Jobs or Entitlements, But Not Both
Wealth redistribution on the other hand chops up the ladder, and strands 90 percent of the population on the ground floor.
At a conference, Bill Gates mourned that people weren’t willing to die 3 months earlier, in order to keep public school teachers employed. But why draw the line at only 3 months, NHS certainly hasn’t. Think of how much you could save by not treating terminally ill patients at all. And what about babies born with birth defects. And the mentally retarded. Just imagine how many more union employees could featherbed to their heart’s content, if only we killed every mentally retarded baby at birth. Forget eugenics in the name of genetic superiority, when we can have eugenics in the name of public sector unions. Because when there are no jobs someone has to pay, even if they’re struggling for breath on a ventilator at the time.
But Socialism calls for these kinds of tough choices. If J.D. Rockefeller had stomped around hospital wards looking for patients to pull the plug on so he could hire ten more coal miners, there would be a movie about it. And you just know it would win a heap of Oscars. But when Bill Gates does it to make sure that New York City school teachers on permanent suspension for sexually harassing students still get their paycheck, even if we have to stuff a pillow over granny’s face, it’s downright noble.
Killing people for capitalism is evil, killing people for socialism is idealistic. Capitalism gets There Will Be Blood. Socialism gets The Motorcycle Diaries. But for all his faults, the old robber barons did a lot more to help people, than the socialists with all their red flags and their red hands did. And paradoxically, without the Rockefeller Foundation, plenty of graduates with a Masters in Philosophy and a Minor in Student Radicalism would never have gotten the chance to carve up the American educational system into a sham of a farce that mainly teaches how awful capitalism is.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Andrew Bostom: The Islamintern is Coming to (Chi-) Town
President Obama’s adopted home town will host an event next week that epitomizes Sharia encroachment: the global Islamintern is coming to Chi-town.
Next Tuesday through Thursday September 28-30, 2010, the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC), our era’s “Islamintern,” in cooperation with the American Islamic College (AIC) is sponsoring a program at the AIC’s Chicago campus, entitled, “The Role of the OIC and The scope for its relations with American Muslims.” Founded in 1969, the OIC is now a 56 state collective which includes every Islamic nation on earth. Currently headed by Turkey’s Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, the OIC thus represents the entire Muslim umma (or global community of individual Muslims), and is the largest single voting bloc in the United Nations (UN).
John Laffin, the late (d. 2000) military historian, and prolific writer on Islam, warned already in 1988 that the Jedda-based OIC, under Saudi Arabia’s patronage, was persuading Muslim nations to jettison even their inchoate adoption of “Western models and codes,” and revert to pre-colonial era (pre-Western) retrograde systems of Sharia, or Islamic Law. The Saudis proffered sizable loans and grants from their institutions in return for the more extensive application of Sharia in these targeted OIC countries. Laffin also noted the unprecedented Saudi distribution of media and print materials which extended to non-Muslim countries, including tens of millions of Korans, translated into many languages for the hundreds of millions of Muslims (and non-Muslims) who did not read Arabic. He concluded at that time,
Propaganda is carried on from Riyadh on a scale comparable to Moscow’s effort to spread Communism
Fast forward two decades to June, 2007, when President Bush, during a re-dedication ceremony for the Saudi-funded Islamic Center Washington, DC announced that a special US envoy to the 56 Muslim nation Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) would be appointed. According to the President, this envoy’s mission would be to “listen and learn.” Within a day of Mr. Bush’s announcement, investigative journalist Steve Emerson warned that the appointment of such an envoy was a potentially serious error, observing appositely, …
| — Hat tip: Andy Bostom | [Return to headlines] |
Debate Over Afghanistan ‘Almost Tore White House Apart’
The debate on Afghanistan policy caused major divisions in the White House, according to a new book, provoking bitter rows and bickering between senior advisers to President Barack Obama.
During the long debate in 2009 about to what degree to escalate the war, two officials expressed doubt that the Afghan war strategy would work, while the meaning of a July 2011 deadline to begin withdrawing US troops was misunderstood by some generals. “Obama’s Wars” by Bob Woodward, the best-selling author who broke the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s, chronicles the often heated debates inside the White House.
According to an advance copy obtained by the New York Times, it portrays the president as a calm, professorial presence who could at times snap and show his frustration. It says he grew tired with the military demanding more and more troops for Afghanistan. Among his staff and aides there was regular back-biting. Vice President Joe Biden called Richard Holbrooke, the special envoy to Afghanistan, “the most egotistical bastard I’ve ever met.” There is scorn expressed for James Jones, who has never been highly rated in Washington. Robert Gates, the Defence Secretary, worried that General Jones would be succeeded by his deputy, Thomas Donilon, who would be a “disaster”. Gen David Petraeus, then chief of the central command region that included Iraq and Afghanistan, is said to have avoided contact with David Axelrod, the senior strategist, whom he regarded as “a complete spin doctor”.
Despite criticism from Republicans that he doesn’t have the stomach to defend America, the author says that Mr Obama strongly supported the CIA drone attacks on al-Qaeda militants in Pakistani territory. Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, reportedly asked a security adviser, “who did we get today?”. Mr Woodward has written more than a dozen bestsellers, several of them offering detailed accounts of major decision-making processes in different White House administrations.
| — Hat tip: JP | [Return to headlines] |
Democracy is Not Freedom
American principles are based upon the core element of the Declaration of Independence — equal justice. This is the system of law that applies the same law to every person and which implements the concept of a higher law — labeled under the Declaration as “Unalienable Rights.” These are the rights imbued and inherent within each of us that allow all people to lead a life of one’s own, with the liberty to act and the right to the use and enjoyment of one’s private property.
Under equal justice, government power accordingly is limited. Such is the foundation of the American Republic. Today, that Republic is in near ruin. When a Republic that is granted limited power is replaced by a democracy with virtually unlimited power, the political recognition of unalienable rights is lost and mob rule replaces individual rights.
Democracy utilizes a different system of justice called social justice. Social justice generates differing results to different groups of people depending on the law’s finding of “common good.” Because the “common good” changes from day to day, no one can ever know who will have what rights tomorrow.
In an attempt to provide “equity” to all groups, social justice creates overlapping castes, each representing a “common good” de jour and each clamoring for more power. But no principle regarding the protection of the ideal of private property exists under social justice. Private use of property may be granted “interim protection” under social justice law, but only when such a conclusion is thought to advance the common good. Yet, even when seeming protections of unalienable rights arise under social justice, they can be retracted later on when they have served their purpose because perceptions of “common good” are always subject to “change.”
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Doc of the Day: Feds’ Guide to Snitching on Your Terrorist Neighbor
That dude next door, man — I used to think he was an OK guy, but now all the bags of fertilizer from Home Depot piled up in his garage are starting to worry me. And what’s with that beard? He’s not a — you don’t think —
For today’s Doc of the Day, here’s a handy pamphlet prepared by federal law enforcement to help you navigate the uncertainties of an age of homegrown terrorism, helpfully illustrated with pictures of New Mexico-born extremist preacher Anwar al-Awlaki and New York food-cart guy/sleeper agent Najibullah Zazi.
Be on the lookout, warn the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the National Counterterrorism Center, for such “indicators of possible terrorist activity” as “behavior that could indicate participation in surveillance of potential targets,” “travel or interest in traveling overseas to attend violent extremist institutions or paramilitary camps,” or checking out “websites and reading materials that advocate violence and then initiating action in support of this activity.” See something? Say something!
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Ground Zero Mosque Site Already Open for Prayers… Despite Derelict Building Having Holes in the Floor
The site of the proposed Ground Zero mosque is already open for prayer, despite officials describing conditions as ‘immediately hazardous’.
Several hundred worshippers are currently using the building, which is in Lower Manhattan, for services once a week.
The building currently has holes in the floor and no proper automatic sprinkler system.
City inspectors have handed out warnings about the state of the property on August 1 and September 3.
In spite of the violations the owners of the 152-year-old building were handed a temporary permits from the city to use it.
‘The two violations will not impact the current temporary place-of-assembly permit, which allows the space to be occupied’, said Buildings Department spokesman Tony Sclafani..
This news will anger those who were opposed to the building of the Islamic centre — especially with it coming so soon after the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
| — Hat tip: Gaia | [Return to headlines] |
Mr. Norquist, Let’s See What This Contract Says First!
Here we go again, the Washington ruling class, led by the likes of Grover Norquist (Americans for Tax Reform), expects Tea Partiers to line up behind a new Contract for (from? with?) America once the smart people get it together.
Norquist, Dick Armey and other establishment Republicans have been busy since at least the beginning of the year trying to keep the Tea Parties in line and off some issues of great concern to conservative activists. Sorry Grover, but the issue of spending alone doesn’t fire up the majority of Tea Partiers all by itself.
And, your condescending tone doesn’t help your cause either— “Shiny objects,” “flapping tongues,” and “gorilla dust.” Really now!
From Grover Norquist at Fox News :…
| — Hat tip: RRW | [Return to headlines] |
Review: Long-Time St. Louis Activist Exposes Historic Disasters of Socialism in Latest Book
St. Louis patriot Fred Sauer recently released an amazing new book: A Simple Guide: How Liberalism, A Euphemism for Socialism, Destroys Peoples and Nations.
This is one of the most unusual, fascinating, and thorough unwrappings of socialism that you will ever read.
The author first provides a concise examination of the economic outcomes of the various nations who took the bitter pill of socialism in the 20th Century. Having provided this context, he then systematically exposes the major political actions and techniques that Liberals have used in the last 100 years to subvert representative government and achieve single party control of our great nation.
The conclusions are devastating. They reveal just how dangerous is the precipice upon which the United States of America finds itself at this time in our history.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Service or Sacrifice
National Day of Service: Deliberate attempt to drain the day of its meaning, to obscure the tragedy with feel good sentiments about the environment and community projects.
Three years ago Reverend Lennox Yearwood was comparing the captured Al Queda and Taliban terrorists to civil rights heroine Rosa Parks, and demanding the shutdown of Guantanamo Bay. But last year Reverend Yearwood was conducting a conference call on behalf of the Obama Administration laying out plans to turn the commemoration of the terrorist attacks of September 11th into a “National Day of Service”.
While there is nothing wrong with giving blood, picking up trash off the sidewalks or serving as a volunteer dance instructor—some of the projects listed by the official 911 Day of Service website, they are not what the commemoration of 9/11 is about. They are instead a deliberate attempt to drain the day of its meaning, to obscure the tragedy with feel good sentiments about the environment and community projects that do not address the meaning of September 11.
9/11 was indeed a Day of Service, but not the sort of generic service that the Obama Administration has in mind. It was a day when police officers and firefighters rushed up story after story, through thick choking smoke and weighed down by their equipment in the hopes of saving lives. Many died. Some are still dying now, year after year. That was their service.
[…]
The attempt to erase 9/11 from collective memory, particularly the memory of American schoolchildren
The new 9/11 is to be a day full of smiles. A deep drink of the waters of Lethe, exchanging memory for upbeat forgetfulness. To return once again to 9/10, to a world in which our biggest challenges are trash in the park and the lack of dance instructors in Harlem. All of it dressed up in cheerful rhetoric about coming together to serve, but what are we serving besides suicidal pacifism stamped with a colorful logo.
The author Francis Fukayama famously said, “Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.” The attempt to erase 9/11 from collective memory, particularly the memory of American schoolchildren, who are the key target of this project, that new generation of Americans who grew up in the shadow of the lost towers, will insure that this is a tragedy and an atrocity that will be repeated over and over again… until we not only remember, but actually understand what it is we are remembering.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Trial to Open for Christian Missionaries Arrested at Arab International Festival in Dearborn
Four Christian missionaries arrested in June at the Dearborn Arab International Festival are heading to trial today after a judge denied a motion to dismiss the case.
Attorneys for the evangelists, who are part of a group known as “Act 17 Apologetics,” say their clients were attempting to engage Muslims in a dialogue about their faith.
But critics argue the suspects hoped to cause a scene at the festival, and Dearborn Police Chief Ron Haddad explained they were arrested for disorderly conduct to ensure they did not provoke violence from other attendees.
Defense attorney Robert Muise of the Ann Arbor-based Thomas More Law Center sought to dismiss the case on the grounds the arrests were unconstitutional — an argument law professors say has merit — but the Detroit Free Press reports 19th District Court Judge Mark Somers on Friday denied the request.
“I think the evidence will show they did absolutely nothing wrong,” Muise told the newspaper, explaining he’s confident his clients will prevail at trial.
The case is being watched closely by First Amendment scholars and political pundits.
| — Hat tip: KGS | [Return to headlines] |
Video: Two Men Charged in Violent Racist Beating of White Teen
WARNING: Graphic content
The two men robbed the teen, burnt him, beat him, p***ed on him and whipped him with this own belt for four hours.
Two men who were questioned and released by Seattle police after a West Seattle teen was beaten in a racially charged attack have been charged in connection with the May 25 assault. One of the men was arrested Tuesday evening.
DNA recently linked Ahmed Mohamed and Jonathan Baquiring to the attack in which a 16-year-old boy was robbed, taunted with racial insults, burned with a lit cigarette and punched repeatedly. Mohamed, 22, and Baquiring, 21, each were charged Monday with first-degree robbery and malicious harassment, the state’s hate-crime statute.
[…]
The victim, Shane McClellan, said he was walking home around 2 a.m. when two men, whom he described as black and Filipino, asked him for a light.
He said the two men then robbed him and beat him for four hours, whipping him with his own belt while saying things like, “How do you like it, white boy?” and “This is for enslaving our people,” according to the police report.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Video: It Begins… The Ohio Democrat Party Chairman is Now Calling Tea Party Patriots “F***ers.”
Via Michelle Malkin— Ohio Democrat Party chairman Chris Redfern says out loud what all of his cohorts really feel about the grass-roots Tea Party patriots. Here he is cursing activists who reject the notion that federally-subsidized health care is a right.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Algerian Women Suicide Bombers ‘Poised to Strike Europe’
Rome, 22 Sept. (AKI) — European airports and other transport hubs are on “high alert” amid fears of a spate of attacks by Algerian female suicide bombers, Israeli intelligence website Debka said on Wednesday, citing counter terrorism sources.
Security has been stepped up at London’s Heathrow, Amsterdam’s Schiphol and airports in Mocow, Berlin and Rome, as well as at major European railway and underground stations, Debka said.
The commander of French police and security services Frederic Pechenard said on radio Wednesday they had “serious evidence coming from reliable intelligence sources telling us there is a risk of a major attack.”
Al-Qaida in North Africa was targeting France in particular, he said.
The threat included “the assassination of an important figure or an attempted mass casualty attack on a crowded public area like a metro train or department store,” Pechenard said.
One of the main prospective targets for the suicide bombings is reportedly the Gare du Nord station in Paris, where trains depart for London and cities in Italy, Belgium and Switzerland.
Besides French intelligence, Debka said the “reliable sources” referred to by Pechenard were Algerian intelligence DGDS, Algerian military intelligence, the Moroccan DST and the United States AFRICOM which coordinates anti-terror activities against Al-Qaeda in the Horn of Africa and the Sahara region.
Debak said these sources had reported that Al-Qaeda in North Africa (AQIM) had assigned to Europe and France in particular a number of Algerian jihadist women trained to carry out suicide bombings on trains and stations.
Security has been massively stepped up at St Pancras International Train Station in central London and on England’s four mainline rail services. Security has also been ratcheted up on the Eurostar service, connecting London to Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam and major cities in Germany, Debka said, citing “our counterterrorism sources.”
“A single bomber aboard one of the Eurorail multi-country links could wreak havoc along the entire line,” Debka said.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Controversial Prophet Mohammed Cartoons to Return
(CNN) — The cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed that sparked protests worldwide four years ago will be republished in a new book soon.
Staffers at Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten said the cartoons will be in a book created by cultural editor Flemming Rose and will be titled “The Tyranny of Silence.”
Rose could not be reached for comment.
The book is scheduled to hit stores on September 30, staffers said.
The cartoons were published in September 2006 and sparked worldwide protests after the reprinting of the caricatures in other publications.
Islam forbids depictions of Mohammed. Many Muslims were also furious at the drawings themselves. One of them showed the religious figure wearing a turban shaped like a bomb with a lit fuse.
In January of 2007, a Norwegian newspaper reprinted the drawings.
Some European papers later published some of the cartoons as a way of covering the controversy, some papers said.
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Denmark’s Burning
Jyllands-Posten, 21 September 2010
“Danish ghettos ravaged by fire,” alerts the Jyllands-Posten. Every week in troubled Danish neighbourhoods, four fires on average burn down kindergartens, trash containers, cars and motor scooters, reports the Danish daily, based on fire department reports in the country’s three biggest cities. According to one sociologist quoted in the paper, these acts are perpetrated by a hard core of ethnic youths who want their neighbourhoods to “take on the image of a dangerous ghetto”. Fewer than 1% of the arsonists are ever apprehended.
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Italy: League Mayor Threatens Defiance in School Symbols Row
Minister orders removal of party’s green flower
(ANSA) — Rome, September 20 — A Northern League mayor who created a storm by plastering a school with his regionalist party’s symbol has threatened to defy Education Minister Mariastella Gelmini’s order to remove the emblems.
Gelmini sent Oscar Lancini, the mayor of Adro near Brescia, a letter at the weekend telling him to have the League’s green Sole delle Alpi (Sun of the Alps) flower taken down.
But Lancini, who had the symbol put on the school’s windows, desks, wastepaper baskets and doormats, has said the only order he would follow would be one from party leader Umberto Bossi.
“I am first and foremost a League activist, being mayor of Adro comes after that,” Lancini said Monday.
“I am waiting for my party leader to tell me what to do.
Then I’ll obey”. Gelmini refused to comment on Lancini’s possible disobedience Monday, replying “enough” with an exasperated tone when asked about the row that has been raging since the school reopened last week after a major renovation Lancini has justified his actions by saying the symbol is also linked to the area’s Celtic heritage.
But the move has been criticised by parents’ groups and opposition parties and the local branch of the CGIL trade union is planning legal action to remove the symbols of a party that frequently takes extreme positions on immigration issues.
They argue politics should be kept out of the classroom.
ItaliaFutura, a think tank set up by Ferrari Chairman Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, went as far as to say in a editorial on its website Monday that the unity of the country was at risk if such initiatives are not nipped in the bud. Even several members of Premier Silvio Berlusconi’s People of Freedom (PdL) party, which is allied with the League, have said Lancini had gone too far.
“Gelmini was right to say that the symbol is not compatible with a school, which should belong to everyone,” the PdL’s governor of Lombardy Roberto Formigoni said Monday.
Lancini, however, suggested he felt no obligation to bow to the national institutions, saying they did not help him renovate the school.
“The Italian state should be ashamed because this school didn’t cost it a cent,” he said.
“When I asked for money, I found all the doors closed and we had to make do ourselves. I’m proud to be the mayor of this town where the local people contributed 300,000 euros (for the school)”.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Italy: ‘Burqa Ban’ Debate Back in Spotlight
Premier’s party presents Senate motion on issue
(ANSA) — Rome, September 21 — National debate over a ‘burqa ban’ was back in the spotlight on Tuesday following an official request for the Senate to discuss the security implications of Islamic face coverings. Senator Ada Spadoni Urbani of Premier Silvio Berlusconi’s People of Freedom party group (PdL) presented a motion on behalf of her party addressing the issue. The motion is aimed “at resolving the public security issues raised by the custom of wearing the burqa or other clothing that prevents accurate identification,” she explained. “This is not intended to discriminate in any way against religious beliefs”. Urbani also said the motion was not prompted by recent legislative initiatives in other European countries to outlaw Islamic face coverings in public.
“We decided to take this action to meet the ever growing number of demands for safeguards from the Italian public and police,” she said. “This has nothing to do, as some have suggested, with what is going on in France and some other European countries”. News of the motion comes after several days of media coverage on the burqa and the niqab, which covers the bottom part of the face only.
The rightwing Northern League party promised a bill on the issue on Friday, while a row has been simmering for a number of days over whether a mother should be permitted to wear a face veil while dropping her child off at nursery school. Other parents at the school in the small Lazio village of Sonnino had reportedly complained to the school’s head that the woman’s niqab scared their own children. On Monday, Sonnino Mayor Gino Cesare Gasbarrone announced a compromise had been reached following a meeting with all parties whereby the woman had agreed to remove the veil once on the school premises. “The imam and his wife were entirely willing to accommodate the demands of our village’s families and those mothers who asked the woman to reveal herself in class to avoid scaring the children,” he said. Meanwhile, the Northern League proposal, a translation of the recently approved French bill, will join eight other draft laws already under consideration by parliament. The bill would prevent women from wearing a face veil in public, including in schools, on public transport or in any kind of office. The penalty for transgressors would be a fine of between 150 and 300 euros or alternatively some kind of community service “aimed at encouraging integration”, explained League Deputy Whip Carolina.
But unlike other proposals, the new bill will also punish anyone “who forces someone else to wear it, using either physical or psychological violence”.
This offence would be punishable by a year in prison and a 30,000 euro fine.
A 1975 law already prohibits any mask or clothing that makes it impossible to identify the wearer.
In its current form, it permits exceptions for ‘justified cause’, which has been interpreted as including religious reasons in court rulings against local attempts to ban the burqa and niqab.
Most of the bills currently before the Italian parliament would amend the 1975 law to make specific reference to Islamic face coverings.
Commenting on the Sonnino case, Isabella Bertolini of the PdL said the case demonstrated a “growing imperative for a complete ban on the burqa in all places, not just in schools”. “Our society’s flexibility leads our institutions at all levels to interpret laws in the most politically correct way possible, causing incalculable damage,” she said. The Movement of Moderate Muslims also said a law was needed in light of the case, describing the solution agreed upon as “paradoxical” and “degrading” to the woman in question.
“This is the perfect example to show that a law prohibiting the full veil in public places is not only appropriate but absolutely necessary, in order to clarify once and for all that you do not go around with your face covered in Italy, either inside or outside a school, or anywhere else,” said the movement’s president, Gamal Bouchaib.
According to Bouchaib, the decision to allow the woman to continue wearing the niqab around Sonnino was a mistake, which allowed her to be used to “promote extremist attitudes that do anything but promote integration”. A survey published on Friday by polling institute Panel Data suggested 73% of Italians thought Islamic face coverings should not be worn in public. Of the 1,000 adults polled, nearly a third were opposed because they felt such veils were a degrading practice imposed on women by others. Just under 30% blamed the burqa and niqab for lower levels of integration, while 20% cited security concerns.
There are no estimates of how many women wear the face veil in Italy, where Islam is the second largest religion after Catholicism with around 1.2 million faithful.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Sweden: Riksdag Revamp Could Limit Far-Right: Reports
Members of several Swedish political parties are calling for a restructuring of the Riksdag to minimize the influence of the far-right Sweden Democrats.
The parties are investigating whether it is possible to shift the make-up of parliamentary committees to reduce the sway of the far-right, anti-immigrant party which was voted into parliament for the first time at the weekend’s general elections, several Swedish dailies reported.
Both Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt’s Moderate Party and the main opposition Social Democrats are reportedly involved.
The far-right party won 5.7 percent of the vote and 20 seats in parliament, according to an initial count.
As things stand, that would be enough for it to automatically have a representative on parliamentary committees, which today count 17 members each.
But the Moderate Party was investigating the possibility of cutting the number of committee seats to 15, the Aftonbladet daily among others reported, citing unnamed sources.
Such a move would block the Sweden Democrats from representation on the committees and reduce their influence in parliament.
The Moderate Party looks set to create a new minority government after Sunday’s vote along with three centre-right coalition partners.
The parties themselves refused to comment until after the final tally of votes, including ballots cast overseas, was completed. That is due late Wednesday or early Thursday.
But there were signs of opposition from some members of Reinfeldt’s coalition, including a senior member of the Liberal Party, according to one report.
“It is better having them inside the tent pissing out that keeping them outside pissing in,” Carl B. Hamilton, a deputy with the party, told the Dagens Nyheter (DN) daily.
Blocking the far-right from the parliamentary committees “will allow them to play the martyr,” he added.
“It is unwise to give them that possibility,” he said.
| — Hat tip: KGS | [Return to headlines] |
Sweden Democrats Tip Scales in 30 Councils
The Sweden Democrats hold the balance of power in 30 of Sweden’s 290 municipal councils, the anti-racist magazine Expo revealed on Wednesday in a compilation of election results.
Mattias Karlsson, the party’s press director, told Expo that the party would support the coalition that would have the most impact on its policies with their support, underlining that there would be no key decision or guidelines to determine which coalition to support.
One of the 30 municipalities where the Sweden Democrats hold the balance of power is Bjuv in Skåne, where it won 19.6 percent support and six seats.
The party’s leader in the municipality, Allan Jönsson, revealed that before the elections, discussions took place with one of the other parliamentary parties in the municipality. He declined to tell Expo which it was.
“I cannot reveal that,” he told the magazine, which once had best-selling author, Stieg Larsson as its editor.
“We with the Sweden Democrats in Bjuv work a little differently than many other party divisions in the country. We are willing to cooperate with all parties as long as it benefits the citizens of the municipality best.”
The party, on paper, also holds the balance power in larger municipalities such Norrköping, Borås and Västerås.
In all the 27 municipalities, the Sweden Democrats tipped the scales between the coalitions, with the help from local parties or parties without parliamentary representation.
In many municipalities, the Sweden Democrats hold the balance of power together with the Swedish Senior Citizen Interest Party (Sveriges pensionärers intresseparti, SPI) or other local parties of discontent, the report said.
In Haninge, the party holds the balance of power with the Socialist Justice Party (Rättvisepartiet Socialisterna). In Gislaved in Småland, the Sweden Democrats hold the balance of power with the Communist Party, which refuses to cooperate with them, according to the magazine.
The Communist Party’s front man in Gislaved, Curt Vang, believes that in practice, the party will not hold the balance of power.
“In Gislaved, the Centre Party has previously worked with the Social Democrats, but in the last term, was part of the Alliance,” he explained. “They will probably switch to the Social Democrats or the Alliance will come to terms with the Green Party.”
In the previous legislative period, the Sweden Democrats held the balance of power in a handful of municipalities. Karlsson believes that the party’s representatives at the municipal level must be much tougher in any negotiations that may occur in the near future.
“We need to be tougher in negotiations and clearer about what we want,” he said to the magazine.
In Landskrona, a former party stronghold, the Sweden Democrats declined by a full seven percentage points. Karlsson argued that accordingly, Landskrona is a place where the party needs to place more demands in negotiations.
“It is about living up to the voters’ hopes,” he said.
Separately, Sweden Democrats’ electoral success means that the party can nominate more than 40 new jurors in southern Skåne and receive a total of 120 jurors in Skåne courts, according to TV4 News Malmo on Wednesday.
Included in this allocation would be the administrative courts (Förvaltningsdomstol), which are charged with among other things, handling applications for asylum.
Earlier, chief prosecutor Sven-Erik Alhem warned that it could lead to people with different ethnic backgrounds having less confidence in the courts, but Carina Herrstedt, the Sweden Democrat’s second vice chairperson, said it is “horrible to believe” that there would be reason for concern.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
The English Defense League: The New Face of Europe?
by A. Millar
A group of extremist Islamists attacked the returning soldiers as “butchers of Basra,” “baby killers,” and “terrorists” during a homecoming parade not long ago in the city of Luton. With years of anti-British “political correctness,” and a political class that has failed to tackle Islamism with seriousness, this proved to be too much: the crowd that had turned out to cheer on the soldiers was soon making their disgust known to the Islamists; the two groups had to be held apart by police. Within a few days, a video was floating around the internet, showing the aftermath: calling themselves the “United People of Luton,” thousands of (mostly) young men had taken to the streets in a rowdy, and chaotic show of anger and frustration, chanting “no surrender to the Taliban,” “we are Luton,” and, directed at the Islamists, “scum.”
A short time later, the English Defense League [EDL] emerged from the United People of Luton, and, in a little over the year since its founding, has become the largest street protest movement in Britain.
The EDL has also inspired the recent establishment of independent leagues in the Netherlands, Norway, Germany, and other EU states; the movement is attracting international attention — including from the Israeli-based Haaretz and the US-based Dissent.
Strident opposition to integration — from politicians, the media, and Islamist extremists — has led to serious social problems, not only for long-settled British citizens, but also for immigrants and the children of immigrants. These range from the high rates of unemployment among Muslims, the forced marriage of school girls (and to a lesser extent school boys), to honor violence against women and girls, and violence against homosexual Muslims. Opponents of integration know of these problems, but ignore them. It would appear that their intention was not to make life easy for immigrants, but to make life easy for themselves.
Mass immigration into Europe, is, in some sense the “Americanization” of Europe, according to Christopher Caldwell, author of Reflections on the Revolution In Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West, who has said that over the last few decades — especially over the last ten years — Europe has become increasingly multi-ethnic, and multi-religious, and multi-everything. In this sense, it resembles the US, especially its cities, such as New York; however, because the EU was intended as a “counterbalance” to the US — and an exemplar of a more socialistic, statist, and allegedly moral and ethical way of doing things — Europe has enacted immigration and integration in an almost opposite way. Consequently, as immigration has increased, instead of becoming more like the US, Europe has become less like it.
In the US, newcomers may be encouraged to feel proud of America’s achievements in the world, its democracy, its opportunities. Immigrants might retain significant aspects of their culture, their religion, or values from their former homes, but, largely, they are also proud to be American, and proud to have democracy, liberty, free speech, and the other opportunities for which they came. In Britain, however, immigrants have been encouraged to remain separate from the rest of society, to refrain from learning the language of the host culture, and from integrating. The Archbishop of Canterbury appeared to encourage the adoption of some sharia into Britain in 2008; a few months later, Stephen Hockman, QC, former chairman of the Bar Council, called for aspects of sharia to be formally incorporated into British law.
The routine devaluing of British culture is a gift to Islamists who want to separate Muslims from non-Muslims in the UK — or, worse, who intend to impose sharia on everyone, like it or not. The organization hosting Hockman, as he delivered his appeal for a sharia-lite Britain, was none other than the now-banned Islam4UK, an Islamist group descended from al-Muhajiroun, which has been linked to one in seven convicted terrorists in the UK [pdf].
Although Hockman suggested that incorporating Sharia into British law would help Muslims integrate, practically he was advocating integrating Britain into Sharia law. Many British people fear that this is precisely what is occurring, and would prefer that everyone accept British law and liberty, and muddle along together. How unlikely this seems, listening to Britain’s elected representatives. When then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown finally addressed the issue of uncontrolled immigration and announced that immigrants would be required to learn English and sign up to British values, David Cameron absurdly accused him of aping far-Right and neo-fascist political parties.
As Natan Sharansky has described in Defending Identity: Its Indispensable Role in Protecting Democracy, multiculturalism has allowed the politically radical to use those identities which they deem “progressive” and “anti-colonial” to destroy the majority culture, which they view as “reactionary” and “colonial.” For the radical Left, the media and political class, Englishness is firmly “reactionary” and “colonial.” To defend national values is taboo, if not regarded as outright “extremism.” To extend liberty to everyone is, we are told, “human rights imperialism.”
Several of the organization’s members traveled to New York recently for the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. In a move, however, that one US conservative blogsite has compared to the deportation of Geert Wilders from the UK last year, the organization’s leader, Tommy Robinson, was reportedly stopped by two police, or TSA, officers and taken into custody before being put on a plane back to the UK. The reason given, apparently, was that Mr. Robinson had filled out his entry form improperly.
While at the World Trade Center area, EDL members spent the morning speaking to the press and members of the public.
Another EDL leader, Kevin Carroll, mentioned that he and others in the movement were visiting the US:…
| — Hat tip: Vlad Tepes | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Pensioner Takes Dogs for Walk… And Returns to Find Locks Changed and a Family Living in His Home
A pensioner who took his dogs out for a walk returned to find a family had moved into his home.
George Pope, 72, was unable to get into his council house because the locks were changed.
Mr Pope left his home in Barking, Essex, to take his dogs out to nearby Parsloes Park last Thursday, September 16.
The arthritis sufferer, who needs a stick to walk, started feeling ill and decided to stay at a friend’s house until he was well enough to go home.
But when he returned to his house on Saturday morning, he was stunned to discover his locks had been changed.
He claims a man then walked up the path to his house and accosted him.
‘I said, “This is my place”. But he said, “This is our property and we intend to stay here unless you go to court”. It made me feel ill.’
He added: ‘I have been shaking ever since. I get panic attacks. It’s just terrible.’
Mr Pope immediately called the council and police.
But he claims they told him the new occupants could not be evicted because they were themselves victims of a scam.
Mr Pope said police claimed the residents, who he believes are from Lithuania, had paid £3,000 to a bogus estate agent to rent the property themselves for six months.
The retired Dagenham Ford worker, who was forced to stay with friends, said: ‘Police told me it looked like a civil matter.
‘But the squatters were using my home, my gas and my electricity — it’s absolutely disgraceful.’
Mr Pope went back to his house on Monday morning to find all his belongings had been thrown out.
Neighbours then helped the him gather up his documents, photographs and clothes.
Mr Pope suspects illegal estate agents of occupying buildings and letting them for money.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Supporters of Ousted Tower Hamlets Mayoral Candidate Mobilise Online Campaign
SUPPORTERS of Lutfur Rahman have mounted an email campaign urging the replacement candidate council leader Helal Abbas not to accept the nomination, claiming it will split the party in Tower Hamlets. He has been asked to run by Labour HQ today instead of Mr Rahman today. A sample message posted on Lutfur Rahman for Mayor’s web page said: “I am asking you to stand by Tower Hamlets Labour Party members and not to accept the NEC’s invitation.. You know very well the division your candidacy would cause in the local Party and the community which can only benefit our opponents.” It adds that the former council leader thanks people for their support.
Mr Rahman was the clear winner in the party’s selection securing 433 votes from the 881 members who voted. Supporters of Mr Rahman have also been asked to contact Ann Black who is the chair of Labour’s National Executive Committee to support the local party’s choice and drop its decision to field Mr Abbas. London Assembly member John Biggs, who came second in the selection process, said he would support the party’s candidate. The deadline for nominations for candidates have to be received by Tower Hamlets council by Friday.
| — Hat tip: JP | [Return to headlines] |
UK: They Are Furious, But British Voters Won’t Hold a Tea Party
Politics in the United States is currently dominated by the Tea Party movement — named after the Boston Tea Party, but focusing its ire on the growth of government under President Obama. In primary elections from Florida to Massachusetts to Alaska, Democrats and Republicans who thought they had a safe ticket to a Congressional seat have been rejected in favour of the insurgents.
The Tea Partiers were best described by Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, as “a movement that blew up in a reaction to spending and threatened tax increases”. And their philosophy enjoys wide support. According to the pollster Scott Rasmussen, more than half of the electorate now “favour” the Tea Party’s ideas, 35 per cent actively support it, and between 20 and 25 per cent claim to be members.
Understandably, then, many people have wondered whether we might see a similar phenomenon over here. The closest thing to date is probably my own group, the TaxPayers’ Alliance, which has tens of thousands of grassroots supporters for its low-tax, small-state agenda. But the truth is that a mass movement along the lines of the Tea Party would be difficult or impossible to sustain.
That doesn’t mean the British public aren’t angry about wasteful spending and high taxes. But the Tea Party is best understood as part of a wider phenomenon. In many countries, our own included, the recession has provoked fury among ordinary taxpayers, who face real hardship but are still expected to pay the bills for feckless politicians and bloated bureaucracies.
In Germany, for example, the government faced a huge backlash over the proposed bail-out of Greece, from voters who didn’t see why they should subsidise decades of irresponsibility. That’s why the bail-out took so long to organise, why European leaders saw Angela Merkel as so intransigent in negotiating its terms — and why the consequence has been a previously unimaginable surge in German Euroscepticism.
In Australia, a revolt against proposed new climate change levies and mining taxes saw the government depose its leader and then lose its status as the largest party in parliament. And even in South Korea, where government spending stands at just 30.6 per cent of GDP and taxes at 31.4 per cent, the equivalent of the TaxPayers’ Alliance has enlisted an incredible 1.35 million members via the internet, making it the largest NGO in the country.
So what about Britain? In a way, we have already had our version of the Tea Party, in the form of the fury over MPs’ expenses. Yet anti-spending sentiment has also been gaining ground more broadly. The public have increasingly told pollsters that they would prefer lower taxes and lower spending to more spending and even higher taxes. One of the reasons Britain kept its solid credit rating was, according to Moody’s, the ratings agency, an “apparent consensus among the public that fiscal retrenchment (including cuts in expenditure) is both inevitable and desirable”. At the election, all three main political parties campaigned, to some degree, on a platform of spending cuts (while avoiding any specifics as to where those cuts would fall).
So in some ways, Britain is further down the road than the United States. President Obama is still planning even more increases in public spending. We have had the same kind of increases, and are now facing what comes with them: higher taxes and rising interest payments on our debt (effectively, a second mortgage for every family). While politicians (and the public) may not enjoy the cuts, they know that there will be greater problems if they don’t get the public finances under control.
There is another important difference: we lack the political institutions that give movements like the Tea Party their bite. For example, we don’t have primaries that let voters kick out candidates who don’t represent them properly. And because voters understand that MPs are more likely than Congressmen to do what their parties tell them, they tend to vote along party lines to a greater extent. That makes it harder for a Tea Party-style movement to show results, and motivate its supporters.
In fact, if there is any disruptive new movement in Britain, it’s likely to come from the Left, in the form of strikes and protests over the cuts. In a recent letter to The Guardian, several potential protesters, including Tony Benn, resolved to campaign “with the level of determination shown by trade unionists and social movements in Greece”. Let’s not forget that those protests, attacking unavoidable cuts and protecting absurdly generous public sector pay and pensions, resulted in the deaths of three people — including a pregnant woman — after a Molotov cocktail was thrown into the offices of a bank. That’s not the kind of thing anyone wants to see here. But I’m still confident that even in the absence of an official Tea Party, the quiet voice of the British public, and its acceptance of the case for cuts, will make itself heard above the din of the vested interests.
Matthew Elliott is the founder of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, and is currently working on the No2AV campaign.
| — Hat tip: JP | [Return to headlines] |
Vatican Bank in Money-Laundering Probe
Chairman placed under investigation
(ANSA) — Rome, September 21 — Vatican Bank Chairman Ettore Gotti Tedeschi is under investigation for suspected failure to observe Italy’s money-laundering laws, police said Tuesday.
Another top executive of the Istituto per le Opere Religiose (IOR) bank is also under investigation, they said, without naming him.
Currency police have impounded, as a precautionary measure, some 23 million euros the IOR has deposited at the Credito Artigiano SpA, a private bank that is part of the Credito Valtellinese group.
It is the first time such action has been taken against the IOR, which, as the Bank of Italy recalled Tuesday, is to be considered a non-European Union bank.
The probe was opened by Rome magistrates to determine whether a 2007 Italian law on transparency in regard to the identity of account holders was violated.
The possibility that the Vatican accounts violated this law was raised by the Bank of Italy special ‘financial intelligence’ unit, which on September 15 suspended two transactions ordered by the IOR from its account with the Rome branch of Credito Artigiano because they were deemed suspicious.
These involved 20 million euros sent to the German bank J.P.Morgan Frankfurt, and three million sent to a central-Italian bank, Banca del Fucino.
The IOR is said to hold 28 million euros at the Credito Artigiano branch.
On November 25, investigators were also said to be focusing on one or more accounts IOR opened with Unicredit, Italy’s biggest bank, through which some 60 million euros has transited over the past three years.
The accounts were opened at a branch of Unicredit, then Banca di Roma, located on the avenue which leads into St Peter’s Square, via della Conciliazione, in Italian territory.
Judicial sources said the probe was centered on clarifying the “opaque screen” which hid the identity of the person, persons or organizations that had actual control over the IOR accounts.
Investigators were also said to be trying to discover the beneficiaries of cheques and bank drafts issued from the IOR accounts and who ordered them.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Egyptian Coptic Church Accused of Stockpiling Weapons
by Mary Abdelmassih
(AINA) — A new wave of defamation by Islamists against Coptic Pope Shenouda III and the Coptic Church is seen by many observers as a serious provocation to sectarian violence against the Copts, and the possibility of Egypt being dragged into civil war.
On September 15, Qatar-owned Al-Jezirah TV broadcast a program called Without Limits, presented by moderator Ahmad Mansour, who hosted the Islamist Dr. Selim el-Awah, former Secretary-General of the World Council of Muslim Scholars, which has stunned and enraged Copts inside and outside of Egypt. “El-Awah is simply threatening Copts that the forthcoming chaos after Mubarak dies will see mass violence against the Copts,” says Magdy Khalil, Coptic activist and head of Middle East Freedom Forum.
The program alleged the Church has its own militia and hides weapons and ammunition in monasteries and churches, preparing for a war “against the Muslims.” el-Awah said that “Israel is in the heart of the Coptic Cause,” and the Church gets weapons from Israel. He cited as evidence an incident in mid-August, in which the son of a priest in Port Said, Mr. Joseph El-Gabalawy, was falsely accused of importing weapons from Israel. Although he was cleared of charges and released, as the imported goods were children’s fireworks from China and did not belong to him, he is still detained by State Security.
The television program also charged the Church of concealing Muslim converts to Christianity, besides abducting and torturing Christian converts to Islam. Out of the thousands of Christian woman who converted to Islam, willingly or unwillingly, el-Awah mentioned only two wives of priests whom he claimed converted to Islam and consequently were imprisoned in monasteries, Wafa Constantine and Mary Abdallah. Speaking on the latest crisis over Camelia Shehata, about whom Muslims fabricated rumors of her conversion to Islam, he said that she never converted to Islam and was handed over by State Security to her two married sisters (AINA 11-1-2015).
The nearly two-hour program went on to accuse the Coptic Church of being a “State within the Egyptian State,” allegedly taking advantage of the weakness of the present regime, behaving as if it is above the law. The Church was also accused of making an “inheritance” deal with the regime to support President Mubarak’s son in succeeding his father as president in exchange for benefits.
Selim el-Awah said that ever since Pope Shenouda came out of detention, having been banished to a desert monastery by the late President Sadat in 1981 and released by President Mubarak in 1982, there has been “scientific preparation” to demand the division of Egypt into a Muslim State and a Coptic secular State”
He warned that if the status of the Church remains as such, the “country will burn” and called on Muslims to go out in demonstrations as the “only answer left to counteract the strength of the Church.” He said “If they go out to the streets, who can control them?”
“For the first time since the establishment of the State of Israel,” says Magdy Khalil, “someone has accused the Coptic Church of stockpiling weapons from Israel as a prelude to waging war on Muslims, claiming that Israel is at the heart of the Coptic issue.”
In response to the seriousness of the accusations, the Church aired a program on its own TV channel, Agape, denying all allegations and accusing Al-Jezirah of being hostile towards Egypt. It discussed the whereabouts of the two priests’ wives, who had marital problems but never converted to Islam. “Constantine chose to remain in a monastery and Abdallah lives in a house alone with her children paid by the church,” said Father Abdelmassih Baseet.
In a Middle East Freedom Forum press release on September 20, Magdy Khalil said that what Dr. Selim el-Awah said “amounts to incitement to murder and ethnic cleansing of a minority, which are crimes in Egyptian and international law” and if Al-Awah’s words of hate and incitement are overlooked by the Egyptian government, “this would mean that they are partners in these crimes.” The Forum invited national lawyers, Muslims and Christians, to join its campaign for the prosecution of Dr. el-Awah for crimes of incitement.
Dr. Naguib Gobrail, legal counselor to the Coptic Church and president of the Egyptian Union of Human Rights Organizations, presented on September 20 a memorandum to the Prosecutor General against Dr. Selim el-Awah and Al-Jezirah’s Egyptian moderator Ahmad Mansour, accusing both men of propagating lies which would affect social peace and harm national security. The memo went on to say that they accused the Church of storing weapons and Christians of “high treason,” since these weapons would “normally be used against the State and their Muslim brethren,” a claim, if true, would subject 15 million Christians to the charge of high treason, which carries the death penalty.
Coptic attorney Mamdouh Nakhla, head of AL-Kalema Centre for Human Rights, told Freecopts the TV program included reference to a terrorist plan for several massacres to be committed against the Copts. “el-Awah said that the simple Coptic citizen will be the real victim of those massacres, while the Coptic clergy will hide in the monasteries,” said Nakhla. “Such remarks should not be ignored and el-Awah should be questioned about the facts and what information he knows about those plans.” He added that he will present a complaint to the prosecutor general against el-Awah and Al-Jezirah Channel for spreading unfounded lies that could provoke incitement against the Church and the Copts.
The Egyptian media has accused el-Awah of claiming the Church is storing weapons without having any evidence. Al-Jezirah was accused by renowned writer Salah Issah, editor of Cairo Daily, of not adhering to the Press Charter, which prohibits covering anything that would cause sectarian strife, stressing the network has committed professional errors.
Observers see that el-Awah statements of September 15, coming only two days after the call of the banned Front of Al-Azhar Scholars, on September 13, to boycott Coptic businesses, professionals and schools, only confirms that there is secret coordination between the Islamist religious groups, “who have one thing in mind, which is to burn the homeland,” say Muslim thinker Ayman Abdel Rassol. He added that weapons are stored in mosques, especially in upper Egypt. Abdel Rassol called for the prosecution of Dr. el-Awah for crimes of incitement.
A Muslim demonstration is called for Friday September 24, in Alexandria demanding the disposal of Pope Shenouda III.
Khalil recollects similar circumstances taking place at the end of the seventies when rumors circulated about a plan by Pope Shenouda to establish a Coptic state in the Upper Egyptian Province of Assiut, and about the storage of weapons in monasteries, “those rumors were justifications for a series of attacks against the Copts over decades,” he said.
He believes that this dangerous talk by Dr. el-Awah is an introduction to the destruction of the Copts in the event of a the outbreak of chaos in Egypt after Mubarak’s death. “It will not be like what happened in the seventies, but it could evolve to become like the Armenian genocide that occurred in Turkey in 1915,” said Khalil.
| — Hat tip: Mary Abdelmassih | [Return to headlines] |
Libya ‘Pleased’ With Unicredit Investment
Bank’s top brass said to be divided over foreign interests
(ANSA) — Milan, September 20 — The Libyan Central Bank (LCB) said in a statement on Monday that it was “extremely pleased” with its investment in Italy’s biggest bank UniCredit, which it defined as “long-term,”.
The statement came amid rumors of a clash between UniCredit CEO Alessandro Profumo and Chairman Dieter Rampl over Libya recently increasing its stake in the bank to some 7.5%, making the North African country its biggest shareholder.
The LCB holds 4.9% of UniCredit while the Libyan Investment Authority (LIA) is reported to have just recently increased its stake from 2% to 2.5%, a move which has also had political repercussions within the government of Premier Berlusconi.
Berlusconi’s key government ally, the devolutionist and anti-immigration Northern League, is opposed to Libya increasing its stake in UniCredit.
The premier, on the other hand, has been actively courting Libya and flaunts his personal relationship with strongman Col.
Muammar Gaddafi.
The opposition Italy of Values (IdV) party has staunchly opposed Libya expanding its stake in UniCredit and has demanded Profumo’s resignation.
There are also fears among UniCredit’s other shareholders that Libya may seek to launch a hostile takeover bid for the bank, something which both the LCB and LIA have denied.
In its statement on Monday, the LCB recalled that its initially investment in UniCredit dated back to the beginning of the 1990s, when it bought a stake in Banca di Roma, which was later merged into UniCredit.
The LCB also explained that in 2008, in response to an invitation to make a strategic investment, the central bank increased its stake in UniCredit also to further bolster economic relations between Rome and Tripoli.
In order to quell fears over a Libyan takeover of the bank, the LCB said it did not intend to take such action and stressed that “the central bank is an independent institution governed by 2005 Libyan banking laws. All rules and regulations regarding the central bank are decided by its governing board.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Palestinians Admit Peace Talks Are a Sham
While Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas puts on a show of playing nice with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the sake of the Obama Administration, the Palestinian ambassador to Lebanon this month assured the Arab world that the current negotiations are just part of a larger plan to delegitimize Israel.
The Palestinian daily newspaper Al-Hayat Al-Jadida reported that on September 9, Ambassador Abdullah Abdullah insisted that “the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations.are not a goal, but rather another stage in the Palestinian struggle. to isolate Israel, to tighten the noose on it, to threaten its legitimacy, and to present it as a rebellious, racist state.”
So much for genuine talks leading to lasting peaceful coexistence.
Like Abbas, Abdullah is sticking to Yasser Arafat’s conclusion decades ago that Israel cannot be defeated in one knock-out blow, but must be slowly whittled away at.
Of course, Abdullah’s remarks were not reported by the mainstream media, because they were spoken and reported on in Arabic. It seems Arabic is the language that simply doesn’t matter. You can say anything, reveal any nefarious plot, and everyone will simply brush it off because you said so in Arabic.
But, can anyone imagine an Israeli ambassador, speaking in either English or Hebrew, saying that Israel was only in the current negotiations to reveal the Palestinian Authority as liars with the ultimate goal of delegitimizing the “Palestinian cause” into oblivion?
[Translation of the Al-Hayat Al-Jadida story was provided by Palestinian Media Watch]
| — Hat tip: CR | [Return to headlines] |
Abu Dhabi: Woman Raped in ‘Public’ Inside Car in Capital
A woman passing by a park in Abu Dhabi heard the victim screaming and called the police
A Pakistani man lured an Ethiopian woman into his car and raped her in public in the middle of the day in Abu Dhabi, local newspapers reported on Wednesday.
The man offered the Ethiopian a lift and took her to a street near the Khalidiaya park in the middle of the capital to rape her inside his vehicle.
“After hesitation, she accepted his offer and got into the car. He then tied her up and threw her on the back seat,” the Arabic language daily Emarat Al Youm said.
“He drove away and parked the car on a street near Khalidiya park at around 12 noon and raped the woman after beating her up.”
The paper said the woman was about to go to the police when he grabbed her and threw her back into the car. He then called his friend and joined hands in beating her up again to prevent her from calling the police.
A passing woman heard her screaming and called the police, who rushed to the scene and arrested the two, the paper said.
The woman told the Abu Dhabi Criminal Court that she was beaten up and raped but the convict denied the charges, saying he had sex with her for money.
| — Hat tip: KGS | [Return to headlines] |
Afghanistan: Italians Doing ‘Fantastic’ Job Says Petraeus
‘We appreciate sacrifice,’ ISAF chief says after 30th death
(ANSA) — Rome, September 20 — Italian troops in Afghanistan are doing a “fantastic” job, US Commander-in-Chief David Petraeus said Monday.
“The Italians are doing a fantastic job and we appreciate their commitment and sacrifice,” Petraeus said in an interview on Italian radio three days after Italy suffered its 30th military death since its Afghan mission began in 2004.
(Speaking at the lying-in-state of Lt Alessandro Romani, a special forces member killed by insurgents Friday, Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said Romani “was there to root out the die-hards, the Taliban we will never be able to reach agreement with”.) Petraeus praised the Italian contingent in the NATO-led ISAF force for “managing to establish an effective and constructive relationship with our Afghan partners and also with the representatives of the civilian authorities”.
He voiced the hope these results could be “consolidated”.
Italy’s troops have “shown great capability” in leading ISAF’s Regional Command West, Petraeus said.
Looking to the political horizon, the NATO commander noted that Afghan President Hamid Karzai was about to name a new ‘peace council’ aimed at encouraging insurgents to disarm.
“We are convinced that this is a crucial step which must be conducted with respect for the rights of all,” he said.
“It will concern all those who, on a voluntary basis, agree to put down their arms and re-integrate into society”.
Petraeus noted that this was a “mechanism already tried in Iraq with good results”.
Italy has some 3,300 troops in ISAF, slated to rise to around 4,000 by the end of the year. It also has some 500 Carabinieri in the European Union-led EUPOL police training mission.
Last week NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen asked Italy for more military trainers and Defence Minister Ignazio La Russa said the armed forces were ready to comply with the request.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Afghanistan: Italy ‘To Send More Trainers’
Up to 150 more instructors, La Russa says
(ANSA) — Rome, September 21 — Italy is set to send between 100 and 150 more military trainers to Afghanistan as requested by NATO, Defence Minister Ignazio La Russa said Tuesday.
“I believe that an increase of this kind is useful because it enables us to reach the objective we have set, to disengage as early as possible,” the minister told a radio show.
Asked about the violence that plagued the weekend elections and on Friday brought Italy’s 30th military death, La Russa said this was a consequence of the increased presence of the NATO-led ISAF force.
“There aren’t just patrols any more. There is real control on the ground. This has resulted in relatively peaceful zones, like the western province where Italians operate, becoming dangerous ones”.
La Russa was asked for more instructors by NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen last week and again on Monday by US commander David Petraeus, who said Italy was doing a “fantastic” job in Afghanistan.
As he had after his talks with Rasmussen, the minister stressed that the decision to send more trainers had to meet with cabinet approval. “I am working to do this without extra budget costs, if it goes through,” La Russa said, cautioning that the decision “is still not definitive”.
Italy has some 3,300 troops in ISAF, slated to rise to around 4,000 by the end of the year. It also has some 500 Carabinieri in the European Union-led EUPOL police training mission.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Militants Cut Both Feet Off Actress Starring in Afghan Film Critical of Taliban
A Director’s Many Battles to Make Her Movie
LOS ANGELES — Sonia Nassery Cole knew that shooting a movie on location in Afghanistan could get her killed. The most vivid reminder came a few weeks before filming, she said, when militants located her leading actress and cut off both of her feet.
But Ms. Cole, an Afghan expatriate with a flair for the dramatic and a history of not taking no for an answer, had her mind made up. Unable to find another actress to take the part — the film is overtly critical of the Taliban — Ms. Cole, 45, decided to play the role herself.
“Come hell, come shine, I was going to make this movie,” said Ms. Cole, a novice filmmaker whose primary job is running the Afghanistan World Foundation, a charity focused on refugees and women’s rights.
Ms. Cole, who holds both Afghan and American citizenship and lives in Los Angeles, has been a fixture in Afghan relief efforts since she wrote to President Ronald Reagan as a teenage refugee, and he unexpectedly invited her to the White House. She fled Afghanistan in 1979, although she is murky about the details, explaining that she plans to write a memoir.
“The Black Tulip,” a tragic love story that Ms. Cole finished at Warner Brothers, is scheduled for its premiere at the Ariana Cinema Theater in Kabul on Thursday. (Military leaders will get a private viewing on Wednesday at NATO’s International Security Assistance Force headquarters.) The Sundance Film Festival is a likely next stop, and Afghanistan has submitted the picture as its entry for best foreign film at the next Academy Awards.
It is extraordinarily rare for a feature film to be shot on location in Afghanistan. Even films like “The Kite Runner,” the sweeping 2007 movie about two Afghan boys from different economic backgrounds, was mostly filmed in Kashgar, China, because Kabul was too dangerous and because it proved impossible to secure insurance coverage.
Afghanistan at one point had a bustling film industry, but the Taliban banned motion pictures and closed or destroyed theaters. Activity has returned — Ms. Cole leaned heavily on a local casting director and the Afghan Film Organization, which is organizing the premiere — but the current American-backed government has remained cautious. “The Kite Runner,” for instance, was not released in Afghanistan because of fears that it would inflame ethnic tensions.
Ms. Cole’s only previous film experience was directing “The Breadwinner,” a 2007 short documentary about an 8-year-old Afghan boy who supports his family by selling calendars. To make “The Black Tulip,” she tapped her extensive network of government and philanthropic contacts, begun when President Reagan connected her with the Afghanistan Relief Committee.
For instance, the singer Natalie Cole, a celebrity ambassador for the Afghanistan World Foundation (but not related to Ms. Cole), recorded two songs for the film’s soundtrack. Henry A. Kissinger is a friend from Ms. Cole’s younger days spent in neoconservative social circles.
Even with the support, making “The Black Tulip” was anything but easy. Days on location sometimes began at 4 a.m. because security was easier to provide with fewer pedestrians around, she said. Before the film wrapped production last fall in Kabul, Ms. Cole survived a bomb blast that shattered the windows of her hotel, machine gun fire and grim telephone threats warning her to go home.
Three senior crew members — her cinematographer, a producer and a set designer — did just that, abandoning Ms. Cole in the middle of production.
“I know I broke her heart,” said Keith Smith, the cinematographer who left. “But I could feel death. I didn’t sign up for that.”
Ms. Cole said she bore some of the responsibility for the defections, conceding that she painted a sanitized picture of life in a war zone while hiring a core crew in Los Angeles. But David McFarland, the cinematographer who replaced Mr. Smith, said he understood why she kept some details to herself.
“As the director of this film, she needed us to focus on our jobs and not be freaked out,” Mr. McFarland said. “What was she supposed to say? ‘Oh, I got a note this morning saying we would all die on the set today. O.K., go focus on doing good work!’ “
Mr. McFarland said Ms. Cole did not tell him the reason she was also acting in the movie until after they finished filming. The woman who was to play the role, Zarifa Jahon, now lives with a relative in a remote area of the country, according to Ms. Cole, the local casting director and Latif Ahmadi, head of the Afghan Film Organization.
The only person aside from Ms. Cole who fully understood the danger of the project may have been her son, Chris. Before leaving last fall for Kabul, she gave him a list of instructions to follow if she ran into trouble.
“It said: ‘If I am abducted, do not make a deal to get me released. Let them torture me. Let them kill me,’ “ said Mr. Cole, who left a job in investment banking to help his mother produce the film. “It was horrible to hear that from your mother. But she was insistent.”
“The Black Tulip,” which has a primary cast of 11, takes place from 2001, just before the Taliban were routed from power, to the present day. A Kabul family seizes on a new window of freedom and opens a restaurant called The Poet’s Corner, where artists and writers are encouraged to make use of an open mic. But the Mansouri family soon learns that the Taliban are not gone and pays a mighty price for daring to embrace culture again. Ms. Cole plays the passionate mother, Farishta Mansouri.
The tale is all too real: just this month an article by the McClatchy Newspapers correspondent Hashim Shukoor detailed how Taliban insurgents had been trying to reimpose their conservative views on music stores — close, or we’ll blow it up — in the city of Jalalabad.
Ms. Cole would not disclose the film’s budget, which she financed by selling personal property, mortgaging her home and relying on credit cards. But it wasn’t cheap. Ms. Cole said at one point she had to pay $5,000 for an old microphone. The same seller then demanded an additional $5,000 from a crew member before handing it over. Mr. McFarland recalls driving hours around the city looking for a light bulb.
“I spent a small fortune on extortion and security,” said Ms. Cole, who often listed fake locations on production schedules to minimize danger. “Every couple of days, a random crew member would threaten to turn off the generator if I didn’t pay him a large sum of money.”
“You start becoming paranoid very quickly,” she added. “Is that crew member you don’t recognize there to help you or is he there to kill you?”
| — Hat tip: heroyalwhyness | [Return to headlines] |
Was Stuxnet Built to Attack Iran’s Nuclear Program?
A highly sophisticated computer worm that has spread through Iran, Indonesia and India was built to destroy operations at one target: possibly Iran’s Bushehr nuclear reactor.
That’s the emerging consensus of security experts who have examined the Stuxnet worm. In recent weeks, they’ve broken the cryptographic code behind the software and taken a look at how the worm operates in test environments. Researchers studying the worm all agree that Stuxnet was built by a very sophisticated and capable attacker — possibly a nation state — and it was designed to destroy something big.
Though it was first developed more than a year ago, Stuxnet was discovered in July 2010, when a Belarus-based security company discovered the worm on computers belonging to an Iranian client. Since then it has been the subject of ongoing study by security researchers who say they’ve never seen anything like it before. Now, after months of private speculation, some of the researchers who know Stuxnet best say that it may have been built to sabotage Iran’s nukes.
Last week Ralph Langner, a well-respected expert on industrial systems security, published an analysis of the worm, which targets Siemens software systems, and suggested that it may have been used to sabotage Iran’s Bushehr nuclear reactor. A Siemens expert, Langner simulated a Siemens industrial network and then analyzed the worm’s attack.
Experts had first thought that Stuxnet was written to steal industrial secrets — factory formulas that could be used to build counterfeit products. But Langner found something quite different. The worm actually looks for very specific Siemens settings — a kind of fingerprint that tells it that it has been installed on a very specific Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) device — and then it injects its own code into that system.
Because of the complexity of the attack, the target “must be of extremely high value to the attacker,” Langner wrote in his analysis.
Langner is set to present his findings at a closed-door security conference in Maryland this week, which will also feature a technical discussion from Siemens engineers. Langner said he wasn’t yet ready to speak to a reporter at length (“the fact of the matter is this stuff is so bizarre that I have to make up my mind how to explain this to the public,” he said via e-mail) but others who have examined his data say that it shows that whoever wrote Stuxnet clearly had a specific target in mind. “It’s looking for specific things in specific places in these PLC devices. And that would really mean that it’s designed to look for a specific plant,” said Dale Peterson, CEO of Digital Bond.
This specific target may well have been Iran’s Bushehr reactor, now under construction, Langner said in a blog posting. Bushehr reportedly experienced delays last year, several months after Stuxnet is thought to have been created, and according to screen shots of the plant posted by UPI, it uses the Windows-based Siemens PLC software targeted by Stuxnet.
Peterson believes that Bushehr was possibly the target. “If I had to guess what it was, yes that’s a logical target,” he said. “But that’s just speculation.”
Langner thinks that it’s possible that Bushehr may have been infected through the Russian contractor that is now building the facility, JSC AtomStroyExport. Recently AtomStroyExport had its Web site hacked, and some of its Web pages are still blocked by security vendors because they are known to host malware. This is not an auspicious sign for a company contracted with handling nuclear secrets.
Tofino Security Chief Technology Officer Eric Byres is an industrial systems security expert who has tracked Stuxnet since it was discovered. Initially he thought it was designed for espionage, but after reading Langner’s analysis, he’s changed his mind. “I guessed wrong, I really did,” he said. “After looking at the code that Ralph hauled out of this thing, he’s right on.”
One of the things that Langner discovered is that when Stuxnet finally identifies its target, it makes changes to a piece of Siemens code called Organizational Block 35. This Siemens component monitors critical factory operations — things that need a response within 100 milliseconds. By messing with Operational Block 35, Stuxnet could easily cause a refinery’s centrifuge to malfunction, but it could be used to hit other targets too, Byres said. “The only thing I can say is that it is something designed to go bang,” he said.
Whoever created Stuxnet developed four previously unknown zero-day attacks and a peer-to-peer communications system, compromised digital certificates belonging to Realtek Semiconductor and JMicron Technology, and displayed extensive knowledge of industrial systems. This is not something that your run-of-the-mill hacker can pull off. Many security researchers think that it would take the resources of a nation state to accomplish.
Last year, rumors began surfacing that Israel might be contemplating a cyber attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Bushehr is a plausible target, but there could easily be other facilities — refineries, chemical plants or factories that could also make valuable targets, said Scott Borg, CEO of the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit, a security advisory group. “It’s not obvious that it has to be the nuclear program,” he said. “Iran has other control systems that could be targeted.”
Iranian government representatives did not return messages seeking comment for this story, but sources within the country say that Iran has been hit hard by the worm. When it was first discovered, 60 percent of the infected Stuxnet computers were located in Iran, according to Symantec.
Now that the Stuxnet attack is public, the industrial control systems industry has come of age in an uncomfortable way. And clearly it will have more things to worry about
“The problem is not Stuxnet. Stuxnet is history,” said Langner in an e-mail message. “The problem is the next generation of malware that will follow.”
| — Hat tip: Wally Ballou | [Return to headlines] |
China Blocks Export of Crucial Minerals to Japan as Dispute Escalates
Sharply raising the stakes in a dispute over Japan’s detention of a Chinese fishing trawler captain, the Chinese government has placed a trade embargo on all exports to Japan of a crucial category of minerals used in products like hybrid cars, wind turbines and guided missiles.
Chinese customs officials are halting all shipments to Japan of so-called rare earth elements, industry experts said on Thursday morning.
| [Return to headlines] |
Angela Merkel: Germany Will Become Islamic State
Chancellor Angela Merkel said that Germans have failed to grasp how Muslim immigration has transformed their country and will have to come to terms with more mosques than churches throughout the countryside, according to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung daily.
“Our country is going to carry on changing, and integration is also a task for the society taking up the task of dealing with immigrants,” Ms. Merkel told the daily newspaper. “For years we’ve been deceiving ourselves about this. Mosques, for example, are going to be a more prominent part of our cities than they were before.”
Germany, with a population of 4-5million Muslims, has been divided in recent weeks by a debate over remarks by the Bundesbank’s Thilo Sarrazin, who argued Turkish and Arab immigrants were failing to integrate and were swamping Germany with a higher birth rate.
The Chancellor’s remarks represent the first official acknowledgment that Germany, like other European countries, is destined to become a stronghold of Islam. She has admitted that the country will some become a stronghold.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
The Strange Case of J.B. Matthews, The Religious Left and the Censure of Senator McCarthy
Religious Left, Social justice, Reds in Our Churches.
While the term “Religious Right” is one of the most frequently used terms in the political lexicon, notably since the rise of what is usually referred to as the Evangelical Churches, the Political Left is alive and well and a strong crutch for the Democratic Party calling for “social justice”. During the first term of the Eisenhower administration, the role of American churches in politics became a major issue and helped precipitate the campaign to defame and censure Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin.
Joseph Brown Matthews was an important witness for McCarthy, testifying before Congressional committees and had the advantage of personal experience as an organizer for communist front organizations before World War II. He took pains to explain that naïve and busy people of good will including many clergymen who were often duped into signing petitions and lending their names to what appeared as ostensibly good causes, but unaware that the leading personalities in these organizations were fronting for the Communist Party.
“In June 1953, Matthews was appointed as McCarthy’s research director and in July published an article called “Reds in our Churches” in the conservative American Mercury magazine. In it, Matthews referred to the Protestant clergy as “The largest single group supporting the Communist apparatus in the United States.” The result was a public outrage at Matthews as well as “his boss”, Senator McCarthy. Time Magazine led the charge against Matthews and what it called “This astounding and inherently uncheckable statement.”
Reds in Our Churches
His authorship of the controversial article “Reds in Our Churches “exposed sophisticated communist manipulation to promote religious dissension in the United States. McCarthy’s critics seized the opportunity to label his efforts as a “Crusade against all Protestant ministers”, a view that Matthew certainly had not intended. In his Mercury article, he specifically pointed out that the great majority of all clergy in America were loyal but that a highly visible minority operating under the guise of “social justice” lent the support of the Religious Left to a variety of Liberal causes. Exaggerated and inaccurate commentaries of his intentions were used to win among many U.S. congressmen to lend support to censure of McCarthy as an extremist.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
2 comments:
Re: Andrew Bostom Islamintern goes to Chi-town: more and more I see civil war coming!
I see it here in the UK and I am mentally prepared.
Post a Comment