and Mrs. Suicide, the husband and wife team who "crashed" a wedding in Amman, killing many of the invited guests (as well as the fathers of both the bride and groom).

Mr. Suicide was able to activate his dynamite belt. Mrs. Suicide's, however, was a dud.

Now she's a widow and he's cavorting with houris in Heaven.

Love's young dream, jihadi-style.

Update: The brother of one of the wedding victims says of Mrs. Suicide, "The woman is a beast".

I'm willing to bet he's never affixed the same label to suicide bombers who've murdered Israelis. Funny how your perpective changes when you're on the receiving end of terrorism. (One recalls the occasion when Cherie Blair, standing beside her good friend Queen Rania, said of a suicide bombing in Israel that the killer was driven to his act because he had no other options. You can be sure neither Cherie nor the Queen would say the same of the suicidal wedding blitzers.)

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:29 | link | comments

Run, Nic, run: We know that the riots in France are on the wane because the number of torched cars--the tally by which we can judge the heatedness of the uprising--seems to be down: in the 300s instead of the 500s. That didn't prevent a mob of "angry youths" (Wiccans? Buddhists? Seventh Day Adventists?) from chasing France's Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, from the Champs-Elysées.

The pride-seeking youngsters chanted the appropriate words for Frenchmen seeking their societal rights--Liberté, egalité, fraternité. And hearing them shout those familiar words, ones likely to stir the blood of any proud Frenchman, one could well imagine that the intifada had nothing whatever to do with the religious background of most of the rioters. Then, however, they blew their cover, directing some of their insults at Minister Sarkozy's mother.

I'm sure you won't be shocked to learn (if you don't know already) that Sarkozy's mom has Jewish blood.

But hey, maybe their objection to his mother has nothing whatever to do with her religion, either.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:41 | link | comments

The truth shall set you free: Melanie Phillips, an outpost of truth in a society quickly sinking into the quicksands of political correctness, has an excellent round-up about the reality of the riots in France. The agreed-upon story, says Melanie, is that the riots are solely about poverty and French racism, and have nothing to do with the religion of the rioters. Anyone who claims otherwise will be villified as a right-wing crank. Before she's completely marginalized, Melanie is determined to cut through the crapola. The truth, one which is being concealed by much of the media but is available if you know where to find it, is the the riots, even now being quelled by bearded activists with megaphones speaking "in the name of Allah" in places like Clicy-sous-Bois, are "the Jihad and nihilism spatchcocked together".

"Spatchcocked"--great word.

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

Safety first: After engaging is some strategic dialogue with the amiable Wabibis, Condi has moved on to the testy Hebrews. The Foggy Bottom diva assured reporters she's still keen on that "two state solution". In fact, she says a Palestinian state will, in the words of a familiar phrase, be good for the Jews because it "would indeed enhance Israeli security."

Small fly in the balm, Condi: Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, and all the rest of the excitable lads, jihadis all, who would sooner see the Jews tossed into the Mediterranean.

Condi says she realizes that, of course, Palestinians need to, in the words of aljazeera.net, "tackle fighters ahead of January's parliamentary election" and that building a democracy full of angry, gun-toting  jihadis ("resistance groups" to A-J--resisting the sovereignty of the Jews, I guess) is likely to be a dicey proposition.

So, yes, Condi: a Palestinian state without angry jihadis would indeed enhance Israeli security. But then, so would a world without angry jihadis. My question: Is it realistic to expect the Palestinians to "tackle fighters" when the Western world has yet to get a handle on the problem?

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

High five: Dennis Prager poses five questions he says non-Muslims would like answered. From the Los Angeles Times:

(1) Why are you so quiet?

Since the first Israelis were targeted for death by Muslim terrorists blowing themselves up in the name of your religion and Palestinian nationalism, I have been praying to see Muslim demonstrations against these atrocities. Last week's protests in Jordan against the bombings, while welcome, were a rarity. What I have seen more often is mainstream Muslim spokesmen implicitly defending this terror on the grounds that Israel occupies Palestinian lands. We see torture and murder in the name of Allah, but we see no anti-torture and anti-murder demonstrations in the name of Allah.

There are a billion Muslims in the world. How is it possible that essentially none have demonstrated against evils perpetrated by Muslims in the name of Islam? This is true even of the millions of Muslims living in free Western societies. What are non-Muslims of goodwill supposed to conclude? When the Israeli government did not stop a Lebanese massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Chatilla refugee camps in Lebanon in 1982, great crowds of Israeli Jews gathered to protest their country's moral failing. Why has there been no comparable public demonstration by Palestinians or other Muslims to morally condemn Palestinian or other Muslim-committed terror?

(2) Why are none of the Palestinian terrorists Christian?

If Israeli occupation is the reason for Muslim terror in Israel, why do no Christian Palestinians engage in terror? They are just as nationalistic and just as occupied as Muslim Palestinians.

(3) Why is only one of the 47 Muslim-majority countries a free country?

According to Freedom House, a Washington-based group that promotes democracy, of the world's 47 Muslim countries, only Mali is free. Sixty percent are not free, and 38% are partly free. Muslim-majority states account for a majority of the world's "not free" states. And of the 10 "worst of the worst," seven are Islamic states. Why is this?

(4) Why are so many atrocities committed and threatened by Muslims in the name of Islam?

Young girls in Indonesia were recently beheaded by Muslim murderers. Last year, Muslims — in the name of Islam — murdered hundreds of schoolchildren in Russia. While reciting Muslim prayers, Islamic terrorists take foreigners working to make Iraq free and slaughter them. Muslim daughters are murdered by their own families in the thousands in "honor killings." And the Muslim government in Iran has publicly called for the extermination of Israel.

(5) Why do countries governed by religious Muslims persecute other religions?

No church or synagogue is allowed in Saudi Arabia. The Taliban destroyed some of the greatest sculptures of the ancient world because they were Buddhist. Sudan's Islamic regime has murdered great numbers of Christians.

Instead of confronting these problems, too many of you deny them. Muslims call my radio show to tell me that even speaking of Muslim or Islamic terrorists is wrong. After all, they argue, Timothy McVeigh is never labeled a "Christian terrorist." As if McVeigh committed his terror as a churchgoing Christian and in the name of Christ, and as if there were Christian-based terror groups around the world...

Why do I get the feeling that he's not really expecting any answers?

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:14 | link | comments (1)

Happy talk: The U.S. and it's compadre in the battle against world wide terrorism, Saudi Arabia, are about to embark on a new phase of their relationship: a "strategic dialogue".

What, you may ask, is a "strategic dialogue"? I'm not sure. From my reading of this story in the Washington Post, it seems to involve tons of smoke and mirrors combined with heaps of window dressing, all decked out in superficial feelings of amity.

But you be the judge:

With skepticism still deep on both sides four years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the United States and Saudi Arabia on Sunday inaugurated a new "strategic dialogue" to expand cooperation on six key issues, including terrorism and energy.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called on Saudi Arabia to play a stronger role in confronting terrorist groups and their financing. "I'm certain the Saudi government can do better," Rice said at a joint press conference with Prince Saud Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister. "All of us can do better. But there is, I think, no lack of political will."


The Bush administration has been under pressure from both Republicans and Democrats to win greater cooperation from the oil-rich kingdom, home to al Qaeda founder Osama Bin Laden and 15 of the 19 terrorists who carried out the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States. U.S. concerns deepened after an attack by al Qaeda gunmen last December on the U.S. consulate in this Red Sea commercial center, which killed five embassy employees and left extensive damage.

The State Department last week issued another warning against U.S. citizens traveling to the kingdom because militants are targeting hotels, housing compounds, transportation and businesses used by Westerners. Movement of U.S. diplomats is now heavily restricted, officials here say.

Congressional criticism has been particularly harsh. "We can't continue this sort of cat and mouse game that has characterized the relationship," Arizona Republican Sen. Jon Kyl told a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting Tuesday. At the same session, Vermont Democrat Sen. Patrick Leahy said Washington is now "far too cozy" with a country whose citizens are responsible for the deadliest attack ever against the United States.

After Rice's talks here, the Saudi foreign minister said the kingdom is "fighting as hard as we can. I would dare anyone to say there is another country that is fighting terror as hard as we are." Faisal, the U.S.-educated son of a former king, noted that Saudi Arabia has outlawed incitement and cracked down on Saudi financing destined for militant groups both inside and outside the country.

"There is what I would call a misunderstanding about Saudi Arabia among the U.S. public, as there is a misunderstanding about the United States among the Saudi public. That is why we are trying to influence this," he said, adding that the media was partially responsible for image problems.

The goal of the dialogue, which emerged out of Saudi King Abdullah's visit to President Bush's ranch in Crawford, Tx., last April, is to launch institutions and regular meetings every six months at senior levels to address problems that now rely heavily on personal relationships and ad hoc contacts, according to Saudi and U.S. officials.

Both nations want to revive the kind of partnership set up by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in the early 1970s on everything from joint military planning to energy policy -- an arrangement that was pivotal to their cooperation during the 1979-1989 Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, a senior Saudi official said Sunday. Coordinated Saudi funding and U.S. arms to the opposition mujaheddin "rolled back communism," the official said. The aim now is to work together to end terrorism, he added.

But noticeably missing from the dialogue are the issues of political reform and democracy, which top of Washington's foreign policy agenda but are the most politically sensitive matters in the Gulf nation. The six new U.S.-Saudi groups will instead focus on counterterrorism, military affairs, energy, business, education and human development, and consular affairs.

To underscore the friendship, the Saudi foreign minister presented Rice with a chocolate birthday cake inscribed to her and with the flags of both nations. The Saudi delegation then sang "Happy Birthday" to her, U.S. officials said. Rice turns 51 on Monday...

Also "noticeably missing from the dialogue": any mention of the fact that Saudi Arabia continues to export a toxic interpretation of their faith to Muslims around the world, convincing some of them to wage violent jihad against, quelle ironie!--its partner in the strategic dialogue.

In other words, the Wahabis are still running rings around the dhimmis.

The birthday cake was a nice touch, though.

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

Weirdest story of the day (week? month? year?): We have a winner! From the Khaleej Times:

When she went to the ladies washroom in the Egyptian Court of Ibn Battuta Mall at 9.30 last night, 37-year old Latifa M. never imagined that she would come face to face with pop icon Michael Jackson, who walked in dressed in a T-shirt and trousers, with his head covered with the Emirati women’s traditional head scarf Sheila.

The Tunisian, who is a teacher in a private school in Dubai, screamed in shock and ran out of the ladies room when she realised that the woman-like person was a man. She went back in to photograph the pop singer with her mobile phone, while he was busy fixing his make up.

This time it was the turn of Michael Jackson who ran after the Ajman-based teacher, to retrieve the pictures. The scene attracted the security of the mall, who tried to take the phone from Latifa, but she refused and asked for compensation, while the two women accompanying Jackson tried to convince her to sit in private and settle the issue.

Wary of this suggestion, the teacher called the police. Colonel Abdul Jalil Al Mehdi, Deputy Director of the Preventive Security Department of Dubai Police, took the matter in his hands and tried to solve the issue, while Jackson left it to his companions to explain who he is and solve the matter.

While Latifa insisted on compensation, Jackson flatly refused to pay up. The police informed Latifa that the UAE laws do not entitle her to any financial gain from the situation and they convinced her to hand over the mobile, which she did after erasing the photos for the fear of being penalised.

I sure I speak for many when I say: They call their headscarves Sheila?

Also--you can see why the King of Pop would decide to settle in Dubai. He finally found a place where his use of face shmattas wouldn't be considered out of place.

Now, if he could only figure out which gender he is...

Posted by: scaramouche at 16:41 | link | comments (2)

Violence spreads to other European countries: France seems to be quieter for the moment. After more than two weeks of riots, the "proud" rampagers were bound to run out of gas, as well as cars. Disaffected pride-seekers in other parts of Europe, however, seem willing to pick up the slack. From the CBC:

France was largely spared overnight Saturday from the violence that has wracked the country for 17 nights, but arson and violence have spread to other European countries... 

...Belgium had its worst night in a week and the Netherlands also reported violent incidents, although they are minor in comparison with the situation in France.

In Belgium, 29 vehicles were set on fire around the country. There are no reports of injuries and 50 people have been arrested.

In the Dutch city of Rotterdam, four cars were torched and a Molotov cocktail was thrown at a home.

Then again, all's not completely quiescent on the Western front:

Back in France, Lyon police used tear gas to break up a crowd of about 50 young men who were throwing stones.

The clash began at about 5 p.m. local time Saturday in Place Bellecour square, where riot police had been deployed to head off possible disturbances.

Police said two people were arrested in the violence.

In Carpentras, youths drove cars into a school and retirement home. No injuries were reported.  

 
And just in case you were wondering what sparked all the unrest, the Ceeb once again fills you in:

The unrest has mainly hit poor suburbs around large towns and cities as black and Arab youths rebelled against poverty, the lack of opportunities, and perceived harassment by police based on skin colour.

Violence erupted Oct. 27 after the accidental electrocutions of two teenagers hiding out in a power substation to evade police.

Update: Melanine Phillips begs to differ about the "root causes" of the French riots. She cites this FrontPage Magazine article from two years ago about France's ongoing Islamification:

This extremist indoctrination also extends to French schools, where non-Muslim teachers are subject to daily insults and racist remarks. For instance, the principal of the Trappes’ primary school described how an 11-year-old kid insulted his female teacher because she was not wearing the hijab. Intolerant behaviors especially against teachers and other religions have skyrocketed in the past three years. These young children are taught from the time they can walk that Islam is the answer to everything the Ultimate Truth and that is why even six-year-olds are now fasting during Ramadan.

Therefore, is not surprising that ten-year olds call for the institution of Shariah, or Koranic law, during class. Or that during a high school History lesson regarding the Crusades, a Muslim student yelled: 'Anyway, the Arabs are going to kill the Christians and the Jews.' The teacher then asked him, 'When?' and the child replied, 'I do not know. It was not mentioned on the imam’s tape.' Or that on a course on the Holocaust, Muslim children demanded to be let go to ask their imams if what they were being taught was true.

But school is not the only place in France where militant Islam is omnipresent. For example, in Avignon, Muslim extremists distribute loads of Koranic tapes in French and drive around town with their windows open and propaganda blasting through the speakers. In French hospitals, most Muslim women, sometimes under the family’s pressure, refuse to be examined by male doctors and many Muslim men by female doctors. Many Muslim defendants refuse to be tried by Jewish judges, and some municipal pools have different hours for women and men to accommodate the Muslim population. A number of supermarkets carrying non-Halaal products (food not permitted by the Koran), have been vandalized by Muslims and then surrendered to this violent blackmail by taking the products off their shelves. This is what France has become.

Islamists have the clear goal of transforming France into the first Islamist regime of the West. Their master plan is clearly formulated and being implemented every day.

Looks like "youths" and "immigrants" aren't the only ones being harrassed.

Update: Despite earlier reports, the violence in France seems to be continuing. At the moment, most of it is concentrated in the south. From the Washington Post:

The violence in France's poor, suburban communities persisted in the south Sunday with attackers ramming burning cars into the sides of a retirement home and a school in one southern town. But nationwide the unrest of the past 18 nights continued to subside.

National Police Chief Michel Gaudin described the declining levels of violence as a "major lull" despite scattered incidents of serious attacks, particularly in southern cities and communities.


The nation's worst violence in nearly four decades has declined slowly over the last week since its ferocious climax last weekend. Residents and police said the unrest has been curbed in many areas with a combination of parental and community pressure on the youths involved in the attacks, curfews and more aggressive arrests by police.

But groups of boys and young men continue to strike at symbols of the republic, including schools and police stations, as well as opportune targets ranging from cars to private businesses...

Charming people. Let's give them a state.

Oh, sorry. I seem to be mixing them up with with something else.

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

Spinning Australia: You gotta love the Ceeb. Rioters in France are into their 16th day of "proud" destruction, and Ceeb radio is still mightily concerned that Muslims in some part of the world might face a backlash. No link on the Mother Org's website, so you'll have to take my word that there was a report on the news this morning about how Muslims in Australia, which recently announced tough anti-terrorism measures in the wake of a failed attack by jihadis, are worried that Australians will take out their hostility on the Muslim community. (The Ceeb, which still refuses to use the "t" word, has no similar restrictions regarding the "b" word--backlash--and hauls it out as frequently as possible.) They are also concerned that the new measures focus on their community to the exclusion of all others.

Right, 'cause as we all know, there's always the possibility that Wiccans, Buddhists and Seventh Day Adventists could become involved in terrorism.

The Ceeb might have mentioned that Australian Prime Minister John Howard has assured law-abiding Muslim Australians that they have nothing to fear from the new laws. At the same time, he has called on them to take an active role in helping to root out those who are "perverting" their religion. From The Australian:

PRIME Minister John Howard has moved to dispel fears of victimisation among Australia's Muslims in the wake of anti-terrorism raids in New South Wales and Victoria.

"All Australians are equal before the law. We all have the same rights and we also have the same responsibilities," Mr Howard said at the Queensland Liberal Party conference in Brisbane today.

Police swooped earlier this week to arrest 18 suspected terrorists in Sydney and Melbourne following the urgent passage of part of the government's new anti-terror bill.

Mr Howard said today Muslims should not fear a backlash because of the events of the past week and called on all Australians to respect each other's rights.

"Anything that I say or anything that is said about the need to fight and resist terrorism should not be seen as in any way an attack upon people of Muslim faith or Islamic identification," he said.

"Islamic Australians are as much a part of our community as any other part of Australian society. We should say that, we should practice that and we should mean that.

"It puts obligations on us to reach out to our fellow law-abiding Muslims and say to them: `you are our friends, you are part of our fight, terrorism is as much your enemy as it is ours'."

But he said the Islamic community also needed to recognise it had a responsibility to identify and deal with the "perverted, fanatical" elements within its ranks.

"There is nothing in the new laws that we have introduced that represents in any way a generalised attack on the Islamic community," he said.

"There is no singling out, there is no scapegoating."

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:40 | link | comments

Hatikvah and false hope: The CBC reports that tens of thousands of people showed up in Israel yesterday to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the murder Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin. At the time, Rabin was deep into heated negotiations with the Palestinian leader, once which may have been a hair breadth's away from finally resolving the difficulties between Isaelis and Palestinians.

Anyway, that's long been the Ceeb and other maintstreamer's story and, all evidence to the contrary--including the words of mainstream hero, Bill Clinton--ten years on, they're stickin' to it:

Tens of thousands of Israelis packed the Tel Aviv park where Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated 10 years ago to mourn the former prime minister and to express hopes that his memory would spur new efforts to bring peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

Rabin's killing by an ultranationalist Jew opposed to the premier's peace efforts with the Palestinians stunned the country, revealing the depth of Israel's internal conflicts and badly damaging hopes for peace.

Sorry, I don't buy it. While Rabin's murder may have revealed schisms within Israel, it had absolutely no bearing on Israel's ability to negotiate a final peace settlement. Yasser Arafat and the whole Oslo process, as well as the ones which followed it at Camp David and Wye, made fools of the Israelis, stringing them along with false hopes for a resolution that was chimerical at best. Arafat had no intention of signing a peace treaty, with Rabin or without Rabin. And to rewrite history so that it was Rabin's murder, and not a Palestinian leader who was "bargaining" in bad faith all along, which has forever after put the kibosh on the peace process, is to give in to the worst sort of blindness. The sort that leads to Israelis being blown to bits in jihadi attacks.

And while we're at it, it's impossible to talk about the peace talks derailed by Rabin's murder without mentioning the absudity of their basic premise. To whit: You could take a terrorist leader, living in mostly harmless exile in Tunisia, bring him back to "the scene of his crimes", give him lots of money and power, including responsibility for a police force which was expected to keep Jihadi terror groups like Hamas in check,  and expect him to suddenly behave like a statesman, a man of peace, a Palestinian Mandela. With the clarity of hindsight, it is now possible to say: WHAT IN THE HECK WERE THEY THINKING?

The fact is, they weren't thinking. They had been lulled in a state of insensibility by that most powerful and addictive of drugs: hope. But hope comes in two varieties. There's the good kind, hatikvah, which enables a ravaged people to turn a desert into an oasis. And there's the  bad kind of hope, false hope. That kind of hope can befog the minds of the most clear-thinking of peoples. It can delude them into believing that Jew-hating terrorists who speak out of both sides of their mouths--for Arafat was always careful to let Arabs know what his true intentions were in Arabic while saying something completely different in English--are capable of waging peace.

If we learn anything from Rabin's murder it should be this: Israel cannot and will not survive if it succumbs to the compelling allure of false hope.

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:15 | link | comments

Enemy of the faithful: The jihadi loons of al Qaeda have released their "Forbes list" of top enemies. Most of the expected names are there--l don't think I need to mention them. But also included is a person who's a fixture on another list--the one which ranks the richest women in the world.

It's none other than our beloved Monrach, Queen Elizabeth.

That's right. That nice, grey-haired, Corgi-loving grandma who lives yonder in Buckingham Palace.

That al Qaeda would include the Queen--an inoffensive sweetie who has done her utmost to coddle the restive Muslims in her midst, by, for example, knighting them, and whose heir, during his recent visit to Washington, wanted to plead Islam's case--says a lot about their anachronistic mindset. Apparently, they see the Queen as their ancestors viewed Richard the Lionhearted--as the English leader in charge of the crusaders.

When everyone knows that these days, that task is performed by American crusader leader, George W. Bush.

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

Cherchez la source: Nadia Anjuman, 25, was a gifted poet. During the reign of the Salafist Taliban, she was a member of a now famous "sewing circle" of Afghani women. Under the Taliban, who interpreted the Koran in the most literal way possible, women in Afghanistan were, in the words of a sewing circle member quoted in the Times Online article, "no more than cows in sheds". That is, they were mostly confined to their quarters and deprived of a basic human right: the right to venture out of their homes without fear of being punished by "religious" police. Nadia and her sewing circle defied authorities who sought to cloister them for religious reasons and deprive them of an education, and pretended to be engaged in sewing; all the while, they were learning about forbidden literary works by Western authors.

Had authorities learned what Nadia and her circle were really up to, it would have cost them their lives. Luckily, their secret was never revealed, and they lived to see the Taliban chased away and replaced by Hamid Karzai's democracy. Now, Nadia and her friends could pursue a higher education without fear of being tortured and killed. They were granted equality under the eyes of the law, and could participate fully in every aspect of public life.

In theory, at least. This being Afghanistan, old habits die hard. And while Nadia could now emerge from her "cow shed" and write her poetry--she was about to have her first book of poems published--she still lived in a country where men believe they have certain God-given rights over their women. Nadia was married to one of those men. The other day, he beat her to death, apparently because her new book would have "shamed" the family and detracted from its "honour". From the Times Online:

The 25-year-old Afghan had garnered wide praise in literary circles for the book Gule Dudi — Dark Flower — and was at work on a second volume.

Friends say her family was furious, believing that the publication of poetry by a woman about love and beauty had brought shame on it.

“She was a great poet and intellectual but, like so many Afghan women, she had to follow orders from her husband,” said Nahid Baqi, her best friend at Herat University.

Farid Ahmad Majid Mia, 29, Anjuman’s husband, is in police custody after confessing to having slapped her during a row. But he denies murder and claims that his wife committed suicide. The couple had a six-month-old son.

Despite these facts, The Times Online takes the p.c. approach, It attempts to link the murder of a woman by a man in the grip of some retrogressvie beliefs with America's backing of Afghani warlords with a "conservative mindset. To bolster this claim it quotes Fauzia Galani, a woman recently elected to Afghanistan's parliament:

The 32-year-old mother of six said she was outraged by Anjuman’s death and was compiling a list of such cases. “In Islam no one has the right to hit their wife,” she said. “We hope the government will take action and stop crimes like this.

Wrong. According to the Koran--a book well known to Afghanis, both freedom-lovers and American-backed warlords alike--you are allowed to beat your wife. You're just not allowed to leave any tell-tale signs of her licking.

Domestic violence occurs in every culture. It may be that Nadia's husband beat her to death in a fit of rage which had nothing to do with any religious notion of how a man is supposed to dominate his wife and prevent her from shaming the family. On the other hand, it may be that he had imbibed "the conservative mindset" of an ancient book which, to this day, provides ammunition for men looking to keep their women in check. We may never know for certain. What we do know is that it is absurd for the Times to impute this kind of brutality to American support for warlords without considering that this "conservatism" might stem from something far older than that.

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

How low can you go? Every day I try to set aside a few moments to repeat my Daniel Pipes mantra: "Radical Islam is the problem; moderate Islam is the solution. I find that when I say these few words over and over, it helps ease my mind and allay my fears. You know--sort of like when Dorothy kept assuring herself "there's no place like home" when she was lost in the wilds of Oz.

I'll have to say it a few more times today because I just read this story in the Telegraph (link via LGF).  The story quotes a Jordanian--a citizen of a "moderate" Arab nation--as saying re: the bombings in Amman: "By killing Jordanians here in Jordan, civilian Jordanians going to a wedding, they did something that not even a Jew would do."

Not even a Jew, huh? Wow. That's really low.

Update: Just when I think I have all the jihad lingo down pat, along comes a new and distressing concept. The new word for today is "takfiri". I came across it in this statement by King Abdullah: “We won’t treat leniently those holding the twisted ideology of takfiri (those who consider others infidels) …. And let them to have a place among us."

Wikipedia, that indespensible (though occasionally biased) source, defines takfiri (or Takfiris) as follows:

Takfiris are violent, Salafist extremists from Egypt. Ahmed Rabei was a prominent follower. Takfiris are not bound by the usual religious constraints such as wearing a beard, drinking alcohol, or eating pork when such restrictions would interfere with waging effective jihad. To Takfiris, strict adherence to those laws precludes necessary covert action in defense of Islam. Because Takfiris "blend in," they can organize, plan, and take action necessitated by the overriding duty of Jihad with less risk of identification, interference, or interception.

The term was brought to a more public prominence by the BBC investigative journalist Peter Taylor, in his 2005 BBC television series ,The New Al Qaeda.

Great. So now we have to be on the lookout for clean-shaven, beer-drinking, rib-scarfing jihadis. As if we didn't have enough trouble identifying the ascetic, clean-living, mosque-attending ones.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:47 | link | comments

Weird science: Speaking of how one can hold two seemingly contradictory ideas in one's mind at the same time, here is another set: Christian fundamentalists who support Israel are to be applauded for their support; Pat Robertson, one of those fundamentalist Christians, is a horse's patootie for telling the folks of Dover, Pennsylvania that they can soon expect to feel God's wrath. The Doverites' sin? They turfed out their entire school board because it wanted schoolkids to be taught  "intelligent design" along with--and as a alternative to--the theory of evolution.

Now, I have no problem with the concept of I.D.--so long as it's part of a curriculum in a religious school, not a public one. You want to believe that the "gaps" in evolutionary record point to a higher power beavering away at some design studio in the heavens--be my guest. Just don't try to try to fob it off as science. It ain't. And what generally happens when you try to mix up faith with science is that the faithful are apt to want to crowd out the scientific--and scientific inquiry grinds to a halt.

Don't believe me? Just ask yourselves why Islam--which injects religion into every aspect of life--hasn't produced any great scientific achievements since, well, since they claim credit for inventing algebra.

And even if they did, and that itself is debatable, that was--what?--seven, eight hundred years ago. In the words of the old Janet Jackson song, what have you done for me lately?

Not much. They've been far too busy trying to make inroads in the infidel portion of the planet,  with the aim of claiming as much as they can for Allah.

As for Pat Robertson--I thought it was only the God of the Old Testament who was supposed to be wrathful and vengeful. Isn't Jesus supposed to be loving and forgiving? Certainly, not the kind of God who would wreak havoc on a community which only wanted to ensure that science classes confined themselves to science and the scientific method. 

I'd say despite Pat Robertson's dire warning, the people of Dover have little to fear. In the sin department, they likely won't even merit a second glance from the Big Dude upstairs. 

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

Glick borrows a "famous" tagline: I am often asked why I chose the name "scaramouche" as my alter ego. I explain it has nothing whatsoever to do with my flair--or lack thereof--for the fandango.The origin is literary rather than musical. Years ago, I read the first line in the novel Scaramouche, a pulpish adventure by Raphael Sabatini: "He was born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad."

"That's me," I thought, and the line has been imprinted on my mental hard drive ever since.

Even in my previous incarnation, when I loved the Democrats and thought that Amensty International and the ACLU were doing a bang-up job, I had the feeling that the world was completely cuckoo--in a different way than I do now, of course. Back then, I thought the Right was a fright, a bunch of overwrought cranks ranting about Commies and making everyone sign loyalty oaths. When everyone knew that the Commies were not nearly as scary as they were made out to be.

Now I know that things are often more complicated that you think they are, and that it's possible to retain two seemingly contradictory ideas in one's mind at the same time. Thus: Joe McCarthy was a sweaty demagogue AND there were Communists in the State Department and Hollywood who were working against the interests of the U.S.

See--that's not so hard, is it?

All this is a roundabout way of noting that Caroline Glick, the columnist for the Jerusalem Post (who is definitely not of the Left) has decided, like Scaramouche and scaramouche, that the world is mad. The only difference between us is the timeframe. Glick says the world "has gone mad". I think it's been that way for quite a while:

It would seem that the world has gone mad. Israel's security is being systematically undermined by its own government and the US-led international community. At this point it seems that the Sharon-Peres government is engaged in a perverse competition with the Bush administration to determine who can come up with the most deranged counter-terror policy.

Last week it was reported that the US has given the Palestinian Authority $4.4 million dollars to pay the salaries of terrorists from Fatah's Al Aksa Brigades. For its part, the terror group showed its gratitude to the US by becoming the first Palestinian terror organization to publicly endorse Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad's call for Israel to be "wiped off the map."

Then we have the latest machinations of the Sharon-Peres government regarding Israel's policies now that we have vacated Gaza...

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:35 | link | comments

Up in smoke: How can you tell if the nightly riot is heating up or cooling down? Why, just count up the number of cars that have been set aflame. Last night, for instance, 506 cars were torched. That's up a notch from the previous evening, which was down from the evening before that.

In today's Globe and Mail, a resident of Clichy-sous-Bois explains that, for people who have been sidelined and discriminated against for so long, rioting and torching cars is an excellent way to boost self-esteem--for an individuual as well as the entire community. "People here feel the riots were justified...They refused to accept a hypocritical system. They stood up for themselves, and they're proud."

I don't mean to be churlish, but that kind of pride is apt to be shortlived, lasting as long as it takes for the flames to consume a Renault 5. Hence the need to get another jolt of "pride" by finding some more vehicles to torch the next evening. And when they run out of cars--because, unlike the number of virgins available in Paradise, there are a finite number of cars in France--they'll have to find another way to get the same rush.

I suggest crack cocaine.

Then again, they've probably already tried it.

Update: Seems you can only torch so many cars before the novelty starts to wear thin. And, after all, how big a blaze do you get when you torch a little Peugot? The Eiffel Tower, on the other hand--now, that should make a spectacular conflagration. And just think how "proud" you'll feel when you and your hard-done-by amies see the detested infidel landmark engulfed and consumed by flames.

From Ireland Online:

Some 3,000 police fanned out around Paris today ahead of feared weekend attacks on high-profile targets such as the Eiffel Tower, as the number of vehicles torched overnight rose slightly elsewhere in France, according to officials.

Authorities in eastern France imposed a weekend curfew on 10 towns in south-eastern France and in Lyon, France’s third largest city, banning children from being outside without adult supervision between 10pm and 6am.

Clashes erupted in central Lyon before the curfew took effect, with youths hurling stones at riot police tonight in the historic Place Bellecour. Police fired tear gas, and the youths quickly dispersed, a television station reported.

Security was tightest in the French capital, were police were posted in suburban trains and at strategic points. Authorities banned public gatherings considered risky until tomorrow morning, after “violent actions” were posted on numerous internet blogs and sent in mobile phone text messages.

“This is not a rumour,” National Police Chief Michel Gaudin said. The Eiffel Tower and Champs-Elysees boulevard were among potential targets, he said.

“One can easily imagine the places where we must be highly vigilant,” he added...

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:47 | link | comments (2)

Jurassic terrorist: Word today that scientists have found and identified the remains a huge, ferocious crocodile which is said to have terrorized the oceans in prehistoric times. The scientists have dubbed the beast "Godzilla".

I was thinking that "Godzilla" (or to refine it further, "God-zilla") would also make a good name for the jihad.

Of course, back in prehistoric times, the crocodiles had to fend for themselves: there weren't any appeasers around to feed them.

Posted by: scaramouche at 16:17 | link | comments (3)

"Where should we go on vacation this year, snookums? Bali? London? I know, how about a nice all-inclusive in Paradise?": Two of the jihadis who self-exploded in those bustling Amman hotels are said to have been a married couple, reports the Times Online. A statement from the group claiming responsibility for the bombings--sort of a jihadi bon voyage--was posted on a website:

"A group of martyrdom-seekers carried out the planning and implementation. They comprised three men and a woman who decided to accompany her husband on the path to martyrdom," said the message, which was posted on a website regularly used by the group.

"All of these are Iraqis from the land between the two rivers," the statement said, referring to Iraq’s ancient name, Mesopotamia. "They vowed to die and they chose the shortest route to receive the blessings of God."

They may have had their hearts set on Paradise, but I have a feeling they've been rerouted to someplace far hotter--with far fewer amenities.

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:47 | link | comments (7)

It's the demography, stupid: Mark Steyn responds to an emailer who wrote him, re: his piece on the frenzy in France, "you right wing shit-for-brains think everything's about jihad". From The Spectator:

Well, it’s true there are Muslims and there are Muslims: some blow up Tube trains and some rampage through French streets and some claim Mossad’s put something in the chewing gum to make Arab men susceptible to the seduction techniques of Jewesses. Some kill Dutch film-makers and some complain about Piglet coffee mugs on co-workers’ desks, and millions of Muslims don’t do any of the above but apparently don’t feel strongly enough about them to say a word in protest. And it’s also true that it’s better to have your Peugeot torched than to be blown apart on the Piccadilly Line. But what all these techniques — and those of lobby groups who offer themselves as interlocutors between bewildered European elites and ‘moderate’ Muslims — have in common is that they advance the Islamification of Europe.

Just for the record, I don’t think everything’s about jihad. Rather, I think everything’s about demography. It wasn’t a subject I took much interest in pre-9/11. A decade ago, for example, I tended to accept the experts’ line that Japan’s rising sun had gone into eclipse because its economy was riddled with protectionism, cronyism and inefficient special-interest groups. But so what? You could have said the same 30 years ago, when the joint was booming. The only real difference is that Japan’s population was a lot younger back then. What happened in the 1990s was what Yamada Masahiro of Tokyo’s Gakugei University calls the first ‘low birth-rate recession’. It’s not the economy, stupid. It’s the stupidity, economists — the stupidity of thinking you can buck demography.

Steyn goes on to note the consequences of Europe's demographics:

Now go back to that bland statistic you hear a lot these days: ‘about 10 per cent of France’s population is Muslim’. Give or take a million here, a million there, that’s broadly correct, as far as it goes. But the population spread isn’t even. And when it comes to those living in France aged 20 and under, about 30 per cent are said to be Muslim and in the major urban centres about 45 per cent. If it came down to street-by-street fighting, as Michel Gurfinkiel, the editor of Valeurs Actuelles, points out, ‘the combatant ratio in any ethnic war may thus be one to one’ — already, right now, in 2005. It is not necessary, incidentally, for Islam to become a statistical majority in order to function as one. At the height of its power in the 8th century, the ‘Islamic world’ stretched from Spain to India, yet its population was only minority Muslim. Nonetheless, by 2010, more elderly white Catholic ethnic frogs will have croaked and more fit healthy Muslim youths will be hitting the streets. One day they’ll even be on the beach at St Trop, and if you and your infidel whore happen to be lying there wearing nothing but two coats of Ambre Solaire when they show up, you better hope that the BBC and CNN are right about there being no religio-ethno-cultural component to their ‘grievances’.

Let's pause on this Remembrance Day to say a prayer for Europe, the site of so many previous battles. As the numbers now stand, it is doomed.

Update: Some demographics Steyn didn't mention in his piece: the demography of genocide. In an orgy of ethnic-cleansing some decades ago, Europe divested itself of a large Jewish population. It then open its gates and replaced all the Jews--and then some--with millions and millions of  Muslims.

In the words of that wise Texan, Dr. Phil McGraw, "How's that workin' for ya, Europe?"

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

Dreams on ice: The National Post has a photo of three members of the national hockey team from the United Arab Emirates. The three, who are shot from the back so you can see their names (ones which don't usually adorn the shirts of NHL players) are posed beside the NHL trophy, the Stanley Cup.

Dyed-in-the-wool pessimist that I am, I took this picture as a sign of hope. If they can play hockey in the UAE, that filthy-rich enclave in the desert, maybe someday other Arabs can be persuaded to put down their bombs and pick up a hockey stick.

More hockey, less jihad, as I always say. (Actually, I just said it for the first time, but plan to repeat it frequently from now on.)

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:22 | link | comments

A pittance of time: On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, we pause for two minutes of silence to recall the sacrifices made by those who fought for freedom. A new song by Terry Kelly called "A Pittance of Time" reminds us of why taking a moment to remember is the least we can do:

They fought and some died for their homeland.
They fought and some died, now it's our land.
Look at his little child; there's no fear in her eyes.
Could he not show respect for other dads who have died?

Take two minutes, would you mind?
It's a pittance of time,
For the boys and the girls who went over.
In peace may they rest, may we never
forget why they died.
It's a pittance of time.

God forgive me for wanting to strike him.
Give me strength so as not to be like him.
My heart pounds in my breast, fingers pressed to my lips,
My throat wants to bawl out, my tongue barely resists.

But two minutes I will bide.
It's a pittance of time,
For the boys and the girls who went over.
In peace may they rest.
May we never forget why they died.
It's a pittance of time.

Read the letters and poems of the heroes at home.
They have casualties, battles, and fears of their own.
There's a price to be paid if you go, if you stay.
Freedom's fought for and won in numerous ways.

Take two minutes, would you mind?
It's a pittance of time,
For the boys and the girls all over.
May we never forget, our young become vets.
At the end of the line,
It's a pittance of time.

It takes courage to fight in your own war.
It takes courage to fight someone else's war.
Our peacekeepers tell of their own living hell.
They bring hope to foreign lands that hate mongers can't kill.

Take two minutes, would you mind?
It's a pittance of time,
For the boys and the girls who go over.
In peacetime our best still don battle dress
And lay their lives on the line.
It's a pittance of time

In peace may they rest,
Lest we forget why they died.
Take a pittance of time.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:59 | link | comments

Gone but not forgotten, alas: In a cruel twist of fate, November 11 is not only Remembrance Day, it's the day on which mass-murdering kleptocrat Yasser Arafat finally bought the farm. One year ago today, the man who, in the sage words of The Christian Science Monitror, "forged the identity of his people" ("forgery" being only one of his many criminal pursuits), drew his last fetid breath in a Paris hospital. At least, that was the official date of death. He may have been "brain dead" for some time before that. One harkens back to the histrionics that accompanied his demise--the hysterical and venal widow-to-be, the clutch of sycophantic acolytes, the breathless press awaiting word from the doctors that the Fish was toast.

Ah yes, I remember it well.

And so of course does Al Jazeera. In a deranged rewrite of the historical record, the kind that has become commonplace in much of the Arab world, the terrorist leader who strove throughout his career to push the Jews into the sea is recalled as a saintly leader, a man of peace:

“Peace will not be achieved in Israel with Yasser Arafat in charge,” Israel had always said.

A year has passed since the death of the veteran Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, the man who led the Palestinians’ struggle for more than 40 years.

When Mr. Arafat died, the Israeli government which has long labelled him a terrorist, said that his death marks a turning point for peace in the Middle East as he was the only obstacle, in its view, in the way of achieving a solution for the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

"Life has got worse since [Palestinian leader] Yasser Arafat died. He was a man of peace. The U.S. and Israel understood there was no solution without him. He was Palestine and would not give up basic negotiating positions. But they said he was a terrorist and repeated this lie so much that people started to believe it," said Khalil, Palestinian.

"Everything is the same before, during or after Arafat - the basic problem is we don't have a two-state solution to stop our children being killed. The solution is not [Palestinian leader Mahmoud] Abbas, although Israel has seen more safety since Abbas took over. Palestinians will only be safe when there is peace," Younis Matouk, another Palestinian, was quoted by BBC as saying.

Although the exact nature of late Palestinian leader’s illness remains a mystery, the Palestinians have a strong beliefe that he had been poisoned, and numerous Palestinian officials accused Israel of having hands in the sudden deterioration of his health and death. Mr. Arafat had been imprisoned in his almost-destroyed compound in Ramallah the lat three years of his life.

One year after the death Arafat, Israel still insists on its “bypass approach” to diplomacy it employed during his rule. Like the Israeli-only bypass roads in the West Bank, which facilitate the Israeli settlers’ movement from Israel to their colonies without encountering Palestinians, the Israeli government’s strategic unilateralism bypasses the importance of engaging in dialogue with the Palestinian leadership to reach a solution for the longstanding conflict between the two parties, stated an editorial by chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat and published on the Financial Times.

Arafat had always accused Israel of lacking the will to find peace...

Excuse me while I puke.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:02 | link | comments

Au contraire: The Globe and Mail's "Thought du jour" on Remembrance Day (as it's known in Canada): "There are no warlike peoples--just warlike leaders."--Ralph Bunche.

With all due respect to Dr. Bunche, I must disagree.There are warlike leaders, but there are also warlike peoples. Had Dr. Bunche lived long enough to witness the most recent manifestation of the jihad--warlike leaders and warlike peoples inspired by their reading of the warlike aspects of their religion--he would not have made that statement.

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

Out of his depth: He may have been a crackerjack eye doctor, but as a despot, he's hopeless. From VOA:

Had it not been for the premature death of the eldest son of the Assad clan, Bashar al-Assad might well be enjoying the quiet life of a private medical practice in Damascus, or London, or perhaps Paris, as he speaks both English and French. 

But when his brother was killed in an automobile accident in 1994, his father, Syrian President Hafez al-Assad called him home from studies in London and began grooming him for a political life.  Six years later, Hafez died and Bashar al-Assad was Syria's new president.

At the recent annual conference of the Middle East Institute in Washington, journalist and political analyst Hisham Melhem of al-Arabiya TV said that was one of the few mistakes by the wily Hafez al-Assad.

"But I would argue that one of his biggest mistakes, if you will, was to bequeath the realm, so to speak, to his son, a 35-year old inexperienced young man," he said.  "Now, Bashar's era shows, I would argue, the pitfalls of political inheritance in the Arab world.  And it's very hard, five years after he began his rule, to point out to a single domestic, regional or international decision that this regime made that was wise or farsighted.  And I'm not being harsh on him."...

It's not too late to go back to your eye charts, Bashar.

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

French fries:

Posted by: scaramouche at 00:02 | link | comments

The Edmund Fitzgerald, 30 years on: Thirty years ago today, a freighter called the Edmund Fitzgerald was caught in a sudden and vicious storm on the largest Great Lake, Lake Superior. The ship broke in two and sunk to the bottom. All 29 hand were lost, and all these years later, not one of them has been reclaimed from his watery grave.

This terrible event, commemorated in a moving song by Gordon Lightfoot, reminds us that, despite our arrogance and hubris, we are mere human beings who are often powerless in the face of a much greater power--the destructive and merciless force of nature.

Posted by: scaramouche at 22:25 | link | comments (1)

Terrorist time travel: Here's a translation of al Qaeda's statement regarding the bombings in Jordan. As you read it, close your eyes and al Zarqwi's wayback machine will instantly whisk you back to the late 7th Century. From the Jamestown Foundation:

In these blessed times, where the lions of monotheism are contending against the tyranny of Crusader unbelief and Shi'ite treachery in the Land of the Two Rivers [Iraq] … a squadron of the lions of the finest and noblest of battalions, the Battalion of the al-Bara bin Malik, coming in aid to its faith and to raise the word of monotheism, undertook a new raid on some of the dens implanted in the land of the Muslims in Amman. After studying the targets and keeping them under surveillance, the choice of site for the operations to be carried out was made on some hotels which the Jordanian tyrant has made into the back garden for the enemies of the Faith—the Jews and Crusaders, a filthy resort for the traitorous apostates of the [Islamic] Nation, a safe refuge for the infidel intelligence services who are directing from there their conspiracy against the Muslims, and springs of fornication and debauchery [designed] as a war against God and His Prophet.

Despite the security precautions implemented by the treacherous son of a traitor [i.e. Jordan's King Abdullah II] to protect these dens, the soldiers of al-Qaeda were able to reach their targets and carry out [the operation], as far as we can ascertain from the news. We shall publish details of the raid and of those who carried it out shortly, so that the Tyrant of Amman will know that the protecting walls for the Jews built in the east of Jordan, and the rear camp for the Crusader armies and the government of the Scions of Ibn al-Alqami [1], are well within range of the Mujahideen and their attacks.

'Course, back then the mujahedeen had to use low-tech stuff, like swords and camel dung.

(I am not inclined to the metaphysical, but for a long time I've had a keen interest in those who are. After years of investigation, I have come to see that there are those who long for religious transcendence and whose experience of its remarkable powers--ones I will likely never experience--has make them better, more complete human beings. Then there are those whose religious ardor so