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

The implacable spirit of jihad: It’s them vs. us, and it looks like they just may have the will to defeat us. By Kenneth Blackwell in the New York Sun:

"There are two powers in this world, the sword and the spirit. Over time the spirit will always prevail."
— Napoleon

The merciless monsters who constitute Al Qaeda and its terrorist movement are equal opportunity killers.

They will use anyone — man, woman, pregnant mother, child — in acts of suicide to kill anyone: Spanish commuters, Sudanese Christians, Indian train travelers, London Tube-riders and tourists, or Americans working at their desks on a clear September morning.

They will kill by any means: videotaped beheadings, homemade bombs packed with nails, explosive chlorine tanks, and, of course, jetliners loaded with fuel — and people. Their terrorism is an asymmetric form of warfare that seeks to attack the human spirit.

In their minds and through their methods, evil has assumed a hideous new shape. The human spirit reels at such enormities, because the boundaries the jihadists cross are the bare minimums of civilization. It's difficult for us to conceive of such hatred. That may be one reason why we are so ready to believe such hatred has faded, or will soon fade, from the scene. But this battle will be long and, much of it, spiritual in nature.

For now, it appears Congress has given up on the plan for a legislatively imposed timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, but there is the sense that what the liberal majority really yearns for is a holiday from history. Facing the immensity and durability of the jihadist threat, a threat that has raged now for decades, the congressional majority pins its hopes on a change in us rather than the decisive defeat of those who attack us. The political games in Washington are weakening the will of the nation.

In psychological terms, the political Left is like the battered spouse picking through her own faults to find the reason why she is being terrorized. America is being attacked for the values we hold and the freedom to which we are so dedicated. We didn't provoke the attack of 9/11, the 1979 Iran hostage crisis, the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon, the 1998 bombing of our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, or the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000. The problem is not American imperialist greed, but a transnational movement of extremist organizations, networks, and their state sponsors that is determined to steal our freedom and dominate us.

The answer to the Left's enabling is realism: America did not cause radical Islam. Smiling more and meeting with dictators will not cure it. The jihadists are zealots filled with equal-opportunity hatred for both the best and the worst of Western civilization…

You mean Nancy Pelosi’s shmatta-wearing exercise in Syria was a complete waste of time and, more to the point, was counter-productive because it lent credibility to a regime that is chin (or, in this case, chin-less) deep in the promotion of regional terrorism?

I’m not surprised. The fact of the matter is that anyone who expects “realism” to seep into the consciousness of the American Left is at best a cockeyed optimist and at worst a total lunatic.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:44 | link | comments

What are the odds?: Another bizarre and ironic co-incidence—and on the same day as the Norwegian one.

Honest Reporting’s Media Backspin notes that “On the same week that British University and College Union voted to boycott Israeli academic institutions, students at Sderot’s Sapir College were cleared to resume classes—in fortified classrooms.”

An irony that is no doubt lost on the British boycotters.

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

Quel surprise!: Syria, Hezbollah condemn UN vote to establish Hariri tribunal.

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

Bizarre—and ironic—co-incidence of the day: On the same day that Norway resumes sending direct aid—10 million smackeroos—to a regime led by Hamas, it is announced that the Norway has been designated the most peaceful nation in the world. 

So, if I have this straight, Norway is an exceptionally peaceful nation that has absolutely no qualms about funding a bunch of genocidal terrorists.

 

I’m sure somewhere down in Hades Vidkun Quisling is shepping naches.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:41 | link | comments

Harpoon uncoils his latest attack: The Toronto Star features a particularly nasty piece of venom by that old Islamism snake-oil salesman, Harpoon Siddiqui. Today’s hiss-y fit deals with all the dirt the infidels are doing to the true believers (specifically, in Gaza, Lebanon and Afghanistan), and how it has chased them into the arms of extremist militias.

Yeah, it’s all our fault.

 

Harpoon waxes especially eloquent about Israel’s iniquity in, well, in continuing to insist on its right to exist as a sovereign Jewish state when such existence keeps the Palestinians, poor dears, isolated in separate “cantons.”

 

I suppose we should be thankful he didn’t call them “Bantulands”:

The crises in Iraq, Gaza, Lebanon and Afghanistan are the inevitable outcome of treating the symptoms rather than the disease.

Gaza: Israeli bombing won't bring peace any more than previous military crackdowns. American-Israeli help to bolster President Mahmoud Abbas' security forces won't stop Hamas from acquiring more rockets to hurl at Israel. The Saudi-sponsored unity government between Fatah and Hamas won't end their internecine warfare.

"The problem is Gaza itself," writes Fawaz Turki, author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile, who lives in Washington.

"Israel may have evacuated its miserable colonists and soldiers from Gaza but it continues to control its airspace, offshore maritime access and its borders, determining the flow of goods, produce and people ...

"The cumulative impact of sustained economic hardship, coupled with living under the thumb of a foreign occupier can be devastating to an individual's psychological, even cognitive and social functioning ...

"Communities made inert by repression, social immobility or economic deprivation, will build up an inescapable drive towards war, towards an assertion of identity at the cost of mutual destruction."

The World Bank, too, recently criticized the Israeli stranglehold on Gaza and the West Bank, the latter cut up into "ever smaller and disconnected cantons."

Neither the Palestinian civil war nor the breakdown of the months-long ceasefire with Israel should have come as a surprise…

No surprise to me, Harpoon. I knew that, stuck as they are in the rut of Judenhass and victimhood, there was no way the Palestinians could get their shite together.

 

Here’s the letter I sent the Star:

 

It’s remarkable that those “miserable colonists”—author Fawaz Turkis’s description of the Israelis who were forced to vacate Gaza when the Israeli government voluntarily disengaged from the area—were able to make a go of things. During their relatively brief time in the area, they transformed the land on which they lived into a rich agricultural sector which produced a wide array of fruits and vegetables, and which had been serving as Israel’s breadbasket. One of the first actions the Palestinians took after the Israelis departed was to smash all the greenhouses—greenhouses they could have used to feed their own people.

 

But then, Israelis have a lot of experience at taking a small piece of desolate land and making it bloom. The Palestinians—not so much.

 

Instead of complaining about the “miserable colonists,” perhaps the Palestinians should realize it’s in their best interest to take a cue from them.

 

Then again, they may hesitate to do so if their real intention is to not actually build a state of their own, but to tear down the flourishing Jewish one next door.

 

Gee, you think the Star will print it?

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:45 | link | comments (2)

Buying into sharia law: Not long ago an alliance of Muslim women, non-Muslim feminists and secular Muslims successfully turned aside an effort to bring sharia tribunals into Ontario. These tribunals would have been legally empowered to adjudicate family and some other civil issues for Muslims in the province. A great victory, indeed, for those who believe in keeping the religious and the legal domains separate, and who know that sharia law, with its Eighth Century mindset and repressive strictures, has absolutely no place in 21^st Century Canada.

Well, it seems that when one door closes, another one opens. While sharia law as it pertains to family matters is a non-starter for the time being, sharia law for financial matters may be about to become a fait accompli.

 

Money talks, as they say.

 

For those who’d like to learn more about the exciting and lucrative world of sharia banking, the Globe and Mail invites you to submit questions to an attorney who’s an expert in the field:

Islamic finance is one of the fastest-growing areas of financial services in the world. Global banks are scrambling to start offering products that conform to sharia law, just as billions of dollars from oil-rich countries in the Middle East look for places to invest.

Canada's not immune to the trend. Most of the big banks are contemplating offering sharia-compliant products to expand their reach among Canada's fastest-growing immigrant population. Products range from mortgages to mutual funds, car financings and bonds.

Sharia-compliant services are similar to any other type of so-called socially responsible investing. In this case, they tend to meet three criteria: no explicit interest; transactions can't be in such areas such as gambling, pork or pornography; and can't be deemed too high risk.

Several articles written in the Globe and Mail have sparked a lively online debate over the growth in such services, the line between faith and finance and what it means to be Canadian.

Walied Soliman, a lawyer at Ogilvy Renault, will join us to take your questions. He acts for clients in a wide range of industries, including mining, energy and pharma and has also helped develop numerous Islamic-finance structured products. He's been seconded to the legal group of CIBC and to the Ontario Securities Commission's enforcement branch.

He'll be online on Thursday at noon EDT to discuss the demand and potential for sharia-compliant financial services in Canada and its rise around the world.

You can join the conversation by submitting a question ahead of time by clicking here.

My question for Mr. Soliman: Since we aren’t prepared to make room for sharia law in the area of family law (because, clearly, such law is not a good fit with our own), why should we be prepared to make accommodations for sharia law in the financial sector? And, once we’ve allowed it into this area, won’t it be more difficult to argue that it should be kept out of other areas—like family law?

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:21 | link | comments (1)

Celebrating Dossa: In the letters section of today’s Globe and Mail, a St. Francis Xavier University student named Miles Tompkins rushes to defend the institution’s most notorious academic:

Antigonish, N.S. -- I take exception with Ed Morgan, Irving Abella and Abraham Foxman (The Professor And The Critics - letters, May 30). Denying the Holocaust deniers the publicity they crave seems to be the crux of the issue. We should be exposing and challenging the David Dukes, David Irvings and Avigdor Liebermans of the world with all the knowledge we have in our possession. If universities can't dig down to the roots of misconceptions, we can hardly expect it to occur in the political arena. We will find ourselves led by those who have their own agenda, be it neo-Nazis, revisionist Zionists or Islamic extremists.

I want wisdom from my university, not oracles. St. Francis Xavier himself, and the founders of the Nova Scotia university, never sat idly by waiting for wisdom to be served to them on a white tablecloth.

Mr. Foxman says Shiraz Dossa was the only scholar from a mainstream Western university to attend. The fact that he went that distance to come away calling the deniers the idiots they are should be something to celebrate, not condemn.

A most “nuanced” missive, I’d say. So nuanced that it hardly makes any sense at all. (He wants wisdom and not oracles but doesn’t want this wisdom served on a white tablecloth? What the heck does that mean?)

My response, on the other hand—not so nuanced:

Miles Tompkins has apparently bought Professor Shiraz Dossa’s claim that he had little in common with the unsavoury types who attended a Holocaust denial conference in Iran, and urges us to “celebrate” him for traveling this vast distance in order to expose the other attendees for being the “idiots that they are.”

 

He’s kidding, right? I know that, having been caught in such disreputable company, Professor Dossa has felt compelled to do some serious back peddling. But it should be clear to anyone who has read his writings, which are vituperatively anti-Zionist and which obsessively explore the link between the Holocaust and the founding of Israel with the aim of undermining the Jewish state, that the Professor was not the odd man out at the conference; in fact, he was right at home.

 

Given that, I suggest we hold off on any “celebration” for the moment.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:20 | link | comments (1)

World War Four, encore: Norman Podhoretz has been saying for some time that, whether or not we’re prepared to admit it, we’re at war with Islamic fascism—a war he calls WW4 (WW3 being the Cold War). He repeats this assertion in Opinion Journal, and says that unless we acknowledge the reality of Ahamdiejad’s seemingly loopy plans and take steps to derail them, it’s game over for Israel and perhaps the entire West:

Although many persist in denying it, I continue to believe that what Sept 11, 2001, did was to plunge us headlong into nothing less than another world war. I call this new war World War IV, because I also believe that what is generally known as the Cold War was actually World War III, and that this one bears a closer resemblance to that great conflict than it does to World War II. Like the Cold War, as the military historian Eliot Cohen was the first to recognize, the one we are now in has ideological roots, pitting us against Islamofascism, yet another mutation of the totalitarian disease we defeated first in the shape of Nazism and fascism and then in the shape of communism; it is global in scope; it is being fought with a variety of weapons, not all of them military; and it is likely to go on for decades.

What follows from this way of looking at the last five years is that the military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq cannot be understood if they are regarded as self-contained wars in their own right. Instead we have to see them as fronts or theaters that have been opened up in the early stages of a protracted global struggle. The same thing is true of Iran. As the currently main center of the Islamofascist ideology against which we have been fighting since 9/11, and as (according to the State Department's latest annual report on the subject) the main sponsor of the terrorism that is Islamofascism's weapon of choice, Iran too is a front in World War IV. Moreover, its effort to build a nuclear arsenal makes it the potentially most dangerous one of all.

The Iranians, of course, never cease denying that they intend to build a nuclear arsenal, and yet in the same breath they openly tell us what they intend to do with it. Their first priority, as repeatedly and unequivocally announced by their president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is to "wipe Israel off the map"--a feat that could not be accomplished by conventional weapons alone.

But Ahmadinejad's ambitions are not confined to the destruction of Israel. He also wishes to dominate the greater Middle East, and thereby to control the oilfields of the region and the flow of oil out of it through the Persian Gulf. If he acquired a nuclear capability, he would not even have to use it in order to put all this within his reach. Intimidation and blackmail by themselves would do the trick.

Nor are Ahmadinejad's ambitions merely regional in scope. He has a larger dream of extending the power and influence of Islam throughout Europe, and this too he hopes to accomplish by playing on the fear that resistance to Iran would lead to a nuclear war. And then, finally, comes the largest dream of all: what Ahmadinejad does not shrink from describing as "a world without America." Demented though he may be, I doubt that Ahmadinejad is so crazy as to imagine that he could wipe America off the map even if he had nuclear weapons. But what he probably does envisage is a diminution of the American will to oppose him: that is, if not a world without America, he will settle, at least in the short run, for a world without much American influence.

Not surprisingly, the old American foreign-policy establishment and many others say that these dreams are nothing more than the fantasies of a madman. They also dismiss those who think otherwise as neoconservative alarmists trying to drag this country into another senseless war that is in the interest not of the United States but only of Israel. But the irony is that Ahmadinejad's dreams are more realistic than the dismissal of those dreams as merely insane delusions…

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

And speaking of dizzy…: My head is spinning after reading this piece in the Tehran Times which claims that the U.S.—and more specifically, the CIA—is behind Fatah al-Islam, the nutso Islamist outfit battling Lebanese authorities at that “refugee camp” in Lebanon:

…The Fatah al-Islam movement was founded last year by Shaker al-Abssi, a Jordanian born in Palestine who has Salafist leanings and is close to the Al-Qaeda terrorist network.

With the help of Al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al-Abssi assassinated U.S. diplomat Laurence Foley in Amman, Jordan in 2002.

Later a Jordanian court tried him in absentia and sentenced him to death, but U.S. and Jordanian forces never attempted to apprehend al-Abssi.

He was then arrested in Syria and spent one year in prison, but after the downfall of Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003, he headed to Iraq together with al-Zarqawi and organized Al-Qaeda of Iraq.

Assassinating prominent Iraqi Shia figures and carrying out suicide bombings at Shia shrines are some of the goals of the organization.

After al-Zarqawi was killed in 2006, al-Abssi, along with his 140 troops, entered Lebanon through Jordan and then Syria’s borders and took up residence in the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp.

Of course, al-Abssi should have been arrested and punished by U.S. and Jordanian forces, but he managed to freely enter Lebanon through Jordan and Syria with all his military equipment.

The series of bombings in Beirut’s Ashrafieh and Ein Alaq districts that killed many Lebanese civilians were carried out by the Fatah al-Islam terrorist group.

Documents obtained by the Lebanese security services that were later publicized show that Fatah al-Islam planned to assassinate 36 prominent Shia leaders in Lebanon.

Honest analyses show that the movement was established by the CIA with the objective of confronting the Lebanese Hezbollah and preparing the ground for the disarming of the group.

Most of the accounts of Fatah al-Islam, which receives financial support from a group of rich Arab Salafists, are in U.S. banks. Yet, how is it that the U.S. freezes the bank accounts of many Islamic movements, but does not freeze bank accounts of Fatah al-Islam?

Moreover, when al-Abssi quit the Fatah al-Intifada movement, which is led by Colonel Abu Musa, and founded the Fatah al-Islam organization, the New York Times printed a detailed interview with him and the U.S. media extensively focused on him.

Other measures by the United States, including recent shipments of weapons to resupply the Lebanese Army, are part of the new U.S. plot to reenter the stage in Lebanon in order to eliminate Hezbollah.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s illegitimate government has become extremely shaky since the publication of the Vinograd report, and this new plot has been devised to help it regain its former standing.

Hence, through attempts to create tension in Lebanon and clash with Hezbollah, Fatah al-Islam is trying to prepare the ground for the U.S. Marines to return to Lebanon. But will the U.S. succeed? Surely not!...

To review: The U.S. is backing a terrorist organization associated with al Qaeda, meanwhile shipping arms to the Lebanese Army so it can fight the terrorists, in order to bolster the Olmert government and provide a pretext for the American army to invade Lebanon and wipe out Hezbollah.

 

What evil genius! No wonder they call it Great Satan.

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

Dubad: In the topsy-turvy world of Human Rights and its dizziest practitioner, the UN Human Rights Council, bad is good, there’s no jihad, and granting recognition to a genocidal terrorist outfit is an essential component of “peace.” From the International Herald Tribune:

GENEVA: An independent human rights expert called Tuesday for the United States, the United Nations, Russia and the European Union to fully recognize the Palestinian government — including Hamas members — as an "indispensable requirement" to peace.

John Dugard, the U.N. Human Rights Council's investigator on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, said the Mideast Quartet has to treat both sides equally if it wants to broker a successful peace agreement.

Israel has consistently rejected Dugard's reports and statements as one-sided. In March he compared the Jewish state's treatment of Palestinians to apartheid — comments that drew strong criticism from Israeli officials, who called them "inflammatory and inciteful."

"In order to prevent another season of violence and to protect human rights in the region, the Quartet must intervene immediately in a fair and evenhanded manner," said Dugard, a South African lawyer. "This means the recognition of both Hamas and non-Hamas members of the Palestinian Government of National Unity."…

So Dugard wants the Quartet to treat both sides equally, yet he himself displays a marked preference for the Palestinian side.

 

Dugard as he says and not as he does?

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

Laggardly UN: President Bush took a bold step today in announcing sanctions against the genocide-promoting regime of Sudan.

Not surprisingly, in the face of such boldness the UN reiterated its utter fecklessness. From AP via the Houston Chronicle:

KHARTOUM, Sudan — The Sudanese government condemned a new set of U.S. economic sanctions aimed at pressuring it to halt the bloodshed in Darfur, describing them Tuesday as "unfair and untimely" and calling on the rest of the world to ignore them.

President Bush announced the United States was enforcing sanctions that bar 31 Sudanese companies owned or controlled by Sudan's government from the U.S. banking system. The sanctions also prevent three Sudanese individuals from doing business with U.S. companies or banks.

"We believe this decision is unfair and untimely," Sudan's Foreign Ministry spokesman, Ali Sadiq, told The Associated Press.

His call found support in China, Khartoum's top diplomatic ally and a key business partner, which defended its investment in Sudan. Trade and investment are "helpful for the development of Sudan's economy and will fundamentally help Sudan to address the conflicts and wars in Sudan," China's envoy, Liu Guijin, told reporters in Beijing.

However, the European Union said it was prepared to consider tougher measures to push Sudan to finally allow a large U.N. peacekeeping mission into Darfur. "In principle, we are open to consider that," Javier Solana told the AP.

Sadiq defending Sudan, saying it accepted a first batch of 3,000 U.N. peacekeepers in April to reinforce the overwhelmed African Union force already deployed in Darfur, where more than 200,000 people have died and 2.5 million have fled their homes in four years of fighting between Sudanese forces and rebels.

"These American measures come at a time when Sudan is actively discussing peace in Darfur and working on the hybrid force," of U.N. and African Union peacekeepers, Sadiq said. "We invite the international community to ignore and condemn these sanctions."

Officials said Chris Hill, the U.S. nuclear negotiator with North Korea, was heading to China on Wednesday and planned to raise Darfur with the Chinese.

The U.S. mission to the United Nations has been drafting a resolution for broader U.N. sanctions against Sudan that is expected to face resistance in the Security Council because of China's opposition and questions over its timing.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon said he needs more time to promote negotiations and persuade the Sudanese government to accept more peacekeepers.

Asked whether the U.S. sanctions would complicate his job of getting Sudan to agree to a larger U.N.-African Union peacekeeping force, Ban said: "We will have to see."…

Yeah, no point in rushing into things while some Darfurians are still alive.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:40 | link | comments

Islam makes inroads in Germany: Violent jihad is only one prong of the Islamic onslaught. The others include the money weapon (always highly persuasive), demographics (i.e., overwhelming the infidels through sheer numbers) and Dawa— proselytizing in an effort to persuade kafirs to “revert” to the one true faith.

The German school system seems to be in the grip of a major Dawa effort. In the name of integration and inter-cultural harmony, of course. From the Muslim News:

 

German politicians often raise the issue of Islam in the educational system when they discuss the integration of migrant youths. Now, there may be progress in making Islam a regular course in German schools.

More than 700,000 Muslim students attend school in Germany, but nowhere does the religious curriculum deal with Islam in the same way as Christianity.

The problem is that most schools rely on their local mosque for guidance, which means there can be large discrepancies in the content and quality of instruction.

That is why German state governments and Muslim organizations alike are looking to create a more standardized approach to teaching Islam.

It is not an easy task, however.

About two-and-a-half million of Germany's Muslims belong to the Sunni denomination of Islam. But the rest are mainly Shiites, Alevis or followers of the south Asian Ahmaddiyya movement.

With such a broad spectrum of beliefs among them, Islam expert Michael Kiefer said creating a single combined course would be difficult.

"We've seen in Austria, for example, that the concept of one course for all Muslims is controversial, because the smaller denominations are left out," he said.

That is why authorities in the German state of Baden-Württemberg have decided to offer with two courses: one for Sunni and Shia students, and another for Alevis. So far, it looks like a number of other states will base their systems on this model as well, he said.

The states of North Rhine-Westphalia, Bavaria and Lower Saxony, however, are still looking for ways to create one standard curriculum with the help of various Muslim groups.

In Lower Saxony, for example, a number of Muslim organizations have come together to form a "shura," or council, to help authorities define the fundamental principles to be included in courses on Islam.

State education minister Heidemarie Ballasch says the body's recommendations have been put to the test in a pilot project at 21 schools since 2003.

"One of the political goals of the trial is to promote integration instead of parallel social structures," Ballasch said.

"Another is to help school students learn about their Islam and other religions, so that when the time comes, they're in a position to declare their faith," she added...

 

When the time comes? Exactly when might that be? When the demographics are such that it looks like a better bet for the majority to make common cause with the burgeoning minority?

 

I don’t know about you, but that’s the scariest thing I’ve read all day.

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

Wonders never cease: Be still my beating heart—a piece in the moonbat Mothership, the New York Times, that actually seems to “get it” about the malign mullahs and their nuclear intentions:

IN the United States and in Europe, there is a widespread belief that the Bush administration has failed to engage Iran diplomatically. Among the advisers to the Iraq Study Group, of which I was one, most believed that the Bush administration, not the mullahs’ regime, was the most culpable party in foreclosing dialogue between Washington and Tehran after 9/11.

Iran’s American-educated longtime ambassador to the United Nations, Javad Zarif, has tirelessly suggested that the administration missed opportunities for improving relations and is tone-deaf to his country’s peaceful intentions.

Yet it ought to be clear that just the opposite is the case. The clerical regime today is no more interested in reaching a peaceful modus vivendi with the United States than it was in the 1990s, when President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright all but begged President Mohammad Khatami of Iran to just talk to them.

Case in point: Haleh Esfandiari, an American citizen and the director of the Middle Eastern program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, has been jailed in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison since May 8. For years, she has been an articulate and determined advocate of better relations between her homeland, Iran, and her adopted country.

Just as the former Representative Lee Hamilton, the head of the Wilson Center and the co-chairman of the Iraq Study Group, has advocated a “diplomatic offensive” toward Tehran, Mrs. Esfandiari has assiduously practiced micro-diplomatic soft power, using the Wilson Center as a bully pulpit for reconciliation. Suspicious, cynical, hawkish and religiously oriented analyses of the Islamic Republic — my school of thought — have not been commonly heard at the Wilson Center under Mrs. Esfandiari and Mr. Hamilton.

In Iran, too, Mr. Hamilton and his Iraq Study Group co-chairman, James Baker, are seen as America’s über-engagement proponents. Mrs. Esfandiari had traveled to Iran frequently in recent years and was, on a smaller scale, viewed in a similar way. By arresting her during a visit to her 93-year-old mother, the clerical regime sent a blatant message to Mr. Hamilton about the effectiveness of engagement. He responded with a private letter to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, asking him to allow her to leave the country. Instead, she is behind bars, described by Tehran as an agent of regime change, an “American-Zionist” spy.

It is undoubtedly the Hamilton connection and her marriage with an Iranian-born Jew — a sin under Islamic law for a Muslim woman — that made Mrs. Esfandiari such an irresistible target for a regime fond of taking hostages to intimidate its enemies…

You know the world is seriously askew when the New York Times seems to “get it” and the Bush administration seems to be seriously at sea.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:52 | link | comments

Moo’s mephitic metaphors: A few days before the U.S. and Iran held official talks for the first time since the cranky Shia with the eyebrows took over, the lit’ler Hitler prophesized what he sees in store for Great Satan. From MEMRI blog (metaphors highlighted, just for fun):

Ahmadinejad: "Let me tell you that with the help of God, they are done for. Like a battery about to run out, they muster the remainder of their power but Allah willing, nothing will happen. We've passed that. Wait one month, two months, three months... Allah willing, as soon as possible, we will pass that. Their situation is much worse than one can imagine. Their foundations are shaking."

A worn-out battery and a shaky foundation. Sheesh. Great Satan better get a tune up—fast.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:32 | link | comments

Vomitous biopic: Move over Farfur. It seems Palestinian TV is getting set to bring another rodent to life. From Al Bawaba:

Palestine's Ma'an News Agency (MNA) is reportedly in the process of producing a TV drama series on Yasser Arafat, the late Palestinian leader.  The drama will be directed by Feisal Az-Zobi and focus on the different stages of the Palestinian struggle and Arafat's contributions to it, recent press reports have indicated. MNA believes that the drama will be ready in time for Ramadan 2008, the hottest season for TV ratings. 

 

Quoted by an Arabic newspaper, Feisal Az-Zobi said: "This is a huge job and it is an ethical one before it is an artistic job. Through it, we will show the [future] generations the suffering of the Palestinian people and their struggle in all forms against the Israeli occupation.  The Israeli occupation has become a real genocide act against the Palestinian people.  Arafat was an inspiration his people and the Arab people in general.  He was something unique in history."

 

Many Arab and foreign channels have started to make contacts that would allow them to broadcast the drama, in which many Arab actors will participate.  The drama has an unprecedented budget and will be made as perfect as possible, the reports suggest.

Nearly two years after his death, Arafat's spirit remains alive.  He is a glorious banner and inspiration to the Palestinian people.  Arafat embodied their hopes and dreams for the achievement of an independent Palestinian state. So the interest in the new TV production is understandable.

 

In any case, like during his life, controversy surrounds Arafat even after his demise. Asked to comment on the news about the expected TV drama, senior Fatah officials – the movement Arafat established and led until his last day – were surprised and claimed they know nothing on the issue.

 

It seems that we should all wait for next Ramadan…. 

 

Can’t hardly wait. One question, though. If Israel has been perpetrating a “genocide” of the Palestinians, why has their population been going up, up, up instead of down, down, down?

 

Looks like the Jews haven’t quite mastered the nuances of being on the giving end of genocide.

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

The rehabilitation of Moo Moo (and Tony): Once upon a time, Libya was ruled by an addlepated potentate who styled himself as the arch enemy of the West, especially the U.S. Now, of course, things are completely different. The potentate no longer pounds his chest, proclaiming his to be the biggest phallus on the world scene. Far from it. A shadow of his former self, he is now content to be the warm up comedy act at Arab League confabs and offer cockamie suggestions for “solving” the Israel/Palestinian problem, namely a little entity he likes to call “Isratine.” 

And since Moo Moo has inched over to the right side, is it any wonder that outgoing British Prime Minister Tony Blair would be eager to pay him a visit? From the Times Online:

Tony Blair set off for a surprise visit to Libya today with Colonel Gaddafi, the latest world leader to receive a farewell visit from the outgoing Prime Minister.

To coincide with Mr Blair's talks with the Libyan leader in Tripoli, BP was preparing to announce that it would be resuming operations in the former pariah state.

Libya is the first stop of Mr Blair's 'legacy' tour of Africa: he is also due to travel to Sierra Leone, where British intervention halted a brutal civil war in 2000, and South Africa, where he may be received by Nelson Mandela.

The valedictory feel of the itinerary was reinforced by a clutch of documentary film-makers and magazine journalists among his travelling press entourage. Rules have also been relaxed to allow television crews to film inside his aircraft.

Libya was not long ago was a notorious state sponsor of terrorism, among the countries he will call on during his final weeks in office; in the 1980s it was shipping arms to the IRA.

But the Prime Minister counts Britain's role in persuading Colonel Gaddafi to renounce terrorism and dismantle his nuclear programme as among his foreign policy triumphs. Mr Blair's spokesman said: "This trip is all about showing that we need to keep engaging with Africa as a whole."

The spokesman also predicted that other countries would announce increases in their aid budgets to Africa before next month's G8 meeting of leading industrial powers in Heiligendamm, Germany, to be hosted by the Chancellor, Angela Merkel.

"Between now and the G8 others will step up to the plate," the spokesman said. "We are going to meet our aid targets we set at Gleneagles."

The twin items topping the agenda at the G8, of Africa's development and climate change, were those put on the agenda when Britain hosted the G8 at Gleneagles two years ago when they were thought "quixotic", he said, but now they are central themes of international politics.

Although Libya is a leading player in the African Union, and Mr Blair's talks with Colonel Gaddafi will include a discussion of Britain's demands for tougher sanctions against Sudan to stop the humanitarian disaster in Darfur, the chief reason for today's visit it clear...

Brilliant idea! If Tony can get Moo Moo onside against Sudan’s genocidal Islamists, maybe some lives can be saved before the Janjaweed machetes their way through the entire Darfur populace.

 

Then again, there’s no reason to expect that Moo Moo will agree to side with infidels over Arabs.

 

But even if Tony fails, you can see where he’s going here. He’s trying to buff up his tarnished legacy by claiming credit for putting African development and climate change at the top of the international agenda. Won’t work, Tony. Sir Bob and Bono’ll get credit for the Africa stuff, and the "Goracle” has already run off with the global warming blue ribbon.

Posted by: scaramouche at 16:55 | link | comments

In other news, dog bites man and the Ayatollah Khomeini was one nutty Islamist: There's been little progress in talks between Great Satan and the most wicked arm of the Axis of Evil.

Go figure.

Posted by: scaramouche at 09:00 | link | comments (3)

Half-baked (and extremely nauseating) cake: I have read a lot of stomach-turning things in the Globe and Mail in the past year, many of them the work of the Globe's tag-team of Israel-bashers, Mark “Malarkey” MacKinnon and his wife, Caroline Wheeler, but this piece of dreck wherein Michael Valpy justifies Professor Shiraz Dossa’s attendance at the lit’ler Hitler’s Holocaust denial conference takes the cake:

A Canadian political scientist excoriated for attending what was widely labelled a Holocaust-denial conference in Tehran has retaliated with a blistering published attack on his university president and his colleagues for being illiterate Islamophobes.

Writing in the influential Literary Review of Canada, Shiraz Dossa, a tenured professor at Nova Scotia's St. Francis Xavier University, said that his academic integrity and academic freedom were grossly impugned by the university administration, an assault on his reputation that he said has yet to be remedied.

He accused the president and chancellor of authorizing a "small Spanish Inquisition" to denounce him - a campaign he said was initiated by two Jewish professors and the Christian chair of the political science department.

Prof. Dossa also wrote that the attack on his reputation was launched by The Globe and Mail's editorial board and by columnists John Ibbitson and Rex Murphy, whom he described as being "intellectually just a cut above the Trailer Park Boys" and ignorant of the Middle East.

James Turk, executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, likened the treatment of Prof. Dossa to the 1950s McCarthy period in the United States when academics and others were subjected to intense pressure not to attend events that were unpopular.

This is the first time Prof. Dossa has spoken out since the storm erupted over his attendance at the Tehran conference in mid-December.

His two-page essay appears in the issue of the LRC that will be posted today on its website, http://www.reviewcanada.ca. Although the monthly publication's circulation is small, it is widely read in the academic, journalistic, political and public-service communities.

In an interview, Prof. Dossa said he wrote the essay because he wanted to set the record straight and because he still hasn't received an apology from either St. FX president Sean Riley or chancellor Raymond Lahey, the Roman Catholic bishop of Antigonish where the university is located. He also said he has refused to speak to his department chair, Prof. Yvon Grenier, since December.

He wrote that the university administration uncritically accepted the Holocaust-denial label "concocted by the Simon Wiesenthal Center [a Jewish human-rights organization] and the [U.S.] Jewish Defence League and peddled by media outlets such as The Globe and Mail."

Prof. Dossa, a Muslim, teaches political theory and comparative politics at St. FX. His focus as a scholar has been on the Holocaust and its aftermath. He abruptly dismisses any suggestion that he is a Holocaust denier. Rather, he said, his interest has been in what use of the Holocaust has been made to promote Zionism - the right of Jews to a national homeland - and to support the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory.

In both his essay and in a telephone conversation, he makes a compelling case for why he attended the two-day Tehran conference, titled "The Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision."

It was a conference for scholars in the global South, said Prof. Dossa, who wanted to examine the Holocaust and its significance unrestrained by the lenses through which it is viewed by the West, and "to devise an intellectual [and] political response to Western-Israeli intervention in Muslim affairs."…

In other words, to rewrite history to suit their own purposes—which Valpy apparently sees as a legitimate pursuit so long as it has some "intellectual" heft behind it.

 

Pass me a barf bag: I’m about to lose my breakfast.

 

It goes on in the same revolting vein for many more paragraphs, but I suggest you read the remainder in small doses, so as to not lose your appetite for the rest of the day.

 

Here’s the letter I sent the Globe:

 

Let me get this straight: Professor Shiraz Dossa is pleased to attend a Holocaust denial conference hosted by an Iranian President who has announced his intention to complete Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution, and when criticized for what, at the very least, was an unfortunate lapse in judgement, he complains that his critics are bigots and demands an immediate apology.

 

I’d be tempted to say the Professor has a great deal of “chutzpah,” but under the circumstances, perhaps using a word in a language that was largely wiped out by the Nazis is not exactly appropriate.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:58 | link | comments (1)

George’s obnoxious answers: Avuncular British politician George Galloway (avuncluar if your uncle happens to be Oswald Mosley, that is) responds to friendly questioners on the Islam Online site:

Name	Ahmed Alam    - Netherlands
Profession
Question	Thanks a lot for this chance. George Galloway is someone for whom I have great respect. You are the kind of the political leaders we need to fight against injustice. Can we say that U.S is now defeated in Iraq? How do you see the future of the U.S as a superpower? And how likely is it the British withdrawal from the Iraq after the period of Mr. Blair? What about the crimes that are committed in Iraq by Mr. Blair and Mr. Bush? Thanks. Ahmed
Answer	The US has been defeated in Iraq. This is acknowledged in the public sphere, in opinion polls and privately by the main leaders of the Democratic Party. No one can win the Democratic nomination without promising to swiftly end the war and John McCain is trailing badly for the Republican nomination because of his continued support for the war. This is epoch-making. What started as an attempt to terrorise the world with American power has instead emboldened opponents of US hegemony from Caracas to Cape Town. Unless Gordon Brown is a fool he will accelerate British withdrawal from Iraq. If he does not, he will have inherited the premiership just in time to lose it.

 

Name	Yasin Yusuf From Somaliland    -
Profession	Computer programmer
Question	Hello, my question is: how Mr Brown will be different from Blair in term of foreign policy specially Islamic world and particularly in East Africa where Ethiopia try to colonize Somalia?
Answer	Mr. Brown and Mr. Blair are two cheeks of the same backside! Let to his own devices Mr. Brown will support imperialist policies and the Zionist state all over the world. However, he will not be left to his own devices. He knows his predecessor has been swept from office three years prematurely because of these policies - especially Iraq and Lebanon - thus change is possible and we will be fighting for it.

 

Name	Muse Ali    - Belgium
Profession
Question	How Mr. Blair will live knowing the crimes he committed in Iraq? How will he live knowing the destruction he caused to the Iraqi poeple?
Answer	Like the swan, Blair appears to glide serenely across the bloodbath. But he must be paddling furiously beneath the surface. He knows Iraq is chiselled on his political tombstone and he will answer for it if not in this life, then in the next.

 

Name	mona    -
Profession
Question	How do you see the future of the Muslims in Europe?
Answer	Islamophobia is the other side of the coin of making war on Muslims abroad. To combat it I commend the British model - an alliance of progressive people with the Muslims. In the UK we have built a movement of millions on that basis whereas, for example, in France, where the twain rarely meet each is weaker as a result.

 

Name	khaled ALi    -
Profession
Question	Do you anticipate any change in Britain's foreign policy after Blair?
Answer	Dear Khaled, please see the previous answer. You can always find more on www.georgegalloway.com

 

Name	Abu Huzaifa    -
Profession
Question	How would you describe the British society after Blair?
Answer	Blair is leaving having more than halved the membership of his party, having lost 4 million votes, and with New Labour at its lowest point in public opinion for 25 years. The war and the lies may yet overwhelm the party he has left behind. Alas, our political system means that tweedeldum is replaced by tweedledee. The conservatives will be no better. That's why we are trying to build real alternative in Respect - the Unity Coalition. The anti-war movement continues - even to disrupt Mr. Brown's coronation. We are determined that Brown will be unable to drag us into any new war even if he were stupid enough to try.

 

Name	Afsar    -
Profession
Question	How about the anti-war movement. Is it still gaining support? Can you give details?
Answer	See above - and look out for our next major demonstration on the 24th June in Manchester outside the New Labour conference.

 

Name	Debauch    -
Profession
Question	If the situation is so terrible in Iraq and it seems it will continue like that unless the invaders leave, why do you think the British are not so strong to change the policies of their government?
Answer	Well, the British people are. That's why Blair is leaving three years before he said he was.

 

Name	Aisha    -
Profession
Question	Can you shed light on the future of Muslims in UK especially in light of recent challenges in UK?
Answer	New Labour has made war on Muslims at home as a concomittant to war on Muslims abroad. But we are fighting each and every manifestation and successfully too. We have 22 councillors elected in Britain (in just three years) and - 20 of them are Muslims. Some of our leaders like Cllr Salma Yaqoob in Birmingham are now national, even international figures. There are those siren voices on the fringe of the Muslim community in Britain who wish to lure young Muslims onto the rocks of separatism and self-annihilating violence. We are their antidote. We say to young Muslims: you are right to be angry, but the best way to be angry is to make common cause with the non-Muslim majority who feel the same way.

 

Name	Batool Anabulsi    -
Profession
Question	Britain has always been a comfortable and peaceful place desired by so many Muslims. In the past few years, things have slightly changed. Do you think this is because the war in Iraq or the policies of the current government. Can the situation in France ( i.e. banning the hijab, etc.) be replayed in Britain? Why and why not?
Answer	It cannot because of the aforementioned Muslim/progressive alliance. But you are viewing Britain through rose-tinted spectacles common amongst Arabs. The scorpion stings because it's a scorpion. Britain is an imperialist country whose delusions of empire have not yet been fully broken. The relative freedom and liberty in Britain was hard won and never secure - the product of a dialectic involving the ruling elite and its opponents…

Dialectic, shmialectic. George just wants the testy British Muslims to see him—and not the local freakazoidal imam—as their ticket to ride. He may find, however, that in seeking to lead the aforementioned Muslim/progressive alliance, it spins out of his control, and he ends up getting stung by this scorpion (because, duh!, it’s a scorpion).

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:45 | link | comments (1)

One more time: David Warren writes about the sickening repeat of history now occurring as, once again, the West fails Lebanon and, once again, Palestinian terrorists will likely be allowed safe passage, enabling them to regroup and strike again in due course. From RealClear Politics:

…The West failed Lebanon, and indeed, the Reagan administration failed her in 1983, when focused instead on the Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union. In that light, Lebanon appeared to be a side-issue. In response to heavy casualties from the bombing of a U.S. Marine barracks, troops sent to restore order in Lebanon, and back the legitimate government, were withdrawn. The Baathist Syrian regime refilled the power vacuum, and for the quarter century since, Lebanon has been directly or indirectly under its murderous thumb.

The mistake the West made was two-fold. For 1982 had been the year when the Israelis had Yasser Arafat's PLO "fedayeen" trapped, in Lebanon, and were in a position to annihilate it. Succumbing to world opinion, including pressure from American allies and European false friends, the Israelis negotiated free passage for this terrorist force, and the late Arafat was able to set himself up in style in Tunisia. The mistake was compounded by the Madrid and Oslo conferences, of 1991-93, wherein the fatuous "roadmap to peace" was conceived and executed. Israel then accepted the relocation of this terrorist force to the West Bank and Gaza; and Arafat was able to establish the regime of thugs that brought Israel intifadas and the suicide bombers.

Though it beggars belief, the Western diplomatic view remains that it is better to negotiate with psychopaths than fight -- even when we have them cornered. This has been consistently the official Western approach, everywhere but in Iraq and Afghanistan, and will be there, too, if Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and company eventually prevail, politically, in the U.S. (This week, they finally agreed to resume funding the U.S. military effort in both countries, without specifying a withdrawal schedule. President Bush waived his veto in return for allowing the Democrats to lard the spending bill with an extraordinary amount of domestic pork.)

We are likely to watch history repeat itself at the Nahr al-Bared camp, where pressure from the world to "avoid civilian casualties" will be the leverage with which the terrorists holding the camp's civilians hostage live to fight another day. A previous generation of Lebanese politicians had already negotiated away the very right of the Lebanese police and military to enter the camp, thus turning it over to the rule of the psychopaths.

Verily, the entire Palestinian population, both within Israel's proximity and far away from it, remains perpetually hostage to the political ambitions of Arab and Persian tyrants claiming to champion their cause -- and are about as far from grasping whom their real friends might be, than they have ever been in history. Their worst enemies will, for the indefinite future, continue to be Fatah, Hamas, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Syrians, the Iranians, and munificent oil sheiks in Arabia…

 

To paraphrase the famous line by Pogo, they have met the enemy and he is them.

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

Correspondence: Letter to the editor of the Toronto Star by Ali Manji of Thornhill, Ontario:

From the start, the democratically elected, Hamas-led Palestinian Authority was never given a chance to succeed. Canada, the United States and other Western nations immediately cut foreign aid, and Israel refused to transfer tax funds owed to the new Palestinian government. The Palestinian Authority could not deliver much-needed social services to its citizens or pay its civil-sector employees.

The Western nations, along with Israel, punished the Palestinians for exercising their democratic right even while there was a lull in violence and a ceasefire in place.

The responsibility for the plight of the Palestinian refugees lies with Israel's never-ending illegal occupation of Palestine and not with an undermined Palestinian Authority. Israel and the international community need to understand that justice is a prerequisite for peace, and not the other way around.

My response:

 

Ali Manji writes that “justice [for the Palestinians] is a prerequisite for peace and not the other way around.” Maybe so, but the question must be posed: who gets to define “justice,” and is the definition truly “just” for both sides? For example, Manji seems to think that justice was not served when the West decided to cut funding to a Palestinian government led by Hamas. However, since Hamas is an Islamist organization that remains committed to Israel’s destruction, from the West’s perspective it is difficult to discern any “justice” in propping up such an intransigent regime, even if it did come to power through a democratic process.

 

Then there is the issue of blaming “Israel’s never-ending illegal occupation of Palestine for the plight of the Palestinian refugees.” If by “Palestine,” Manji means the West Bank and Gaza, they were not illegally occupied. They were occupied as the result of a pre-emptive war intended to liquidate Israel that was launched by her neighbours in 1967. And Israel had every intention of handing back the West Bank—as it handed back Gaza—had the Palestinians not decided to use Gaza as a launch pad for missiles instead of as a launch pad for statehood.

 

If, however, “Palestine” refers to all of Israel, then, clearly, we have a problem. Despite what Israel’s detractors may say, there is no justice to be had in destroying a thriving, vibrant Jewish state—the only one in the world—and turning it over to Arabs. Justice for both sides demands another solution. The question is whether the Palestinians will be able to stop the blame game long enough to see that a sovereign Palestine existing in peace beside a sovereign Israel is their best—indeed, their only—shot at a decent future, or whether they will continue down the deadly path of chaos, recrimination and self-destruction.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:39 | link | comments (1)

Bibi’s investment in divestment: The U.S. is getting set to sit down and “talk” with Iran in an effort to convince the ambitious Shiafascisti to tone down the violence in Iraq.

Yeah, that’ll work.

 

Here’s how Bibi Netanyahu, Israel’s once and future Prime Minister (pretty please with sugar on top) would deal with the wily, pint-sized Hitler and his enrichment scheme. From Opinion Journal:

 

How to deal with the Iranian nuclear threat has proved a conundrum for America and the West, including Israel. Mr. Netanyahu acknowledges that military strikes would pose "complications and difficulties" and thus "should be a last resort." But diplomacy has been tried for several years with scant results.

 

Mr. Netanyahu proposes a third way. The Iranian regime, he argues, is economically vulnerable. He is in America to urge state and local pension funds to divest from foreign companies that do business in Iran (U.S. law already keeps American firms out).

 

"This could be very effective," he tells me, "because Iran is in desperate need of new investments for its sagging oil industry. It's curtailed its oil production by 7%, I think, in each of the last three years. It's running unemployment to a rate of close to 20%, and Ahmadinejad is continuously being criticized from rivals within the regime and outside the regime for failing to deliver on economic problems."

Divestment "could stop Iran dead in its tracks," Mr. Netanyahu argues. "We're talking about several dozen companies . . . that are propping up the energy sector in Iran and a few other relevant sectors. They are eminently susceptible to stock prices. Their chief executives are compensated by stock prices. Divestment depresses stock prices and immediately forces reconsideration." This in turn would squeeze "Iranian economic elites," who Mr. Netanyahu says are motivated by money, not ideology. "That elite funds and finances a lot of politicians, and when they see their own holdings and their own businesses endangered, they'll put pressure to either block the nuclear program or to change the regime."

 

Mr. Netanyahu believes Americans across the political spectrum could unite behind the principle that "a regime that promotes genocide cannot receive American taxpayers' savings . . . through European intermediaries." And the idea is catching on.

 

Last year Missouri's treasurer, Sarah Steelman, established a terror-free mutual fund and spearheaded a move to divest the $6.9 billion State Employees Retirement System from companies that do business in Iran and other terror-supporting nations. Earlier this month Florida's Legislature unanimously approved a bill mandating divestment from companies with ties to Iran or Sudan. On Capitol Hill, Sens. Barack Obama (D., Ill.) and Sam Brownback (R., Kan.) have introduced the Iran Sanctions Enabling Act, which would create a federal list of investors in Iran and shield fund managers from lawsuits if they disinvest.

The big prize, of course, is California, whose $247 billion pension fund is the nation's biggest. "I spoke to Gov. [Arnold] Schwarzenegger on this a few weeks ago," Mr. Netanyahu says. "He said he'd look into it. I'm going to call him, possibly before I leave tonight." On Tuesday an official from the Israeli Embassy in Washington emailed me that Mr. Netanyahu "did get in touch with Governor Schwarzenegger yesterday. . . . The Governor was aware of the divestment bill and said that it may get passed by the end of the summer."

 

Sounds like a plan, but considering that Iran’s nuclear program is now being fast-tracked (even nuke-watcher extraordinaire, Mo ElBaradei says so), I’m not sure divestment will work in time.

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:07 | link | comments

Referendum day in Syria: Well, not so much a “referendum” as a forced vote for the chin-challenged despot in charge. From Al Bawaba: 

Referendum on a new constitutional term for President Bashar al-Assad started on 7 a.m. of Sunday in all governorates, SANA reported.

With parliament unanimously approving the candidature of the 41-year-old president for a second term, the referendum will inevitably approve Assad as president until the year 2014.

 

The ruling Baath party has called on voters to give a resounding "yes" to a new mandate for Assad, who it said "will express the hopes of the people and the expectations of the nation".

 

Sunday's referendum, in which about 12 million Syrians are eligible to vote, is the second involving Bashar al-Assad.

 

Lawyer Hassan Abdel-Azim, spokesman for six banned parties operating under the umbrella National Democratic Rally (NDR), said that "for there to be real elections", there should be other candidates standing. "The NDR will boycott the referendum because no one has asked the opposition for its opinion. Our claims for an amendment to the electoral law have not been taken into account," he said, according to AFP.

 

In July 2000, Assad was the sole candidate to succeed his father Hafez who had died the previous month. The official result then showed that Bashar received 97.29 percent of voter support.

 

Wow. That’s almost as high as the near unanimous vote to boycott Israel at a CUPE Ontario convention.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:07 | link | comments

Eco-imbeciles: The Toronto Star has an article about eco-tourists who are overwrought about impending climate doom (and flush with disposable income to spend on exotic eco-vacations). They have been traveling in increasing numbers to a small town in Greenland where the effects of climate change are immediately apparent—thus hastening the climate change they supposedly so abhor.

If they really care about the environment, maybe they should stay home and purchase carbon credits from Al Gore instead

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:56 | link | comments (2)

So much for ‘Never Again’: It’s bombs away in Sderot, as the war to liquidate the Jews continues apace. By Steve Feldman on the American Thinker site:

…It is May, 2007, and for many Jews in the Jewish state of Israel it must seem more like the Warsaw Ghetto or London circa 1942.

 

One of the reasons that Israel was re-established in 1948 was to ensure that no Jews would ever have to be subjected to such attacks or live in fear. After all, we were promised, "Never Again!"

 

Well, I guess someone forgot to tell the Muslims.

 

The Palestinian-Arabs, joined by Muslims throughout the world, proclaimed that no Jews were allowed to live in an area called the Gaza Strip. It was a barren land that Israelis had made bloom and flourish after 1967 and which Jews have - at minimum - a biblical claim to.

 

If the Jews left, the Muslims told the Israelis -- with the E.U., U.N. and even the United States agreeing -- the missiles would stop. So in August, 2005, the Israeli government dragged every Jew (including those interred at cemeteries) out of the Gaza Strip and handed that land -lock, stock and barrel - to the Palestinian-Arabs so that they could develop a state of their own and demonstrate that they would be good neighbors.

 

Yet the rockets have kept coming.

 

Fired at will into Israel.

 

When the warning system works, civilians have 20 seconds to find shelter, though unfortified houses, schools and businesses have hardly been a haven.

 

About a dozen Israelis have been killed by these Kassam rockets, including a32-year-old woman last week, with scores more physically injured and thousands psychologically scarred.

 

The Palestinian-Arabs lied.

 

Again.

 

A variety of Palestinian-Arab groups, including the ruling Hamas and the so-called "military-wing" of Fatah, as well as Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the aptly named Popular Resistance Committees are variably claiming credit for the missile attacks.

 

The Palestinian-Arab president, Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen to his terrorist pals) of Fatah, who is always described as a peaceful man who abhors terrorism by American officials and a "moderate" by the media, has an army numbering anywhere from 10,000 to 30,000 troops at his disposal. They have not lifted a finger to stop the missile attacks aimed at Israeli civilians. In fact, some of them are no doubt responsible for the missile-firing.

 

Mind you: It is Israeli civilians who are the targets of these barrages, and the missiles are being launched from the Gaza Strip into Israel.

 

The Israeli Army, reluctant to send ground forces into the Gaza Strip for a variety of reasons (including warnings not to from the United States, and concern about heavy military casualties from a well-armed and heavily fortified assortment of thousands of Palestinian-Arab terrorists), have tried pinpoint air strikes to try to stem the missile attacks. They have only slowed down the terrorists - who use densely populated civilian areas to launch missiles at Israel.

 

So it does not seem like the residents of Sderot and its environs will be able to live at ease anytime soon. Meanwhile, other Israelis north of the Gaza Strip in Ashkelon (home to more than 110,000 people, plus chemical plants that store potentially dangerous substances, and major electrical grids) are within missile range and have already tasted a little of what missile barrages can do to the body and spirit.

 

And of course it was just last summer that the Lebanese terrorist organization Hizballah fired 4,000 missiles at Israel's northern cities and towns, killing more than 100 people.

 

So, now you know what tens of thousands of Israelis who truly want to live in peace are facing every moment of every day.

 

You may now return to your comfort zone. If you can

 

Unfortunately, lots and lots of folks are entirely comfortable with the scenario wherein the Palestinians, using missiles and any other weapon at hand, get to “reclaim” their “stolen land” from those nasty, apartheid-practicing Jews. For the sake of justice and fairness, of course.

 

For those who care for a reality check, here’s a superb—and succinct—summary of historical events (the real ones, not the Arab rewrite) by intrepid truth-teller Melanie Phillips.

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

Heigh ho: Under sharia law, women always seem to get the fuzzy end of the lollipop (to quote Marilyn Monroe in Some Like it Hot). And even when the extremist sisters are accorded the one equal opportunity allowed to them—the opportunity to strap on a bomb and blow themselves up to, I believe the phrase used by the Pew pollers is “to defend Islam”—the rewards of becoming a female martyr are, shall we say, a bit on the skimpy side, especially compared to the bordello-with-panting-re-virginizing-virgins deal their brothers are promised.

Here’s how Mark Steyn explains it:

 

Item One: In Gaza, Islamic Jihad is planning to send waves of female suicide bombers into action against the Zionist Entity. Asked by an Israeli reporter whether self-detonating ladies enjoy the same 72-virgin deal as the lads, an Arab scholar said no, but that the gals will be served in Paradise by "dwarfs." Snow White got seven dwarfs, but it's unclear whether Blow White will get the full 72: Sleepy, Grumpy, Bashful, etc., all the way down to Incendiary, Non-Alcoholic and Anti-Zionist.

 

Now, that’s what I call getting short changed.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:13 | link | comments

Who benefits from chaos in Gaza?: The jihadists and Syria, that's who.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:19 | link | comments

Blue moon/frozen Hades/airborne swine moment: I started reading this article in Arab News about the European Commission on Intolerance and Racism’s annual report detailing rampant racism in Europe, expecting it to be the usual boo-hooing about “Islamophobia” and a whitewash of Muslim involvement in racist activities against Jews. Well, I was half right. The stuff about Islamophobia was there—and, as expected, way off base. (“Islamophobia is a difficult term. Whereas anti-Semitism clearly denotes hostility, prejudice and discrimination aimed at people of a specific race, Islamophobia confuses hostility toward Islam as a religion and hostility toward Muslims as individuals. It is an all-encompassing term that describes not only a hatred toward Islam but a view of Islam that — to my mind — is directly derived from the deranged teachings of Al-Qaeda et al.” Wrong. Jews are not "a specific race." And “Islamophobia” is the misperception that non-believers' legitimate concerns about Islam's jihad imperative and those who heed it somehow constitutes “hatred” of Muslims. It is a term intended to summarily shut down all criticism of any aspect of what believers consider to be a perfect—and thus unassailable—faith.) But to my astonishment, the writer, Iman Kurdi, comes clean about Muslim hatred of Jews, and urges her co-religionists to knock it off:

…This is particularly the case with respect to anti-Semitism, which ECRI reports is also on the rise in Europe. This fact is supported by the growing incidence of violence and desecrations of Jewish targets such as synagogues and cemeteries, something I deplore. It is also supported by a recently released survey by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) that looked at attitudes toward Jews in five European countries: France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Portugal. It found an increasing prevalence of anti-Semitic attitudes, such as the belief that Jews have too much power in business and finance and the belief that Jews talk too much about the holocaust (sic).

 

And if you dear reader also adhere to these beliefs, I ask you to question not only where they come from but also the role they play in propagating an ever-increasing cycle of hate between Muslims and their Semitic cousins. The truth is that many Arabs and Muslims like to believe in a view of the world where Jewish interests control everything from the media to the planes that crashed into the twin towers on 9/11.

 

They like this view because it focuses the blame for everything that is wrong in the Arab and/or Muslim world on dark Israeli forces. The State of Israel has much blood on its hands, and the Israeli lobby is indeed powerful in international relations, but it is a gross simplification to credit the Israelis with more power than they have. It is also a gross simplification not to differentiate between Israeli and Jew. Supporting the plight of the Palestinians should not be discredited by resorting to anti-Semitism. It is morally wrong and it does not help the Palestinian cause. It is no different in principle to those who think all Muslims are terrorists. If you want to fight Islamophobia, the first step is to start clearing your own closet of racial prejudice…

 

Okay, so she used a lower-case "h" for Holocaust, and she's not quite there in her understanding of Israel, and her desire to distinguish between Israelis and Jews is somewhat problematic. However, you have to admit that it's heartening to read something like this, instead of something like this, for a change.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:07 | link | comments

Reading the numbers: Americans are still pinching themselves at the good news, as revealed by a Pew poll this week, that most American Muslims are thrilled to bits to live in the good old U.S. of A., while only a miniscule fringe of mostly younger American Muslims are thrilled when "martyrs" blow themselves to bits in order to—I believe the phrase used in the survey was—“defend Islam.” 

Kathleen Parker suggests Americans hold off on the celebrations, at least until they take a second look at the numbers. From RealClear Politics: 

What a relief to read in a new Pew Research Center study that Muslims in America are "largely assimilated, happy with their lives, and moderate with respect to many of the issues that have divided Muslims and Westerners around the world."

Phew. Praise Allah. No more worries.

On the other hand, the study's findings may depend on how you define "largely."

Here's another way of putting the Pew results: While a majority of older U.S. Muslims have largely assimilated, more than a few younger Muslims think suicide bombings are justified.

Having trouble remembering where you put those pompoms? Stick around. Despite the upbeat treatment of the Pew study -- and headlines that conveyed a positive message -- the devil in the details is less reassuring.

In fact, the survey found that though a majority of the 1,050 surveyed (a fraction of the Pew's estimated 2.35 million Muslims in this country) are prospering, a significant minority are not assimilating and sympathize with radical Islam.

There is good news among the survey results, to be sure, especially if you're Muslim. In classically American fashion, 71 percent think that one can get ahead by working hard and 78 percent report being happy. In delightful news, those who report being happiest are young Muslims ages 18-29, who also comprise 30 percent of the total U.S. Muslim population.

In less happy news, these young Muslims are also more accepting of Islamist extremism. Add to that disconcerting note the following:

Sixty percent of the young group consider themselves Muslim first, American second. Among all young Muslims, 26 percent think that suicide bombings are justified often, sometimes or rarely. Another 5 percent said they "don't know" or refused to answer.

Don't know? To kill civilians or not to kill civilians is not a tricky question.

If 26 percent are fine with suicide bombing and another 5 percent probably are, then we may reasonably conclude that 31 percent of young American Muslims -- or roughly 219,000 -- support murdering innocents in the name of Islam. Peachy. Given that 9/11 was a supersized suicide bombing, it would seem we have a problem.

In another finding of Muslim American disconnect, fewer than half of all American Muslims believe that Arabs engineered the 9/11 attacks. Another third expressed no opinion or refused to answer.

That means that the vast majority of Muslims in America think ... what? That the U.S. attacked itself? That Israel did it?

While a majority of Muslims of all ages view al-Qaeda "very unfavorably" (58 percent), an alarming number seem to be ambivalent. A whopping 27 percent said they didn't know how they felt toward the terrorist organization or refused to answer the question. An immigrant population that does not recognize the enemy of its adopted country cannot be said to have assimilated.

Nevertheless, the Pew study authors tell us that compared to Europe, we're in good shape. Yes, sure, "there is somewhat more acceptance of Islamic extremism in some segments of the U.S. Muslim public than others," concede the authors. " ... Nonetheless, absolute levels of support for Islamic extremism among Muslim Americans are quite low, especially when compared with Muslims around the world."

In other words, presumably, we should be grateful that only 200,000 or so local Muslims support terrorism. In Europe, where many young Muslims are unemployed and alienated, things are much worse. True, but seldom does America measure success according to a things-could-be-worse standard.

Not so great is bad enough for reasoned alarm.

Another reason to hold off on the hoopla: Parker says the survey may not be accurate since the precise number of Muslims in the U.S. is far from definitive:

All of the study's conclusions depend, meanwhile, on whether one trusts its population figures, which Pew warns should be interpreted with caution. Since this was a telephone survey using only landlines -- and given that 48 percent of Americans age 18-29 use cells phones exclusively -- the number of young Muslims could be much higher than estimated. The truth is, no one knows how many Muslims live in the U.S. because the Census Bureau doesn't ask about religious identity. Muslim organizations put the figure at closer to 7 million based on mosque attendance.

If there are 7 million Muslims in the U.S., 30 percent of whom are young, 31 percent of whom do not forswear suicide bombings, then that could mean that as many as 651,000 young Muslim Americans sympathize with radical Islam and terrorism.

All things considered, it may be too soon to celebrate Muslim assimilation. Let's do hold the fireworks.

And, at the same time, let us pray that authorities are able to put a damper on any upcoming fireworks being plotted by the miniscule fringe.

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

Rosie’s Big Lie: Dubunked, courtesy Roger Aronoff of Accuracy in Media:

The Rosie O'Donnell-Elisabeth Hasselbeck battle is big news. In a modern female version of CNN's old Crossfire show, these panelists on ABC's "The View" let the rhetoric fly on issues like the Iraq War. But there is more at stake than a clash of media personalities. Whatever happened to the media's responsibility to get the facts right?

On May 17, Rosie implied that U.S. Government officials -- and U.S. soldiers in Iraq -- were terrorists, saying, "I just want to say something. 655,000 Iraqi civilians are dead. Who are the terrorists?" When Hasselbeck incredulously repeated Rosie's statement, "Who are the terrorists?...Who are you calling terrorists?" Rosie attempted to clarify, saying, "I'm saying that if you are in Iraq and another country, the United States, the richest in the world, invaded your country and killed 655,000 of your citizens, what would you call us?" She later attempted to distinguish between supporting the troops while opposing the government that sent them to Iraq.

But where did this figure of 655,000 come from?

It's based on a study released last October by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health for the British magazine Lancet. The figure is said to be "excess Iraqi deaths as a consequence of the war." But this study was shown to be wildly off base, as I pointed out in a column last November.

From the political backgrounds and agendas of the authors of the study, to their methodology, to their ignoring the evidence that would suggest that in fact there has likely been a substantial saving of lives through better hospitals and medical care and a vastly increased average life span, this report was badly flawed and misrepresented in the media. Incredibly, the study gives the number of 655,000, but with a plus or minus 250,000. If such a study were accurate, it would suggest that in the 1,300 or so days between the start of the war and the release of the report, an average of over 500 "excess Iraqi deaths" were occurring every day, seven days a week. This is preposterous.

There have been some days when civilian deaths numbered in the hundreds, and these make big news. For example, after the Golden Mosque in Samarra was blown up in February, 2006, it set off what has widely been called the worst week of sectarian violence in the entire war, and the estimated figure was that 1,300 died in that week.

The figure of dead Iraqis is probably closer to 50,000 than 650,000. How many of them were terrorists? And of those civilian dead, a significant number, probably a majority, was killed by insurgents or jihadists.

Rosie makes no such distinctions, blaming the U.S. for deaths carried out by anti-American terrorists. It's obvious that she has a visceral hatred for the American attempt to bring democracy and stability to Iraq and the Middle East. It may stem from her personal animosity toward Bush. Rosie has said publicly that she despises Bush because he opposes gay marriage.

This kind of propaganda from Rosie about the war does have an impact, especially on the millions of women watching the show. Of course, using misinformation as a weapon is what people like Rosie accuse Bush of doing. Bush is held accountable, as evidenced by the hostile questions at his Thursday news conference. But why isn't Rosie being held accountable? Is it because she is assumed to be a know-nothing who utters nonsensical things for entertainment purposes only? Unfortunately, we can't assume that's the case. She may believe what she's saying, and some who listen to her may believe it, too…

 

The truther shall set you free? Fat chance.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:44 | link | comments

When the going gets tough, The View’s truther beats a hasty retreat: Hard on the heels of her angry exchange with token Conservative Elisabeth Hasselbeck, Rosie O’Donnell exits, stage left, a little earlier than expected.

I wouldn’t count Rosie out, though. Her repellent views put her well within in Leftie mainstream, and, considering her popularity, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see the Democrats trying to persuade her to run for office. Who knows? She could become a fat, lesbian Nancy Pelosi, high-fiving the Baathists and showing off photos of her kiddies to Islamic terrorists (who, according to Rosie, are just ordinary moms and dads, same as us).

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:16 | link | comments

Malevolent do-gooders: Ralph Peters has nothing but withering contempt for the self-righteous Human Rights weenies of Amnesty International. From the New York Post:

…Each year, Amnesty International releases what purports to be an objective global survey of the state of human rights. Sounds like a great idea, but the report has long since degenerated into an effort to protect terrorists and mass murderers from justice - and bash America.

In its latest report, Amnesty International denounces the United States again. This time, it seems we're the foremost global abuser of human rights.

Oh, if you keep reading, rogue states such as Zimbabwe, China, Sudan, Russia and Iran get tut-tut mentions, although North Korea just sounds like a weight-loss spa. Except for our democratic ally, Colombia, only the United Kingdom appears remotely as savage as the United States.

Reading about American heartlessness made me want to move to Saudi Arabia, where women never see their rights abused and believers of every faith are free to worship. And if I want a beer, I can hop over to Venezuela, where everything's free.

The sad truth is that the misnamed "human-rights community" just may be the worst enemy of human rights without a country of its own. There are real human-rights tragedies unfolding every day, from Harare to Havana, but activists don't give a damn about the average Joe or Miguel or Ali…

Bingo! They only care about advancing the internationalist agenda which--what are the odds?--happens to go hand in glove with the Islamist agenda.

Posted by: scaramouche at 16:57 | link | comments

Poor, poor pitiful them: A clueless editorial in Toronto Star champions the cause of the Palestinians--and their victimhood:

Scattered by war across Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and other countries, the world's 9 million Palestinians are a people without a state of their own. Nearly half are refugees. More than 1 million live in squalid camps.

Yet despite these appalling conditions which have lasted almost 60 years, a Palestinian leadership has emerged to press their cause.

In the West Bank and Gaza, President Mahmoud Abbas presides over an elected government that rules 3.8 million people and has a strong security force. Even in chaotic Lebanon, home to 400,000 refugees, the Palestine Liberation Organization has a representative, Abbas Zaki, and an armed militia.

In both places, however, Palestinian leaders have allowed extremists to run riot, with catastrophic results.

From Gaza, Hamas militants have fired 200 rockets at Israel in a week, provoking fierce Israeli reprisals, including yesterday's arrest of 33 Hamas leaders. And in Lebanon's Nahr al-Bared refugee camp, gunmen from the Al Qaeda-inspired Fatah al-Islam faction have established a foothold, triggering fighting with the Lebanese army that has sent thousands fleeing for their lives.

This violence is self-defeating, as Abbas indicated yesterday when he said, "No violence is going to resolve any problems."

The causes of these crises differ.

In Gaza, rivalry between Abbas' Fatah camp and Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh's Hamas has led to near civil war. Hamas is trying to sabotage Abbas as he lobbies for peace talks. In Lebanon, Syria has been blamed for encouraging Fatah al-Islam to destabilize the elected but shaky Beirut regime to restore Syria's sway.

Whatever the rationale, Palestinians undercut their cause by ceding areas under their control – Gaza or the Lebanese camps – to extremists.

Israel and the Palestinians came closest to peace under the Oslo Accords, which were based on the premise that Palestinians would obtain control of the West Bank and Gaza, provided those areas did not become launch pads for attacks. And in Lebanon, the Beirut government agreed to keep its troops out of the refugee camps, on the proviso that Palestinians police themselves.

Both deals unravelled, and Palestinians are paying a high price, besieged by Israelis and Lebanese.

Palestinians deserve a state. But as Abbas understands, they must maintain order in areas they already control. Gaza's rocket launchers and Nahr al-Bared's outlaws are poor advertisements for self-rule.

Got that? They’re refugees. They live in squalid conditions. They’re besieged. And despite all the setbacks, their leadership which has risen to press their cause and get them what they deserve—their own state.

 

How admirable.

 

Too bad the leadership emerged for one reason and one reason only—to divest the Jews of their sovereignty—and that Mahmoud Abbas is no better, if somewhat less fanatically devout, than his Hamas rivals. And too bad that the leadership has proven itself incapable of running a dog pound, much less anything that remotely resembles a viable state. And let’s not mention the fact that there’s already a large Palestinian state in the vicinity—Jordan.

 

No, let’s cling to the myth that, with just a little more retooling of a “peace plan,” the Palestinians will be willing to living alongside sovereign Jews in two separate states. Even though by now it should be clear to everyone—even clueless Star editorialists—that a one state solution—one sans Israel—has been and always will be the goal.

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

He's baa-aack: After cooling his heels in Ayatollahville for the past few months, the choleric cleric has returned to incite maynhem in Iraq.

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

Past imperfect: Sanctimonious gasbag Jimmy Carter got in hot water recently for calling George W. Bush the worst President ever—a veritable pot-calling-the-kettle-black moment. But as Times columnist Gerard Barker points out, there’s bad, and then there’s Jimmy Carter bad, and frankly, we ain’t there yet:

…For the younger reader, perhaps already infused with a nostalgia that recalls the 1970s as a time of peace and prosperity, a brief reminder of the golden era of Carter is in order. It wasn’t all disco and flared trousers and sex without condoms. Also fashionable in those days were unemployment, inflation and communism.

The US jobless rate was more than 10 per cent. Inflation touched 15 per cent. Soviet troops marched unmolested into Afghanistan. America watched helpless as its diplomats were held hostage by Iranian revolutionaries for 444 days. In the rest of the world, from Latin America to Asia, American power yielded to the communist advance; economically, America was being bested by Japan and Germany.

And then there was the moment when the US President was almost felled by a killer rabbit. It struck one day in 1979 when Mr Carter was in the presidential dinghy on a fishing trip in Georgia. A large, evidently amphibious animal with big floppy ears and protuberant teeth swam boldly up to the President’s boat and had to be smacked away with a paddle (a nice metaphor in many respects: the President may have been up the creek but at least he still had his paddle).

Mr Carter’s defenders say: very well. Not our finest hour. But at least people liked us. Better to be pitied than despised. And laugh if you will about killer rabbits, at least Mr Carter’s near-death experience came at the furry paws of an animate creature; Mr Bush’s main brush with mortality in the White House was with a pretzel.

For many Americans, the Carter critique rings true. They wonder whether, finally, this is it for America. Whether two terms of George Bush may have done for the superpower what the Great Depression, fascism, communism and Jimmy Carter failed to do: sow the seeds of its destruction.

The country is in the grip of an unrelieved gloom about its condition. The Iraq war rolls on, sapping self-confidence. In the broader Middle East the war that was supposed to turn history in America’s direction seems to have done the opposite. Iran is emboldened. Syria is throwing its weight around again.

Farther afield, of course, America is despised as never before. Its much-vaunted soft power, the appeal of its freedoms, its lifestyle, its economic opportunities, is tarnished. It is not just Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, but the very American system itself – its thirst for oil, its healthcare, its inequalities – that is now so readily maligned.

Americans read every day that their economic supremacy is in its last days. This week a delegation from Beijing has been in Washington for economic talks. In the pictures of the event, the Chinese leaders, smiling beneficently on their hosts, looked like nothing so much as a kind of memento mori, a chilling reminder for Americans that the future does not belong to them.

Meanwhile, an immigration debate rages on. Right and Left are furious with a compromise Bill in Congress. The nativist Right, egged on by latterday Goebbelses on TV and radio, thinks America is being overwhelmed by sub-literate Hispanic immigrants, armed with lawnmowers and cleaning brushes, ready to roll in and sweep them away. The bleeding-heart Left thinks that, in allowing an amnesty for only 12 million illegal immigrants, America is inflicting unimaginable cruelties on another 30 million family members who will not be allowed to come into the US.

Steady on. Once Americans get into a funk, there really is no stopping them. It’s an old truth that things are never as good or as bad as they seem and so it is now…

I dunno, Gerard. Things seem pretty bad, and not in the 70s sense of disco music and stagflation (which, incidentally, is my favourite word from that decade). I’d feel a lot better if “the bleeding heart Left,” of which Jimminy is now a revered Patriarch, weren’t so damned clueless.

Posted by: scaramouche at 09:40 | link | comments (1)

Romancing the stone cold killer: True to form, the Globe and Mail’s Mark “Malarkey” MacKinnon romanticizes a brutal jihadist. But really, how could he resist? To those who see things through the Malarkey lens, it’s a reflex, like slamming Israel, and the beleaguered “underdog” will always cut an appealing figure, even if—minor technicality—he does happen to be a bloodthirsty thug.

SHATILA REFUGEE CAMP, LEBANON -- The man leading the fundamentalist Fatah al-Islam group in its six-day-old battle with the Lebanese army is a fanatically devout former Libyan air force pilot who is almost certain to choose death over surrender in the standoff at the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp, former comrades-in-arms say.

Even before he founded Fatah al-Islam last year, Shakir al-Abssi was a well-known militant who grew up fighting in the refugee camps of Jordan and Lebanon and dreaming of "liberating" the Palestinian territories. The last place he lived before he established his base at Nahr al-Bared is testament to that: a grungy three-room building furnished only with bunk beds, uncomfortable chairs and a messy desk in Shatila, a Palestinian refugee camp near Beirut.

A single bare light bulb hangs from the ceiling, illuminating a wall decorated with a Palestinian flag, paintings of Jerusalem's al-Aqsa mosque and a rocket-propelled grenade launcher hanging by its shoulder strap from a nail.

The building's front door is plastered with pictures of Saddam Hussein and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

Mr. al-Abssi, who returned to Lebanon last summer after a prolonged absence, lived in these Spartan accommodations for several months after being assigned by Fatah Intifada chiefs in Syria to take over the local leadership of the Syrian-backed group dedicated to violent resistance against Israel.

Shortly afterward, he founded the breakaway Fatah al-Islam, the radical Salafist group now locked in the deadly showdown with government forces at Nahr al-Bared in the north of the country. The fight has already left at least 90 people dead, and many more casualties are feared with thousands of Palestinian refugees still trapped inside as sporadic fighting continues, and emergency workers are unable to reach most of the besieged camp.

The 51-year-old Mr. al-Abssi is remembered on these grimy, narrow streets as a physically fit man with greying hair who wore a mustache and, occasionally, a short beard. He was a popular and respected figure, renowned for his religiosity.

"He is modest and forgiving. You can do anything you want to him and he will forgive you, but if someone insulted God in his presence, he might kill them," said Ibrahim Abu Mohammed, the security chief for Fatah Intifada in Shatila…

Also, no doubt, courteous, brave and thrifty. A regular jihad scout leader who’s helping the lads work on their final merit badge: martyrdom.

 

My letter to the Globe:

 

It sounds like there’s a lot to admire about Shakir al-Abssi, the “militant” who founded Fatah al-Islam. He’s stalwart, “staring down Lebanese troops.” He’s a man of vision who dreams of “‘liberating’ the Palestinian territories.” He’s “modest and forgiving,” except of course if you have something negative to say about his beliefs, in which case, being so incredibly “devout,” he’s apt to take offence and do you grievous personal harm.

 

All in all, he sounds rather appealing—Robin Hood by way of Che Guevera, with a jihadist twist.

 

Alas, unless it's Errol Flynn in an old Warner Brothers movie, the “romance” of the dashing outlaw is lost on me. As a devotee of reality and not legend, you’ll understand if I prefer to see Mr. al-Abssi for what he really is: a dangerous, fanatical brute.

Posted by: scaramouche at 08:54 | link | comments (2)

Palestinian death wish: Youssef Ibrahim in the New York Sun poses one of the most confounding questions of our era: why, time after time, do the Palestinians back the wrong horse and act against their own best interests?:

…Mayhem is always to be expected from Syria, but why are the Palestinian Arabs offering themselves up as tools of Syria, destroying whatever sympathy is still left for their cause, and turning themselves into pariahs in the Arab world? And why do they keep doing it over and over?

In 1990, some 400,000 Palestinian Arab residents of Kuwait cheered on, and even collaborated with, Saddam Hussein's Iraqi army during his invasion of the Gulf state; when the Gulf War liberated Kuwait a year and a half later, the Kuwaitis threw all their Palestinians out.

Twenty years earlier in Jordan, armed Palestinian Arab gangs waged the so-called Black September Civil War in an effort to overthrow King Hussein and take over the country.

Both episodes cost the Palestinian Arab cause dearly. Those in Kuwait lost some of the best living standards they ever enjoyed. In Jordan, after killing some 7,000 Palestine Liberation Organization fighters, Hussein threw the rest out along with their leader, Yasser Arafat, who had found his way to Lebanon by 1971.

Within a decade, Arafat and his PLO gangs had brought turmoil to Lebanon, in effect triggering the 1975 Lebanese Civil War and, in 1982, inviting an Israeli invasion of the country. Those travesties got the gangster leadership of the PLO evicted once again, this time to Tunisia, leaving behind some 350,000 Palestinian Arabs holed up in refugee camps of Lebanon, which quickly became 12 cesspools of radicalism. They are where Syria and Al Qaeda went to recruit the newest gang of mercenary Palestinian Arabs, Fatah al-Islam.

All of this invites the question of what makes our Palestinian Arab brethren gravitate constantly toward such lowest possible denominators and end up as the prime losers…

In a word: Judenhass. It makes you stupid.

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

F-A-R-F-O-U-R-M-O-U-S-E: The American Thinker has a piece about the ugly little rodent in the Palestinian living room, and why the Disney Corp. and the leftoids are so loath to acknowledge it:

Hamas, the Islamofascist party that now controls half the Palestinian population, is giving the world an important object lesson on civilization; or rather, on the crucial difference between civilization and barbarism. In a West that has dulled the edge of its moral sense after years of "all cultures are equal" propaganda, it is high time for us to learn again what seemed so simple and obvious to previous generations: That civilization is better than bloody, vengeful barbarism, both in war and peace.

 

If we fail to understand the morality of our cause with the greatest intellectual clarity, we will not have the psychic strength to win this struggle. The moral lessons of what we see  in the news every day must be pointed out, over and over again. In a previous age, the mainstream media did that job.  Today, only the new media are willing to do it.

 

Annette Funicello wouldn't approve, and neither would Walt Disney, but nonetheless the world has been introduced to the Mickey Martyr Club (Music please, Maestro!). Here come the kids marching in. Palestinian toddlers are being taught the glories of suicide-killing the Jews of Israel, using a Mickey Mouse rip-off on Hamas TV. Walt Disney's cartoon mouse is now Mickey Martyr, on his way to paradise-after-death in a thousand bloody shreds. This is not the wholesome land of Disney.

 

So far, the Disney Company isn't suing to protect its copyright, simply just hoping that this insanity will go away.

 

Now in a sane and decent country this sort of brainwashing of innocents would be called child abuse. If American liberals knew about little kids being told to commit suicide-murder anywhere in the United States, wouldn't they explode with righteous rage? So ... where is their moral outrage?...

 

It’s otherwise engaged trying to unravel conspiracy plots about 9/11 and consumed by a pathological hatred for George Bush and American “war crimes” in Iraq. Also, the lefties are so heavily invested in the Palestinians=helpless victims equation that they are incapable of perceiving the truth.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:15 | link | comments

Jenin! Jenin!: Oh, sorry. It’s only Arabs killing other Arabs. Move along, now. Nothing to get excited about.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:59 | link | comments

They were here just a minute ago…: Some red faces today at Scotland Yard as it has had to account for the disappearance of three alleged fertilizer of peace plotters. Seems under current terror laws, police didn’t actually have enough on them to keep them locked up, but has sufficient evidence to require them to show up their local police station once a day. The alleged jihadists took that as an invitation to vamoose to parts unknown. From the Times Online:

The Home Secretary lashed out in frustration this morning after two brothers of a man convicted of involvement in the fertiliser bomb plot were found to have absconded from a control order imposed on them under terrorism laws.

Scotland Yard said they are anxious to trace Lamine Adam, 26, and Ibrahim Adam, 20, and a third man, Cerie Bullivant, 24, who went missing this week. The Adams are the brothers of Anthony Garcia, 25, who was jailed for life last month after being convicted at the Old Bailey of conspiring to commit a terrorist attack in Britain.

In a statement outside 10 Downing Street, a visibly furious John Reid blamed the limited power of the control orders for the breach. “We are doing absolutely everything we can, the police and the Government, with the limitations placed upon us by Parliament, by the courts and by the law,” the Home Secretary said.

“I admit that sometimes it feels as though we are having to fight with one hand tied behind our back. Not least because some of those who are the first to complain are also the first in the queue to stop us getting the powers we need, the strength and powers we need.”…

Oh, pshaw, Home Secretary. That would only get you a severe tongue lashing/finger waggling from Amnesty International about how the state has gone all xenophobic and is depriving the ammonium nitrate boys of their inalienable “human rights.” And no one should have to endure that.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:07 | link | comments

More good news: There’s no jihad. None whatsoever. So saith the seers over at Amnesty International, who have slammed Western efforts to counter Islam’s holy warriors as ‘the politics of fear.’ As A.I. sees it, there are only two things we have to be afraid of: fear itself, and the refusal of certain Western nations, including Canada, to lie down and die. From the Toronto Star:

In its most sweeping statement to date, Amnesty International has condemned the "politics of fear" that it says has polarized the world and allowed appalling violations of human rights to burgeon.

"Fear thrives on myopic and cowardly leadership," said Amnesty Secretary General Irene Khan, introducing the London-based group's annual report, released yesterday.

She accused politicians worldwide of "short-sighted ... policies and strategies that erode the rule of law and human rights, increase inequalities, feed racism and xenophobia, divide and damage communities and sow the seeds for violence and more conflict."

Canada has not been immune, Khan said.

It is one of a number of Western countries whose fear of terrorism has caused them to "collude" with the U.S. government's "unlawful transfer" of suspected terrorists to countries that routinely violate human rights, she added.

"Nothing so aptly portrays the globalization of human rights violations as the U.S. government's program of `extraordinary renditions,'" Khan said.

"Investigations by the Council of Europe, the European Parliament and a public inquiry in Canada have provided compelling evidence confirming ... the complicity, collusion or acquiescence of a number of European and other governments – whether democratic like Canada or autocratic like Pakistan."

Alex Neve, who heads Amnesty's office in Canada, said that the case of Maher Arar, which sparked the public inquiry, "points to where we went terribly wrong, and emphasizes that when we do stray from the path of human rights there can be desperate human costs."

The U.S. State Department dismissed the Amnesty report as a "political document" and said it was trying to make Washington "an ideological punching ball."…

So you see the great sin of our times, at least according to A.I., is straying from the clearly demarcated path of international “human rights.”  Never mind that there are countries, like democratic Canada, where people are free and have rights and countries, like autocratic Pakistan or theocratic Saudi Arabia, where people have limited or no rights, and, in the case of the Magic Kingdom, where they are forced to submit to brutal police who seek to propagate virtue and prevent vice. Never mind that there's a religious totalitarianism which threatens to engulf the planet. That’s irrelevant—and anyway, in the wacky world of moral relativism, democratic Canada and autocratic Pakistan are exactly the same. What really matters is that everyone—and that means you, America, Canada, and Israel—get with the internationalist agenda and genuflect to the great empty God of “human rights.”  Except, of course, for the jihadists. They only prostrate themselves before Allah.

 

The immense irony here: were we to do as A.I. demands, Islamism will prevail and the only “rights” anyone will have are the ones enshrined in sharia law.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:48 | link | comments (1)

Say it loud, they’re "submissive" and proud: An interesting stat lost in the shuffle of the Pew poll—a quarter of American Muslims are “reverts.” From the Christian Post:

Not much was formerly known about the Muslim American population in terms of their attitudes and opinions, but the new survey by the Pew Research Center found that Muslim Americans, in comparison to the rest of the world, have the unique feature of consisting of a relatively large number of converts to the religion – nearly a quarter. Almost all conversions are native-born (91 percent) and almost three-fifths (59 percent) of converts to Islam are African American.

Most converts to Islam gave as reasons for their conversions: the appeal of Islam’s teachings, the belief that Islam is superior to Christianity, or that religion “made sense” to them.

Only 18 percent of converts said family reasons, such as marrying a Muslim, was reason for conversion…

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:27 | link | comments

Fashion police: Cox & Forkum on the mully-bully version of a popular TV make-over show:

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:29 | link | comments

The dark side of looking on the bright side: Over at the Corner, Mark Steyn responds to Jonah Goldberg’s observations about the relentlessly upbeat coverage of the Pew poll:

Jonah, it's true that that poll of US Muslims is less bad news than equivalent polls in Britain and Europe. But the net effect is the same: If 26% of America's "Muslim youth" (and the age of 30 isn't all that youthful) believe suicide bombing can be justified, that provides a huge comfort zone for the jihad to operate in.

And saying, well, most of the 26% just have the jihad fever in a purely rhetorical sense - they may sound off about Jews and infidels and whatnot when they're with their pals, but they're not going to act on it - only makes it harder for the broader community to distinguish between pseudo-jihad machismo and the real thing. Judging from the media coverage, America is as anxious to normalize that 26% as Sweden's Chancellor of Justice was when he closed down an investigation into the Grand Mosque of Stockholm on the grounds that calls to go forth and kill "the brothers of pigs and apes" - i.e. you know who - were part of what he called "the everyday climate in the rhetoric that surrounds this conflict". In other words, if you threaten to kill people often enough, it will be seen as part of your vibrant rich cultural tradition - and, by definition, we're all cool with that. That provides very useful cover for serious mischief makers.

Also, note the same trend as in Europe: second and third generation Muslims, the ones born or at least raised in the west, the ones most at ease with pop culture et al and with no real memory of life in Yemen or Pakistan, are the ones most prone to radical pan-Islamist ideology. And what went unasked in the poll is how many sympathize not with the jihad's means but with the end: that is, how many of them wish ultimately to live under Islamic law in an Islamic States of America. In Britain, depending on how the question's phrased, 40-60% want to.

On the other hand, I was heartened to discover that 40% of US Muslims think there were no Arabs involved in 9/11. You couldn't hold the number down that low if you polled American college faculties. 

Too true. I guess the glass is half full.

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

Useful idiots: An editorial in the New York Sun criticizes Amnesty International for what amounts to nothing less than chronic idiocy:

For many journalists, diplomats, and political activists, Amnesty International is considered to be a highly reliable and objective source of information and analysis on human rights around the world. But the halo that surrounds its reports and campaigns is beginning to fray, as the evidence of political bias and inaccuracy mounts.

Recently, the Economist, published in Britain, noted that "an organisation which devotes more pages in its annual report to human-rights abuses in Britain and America than those in Belarus and Saudi Arabia cannot expect to escape doubters' scrutiny." Other critics, including law professor at Harvard, Alan Dershowitz, and the U.S.-based Capital Research Center, have been more pointed, providing evidence of Amnesty's systematic bias and reports based largely on claims by carefully selected "eyewitnesses" in Colombia, Gaza, and Lebanon.

As Amnesty releases its annual report on human rights for 2006, amid highly choreographed public relations events, and repeating the familiar condemnations of Israel and America, NGO Monitor has also published a report on Amnesty's activities in the Middle East. The result is not a pretty picture for those clinging to the "halo effect."

Using a detailed and sophisticated qualitative model for comparing relative resources devoted to the different countries, this report clearly shows that in 2006, Amnesty singled out Israel for condemnation of human rights to a far greater extent than Iran, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Syria, Egypt, and other chronic abusers of human rights.

During the year, Amnesty issued 48 publications critical of Israel, compared to 35 for Iran, 2 for Saudi Arabia, and only 7 for Syria. Many of the attacks directed at Israel took place during the war with Hezbollah, but this terror group and state-within-a-state also got relatively little attention from Amnesty.

Furthermore, as Amnesty has almost no professional researchers, many of the "factual" claims in these reports were provided by "eyewitnesses," whose political affiliations and credibility can be only guessed. And the language used in these reports also reflects an obsessive and unjustified singling out of Israel, with frequent use of terms such "disproportionate attacks," "war crimes," and "violations of international humanitarian law."

And while Amnesty International was founded to fight for the freedom of political prisoners, the officials in charge of this organization failed to issue a single statement calling for the release of the Israeli soldiers that were kidnapped by Hezbollah and Hamas, and who have not been heard from since their illegal capture…

Amnesty International—the Human Rights Council of NGOs.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:40 | link | comments

Beyond the fringe: Michelle Malkin weighs in on the miniscule fringe of young American Muslims who believe it’s okey-dokey to ‘splode folks, so long as it’s to “defend Islam”—and how the mainstream media have chosen to play down the poll’s disturbing results. From NRO:

If we believe the spin of Associated Press headline writers, there’s little cause for concern about a new Pew poll of American Muslims. “Most U.S. Muslims reject suicide bombings,” the AP headline writer blithely reports.

But the details of the poll show that the always-downplayed tiny minority of jihadi sympathizers in America is cause for big concern…

…The poll focused particular concern on jihadi sympathy among young Muslims and black Muslims…

“It is a hair-raising number,” Radwan Masmoudi, president of the Washington-based Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy, told the AP. Indeed. The numbers should be a wake-up call, not another excuse for the mainstream media to downplay the threat of homegrown jihad.

The poll comes on the heels of the Fort Dix jihadi terror bust involving young, American-raised Muslims and the conviction this week of Muslim doctor Rafiq Abdus Sabir — born in Harlem, based in Florida — who had pledged loyalty to al Qaeda and vowed to treat injured al Qaeda fighters so they could return to Iraq to kill Americans. A Brooklyn bookstore owner and a Washington, D.C., cab driver also pleaded guilty and were sentenced to prison in the case. The tiny minority of jihadi sympathizers aren’t just sitting around stewing harmlessly about their beliefs. They are recruiting, proselytizing, plotting, and growing.

I’m reminded of a similar poll conducted in Indonesia last fall. One in ten Indonesian Muslims was found to support bombings in defense of Islam. They took the news a little more seriously in “moderate” Indonesia. One in 10 in Indonesia, you see, equals 19 million Muslims for violent jihad. That’s just Indonesia.

Recent polling in Britain found that 13 percent of British Muslims believe the London subway bombers are righteous “martyrs,” and 7 percent approve of suicide bombing attacks on civilians in Britain in some circumstances.

Now, add that to the 16 percent of French Muslims, 16 percent of Spanish Muslims, 7 percent of German Muslims, 28 percent of Egyptian Muslims, 14 percent of Pakistani Muslims, and 46 percent of Nigerian Muslims who told Pew last summer that “violence against civilian targets in order to defend Islam” can be justified “often/sometimes.”

A few fringe jihadists here, a few fringe jihadists there, and soon you’re talking about bloody real numbers.

Bloody well right.

Posted by: scaramouche at 16:06 | link | comments

Confidential info: Shhh! Don’t tell anyone—because UN nuclear watchkitty, Mo ElBaradei would prefer to keep it on the q.t.—but  it looks like the lit’ler Hitler’s nuclear project may be ready for blast off even sooner than expected.

Posted by: scaramouche at 15:28 | link | comments

 First Nations Jew: Graham Greene, now wowin’ ‘em as Shylock during previews of The Merchant of Venice at Stratford, sees a lot of parallels between Jews and First Nations Canadians. From the Ceeb:

Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice is often slammed as anti-Semitic, but actor Graham Greene — who stars as the Jewish moneylender Shylock in the Stratford Festival’s new production, opening June 1 — sees his character as a victim, not a villain.

“Shylock, he’s the one who gets boned, big time,” says a gruffly affable Greene, who is a master of the pithy summary. “He loses everything — his daughter, his money, his house. He’s completely reduced to nothing and forced to convert to Christianity on top of it.”

The Venetian Christians, meanwhile, who preach to Shylock about mercy and forgiveness when he insists on his pound of flesh for an unpaid loan, wind up with his riches. “Even [Shylock’s] rotten son-in-law Lorenzo doesn’t care about his wife anymore when he finds out he gets the inheritance from Shylock,” says Greene, suddenly erupting into one of his huge, cackling laughs. “They’re an ugly bunch of characters — brutal. This play makes Christians look like complete animals. It just cracks me up.”

Greene, 55, is sitting for this late-morning interview backstage at the Festival Theatre, where, apart from some sniffles due to spring allergies, he’s appearing fit and relaxed. He’s clad in a chill-out ensemble of sweatpants, T-shirt and black leather vest, but this evening he’ll don a grey businessman’s suit for his role in director Richard Rose’s semi-modern-dress Merchant, as well as acquiring a yarmulke and prayer shawl, or tallit.

The idea of having Canada’s best-known First Nations actor play Shakespeare’s Hebrew antihero is an inspired stroke of casting. Sadly enough, if you’re trying to put the marginalized, ghetto-confined Jews of Renaissance Italy into a Canadian context, this country’s aboriginal people immediately spring to mind. “Shylock’s forced conversion to Christianity is not unlike the First Nations people being forced into Christianity,” notes Greene, an Oneida who was born on Ontario’s Six Nations Reserve.

And the fundamental misunderstanding between Shylock and his Christian clients brings to mind such ongoing disputes as the continuing Caledonia land claim dispute in southern Ontario. “There are a lot of parallels there,” says Greene…

Greene dons a yarmulke and prayer shawl for his role as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. (David Hou/Stratford Festival of Canada)

 

So you mean all that stuff in the play about Jews being greedy, vindictive, cannibalistic, demonic, blood-thirsty Christ-killers; all the Judenhass here and elsewhere which helped form the fertile seedbed of hatred that was ultimately “harvested” during the Holocaust—Greene sees “a lot of parallels there” with the First Nations experience?

 

Fascinating.

 

I wish the Bard were still around so he could explain to everyone that his “comedy” about a villain getting his much-deserved comeuppance is not a plea for universal tolerance. It is his version of Borat’s “running of the Jew,” a crowd-pleaser intended to sate an audience that had thrilled to the recent real-life hanging, drawing and quartering of the Queen’s physician, a converso accused of plotting against the Crown. To try to turn this sow’s ear of anti-Semitism into a silk purse of mutual understanding in which the Christians--the Christians!--are the villains is more than a gross misreading of the play; it is, quite simply, absurd.

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

Hole-y poll: Good news! According to a just-released survey, only 20 per cent of American Muslims think human bombs have a right to blow themselves up “to defend Islam.” And since there are only 2.35 million American Muslims, far lower than previously reported, that leaves a pool of 470,000 or so—call it a miniscule fringe—who could give a hearty thumbs up to exploding shahids. And of them, only around 200,000 actually do so. Or at least, are willing to ‘fess up to such convictions to intrusive infidel pollsters.

The worse news, as always, is buried several paragraphs down:

The survey found that Muslim Americans under age 30 are more religiously observant and accepting of Islamic extremism than other Muslims.

Oh, really. And what percentage of the overall Muslim population do they comprise? The poll doesn't say. And how quickly is this segment of the population growing? The poll doesn't say. And how do these young Muslims understand the jihad imperative as set out in Islamic teachings--as an individual's internal struggle to submit to God's strictures, or as a communal call to take up arms against non-believers? The poll doesn't say. And do they accord Israel the right to exist as a sovereign Jewish state? The poll doesn't say. And are they actively working to help Dar al-Islam subborn Dar al-Harb? The poll doesn't say.

What does the poll say? Among other things that:

• • The majority of American Muslims -- 63 percent -- lean Democratic.

• • Sixty-five percent of adult U.S. Muslims were born elsewhere; most are Arab immigrants.

• • The majority believe they should adopt American customs.

• • Muslim-American income and education levels generally mirror those of the general public.

• • Seventy-one percent believe most people can get ahead in the United States if they work hard.

• • Slightly more than half agreed their lives are more difficult since Sept. 11.

• • Most believe the government targets them for surveillance and monitoring.

As for those unposed and unanswered questions mentioned above, I guess we’ll have to extrapolate from available information.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:36 | link | comments (1)

Close encounters of the Third Reich kind: Now playing at the Cairo multiplex and in living rooms across America—stupefying, puke-inducing Judenhass. By Nonie Darwish in FrontPage Magazine:

The anti-Semitism of the Arab news media is a well-documented phenomenon.  Less well known in the West is the extreme hatred of Jews that saturates much of the Arab entertainment world. Consider the Egyptian film, “A Girl from Israel” (“Fataah Min Israeel” in Arabic), which was shown earlier this month on Arab television.  Featuring a cast of Egyptian movie stars, it is one of the vilest and most hateful examples of Arab anti-Semitic propaganda I have ever seen.

A jumble of anti-Semitic tropes, the film revolves around a conspiratorial plotline: A Jewish family vacationing in the Sinai hides the fact that they are Israeli, while at the same time conspiring against Egyptians.  Each of the family members plays their respective sinister role.  Thus, the sexually promiscuous daughter seduces “good” Egyptian young men, while the son rapes the fiancé of an Egyptian.  The father, who is made to look like a pimp, works to further Israel’s interests.

Opposite the Israeli family is an Egyptian family.  Where the Jewish family is constantly scheming against Egyptians, the devout Egyptian family represents all that is good. The Egyptian father and mother are conservative Muslims trying to protect their children from the immoral Jews, who, they claim, are “all liars, untrustworthy and [who] infiltrate good Egyptian families to cause divisions and friction.”

The theme that the Israelis are evil foreigners who do not belong recurs throughout.  The Egyptian parents constantly refer to the Sinai as “our land,” and the mere presence of Israelis in Egypt, even as tourists, is portrayed as a form of invasion or occupation.  When one of the Egyptian girls discovers that her Egyptian boyfriend has befriended the Israeli young man, she confronts the latter. “Are you Israeli?” she demands. When he answers that he is, she shoves him, telling him to “get lost.”  Similarly, the Egyptian mother and father slap their adult children in the face for making friends with Jews.  When an Egyptian businessman attempts to do business with the Israeli father, the outraged Muslim mother voices her disapproval.  Business with Jews, she says, is “treason.”

The Muslim father is particularly disgusted by the Israelis.  In the film’s most dramatic scene, for instance, the Egyptian family discovers the true origins of the Israelis.  As a sinister, “Jaws”-like theme plays, the Egyptian father washes his hands in the bathroom.  Previously, he had shaken hands with one of the Israelis, and he now imagines they are dripping with blood.  On another occasion, the Egyptian father confronts his Israeli counterpart.  “Jews have no honor, are sexually permissive, distrustful, conspirators and want to control us,” he says.

In keeping with the film’s theme that Jews are not to be trusted, the Israeli father is shown trying to shake hands with Egyptians, while talking about peace and the normalization of relations.  The Egyptians, however, regard him with utter disgust, rejecting his extended hand. In this way, the Israeli father is understood to be insincere in his quest for peace. In a final act of Jewish treachery, the film ends with the killing of the Egyptian young man, the only character to befriend Jews, at the hands of his Israeli friend! T he message of the movie could not be clearer: Those who befriend and trust Jews end up getting killed by their Jewish friends.

Tasteless as such anti-Jewish propaganda is, it cannot be dismissed as insignificant or unusual.  With even Israeli tourists portrayed as enemies of Arabs and Muslims, it is no wonder that terrorist attacks target Israeli visitors in the Sinai, and that Arab anti-Semitism, aided by today’s technology, is rapidly spreading.  Equally worrisome is that such anti-Semitic fare is now offered, through Arab satellite channels, right here in America…

Luckily for the hate-mongers, the Judenhass is only available via satellite, and is thus out of the FCC’s jurisdiction.

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:38 | link | comments (1)

History bites: There was a story making the rounds some weeks ago that schools in the U.K. were dropping the Holocaust from the curriculum for fear of offending certain students who had been taught at home that A) Holocaust stats have been drastically overstated so that the Jews could set up their illegitimate colonialist entity on Arab land; and that B) Jews aren't so much human as they are porcine and simian—it says so in the Koran. Well, you can’t imagine the outrage that the story occasioned, as various Brits (including a number of Jewish ones) insisted that the Holocaust was still very much on the agenda, and that it was an insult to the British educational system and to Her Majesty’s scepter’d realm to suggest otherwise.

 Mark Steyn, always a welcome voice of reason, offers some much needed perspective on the matter. From The Western Standard:

…Over in London the other day, there was an interesting story in The Mail On Sunday, which began as follows:

"Schools are dropping controversial subjects from history lessons--such as the Holocaust and the Crusades--because teachers do not want to cause offence, Government research has found . . . Some teachers have even dropped the Holocaust completely from lessons over fears that Muslim pupils might express anti-Semitic reactions in class."

Indeed. This was from a study for the Department of Education, which reported: "Teachers and schools avoid emotive and controversial history for a variety of reasons, some of which are well-intentioned. Staff may wish to avoid causing offence or appearing insensitive to individuals or groups in their classes. In particular settings, teachers of history are unwilling to challenge highly contentious or charged versions of history in which pupils are steeped at home, in their community or in a place of worship."

I felt vaguely I'd read this story before, and I had: different country, same discreet closing of the door on awkward corners of the past. In the Netherlands, schoolteachers are reluctant to discuss the Second World War because "in particular settings" pupils don't believe the Holocaust happened, and, if it did, the Germans should have finished the job and we wouldn't have all these problems today.

When these stories crop up in the papers, official spokespersons rush to reassure us that no formal official decision has been made. The Holocaust remains on the national curriculum, no plans to change anything, nothing to worry about. It's just isolated schools here and there where it's become a subject more honoured in the breach, and only in the interests of "avoiding causing offence." Which, let's face it, is what most of us want to do, because if you're "causing offence" it can get pretty exhausting. In the Middle East, for example, I'm like those British and European schoolma'ams: on the whole, I avoid bringing up the Holocaust--in part because in the Muslim world it's a subject impervious to reason, but also because it's very disheartening to meet folks who are bright, witty, engaging, perceptive and then 40 minutes into the conversation you mention the Jews and discover that your bright, witty, engaging, et cetera companion is, at a certain level, nuts.

That's the problem a lot of European teachers are facing. If a large percentage of your class has a blind spot, it's easiest just to move on to something else. Hizb ut-Tahrir, a prominent voice among European Muslims, tells its adherents that "the Jews are a people of slander . . . a treacherous people" and that Islam commands believers to "kill them wherever you find them." Last year, a poll found that 37 per cent of British Muslims agreed that British Jews are a legitimate target "as part of the ongoing struggle for justice in the Middle East." Who wants to argue with that every time you mention the Second World War? Best just to drop the subject…

A “European” problem? If only. As Muslim critical mass builds on this side of the pond—see my first post of the day—the truth is likely to become more of a “problem” here too.

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:07 | link | comments

Taking the fall: Pakistan’s Minister of Tourism has been forced to resign because of what wrathful clerics viewed as a grievous religious impropriety. From the Times Online:

The Pakistani Tourism Minister resigned yesterday after hardline Islamic clerics accused her of obscenity for hugging her instructor after a charity parachute jump.

Nilofer Bakhtiar was photographed in brightly coloured jumpsuit and hugging her instructor after a tandem jump to raise money for child victims of the earthquake that struck Pakistan in October 2005.

The images provoked the wrath of clerics in Islamabad, who accused Ms Bakhtiar of posing in an obscene manner and violating the Islamic moral norms.

A religious court set up by the clerics at a radical mosque in Islamabad issued a fatwa, or religious edict, against Ms Bakhtiar when the photographs appeared in local newspapers last month. They urged the Government to punish her and dismiss her from the Cabinet. Ms Bakhtiar failed to win the support of Cabinet colleagues and the Government appeared to cave in to the demands of the militants.

As she announced her intention to resign yesterday, Ms Bakhtiar complained of a campaign of intimidation against her. This month she was sacked as head of the women’s wing of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League.

Ms Bakhtiar denounced the fatwa against her, saying that it had no legal, religious or moral authority. The photographs showed her being congratulated for making the jump at a charity event in France and that the allegations of immoral behaviour were baseless, she said. She had no regrets and would do it again happily if it helped the people of Pakistan…

With wrathful clerics calling the shots, the people of Pakistan may be beyond help.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:36 | link | comments

 He is heavy, he’s my brother: Ralph Peters has a must-read column on the Palestinians’ “slow suicide” and how it has been facilitated by other Arabs. From the New York Post:

May 22, 2007 -- TERROR in Tripoli. Havoc in Gaza. Palestinians assassinating the innocent and blaming it on their own victimization.

Sounds a lot like 1982. Except that yesteryear's political hit-men are now fanatics. And the Palestinians have blown yet another chance - to the relief of their fellow Arabs.

No Arab potentate wants the Palestinians to build a successful, rule-of-law state that co-exists with Israel. Nor does a single Arab ruler like democracy in Lebanon.

The Lebanese army's siege of the Nahr el-Bared refugee camp in Tripoli is an act of desperation. Forced to accept the autonomy of Palestinian bastions on Lebanese soil, a succession of Beirut governments has had to watch the growth of Islamist radicalism as rich Arab states played up the Palestinian cause - and ignored flesh-and-blood Palestinians.

The camp under fire (by the way, the shelling isn't indiscriminate - the Lebanese gunners just aren't very good shots) has 32,000 registered residents. The real number may be closer to 50,000, all crammed in a ghetto where poverty reigns and ignorance rules - exactly the kind of situation in which Saudis, Syrians and Gulf Arabs like to keep Palestinians.

The destitute camp - really, an urban slum - would seem to be a perfect recruiting ground for fanatics. Yet most of the local refugees, who have lived in Lebanon for a full generation, are siding with the Lebanese government. They don't like being shelled, but they want the terrorists gone. For their part, the terrorists hope the fighting will spread to other camps.

And who are these terrorists whose actions brought the Lebanese army down on their heads?

Fatah al-Islam is one of those countless splinter groups right out of Monty Python's "Life of Brian" - except for its murderous bent. Aligned with al Qaeda and backed by Syria, its immediate mission is to make Lebanon ungovernable.

So the bodies pile up as the buildings burn.

Meanwhile, the Palestinian try at self-government in Gaza is an even greater shambles. When Israel withdrew its forces in 2005, Palestinian leaders had an unprecedented chance to prove that they could govern competently. With aid in the pipeline (from the West, of course) and goodwill abounding, they could have given the people they ruled a chance.

Instead, they gave them anarchy, economic collapse, rampant criminality, a return to "honor killings" and a society broken by blood feuds and internecine hatred.

Last week, the Gaza fighting spun out of control, and Fatah forces, whose leadership now quietly leans on Israel for support, proved tougher than the Hamas thugs expected. With newly trained security-forces in play, Fatah threatened to seize the local initiative.

Hamas responded by launching waves of missiles against civilian targets in Israel. By week's end, the Hamas barbarism had become intolerable. Israel responded by killing dozens of Hamas terrorists - including senior figures - with stand-off weaponry.

The result? A fragile truce to which Fatah had to agree in the name of Palestinian solidarity. But the Pal-on-Pal fighting will resume soon enough. After winning the last election, Hamas outed itself as a pure-terrorist organization obsessed with killing Israelis and grabbing power for itself - not a party dedicated to improving the lives of the people.

Average Palestinians would like to get on with the shabby lives left to them. And some are staging a quiet rebellion against Hamas: A significant number of the targets Israel struck over the past several days were identified via Palestinian tip-offs.

Arab societies have a genius for self-destruction (look at Iraq), but President Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah party may prove readier to deal sensibly with Israel than any Palestinian faction in the past. Abbas recognizes that, today, the greatest danger comes from within, not from Tel Aviv or Jerusalem…

Ironically, one of the greatest dangers to the Jewish state comes from within, too. (The other great danger, as we know, emanates from outside its borders.) But Peters strays off course when he suggests that the "secular" Abbas is capable of "sensible" dealings with Israel. Oh, he may be perfectly capable of masking his true intentions--something which, give credit where it's due, Hamas refuses to do--but he is every bit as devoted to Israel's disappearance as his former boss was.

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

No mouse in the house:

Palestinian parents who were depending on Farfur Mouse to entertain their children in his own inimitable manner are going to be disappointed today. According to Carl in Jerusalem, Farfur is off the air for now.

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

Lies, damned lies, and damned lying statistics: I was fascinated to learn, courtesy the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada (I can’t help it—that name always elicits a chuckle), that history has been blackened by many Muslim “holocausts.” For instance, did you know that “More than 5 million Muslims have been killed/displaced in Palestine since 1948?”

Wow. That’s less than one million shy of the 6 million Jews who were murdered during Europe’s Holocaust. Or so they say…

 

I’m not sure how the Supremes arrived at this figure; nor is it clear what portion of the 5 million were “killed” and what portion “displaced.” Not that, for the purposes of this list, it really matters.

 

For obvious reasons the list fails to include the “holocausts” perpetrated by Muslims against Muslims (or by Muslims against infidels). But I guess were those “holocausts” included, the fatalities from the listed “holocausts” would seem far less impressive.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:09 | link | comments

Big old mosque near the Prairie: Calgary, the Texas of Canada, home of oil, Tories and an annual rodeo known as the Stampede, is also home to a sizeable Muslim community—65,000 and counting. As Globe and Mail Colin Freeze scribe reports, the community is “surprisingly large and united.” At the same time, though, there seem to be perturbing divisions between young’uns, some of whom are eager to take their devotion that extra step by waging violent jihad against the infidel, and their elders, who are still hoping that their cooler heads (and interpretation of Islamic doctrine) will prevail. Unfortunately, a Calgary physician was unable to dissuade his son, a “computer whiz” named Sohail Qureshi, from rushing off to find adventure overseas. The son now sits in Kabul jail, accused of plotting to deploy a human bomb in Afghanistan. (It’s unclear from the article whether he was hoping to be the bomb or whether he was using his technological acumen to equip other shahids):

…Calgary remains a place where you could paint a two-by-four Tory blue and it would win a seat if put up for election, quips Nagah Hage, the chairman of the MCC [Muslim Council of Calgary]. But the Lebanese grocer, a former Liberal candidate, says consensus among Muslims is much tougher to build.

He works at it on a daily basis. He's been at it for more than 25 years.

And that, not Mr. Qureshi, is the real story about the Calgary Islamic community, the grocer says. Muslims from all corners of the world pray together, he says, just as he sells his halal meat to everyone from pakool-capped Afghans to the snazzily dressed sons of Pakistani diplomats.

His council guides much of what's said and what's taught in the city. In other cities, each imam can be an island inside his own mosque. Yet the MCC has hired five full-time imams, and vets applicants for suitable education and disposition. One, Sheik Alaa Elsayed, a young preacher was recently brought in from Ontario, partly for his knack of working with the youth.

Last year, after the arrests of 18 young Muslims in Toronto, the plainspoken Mr. Elsayed said Muslims must address the problem of extremism. "We have no choice," he told a reporter. "We must put forward a game plan and educate our youth, so they do not fall into brainwashing."

But months after saying that he found out just how hard it can be. A few months ago, a man called him, beseeching him for help in turning around a son who was announcing plans to fight the jihad in Afghanistan.

Mr. Elsayed arranged a meeting with the family, counselling the young man that the Koran prohibited the plan - and even phoned the police. Yet today, he fears, none of this dissuaded a youth "brainwashed" by the Internet.

The imam has never named names, but there is no longer any doubt he is talking about Mr. Qureshi. The shadow cast by the detainee made many headlines last week, at least until the MCC asked Muslims to stop talking about Mr. Qureshi to the press…

The great irony of this article is that it largely aims to show how benign and multicultural it is to have a large, unassimilated community in one’s midst. Instead, it demonstrates that this community is no better equipped than any other Muslim community in North America to handle the truth about its excitable young people, and the true source of their “brainwashing.” Young people like “Muslim student activist Dina Dabash,” who thinks far too much of a fuss is being made about “youth extremism” which, according to her, “must be taken with a grain of salt.”

 

Sorry, Ms. Dabash. Somehow I don’t think that’ll do the trick.

 

Ms. Dabash herself seems to have consumed copious amounts of sodium, as when she praises a recent conference sponsored by Muslim Students Associations:

Ms. Dabash argues that a lot of good is done by Muslim Students Associations, like the one she presides over at college. The MSAs keep students out of the bars. Members can compare notes on how they're dealing with their parents.

The posters she made for the recent weekend conference had a radical chic quality to them - showing a silhouetted youth in hip-hop clothes, under the banner "Muslim Youth: Dealers of Islam." They created some buzz about the event.

"We're sort of the dealers of Islam, right? We're the ones that spread the message, talk about it. It puts the idea in people's heads," said Ms. Dabash.

The conference had some glitches. There was one guest she had to un-invite.

Upon reflection, she found it prudent to ask writer Yamin Zakaria, who lives in Mumbai, not to come to Calgary. His tracts - with titles like Seven Good Reasons to Nuke the United States - are controversial.

Critics argue the writer treads too closely to endorsing terrorism. Ms. Dabash say the provocative writings amount to satirical takes on issues like the folly of U.S.-led pre-emptive war. Still, she concedes, the writer's arrival in Canada could have caused "a big fuss" if border guards read the titles of the essays too literally…

Yeah, it’s always a concern when infidels take things literally and read too much into tracts like Seven Good Reasons to Nuke the United States. I’m sure the Mumbai-based jihadist, er, author, was just joshing.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:24 | link | comments

It's the jihad, Dad: Strife in Gaza; strife in Lebanon—someone in the media finally connects the dots. From the New York Sun:

…The alleged bandits are tied to the Syrian-backed Palestinian terrorist group Fatah al-Islam, which distinguishes itself among the Palestinian factions by its declared adherence to al Qaeda. In retaliation, Fatah al-Islam members opened fire on a Lebanese army patrol killing four additional soldiers. By the end of the weekend, the toll had risen to 48 dead, including 23 soldiers and 19 terrorists.

The terrorist group was already on the Lebanese army's radar screen following a pair of bus bombings last February that targeted Christians. The flare-up of violence in Lebanon came only a few days after the latest discussion in the United Nations Security Council on a resolution to forge ahead with a judicial tribunal to try suspects in the assassination of the former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri. The tribunal is opposed by Damascus, because the preliminary investigations point to top level Syrian involvement.

The Lebanese strife, however, is also part of a wider struggle against the Iran-Syria-Hezbollah axis on the one hand and against Sunni extremism on the other. Down the coast in the Gaza Strip, other Palestinian Sunni extremists, organized under the Hamas banner, have been firing rockets into Israeli towns and cities and battling Fatah forces loyal to the president of the Palestinian Arab authority, Mahmoud Abbas. The government in Jerusalem, after months of restraint, finally gave a green light to the air force to pound Hamas positions, including but not limited to rocket sites. Ground forces also crossed over into northern Gaza to help pinpoint targets…

Posted by: scaramouche at 16:51 | link | comments

Malicious “militias”: