Sakina was sold by her father to a 65-year-old man, who was killed after one beating too many. Now his family say they want revenge

Engaged at 7, married at 12, jailed on a murder charge at 14, Sakina has never known justice and seldom been free. But at least she is safe in captivity. Beyond the walls of her detention centre many people want her dead. The eldest daughter of a poor Afghan farmer, she was sold into marriage by her father to a 65-year-old stranger for a $1,400 (£750) dowry, a deal designed to pay off debts. NI_MPU('middle'); “He was a very old man, without any teeth, and he was always cruel to me,” said Sakina, an alias. A striking, sharp-witted teenager wrapped in a coloured shawl, at first she displayed little evidence of trauma, though human rights officials and social workers say that most juvenile detainees in the country are scarred, both by their lives and subsequent experiences in the prison system. “He was very jealous and never let me out of the house, not even to see my family,” Sakina added. “He used to beat me with a stick or cable, sometimes twice a day.” The beatings started on her wedding night when her husband thrashed his 12-year-old bride for her sexual ignorance. One night there was a beating too many. Sakina woke to find the old man trying to throttle her with a rope. Her screams attracted her husband’s nephew, who burst into the room. There was a fight. The old man died of strangulation. Sakina and the nephew were jailed for murder. She was given an additional year for having an affair with the nephew, a charge she denies.

This is your mind on Islam.

The Times Online 

Even in Britain, our supposed attachment to our supposed freedom turns out to be tenuous. We seem content to toss aside ancient liberties in the face of a dubious war on terror, and we live, cheerily enough, under a regime of surveillance that the KGB might have envied.

Saddam offered his people a harsh deal. Yet, their lives were at risk only if they chose to challenge his authority. Now, they die because of the sect to which they happen to belong. Soon, their country may fall prey to a savage civil war. If that happens, the Iranians will doubtless intervene, along, perhaps, with Turkey and Israel. No one can predict where that might lead, but the outcome is unlikely to be positive for peace, prosperity, justice or, indeed, human rights.

If Saddam were still in power, he would have stopped this happening. Iraq's dissidents would have paid a price, but the rest of us would be a lot better off. As he goes to meet the hangman, the world has cause to rue his demise.

Just absolutely amazing.  Be sure to read the comments...

The Guardian 

ISTANBUL, Turkey (CNN) -- Police say they have arrested a man who allegedly fired a pistol into the air outside the Italian consulate in Istanbul, then shouted slogans in protest of Pope Benedict XVI's upcoming visit.

The man, who was identified by police sources as Ibrahim Ak, according to CNN Turk, threw the gun on the grounds of the consulate shortly before his arrest on Thursday.

"I don't want him here, if he was here now I would strangle him with my bare hands," the suspect, who identified himself as Ibrahim Ak, 26, told a Dogan news agency television camera as he was detained by police, according to The Associated Press.

"I fired the shots for God," Ak said as he sat handcuffed inside a police van outside the consulate. "Inshallah (God willing), this will be a spark, a starter for Muslims."

"God willing, he will not come, if he comes, he will see what will happen to him Inshallah," Ak said.

No one was injured in the incident, which comes a day after Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan announced he would not meet the pontiff during his November 28-30 visit.

"I believe (the shooting) is a very isolated and marginal act," chief Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi, told CNN. He said he did not believe it would jeopardize the planning of the pope's trip, which was being carried out calmly.

Erdogan will be at a NATO summit during the pope's visit, but some see the move as a snub.

The pope's trip follows a controversial speech in Germany in which he quoted a 14th-century emperor who said the Muslim Prophet Mohammed's teachings are "evil and inhuman."

That speech in mid-September prompted widespread criticism from Muslims. The pope has made a series of increasingly apologetic statements since then.

The religion of Peace^TM

CNN 

I’m not going to get into a knockdown mud rassle with Allahpundit about it (or with Mr. Genial, for that matter), but I’m with Ace on this one. I just don’t buy John F. Kerry’s excuses, and I’m skeptical of—no, I scoff at, in fact, I mock—the claims that he deviated from a prepared speech. It just doesn’t pass the giggle test, after watching him deliver those lines.

Two words: Occam’s Razor.

Via:  LGF

Palestinian mass murderers and terrorist leaders agree: Vote Democrat. (Hat tip: LGF readers.)

“Of course Americans should vote Democrat,” Jihad Jaara, a senior member of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades terror group and the infamous leader of the 2002 siege of Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity, told WND.

“This is why American Muslims will support the Democrats, because there is an atmosphere in America that encourages those who want to withdraw from Iraq. It is time that the American people support those who want to take them out of this Iraqi mud,” said Jaara, speaking to WND from exile in Ireland, where he was sent as part of an internationally brokered deal that ended the church siege.

Jaara was the chief in Bethlehem of the Brigades, the declared “military wing” of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party. Together with the Islamic Jihad terror group, the Brigades has taken responsibility for every suicide bombing inside Israel the past two years, including an attack in Tel Aviv in April that killed American teenager Daniel Wultz and nine Israelis.

Muhammad Saadi, a senior leader of Islamic Jihad in the northern West Bank town of Jenin, said the Democrats’ talk of withdrawal from Iraq makes him feel “proud.”

“As Arabs and Muslims we feel proud of this talk,” he told WND. “Very proud from the great successes of the Iraqi resistance. This success that brought the big superpower of the world to discuss a possible withdrawal.”

Abu Abdullah, a leader of Hamas’ military wing in the Gaza Strip, said the policy of withdrawal “proves the strategy of the resistance is the right strategy against the occupation.”

Proof.  Jihadi Muslims back Democrats.

World Net Daily

Here’s a reminder that John F. Kerry’s anti-military remarks do not exist in a vacuum: Kerry’s ’72 Army Comments Mirror Latest. (Hat tip: Natan.)

WASHINGTON (AP) - During a Vietnam-era run for Congress three decades ago, John Kerry said he opposed a volunteer Army because it would be dominated by the underprivileged, be less accountable and be more prone to “the perpetuation of war crimes.” ...

In 1972, as he ran for the House, he was less apologetic in his comments about the merits of a volunteer army. He declared in the questionnaire that he opposed the draft but considered a volunteer army “a greater anathema.”

“I am convinced a volunteer army would be an army of the poor and the black and the brown,” Kerry wrote. “We must not repeat the travesty of the inequities present during Vietnam. I also fear having a professional army that views the perpetuation of war crimes as simply ‘doing its job.’

“Equally as important, a volunteer army with our present constitutional crisis takes accountability away from the president and put the people further from control over military activities,” he wrote.

UPDATE at 11/2/06 8:19:41 am:

The New York Times, meanwhile, is running interference for Kerry by printing his alleged “prepared remarks” as an actual quote: New York Times Lies to Its Readers About the Content of Kerry’s Remarks.

UPDATE at 11/2/06 8:36:25 am:

Seymour Hersh wants us to know that John Kerry is right about the troops: “There has never been an American army as violent and murderous as the one in Iraq.” He claims to have seen video of atrocities—but Hersh has also admitted publicly that he thinks it’s OK to lie for political reasons.

Via:  LGF

A reader forwarded a graphic demonstration of how far John F. Kerry’s “prepared remarks” (as shilled by the NYT) are from what he really said:

The actual statement:

You know, education, if you make the most of it, and you study hard, and you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.

The New York Times version: Flubbed Joke Makes Kerry a Political Punching Bag, Again.

Mr. Kerry’s prepared remarks to California students on Monday called for him to say, “Do you know where you end up if you don’t study, if you aren’t smart, if you’re intellectually lazy? You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq. Just ask President Bush.” In his delivery, he dropped the word “us.”

The necessary edits to get from one to the other:

Note that the Times doesn’t even print Kerry’s actual remarks.

UPDATE at 11/2/06 9:52:37 am:

ABC News apparently thinks Kerry may be right: ABC News Agrees With Kerry- Troops Are Dumb.

Via: LGF

John Kerry is a war criminial douchbag.

As reported by the Boston Globe on June 19, 2003, during Kerry’s run for the Senate in 1984, he revised answers to a questionnaire that he had filled out for a nuclear disarmament group called Freeze Voter ’84. Kerry had been outscored in this questionnaire by his primary opponent, Rep. James M. Shannon. This significantly threatened his primary run. As the Globe reported:

Then a strange thing happened. Paul F. Walker, Shannon's most prominent backer on the group's executive committee, graded the answers and laid out for Kerry campaign manager Paul L. Rosenberg both the flaws in Kerry's responses and what the "correct" answers should be.

"Walker was confused about your answer" on funding the Trident submarine, Rosenberg wrote in an internal memo to Kerry, who had originally hedged in his opposition to funding new subs.

"It is critically important that we get a 100 percent rating," Rosenberg wrote, in a memo that has not previously been made public. "You should explain how your position was misinterpreted so that he will correct the rating before it is distributed to the board tomorrow evening."

Here is the actual May 23, 1984, memo from Rosenberg to Kerry explaining how he needed to alter his answers to win the primary. As the Globe reported, this was the key to Kerry beating Shannon:

Kerry revised his answers, tied Shannon with a perfect score, and at the activists' meeting in late June denied Shannon the 60 percent majority he needed to secure the endorsement for himself. Instead, Shannon and Kerry shared the group's stamp of approval in the primary field that also included then-secretary of state Michael J. Connolly and former House speaker David M. Bartley.

Of course, the rest is history, as Kerry ended up winning the primary, and won the Senate seat that November. Will the media report this now that Sen. Kerry is contending tBustershat he “botched” the joke written for his speech in Pasadena, California, while his aides disseminate the text of what he was supposed to say on Monday?

Stay tuned.

News  Busters

John Kerry is a prick. 

During the Vietnam War, both Naval officer Kerry and Air National Guardsman Bush took military intelligence tests. These tests measured Bush's I.Q. a few points higher than Kerry's. (Kerry, a lifelong master at excuses, claims this happened only because he had been drinking heavily the night before he took the test, which itself shows a profound lack of intelligence.)

Kerry's pretensions of being a military hero were dashed by truth-telling Swift Boat veterans who served with him in Vietnam.

Kerry's anti-war activism made him a darling of the anti-American Left. But Kerry's lies about his fellow soldiers, used as leftwing propaganda, encouraged his new comrades to keep fighting. Kerry thus prolonged the Vietnam War, and this killed thousands more Americans.

Kerry's accusation that our troops in Iraq are "terrorizing" people has given aid and comfort to our Islamo-fascist enemies. Kerry's attacks encourage Islamists to keep up their own bloody "Tet offensive," killing Americans to tilt our elections to the cut-and-run Democratic Party.

Ironically, Kerry modeled himself and his career path on President John F. Kennedy. But Kennedy committed the first 17,000 armed U.S. troops into a Vietnam War Kerry sought fame by opposing.

Kerry continues to prate that President Bush should either have avoided Iraq or committing far more military force there. But the liberal press has taken care not to mention Kerry's hypocrisy. Senator Kerry, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, voted to authorize Mr. Bush's actions but then voted against the supplemental appropriation to supply our troops with sufficient weapons, body armor and other necessities.

During the 2004 campaign Kerry was caught on camera telling one audience that he had voted for the war before he voted against it. He was and is, therefore, the perfect poster boy for untrustworthy Democratic leadership.

As a newly elected United States Senator from the nation's most liberal state, Kerry rushed to Nicaragua to embrace Marxist dictator Daniel Ortega days before Ortega flew to Moscow to pledge his allegiance to the Soviet Union.

But despite Kerry's long service as a rubber stamp second vote for his state's senior Democratic Senator Edward M. Kennedy, he has been a failure as a lawmaker. No landmark piece of legislation or policy achievement carries Kerry's name.

Senator Kerry chaired rigged hearings in 1991 to give Communist Vietnam a clean bill of health concerning American POWs, ending U.S. efforts to free any who remained, and this opened the way for companies to do business with that dictatorship. A year later, Communist Vietnam awarded a contract worth almost a billion dollars to John F. Kerry's cousin and his company.

If Democrats win control of the U.S. Senate on November 7, capitalism-hating Kerry would likely become chairman of the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee where he is now Ranking Democrat. He might also become chair of Senate subcommittees on Oceans, Fisheries, and the Environment (overseeing Global Warming) and on East Asian and Pacific Affairs (overseeing U.S. policy towards China, North Korea, Japan and Taiwan, among other nations).

Kerry's only significant life achievement, and the source of his political status, is that he seduced two incredibly wealthy women into marrying him. The first, a Massachusetts Brahmin, he courted at her family's palatial villa in Italy. He separated from her but continued to live on her money. Kerry then found an even richer wife, the African-born heiress to her deceased Republican Pennsylvania Senator husband's Heinz ketchup fortune of more than half a billion dollars.

When in private, John and Teresa Heinz Kerry reportedly speak French, not English. A globalist, Kerry once told a grieving mother to be proud her American soldier son had died while, at President Bill Clinton's orders, wearing the blue beret of the United Nations.

In 2004, backed with truckloads of cash from his wife and from a front man for the theocratic, nuclear-weapon-seeking rulers of oil-rich Iran, Kerry came close to being elected President.

The good news about Mr. Kerry's latest slip of his forked tongue is twofold. It has probably eliminated any chance that he could be re-nominated or elected President in 2008. And, as he selfishly put his own ego and ambition above the interests of his party, Senator Kerry's contemptuous remarks about our soldiers and President reminded the American people just how loony Left today's Democratic Party has become.

Haughty John Kerry may have cost his party one or both houses of Congress on November 7.

NewsMax

John Kerry is a prat.

If you can believe this, we have yet another version of John Kerry’s excuse. By my count, this is the fourth version of what he really meant to say:

Just for the sake of sweet sweet context, here’s what he actually said to an audience of young Democrats at a rally for California gubernatorial candidate Phil Angelides:

You know, education, if you make the most of it, and you study hard, and you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.

Via:  LGF

Make up your mind, dickhead.  Which is it, captain flip-flop?

So, attacking the Commander in Chief is fair game, but if you get called on it, it's the "Right-Wing attack machine..."

You liberal assholes are defending a SELF-PROFESSED war criminal?  Speaks volumes... 

By Scott M. Fulton, III, BetaNews

October 31, 2006, 4:27 PM

These folks have a hell of a lot more class than you ever will, Senator Kerry.