Archived
news and commentary: February 7 - 13, 2005
2005/02/07 - 2005/02/13
2005/01/31 - 2005/02/06
2005/01/24 - 2005/01/30
2005/01/17 - 2005/01/23
2005/01/10 - 2005/01/16
2005/01/03 - 2005/01/09
Sunday,
February 13, 2005
News and
commentary:
"BBC's deep thoughts" (Backspin, 2005/02/13)
"What prompted BBC Radio to remove its February 10 edition of “Daily Thoughts?” If you want evidence that presenter John Bell talked about an Israeli-Arab allegedly "conscripted" by the IDF and later “imprisoned for refusing to shoot unarmed schoolchildren,” all that’s left are the comments it generated from angry listeners.":
"Thought for the Day, 10 February 2005 John Bell
Two years ago, in a Lebanese restaurant in Vancouver, I talked to a waiter called Adam who was an Arab Israeli.
That means that he was of Palestinian Muslim stock, born in the state of Israel and, like his Jewish compatriots, he had been conscripted into the Israeli Army.
There he had distinguished himself as a good soldier and was made a corporal. He was also imprisoned for refusing to shoot unarmed schoolchildren. And one day, when off-duty, he saved many lives by killing a suicide bomber who entered the bus on which he was travelling. ...
His stories will be recounted by his children and by his children's children. And with each retelling some animosity will surface. For Adam's history will be in their genes.""Kurds emerge as key players in new Iraq after years of struggle" (AFP/Yahoo! News, 2005/02/13)
"Kurds swept into second place in Iraq's historic elections, well-placed to secure a major parliamentary presence and top government job after decades of struggle against successive Sunni regimes. ...
With the main Shiite coalition mustering slightly less than the 50 percent it had hoped for and Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's ticket coming in a distant third, the Kurds arguably posted the best performance of the elections.
Kurds turned out in force to celebrate in the disputed oil city of Kirkuk, where they won absolute victory in local polls, driving with Kurdistani flags blazing out of windows and shooting into the air.
Almost immediately, they reiterated demands for the presidency or premiership -- their success set to make them powerbroker in national politics, serving as a bridge between Shiite religious parties and secular Arabs.""Shiites Win Nearly Half of Iraqi Votes" (Robert H. Reid, AP/Yahoo! News, 2005/02/13)
"BAGHDAD, Iraq - Iraq's majority Shiite Muslims won nearly half the votes in the nation's landmark Jan. 30 election, giving the long-oppressed group significant power but not enough to form a government on its own, according to results released Sunday.
The Shiites likely will have to form a coalition in the 275-member National Assembly with the other top vote-getters — the Kurds and Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's list — to push through their agenda and select a president and prime minister. The president and two vice presidents must be elected by a two-thirds majority. ...
The Shiite-dominated United Iraqi Alliance ticket received 4,075,295 votes, or about 48 percent of the total cast, Iraqi election officials said. The Kurdistan Alliance, a coalition of two main Kurdish factions, was second with 2,175,551 votes, or 26 percent, and the Iraqi List headed by the U.S.-backed Allawi finished third with 1,168,943 votes, or about 14 percent.
Those three top finishers represent about 88 percent of the total, making them the main power brokers as the assembly chooses national leaders and writes a constitution.
Of Iraq's 14 million eligible voters, 8,456,266 cast ballots for 111 candidate lists, the commission said. That represents a turnout of about 60 percent, several points higher than the predicted 57 percent.""Saudi Morality Police See Red Over Valentine Roses" (Dominic Evans, Reuters/Yahoo! News, 2005/02/13)
"RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia's morality police are on the scent of illicit red roses as part of a clampdown on would-be St Valentine's lovers in the strict Muslim kingdom.
The Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, Saudi Arabia's powerful religious vigilantes, have banned shops from selling any red flowers in the run-up to February 14.
Florists say the move is part of an annual campaign by the committee -- whose members are known as "mutawwaeen" or volunteers -- to prevent Saudis marking a festival they believe flouts their austere doctrine of "Wahhabi" Islam.
"They pass by two or three times a day to check we don't have any red flowers," said a Pakistani florist in Riyadh's smart Sulaimaniya district. "Look, no red. I've taken them all out," he said pointing to a dazzling floral collection covering every color of the rainbow except one.""Israel Approves Release of Palestinian Prisoners" (Jeffrey Heller, Reuters/Yahoo! News, 2005/02/13)
"JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel's cabinet on Sunday approved the release of 500 Palestinian prisoners in what Prime Minister Ariel Sharon called a goodwill gesture to bolster new Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas and build mutual trust. ...
Government officials said the 500 prisoners could go free as early as Wednesday. Another 400 are due to be released in the next few weeks under a decision announced by Sharon last week. ...
An Israeli government official said of the 500 prisoners scheduled for release, around half belonged to Abbas's Fatah faction and the others were members of Islamic militant groups.""On culture front, we're losing war" (Mark Steyn, Chicago Sun-Times, 2005/02/13)
"Here are three small news items from around the world you might have missed:1) An unemployed waitress in Berlin faces the loss of her welfare benefits after refusing a job as a prostitute in a legalized brothel.
2) A British court has ruled that a suspected terrorist from Algeria cannot be detained in custody because jail causes him to suffer a "depressive illness."
3) Seventeen-year-old Jeffrey Eden of Charlestown, R.I., has been awarded an A by his teacher and the "Silver Key" in the Rhode Island Scholastic Art Awards for a diorama titled "Bush/Hitler and How History Repeats Itself." ...I'm not worried about Iraq. As they demonstrated on Jan. 30, they'll be just fine. The western front is the important one in this war, the point of intersection between Islam and a liberal democratic tradition so mired in self-loathing it would rather destroy our civilization just to demonstrate its multicultural bona fides. ...
It's an open question whether the West will survive this twilight struggle: Europe almost certainly won't, America might; on the other hand, the psychosis to which much of the culture is in thrall may eventually reach a tipping point into mass civilizational suicide. And then the new barbarians will inherit, and young Master Eden will end his days pining for the rosy-hued nostalgia for the Bushitler tyranny." (See also: "A high-school art project on Bush and Hitler" (Mark Reynolds, The Providance Journal, 2005/02/08). Also: "Terror court backs al-Qa'eda suspect" (Joshua Rozenberg, The Daily Telegraph, 2005/02/08) and "'If you don't take a job as a prostitute, we can stop your benefits'" (Clare Chapman, The Daily Telegraph, 2005/01/30))"The looming nuclear danger" (Steve Chapman, Chicago Tribune, 2005/02/13)
"It's only the third quarter, but right now the scoreboard reads: Axis of Evil 2, Bush 1. While Saddam Hussein is in jail, North Korea has announced it has nuclear weapons and Iran is moving briskly in that direction. ...
These displays of stubbornness are an embarrassment for a president who thought he could intimidate our enemies with threats and demands. In his 2002 State of the Union address, Bush declared, "The United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons."
That was the rationale for the Iraq war, which only adds to the mortification: We invaded a country that didn't have weapons of mass destruction, while putting up with one that claims it does and another that is far closer to getting nukes than Iraq ever was.
Our demolition of Hussein was supposed to cow the others into submission. As it happens, the invasion apparently had the opposite effect. In the first place, North Korea and Iran may have deduced that the greatest danger is not building nuclear weapons. Hussein's strategic blunder was to do just enough on weapons of mass destruction to attract attention but not enough to defend himself.""The bubbling UN cauldron under a shaky western lid" (Andrew Sullivan, The Sunday Times, 2005/02/13)
"If the UN is powerless before genocide and corrupt in the face of dictatorships how can it be relied on to do anything of real significance in the world? That kind of work is left to the despised leaders of the West — the George Bushes and Tony Blairs and Michael Howards.":
"Imagine we had followed the UN line and not gone to war. The corrupt oil for food programme would have continued, while pressure to remove sanctions increased. Saddam would have gradually rebuilt the ability to threaten the region and the world. Hundreds of shady businessmen, lobbyists and bureaucrats would have seen their bank accounts padded with lucrative oil contracts.
The Iraqi people would have continued to live in a fast-collapsing police state, kept barely alive by medicine and food supplies from the UN that were also the means to keep them under Saddam’s thumb. How on earth would this have been anything but a disaster and an injustice? Yes, critics of the war are right to say that we now know the WMD threat was greatly exaggerated. But it is equally true that we now know that the status quo the war critics preferred was inefficient, corrupt and deadly to the Iraqi people. ...
We have learnt a lot since the liberation of Iraq. Western leaders are fallible. They even occasionally preside over serious crimes in pursuit of their policies. But without these western leaders and military powers, the Taliban would still be in power and Saddam would still be skimming off UN dollars. And Annan would be making excuses.
After all the huffing and puffing of the past three years, doesn’t that tell you all you really need to know?""Stranger Than Fiction" (B.R. Myers, The New York Times, 2005/02/13)
"But the propaganda dinned every day into the North Korean people is of a different order. School textbooks, wall posters, literary works: all celebrate a cynical "attack diplomacy" that makes a frightened and uncertain world dance to the drum of Kim Jong Il. Again and again, comic effect is derived from stories of stammering American and international officials trying to placate the relentless "warriors" of the Foreign Ministry. Washington's refusal to follow through on veiled threats of military action is mocked as a failure of nerve.
The novel "Barrel of a Gun," for example, released in 2003, is an official "historical" work about how Mr. Kim's iron resolve forced the Clinton administration to its knees in 1998. "Excellency," the American negotiator says at the end of the book, groveling shamelessly before his North Korean counterpart, "you are also a mighty superpower." ...
The glorification of "attack diplomacy" must be taken seriously. Either it reflects Kim Jong Il's real attitude, in which case any negotiations - bilateral or otherwise - are unlikely to bear fruit; or it is only part of a larger effort to shore up pride in the regime, in which case it still creates a mood - in the People's Army and the North Korean public at large - that will oppose any meaningful concession to the outside world.""Iraq Grows More Dangerous. But..." (Roger Cohen, The New York Times, 2005/02/13)
"Are things getting better or worse in Iraq?": "The ballot counting is not yet over, but it is clear that Iraq's Shiite majority will emerge from the election with a claim on power that once belonged only to Sunni Arabs. The shift can be consolidated only if the Shiites have the good sense to negotiate political alliances with Iraq's other ethnic and religious groups. It seems possible that good sense exists. The intricate theater of Iraq's dawning democracy is something beautiful.
It is still dangerous on the streets. But once they close the doors to their homes at night, Iraqis now know that no longer will anyone come knocking with cars waiting outside to whisk them away to anonymous deaths approved by Saddam Hussein. That is heady headway.
The situation here is rough, and this vast investment of American blood and money could still be lost. But by a narrow margin, things are getting better in Iraq.""Hamas link to London mosque" (Nick Fielding and Abul Taher, The Sunday Times, 2005/02/13)
"A MUSLIM leader appointed to help to run the recently reopened Finsbury Park mosque in north London is a former military commander of Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist organisation. Mohammed Kassem Sawalha is one of five trustees appointed to give the mosque a fresh start.
The mosque was closed last year after becoming a centre of Islamic militancy under Abu Hamza al-Masri, the radical cleric facing charges in Britain and America.
Sawalha’s link with Hamas emerged after he was named as a co-conspirator in an American court case involving racketeering and conspiracy. Last week the cleric, who arrived in Britain 15 years ago and has been given indefinite leave to remain, said that he still supported Hamas, notorious for its suicide attacks in Israel. ...
According to US court documents, Sawalha was a leading militant in the early 1990s 'in charge of Hamas terrorist operations within the West Bank.'" (Hat tip: Melanie Phillips.)"Habib seeks disability payments" (Phillip Hudson, The Sydney Morning Herald, 2005/02/13)
"Freed Guantanamo Bay detainee Mamdouh Habib has applied for a disability support pension but has been told he owes the Federal Government thousands of dollars for previous welfare overpayments.
Centrelink is yet to decide if it will pursue the money from Mr Habib, who may be eligible for up to $470 a fortnight if his application is accepted.
Mr Habib previously received the benefit, which is paid to people who are not able to work or be retrained because of illness, injury or disability, but failed to notify Centrelink about leaving Australia, as required.
Payments were made when he was allegedly visiting al-Qaeda terrorist training camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan. "People will ask if he was well enough to allegedly fight with al-Qaeda, why were we paying him the disability pension," a source said." (Hat tip: Tim Blair.)"U.S. Uses Drones to Probe Iran For Arms" (Dafna Linzer, The Washington Post, 2005/02/13)
"The Bush administration has been flying surveillance drones over Iran for nearly a year to seek evidence of nuclear weapons programs and detect weaknesses in air defenses, according to three U.S. officials with detailed knowledge of the secret effort.
The small, pilotless planes, penetrating Iranian airspace from U.S. military facilities in Iraq, use radar, video, still photography and air filters designed to pick up traces of nuclear activity to gather information that is not accessible by satellites, the officials said. The aerial espionage is standard in military preparations for an eventual air attack and is also employed as a tool for intimidation." (See also: "Iran to shoot down ‘flying objects’ near nuclear facilities" (AP/The Daily Times, 2004/12/26) and "Dozens of UFO sightings excite Iran" (WorldNetDaily, 2004/04/28))
Saturday,
February 12, 2005
News and
commentary:
"17 Die in Iraq Bombing; Vote Results Set" (Robert H. Reid, AP/Yahoo! News, 2005/02/12)
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A car bomb killed 17 people Saturday and injured 21 others in a mostly Shiite Muslim town south of Baghdad, and U.S. troops backed by tanks battled rebels in the country's third-largest city as the insurgency showed no sign of abating after national elections. ...
The car bomb south of Baghdad exploded near the main hospital in Musayyib, a mostly Shiite town 35 miles south of Baghdad along the Euphrates River. The town is in a religiously mixed area that has been the scene of frequent attacks by Sunni Muslim insurgents.
It appeared the attack was part of a campaign by Sunni Arab extremists against the country's Shiites — an estimated 60 percent of Iraq's 26 million people — who stand on the verge of a major election victory as officials finish the final vote tallies.
More than 100 people have been killed this week in sectarian and insurgency-related violence, much of it targeting Shiite Muslims.""Palestinian militants to maintain informal truce, but no immediate ceasefire" (AFP/Yahoo! News, 2005/02/12)
"GAZA CITY (AFP) - Palestinian militant groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad agreed to maintain an informal truce but the leadership failed to secure their signature to a ceasefire announced with Israel earlier in the week.
"Hamas is going to maintain its cooling down period," one of its leaders, Ismail Haniyah, told AFP after the talks with Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas, in which he took part.
Islamic Jihad leader Mohammed al-Hindi made similar comments after a later meeting with Abbas.""The trouble with liberals" (Ross Terrill, The Boston Globe, 2005/02/12)
"What a strange moment for the left to lose faith in democracy. The Soviet Union and other Leninist dictatorships are gone in a puff of smoke. Democracy is taking root in Latin America. South Korea, Indonesia, Taiwan, Mongolia, and Thailand are all newly democratic. Throughout the 20th century, war and authoritarianism were inseparable. For 30 years, democracy and free markets have surged and no war has occurred anywhere on the scale of Korea and Vietnam, let alone World War I and World War II.
Seymour Hersh recently told "Democracy Now!" radio that America was in a bad way because "eight or nine neoconservatives" have "grabbed the government." Not mentioning that Bush was elected by 51 percent of the voters, Hersh did detect a ray of hope. One "salvation may be the economy," Hersh said regrettably, "It's going to go very bad, folks. You know, if you have not sold your stocks and bought property in Italy, you better do it quick."
A left that sees a lousy economy as political salvation and frets about stocks and a villa in Italy is not the idealistic, worker-respecting left anymore. Certainly it is not a believer in democracy." (Hat tip: InstaPundit. See also: "We've Been Taken Over By a Cult" (Seymour Hersh, Counterpunch, 2005/01/27))"Fear of Islamists Drives Growth of Far Right in Belgium" (Craig S. Smith, The New York Times, 2005/02/12)
"From the Freedom Party in Austria to the National Front in France to the Republicans in Germany, Europe's far right has made a comeback in recent years, largely on the strength of anti-immigration feelings sharpened to a fear of Islam. That fear is fed by threats of terrorism, rising crime rates among Muslim youth and mounting cultural clashes with the Continent's growing Islamic communities.":
"But nowhere has the right's revival been as swift or as strong as in Belgium's Dutch-speaking region of Flanders, where support for Mr. Dewinter's Vlaams Belang, or Flemish Interest, has surged from 10 percent of the electorate in 1999 to nearly a quarter today. ...
As the right rallies beneath an anti-Muslim banner, European Muslims themselves have become increasingly politically engaged.
The community is far too divided along religious, racial and national lines to present a unified political force, so most of Europe's Muslim politicians have allied themselves with socialists or other left-leaning parties. But radical Muslims are also getting involved, and in many ways they are helping to validate the fears that keep parties like Vlaams Belang alive.
Behind the wooden door of a brick Brussels town house, Jean-François Bastin, 61, a Belgian convert to Islam, holds court before a steady stream of Islamic activists. His fledgling Young Muslims Party is one of the new groups aggressively pursuing pro-Muslim agendas in Europe.
He calls Osama bin Laden "a modern Robin Hood," and the World Trade Center attacks "a poetic act," "a pure abstraction." His 23-year-old son is in jail in Turkey on charges that he was involved in the bombings there that killed 61 people in November 2003." (Hat tip: Marc Schulman.)"CIA Operation in Iran Failed When Spies Were Exposed" (Greg Miller, Los Angeles Times, 2005/02/12)
"Dozens of CIA informants in Iran were executed or imprisoned in the late 1980s or early 1990s after their secret communications with the agency were uncovered by the government, according to former CIA officials who discussed the episode after aspects of it were disclosed during a recent congressional hearing. ...
Details of the setback were first outlined Feb. 2 by former Pentagon advisor Richard N. Perle in testimony before the House Intelligence Committee. During a hearing on security threats, Perle was critical of U.S. intelligence capabilities and cited the crackdown on American sources in Iran as an example of the failures that have beset U.S. espionage in the Mideast.
Perle referred to the "terrible setback that we suffered in Iran a few years ago when in a display of unbelievable, careless management we put pressure on agents operating in Iran to report with greater frequency and didn't provide improved communications."
When the CIA's sources stepped up their reporting, 'the Iranian intelligence authorities quickly saw the surge in traffic and, as I understand it, virtually our entire network in Iran was wiped out.'""CNN's Jordan Resigns Over Iraq Remarks" (Howard Kurtz, The Washington Post, 2005/02/12)
"Blogs operated by National Review Online, radio talk-show host Hugh Hewitt and commentator Michelle Malkin were among those that began slamming Jordan last week after a Davos attendee posted an online account, but the establishment press was slow to pick up on the controversy. The Washington Post and Boston Globe published stories Tuesday and the Miami Herald ran one Thursday. Also on Thursday, Wall Street Journal editorial board member Bret Stephens, who was at Davos, published an account accusing Jordan of "defamatory innuendo," and the Associated Press moved a story. As of yesterday, the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and USA Today had not carried a staff-written story, and the CBS, NBC and ABC nightly news programs had not reported the matter. It was discussed on several talk shows on Fox News, MSNBC and CNBC but not on CNN." (See also: "CNN News Executive Eason Jordan Quits" (David Bauder, AP/Yahoo! News, 2005/02/11))
Friday,
February 11, 2005
News and
commentary:
"CNN News Executive Eason Jordan Quits" (David Bauder, AP/Yahoo! News, 2005/02/11)
"NEW YORK - CNN chief news executive Eason Jordan quit Friday amidst a furor over remarks he made in Switzerland last month about journalists killed by the U.S. military in Iraq.
Jordan said he was quitting to avoid CNN being "unfairly tarnished" by the controversy.
During a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum last month, Jordan said he believed that several journalists who were killed by coalition forces in Iraq had been targeted. ...
"I never meant to imply U.S. forces acted with ill intent when U.S. forces accidentally killed journalists, and I apologize to anyone who thought I said or believed otherwise," Jordan said in a memo to fellow staff members at CNN.
But the damage had been done, compounded by the fact that no transcript of his actual remarks has turned up. There was an online petition calling on CNN to find a transcript, and fire Jordan if he said the military had intentionally killed journalists." (Note: InstaPundit has a roundup of reactions. See also: "How Crazy Are They?" (Hindrocket, Power Line, 2005/02/01) and "Response from Eason Jordan" (Carol Platt Liebau, carolliebau.blogspot.com, 2005/02/02) and "Kurtz Does CNN's Damage Control" (Mickey Kaus, kausfiles, 2005/02/08))"On Message" (Joseph Braude, The New Republic, 2005/02/11)
Braude translates and comments on Al Zawahiri's latest speech:
"Al Zawahiri began by explaining what freedom is not:The freedom that we want is not the freedom of interest-bearing banks and vast corporations and misleading mass media; not the freedom of the destruction of others for the sake of materialistic interests; and not the freedom of AIDS and an industry of obscenities and homosexual marriages; and not the freedom to use women as a commodity to gain clients, win deals, or attract tourists; not the freedom of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and not the freedom of trading in the apparatus of torture and supporting the regimes of oppression and Copts and suppression, the friends of America; and not the freedom of Israel, with their annihilation of the Muslims and destruction of the Aqsa mosque; and not the freedom of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. ...
He goes on to offer an alternative:
Our freedom is a freedom of monotheism and morals and probity and asceticism and justice. The freedom that we are striving toward is on three foundations: The first is the rule of the Shari'a. The Shari'a, revealed by Almighty God, is the path that is obligatory to be followed. ... The second foundation, upon which reform must be established -- and this is a corollary to the first foundation -- is the freedom of the lands of Islam and their liberation from every robbing and looting aggressor. It is unimaginable that any reform may be realized for us while we are under the coercion of American and Jewish occupation."
(See also: "Al-Qaeda number two hits out at US in new audiotape" (AFP/Yahoo! News, 2005/02/10))
"Symposium: The Saddam-Osama Connection" (Jamie Glazov, FrontPageMagazine, 2005/02/11)
Robert Leiken on Laurie Mylroie: "Laurie has discovered Saddam’s hand in every major attack on US interests since the Persian Gulf War, including U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and even the federal building in Oklahoma City. These allegations have all been definitively refuted by the FBI, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and other investigatory bodies, as summarized in a piece by Peter Bergen, a journalist who has covered al Qaeda for many years. ...
Sadly, Laurie seems to have become something of a conspiracy theorist, clinging to her thesis that Saddam masterminded for more than a decade a vast terrorist conspiracy, notwithstanding all the evidence and expert opinion to the contrary. ...
There is no expert on terrorism who supports the idea of an operative al Qaeda-Saddam relationship, none of the eminences at St. Andrews or at Rand or at any Washington think tank. Not Paul Wilkinson, not Brian Jenkins, nor Magnus Ranstorp nor Bruce Hoffman or Gunaratna…. And Middle East experts such as Olivier Roy (“no bond existed between Iraq and Al-Qaida” — Le Figaro, January 3 2004) Giles Keppel, Barry Rubin, Geoffrey Kemp, Ken Pollock (Iraq- al Qaeda ties were "Tenuous and inconsequential.") and a legion of others agree with me not Laurie." (See also: "Armchair Provocateur" (Peter Bergen, The Washington Monthly, from the December 2003 issue) and "The Truth about the Saddam - al Qaeda Connection" (Robert S. Leiken, In the National Interest, from the November 2004 issue))"Why the Palestinians Came to the Table" (Charles Krauthammer, The Washington Post, 2005/02/11)
"And if you look closely at the pictures, you see Israeli flags flying publicly alongside the Arab flags at the Sharm el-Sheik summit.
There was no Israeli flag flying at the last summit involving Israel's then-prime minister and pathetic peace mendicant, Ehud Barak, when he came begging Arafat to make peace shortly before a disgusted Israeli public could vote him out of office.
Was not Barak the good guy? And Sharon the tough guy? Surprise. Arabs respect toughness. Sharon launched a massive invasion of the Palestinian territories after the Passover massacre of 2002. Western experts and the media were practically unanimous that this would achieve nothing.
Completely wrong. In fact, it is precisely Israel's aggressive counterattack against Palestinian terrorists, coupled with the defensive fence (which has prevented practically all suicide attacks wherever it has been built), that has brought us to this point of hope.""Jewish reporter acted like camp guard, says mayor" (Tom Baldwin, The Times, 2005/02/11)
Via Melanie Phillips, who notes: "It it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...":
"KEN LIVINGSTONE was accused last night of having “lost the plot” after an angry confrontation with a Jewish journalist who, he said, was behaving “just like a concentration camp guard”.
The [London] Mayor clashed with Oliver Finegold, a reporter from the London Evening Standard, on Wednesday night at a party marking the 20th anniversary of Chris Smith becoming the first openly gay MP.
His “concentration camp” remark came after being told that the reporter was Jewish, it was claimed.
It is also alleged that he told the reporter to “work for a paper that doesn’t have a record of supporting Fascism” — a reference to the pro-Hitler stance in the 1930s of the Standard’s stablemate, the Daily Mail.""Lawyers Take Uneasy Look at the Future" (William Glaberson, The New York Times, 2005/02/11)
Stewart II: "During the trial, prosecutors presented evidence showing that Ms. Stewart had called a reporter in Cairo to say that Mr. Abdel Rahman was withdrawing his support for a cease-fire his followers there had adopted.
The prosecution also showed videotapes of Ms. Stewart saying "good for them" when her client was told in her presence that a militant group in the Philippines had taken hostages. Recordings showed that she seemed to enjoy trying to distract prison guards so they would not know when her translator was giving Mr. Abdel Rahman messages about his followers and their plans.
After one such incident, according to a prosecution transcript, she said of her performance for the guards, 'I can get an Academy Award for it.'""Lawyer Is Guilty of Aiding Terror" (Julia Preston, The New York Times, 2005/02/11)
Stewart I: "Lynne F. Stewart, an outspoken lawyer known for representing a long list of unpopular defendants, was convicted yesterday by a federal jury in Manhattan of aiding Islamic terrorism by smuggling messages out of jail from a terrorist client.
In a startlingly sweeping verdict, Ms. Stewart was convicted on all five counts of providing material aid to terrorism and of lying to the government when she pledged to obey federal rules that barred her client, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, from communicating with his followers. Her co-defendants, Ahmed Abdel Sattar and Mohamed Yousry, were also convicted of all the charges against them. ...
"I see myself as being a symbol of what people rail against when they say our civil liberties are eroded," she said to a small cluster of her supporters outside the federal district courthouse. "I hope this will be a wake-up call to all the citizens of this country, that you can't lock up the lawyers, you can't tell the lawyers how to do their jobs."
"I will fight on, I'm not giving up," she promised defiantly. "I know I committed no crime. I know what I did was right."
But then her voice wavered and tears came to her eyes.
Ms. Stewart, who is 65, faces up to 30 years in jail."Added in archive:
"'Kill A Jew – Go To Heaven': A Study of the Palestinian Authority’s Promotion of Genocide" (Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook, Palestinian Media Watch, January 2005)
"The Truth about the Saddam - al Qaeda Connection" (Robert S. Leiken, In the National Interest, from the November 2004 issue)
"Armchair Provocateur" (Peter Bergen, The Washington Monthly, from the December 2003 issue)
Thursday,
February 10, 2005
News and
commentary:
"A Saudi woman walks outside a polling station in Riyadh..."
(Rabih Moghrabi, AFP, 2005/02/10)
"A Saudi woman walks outside a polling station in Riyadh during the desert kingdom's first municipal elections. Saudi men went to the polls in the country's first ever election, a municipal vote barred to women that represents a cautious initial step towards democracy in the ultra-conservative kingdom.""Say Islam is a religion of peace, or we'll kill you" (Robert Spencer, Dhimmi Watch, 2005/02/10)
"From the Orwellian Department: it's all because people talk bad about Islam, you see. Evidently if someone points out that Islam is unique among religions in having a doctrine of warfare against unbelievers, it will provoke Muslims into fighting that war, when they wouldn't have otherwise. ...:AMSTERDAM — The radicalisation of young Muslims is partly caused by the negative way Islam is being talked about in the Netherlands, the head of the security service AIVD has claimed.
Sybrand van Hulst made the suggestion during an interview with television current affairs programme Zembla on Wednesday night. ...
But he did not specify who he was referring too as being partly responsible for driving some young Muslims towards radicalism.
MPs Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Geert Wilders have led the criticism against aspects of Islam and the Muslim community in the Netherlands in recent years. Both have received death threats.
Filmmaker Theo van Gogh, another vocal critic of Islam, was murdered in Amsterdam on 2 November last year."(See also: "'Anti-Islamic rhetoric helps radicalisation'" (Expatica, 2005/02/10))
"Iran Promises 'Burning Hell' for Any Aggressor" (Amir Paivar, Reuters/My Way, 2005/02/10)
"TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran, facing mounting U.S. pressure over its nuclear program, promised Thursday a "burning hell" for any aggressor as tens of thousands marched to mark the 26th anniversary of its Islamic revolution.
"The Iranian nation does not seek war, does not seek violence and dispute. But the world must know that this nation will not tolerate any invasion," President Mohammad Khatami said in a fiery speech to the crowd in central Tehran.
"The whole Iranian nation is united against any threat or attack. If the invaders reach Iran, the country will turn into a burning hell for them," he added, as the crowd, braving heavy snow blizzards, chanted "Death to America!." ...
President Bush said Wednesday a nuclear-armed Iran would be "a very destabilizing force" and urged the West to work together to stop this happening.
"The Iranians just need to know that the free world is working together to send a very clear message: Don't develop a nuclear weapon," Bush said.""Al-Qaeda number two hits out at US in new audiotape" (AFP/Yahoo! News, 2005/02/10)
"An audiotape purportedly of Al-Qaeda number two Ayman al-Zawahiri hit out at the US concept of freedom, saying it was a cloak for spreading corruption and injustice in the Islamic world.
Liberty as construed by the Americans was based on "usurious banks, giant companies, misleading media outlets and the destruction of others for material gain," charged the voice in the recording aired by Arabic news channel Al-Jazeera.
Real freedom was "not the liberty of homosexual marriages and the abuse of women as a commodity to gain clients, win deals or attract tourists," said the voice.
"It is not the freedom of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib," it said, referring to US-run prisons in Cuba and Iraq where serious allegations of torture have been levelled.
'Our freedom ... and the reform that we are seeking depends on three concepts -- the rule of sharia (Islamic law) ... freeing Islam from any aggressor ... and liberating the human being.'""Ex-CIA Man Uncovers Jewish Conspiracy!" (James Taranto, Best of the Web Today, 2005/02/10)
"Last week [Michael] Scheuer turned up as a speaker at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, with Nick Lemann, dean of the Columbia University journalism school, acting as master of ceremonies. Scheuer elaborated on his theory about Israel's role on fomenting terror: ...Scheuer: I always have thought that there's nothing too dangerous to talk about in America, that there shouldn't be anything. And it happens that Israel is the one thing that seems to be too dangerous to talk about. And I wrote in my book that I congratulate them. It's probably the most successful covert action program in the history of man to control -- the important political debate in a country of 270 million people is an extraordinary accomplishment. I wish our clandestine service could do as well. ...
Questioner: I'm curious -- Gary Rosen from Commentary magazine. If you could just elaborate a little bit on the clandestine ways in which Israel and presumably Jews have managed to so control debate over this fundamental foreign policy question. ...
Scheuer: Well, the clandestine aspect is that, clearly, the ability to influence the Congress -- that's a clandestine activity, a covert activity. You know to some extent, the idea that the Holocaust Museum here in our country is another great ability to somehow make people feel guilty about being the people who did the most to try to end the Holocaust. I find -- I just find the whole debate in the United States unbearably restricted with the inability to factually discuss what goes on between our two countries.So let's see if we have this straight: The Council on Foreign Relations gives a public forum, hosted by a dean from an Ivy League university, to a guy who expounds crackpot theories about "clandestine" Jewish efforts to control America -- including the Holocaust Museum! -- and the "debate" is "unbearably restricted"?" (See also: "Winning or Losing? An Inside Look at the War on Terror" (Council on Foreign relations, 2005/02/03))
"'The United States Needs to Lose'" (James Taranto, Best of the Web Today, 2005/02/10)
"Metro Times, a Detroit weekly, quotes a new book from World's Laziest Columnist Gwynne Dyer:"The United States needs to lose the war in Iraq as soon as possible. Even more urgently, the whole world needs the United States to lose the war in Iraq. What is at stake now is the way we run the world for the next generation or more, and really bad things will happen if we get it wrong."
This is a common sentiment on the anti-American left, but Dyer deserves some credit for stating it so forthrightly." (See also: "Why we must lose this war" (Jack Lessenberry, Metro Times, 2005/02/19))
"Bush will not be mocked" (Mark Steyn, The Spectator, from the 2005/02/12 issue)
"But at the very bottom of the iceberg is a basic fact: most of the countries with the fastest-growing populations are Muslim, and most of the ones just beginning the demographic death-spiral are Western. So the one thing we can say for certain is that the world of the mid-21st century will be a lot more Islamic and a lot less European. In the space of 40 years, half of Nigeria has gone from living under English common law to Sharia. What’s the tipping point? And why would, say, Belgium be any more resistant than Nigeria? ...
That’s the seven eighths of the iceberg that the war’s really about: there are more Muslims, and more of those Muslims are radicalised. That doesn’t mean they all want to graduate to the top eighth and fly planes into skyscrapers or release a dirty nuke in Birmingham, but it does indicate that if you’re cooking up a scheme along those lines, you’ve got a much bigger talent pool to draw on — and that at a certain point they won’t need to release dirty nukes, because Islamification will be so advanced that many countries will simply find a way to accommodate it. Look at Holland, where Theo van Gogh’s fellow film-makers reacted to his murder by cancelling the screening of his picture and scheduling some Muslim propaganda flicks. Are these people likely to show any more backbone in 20 years’ time, when Europe’s cities are even more Islamic and even more radically Islamic?""The Record of a Radical" (Jacob Laksin, FrontPageMagazine, 2005/02/10)
More on Ward Churchill: "Churchill's unrelenting hatred stems from his belief that the United States is a genocidal state. In support of this argument, Churchill has gone so far as to falsely contend that, in the 1830s, the U.S. Army dispersed smallpox-infected blankets to Indians in a bid to exterminate them. Historians have stated this is fraud.
Churchill regards American history as one unbroken procession of genocidal tyranny, beginning in 1492. In accordance with this view, he condemns the arrival of Christopher Columbus as a “mistaken landfall,” that “unleashed a process of conquest and colonization unparalleled in the history of humanity.” The explorer is a frequent object of Churchill’s venom. Ever eager to draw scurrilous parallels with Nazism, Churchill also routinely equates Columbus with Nazi Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler. Churchill’s 1997 book makes the point more starkly; it is called, A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 through the Present. Other Churchill books, among them Fantasies of the Master Race (1992) and Colonization and Genocide in Native North America (1994), place the United States on par with Nazi Germany. Past students at the University of Colorado have reported that Churchill’s conception of America as the newest rendition of the Third Reich invariably finds its way into his lectures, particularly in the undergraduate class he teaches entitled 'American Holocaust.'" (See also: "Ward Churchill Is Just The Beginning" (David Horowitz, Rocky Mountain News/FrontPageMagazine, 2005/02/09) and "Scholar Defiant Amid Furor Over 9/11 Remarks" (Keith Coffman, AP/My Way, 2005/02/09))"Calling All Democrats" (Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times, 2005/02/10)
Friedman is surely wrong in his analysis of why and when Palestinian terror attacks "stopped": "Palestinian suicide bombing has stopped not because of the Israeli fence or because Palestinians are no longer "desperate." It has stopped because the Palestinians had an election, and a majority voted to get behind a diplomatic approach."
Well, that might sound nice, but here's the truth: Suicide bombings "stopped" months before the election and in all probability mainly because of the Israeli fence:
"In the past week, I've received several e-mail notes from Democrats about the Iraq elections, or heard comments from various Democratic lawmakers — always along the following lines: "Remember, Vietnam also had an election, and you recall how that ended." Or, "O.K., the election was nice, but none of it was worth $100 billion or 10,000 killed and wounded." Or, "You know, we've actually created more terrorists in Iraq — election or not."
I think there is much to criticize about how the war in Iraq has been conducted, and the outcome is still uncertain. But those who suggest that the Iraqi election is just beanbag, and that all we are doing is making the war on terrorism worse as a result of Iraq, are speaking nonsense.
Here's the truth: There is no single action we could undertake anywhere in the world to reduce the threat of terrorism that would have a bigger impact today than a decent outcome in Iraq. It is that important. And precisely because it is so important, it should not be left to Donald Rumsfeld.
Democrats need to start thinking seriously about Iraq — the way Joe Biden, Joe Lieberman and Hillary Clinton have. If France — the mother of all blue states - can do it, so, too, can the Democrats. Otherwise, they will be absenting themselves from the most important foreign policy issue of our day.""Mubarak, $2 Billion and Change" (Max Boot, Los Angeles Times, 2005/02/10)
"Here's a modest proposal: Reduce or eliminate altogether the $2-billion annual U.S. subsidy to Egypt unless there's real economic and political progress.":
"The Egyptian media also love more-modern conspiracy theories. They accuse the U.S. of dropping poisoned food packets in Afghanistan and spreading AIDS in Africa. Almost every terrorist outrage, including 9/11, is blamed on Americans or Israelis. Ibrahim Nafi, editor of the government newspaper Al-Ahram, wrote last year: "The West, and specifically those that are at the helm of their empire of evil, are the real terrorists…. The West is currently engaged in a war of annihilation against Muslims…."
Given the poisonous climate of opinion fostered by the Mubarak mafia, it is little wonder that the leader of the 9/11 hijackers was Egyptian or that Osama bin Laden's deputy is Egyptian. Egypt has long been a breeding ground of Islamist extremism. Mubarak uses this to his advantage by telling the West that if he falls, the fundamentalists will take over. To forestall this catastrophe, the 76-year-old generously proposes to "run" for a fifth term this fall as the only candidate on the ballot. But there is little evidence that Islamists are popular enough to win a free election in Egypt. They have flourished mainly because little mainstream opposition is allowed. The U.S. government should be funding the opposition, not the apparatus that represses it.""North Korea Says It Has Nuclear Weapons" (Sang-Hun Choe, AP/Yahoo! News, 2005/02/10)
"SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea on Thursday announced for the first time that it has nuclear arms and rejected moves to restart disarmament talks anytime soon, saying it needs the weapons as protection against an increasingly hostile United States.
The communist state's pronouncement dramatically raised the stakes in the two-year-old nuclear confrontation and posed a grave challenge to President Bush, who started his second term with a vow to end North Korea's nuclear program through six-nation talks.
"We ... have manufactured nukes for self-defense to cope with the Bush administration's ever more undisguised policy to isolate and stifle the (North)," the North Korean Foreign Ministry said in a statement carried by the state-run Korean Central News Agency.""Saudi women shut out of first election contest" (Samia Nakhoul, Reuters/Yahoo! News, 2005/02/10)
"RIYADH (Reuters) - Secluded from men at home and segregated from them in public, Saudi Arabia's women were shut out of the kingdom's first experiment in democratic voting.
Thursday's vote, to partly elect municipal councils, was by and for men only. Under Saudi Arabia's puritanical version of Islam women are treated as second-class citizens and put under the legal guardianship of their husbands or male relatives. ...
"Their message to us is that we're not citizens, we're not worthy, that we don't exist. This discrimination, this treatment of women as if we're minors, is killing. We face it every day in our lives," said [historian Hatoon] Fassi, who lobbied in vain for women to be able to vote and stand as candidates in the elections. ...
Activists say it is impossible to imagine how women could campaign for election when they are not allowed to have their photos in newspapers or hold public debates or appear on TV.
Even so, the landmark vote has sparked unprecedented debate in this closed society and encouraged many women to believe their rights cannot be kept brushed under the carpet for ever.""Saudi men vote in landmark elections" (Dominic Evans, Reuters/Yahoo! News, 2005/02/10)
"RIYADH (Reuters) - Saudi men have started voting in municipal elections in the capital Riyadh, the first stage in an unprecedented nationwide vote in the absolute monarchy which is inching toward reform. ...
Critics say the elections are largely a cosmetic response to reform demands. But diplomats say the vote will at least create a mechanism for Saudis to channel concerns and complaints.
Voters are deciding just half the members of municipal councils whose powers are likely to be limited. The other council members will be appointed.
Women cannot vote and few men registered in the Riyadh area — just 149,000 in a city of over four million people.""Arab Bank Says It Didn't Know of Payments to Bombers' Families" (James Cordahi, Bloomberg, 2005/02/10)
"Feb. 10 (Bloomberg) -- Arab Bank Plc didn't know payments made by a Saudi charity through the bank's branches in the West Bank and Gaza Strip were going to the families of suicide bombers, said Shukry Bishara, Arab Bank's chief banking officer.
The Saudi Committee in Support of the Intifada Al-Quds used Arab Bank to make at least six payments of 20,000 Saudi riyals ($5,332) each to relatives of bombers and gunmen, according to two lawsuits filed in the U.S. by the families of those who died in the attacks. The charity has raised more than $100 million to aid Palestinians injured in the conflict with Israel.
"We did not have prior knowledge of payments to the families of suicide bombers," Bishara, 57, said in an interview on Feb. 7 at Arab Bank's headquarters in Amman, Jordan. "We have zero role in determining who receives the payments and why that beneficiary received the payments."
Families of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the U.S. have used the courts to target Arab individuals, banks and governments, including Saudi Arabia. The families acting against Arab Bank are seeking $2 billion in damages. ...
Arab Bank, the third-largest Arab lender, may shut its New York office, set up in 1982, because of the "litigation environment in the U.S.," Bishara said. The Jordan Times reported yesterday that the bank will shut its New York branch in phases."
Wednesday,
February 9, 2005
News and
commentary:
"On the Justice of Roosting Chickens"
(Ward Churchill, AKPress, 2003/09/18)"Ward Churchill Is Just The Beginning" (David Horowitz, Rocky Mountain News/FrontPageMagazine, 2005/02/09)
Ward Churchill II: "Yes, Churchill is a self-declared ally of our enemies in the terrorist war against us. But so are many academic leftists, including those now rallying to his defense. A decent university system with serious academic standards would probably not have hired Churchill in the first place, let alone promoted him to a position of responsibility and honor as the chair of the Ethnic Studies Department. But that does not give the regents of the university the right to fire him because he has embarrassed them now. ...
The remedy for the Churchill problem is first of all to embrace the idea of intellectual diversity as a primary university value. This will insulate the university from attempts by legislators to remedy the situation themselves. The American public will accept the presence of an extremist like Churchill on a university faculty if they are convinced that the university is a true marketplace of ideas and that Churchill's perverse views will be answered by his peers.
The real problem is that there is no such diversity at the University of Colorado at Boulder today. In the present academic system, conservatives are as rare as unicorns, and have an almost impossible barrier to overcome in order to get hired. That is because search and hiring committees are composed of professors like Ward Churchill. That is the problem that the regents of the University of Colorado (and similar institutions) need to begin to address, now.""Scholar Defiant Amid Furor Over 9/11 Remarks" (Keith Coffman, AP/My Way, 2005/02/09)
Ward Churchill I: "BOULDER, Colo. (Reuters) - A University of Colorado professor under fire for comparing World Trade Center victims to a Nazi war criminal on Tuesday refused to apologize for his remarks.
"I am not backing off an inch," said Ward Churchill, drawing an ovation from a standing-room-only crowd of about 1,200 students and backers gathered in a ballroom. "I owe no one an apology." ...
In his essay, "Some People Push Back," written shortly after Sept. 11, Churchill said the hijackers had mounted "counterattacks" in the face of hostile U.S. policy in the Middle East and a campaign of "genocide" against Iraq through the trade sanctions imposed after the first Gulf War.
In the essay, later revised for a book, Churchill also said that World Trade Center victims could not be seen as innocent, calling them "little Eichmanns," a reference to German World War II criminal Adolf Eichmann.
"True enough, they were civilians of a sort," he wrote. 'But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire.'" (See also: "'Some People Push Back': On the Justice of Roosting Chickens" (Ward Churchill, Pockets of Resistance/kersplebedeb.com, 2001/09/11))"Slavery: Blame America First" (James Taranto, Best of the Web Today, 2005/02/09)
"In a review of a PBS documentary called "Slavery and the Making of America," Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales weighs in with this observation:In his State of the Union address, George W. Bush said Americans should congratulate themselves on turning "the abolition of slavery" from a dream into reality. Now there's a man who sees the glass half full, no matter what. He'd like to view slavery, the foulest blight on the history of this great nation, as something positive, a real victory for Our Way of Life.
Of course, if Shales were capable of nuance, he would see that it is true both that slavery was the foulest blight in American history and that its abolition was a real victory for Our Way of Life. Slavery, after all, was not just an American phenomenon, as Thomas Sowell points out:
To me the most staggering thing about the long history of slavery -- which encompassed the entire world and every race in it -- is that nowhere before the 18th century was there any serious question raised about whether slavery was right or wrong. In the late 18th century, that question arose in Western civilization, but nowhere else.
It seems so obvious today that, as Lincoln said, if slavery is not wrong, then nothing is wrong. But no country anywhere believed that three centuries ago.Treating slavery as a peculiarly American evil reflects a weird sort of self-loathing ethnocentrism, an attitude that one's own country can do no right." (See also: "The News Program That Ventures Beyond The Comfort Zone" (Tom Shales, The Washington Post, 2005/02/09) and "Ending slavery" (Thomas Sowell, Town Hall, 2005/02/09))
"Shia journalist murdered in Basra" (Richard Allen, The Times, 2005/02/09)
"A Shia journalist working for a US-funded television channel and his three-year-old son were murdered today in the southern Iraqi city of Basra.
Abdul Hussein al-Basri and his son were shot dead as they left their home. He worked for the television station al-Hurra, "The Free", which was launched a year ago to compete with other regional stations like al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya. ...
Al-Basri was a member of the Islamic Dawa Party, an influential Shia movement, and the editor of a local newspaper in Basra. He was also head of the press office at Basra City Council.
Sunni Muslim militants, many dedicated to the extremist Wahabi cult that originated in Saudi Arabia, are deliberately targeting Shias in Iraq in the hopes of fomenting sectarian violence and civil war.""The Middle East's dance of death" (Melanie Phillips, melaniephillips.com, 2005/02/09)
"Certainly, the Sharm-el-Sheikh summit represents some hitherto unimaginable developments. In Ha’aretz — the Guardian of Israel — once Sharon’s most bitter and implacable enemy, Yoel Marcus muses on one such extraordinary change:‘A distant observer of this ceremony might wonder at Sharon's transformation from the most hated, war-mongering man in the world to a man of peace and hope in the eyes of Europe and America. But more than anything else, he has been transformed in the eyes of the Arabs into the only Israeli leader who can lead to a permanent agreement. Sharon is the man of the hour. The image of a hesitant foot-dragger has been replaced by a decisive and determined leader, who has resolved to put an end to the anomaly of a state living without borders in a permanent state of war. Never was a leader forced to make such a daring political breakthrough under such harsh domestic conditions, with such great opposition from within his own camp and from all the crazed Greater Israel adherents.’ ...
The uncomfortable reality is that, while it is possible that Abbas will turn out to be a world-class statesman, what looks rather more likely is that he is instead a world-class tactician, who will be able to pose with ostensibly clean hands — and the approval of the gullible, Israel-hating west — disclaiming the murderous terrorism that Hamas and co will continue to inflict upon Israel, thus forcing Israel to react and casting it even more decisively as the regional bully. If this is so, then Israel is in even more danger now than it was in before — the danger of being trapped inside a far shrewder and more sophisticated dance of death." (See also: "Requiem for a referendum" (Yoel Marcus, Haaretz, 2005/02/09))
"Terror's New Frontier" (Ralph Peters, New York Post, 2005/02/09)
"After Baghdad, Mosul will remain the most bitterly contested Iraqi city in the months ahead.
Every blast and tactical ambush has a strategic purpose. The Sunni Arab insurgents need control of Mosul to remain viable. And the international terrorists want to deny it to all but Sunni Arabs. ...
The insurgents and terrorists alike recognize Mosul as the vital outpost of their blood and faith. If Iraq remains whole, the Sunni Arabs need to dominate Mosul for political leverage. Should Iraq break into three pieces, Mosul would be strategically and economically essential to a Sunni Arab state.
We see Mosul as a set of tactical problems. Our enemies view it as an indispensable fortress-city on the edge of the Sunni Arab world. ...
Our enemies fantasize about turning Mosul into another Mogadishu or Beirut. We need to prevent it from turning into another Fallujah. The odds are on our side, not theirs.
But be prepared for more bloodshed in Mosul. If our enemies lose the city, they've lost Iraq.""Blogger's 'Crime' Against the Islamic State" (Farouz Farzami, Los Angeles Times, 2005/02/09)
Farouz Farzami is the pseudonym of an Iranian blogger:
"TEHRAN — "Excuse me, Miss, but here in my hand I have a warrant for your arrest," said a middle-aged man with a few days' growth of beard. "Please do not make any noise as you walk calmly to the Mercedes parked at the corner."
When the man approached me, I had just left a bookstore. It crossed my mind to resist, but I thought better of it. ...
"Do you accept the charges?" the interrogator asked.
"What charges?"
"That you have written things in your Web log that go against the Islamic system and that encourage people to topple the system," he said. "You are inviting corrupt American liberalism to rule Iran."
"I've tried to write my ideas and opinions in my Web log and to communicate with others in Farsi all over the world," I said."
He was displeased. ...
I remained in prison for 36 days. Now I am awaiting trial. On my release I was reminded, "Be thankful to God that we arrested you. If you had been detained by the intelligence department of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards, they would surely have beaten you. Here you were our guest."
Before I departed I was politely asked to fill out a form seeking suggestions for improving conditions in the jail.""Urging New Path, Sharon and Abbas Declare Truce" (Steven Erlanger, The New York Times, 2005/02/09)
"HARM EL SHEIK, Egypt, Feb. 8 - Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, and Ariel Sharon, prime minister of Israel, held summit talks at this Egyptian resort on Tuesday - the highest-level meeting between the sides in four years - and declared a truce in hostilities.
Mr. Abbas said he and Mr. Sharon "have jointly agreed to cease all acts of violence against Israelis and Palestinians everywhere," while Mr. Sharon said they "agreed that all Palestinians will stop all acts of violence against all Israelis everywhere, and in parallel, Israel will cease all its military activity against all Palestinians everywhere."
Officials said Israel would also pull back its troops from five West Bank cities - Jericho, Bethlehem, Ramallah, Tulkarm and Qalqilya - in the next three weeks and stop the arrests and assassinations of top militants if they agree to put down their weapons.
There was an immediate reminder of the fragility of those declarations when spokesmen for the radical Palestinian group Hamas said the truce was not binding on them.
The summit meeting on the shores of the Red Sea was nonetheless filled with the symbolism of renewed hopes, as the Israeli and Palestinian leaders sat at a round table with their host, the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, and King Abdullah II of Jordan.
In the hall, the Israeli flag was displayed next to the Egyptian, Jordanian and Palestinian flags."Added in archive:
"Drinking with Christopher Hitchens and the Iraqis" (Michael J. Totten, michaeltotten.com, 2005/02/06)
"What Bin Laden Sees in Hiroshima" (Steve Coll, The Washington Post, 2005/02/06)
"Q&A: ElBaradei, Feeling the Nuclear Heat" (The Washington Post, 2005/01/30)
Tuesday,
February 8, 2005
News and
commentary:
"U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice..."
(Tony Gentile, Reuters, 2005/02/08)
"U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice adjusts her earpiece during a joint news conference with Italian Foreign Minister Gianfranco Fini at the Villa Madama in Rome, February 8, 2005.""Remarks at The Institut d'Etudes Politiques - Science Politique Paris" (Condoleezza Rice, U.S. Department of State, 2005/02/08)
"Our charge is clear: We on the right side of freedom's divide have an obligation to help those unlucky enough to have been born on the wrong side of that divide.":
"In my own experience, a black woman named Rosa Parks was just tired one day of being told to sit in the back of a bus, so she refused to move. And she touched off a revolution of freedom across the American South.
In Poland, Lech Walesa had had enough of the lies and the exploitation, so he climbed a wall and he joined a strike for his rights; and Poland was transformed.
In Afghanistan just a few months ago, men and women, once oppressed by the Taliban, walked miles, forded streams and stood hours in the snow just to cast a ballot for their first vote as a free people.
And just a few days ago in Iraq, millions of Iraqi men and women defied the terrorist threats and delivered a clarion call for freedom. Individual Iraqis risked their lives. One policeman threw his body on a suicide bomber to preserve the right of his fellow citizens to vote. They cast their free votes, and they began their nation's new history.
These examples demonstrate a basic truth -- the truth that human dignity is embodied in the free choice of individuals. ...
We have had our disagreements. But it is time to turn away from the disagreements of the past. It is time to open a new chapter in our relationship, and a new chapter in our alliance. ...
Ladies and Gentlemen, this is a time of unprecedented opportunity for the transatlantic Alliance. If we make the pursuit of global freedom the organizing principle of the 21st century, we will achieve historic global advances for justice and prosperity, for liberty and for peace. But a global agenda requires a global partnership. So let us multiply our common effort."
"Bush/Hitler and How History Repeats Itself"
(Antiprotester Journal, 2005/02/09)"A high-school art project on Bush and Hitler" (Mark Reynolds, The Providance Journal, 2005/02/08)
"PROVIDENCE, R.I. - Jeffrey Eden devised his award-winning project less than 30 minutes after his high-school art teacher asked him to express a thought or two in a three-dimensional way.
So, in the wake of last year's polarizing election and the war in Iraq, the 17-year-old built an abstract scene comparing President Bush's war policies with Adolf Hitler's pillage of Europe.
The student's diorama-like assemblage juxtaposes Hitler quotes with Bush statements, Nazi swastikas with American flags, desert-colored toy soldiers with olive plastic figures. And so on.
Eden said he's trying to point out certain similarities between the U.S.-led war in Iraq and the German blitzkrieg - without actually equating Hitler to Bush.
In this, the success of his project is debatable.
Nonetheless, it has earned the Charlestown student a silver key at the Rhode Island Scholastic Art Awards. It has also tested the contest's commitment to an overriding principle: that students should be encouraged to express their own thoughts through art.
The piece, titled "Bush/Hitler and How History Repeats Itself," triggered a complaint soon after it was displayed at a store with other award-winning entries last week." (Hat tip: Michelle Malkin.)"What they played in Rotterdam instead of Submission" (Robert Spencer, Dhimmi Watch, 2005/02/08)
"Bowing to Muslim pressure, The Netherlands' principal film festival cancelled a showing of the murdered filmmaker Theo van Gogh's Submission, an exposé of the mistreatment of women mandated by Islamic law.
But they did show Yasmin (thanks to Twostellas for the link), a film that so distorts the reality of anti-Muslim bigotry in England that twice its attempts to film acts of hatred against Muslims were interrupted by non-Muslim bystanders who, unaware that what they were seeing was part of a film, rushed to the aid of the beleaguered Muslims. The film nevertheless portrays Britain as a hotbed of anti-Muslim hatred." (See also: "European Cinema Exposes Anti-Muslim Practices" (Khaled Shawkat, Islam Online, 2005/02/07): "Scottish movie “Yasmin”, directed by Kenny Glenaan, blamed the “racism” of British authorities in dealing with Muslims after the 9/11 attacks as the main reason for many young British Muslims joining Al-Qaeda and other extremist groups." Also: "Fears prompt withdrawal of Van Gogh film" (The Guardian, 2005/01/27))"Kurtz Does CNN's Damage Control" (Mickey Kaus, kausfiles, 2005/02/08)
More on the Eason Jordan affair: "If you were worrying that WaPo's conflicted Howie Kurtz would bend over backwards to be tough on his own CNN bosses, you can stop now. Kurtz's article ... well, let's just say that if a p.r. agent or damage control spinner produced a piece designed to try and save CNN exec Eason Jordan's job, it would be the piece Kurtz wrote in the Post today. Why? Here are some of the blatant and subtle pro-Jordan tricks: ...Rony Abovitz -- mentioned in passing by Kurtz only as supporting the proposition that Jordan "backpedaled when challenged," when in fact he is one of the main witnesses against Jordan who criticizes even Jordan's post-backpedaling comments. Abovitz wrote that Jordan at first "asserted that he knew of 12 journalists who had not only been killed by US troops in Iraq, but they had in fact been targeted. He repeated the assertion a few times, which seemed to win favor in parts of the audience (the anti-US crowd)." Then, according to Abovitz
Eason did backpedal and make a number of statements claiming that he really did not know if what he said was true, and that he did not himself believe it. But when pressed by others, he seemed to waver back and forth between what might have been his beliefs and the realization that he had created a kind of public mess. ...[snip] His statements, his reaction, and the reaction of all in attendance left me perplexed and confused. Many in the crowd, especially those from Arab nations, applauded what he said and called him a "very brave man" for speaking up against the U.S. in a public way amongst a crowd ready to hear anti-US sentiments. I am quite sure that somewhere in the Middle East, right now, his remarks are being printed up in Arab language newspapers as proof that the U.S. is an evil and corrupt nation. [Emph. added]"
(Hat tip: Hugh Hewitt. See also: "Eason Jordan, Quote, Unquote" (Howard Kurtz, The Washington Post, 2005/02/08) and "Do US Troops Target Journalists in Iraq?" (Rony Abovitz, ForumBlog.org, 2005/01/28) . Also: "Response from Eason Jordan" (Carol Platt Liebau, carolliebau.blogspot.com, 2005/02/02) and "How Crazy Are They?" (Hindrocket, Power Line, 2005/02/01))
"Denying Terrorism" (Daniel Pipes, New York Sun/danielpipes.org, 2005/02/08)
"Anyone following the investigation into the mid-January slaughter of the Armanious family (husband, wife, two young daughters), Copts living in Jersey City, N.J., knows who the presumptive suspects are: Islamists furious at a Christian Egyptian immigrant who dares engage in Internet polemics against Islam and who attempts to convert Muslims to Christianity.
The authorities, however, have blinded themselves to the extensive circumstantial evidence, insisting that "no facts at this point" substantiate a religious motive for the murders." ...
This attitude of denial fits an all-too-common pattern. I previously documented a reluctance in nearby New York City to see as terrorism the 1994 Brooklyn Bridge ("road rage" was the FBI's preferred description) and the 1997 Empire State Building shootings ("many, many enemies in his mind," said Rudolph Giuliani). And the July 2002 LAX murders were initially dismissed as "a work dispute" and the October 2002 rampage of the Beltway snipers went unexplained, leaving the press to ascribe it to such factors as a "stormy [family] relationship."
These instances are part of a yet-larger pattern.• The 1990 murder of Rabbi Meir Kahane by the Islamist El Sayyid Nosair was initially ascribed by the police to "a prescription drug for or consistent with depression."
• The 1999 crash of EgyptAir 990, killing 217 - by a co-pilot not supposed to be near the aircraft's controls at that time who repeated 11 times "I rely on God" as he wrenched the plane down - went unexplained by the National Transportation Safety Board.
• The 2002 purposeful crash of a small plane into a Tampa high-rise by bin Laden-sympathizer Charles Bishara Bishop went unexplained; the family chimed in by blaming the acne drug Accutane.
• The 2003 murder and near-decapitation in Houston of an Israeli by a former Saudi friend who had newly become an Islamist found the police unable to discern "any evidence" that the crime had anything to do with religion."
(See also: "More Incidents of 'Denying Terrorism'" (Daniel Pipes, danielpipes.org, 2005/02/08))
"C4 lines up Guantánamo-style torture show" (Dominic Timms, The Guardian, 2005/02/08)
"Channel 4 is to broadcast what it is styling a Guantánamo Bay-style reality show that will examine the effects of mild torture on seven male volunteers.
The Guantánamo Guidebook will recreate some of the practices used at the US naval base where hundreds of so-called "enemy combatants" have been held without trial or access to lawyers for nearly three years.
Using an east London warehouse and declassified internal documents obtained from US sources, programme-makers mocked up conditions as they are inside Guantánamo, before subjecting seven volunteers to some of the milder forms of torture alleged to have been used by US authorities.
The programme exposed the volunteers, three of whom are Muslim, to 48 hours of "torture lite" including sleep deprivation, the use of extreme temperatures and "mild" physical contact.
As at Guantánamo and more vividly in Abu Ghraib, the volunteers were also subject to periods of enforced nudity and religious and sexual humiliation.""Sistani 'not seeking Islamic law'" (BBC News, 2005/02/08)
"A spokesman for Iraq's most influential Shia cleric has denied reports that the cleric is demanding that Islam be the country's sole source of law.
Hamed Khafaf said Ayatollah Ali Sistani believes Iraq's new constitution should respect what he described as the Islamic cultural identity of Iraqis.
Shia success in the election led to speculation that the ayatollah wanted a constitution based on Sharia law.
Mr Khafaf said the speculation was baseless.
He insisted that Ayatollah Sistani's position had not changed.
In Ayatollah Sistani's view, his spokesman went on to say, it was up to the elected representatives of the people in the new National Assembly to decide the details.
Mr Khafaf said the ayatollah had approved the current wording of Iraq's interim constitution, which states that Islam is a source of legislation and no law contradicting Islamic tenets may be passed." (See also: "Iraq Shiite leaders demand Islam be the source of law" (AFP/Yahoo! News, 2005/02/06))"Suicide Bomber Kills at Least 21 in Baghdad" (Gideon Long and Alister Bull, Reuters, 2005/02/08)
"BAGHDAD (Reuters) - A suicide bomber killed at least 21 people and wounded nearly 30 outside an Iraqi security forces recruitment center in Baghdad Tuesday in the deadliest insurgent attack since last month's historic election.
The blast came a day after suicide bombers killed 27 people in attacks in two Iraqi cities. Between them, the three bombs have shattered the lull in violence that followed the poll.
The al Qaeda wing in Iraq, led by Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, claimed responsibility for the latest attack, as it did for Monday's blasts in the cities of Mosul and Baquba.
"Here come the convoys of martyrs to strike the headquarters of infidels and apostates, and this is the beginning of the escalation we had promised," the group said in an Internet statement. It described the victims as "apostate pagan guards who are agents of the Jews and crusaders." (See also: "More than 20 dead as Iraqi police targeted" (AFP/Yahoo! News, 2005/02/07))
Mahmoud Abbas and Ariel Sharon shake hands
(Lefteris Pitarakis, AP, 2005/02/08)
"Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, right, and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, left, also known as Abu Mazen, shake hands prior to their delegations' meeting at the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheik, Egypt, Tuesday Feb 8, 2005.""Mideast Leaders Pledge to End Violence" (Lara Sukhtian, AP/Yahoo! News, 2005/02/08)
"SHARM EL-SHEIK, Egypt - Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas declared Tuesday that their people would stop all military or violent activity, pledging to break the four-year cycle of bloodshed and get peace talks back on track.
With the flags of their countries whipping in the wind, Sharon and Abbas met face-to-face at a Mideast summit Tuesday. Afterward, Abbas said: "We have agreed on halting all violent actions against Palestinians and Israelis wherever they are."
Sharon made a similar pledge.
"Today, in my meeting with chairman Abbas, we agreed that all Palestinians will stop all acts of violence against all Israelis everywhere, and, at the same time, Israel will cease all its military activity against all Palestinians everywhere," he said.""Beyond tyranny's shadow" (Fouad Ajami, USNews.com, from the 2005/02/14 issue)
"One plain, unsentimental truth of these elections is their importance in the court of American opinion. In the past few months, Americans had grown estranged from Iraq and its people. There had come disenchantment even to countless people who had supported the war to begin with. The images from Iraq were of a people in a state of constant agitation; there had not been enough gratitude in Iraq for America's sacrifices. The kind of sentiment expressed to Colonel Miles in Kirkuk was never voiced in public. Now, on a surprising day, Iraqis went out and did the most American of civic deeds: They cast their ballots; they shed their fears and their second-guessing of the American forces in their midst to claim their own history, to show the world that they are eager to move beyond tyranny's shadow. ...
The Cassandras warn that the Kurds want full independence, that the Shiites yearn for a theocracy like Iran's, and that the Sunni Arabs will never accept their loss of dominion. The Cassandras have Iraq's history on their side, and the terrible ways of an Arab political tradition steeped in authoritarianism and sectarian bigotry. But they may lose their bet -- again. Iraq surprised them on January 30, and the new history may yet stick on that hard Mesopotamian land.""The Fighting Islamists of Notre Dame" (Thomas Ryan, FrontPageMagazine, 2005/02/08)
Ryon on the Kroc Institute at Notre Dame:
"In 2003, Notre Dame required incoming freshmen to complete an assigned reading in preparation for an academic convocation entitled, “The United States and the Middle East: Do We Face a 'Clash of Civilizations?'” [The Kroc Institute Director, R. Scott] Appleby moderated the convocation. The assigned reading was not Samuel Huntington’s path-breaking (but pro-Western book) of that title. It was Seyyed Hossein Nasr's book The Heart Of Islam: Enduring Values for Humanity, an apologist’s view of Islam, which hides the darker sides of fundamentalist Islam. ... In a September, 2003 article in the student newspaper The Observer, Martin shared his thoughts on the text:Months ago, when I first learned that my class was having an ‘academic convocation,’ I was baffled. As our servicemen are dying fighting murderous Islamic fundamentalists across the globe, the University wrote to tell me that I was expected to sit in an ivory tower and have ‘intellectual’ discussions about Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s The Heart of Islam? … [M]ost offensive is when Nasr writes, ‘When some people attack Islam for inciting struggle in the name of justice, they forget the Boston Tea Party and the American Revolution.’ Nasr equates systematic attacks carried out by Muslims on innocent men, women and children to the actions of our founding fathers. In essence, Nasr finds little difference between a suicide bombing of a bus of school children and our founding fathers throwing British tea into the Boston Harbor."
(See also: "Misrepresenting the facts is not being understanding" (Dan Martin, The Observer, 2003/09/29))
"The Cows Come Home"
(The Wandering Jew, 2005/02/08)"The Cows Come Home" (Brendan Miniter, The Wall Street Journal, 2005/02/08)
"If George W. Bush is a cowboy, then one of his most trusted hands just brought in a stray. Thanks to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's recent trip to Europe, Germany is now promising to rejoin the herd migrating toward Iraqi democracy. This was not how it was supposed to be. Last year John Kerry claimed only he could bring in the wayward European cattle. ...
Two elections have forced "old Europe" to reconsider where its interests lie. Mr. Schroeder is burying the hatchet because he knows he must now deal with President Bush for another four years. At the same time, it is now undeniable that the U.S. is not fighting a popular insurgency in Iraq and is successfully helping a people liberate itself from tyranny. With the terrorists declaring war on the democratic process and eight million people voting anyway, the Iraqi people clearly want democracy, not another strongman. As Iraq stabilizes, look for Europe increasingly to back the government that emerges. After all, European nations need oil too and won't benefit by having chilly relationships with the new democratic Iraq. ...
In confronting Iran and Syria or pressing for democracy in Egypt or Saudi Arabia, President Bush can expect little support from either France or Germany. But when American policies begin to succeed, when the U.S. leads the world to greener pastures ahead,
