Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Copyright © 2006 Republican-American

Ask the average Joe where he thinks most of America's hate crimes occur, and he's apt to guess Mississippi, Alabama or another state stereotypically overrun with redneck lynch mobs. He would dismiss as preposterous the idea that such enlightened, diverse states such as New Jersey, Michigan, Minnesota and Connecticut are bastions of bigots.

Out of the 19 states and the District of Columbia that voted for John Kerry for president in 2004, 15 were among the top 25 in hate crimes. All six New England states landed in the top 25, with Massachusetts leading the way at No. 6; Connecticut was 21st with a rate 23 times higher than Alabama's and Mississippi's.

If there is a silver lining in these statistics, it's this: The FBI logged 7,649 hate crimes in 2004, which represent one-half of 1 percent of all violent crimes and a meaninglessly small percentage of all crimes that year. More than twice as many Americans were victims of homicides than bias crimes. Though the liberals and the mainstream news media want the public to believe hate crimes are epidemic in this country, the statistics refute that notion even as they reveal where America's real bigots live.

Interesting article.

The Waterbury Connecticut Republican-American

By Ed Oswald, BetaNews

August 30, 2006, 5:03 PM

By Burak Akinci

ANKARA: An attack by Islamists on a young Turkish woman wearing a bikini on a beach has reopened the question of the direction that the country, overwhelmingly Muslim but traditionally secular, is now taking.

The incident happened earlier this month at the resort of Karaburun, near Izmir in the west of the country, the most Europeanized part.

The young woman had asked a group of headscarf-wearing women and their families not to soil the beach with the used diapers of their children, only to be called a prostitute because she was wearing a bikini. She was then attacked by the men in the group.

The affair might have been dismissed in a couple of paragraphs in the local press but the woman filed a complaint. Furthermore she is the daughter of a journalist on the mass-circulation Hurriyet newspaper which picked up the story and attacked the departure from secular, non-religious principles.

The attack became big news in a country where since the Justice and Development party (AKP), which has Islamist roots, came to power in 2002.

The powerful secular lobby, which includes the armed forces, has repeatedly condemned what it sees as the galloping Islamization of the country.

Luxury hotels have opened on the coast, which apply strict Islamist rules, offering guests, for example, beaches and swimming pools segregated by sex.

Sales of hasema swimming costumes that cover religiously observant women from head to toe and include a head covering are booming.

 The Religion of Peace^TM

The Manila Times 

PARKSVILLE, British Columbia (AP) -- If you're interested in a three-hour tour, George Schultz has just the boat for you.

For $99,000 Canadian (US$89,400), you can buy the boat famous for setting aground on an uncharted desert isle to set the stage for the 1960s television classic "Gilligan's Island."

The S.S. Minnow supposedly off for a three-hour tour when, as the theme song explained, "The weather started getting rough, the tiny ship was tossed. If not for the courage of the fearless crew, the Minnow would be lost."

The real-life Minnow also ran aground.

The twin-diesel, 36-foot (11-meter) mahogany Wheeler Express Cruiser hit a reef in Hecate Strait as the former owner was taking the vessel down the coast from Alaska. Scotty Taylor of Parksville said the owner sold the 46-year-old boat to him for salvage on condition that he promise to restore it.

Schultz, a boat broker, estimated Sunday that the work cost more than $180,000.

Kind of like the old definition of a boat as a hole in the water into which to pour money?

"You better believe it!" Schultz said with a laugh.

Taylor is selling the storied vessel because he is tired of it.

"He's going on 70 now and doesn't want to bother with it anymore," Schultz said. "It would make a great investment for a three-hour tour."

According to the Gilligan's Island Web site (www.gilligansisle.com), the boat is the third of four vessels used in the show. Taylor's Minnow was used in the opening credits of the second season.

Caliphate News Network 

MARK STEYN

There are a few differences  though. 

First .. this is the age of (argggghhhhhhhh!!!!!)&nbs p; GLOBAL WARMING!  Now never mind the evidence.  The anti-capitalist environmental moonbats have decided that we have caused significant global warming ... and that the global warming is caused by Americans driving SUVs. 

Secondly ... we have Katrina.  Watch the TV newscasts and weathercasts very carefully.  Everyone seems to have received the memo.  We are at the one-year anniversary of Katrina, and Katrina must be mentioned in all stories dealing with Ernesto.  It matters not that Ernesto looks like a weakling ... with every newscast you have to somehow make people believe that they are going to see another disaster of the Katrina scale. 

Remember ... all of the broadcast and cable news networks have positioned very expensive satellite trucks throughout the Florida Keys.  They're paying big bucks to get their reporters down there so that non-stop images can fill your TV as the storm approaches.  Remember, this is all about images --- and these images are expensive. 

How do they pay for this expensive equipment and these high-priced personnel?  With advertising, of course!  And the more people they have watching, the higher the ratings.  The higher the ratings, the more they can charge for the advertising.  So the game here is to make sure you keep glued to the TV screens.  To do this they will spend the next day or so trying to scare the absolute goose squeeze out of you until (1) Ernesto actually turns into a threat and they can report the news as it is instead of how they want it to be; or, (2) Ernesto fizzles and goes away.

Now .. it's not only the media that's in full-blown panic mode.  Count government in also.  Florida has declared a state of emergency.   Ernesto is only a tropical storm, and Jeb Bush is declaring a state of emergency.  In 2004 Florida had four separate hurricanes.  Not once was a state of emergency declared for any of those storms when they still categorized as tropical storms and the winds were only 50 miles per hour.  Hell ... why don't we just keep Florida in a continuous state of emergency?  After all, almost any thunderstorm -- and Florida has more of them than any other state -- can put out 50 mph winds.

Now ... for all you hurricane junkies out there, here's an excellent site with more information than you really need!

Nealz Nuze 

How the Media Legitimized an Anti-Israel Hoax and Changed the Course of a War

+ Introduction

On the night of July 23, 2006, an Israeli aircraft intentionally fired missiles at and struck two Lebanese Red Cross ambulances performing rescue operations, causing huge explosions that injured everyone inside the vehicles. Or so says the global media, including Time magazine, the BBC, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and thousands of other outlets around the world. If true, the incident would have been an egregious and indefensible violation of the Geneva Convention, and would constitute a war crime committed by the state of Israel.

But there's one problem: It never happened. 

Of all the exposés and scandals surrounding the media's coverage of the Israel-Hezbollah conflict in Lebanon, The Red Cross Ambulance Incident stands out as the most serious. The other exposés were spectacular in their simplicity (photographers staging scenes, clumsy attempts at Photoshopping images), but often concerned fairly trivial details. What does it matter whether there was a big cloud of smoke over Beirut, or a really big cloud of smoke, as one notorious doctored photograph showed? The fact that the media was lying was indeed extremely important, and justified the publicity surrounding the exposés -- but what they were lying about was often minor, a slight fudging of the visuals to exaggerate the damage.

The ambulance incident, however, was anything but trivial. The media accused Israel of the most heinous type of war crime: intentionally targeting neutral ambulances which were attempting to rescue innocent victims. If true -- and it is almost universally accepted as true -- then Israel would lose any claim to moral superiority in the conflict. The commanders who ordered the strike should be brought up on war-crimes charges. As it is, the worldwide outcry over Israel's purported malfeasances grew so strident that the country was pressured into a ceasefire. The media's depictions of Israel's actions so influenced public opinion that Israel felt compelled to end the fighting right at the moment it was starting to gain the upper hand. And as a result, Hezbollah has now claimed victory.

The Red Cross Ambulance Incident was perhaps the most damning of all the evidence against Israel, and the most morally indefensible. Other incidents were open to debate: in those cases where Israel bombed buildings that turned out to have civilians inside, Israel claimed either that it didn't know the building was occupied, or that it was trying to hit a Hezbollah stronghold elsewhere in the same building; or that the strike was a mistake, an errant missile. But targeting clearly marked ambulances, and hitting them directly -- there's no possible excuse for that. So this specific incident contributed to the outrage over the war, eventually causing Israel to stand down.

Which makes it all the more shocking to learn that the attack on the ambulances most likely never occurred, and that the "evidence" supporting the claim is in fact a hoax. 

Excellent work by Zombie.  I encourage you to go read it, and judge for yourself.

Zombietime

(2006-08-23) — The latest poll of al Qaeda members worldwide shows that 91 percent see no link between the global fight against Islamic terrorists and the ongoing U.S. effort to establish a free and democratic Iraq.

The results follow release of a New York Times/CBS News poll showing 51 percent of Americans also fail to see the connection.

“The al Qaeda public is simply not buying President Bush’s argument that a free Iraq will make the world more secure by denying safe-haven to terrorists,” said an unnamed spokesman for al-Razmuhsan, the polling division of al-Jazeera. “Our survey shows that the average al Qaeda man on the street is much like the average American. He has no fear that Islamic fascists plan to use Iraq as a base from which to fight their jihad to establish a global Muslim caliphate.”

In other results that parallel U.S. public opinion, the poll shows that the overwhelming majority of al Qaeda members think that “planting the seeds of democracy in the Arab world” is not worth the cost in American lives and money, and most believe that a hasty retreat of American forces will not embolden the terrorists.

The al-Razmuhsan poll was conducted over the past three weeks in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Iraq, Indonesia, Great Britain, Russia, France and the U.S., by contacting al Qaeda cell leaders via satellite phone or donkey courier.

Link 

Group says it's trying to spread awareness; others call journey insulting.

By Jeremy Schwartz
MEXICO CITY BUREAU

Wednesday, August 23, 2006

IXMIQUILPAN, Hidalgo — On a misty, moonless night, the group scurried down the canyon wall, their feet slipping in the ankle-high mud. The sirens grew louder as their guide, clad in a ski mask and known only as Poncho, urged them to run faster. "Hurry up! The Border Patrol is coming!"

A couple in matching designer tennis outfits loped awkwardly along, the boyfriend clutching a digital video camera and struggling to keep the pop-out screen steady.

The 20 or so people fleeing the fictional Border Patrol weren't undocumented immigrants; they were tourists about 700 miles from the border. Most are well-heeled professionals more likely to travel to the United States in an airplane than on foot.

They've each paid 150 pesos — about $15 — for what is perhaps Mexico's strangest tourist attraction: a night as an illegal immigrant crossing the Rio Grande.

Advertising for the mock journey, which takes place at a nature park in the central state of Hidalgo, tells the pretend [illegal -ed.] immigrants to "Make fun of the Border Patrol!" and to "Cross the Border as an Extreme Sport!"

As craven as the advertising sounds, the organizers say they are trying to build empathy for [illegal -ed.] migrants(sic) by putting people in their shoes.

And the organizers, members of a Hnahnu (pronounced nyah-nyoo) indigenous community, speak from experience. Leaders estimate that as many as 90 percent of the 2,500-person community have made the journey to the United States, most ending up in Las Vegas. [Illegally? -ed.]

"We do this to show the people what it's like, to make them more conscious," said Hnahnu elder Luis Santiago Hernandez, who has crossed the genuine border more than five times.

Hernandez said that although they try to make the experience authentic, "It's not even 10 percent of the real thing."

The trip also seeks to educate participants on Hnahnu culture and represents a source of income for the community, leaders said. The Mexican government helped finance the creation of the Eco Alberto nature park, which is communally owned.

Participants in the mock [illegal -ed.] border crossing said they were lured by the realistic experience promised by the nearly six-hour nocturnal walk.

"It was like being in their flesh and bones," said Oswaldo Martinez, a 31-year-old computer security technician from Cuernavaca.

"It was cool; it was very fun," said his friend Mauricio Palacios, 30. "I never imagined it would be like that."

Until almost 2 a.m., the group scaled walls, hid in tunnels, jumped into pickups and followed a path through a cornfield. The trip ended with a blindfolded ride to a Hnahnu holy place where Poncho, whose real name is Alfonso Martinez Flores, asked the group to be more honest and sincere in their lives.

Word of the tourist attraction has provoked much head-scratching among real [illegal -ed.] immigrants and advocates in the United States.

Some called the risk-free adrenaline rush insulting. Others said it could improve the often-conflicted attitudes of Mexicans toward their compatriots who [illegally -ed.] migrate.

The Austin American-Statesman 

Simply Astounding.  What's next?  A mock drug gang war?

By Brenda Strohmaier

Who planted the bombs on German trains? Depends who you ask. Many Muslims in Germany think it's a government conspiracy. Just like with Sept. 11. And London....

This just in: The Lebanese men suspected of having deposited bombs on German trains last month were hired hands -- in the employ of the German government itself.

That, at least, is what one 27-year-old from Saudi Arabia believes. "It's all a Protestant crusade," the man explains. "All of northern Germany is Protestant, isn't it? And so is President Bush." Then the man launches into a melange of confusing arguments and historical facts. The bubonic plague, Martin Luther and former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl all make a cameo. It's all connected somehow, the man is sure of it.

The young Saudi Arabian's views may make little sense from a Western point of view, but you can meet him and talk to him at a street corner in the middle of Hamburg, right by the central station. Foreigners from all over the world live in this neighborhood, called St. Georg, and a large number of them are Muslim. Several mosques have been built in the neighborhood. Many nearby stores carry no alcohol -- but they do have electronic memory aides for Koran students on offer.

And then there are the conspiracy theories. They are everywhere -- dozens of them -- including some to explain away Germany's recent terror scare. The others -- some mutually contradictory -- have pat explanations for what's really going on in the world.

The Saudi Arabian's crusade theory is being hotly debated on Steindamm, one of the main streets in the neighborhood. "It's not about religion, it's about money," says an Algerian wearing a Lacoste shirt. A man from Tunisia immediately agrees and asks, "Why else have German soldiers been sent to Congo?"

In their struggle for money and oil, Western states will use whatever means they can, according to the theory. That the USA knew about the September 11, 2001 attacks before they happened but chose not to prevent them is a widespread view. "We think the United States needed those attacks so they could start the Iraq war," explains Mahran Abdulwahab, a Lebanese graphic designer with a Hamburg accent.

OOOOOOKKKKK.....

Spiegel Online

Police end funeral striptease acts

STRIPTEASE send-offs at funerals may become a thing of the past in east China after five people were arrested for organising the intimate farewells, state media reported.

Police swooped last week after two groups of strippers gave “obscene performances” at a farmer's funeral in Donghai County, Jiangsu province, Xinhua news agency said.

The disrobing served a higher purpose, the report noted.

“Striptease used to be a common practice at funerals in Donghai's rural areas to allure viewers,” it said.

“Local villagers believe that the more people who attend the funeral, the more the dead person is honoured”.

Wealthy families often employed two troupes of performers to attract a crowd. Two hundred showed up at last week's funeral.

Five strippers were detained and local officials “issued notices concerning funeral management”, Xinhua said.

Now, village officials must submit plans for funerals within 12 hours after a villager dies. And residents can report “funeral misdeeds” on a hotline, the report said.

Ahem.  Well, that will certainly increase attendance at your funeral...

The Australian 

By Michael Georgy

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Cursing Saddam Hussein, a Kurdish woman told the former Iraqi leader's genocide trial on Wednesday she was horribly burned after aircraft bombed her mountain village with chemical weapons.

"I lost my sight. My children lost their sight ... My house was razed to the ground. May God blind them all," said Adiba Owla Bayez, pointing at the former Iraqi president and his six co-defendants on the third day of the trial.

Describing a spring evening in 1987, the 45-year-old mother of five said aircraft dropped bombs behind her house and she had immediately noticed a difference from previous attacks.

"We smelt a peculiar smell. It was rotten apple ... My daughter Nargis said she had pain in the stomach and in her eyes. She was vomiting. All my children were vomiting. I too felt like that and started vomiting," Bayez said.

The testimony was similar to the recollections of other witnesses to the events of April 16, 1987, nearly a year before the formal launch of the Anfal -- Spoils of War -- campaign in the Balisan valley, north of Sulaimaniya.

Bayez, the wife of the trial's first witness, Ali Mustafa Hama, said she suffered two miscarriages and had an infant die at the age of three months following the attack.

Saddam and his cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid, are charged with genocide over the seven-month operation. Majid earned his nickname "Chemical Ali" after poison gas attacks in the north.

...Bayez said that once the bombardment ceased, a helicopter hunted the villagers as they fled into the mountains. Those that escaped took refuge in caves.

"We were wounded, sick, but still fled. By now I was vomiting blood. My children were blind. My skin on the body had peeled off," she told the court, speaking Kurdish and wearing traditional black dress.

Saddam's soldiers soon rounded them up, shipping them to Arbil, where they were held with no medical treatment until being moved again, she said.

"After nine days guards said 'all the wounded come to the courtyard of the detention center'. I was screaming as my leg was burned. I was unable to walk. My skin was peeled off, my children ... their skin was peeled," she said.

After photographing the captured Kurds, the men were separated and led away and the women and children were transported back to the countryside, where they were dumped.

Al-Reuters 

There is poor reasoning, and then there is head-spinningly, jaw-droppingly poor reasoning. U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor's angry 44-page ruling against NSA terrorism surveillance is the latter, and constitutes little more than a political stunt, with ever-so-helpful declarations like "There are no hereditary Kings in America and no powers not created by the Constitution." The American Civil Liberties Union forum-shopped this lawsuit, handed it to a reliably left-liberal Jimmy Carter appointee in Detroit and got its desired result. It probably didn't count on the extreme intellectual embarrassment of Judge Diggs Taylor's opinion, however, which is now being noted by left and right alike.

The New York Times, of course, could be counted on to call the ruling -- which declares NSA surveillance unconstitutional, sides with the journalist-academic-lawye r plaintiffs who alleged that their rights were being monitored and issues a permanent injunction against the NSA program -- "a careful, thoroughly grounded opinion." But aside from the NYT-ACLU-Democratic Party axis, just about everyone commenting on the legal worth of the opinion acknowledges its exceptional logical poverty.

The Washington Post called the opinion "neither careful nor scholarly" and "long on throat-clearing sound bites." A writer for the hard-left Web site Daily Kos called it "poorly reasoned and totally unhelpful." "[A]n atrocity," wrote the liberal blogger Publius: "[p]remature, unsupported, and in violation of elementary civil procedure." "[T]here's no question that it's a poorly reasoned decision," Wake Forest University national-security law professor Bobby Chesney said. "[A] few pages of general ruminations about the Fourth Amendment (much of it incomplete and some of it simply incorrect)," wrote the legal scholar Orin Kerr. "I wouldn't accept this utterly unsupported, constitutionally and logically bankrupt collection of musings from a first-year law student, much less a new lawyer at my firm," wrote Brian Cunningham, a lawyer who served under both the Clinton and Bush administrations.

The Washington Times 

I always thought the shame of slavery would forever be our low point. That was right up until Jimmy Carter took office in 1977 and again last week when he spewed his hate-filled venom against his country and its president in Der Spiegel magazine. Jimmy, you are a disgrace to our nation.

The byline of the article read: ''Former U.S. president speaks with Der Spiegel about the danger posed to American values by George W. Bush, the difficult situation in the Middle East and Cuba's ailing Fidel Castro.'' Carter should have been front and center condemning such a headline. In any other time, with any other president, this would have been unheard of, but not from the new voices coming from the Bush-haters in the Democratic Party. Al Gore does it. Howard Dean does it. Maxine Waters does it. But that doesn't make it right. Jimmy Carter has allowed partisan attacks to escalate to dangerous levels.

So, I thought a stroll down memory lane would be appropriate. In the mid-1970s, Jimmy Carter, a fine peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia, ran for the highest office in the land and won. Congratulations Jimmy. Jimmy Carter appeared not to be your garden-variety politician and the country welcomed his down-home country approach. Within a year however, the welcome wore off. Carter's legacy is now inextricably linked to the ''Misery Index.'' No president in the history of the country had a Misery Index as high as Jimmy Carter's. Carter had an average Index of 16.27 percent during his term (1977-80). When he finally left Washington in 1980 is was at an all-time high of 21.98 percent. Not a record I would be proud of if I were you Jimmy.

Of course, who could forget the 444 days America was held hostage by Iran? The now-famous program, ABC's Nightline, was birthed to cover the day-to-day events. Each night we would watch the news, counting the days our captured Americans were being held by radical Islamic terrorists while President Jimmy Carter sat by powerless and did nothing. The appeaser didn't want to upset the Ayatollah Khomeini. The leader of the free world had been reduced to a thumb-sucking peacenik by a gang of 7th-century hoodlums.

Suffice it to say, the Carter years were very bad for our nation. 16 percent inflation, 22 percent interest rates, and 70 percent marginal tax rates did little to endear Jimmy to the hard working people he claims to now protect against George W. Bush. Today, under Bush, we have 2.7 percent core inflation rates, historically low interest rates and 35 percent marginal tax rates. Looks like Jimmy is jealous.

I have to stop myself from going any further, for if Carter's own words are not enough to show his stupidity and hatred for our country and the president then nothing will. Jimmy Carter has done more than any single president to hurt this nation, not only while in office, but even more so since he was booted from office in complete humiliation. The American people rejected him and his insane policies. We in America couldn't get rid of this guy quick enough. His anger toward the country and its current leader is no surprise given how soundly he was rejected. He needs therapy to heal, not worldwide attention.

Carter is the first former president I can think of who has openly attacked a sitting president. Carter should thank his lucky stars Nixon, Ford and Reagan were men of character, for if they operated like Carter and Gore he would have been under an attack that would have made his head spin. And he would have actually deserved it.

World Net Daily 

Feds show CAIR latest screening steps,
sensitive counterterrorism procedures

© 2006 Wor ldNetDaily.com

The Department of Homeland Security took a Muslim group with known past ties to terror organizations on a VIP tour of security operations at the nation's busiest airport at the same time British authorities were working to break up a plot to blow up U.S. airlines.

On June 21, a senior DHS official from Washington personally guided Muslim officials from the Council on American-Islamic Relations on a behind-the-scenes tour of Customs screening operations at O'Hare International Airport in response to CAIR complaints that Muslim travelers were being unfairly delayed as they entered the U.S. from abroad.

CAIR is a spin-off of the Islamic Association for Palestine, identified by two former FBI counterterrorism chiefs as a "front group" for the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. Several CAIR leaders have been convicted on terror-related charges.

During the airport tour, CAIR was taken on a walk through the point-of-entry, Customs stations, secondary screening and interview rooms. In addition, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agents were asked to describe for CAIR representatives various features of the high-risk passenger lookout system.

In a meeting, Brian Humphrey, Customs and Border Patrol's executive director of field operations, assured CAIR officials that agents do not single out Muslim passengers for special screening and that they must undergo a mandatory course in Muslim sensitivity training. The course teaches agents that Muslims believe jihad is an "internal struggle against sin" and not holy warfare.

Customs agents involved in the CAIR tour at O'Hare tell WorldNetDaily they were outraged that headquarters would reveal sensitive counterterrorism procedures to an organization that has seen several of its own officials convicted of terror-related charges since 9-11.

"Isn't that nice of CBP," one agent said, to provide a "group like CAIR with a guided, behind-the-scenes tour of our customs facilities, explaining how programs designed to catch Muslim terrorists work."

CAIR says the tour allayed its concerns about profiling and that it "looks forward to continuing the relationship with U.S. Customs and Border Protection offices in the region, and to furthering understanding between the organizations as well as facilitating future communication in order to eliminate problems for Muslim travelers before they even arise."

The Muslim-sensitivity training course at O'Hare is taught by Margaret Nydell, an Arabic professor at Georgetown University, home to a large Saudi-financed center on Islamic studies.

A Customs and Border Protection supervisor described Nydell's instruction, along with CBP's companion training manual and video, as "politically correct drivel."

"It's all about how Islam means peace and tolerance," he told WorldNetDaily. "We're told how to deal with Arabs and Muslims, that they are loving people and not terrorists. That jihad is struggle with sin and has nothing to do with violence."

The Department of Homeland Security invites CAIR itself to conduct sensitivity training for Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and supervisors (CBP's counterparts) in Chicago. The course is taught by local CAIR officials Christina Abraham and Mariyam Hussain. More than 30 ICE staffers have gone through the CAIR awareness program so far.

CAIR – which is bankrolled by the Saudis and the United Arab Emirates, two countries that formally recognized the Taliban – also offers religious and cultural sensitivity training about Islam and Muslims to the military. In June, for example, CAIR trained more than 300 military personnel at the Marine Corps Air Station in Yuma, Ariz.

Also in June, CAIR was invited by the Pentagon to a ceremony dedicating the first Islamic center in Marine Corps history at Quantico headquarters outside of Washington.

Washington-based CAIR also has regular meetings with the FBI and Justice Department. In fact, FBI case agents complain the bureau rarely can make a move in the Muslim community without first consulting with CAIR, which sits on its advisory board. CAIR in the past has cried racism and bigotry when the bureau has moved unilaterally with investigations and raids in the community.

Un.  Freaking.  Believeable.

World Net Daily 

Friday, August 18, 2006

Copyright © 2006 Republican-American

Life is about contrasts. Happy and sad. Winners and losers. Pleasure and pain. Without bad days, how will you recognize good days when they come around? But to self-esteem despots, life is a even-steven proposition. Everyone, regardless of talent or temperament, perseverance or personality, is treated equally, even when they manifestly are not.

Homosexuality is illegal in conservative Saudi Arabia, which metes out strict punishments based on sharia, or Islamic law. - Sapa-AFP [Yeah, like death... -ed.]

So, I assume members of ACTUP are winging their way to the Magic Kingdom as we speak?  No?

Via:  IOL 

For half a century, the Cold War and the fight against communism had us in its grip. But despite the persistent threat of nuclear war with the Soviet bloc, the sense of fear wasn't nearly as pervasive and relentless as it is now with the war on terrorism.

Even as children performed "duck and cover" drills at school and the world was catching its breath after the Cuban Missile Crisis, people sat in movie theatres laughing at actor Slim Pickens' character riding the H-bomb down to global destruction in Stanley Kubrick's movie, Dr. Strangelove.

Our enemy today isn't big on comedy, and can be as hypersensitive as an Oprah show audience. Some Danish cartoonists tried to lighten things up, but now they're in hiding and fearing for their lives.

Here are some other reasons the war on terrorism is scarier than the Cold War:

* During the communist threat, we could take comfort in the fact that authorities had a pretty good idea where the communists were: Russia (and Hollywood). In this new war, the threat comes from Muslim extremists. So naturally, our authorities are focused on confiscating prune juice from little old ladies at airport security. That would be great if there was any evidence the Golden Girls were plotting to blow up planes.

* We knew we won the Cold War when Russia's economy collapsed along with the Berlin Wall. Today, we can't measure success because the media only gives us two numbers in the daily play-by-play: Western "military" deaths and Mideastern "civilian" deaths. One has to assume "civilians," includes "terrorist scumbags" because I don't see that team anywhere else on the media scoreboard.

* During the Cold War, you didn't have to take the guy wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt on the subway seriously. The people worth worrying about typically wore uniforms and at least had some sense of decorum. In the terror war, it's tough to distinguish a flake from a threat.

* Consider British terror suspect Donald Stewart-Whyte, a 21-year old Muslim convert described by his ex-girlfriend as someone who "used to smoke 20 a day, usually roll-ups. And he liked a bit of weed and loved drinking Stella." In the Cold War era, brain cells are about the only things a kid like this would have destroyed. Now a Daily Telegraph report describes British universities as prime recruiting grounds for terrorists. I guess being a communist at university isn't original enough anymore.

* U.S. President John F. Kennedy wasn't contemplating the communist threat in Cuba and thinking, "It's hot down there. I wonder if it's hotter in Havana than it was a thousand years ago?" Today's liberals say there's no connection between 9/11 and Iraq, but they have no problem connecting global annihilation to the guy who drives his SUV to work every day. If liberals were in a plane blown up by Muslim radicals, I wonder if their last thought would be, "Oh no! All this burning jet fuel is releasing an excess of aromatic hydrocarbons into the earth's atmosphere!"

Despite all the reasons for white-knuckling this war, for our sanity's sake, we can always make like the erratic driver who was recently pulled over by my police officer friend. Pointing to the steering wheel, he shrugged, "I can't control that thing!" -- then got right back on the road and kept on going.

Via:  The Toronto Sun 

ROME, Aug 16: The killing in Italy of a young Pakistani woman by her own family has shocked Italians and prompted a discussion about integration, just as the government pushes through legislation making it easier for immigrants to obtain citizenship.

The stabbed body of 21-year-old Hina Saleem, whose boyfriend — a 33-year-old divorced and re-married Italian — raised the alarm to police about her disappearance, was discovered on Saturday buried in the garden of the family home at Sarezzo, near the north-eastern city of Brescia.

The killing was “a kind of punishment inflicted by her father because she did not respect the rules of their ethnicity and culture,” Brescia prosecutor Giancarlo Tarquini said at a news conference.

The father and brother-in-law of the young woman were charged with murder and concealing the body, while a third male family member was still being hunted by police on Wednesday.

Investigators are trying to determine whether the murder was premeditated, a hypothesis supported by the fact that the women and children of the family appeared to have been removed from the house before the murder.

The father told police that he killed his daughter because he did not want her to “become like the others.”

He has remained silent since then and his lawyer has described him as an extremely pious man “who respected the Quran to the letter”.

“Hina was very beautiful. She used to wear mini-skirts or show her belly button like all girls of her age, and she spoke Italian very well,” a woman living next door to the flat the young woman shared with her boyfriend told news agency ANSA.

A spokesman for the Brescia Pakistani community, Mohammed Tofi, condemned the murder.—AFP

Via:  Dawn 

Ran across this over at Mambo's blog:

DemocracyNow and AFP [Should have stopped reading right there... -ed]
13th August 2006
AFP Story:

The US government was closely involved in planning Israel's military operations against Lebanon's Hezbollah militia even before the July 12 kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers, a US magazine reported.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh writes in The New Yorker magazine that President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were convinced that a successful Israeli bombing campaign against Hezbollah could ease Israel's security concerns and also serve as a prototype for a potential US preemptive attack to destroy Iran's nuclear installations.

Citing an unnamed Middle East expert [Emphasis mine. Apparently, "journalists" don't need no steekin' credible sources... -ed.] with knowledge of the current thinking of the Israeli and US governments, Hersh said Israel had devised a plan for attacking Hezbollah -- and shared it with Bush administration officials -- well before the July 12 kidnappings.

"When they grabbed the soldiers in early July, that was then a pretext" for Israel's assault on Hezbollah, Hersh said Sunday on CNN television.

Generally, liberal rants posing as new stories don't raise my blood pressure all that much, however, the following comment on the "source" site left me speechless:

"I have typed and retyped my response to this article so many times now but I simply cannot get across my sheer anger, sadness, frustration, despair and disgust at what can only be described as the most appaling waste of human life in the history of our planet.

I am almost at a loss for words as to how repugnant this is all getting.

I have little to say other than read the following and get ready for yet another war in yet another Muslim nation with yet further huge human and financial cost.

And remember, all of these pre-planned and pre-scheduled wars are taking place IN YOUR NAME.

If you know a soldier in either the US, UK or Israel then ask them, no, BEG them to resign their position or, if necessary, go AWOL. If these bastards have no soldiers left to sacrifice with no thought for their families then there cannot be another war, can there?

To be honest, I am sick and tired of hearing about all of the soldiers who are dedicated family men and women.

Family men and women do not go to other countries to kill other family men and women, leaving their families behind to pick up the pieces once they are dead. [Emphasis mine. -ed.]

STOP FIGHTING FOR THEM AND THEY CANNOT START ANY MORE WARS."

Signs of the Times (Snicker)

Wow. The stupidity of this statement just astounds me.

I maintain, you spoiled little shit, that a *lot* of Family Men have put on a uniform, taken up arms, and faught and died to give you the right to make an absolute ass of yourself. Maybe you should move out of Mom's basement, and read a bit of history, needledick.

God I wish 14 year olds would stay the hell away from the Internet...

In a spasm of celebration for Hezbollah’s monthlong battle against Israel, many parents in Gaza City have named their children after the Islamic militant group and its leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah.

In Gaza City’s Shifa Hospital, six Palestinian women have named their babies Hassan, Nasrallah, or Hassan Nasrallah, according to maternity records from when fighting began July 12 to when a cease-fire took effect Monday.

Answering ‘nationalist spirit’
“My wife wanted to call the baby Nasrallah, but I wanted Hezbollah — to commemorate the entire resistance,” he said smiling.

“My friends said with this name he won’t be able to work, or travel abroad. I have business in Israel as well — but you know, there is a nationalist spirit in me,” he said.

Ghurani said he also tried to change his 6-year-old son’s name from Islam to Nasrallah, but “couldn’t find the right papers.”

“The next son — we’ll call him Ahmadinejad,” Ghurani said, in honor of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has called for the complete annihilation of Israel.

Yeah.  Maybe we should dialogue with them some more...

PMSNBC

NEW YORK (CNN) -- CNN terrorism analyst Peter Bergen says the notion that Osama bin Laden once worked for the CIA is "simply a folk myth" and that there's no shred of evidence to support such theories.

Q: If it's true that bin Laden once worked for the CIA, what makes you so sure that he isn't still?
Anne Busigin, Toronto, Canada

BERGEN: This is one of those things where you cannot put it out of its misery.

The story about bin Laden and the CIA -- that the CIA funded bin Laden or trained bin Laden -- is simply a folk myth. There's no evidence of this. In fact, there are very few things that bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and the U.S. government agree on. They all agree that they didn't have a relationship in the 1980s. And they wouldn't have needed to. Bin Laden had his own money, he was anti-American and he was operating secretly and independently.

The real story here is the CIA didn't really have a clue about who this guy was until 1996 when they set up a unit to really start tracking him.

Caliphate News Network

 Wow.  I can hear the heads of conspiracy theorists exploding now...

Scholars of the Enlightenment should be in high demand these days. For the political and media responses to the plot to bomb up to ten U.S. airliners in mid air above the Atlantic reflect its two-faced intellectual and philosophical heritage. There is that great optimism in human nature, the belief in rationality and science, the conviction that everything has an explanation and that every problem has a solution. There is the unbending belief that “all men are created equals,” that we are entitled to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Then there is the dark side, not of Locke and Montesquieu, not of the American Revolution and the Federalists, but of the French terror, of the tyranny of ideas over the liberty of men, of the totalitarian regimes that sprang out of Enlightenment philosophy no less than liberal democracies did.

Some, in Europe and the U.S., have already understood terrorism’s true nature: the tool of a totalitarian murderous ideology, which must be confronted for what it is, not for what we wish it to be, if liberty is to survive.

But others are trying to play down this characterization, for fear of the consequences of putting radical Islam in the same category as Fascism and Communism, especially given that Islam is not a distant reality of the East, but it now dwells in the heart of Europe.

... Western impulses to explain away the threat of terror and seek a solution to the problem are empowering in a way. We have a diagnosis and we have a cure. But they are also misleading. For why should it be logical or even understandable that Muslim anger at Western foreign policy solicits terrorism? Should anger at high taxes, inefficient health care, poor environmental standards, or disagreeable op-eds solicit “understandable&rdq uo; similar responses? Should we condone people blowing up airliners because they think the highest tax bracket should not be higher than, say, 30 percent? Should we “address their grievances”? By, say, lowering taxes? What if someone decides to blow up, say, the Guardian because they are fed up with the political inclination of its Comment section? Should the Guardian address their grievances by becoming right-wing? Can we not call it blackmail, instead, as it should be the case? Can we not say that differences of opinion are only legitimate when voiced in the peaceful forms amply provided by the open societies we are part of? That what makes people angry is no excuse for killing people?

The “root-cause” argument boils down to excusing the inexcusable. It also ignores the plain facts: The foiled plot to blow up airliners was not hastily planned in response to Israel’s war on Hezbollah, or U.S. and British reluctance to stop Israel. The planning began months before those events. The real cause is a totalitarian ideology that uses grievances as excuses but has goals we can never accede, if the West is to stay true to its values and beliefs, let alone interests, as an open society.

Emanuele Ottolenghi GETS it.
 

By LARRY MARGASAK

Copyright © 2006 AP Wire

WASHINGTON -- The federal program that provides legal help to poor Americans turns away half of its applicants for lack of resources.

But that hasn't stopped its executives from lavishing expensive meals, chauffeur-driven cars and foreign trips on themselves.

Agency documents detail the luxuries that executives of the Legal Services Corp. have given themselves with federal money -- from $14 "Death by Chocolate" desserts to $400 chauffeured rides to locations within cab distance of their offices.

The government-funded corporation also has a spacious headquarters in Washington's tony Georgetown district -- with views of the Potomac River and a rent significantly higher than other tenants in the same building.

And board members wrote themselves a policy that doubled the amount they could claim for meals compared with their staff.

Germany`s NDR presents unpublished video footage from the qana events, demasking "Green Helmet" as a cynical movie director, staging photographs with a child's body.

YouTube

Reuters
Wednesday, August 9, 2006; 5:48 PM

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Members of Iran's Revolutionary Guard have been found among Hizbollah guerrillas slain by Israeli forces in southern Lebanon, Israel's Channel 10 television reported on Wednesday citing diplomatic sources.

It said the Iranians were identified by documents found on their bodies, but gave no further details on how many were discovered or when. Neither the Israeli military nor Hizbollah representatives in Beirut had immediate comment on the report.

Iran, like fellow Hizbollah patron Syria, insists its support for the Shi'ite guerrilla group is purely moral.

Israel says many of the rockets being fired against its civilian and military targets are Iranian made, and that Hizbollah fighters taking on its forces trained in Iran. Washington also accuses Tehran of actively funding Hizbollah.

Iran's Revolutionary Guards are traditionally very close to fellow Shi'ite Muslims in Hizbollah and were deployed in south Lebanon in the 1980s.

Hmmm...

The Washington comPost

UPDATE: 

August 10, 2006 -- JERUSALEM - The bodies of members of Iran's Revolutionary Guard were found among Hezbollah fighters killed by Israeli forces in southern Lebanon - conclusive proof that Tehran is supporting the terror group, it was reported yesterday.

Israel's Channel 10 television said the Iranians were identified by papers on their bodies, but gave no further details on how many were soldiers or where or when they were found.

Revolutionary Guard members have been training Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, sources said.

Iran has insisted its support for the terror group is purely moral. Israeli officials have said that many of the rockets being fired against it are made in Iran.

A captured Hezbollah guerrilla, who took part in the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers that sparked the war in Lebanon, confessed in a video released this week that he received military training in Iran.

Hezbollah said it "categorically denies the lies and claims that the enemy is promoting that Iranian fighters are present in the confrontations with the occupation forces."

Hours earlier, defiant Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, in a televised speech, warned that expanded Israeli military operations into Lebanon would be repelled by the same fierce resistance that has prevented Israeli troops from controlling the area over the 29 days since the conflict began.

"You can invade, you can land by air, by sea and take any hill - we will expel you with force and transform our land in the south to a graveyard for Zionist invaders," Nasrallah said.

"We will kill your officers and soldiers and inflict a calamity on you in the battlefield."

New York Post

By Joel Mowbray
Washington Times | August 8, 2006

Hiding behind potted plants, Naveed Haq laid in wait for a 14-year-old girl he could use as a hostage. With a gun in her back, he pushed his way past security and through the door. He coldly, deliberately shot six women. When a wounded Pamela Waechter tried to flee up some stairs, he followed her, leaned over a railing and killed her. 

AP News Alert Aug 07 11:17 AM US/Eastern Email this story

BEIRUT, Lebanon

The Lebanese prime minister says only one person died in an Israeli air raid on the southern village of Houla, lowering the death toll from 40.

No! Hiz-ebola lied???

More from the Communist News Network:

BEIRUT, Lebanon (CNN) -- Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora said Monday that one person was killed in an Israeli airstrike on the southern village of Houla, not 40 as he had earlier reported.

"The massacre in Houla, it turned out that there was one person killed," Reuters quoted Siniora as saying. "They thought that the whole building smashed on the heads of about 40 people ... thank God they have been saved."

Siniora had earlier told Arab foreign ministers in Beirut that the attack "was a horrific massacre ... in which more than 40 martyrs were victims of deliberate bombing."

Saniora said he had based the initial tally on unspecified information that he had received, The Associated Press reported. He offered no other explanation for the error.

Lebanese media are reporting 65 survivors were pulled from the rubble, more than half of them children.

Six homes were destroyed, and fires engulfed the area, a Lebanese law enforcement source said.

The Israel Defense Forces said it is checking the reports on Houla, noting that it has warned residents for the past two weeks to leave.

LONDON, Aug 7 (Reuters) - Reuters withdrew all 920 photographs by a freelance Lebanese photographer from its database on Monday after an urgent review of his work showed he had altered two images from the conflict between Israel and the armed group Hizbollah.

Global Picture Editor Tom Szlukovenyi called the measure precautionary but said the fact that two of the images by photographer Adnan Hajj had been manipulated undermined trust in his entire body of work. "There is no graver breach of Reuters standards for our photographers than the deliberate manipulation of an image," Szlukovenyi said in a statement. "Reuters has zero tolerance for any doctoring of pictures and constantly reminds its photographers, both staff and freelance, of this strict and unalterable policy."

Yeah.  Just two pictures...

Al-Reuters 

So, Mel Gibson goes on a drunken anti-Semitic rant, and we're all supposed to boycott his movies and demand that Hollywood never work with him again -- but Jesse Jackson calls Jews "Hymies" and New York City "Hymietown," and all is forgiven and forgotten.

Jackson made those remarks to a black Washington Post reporter in 1984. According to the Post, Jackson thought the reporter would not print the remarks because they had a "racial bond." They were printed, and it caused a huge controversy. Jackson later apologized, and he has remained a power player on the Left. He has spoken at every Democratic National Convention since 1984. Gibson has apologized too (and Gibson was drunk, Jackson sober), but that has not pacified those who are demanding that his career be ended. Were the GOP to hand Gibson the mike at any future convention, the Democratic reaction would be entirely predictable, and entirely hypocritical.

Let's be clear, I am in no way excusing Gibson's horrible rant. Though his apologies were eloquent, he obviously has a serious, deeply embedded problem with anti-Semitism, and the apologies by themselves are not enough to bring forgiveness. Gibson is going to have to do some serious penance to prove that he neither believes nor endorses the terrible things he said. An hour with Barbara Walters would be a good start.

It is not that Gibson's remarks should be brushed aside. They should not be. But there should be balance in the calls for the public to shun an artist for his personal views. If we are to ruin Gibson's career because of his rant, why are we not supposed to do the same for the left-wingers who express similarly hateful views?

At the 1999 Cannes Film Festival, Spike Lee said of National Rifle Association President Charlton Heston, "Shoot him -- with a .44 caliber Bulldog." Lee did not have the excuse of being drunk. He advocated murdering a man with whom he disagreed politically, and the Left, in its pious oversight of all potentially offensive or inflammatory hate speech, found nothing objectionable.

In 2003, London's Independent newspaper (a liberal paper) reported that Michael Moore belittled the passengers on the airplanes that were hijacked on 9/11, saying that they didn't resist because they were chicken white people. Had they been black, they would've used their physical superiority to overpower the hijackers, Moore said. Even the Independent columnist who reported this rant called it "racist," but the American Left let it pass without comment.

In 1998, Alec Baldwin went on Late Night with Conan O'Brien and said, "And I have come back from Africa to stained dresses and cigars and this and impeachment. I am thinking to myself, in other countries they are laughing at us 24 hours a day and I'm thinking to myself, if we were in other countries, we would all right now, all of us together, [starts to shout] all of us together would go down to Washington and we would stone Henry Hyde to death! We would stone him to death! [crowd cheers] Wait! Shut up! Shut up! No shut up! I'm not finished. We would stone Henry Hyde to death and we would go to their homes and we'd kill their wives and their children. We would kill their families."

...In 1998, Jack Nicholson met Fidel Castro. He came away swooning, calling Castro a "genius" and a "humanist like President Clinton." Oliver Stone said of Castro, "We should look to [Castro] as one of the Earth's wisest people, one of the people we should consult." Never mind that Castro is personally responsible for the murder or imprisonment of thousands, stole and pocketed the wealth of his countrymen, and denies the Cuban people freedom of speech, the press, assembly or just about anything else. No comment from the Left.

The American Spectator

I have often wondered what it would have been like to live through the Thirties. How would I have reacted to the annual Nuremberg Party rallies, the rants against the Jews, and Hitler’s foreign adventures which the democracies did nothing to oppose, the occupation of the Rhineland and Austria, Nazi support for Franco in the Spanish civil war, and the rest of it. Appeasement was then considered wise, and has only become a dirty word with hindsight.  One of my heroes is Robert Byron, so passionate an anti-Nazi that in his passport he described his occupation as “warmonger.”  He was to be killed in 1941. My own father, a man of literary and artistic sensitivities, wrote a letter in 1938 to the New Statesman, that perennially weak-kneed leftist publication, to denounce pacifism and appeasement, and to insist on re-arming. Doing other research, I came across this letter quite by chance, and I hope I would have been so minded at that time.

Now Iran is embarked on foreign adventures in Iraq and Syria and Lebanon. It is engaged on all-out armament programs, and is evidently hard at work developing the nuclear weapon that will give it a dimension of power that Hitler did not have. The latest unpleasant revelation on that front is that some months ago a huge shipment of uranium 238 from the Congo was due to be smuggled to the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas, but was intercepted in Tanzania. Appeasement is again considered wise. Israel’s attempt to get Iranian Hezbollah off its back is widely criticised as “disproportionate.”  A clamour rises for hostilities to cease even though that means entrenching Hezbollah and allowing it to dictate the future course of events. In Malaysia, President Ahmedinejad informs a gathering of heads of Muslim states that the extermination of Israel is the solution to the crisis. Apparently nobody objected or even demurred: It might have been Goebbels addressing a group of gauleiters.  Propaganda videos show Hezbollah columns goose-stepping in the streets, or else on parade in black uniforms, right arms raised in the Nazi salute.  At least I know now what it was like to live through the Thirties.

National Review Online

ACROSS Indonesia's most religious of provinces, the sight of brown uniformed policemen has come to signify one thing. The brutal enforcement of Sharia law which is raising fears about the future of the world's most populous Muslim country.

They haul unmarried couples into precincts and arrest people for drinking or gambling. Increasingly, many of the cases are pushed to the ultimate conclusion, public canings at mosques in front of excited crowds.

In mid-July, a 27-year-old man sentenced to 40 lashes fainted on the seventh stroke of a rattan cane from a hooded man in the yard of a mosque here in the provincial capital.

The caning was televised nationally, with a presenter saying that the man, who had been arrested for drinking at a beachside stall, would receive the remainder of his punishment once he had recovered.

Battered by the Asian tsunami 19 months ago, Aceh is undergoing a profound transformation that is likely to have considerable impact on the nature of Islam in Indonesia.

For centuries Indonesia has been known for the open-minded, sometimes freewheeling, interpretation of its dominant religion. That is changing as moderate Muslims find themselves under siege from more orthodox proponents, and as the moderates are hesitant to push back.

Aceh, where Islam has always been more rigorously observed, is the first of Indonesia's 33 provinces to put Sharia law on to the books. Special Sharia courts established to mete out punishments have been operating for a year.

Now, some of Indonesia's other provincial governments are looking to Aceh as a model for how they might enforce Sharia laws.

Lovely.

Scotland on Sunday

Are you curious to know what Hizballah’s Media Relations Department has to say about the Lebanon crisis, and their role in Western media’s coverage of the Qana bombing?

Now you can call them and ask, thanks to a reader who forwarded scans of their business cards:

UPDATE at 8/3/06 8:51:28 pm:

This is not a joke.

From LGF. 

An Iranian man who with his wife chose a Christian name for their newborn son has been arrested and imprisoned by Muslims on allegations of apostasy.

Issa Motamadi, whose son became known to authorities seven months ago, faces a trial before a national Revolutionary Tribunal, according to a World Evangelical Alliance Religious Liberty Commission report published by Assist News Service.

Motamadi, a resident of Recht, the capital of Gilan Province, was taken into custody July 24 and sources told the Religious Liberty Commission it was because of the couple's choice of a name.

Both Motamadi and his wife, Parvah, are converts to Christianity, and while technically the Iranian constitution bans persecution of anyone for their religious beliefs, it remains common for authorities to level a non-religious legal allegation against someone they want to use as an example.

Supporters of the couple are pleading with Christians around the world for prayer for the family and also are asking for human rights and religious liberty groups to intercede for Motamadi with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

"The investigation of individuals' beliefs is forbidden, and no one may be molested or taken to task simply for holding a certain belief," is the rule of law in Iran's constitution.  [Wink, wink...  -ed.]

However, a secret service official with responsibilities for minorities, identified only as Mr. Bagani, advised that Motamadi will not be freed unless he renounces his faith and returns to Islam.

Bagani told sources for the Commission the judge in the case will accept no other solution. He also hinted it may take several executions before Iranians realize the consequences of apostasy.

The couple drew attention to themselves with their choice of names for their infant. Such an action is considered an irrevocable abandonment of Islam because a Christian name identifies the child as being born to Christian parents. Also, if a child is considered Christian from birth, the child never could be accused of apostasy. The Commission chose not to reveal the child's actual name.

Sources also reported to the Commission's researcher, Elizabeth Kendal, that authorities may soon move to arrest Parvah and falsely accuse her of drug trafficking. Issa's mother, who is not Christian, also has been traumatized by the accusations.

The researcher noted that 14 centuries ago, Muslims who were fleeing persecution sought refuge in what then was Christian Abyssinia, now Ethiopia, where they were granted asylum by the emperor.

The Abyssinian experience, according to Kendal, is repeated widely around the world today.

"For example, multitudes of Shiite Muslims who fled persecution in Iraq during the rule of Saddam Hussein have found both refuge and religious liberty in the 'Christian' West," she wrote.

"Yet today, Issa Motamadi is holed up in an Islamic prison in Rasht, wrongfully accused and separated from his family and loved ones simply on account of his devotion to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the Creator of the world."

The Religion of Peace^TM

IRN News 

By Victor Davis Hanson

When I used to read about the 1930s — the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, the rise of fascism in Italy, Spain, and Germany, the appeasement in France and Britain, the murderous duplicity of the Soviet Union, and the racist Japanese murdering in China — I never could quite figure out why, during those bleak years, Western Europeans and those in the United States did not speak out and condemn the growing madness, if only to defend the millennia-long promise of Western liberalism.

Of course, the trauma of the Great War was all too fresh, and the utopian hopes for the League of Nations were not yet dashed. The Great Depression made the thought of rearmament seem absurd. The connivances of Stalin with Hitler — both satanic, yet sometimes in alliance, sometimes not — could confuse political judgments.

But nevertheless it is still surreal to reread the fantasies of Chamberlain, Daladier, and Pope Pius, or the stump speeches by Charles Lindbergh (“Their [the Jews’] greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government”) or Father Coughlin (“Many people are beginning to wonder whom they should fear most — the Roosevelt-Churchill combination or the Hitler-Mussolini combination.”) — and baffling to consider that such men ever had any influence.

Not any longer.

Our present generation too is on the brink of moral insanity. That has never been more evident than in the last three weeks, as the West has proven utterly unable to distinguish between an attacked democracy that seeks to strike back at terrorist combatants, and terrorist aggressors who seek to kill civilians.

It is now nearly five years since jihadists from the Arab world left a crater in Manhattan and ignited the Pentagon. Apart from the frontline in Iraq, the United States and NATO have troops battling the Islamic fascists in Afghanistan. European police scramble daily to avoid another London or Madrid train bombing. The French, Dutch, and Danish governments are worried that a sizable number of Muslim immigrants inside their countries are not assimilating, and, more worrisome, are starting to demand that their hosts alter their liberal values to accommodate radical Islam. It is apparently not safe for Australians in Bali, and a Jew alone in any Arab nation would have to be discreet — and perhaps now in France or Sweden as well. Canadians’ past opposition to the Iraq war, and their empathy for the Palestinians, earned no reprieve, if we can believe that Islamists were caught plotting to behead their prime minister. Russians have been blown up by Muslim Chechnyans from Moscow to Beslan. India is routinely attacked by Islamic terrorists. An elected Lebanese minister must keep in mind that a Hezbollah or Syrian terrorist — not an Israeli bomb — might kill him if he utters a wrong word. The only mystery here in the United States is which target the jihadists want to destroy first: the Holland Tunnel in New York or the Sears Tower in Chicago.

In nearly all these cases there is a certain sameness: The Koran is quoted as the moral authority of the perpetrators; terrorism is the preferred method of violence; Jews are usually blamed; dozens of rambling complaints are aired, and killers are often considered stateless, at least in the sense that the countries in which they seek shelter or conduct business or find support do not accept culpability for their actions.

Yet the present Western apology to all this is often to deal piecemeal with these perceived Muslim grievances: India, after all, is in Kashmir; Russia is in Chechnya; America is in Iraq, Canada is in Afghanistan; Spain was in Iraq (or rather, still is in Al Andalus); or Israel was in Gaza and Lebanon. Therefore we are to believe that “freedom fighters” commit terror for political purposes of “liberation.” At the most extreme, some think there is absolutely no pattern to global terrorism, and the mere suggestion that there is constitutes “Islamaphobia.”

Here at home, yet another Islamic fanatic conducts an act of al Qaedism in Seattle, and the police worry immediately about the safety of the mosques from which such hatred has in the past often emanated — as if the problem of a Jew being murdered at the Los Angeles airport or a Seattle civic center arises from not protecting mosques, rather than protecting us from what sometimes goes on in mosques.

But then the world is awash with a vicious hatred that we have not seen in our generation: the most lavish film in Turkish history, “Valley of the Wolves,” depicts a Jewish-American harvesting organs at Abu Ghraib in order to sell them; the Palestinian state press regularly denigrates the race and appearance of the American Secretary of State; the U.N. secretary general calls a mistaken Israeli strike on a U.N. post “deliberate,” without a word that his own Blue Helmets have for years watched Hezbollah arm rockets in violation of U.N. resolutions, and Hezbollah’s terrorists routinely hide behind U.N. peacekeepers to ensure impunity while launching missiles.

If you think I exaggerate the bankruptcy of the West or only refer to the serial ravings on the Middle East of Pat Buchanan or Jimmy Carter, consider some of the most recent comments from Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah about Israel: “When the people of this temporary country lose their confidence in their legendary army, the end of this entity will begin [emphasis added].” Then compare Nasrallah’s remarks about the U.S: “To President Bush, Prime Minister Olmert and every other tyrannical aggressor. I want to invite you to do what you want, practice your hostilities. By God, you will not succeed in erasing our memory, our presence or eradicating our strong belief. Your masses will soon waste away, and your days are numbered [emphasis added].”

And finally examine here at home reaction to Hezbollah — which has butchered Americans in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia — from a prominent Democratic Congressman, John Dingell: “I don’t take sides for or against Hezbollah.” And isn’t that the point, after all: the amoral Westerner cannot exercise moral judgment because he no longer has any?

An Arab rights group, between denunciations of Israel and America, is suing its alma mater the United States for not evacuating Arab-Americans quickly enough from Lebanon, despite government warnings of the dangers of going there, and the explicit tactics of Hezbollah, in the manner of Saddam Hussein, of using civilians as human shields in the war it started against Israel.

Demonstrators on behalf of Hezbollah inside the United States — does anyone remember our 241 Marines slaughtered by these cowardly terrorists? — routinely carry placards with the Star of David juxtaposed with Swastikas, as voices praise terrorist killers. Few Arab-American groups these past few days have publicly explained that the sort of violence, tyranny, and lawlessness of the Middle East that drove them to the shores of a compassionate and successful America is best epitomized by the primordial creed of Hezbollah.

There is no need to mention Europe, an entire continent now returning to the cowardice of the 1930s. Its cartoonists are terrified of offending Muslim sensibilities, so they now portray the Jews as Nazis, secure that no offended Israeli terrorist might chop off their heads. The French foreign minister meets with the Iranians to show solidarity with the terrorists who promise to wipe Israel off the map (“In the region there is of course a country such as Iran — a great country, a great people and a great civilization which is respected and which plays a stabilizing role in the region”) — and manages to outdo Chamberlain at Munich. One wonders only whether the prime catalyst for such French debasement is worry over oil, terrorists, nukes, unassimilated Arab minorities at home, or the old Gallic Jew-hatred.

It is now a cliché to rant about the spread of postmodernism, cultural relativism, utopian pacifism, and moral equivalence among the affluent and leisured societies of the West. But we are seeing the insidious wages of such pernicious theories as they filter down from our media, universities, and government — and never more so than in the general public’s nonchalance since Hezbollah attacked Israel.

These past few days the inability of millions of Westerners, both here and in Europe, to condemn fascist terrorists who start wars, spread racial hatred, and despise Western democracies is the real story, not the “quarter-ton” Israeli bombs that inadvertently hit civilians in Lebanon who live among rocket launchers that send missiles into Israeli cities and suburbs.

Yes, perhaps Israel should have hit more quickly, harder, and on the ground; yes, it has run an inept public relations campaign; yes, to these criticisms and more. But what is lost sight of is the central moral issue of our times: a humane democracy mired in an asymmetrical war is trying to protect itself against terrorists from the 7^th century, while under the scrutiny of a corrupt world that needs oil, is largely anti-Semitic and deathly afraid of Islamic terrorists, and finds psychic enjoyment in seeing successful Western societies under duress.

In short, if we wish to learn what was going on in Europe in 1938, just look around.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the author, most recently, of A War Like No Other. How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War.

VDH nails it again.

National Review Online

More MSM Propaganda Exposed

It’s a tragic day for the earnest Left. One of their darlings may be about to nationalize the farm.

Castro’s coughing up blood. He’s handed over the reins to his kid brother Raul.
    T he original "Speak Truth to Powah" guy, the bearded, combat fatigue-wearing, cigar-chomping originator of Guerrilla-chic, is now as old and feeble as his cause: International socialism with a gun. It is on its last legs, and so is he.
    F orgive me if I don’t adopt a reverential tone. Others will. Just wait and see. Forgive me if I don’t meet this development with the correct cocktail of respect and awe tinged by a vague sense of disapproval. Don’t worry. Others will. United States congressmen. The leaders of free nations in Europe. American media giants. Hollywood activistas. They will talk with poorly disguised admiration about a towering figure who thumbed his nose at the United States.
    Thanks to Castro’s remarkable Madonna-like sense of marketing -- and our own cynicism in this difficult world -- it has always been too easy to overlook the thousands of political opponents imprisoned, tortured and killed; the hundreds of thousands who risked sharks, thirst and drowning at sea to escape his people’s island paradise; and the untold numbers who succumbed to wretched fates. Cuba had that great much ballyhooed national health system. Its peasants weren’t being oppressd by Yanqui imperialista multi-nationals anymore.
    T he history of the Cuban missile crisis, when Nikita Kruschev tried to gain leverage and instill fear by planting missiles 90 miles off our shores, only mentions Castro in passing as the puppet host. It is easy to overlook the fact that he too wanted to bring us to our knees.
    C astro himself was always smart enough not to push it too far. Those were the bad years, when he had to make sure he wasn’t about to light up an exploding cigar, compliments of the CIA. But like his Venezuelan understudy, Hugo Chavez, Castro knew at the end of the day that the United States would tolerate a buffoon just offshore, as long as that buffoon, murderous though he may be, knew his place.
    This is not to diminish Castro’s bloody accomplishments: the export of violent class warfare, with material support, throughout Central and South America and across the pond to Africa. Impressive for a people’s banana republic.

    In Miami’s Little Havana, they are gearing up to party. You can rest assured they are looking forward to the brief reign of Raul, and the power struggle and ultimate collapse of Castro’s commie dream that is to follow. Let us just pray the Cuban Communists can just smell the cigar smoke and go quietly. Hey ... speaking of doddering Raul, I thought this was supposed to be a classless society.How come, of all the high-ranking card-carrying commies in Cuba, after an exhaustive island-wide search, no doubt, the best candidate to replace Fidel is his kid brother? Aren’t they going to have an election or something? ... Oh, right, never mind.

 Excellent.  Read the rest at BostonHerald.com

THE NEW BATTLE FLAG now being waved high over the armies of Allah mustering across the world is not the banner of Muhammad, but a flag almost as ancient as the prophet, the Bloody Shirt. Among the weak in arms and courage and righteousness, the Bloody Shirt is their weapon of mass distraction; their attempt to storm the moral high ground and hold it as they wait for their reinforcements of love, peace, compassion and truce to flow in from the far corners of the world screaming "Stop this barbaric war that slaughters, for God's sake, innocent women and children!"

The cynical create and present the daily dead baby exhibit. And the fools of the world oblige them with their compassionate echoes sent out with the numbing predictability and regularity of a New York Times editorial or, worse still, a mushy screed from our high-priest of compassion, Jimmy Carter.

After all, who among us is not moved by endless images of dead babies sheathed in blood, body parts hanging by a shred of gristle, with the blank stare of eternity glazing their eyes? What "civilized" person secure in their happy world of languid summer days, mall festivals brimming with second-rate food and third rate crafts, concerts on the lawn with wine and traveling minstrels, could not want this distant tribal slaughter to stop, stop, stop this very instant?

To see the Bloody Shirt, as the Hezbollah in Lebanon drag their children from the rubble and parade them before the world, is to want all replaced with the Rainbow Flag immediately -- no matter who must suffer, no matter how many Jews must die in that distant country where, "After all the Israelis aren't so much Jewish as they are Zionist oppressors who, if they just gave up a little more, would be left in peace. I mean, look at that. Children are dying every minute there. Have you no compassion, sir? Have you, at long last, no compassion?"

Have I no compassion?

That was a fair question the first time it was posed to me, oh, several decades back. I think I had a lot of compassion back then. I must have had oodles. I must have been soaking in it. At least that's what I conclude when I read the things I wrote and remember the things I did. For awhile, every cause on Earth, every injustice from Cape Horn to Belfast called upon my bottomless well of compassion. The church burnings and bombings in the South during the Civil Rights struggle. The napalmed girl on the road in Vietnam. The carnage of apartheid. And, of course, the 50 years of ceaseless exposure of their dead by the Palestinians.

The Palestinians, and by extension their rollicking sidekicks around the Muslim world, are the masters of dead-child porn. Looking at the recent releases from this sick culture is like watching a very unfunny Monty Python clip from the Holy Grail movie where the cart is pulled through the city with the chant, "Bring out your dead!"

And the dead are brought out -- once they are determined to be photo-op worthy. The Killed-Kids of the Palestinians film series, like all standard porn films or magazines, almost never varies in its presentation. What you see is almost always dead children presented to the world on a platter like some grim roasted entree to be grabbed up and consumed by the ever-voracious cameras of the media and played in an endless looping celebration of carnage to a world hungry to note the offering and think, deep down, "Well, it is all happening far away and should stop, but at least, thank God, it's not my kid."

Of course, it is "not my kid." But only because the "brave warriors" of Islam couldn't get their hands on him or her. They would actually have much prefered it if it was your kid, but absent that they are more than happy to use some of their own. It's allowed, you see, because it is in the service of the Palestinian "cause," or of global jihad, or because Allah, the compassionate and merciful, says it is okay. Its right there in the book. You could look it up.

So, have I no compassion for this ceaseless cascade, this barrage of dead babies hurled into our mind by the masters of terror? More to the point, must I have compassion? Am I marooned forever on John Donne's continent where "any man's death diminishes me, for I am involved in all mankind?" I suppose that, since I am yet of the world, this remains true in some sense. But at the same time I am convinced that while compassion remains within me, the expression of it is currently overwhelmed and what I feel, much more than compassion, is a grinding sense of "compassion fatigue."

I feel this not so much because of the platters of dead babies being served up in Gaza and Lebanon, but rather because I know it for what it is -- the cynical attempt by a weak and cowardly cadre of killers to manipulate my compassion gland that is just as base and unrelenting as the attempts of pornographers across the internet to manipulate my lust. The main difference being that the Terrorists are getting better at their game and you don't have to swear you're 18 to see their creations. Most major media outlets around the world are only to happy to beam them into your brain 24/7.

If you aren't sure exactly who has the moral high ground in the current struggle in Lebanon, you might reflect that while it is possible to see a grown man on the Lebanese side of the struggle dangle a shredded child by an ankle for the world's cameras, you don't ever see that sort of thing at an Israeli funeral, do you?

And while you might be feeling very, very bad for the dead and dangled child, you might also ask yourself where the pictures of all the dead Hezbollah and Hamas warriors are? Don't see many of those, do you?

Or perhaps you do, if you ask yourself what sort of man could hold up a dead child by the ankle to be photographed. Or what sort of man could seek out and take the picture and make sure it got out to the ever accommodating Associated Press?

Because you do see the "brave" terrorist warriors in these pictures after all. They're the ones digging up the kids, and holding them up for the feast of the cameras. Indeed, the terrible truth that we in the West cannot confront is that, in some instances, they're the ones that are killing the kids in the first place. As we know if we are honest with ourselves at this stage, there is nothing too base and too vile for the proud "warriors" of Islam to do in the service of their anachronistic god; their banner is the Bloody Shirt, and they will never have enough blood to quench it. And any blood, as long as it is not theirs, will do.

I saw my first "waving of the Bloody Shirt" during the halcyon days of the Free Speech Movement's original college protests in Berkeley in 1964. Or maybe it was with the Vietnam Day Committee's actions a few years later. Or perhaps the People's Park riots of a year or so after that. It is not clear and it really doesn't matter. It was always, in a manner of speaking, the same shirt.

It worked like this. Some activist would get himself arrested, and in some manner get himself a whack from the cops. Then he'd get bailed out and appear before the crowd in the shirt he wore that had a few stains of blood on it. Worked like a charm and upped the donations every time.

For a long time, I thought "waving the bloody shirt" was some sort of American invention from the time of the Civil War. And in a sense it was. In a sense, when it comes to war one side or another always waves the shirt to rally the troops and exaggerate its suffering. It is one of the most effective propaganda tools there is. Works every time. If you want to cover your own barbarity, weakness, and failure as a warrior, the bloody shirt is just the thing.

As a result I was interested to discover that "The Bloody Shirt" does not after all originate with the American Civil War but with a much more ancient and Middle Eastern source, the Muslim religion:

The term 'bloody shirt' can be traced back to the aftermath of the murder of the third Caliph, Uthman in 656 CE, when a bloody shirt and some hair alleged to be from his beard were used in what is widely regarded as a cynical ploy to gain support for revenge against opponents. -- Waving the bloody shirt - Wikipedia,

In my work these days I see all the dead-child porn coming out of Lebanon and Gaza. In a way, I have too. I don't link a lot of it along. The Western media is doing that job for me to a fair-thee-well. I don't like to think I'm becoming used to it now, but I am.

One of the downsides of the work I do these days is that you become numb to suffering. One of the downsides for those who are manufacturing dead-child porn in the Middle East is that they know the West becomes numb to your ordinary dead-child porn after a bit. And so they do what pornographers always do when the suckers don't get that rush any longer, they make it more base than ever before. One of the iron laws of porn, be it the porn of sex or the porn of violence, is that there really is no bottom to it.

Most of the world does not, cannot, believe that -- in order to score some propaganda points with Western media and gain a small respite from Israeli arms in which to resupply -- that Hezbollah would herd a group of handicapped children and other civilians into a bombed building and then bring it down on them just for the photo-op. Some of the world is, this morning, not so sure.

At the time of this writing, nobody has taken the body parts of children harvested from some grave-site out along some nameless highway, strewn them across Israeli tank tracks, and then run over them a few times before the appointed photo-op. But it really is only a matter of time, isn't it? After all, in the Terror War children are not only the terrorists' main targets, they are their most effective weapons as well.

In the West and in Israel, which like it or not, is now the front line of the West, we think of children as our most precious commodity. Our enemies think of them as either suicide-bomb fodder or, worse still, "Coming Attractions."

Powerful stuff.

I guess I'll just wait here for Surrogate to attempt another self-rightous drive-by smugging...

Vanderleun, at American Digest