Several weeks ago the PVV requested that the Dutch government make public the actual costs of immigration. The government has finally replied: it can’t give such costs; the information is not available. Also, it does not believe that quantifying the monetary costs of citizens is justifiable.In other news, according to Palestinian sources the latest nefarious Israeli tactic is to train venomous snakes to seek out and bite innocent Palestinians.
Thanks to AA, AMDG, CSP, Gaia, JD, Sean O’Brian, Steen, TB, The Observer, and all the other tipsters who sent these in. Headlines and articles are below the fold.
- - - - - - - - -
A Hot, Green Fire
The forests of the state are in dangerous condition because of activist environmentalists who have, via propaganda, lobbying and lawsuits, managed to virtually stop commercial logging and debris salvage in the woods.
They claim the land needs to be free of “human intervention.” Fire roads, providing firefighter access to remote areas, have been reduced or removed. Following a fire, salvage of still viable trees for lumber is forbidden and underbrush and debris removal prohibited.
The green rationale is that “nature” will take care of it. Unfortunately, “nature” also involves fire, whether lightening or man caused, and fire feeding on ample, dry fuel burns more ferociously, destroying everything, including healthy trees.
Centuries ago, “nature” did take care of it, cleaning forests with smaller, ground-hovering fires that destroyed brush, didn’t harm big trees and burned themselves out.
As humans moved into the areas and began “caring” for the forests, they worked to extinguish fires. The idea was nice, but in reality it led to accumulation of underbrush and dead wood, which encourage insect infestation, which in turn, kills healthy trees.
The environmental view that nothing should be removed from the woods caused the situation that exists today.
According to Bob Mion, spokesman for the California Forestry Association, “… dead trees account for 38 percent of the forest in Stanislaus National Forest and 34 percent in El Dorado National Forest.”
Bob Tanner, owner of Tanner Logging, told Ag Alert “… we’ve got a lot of standing firewood in our forests.”
And it burns. Figures show that compared to a five-year average, disastrous California wildfires increased 300 percent in 2007 and 315 percent in 2008. The 2009 fire season has barely begun.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Court Document Swears Kenyan Birth Cert Legit
Owner risks perjury in high-profile case to insist Barack Obama born in Africa
With a scheduled hearing date Tuesday, Lucas Smith, the man who tried to sell an alleged Barack Obama Kenyan birth certificate on eBay, has filed court papers in a high-profile eligibility case insisting — under threat of perjury — that the Obama birth certificate in his possession is the genuine article.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Frank Gaffney: EMP & You
With hurricane season upon us once again, the recent anniversary of one of the most deadly and destructive in our nation’s history — the mega-storm called Katrina — was an occasion for remembering what can happen if we are unprepared. Unfortunately, what was arguably the most important lesson of that hurricane has still not been addressed: the truly catastrophic vulnerability of all of the infrastructures upon which our society critically depends to interruptions of the electrical grid.
Worse yet, there are both looming man-induced and far more devastating natural means of precipitating such interruptions that we have not begun to address. Should these eventuate, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina will look like, well, a day at the beach. It is no exaggeration to say that the effect of one or the other of these assaults on our electrical grid could be to engender what Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called “a world without America.”…
| — Hat tip: CSP | [Return to headlines] |
Obama ‘Outreach’ To School Kids Feels More Like Personality Cult
In 2003, motoring around western Iraq a few weeks after the regime’s fall, when the schoolhouses were hastily taking down the huge portraits of Saddam that had hung on every classroom wall, I visited an elementary-school principal with a huge stack of suddenly empty picture frames piled up on his desk, and nothing to put in them.
The education system’s standard first-grade reader featured a couple of kids called Hassan and Amal — a kind of Iraqi Dick and Jane — proudly holding up their portraits of the great man and explaining the benefits of an Iraqi education:
“O come, Hassan,” says Amal. “Let us chant for the homeland and use our pens to write, ‘Our beloved Saddam.’“
“I come, Amal,” says Hassan. “I come in a hurry to chant, ‘O, Saddam, our courageous president, we are all soldiers defending the borders for you, carrying weapons and marching to success.’“
Pathetic, right?
On Friday, Aug. 28, the principal of Eagle Bay Elementary School in Farmington, Utah — in the name of “education” — showed her young charges the “Obama Pledge” video released at the time of the inauguration, in which Ashton Kutcher and various other big-time celebrities, two or three of whom you might even recognize, “pledge to be a servant to our president and to all mankind because together we can, together we are, and together we will be the change that we seek.”
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Tea Parties Cannot Win Back the Republic Without This Information
Sustainable Development: The Root of All Our Problems
In his book, Earth in the Balance, Al Gore warned that a “wrenching transformation” must take place to lead America away from the “horrors of the Industrial Revolution.” The process to do that is called Sustainable Development and its’ roots can be traced back to a UN policy document called Agenda 21, adopted at the UN’s Earth Summit in 1992.
Sustainable Development calls for changing the very infrastructure of the nation, away from private ownership and control of property to nothing short of central planning of the entire economy — often referred to as top-down control. Truly, Sustainable Development is designed to change our way of life.
In short, it’s all about wealth redistribution. Your wealth into a green rat hole.
During the Cold War, communists tried to get us to surrender our liberties and way of life for the wisdom of Karl Marx. Americans didn’t buy it.
But now, they have taken the same clap trap and wrapped it all in a nice green blanket, scaring us with horror stories about the human destruction of the environment — and so we are now throwing our liberties on the bon fire like a good old fashioned book burning — all in the name of protecting the planet.
It sounds so friendly. So meaningful. So urgent. But, the devastation to our liberty and way of life is the same as if Lenin ordered it.
[…]
So what is Sustainable Development? The Sustainablists insist that society be transformed into feudal-like governance by making nature the central organizing principle for our economy and society.
To achieve this, Sustainablist policy focuses on three components; global land use, global education, and global population control.
Keep in mind that America is the only country in the world based on the ideals of private property. But, private property is incompatible with the collectivist premise of Sustainable Development.
If you doubt that, then consider this quote from the report of the 1976 UN’s Habitat I conference which said: “Land …cannot be treated as an ordinary asset, controlled by individuals and subject to the pressures and inefficiencies of the market. Private land ownership is also a principle instrument of accumulation and concentration of wealth, therefore, contributes to social injustice.”
According to Sustainablist doctrine, It is a social injustice for some to have prosperity if others do not. It is a social injustice to keep our borders closed. It is a social injustice for some to be bosses and others to be merely workers.
Social justice is a major premise of Sustainable Development. Another word for social justice, by the way, is Socialism. Karl Marx was the first to coin the phrase “social justice.” Some officials try to pretend that Sustainable Development is just a local effort to protect the environment — just your local leaders putting together a local vision for the community. Then ask your local officials how it is possible that the exact language and tactics for implementation of Sustainable Development are being used in nearly every city around the globe from Lewiston, Maine to Singapore. Local indeed.
Sustainable Development is the process by which America is being reorganized around a central principle of state collectivism using the environment as bait.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
The ‘Green’ Trojan Horse
Domestic Policy: Among the many controversies swirling around the White House’s “green czar,” none is more disturbing than his plan to use the green movement to socialize the economy.
Van Jones, a special adviser to the president, revealed his Trojan-horse strategy during a 2008 interview on leftist Uprising Radio in Los Angeles.
“The green economy will start off as a small subset” of a “complete revolution” away from “gray capitalism” and toward “redistribution of all the wealth,” he said. “And we are going to push it and push it and push it until it becomes the engine for transforming the whole society.”
A self-described “communist,” Jones caught heat recently for calling Republicans “a**holes.” He’s also a 9/11 “truther” as it turns out, one of many red flags in a radical past that, remarkably, didn’t disqualify him from shaping domestic policy in this White House.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
US Mayor Under Fire for Anti-Muslim Email
The mayor of an American town came under fire over the weekend for forwarding an anti-Islam email calling on recipients to protest against a U.S. postage stamp recognizing Islamic holidays as it was a “slap in the face” to Americans.
Stereotyping the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims, the email cites “Muslim terrorist attacks” and calls on people to “remember the Muslim bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993!” in a bid to call on “Patriotic Americans” to protest against the postage stamps first issued in 2001 to mark the Eid holidays.
Forwarded by Mayor Johnny Piper of Clarksville, Tennessee, who defended his actions, the email was sent to around 22 city council members, city officials and even a local newspaper editor.
The email called the stamps, which were wrongly assumed to have been issued under President Barack Obama’s administration, a “slap in the face” to the Americans who “died at the hands of those whom this stamp honors.”
Piper said his actions were not anti-Muslim and that he was passing on “information.”
Meanwhile, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Muslim civil liberties and advocacy organization, said it would send a copy of the Quran, Islam’s holy book, to Piper and other council memebrs.
While president of the Islamic Center of Clarksville, Ahmed Joudah, said: “I laughed when I read it, but at the same time, I felt sorry that we still have people around us that think that way.”
Joudah said he was surprised the mayor had forwarded the email and added: “I don’t want to say harsh things, because he’s a very nice man. I know him personally, and he’s a very nice, decent man.”
| — Hat tip: TB | [Return to headlines] |
Van Jones — Just One of Many Obama-Marxists
I must say that I was almost surprised by Obama Czar Van Jones’ resignation. As there are now so many racist anti-American Marxists in the current administration, I actually thought Obama would ignore the calls from both political parties for Jones to leave. And as the calls for Jones to step down from his powerful Green Czar position increased, the White House continued to remain “mum” on the matter. To date, the White House still remains closed-lipped about Jones.
As multiple YouTube videos that played Jones’ actual racist (he says white people are poisoning the black community and only white kids shoot up schools) anti-American comments (in his own voice) were played (by Fox News and were written about by conservative columnists), Jones’ actual views finally became known to the public. Note: Suffice it to say, Obama’s State-run media wrote nothing about Van Jones until he resigned on Saturday.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Van Jones Scandal Threatens Obama Presidency
Reporting from near the home turf of embattled Green Jobs Czar Van Jones, Joe Garofoli of the San Francisco Chronicle says it’s clearly a bad sign when White House flak Robert Gibbs is asked if Jones still enjoys the confidence of the President and merely replies that Jones “continues to work in this administration.”
But the White House has to know that, if Jones goes, the questions won’t end. Who appointed him? Who looked into his background? Who knew what and when? Obama has decades of friendly associations with communists and terrorists
Gibbs knows that the Jones controversy undermines confidence in the President, who bears ultimate responsibility for the appointment. Gibbs also has to know that, if Jones’ background can sink Jones, the President himself is in trouble. Obama has decades of friendly associations with communists and terrorists, ranging from Communist Party USA member Frank Marshall Davis in his youth in Hawaii to communist terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn in Chicago when he was doing community organizing and running for political office.
By comparison to Obama, when it comes to nefarious connections, Jones is a piker.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
You Can Put Lipstick on a Pig…
Immediately after his election, Obama began supplanting his Cabinet through the appointment of three dozen advisers, none of whom faced Senate confirmation. All of these people have direct accountability only to Obama. With these Czars, he has successfully positioned the United States government to be squarely in charge of nearly every aspect of American life and eroding much of our freedom in the process.
[…]
In order to exert this type of control, Obama has recruited some of the most radical liberal ideologues imaginable. Take Van Jones, a Yale-educated, self-described communist with a colorful vocabulary. Jones was a special adviser to the President on Green Jobs at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, until he was forced to resign late Saturday night. But, his resignation should not signal the end to this controversy.
Ironically, notwithstanding the fact that thousands of Americans nationwide are being labeled kooks and conspiracy theorists, simply because they want proof positive of Barack Obama’s place of birth, Jones is a real-life conspiracy kook, having been signatory number 46 to a petition circulated by 911truth.org, an organization of bad actors, Democrat activists and other “respected” leaders that actually believe our government let the September 2001 attacks happen simply to justify starting a war.
Jones’ resignation statement blamed his demise on the smears of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, rather than his own foul-mouthed diatribes, his pro-Communist beliefs, which advocate for a “whole new system”, or the signature that he placed on that ridiculous petition. He even tried to downplay his own signature, claiming that he really didn’t read the petition, but 911truth.org stated emphatically that all signatories knew exactly what they were signing. When that didn’t work, he said the petition didn’t reflect his views. Pathetic.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
The Natural Governing Party, R.I.P.
The Liberal Party of Canada has long been known as the Natural Governing Party and Liberals consider themselves to be the only true political party that is fit to govern Canada. To Liberals, Liberal Party values are synonymous with Canadian values. They consider the occasional election of another party to power as nothing more than a blip; something that occurs every once in awhile when the government has been around too long and has grown tired. Liberals see themselves as the star player who, while occasionally is benched to get a rest, is still the star.
The Liberal Party has no policy ideas to speak of other than those that they can steal from other sources, usually the NDP. The total purpose of their existence is not to form a vision of what the country should be but to obtain and hold power. It has been said that Liberals have only two core beliefs; they believe in God and they believe that God is a Liberal. But in order to achieve their prime directive the party needs a leader who understands power and the party has been lacking a competent leader since late 2003 when Jean Chrétien stepped down.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Brussels is a Shining Symbol of Where the Real Power Lies
As Westminster MPs lick their wounds, their European counterparts grow ever more confident, says Boris Johnson.
By Boris Johnson
Cor, I thought. This is what it must be like to be in one of those films. You nod off for 10 minutes and you wake up in 200 years’ time. We had just pitched up at the Gare du Midi in Brussels and the transformation was incredible. It was 20 years ago that this paper despatched me to the Belgian capital to be its Common Market Correspondent, and in those days the Gare du Midi was a wonderfully dingy place with feral cats and trod-on chips and Turkish taxi drivers snoozing in their battered Mercs and trains departing slowly for First World War destinations like Poperinge.
Now the future had arrived. A vast space-age Eurostar terminal loured over the ancient quartier, and as we headed into the heart of Euroville I couldn’t believe my eyes. Poor old Brussels took a terrible pasting in the Fifties, when ruthless British developers moved in and razed so many lovely maisons de maître, whacking up anonymous office blocks in their place. That was nothing to the destruction now taking place in the name of Europe. As you get to the sites of the burgeoning European institutions, it is as though gigantic alien motherships of glass and steel have crash-landed on the city, dwarfing the cobbled streets and crushing out the patisseries and the gloomy little bars I used to love.
Take the Euro-parliament, which in my day had a fairly poky office on Rue Belliard. Look at it now. To call it a palace is a wild understatement. It is a series of palaces, a city within a city, with bars and restaurants and coiffeurs, and arcing passerelles linking one modernist monstrosity with another. In my time the Euro-parliament was an amiable backwater, the mother-in-law of parliaments, a herbivorous habitat of oddballs — German ex-stormtroopers, retired Italian porn stars, long-haired Flemish greens, the young Geoff Hoon. The agenda broadly consisted of having lunches in Strasbourg before issuing strongly worded and cosmically irrelevant denunciations of African famines or Latin American earthquakes.
All that is changed, changed utterly. There may have been a bar in the old Brussels Euro-parliament office, but not even the most desperate journalist would have gone there in search of a story. Today that parliament bar is heaving, and so are all the innumerable places of refreshment, pullulating with animated young thrusters of both sexes, their Christian Dior spectacles glittering with lust for — lust for what? Power, that’s what. For the first time in the 30-year history of this much-mocked institution I had a sense of the power that seeps from the brown moleskin walls, and as I watched huissiers scuttling softly to and fro, I saw an assembly newly drenched and glistening with a rich béarnaise of self-confidence.
And I could not help thinking, of course, of the pitiful comparison with Westminster, the parliament in which I recently served. Woe to the Westminster MPs, the vast majority of whom are — at least in my experience — decent and hard-working public servants. They have been so bullied, burned and beaten by the media that they seem to have had a collective nervous breakdown. Many of them are retiring, shell-shocked by the expenses scandal, their confidence permanently shredded by the detonation of public anger.
As for their replacements, they must cope with an unloved unreformed Gormenghast of a parliament, in which they are still forced to use their archaic third-person form of address, still forced to vote by an ancient procedure that means 15 minutes of halitotic shuffling round wood-panelled lobbies.
What a contrast with Brussels. In Brussels and Strasbourg (and Luxembourg, where heaven knows what they get up to), the MEPs just turn up and ker-ching, they claim their per diems. They vote at the push of a button, they are attended by every possible comfort, they have minimal interaction with their constituents, and in general the great Euro-gravy train rolls on at tre’s grande vitesse.
In Brussels the parliament is growing in physical splendour and size, with about 750 Euro-MPs now browsing in its pastures. In London the tendency is all in the opposite direction. Not only are there plans to reduce Parliament from 659 to about 400, but British MPs face a protracted humiliation, of being forced by the whips to fill in weird prep-school forms giving an account of how they have spent every hour of every day.
In Brussels the lunching seems as uninhibited as ever; in London it’s humble pie all round — and the kicker of the whole affair is that this change is not just symbolic. It reflects the underlying reality. It reflects the shift in the balance of power and the fact that the laws of this country are no longer determined by Parliament at Westminster.
You do not need to understand the detail of the directive on Alternative Investment Fund Management, for instance, to grasp that it is aimed at businesses in London, and risks doing considerable damage to such businesses, and yet our Parliament in London is wholly irrelevant. These hedge funds, private equity and venture capital firms had little or nothing to do with the financial meltdown of last year. But it happens that they have long been unpopular with certain European governments, who took advantage of the crisis to dust down an old plan of attack — rather as George Bush took advantage of 9/11 to launch an irrelevant attack on his father’s bugbear, Saddam Hussein.
The result is a directive that threatens to drive such businesses outside the European Union. Of course there is a case for sensible regulation, and there is still time for that directive to be improved. But who is going to do that work? There is no point in the venture capitalists and the hedge funds lobbying any British ministers. Under the new co-decision powers of the Euro-parliament, those crucial amendments will be made in Brussels by Euro-MPs.
Indeed, with more directives in the pipeline, the future of the whole UK financial services industry is probably in their hands. That is why it is so telling to see the physical contrast between desiccated Westminster and sleek, self-confident Brussels. Power has passed, is passing, and under the Treaty of Lisbon, will pass further to the Euro-parliament.
| — Hat tip: Gaia | [Return to headlines] |
Denmark: Ramadan Kareem — a Bountiful Ramadan to All
On September 2, Ambassador Laurie Fulton gathered prominent Muslims and representatives of other faiths at the Residence for a celebration of a traditional Iftar — the evening meal when Muslims break their fast during Ramadan.
Speaking to her guests, the Ambassador recounted her own moving experience of visiting Morocco during Ramadan a few years ago and quoted President Obama’s own Ramadan message to Muslim communities.
| — Hat tip: Steen | [Return to headlines] |
EU: Sarkozy’s Shortlist: 5ft-5in French President Accused of Ordering 20 Short People to Stand Behind to Make Him Look ‘Statuesque’
It’s hard work looking like an imposing statesman when you’re only 5ft 5in tall.
Nicolas Sarkozy has resorted to standing on a box and even rising on to his tiptoes to disguise his height — or rather the lack of it.
But for a televised speech at a major industrial plant, the French President and his aides were taking no chances.
They found 20 of the site’s shortest workers to stand behind Mr Sarkozy as he delivered the keynote address.
They were bussed in from all over the Faurecia motor technology plant near Caen in Normandy after aides made sure none exceeded Mr Sarkozy’s 5ft 5in.
However, yesterday the strategy was exposed by a worker at the site who admitted she had been chosen because she was short.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Ireland: Why Even the Yes Men Should Say No to a Man With Links to Libya
STAY with me for five short hops, and I will take you from Colonel Gaddafi and Abdelbaset Al Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber, to the ‘Ireland for Europe’ campaign and questions about who is backing this Yes propaganda outfit being run by Pat Cox. The connections will illuminate the sort of company with which the Yes campaign feels comfortable.
Start at one. The mass-murderer Megrahi has just been set free from prison in Scotland and returned to Libya.
Two, last week Jack Straw, the British Secretary of State for Justice, admitted for the first time that a Libyan oil deal with BP was an essential part of the government’s decision to included Megrahi in a prisoner transfer deal.
Three, the oil deal was worth $900million (E630m) and struck with BP six weeks after Megrahi was included in the prisoner transfer agreement. A report in the British Press at the weekend said that BP had warned the British government that the failure to include Megrahi in the deal could damage BP’s interests, but BP denied actually mentioning Megrahi by name.
Four, up until last Tuesday, the chairman of BP was Peter Sutherland. In 2004, Sir Mark Allen, a Middle East expert, resigned from the British intelligence service MI6 to join Mr Sutherland’s BP for £200,000 (E230,000)a year. Six months before joining BP, Sir Mark chaired a secret meeting with Colonel Gaddafi’s spy chief in London, which included discussion of the Megrahi case. It turns out it was Mr Sutherland’s ex-spook who then lobbied the British justice secretary. He urged his old friend Mr Straw to speed up an agreement over prisoner transfers, which had been expected to lead to Megrahi’s return, to avoid jeopardising a trade deal with Libya worth up to £15billion (E17bn) to Mr Sutherland’s BP.
Five, Mr Sutherland is a patron of Ireland for Europe, of which Pat Cox is campaign director. The organisation’s website does not disclose the extent or source of its funding nor whether Mr Sutherland has contributed financially to the cause.
[…]
Now, this Libya-Sutherland-Yes lobby connection should have been spotted long ago. I only spotted it when a No-to-Lisbon friend pointed out what the blogger CookieMonster wrote about it on politics.ie.
Until now I have been viewing Mr Sutherland just as a representative for Goldman’s and their tarnished reputation. And I do not forget his history as anon-executive director and member of the remuneration committee of the Royal Bank of Scotland. You will remember Mr Sutherland’s RBS committee: it allowed Sir Fred Goodwin, the former chief executive, to walk away from the wreck of the bank with a pension of £703,000 (E837,000) a year.
It was the blogger who showed me I now have to see Mr Sutherland also as someone who is happy for his firm to deal with Libyan killer, Colonel Gaddafi, the man who provided the Provos with all that Semtex. But as CookieMonster says: ‘We won’t be seeing the Prime Time “Citizen Sutherland” programme, and we won’t be seeing any of this reported in the Irish Times, and we won’t see any Yes-siders spitting feathers about having Peter Sutherland, chairman of the prisoner release-profiting BP, on their side.’
Which is not to say that the Yes campaign isn’t fastidious in its own way about just whom they believe should be allowed to join in the Lisbon debate. Yesterday in the Irish edition of the News of the World, the Defence Minister, Willie O’Dea, told the London-based Open Europe think tank to ‘butt out’ of the Lisbon debate here.
He was reacting to research just released by Lorraine Mullally, director of Open Europe, which showed that during negotiations on the original text of the Lisbon Treaty, between 2002 and 2004, the Irish government objected to many of the treaty’s most important elements but failed in the overwhelming majority of the amendments it tried to make to the text…
| — Hat tip: Sean O’Brian | [Return to headlines] |
Irish Homes to Get UK Leaflets on ‘Open Door’ To Immigrants
THE UK Independence Party (UKIP) will send a leaflet to every Irish home urging a No vote in the Lisbon Treaty to close an “open door” to immigrants.
It will also argue that the final decision on sensitive ethical issues such as abortion and euthanasia will pass from Irish to European courts if the treaty is ratified.
British MEP and UKIP leader Nigel Farage said: “With the Charter of Fundamental Rights, which is justiciable at the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg, it will no longer be your Supreme Court that takes decisions on really hot and contentious issues.” He added the European court had a record of “political activism”.
Mr Farage, who is a trenchant critic of the EU, described the Government’s guarantees on the treaty as “laughable”.
He said UKIP had decided to get involved in the Lisbon referendum campaign because the “No side seemed to be a bit thin on the ground, and someone needed to redress the balance”.
UKIP, which won the second biggest vote in the recent European elections in Britain, has 13 MEPs. It is the biggest party in the newly- formed Europe of Freedom of Democracy group within the European Parliament.
Mr Farage said it would cost more than €100,000 to fund the leaflet drop and other campaign activities in Ireland. The Europe of Freedom of Democracy group would provide the cash for the campaign even though the parliamentary group does not contain a single Irish MEP.
Mr Farage, who rejected any suggestion that UKIP’s involvement in an Irish referendum was political interference, added: “We are not the Tories, for Christ sake. We are not the party that governed Ireland and fought tooth and nail against the creation of a free state and all the rest of it. We are unashamedly a pro-British party but that doesn’t make us anti-Irish.”
One of the most controversial arguments in the campaign leaflets which will be sent to Irish homes in the next few weeks is a claim that the Lisbon Treaty will open the door to immigration.
“I suspect no one else would touch this issue with a barge pole but we will deal with it in an utterly responsible way,” said Mr Farage, who added that UKIP was not in any way racist and had five black or Asian candidates in the recent European elections.
Mr Farage will travel to Ireland next Tuesday to attend a debate on the treaty in Dublin.
Another UKIP MEP, Marta Andreasen, was in Dublin yesterday to launch the NO to Lisbon 2 campaign.
Ms Andreasen, a former European Commission chief accountant, said the EU was giving “no help at all” to member states in the current economic crisis.
“Ireland has had many economic policies that have helped the country grow until 2002 without the help of the European Union,” she said.
Ms Andreasen, an Argentinian-born Spaniard, said she was dismissed from her former job for going public with concerns about accounting systems. “I have seen what happens within the walls of the European Union, and out of that experience I wouldn’t like my children to be ruled by this political elite in Brussels.”
| — Hat tip: Sean O’Brian | [Return to headlines] |
Irish Prime Minister Still Confused on Lisbon
Twenty-nine days until the Irish are forced to vote again on Lisbon, and the Irish prime minister still can’t give more than muddled answers about what is in the treaty.
Yesterday the Taoiseach, Brian Cowen, launched his party’s campaign for a Yes vote, and insisted again that he had read all 306 pages of the treaty. But when an Irish Daily Mail reporter asked him how Lisbon would affect employment policy in Ireland, Mr Cowen could only give a rambling reply that never answered the question.
Here is the best the head of the Irish government could come up with on Lisbon and employment policy: ‘Clearly, the way it’s going to affect employment in Ireland is that by having a Lisbon Treaty passed we’ll have more effective decision making in all aspects of both Council, Parliament and Commission in terms of their right of initiative.’ Then he wandered into something he called ‘social protection area’ and so-called ‘workers’ rights.’
In fact, the crisp answer to the question,- and Mr Cowen clearly doesn’t have what it takes to give a crisp answer on Lisbon: 23 pages in on the 306, and he must have dozed off — is: ‘The Union shall take measures to ensure co-ordination of the employment policies of the Member States, in particular by defining guidelines for these policies.’
In other words, Lisbon means that employment policies will be taken out of the hands of Irish business, Irish trade unions, and the Irish government and placed into the hands of the EU institutions.
Irish voters have a right to expect their head of government would know that. Either he doesn’t know, or he does know but he won’t admit this further surrender of power to Brussels before the referendum on October 2nd.
| — Hat tip: Sean O’Brian | [Return to headlines] |
Sweden: Female Cyclist Bitten by Attacker
A female cyclist in central Sweden was assaulted on Sunday night by two men, one of whom left bite marks on her left arm.
The 18-year-old woman was riding along a bike path in Motala in central Sweden when she was attacked at 2am on Sunday night by two men in dark clothes, reported MVT newspaper.
“One of them bit her on her lower left arm and they also pulled her hair. She had clear bite marks on her arm,” Christer Pettersson of the Motala police told TT news agency.
The woman went into shock and has foggy recollections of what happened next, although she didn’t recognize either of her assailants.
Authorities don’t consider the attack to be an attempted rape.
“Nothing indicates (it was attempted rape), and we are looking at it as an assault,” Pettersson said.
| — Hat tip: TB | [Return to headlines] |
UK: ‘No U-Turn’ On Libya Compensation
Downing Street has denied any U-turn in its support for IRA victims’ families seeking compensation from Libya.
Libya, which supplied the IRA with explosives, has paid compensation to US victims of Libya-backed terrorism.
But last year Gordon Brown wrote to the UK victims’ lawyer saying it would not be “appropriate” for the government to push Libya to compensate them.
On Sunday he said a government unit was being set up to help them. The Tories called that a “partial U-turn”.
In the latest row to follow the release of the Lockerbie bomber, Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, by the Scottish government, the Sunday Times published ministers’ letters to campaigners for IRA victims, which were sent last November.
‘Not negotiate’
In them Mr Brown wrote that the government did not “consider it appropriate to enter into a bilateral discussion with Libya on this matter”.
But on Sunday he said he was setting up a dedicated Foreign Office team to assist the IRA families’ victims.
The prime minister’s spokesman said that was “entirely consistent with the approach taken so far” and that Foreign Office officials in Libya would “facilitate not negotiate”.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Schools Secretary Ed Balls said: “It’s not a U-turn because, as I understand it, what Gordon Brown said last night is the same as he said to families [in the past].”
He added that it had not been possible to pursue a “government-led case for compensation” as Britain had already agreed with Libya to “recognise what had happened in the past, put it behind us and move on”.
There had been an attempt to get a government agreement in 2004 for compensation for both the IRA and Lockerbie victims, he said.
[…]
Edward Davey, the Liberal Democrats’ foreign affairs spokesman, added: “The prime minister is still failing to explain why he rejected the idea of the British government negotiating directly for compensation for the IRA victims’ families.
“Everyone will wish the families’ legal teams good luck, but Gordon Brown’s decision to leave this to the courts and not to make this an issue between governments looks hard to justify.”
‘Engagement’
Meanwhile Colonel Gaddafi’s son Saif al-Islam Gaddafi said any claims for compensation based on Libya’s supply of explosives to the IRA would be a matter for the courts.
He told Sky News: “They have their lawyers. We have our lawyers.”
And when asked if his answer to the compensation demand would be “no” in the first instance, he replied: “Of course.”
| — Hat tip: Sean O’Brian | [Return to headlines] |
UK: 67% Want Vote on EU Membership
TWO thirds of Britons want their chance to vote on our membership of the European Union, a survey shows.
The online poll published today reveals 67 per cent want a referendum, including more than half of Labour and Lib Dem voters.
Among Conservatives the figure is 82 per cent — putting more pressure on party leader David Cameron to clarify his position on Europe. Despite campaigning against the Lisbon Treaty — the rehashed EU constitution — the Tories will not say whether they will tear it up in power.
But the furore over the treaty will be re-ignited next month when Ireland holds a second referendum, despite voting against it last year.
Labour has denied British voters the chance to vote on the treaty, but today’s survey by Opinium Research suggests Britain could deliver a huge blow to Brussels if ever given the chance to vote on EU membership.
Anger has been fuelled after the Treasury admitted Britain’s net EU contribution will rise by almost 60 per cent to £6.4billion in 2010 — equal to a £260 levy on every British home.
Ukip leader Nigel Farage said: “The Irish referendum will put Europe back at the heart of the debate. The question the Tories would rather not face is coming back.”
| — Hat tip: Sean O’Brian | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Devout Muslim Dies After Savage Beating by ‘Race-Hate’ Gang in Front of His Granddaughter, Three
A Muslim pensioner has died today after an appalling race-hate attack by a gang of schoolboys.
Retired care worker Ekram Haque, 67, was battered to the ground in front of his three-year- old granddaughter Marian.
Police are linking the attack to other assaults on elderly Asians. The attackers, who were black and wore hooded tops, are believed to be as young as 12.
Mr Haque, a devout Muslim, was ambushed as he left his local mosque in Tooting, South-West London, where he had been attending evening prayers during the holy month of Ramadan.
As he and Marian waited for a lift, the gang ran up behind him and clubbed him around the head.
Two other worshippers chased the thugs away but Mr Haque — described by friends as a ‘gentle giant’ — had suffered horrific head injuries.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Muslim Cleric: Sebastian Faulks Should Face Sharia Justice
MUSLIM firebrand Anjem Choudary caused new outrage last night after demanding author Sebastian Faulks be tried before an Islamic court where the penalty could be possible execution.
He said the bestselling novelist should be hauled before a Sharia court to answer charges that he had insulted the Prophet Mohammed by describing the Koran as the “rantings of a schizophrenic”.
In the interview last week, Mr Faulks added that the English translation of the Koran was a “depressing read”.
Although the bestselling author has since apologised, Islam4UK a radical group associated with Choudary and his mentor, the banned cleric Omar Bakri Mohammed, posted an article on its website entitled, “Sebastian Faulks on a Death Wish?”
The article goes on to say that “with other individuals having faced disturbing consequences over the last few years for similar rants, [Mr Faulks] cannot provide himself an excuse for not being aware of the repercussions of such careless comments, which is a great cause for concern”.
Author Sebastian Faulks
It concludes: “May Allah punish the oppressors and deal with the slanderers.”
Mr Choudary, a former supporter of banned extremist group Al-Muhajiroun, denied writing the article, but said he agreed with its content.
The father of three, who sits as a judge in the London Sharia court and wants the “flag of Allah” flying over Downing Street, went further.
He said the murder of Dutch film director Theo van Gogh, who was killed by a Muslim extremist in 2004 after criticising Islam, should serve as a warning.
“Mr Faulks was extremely naïve for what he said and it could have some grave consequence for him,” he said.
“He’s not the first person to insult the Prophet. You can see with Theo van Gogh and Salman Rushdie and whole host of other people that it does have those consequences.
“There are many people out there who do like to take things into their own hands.
“Someone like this needs to be assessed in an Islamic court of law and if he’s found guilty then there would be capital punishment.
| — Hat tip: AA | [Return to headlines] |
UK: No.10 Turns on Obama and Clinton for Criticising Decision to Release Lockerbie Bomber
Downing Street has hit back at Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for attacking the decision to release the Lockerbie bomber.
President Obama and the US Secretary of State fuelled a fierce American backlash against Britain, claiming Abdelbaset Al Megrahi should have been forced to serve out his jail sentence in Scotland — but a senior Whitehall aide said their reaction was ‘disingenuous’.
British officials claim Mr Obama and Mrs Clinton were kept informed at all stages of discussions concerning Megrahi’s return.
The officials say the Americans spoke out because they were taken aback by the row over Megrahi’s release, not because they did not know it was about to happen.
‘The US was kept fully in touch about everything that was going on with regard to Britain’s discussions with Libya in recent years and about Megrahi,’ said the Whitehall aide.
‘We would never do anything about Lockerbie without discussing it with the US. It is disingenuous of them to act as though Megrahi’s return was out of the blue.
‘They knew about our prisoner transfer agreement with Libya and they knew that the Scots were considering Megrahi’s case.’
Mr Obama said Megrahi’s release on compassionate grounds was a ‘mistake’ while Mrs Clinton phoned the Scottish administration to complain in person.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Foreign Secretary David Miliband are said to have been ‘disappointed’ by the force of Washington’s response.
American politicians claimed the Anglo-US ‘special relationship’ had been damaged ‘for years to come’ because the UK had gone back on a joint pledge that Megrahi would stay behind bars in Scotland.
Former US Justice Department official David Rivkin said it was ‘duplicitous behaviour’.
| — Hat tip: Sean O’Brian | [Return to headlines] |
New Arab Incitement: Israelis Train Snakes to Attack
(IsraelNN.com) Palestinian Authority Arabs have made a variety of accusations against Israel over the years, from distributing bubble gum that corrupts Muslim youth to attacking with trained pigs. The latest rumor making the rounds among Arabs in Samaria is that Israelis are training snakes to attack innocent farmers, according to the Bethlehem-based Maan news, which is closely associated with the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority.
The rumor apparently began when a snake bit a woman outside a village adjacent to the Jewish city of Ariel. Local Arabs said that after the attack, the snake “escaped” toward Ariel. The snake’s movement was taken as a sign that it had been released from Ariel by Israelis intent on harming Arabs.
The Maan report also accused Ariel residents of ruining farmland in the area by dumping waste onto Arab land.
PA villagers in the same area were the first to accuse Israelis of using trained pigs to attack Arab farmers. Several such accusations have been published by PA media. In addition, PA media has accused Israel of unleashing anti-Arab “super rats” in Jerusalem.
There is no scientific evidence indicating that rats or snakes can be trained as attack animals, or that either of the species can differentiate between Jews and Arabs.
The United States Roadmap plan demands that the PA halt incitement against Israel.
| — Hat tip: Sean O’Brian | [Return to headlines] |
Swedish Foreign Minister Cancels Israel Trip
Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt has cancelled an upcoming trip to Israel. But the decision is not linked to a dispute over a newspaper article about organ harvesting, Swedish officials say.
Israeli foreign ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor said on Sunday (6 September) that Mr Bildt will not travel to Israel on 11 September as planned.
Mr Palmor gave no reason for the cancellation. But Israeli newspaper Haaretz on Sunday cited “a source at the foreign ministry” as saying it was due to fears of a hostile reception.
Mr Bildt in August declined to condemn an article in Swedish daily Aftonbladet which claimed that Israeli soldiers killed Palestinians in order to sell their organs for transplants.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had called for the refutation after the article caused outrage in Israel, including a petition for Jews to boycott Swedish furniture shop Ikea.
Swedish officials denied that a date had been set for Mr Bildt’s trip to Israel however, saying that his decision not to go for the time being is due to lack of clarity in US-Israeli talks on the Middle East peace process.
“Mr Bildt is planning to visit the Middle East during the [Swedish EU] presidency, but he’s waiting for the right opportunity to do it when the peace process is maybe in a more positive state,” Swedish foreign ministry spokeswoman Cecilia Julin told AFP.
US congressmen on Friday joined the debate with an open letter from Democrat Robert Wexler and Republican Elton Gallegly saying Sweden should set an example because of its current role as EU chair.
“It is critical that your government unequivocally repudiate and reject the heinous allegations expressed in this article,” the letter stated.
Jerusalem-based pressure group NGO Monitor has also accused Sweden of tolerating the spread of anti-Semitic views by funding Israeli-critical NGOs such as the Alternative Information Centre and Sabeel.
“Failure to [condemn the Aftonbladet story] threatens to further strain European diplomatic relations with Israel,” NGO Monitor’s Dan Kosky said.
EU-Israel relations have suffered in recent months due to EU criticism of Israeli settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank and the EU’s decision to freeze a planned upgrade in diplomatic ties.
Mr Bildt at an informal EU foreign ministers’ meeting in Stockholm on Friday said settlements are “illegal, they are an impediment to the peace process.”
Israel’s defence ministry at the same time gave notice it will this week approve the building of 500 new settlers’ homes in the West Bank area.
If Mr Netanyahu eventually gives in to US pressure to halt further expansion, as expected, the current move could be a sop to right-wing hardliners in the Israeli establishment.
| — Hat tip: Sean O’Brian | [Return to headlines] |
Iran Has Enough Uranium to Build at Least Two Bombs
Last night, my wife and I and several members of our Joshua Fund team hosted a dinner party for Dr. Dore Gold and a small group of evangelical Christian and Catholic leaders and journalists at our home. A long-time friend and senior advisor to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Gold is the author of several New York Times best-selling books about the Middle East. His latest is a must-read expose of the apocalyptic ayatollahs entitled, The Rise of Nuclear Iran: How Tehran Defies The West.
The evening’s chilling headline: Gold noted that a careful reading of the new IAEA report indicates that Iran now appears to have enough uranium to produce at least two nuclear bombs.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Saudi Prince Urges U.S. To Recognize Oil Dependency
MILAN (Reuters) — The United States has no alternative to oil to meet its massive energy needs and should recognize its energy interdependence with the Middle East, Saudi Arabia’s Prince Turki al-Faisal wrote in an article on Friday.
U.S. President Barack Obama has been pushing to boost green energy which cuts emissions of heat-trapping gases and reduces the use of fossil fuels. In his election campaign, Obama raised some potentially disturbing issues for the Saudis, such as ending dependence on Middle Eastern oil.
In the article translated into Italian and published by Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore, Turki said energy independence was an unrealistic, groundless and harmful concept which was likely to re-emerge once economic recovery pushed oil prices up.
“There is no technology on the horizon which can replace oil to satisfy colossal needs of U.S. industry, transport and armed forces. Any future scenario will be characterized by mix of renewable and non-renewable energies whether you like it or not,” Turki said.
His criticism comes as the U.S. Senate is working on a wide-ranging energy and environmental bill aimed to put limits on the amount of greenhouse gases that big industries are allowed to emit.
Turki, a former Saudi intelligence chief and envoy to Washington and London, said the United States, the world’s biggest energy consumer, should put aside the rhetoric of energy independence and instead recognize interdependence of energy producers and consumers.
“Whether you like it or not, the destinies of the United States and Saudi Arabia are linked and will remain (linked) for decades,” he said.
The United States is the biggest trading partner for the world’s biggest oil exporter.
| — Hat tip: Sean O’Brian | [Return to headlines] |
Alcohol Banned at US Base in Afghanistan After Airstrike That Killed 125
After a Nato airstrike killed as many as 125 people last week, General Stanley McChrystal was keen to get the situation under control — fast.
When he tried to contact his underlings to find out what had happened, however, he found, to his fury, that many of them were either drunk or too hungover to respond.
Complaining in his daily Commander’s Update that too many people had been “partying it up”, General McChrystal, head of International Forces in Afghanistan (Isaf), banned alcohol at his headquarters yesterday, admonishing staff for not having “their heads in the right place” on Friday morning — a few hours after the deadly attack.
What was an oasis of coffee shops and bars where commanders could enjoy a beer or three will now be a dry area.
German soldiers in northern Afghanistan have been criticised for calling in an American F15 Strike Eagle to drop two 500lb bombs on a pair of hijacked fuel tankers in Kunduz at about 2.30am on Friday. Scores of local people who had gathered to siphon fuel from the lorries were killed in the explosions.
Nato began an investigation later that morning but military sources said that General McChrystal was furious because he “couldn’t get hold of the people he needed to get hold of and he blamed it on all-night partying”.
Rear-Admiral Gregory Smith, the top US spokesman in Afghanistan, accused German troops of waiting too long after the blasts to investigate the scene. When General McChrystal flew north, the local German commander, Colonel Georg Klein, told him that it was too dangerous to visit the blast site, four miles outside their camp, because they might get shot at.
President Karzai called the airstrikes unacceptable, and the fallout has heightened tensions inside Nato. Bernard Kouchner, the French Foreign Minister, described the bombing as a big mistake and the European Union foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, called it a “very sad event”.
Germany insisted yesterday that the tankers posed an acute threat to their troops because they could have been used for suicide bomb missions. Josef Jung, the Defence Minister, told parliament that there were no civilian casualties, and his deputy, Christian Schmidt, demanded that “foreign ministers from other countries should wait for the investigations”.
The German military is set to face tough questions, however, after a preliminary investigation found that the bombs were dropped in breach of Nato guidelines.
The decision was based mainly on information from a single intelligence source, who claimed that everyone at the scene was part of the Taleban.
Afghan human rights investigators said that as many as 70 civilians were among the dead and only a dozen insurgents were killed.
The row mirrors tensions inside the Nato-led international force over the two-tier nature of the coalition, where a handful of the member nations do the lion’s share of the fighting.
American soldiers, who have one of the strictest work ethics, joke that Isaf stands for “I Saw Americans Fighting”.
US troops are banned from drinking and British troops are allowed to drink only at official functions with special permission. Soldiers from the rest of the 42-nation alliance are governed by divergent national guidelines on alcohol consumption.
The Isaf headquarters is only half a mile square but it has at least seven bars that serve tax-free beer and wine — including a Tora Bora sports bar complete with flat-screen televisions and football memorabilia, the Gravel Pit, which has a snooker table, a German beer hall, the 37 Club and a Nordic Palace.
One insider said: “Thursday nights are the big party nights, because Friday’s a ‘low-ops’ day. They even open a bar in the garden at headquarters. There’s a ‘two can’ rule but people ignore it and hit it pretty hard.”
A group of Macedonian guards were sent home this year because they were discovered drunk on duty, while protecting the back gate.
The problem became so acute that military police started breathalysing drivers and pedestrians around the base.
“General McChrystal is extremely focused on the mission and he feels that the folk who are here at the headquarters level need to be at the top of their game in terms of supporting the folks out in the field,” an Isaf spokesman said. “The Kunduz incident provided an opportunity for him to articulate his concerns in this regard, but it was not the cause of the order nor is there any indication at this point that alcohol consumption was somehow a factor in the incident.”
He added that the decision was driven partly by respect for Muslim culture.
Civilian staff have been advised to make arrangements to stay off camp if they have more than two beers in an evening, but soldiers stationed elsewhere will still be free to drink.
The military airport KAIA was dubbed Kaia-napa, after the Cyprus resort, because there are so many bars; the main French garrison in Kabul has at least five bars with ales on tap. The Spanish and Italian troops stationed in the west are known within Nato for drinking wine at lunchtime.
At the main German base in Mazar-e-Sharif, in northern Afghanistan, there is a purpose-built nightclub known as the Beach Club Bar where hundreds of camp-bound troops party every Thursday. In a leaked report, German officers branded their troops there “useless cake-eaters,” before a parliamentary report revealed that 3,500 troops had consumed about 1.7 million pints of beer and 90,000 bottles of wine in a year.
In December their reputation suffered another blow when they were branded too fat to fight: a report claimed that 40 per cent of the troops aged 18-29 were overweight, compared with 35 per cent of the civilian population.
Talk of the new ban dominated conversations at Ciano’s pizzeria at the headquarters yesterday. The restaurant used to serve thousands of bottles of Peroni beer every month. The soldiers with calzones were resigned to sipping coffee instead.
Many of the civilian staff, who are free to leave the base, were not concerned. “It’s only on HQ that they’ve banned it. All the other bases that served it, still do,” one said.
| [Return to headlines] |
Islamic Extremists Guilty of Liquid Bomb Plot to Kill Thousands by Blowing Up Transatlantic Jets
Three British Islamic extremists were today found guilty of conspiring to murder thousands in an unprecedented airline bomb plot.
Abdulla Ahmed Ali was responsible for the most complex and daring UK-based terrorist conspiracy of modern times.
The 28-year-old, along with two other men, had planned to detonate home-made liquid bombs in suicide attacks on transatlantic aircraft bound for major North American cities.
With thousands killed in the air and on the ground, the explosions would have exceeded the carnage of the September 11 attacks.
Abdulla Ahmed Ali was the leader of the east London Al Qaeda-inspired terror cell.
Assad Sarwar, 29, and Tanvir Hussain, 28, were also convicted of conspiracy to commit mass-murder.
All three will be sentenced on Monday after being found guilty by a jury at Woolwich Crown Court.
The trio was accused, along with five others, of conspiracy to murder by smuggling bombs disguised as soft drinks on board planes between January 1 and August 11, 2006.
The jury of nine women and three men in the six-month trial at Woolwich Crown Court had been considering its verdicts for more than 50 hours.
Abdulla Ahmed Ali, along with Hussain and Sarwar, was previously found guilty of conspiracy to murder involving liquid bombs — but that jury could not decide whether the three men’s plans extended to detonating the devices on planes.
Now this second jury has decided that such a terror plot did exist.
Counter-terrorist police, the security services and prosecutors spent more than £35million foiling the plot and bringing the would-be bombers to justice.
The arrest of the gang in August 2006 sparked tight restrictions on carrying liquids on to aircraft that led to travel chaos.
The guilty verdict will come as an enormous relief for Government ministers who endured heavy criticism for introducing the draconian luggage restrictions.
It will also be seen as a vindication of the decision to retry the trio after all three were found guilty of conspiracy to cause explosions last September. The previous jury failed to reach verdicts on the airline plot.
British-born Abdulla Ahmed Ali, of Walthamstow, was inspired by the July 7 bombers and Osama Bin Laden and considered taking his baby son on his suicide mission.
He planned to smuggle homemade bombs disguised as soft drinks on to passenger jets run by United Airlines, American Airlines and Air Canada.
The hydrogen peroxide devices would have been assembled and detonated in mid-air by a team of suicide bombers.
He singled out seven flights to San Francisco, Toronto, Montreal, Washington, New York and Chicago that departed within two-and-a-half hours of each other.
Authorities on both sides of the Atlantic would have been left powerless to stop the destruction once the first bomb exploded.
Police said the plot was drawn up in Pakistan with detailed instructions passed to Abdulla Ahmed Ali during frequent trips to its lawless border with Afghanistan.
Officers believe a mystery Al Qaeda bombmaker was responsible for the ingenious liquid bomb design, concealed within 500ml Oasis or Lucozade bottles.
Surveillance teams watched Abdulla Ahmed Ali on his return to Britain as he assembled his terror cell, gathered materials and identified targets.
Undercover officers looked on as the unemployed former shop worker used cash to purchase a £138,000 second-floor flat in Forest Road, Walthamstow.
They planted a secret bug that revealed it had been converted into a bomb factory where Abdulla Ahmed Ali met others to construct the bombs.
The flat was also used as a location for him and others to record suicide videos threatening further attacks against the West.
In his video Abdulla Ahmed Ali warned the British public to expect ‘floods of martyr operations’ that would leave body parts scattered in the streets.
He was watched as he used public phone boxes, mobile phones and anonymous email accounts to keep in touch with mystery terrorist controllers in Pakistan.
On his arrest, he was found to be carrying an elaborate and damning blueprint for the plot scrawled in a battered pocket diary.
Airport security arrangements and details of flights, including the seven highlighted services, were discovered on a computer memory stick in another pocket.
Although Abdulla Ahmed Ali, Sarwar and Hussain were convicted, Ibrahim Savant, 28, of Stoke Newington, North London, Arafat Waheed Khan, 28, and Waheed Zaman, 25, both of Walthamstow, were found not guilty of the airliner plot.
The jury failed to reach a verdict on Umar Islam, 31, of Plaistow, East London, of the airliner plot. But Islam was convicted of conspiracy to murder.
Donald Stewart-Whyte, 23, of High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, was found not guilty of both conspiracy to murder on aircraft and conspiracy to murder.
Abdulla Ahmed Ali, Sarwar and Hussain were convicted of conspiracy to murder in the first trial but retried, along with the five other men, for the airliner plot after the first jury failed to reach verdicts on those charges.
All the defendants except Muslim convert Stewart-Whyte admitted conspiracy to cause a public nuisance and will be sentenced on Monday.
The jury took a total of 54 hours and 11 minutes to reach their verdicts in the retrial.
Abdulla Ahmed Ali, wearing a dark blue sweater, showed no emotion as the verdicts were read out, while Hussain nodded his head as the verdicts were read and shrugged his shoulders as he left the secure dock at the back of the court.
Stewart-Whyte looked to the ground as he was cleared before smiling.
See video report:
Although Savant, Khan and Zaman were cleared of the airliner plot, the jury failed to reach verdicts on general conspiracy to murder charges against them.
Adina Ezekiel, for the prosecution, said they would announce a decision on whether they would seek a retrial of Savant, Khan, Zaman and Islam on Monday.
The jury rejected the defence of Abdulla Ahmed Ali, Sarwar, and Hussain that the plot was an elaborate publicity stunt.
The men claimed they wanted to draw attention to an internet propaganda documentary, complete with spoof martyrdom videos, attacking British foreign policy.
Abdulla Ahmed Ali described himself as the leader of the ‘blessed operation’ to cause carnage and to teach non-Muslims ‘a lesson that they will never forget’.
The fanatical mastermind was captured with a blueprint for the plot in his pockets and the evidence against him was overwhelming.
Counter-terrorist police believe he finalised the terrorist attack strategy during a six-month trip to Pakistan in 2005.
They dubbed him ‘triple A’, a black reference to the unusual Japanese batteries that would form a vital component of the bombs.
He was left to recreate the homemade bombs in East London, gather supporters and select appropriate targets.
See Ali’s video here: Secretly-filmed footage showed him casually experimenting with the plastic bottle bombs at his Forest Road flat while listening to the radio.
Surveillance teams watched him buy materials and instruct others as he travelled around East London in the final days of the conspiracy.
For his foot soldiers, he drew on long-standing friends, associates from mosques and others apparently referred by overseas Al Qaeda godfathers.
Abdulla Ahmed Ali’s acolyte and right-hand man, Hussain was a loyal and enthusiastic participant in the operation.
He spent hours with the ringleader at the Forest Road bomb factory adapting and experimenting with soft drinks bottles.
It was this evidence that forced him, like Abdulla Ahmed Ali and Sarwar, to admit to conspiring to cause explosions.
Following several years at college experimenting with drink, drugs and girls, Hussain worked in a sexual health clinic.
In 2005 the keen sportsman reinvented himself as a devout Muslim after entering into an arranged marriage.
Hussain was caught on a bug discussing popular holiday destinations for British travellers with Abdulla Ahmed Ali.
The two men applied for fast-track passports after deliberately losing their originals, which contained Pakistani visas.
Hussain was also overheard counting up to 18, but it remains hotly disputed whether he was referring to participants in the plot or bombs.
He was also followed by surveillance teams as he bought essential items for the plot, including surgical needles and syringes.
In his suicide video, Hussain bragged that he wished he could come back and kill others until people realise they ‘don’t mess with the Muslims’.|
Plot ‘quartermaster’, university drop-out Sarwar was a bumbling fool bizarrely handed the crucial role of bomb plot chemist.
Labelled ‘Mr Bean’, a ‘plonker’ and ‘one of life’s losers’ by his own barrister, Sarwar was nevertheless a key member of the conspiracy.
With no qualifications, no job prospects and never having had a girlfriend, the terrorist conspiracy was an opportunity for him to shine.
Using his parent’s High Wycombe home as a base, he was responsible for amassing the components for the liquid bottle bombs.
Sarwar was the main link man with terrorist bosses overseas, repeatedly using public telephone boxes and anonymous email accounts to conceal his tracks.
He amassed martial arts and body building DVDs to sell on eBay, but surveillance teams dubbed him ‘rich food’ because of his love of takeaways.
After quitting his earth sciences degree at Brunel University because he could not cope, Sarwar worked in Asda and as a postman in his hometown.
He travelled to Pakistan with co-defendant Umar Islam following the 2005 earthquake and met Ali before returning home with his deadly plans.
Although investigators insisted Sarwar was an ambitious terrorist, his methods were not always top grade.
Computer experts found he researched ‘how to dig a hole’ on Google before heading out to conceal his hydrogen peroxide stash, something he was not able to find again.
He created a complex false identity to use a South Wales chemical supplier, but allowed his face to be caught on a speed camera as he drove home.
In the witness box Sarwar could not resist showing off his knowledge of complex bomb-making formulas, despite insisting he was a dim-witted foot soldier.
And asked on his arrest if there was anything dangerous in his ramshackle car, Sarwar replied: ‘Only the handbrake.’
Officers found the camcorder used to record the martyrdom videos, and two of the recordings, in the boot.
Within hours they would find chilling details of potential targets hidden at his home.
After the men were arrested in August 2006, restrictions on liquids were brought into place overnight, causing immediate chaos and lengthy delays for travellers at airports across the country.
The terror alert caused chaos at Britain’s airports as strict rules were immediately introduced.
Body searches intensified, adding to queues and delays. Mothers were forced to taste their own baby’s bottled milk and prams were X-rayed. Motorists had to put car keys attached to electronic fobs into the hold.
Since then, a new generation of screening machines that can detect fluids have been bought by airport operator BAA. But suspect containers then have to be given further examination.
The liquids ban is likely to stay in place until there is a machine that can not only monitor all liquids, but do so without causing lengthy delays, which experts predict will take five years.
The bomb plot has cost the aviation industry an estimated £200million, with BAA alone spending £75million on a further 2,500 security guards.
| — Hat tip: Gaia | [Return to headlines] |
Australia Shuts Down the Internet for an Hour After Condemning China for Doing the Same Thing in June of This Year.
On June 3, 2009, one day before the 20th Anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre in Beijing, the Chinese government censored its own people by blocking their access to the Internet. In addition to blocking the ability of Chinese people to access the Internet, international sites like Blogger, Flickr, and Twitter were placed behind the Great Firewall of China, as were Wordpress and Hotmail. The Australian Parliament was the first official government body to condemn the actions of the Chinese. Green Party Senator Scott Ludlam of the Austrian Parliament criticized China, noting that the “…newly blocked sites now join the existing ban on YouTube and Wikipedia, among a growing list that is thought to include over 6,000 online university websites.” The timing of this move is no coincidence.
[…]
On March 18, 2009 WikiLeaks published a list of 2,300 websites which were on the Labor Party’s hit list. The Australian government replied, on March 19 that since the ACMA list contained only 1,370 websites, this was not their list. In point of fact, it now appears that there are about 9,000 websites that are being targeted by the Labor Party. Two websites that are on the ACMA blacklist were made public. Both are political content websites that do not, nor never have, posted sexual content of any type. Nor do either display or advocate violence. They are simply political websites like any of those read daily in this country.
One was a pro-life, anti-abortion website. The other contained political content. Most of the content dealt with efforts by government to restrict freedom of speech through State filtration devices that censor content. While the Labor Party insisted they are not violating free speech rights of Australians, civil libertarians insist that the two websites which were censored proves that the Australian government will censor political content. The ACMA admitted they had blocked some political content, but they would admit to doing so only on sites that originated from other countries.
[…]
The main problem with Internet free speech in Australia is that almost every Aussie depends on one ISP—the State-owned Telstra for Internet service.
[…]
To the media, Telstra called it the problem an outage. The company said they had formed a major incident response team to investigate the outage, claiming they had no idea what caused it.
[…]
The webcaster said he knew Telstra was lying because they checked all of the government’s websites, and they were all up and running. Clearly, every government in the world that uses a website for whatever purpose, uses a government secured ISP that it simply won’t crash when common usage glitches cause universal outages. And, of course, it will also be immune from intentional glitches designed to test the ability of government interrupt service in a national emergency. In other words, the government can close down the commercial and private sectors without impacting service to the public sector.
[…]
On April 9 of this year, the German government raided the offices of WikiLeaks.de and transferred control of that Internet domain to the government. The conspiracy website, The Inquirer, reported on Sept. 6, that WikiLeaks was taken over by the German government because it posted what the Inquirer called “Australia’s secret Internet censorship list.” What WikiLeaks purportedly showed was that, contrary to the rhetoric of the Labor Party, the Family First Party, and the ACMA, far from simply censoring child porn sites, the list of targeted websites included many sites whose only crime was that they opposed policies of the Aussie government.
[…]
Clearly, as the governments of the world get closer to their corporate dream of global government, their peoples increasingly realize just how fleeting is the nature of freedom. The people in the industrialized nations of the world no longer trust their governments, nor do they trust the corporate news media which the world’s elites use to spoonfeed propaganda to their “subjects” and to the politicians who theoretically lead them. Increasingly, the media of the common people has become the Internet. And, that’s a problem for the taskmasters of Utopia who need the people communicating with one another even less than they need them reporting what is happening in, and to, their nation over the Internet.
[…]
Cybersecurity bill will give Obama’s cyberczar unfettered authority to invade any privately-owned website, platform or operating system without regard for any provision of law restricting such access.
If S.773, the Cybersecurity Act of 2009 which was proposed by Senators Jay Rockefeller [D-WV] and Olympia Snowe [R-ME] with cosponsors Bill Nelson [D-FL] and Evan Bayh [D-IN] on April 1, 2009, somehow finds enough votes in the House and Senate, Obama will have the power to create a cadre of regulations that will virtually suspend the 1st Amendment and silence his political detractors on the Internet. The legislature will provide the Secretary of Commerce—or Obama’s cyberczar (authorized by this legislation)— who, without congressional oversight, will be allowed to access any process, program or protocol from any Internet website, platform, network or operating system without regard of any provision of law, rule, or policy restricting such access. The bill, as it’s written, risks giving the federal government unprecedented power by federalizing critical infrastructure security— particularly within those system used by telecommunications companies and banks that are in the hands of the private sector, by shifting the power to control those systems away from those companies which created them, to the federal government.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Sudanese ‘Trousers Woman’ Jailed
A Sudanese woman has been jailed for a month after refusing to pay a fine for “dressing indecently” by wearing trousers, her lawyers say.
Lubna Ahmed Hussein did not want to “give the verdict any legitimacy” by paying the fine of about $200 (£122), her lawyer, Nabil Adib, told the BBC.
Ms Hussein, a journalist in her 30s, could have been given up to 40 lashes.
Before the verdict, she had said she wanted her trial to become a test case for women’s rights, correspondents say.
Ms Hussein had resigned from her job at the UN, which would have given her immunity.
“She thinks she was unfairly tried and convicted and was not given a proper chance to put her defence case,” Mr Adib said.
He said Ms Hussein would appeal to both the Court of Appeal and the Constitutional Court.
Kamal Omar, another of Ms Hussein’s lawyers, told the AFP news agency his client had been taken to the women’s prison in Omdurman.
The BBC’s James Copnall, at the court in Khartoum, says that Ms Hussein had previously said she was determined not to pay the fine but her lawyers had been trying to convince her to do so.
[…]
Ms Hussein’s supporters were heckled by Islamists, who tore up some of the women’s homemade signs, says our correspondent.
The chairman of the SPLM’s parliamentary group, Yasser Arman, told the BBC the prosecutions were adding to “the violations of the constitution of the peace agreement and of women’s rights — Muslims and Christians”.
“We reject it, we denounce it. The law itself it is unconstitutional, it is contradicting the constitution,” he said.
‘Nothing wrong’
Ms Hussein was arrested in July together with 12 other women who were wearing trousers.
Several of the women pleaded guilty and were given 10 lashes immediately, Ms Hussein said at the time.
She said several of those punished were from the mainly Christian and animist south, even though non-Muslims are not supposed to be subject to Islamic law.
During the trial, Ms Hussein argued that she had done nothing wrong under Sudan’s indecency law.
| — Hat tip: Sean O’Brian | [Return to headlines] |
Canadians to Challenge Refugee Decision on White South African
A WHITE South African granted refugee status in Canada on the grounds that he faced persecution by black criminals at home may have his status revoked following a decision by the Canadian government to challenge the ruling.
Last week, Canada’s independent immigration and refugee board found “clear and convincing proof” that Brandon Huntley (31), from Mowbray near Cape Town, was targeted by criminals because of his race, and the South African government did nothing to protect him.
The ruling has received widespread attention in South Africa, angering many in the government, who say Mr Huntley has taken the Canadian immigration board, which is independent of government, for a “ride”.
Mr Huntley, who applied for refugee status last year, told the tribunal he was attacked seven times and stabbed four times by “African South Africans” during his time in South Africa.
He never reported any of the attacks to the police.
The board’s chairman, William Davis, granted him refugee status, saying the evidence presented painted a picture “of indifference and inability or unwillingness” on the part of the South African government to protect Mr Huntley.
However, the Canadian federal government agreed to review the ruling after receiving a number of requests to do so by the South Africans, who say it is an inaccurate reflection of life in their country.
South Africa’s deputy international relations minister Sue van der Merwe said the government was urging the Canadians to find a way to rescind the decision because it “cast South Africa in an appalling light”.
The Canadian federal citizenship and immigration department spokeswoman Danielle Norris said yesterday that after reviewing the contentious decision they had decided to challenge it.
“However, a judicial review by the federal court will not hear additional evidence, with respect to the facts, for example, conditions in South Africa,” she said.
If a judicial review finds that the ruling is incorrect and revokes Mr Huntley’s status, he may be forced to return to South Africa.
| — Hat tip: Sean O’Brian | [Return to headlines] |
Ireland: We Have a Duty to Create an Immigration Policy That Matches Our National Requirements
SOMEWHERE or other in the protracted Anglo-Irish negotiations of the past 20 years, which might have been conducted in Albanian for all I understood of them at the time, was a government concession given to the DUP.
It was the guarantee of — in unionist terms — Ulster’s Britishness. This provided an assurance that the entire island of Ireland would not be a separate travel entity to and from the island of Britain, as had earlier been proposed within the EU. Travellers between the North and Britain would not in future have to show travel documentation.
The Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) accepted this concession to the DUP.
Well, that’s what happens when policy is dedicated to conciliating terrorists instead of identifying and pursuing long-term national interests. Dublin was so anxious to get the Shinners in government in the North that it took its eyes off the larger game: the future of the island of Ireland, with regard to the greater demographic forces at loose in Europe, and most particularly, in Britain.
The DFA’s multiple concession-making also involved removing all trace of the Border between the North and the Republic. Movement within Ireland is open and unchecked to keep the Shinners happy, but to keep the Orangies happy, movement between Britain and the North is also open and unchecked. In other words, the dam walls between demographic changes in Britain and the furthermost reaches of the Republic of Ireland have been removed. The polders of Kerry are ultimately as vulnerable to major population change as the ports of Kent. The only difference is time.
Now, this might not be a problem if Britain were governed by a capable and far-seeing administrative class. It is not. Indeed, there is every sign that the British government, and the civil service which answers to it, is ripe for being sectioned under some Mental Health Act to be taken to some secure place of confinement, and detained there permanently. For any index of governmental performance gives the same reading of certifiable lunacy. Most of these — the defence policy, for example — affect us only tangentially, but the British immigration policy today is ipso facto our immigration policy tomorrow. The bulkheads are down, the future of those in the stern is decided by others in the prow.
The nub is this. The immigration figures from Britain are even more terrifying than the already stupefying ones for Ireland. Almost a quarter of all babies born in Britain last year were to foreign-born mothers. But that doesn’t even begin to tell half the truth.
Foreigners in Britain are not equally spread. They concentrate in urban areas, where the proportions of foreign to native are often either parity, or in the majority. How does one inculcate a sense of Englishness amongst schoolchildren in entire cities where the majority of their mothers are foreign?
But even that is to presume that all native-born mothers are culturally English (the immigration crisis being more acute in England than in Scotland or Wales). And this is simply not so. Many young English-born mothers have been raised in alien cantonments, in which they might well speak a regional English (or a Caribbean/Asian patois thereof), but they are as much part of England as one of Somerset Maugham’s tea-planters was culturally Malay.
Moreover, for the first time in decades, a straightforward increase in fertility, rather than immigration, was a prime mover in the overall growth of population in Britain, by some 408,000 people. But this was not of British people. Nearly 60pc of the increase was due to the fecundity of foreign-born mothers. More births in Britain does not necessarily mean more Britons. Britain doesn’t need immigration to have lots of foreigners any more, because now it’s growing them at home.
Just about every single statistic in the British birth survey should be ringing action stations in the British media, but instead there is merely the white flag of mute surrender to post-Powellite political correctness, no matter the issue. For example, the population of Britain rose by two million in seven years, to reach 61.4 million.
That is more than one fifth the population of the US, but in just one-fortieth of the land mass. And there’s almost nothing to stop any part of that multinational, culturally-inchoate mass moving to Ireland.
IT is an indisputable fact that immigration is good for a society. Ireland is far better off as an immigrant-receiver than as a people-supplier.
But we have a duty both to ourselves and to future generations to create an immigration policy that matches our national requirements. Even the compromise of being in the EU does not, of itself, make us vulnerable to the manifold failings of the only state with which we share a land border, the UK.
With enough political will, we could have created a land border at Newry or, preferably, an insular one at Larne.
Instead, our weak and abject compromises with the two irreconcilable tribal extremes of the North have meant that we have effectively removed almost all barriers between Birr and Birmingham, Ballina and Kandahar. All that is needed now is time.
Geologically, it made the Rockies — demographically, it can unmake Ireland.
| — Hat tip: Sean O’Brian | [Return to headlines] |
Letter: The Perspective of a Russian Immigrant
In the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, I was taught to believe individual pursuits are selfish and sacrificing for the collective good is noble.
In kindergarten we sang songs about Lenin, the leader of the Socialist Revolution. In school we learned about the beautiful socialist system, where everybody is equal and everything is fair; about ugly capitalism, where people are exploited and treat each other like wolves in the wilderness.
Life in the USSR modeled the socialist ideal. God-based religion was suppressed and replaced with cultlike adoration for political figures.
The government-assigned salary of the proletariat (blue-collar worker) was 30%-50% higher then any professional. Without incentive to improve their life, professionals drank themselves to oblivion. They — engineers, lawyers, doctors, teachers — earned a government-determined salary that barely covered the necessities, mainly food.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Netherlands: Immigration Costs Not Available, Says Minister
The cabinet will not come up with detailed figures about the cost of immigrants to society, integration minister Eberhard van der Laan has told MPs.
This summer, the anti-immigration PVV asked all 12 ministries to come up with a detailed analysis of the cost of non-western immigrants between 2004 and 2014.
‘We look at the effect of policy but we do not measure our citizens in terms of their cost in euros,’ Van der Laan was quoted as saying in the Volkskrant.
The cabinet would not come up with a total figure as a question of principle and because it was not available, he said.
‘We are not going to do sums or make estimates because we do not keep accounts based on groups of people,’ he was quoted as saying.
Van der Laan also pointed out that immigrant groups may be over-represented in terms of visits to family doctors but are less likely to use hospital specialists. ‘They also make far less use of mortgage tax relief and cultural subsidies,’ the minister said.
Support
But Socialist Party leader Agnes Kant told a tv programme on Sunday that the PVV’s questions should be answered.
‘As a member of the opposition, you have a right to information,’ Kant said, adding that she did not agree with the reasoning behind the party’s questions.
Liberal (VVD) MP Paul de Krom said the minister’s reasoning was ‘odd’. De Krom said his party was only interested in the cost of immigrants who did not contribute to society, he was reported as saying in the NRC.
PVV leader Geert Wilders described the minister’s response as ‘elitist arrogance’ and said people were not being allowed to know how much ‘mass immigration’ cost.
| — Hat tip: AMDG | [Return to headlines] |
Norwegian Politicians Want Criminal Asylum Seekers Interned
On September 14th there will be elections to the Norwegian Parliament (Storting) (photo) and to the Sami Assembly in Norway. The Norway Post will try to present information and comments. Top Oslo politicians representing the Labour Party, Rune Gerhardsen and Jan Boehler want to introduce stricter reactions against criminal asylum seekers, including the use of detention camps or immediate return to their homeland after serving sentence.
- It is totally unacceptable that persons who apply for asylum in Norway are engaged in criminal activities. Many of them know they will never obtain asylum in Norway, and they come here in order to abuse our tolerance to push dope or carry out other criminal acts, Gerhardsen says.
- People who conceal their identity never have honest intentions. When people cross our borders to seek asylum, at least 80 per cent of them lack ID papers, says Boehler.
(NRK)
Rolleiv Solholm
| — Hat tip: The Observer | [Return to headlines] |
2 comments:
"Also, it does not believe that quantifying the monetary costs of citizens is justifiable."
I just love that one. The same has been said in Sweden when the authorities have been asked about the costs of immigration.
And of course it´s just pure and utter b*llsh*t. They know, down to the last eurocent, the complete cost. It can be, and is, done for just about any other group of citizens. Old folks, children, unemployed. You name it. But don´t ask about the holy cow folks. That´s not justifiable.
Doctors want booze marketing ban.
I think this one has been on it's way for a while...
Post a Comment
All comments are subject to pre-approval by blog admins.
Gates of Vienna's rules about comments require that they be civil, temperate, on-topic, and show decorum. For more information, click here.
Users are asked to limit each comment to about 500 words. If you need to say more, leave a link to your own blog.
Also: long or off-topic comments may be posted on news feed threads.
To add a link in a comment, use this format:
<a href="http://mywebsite.com">My Title</a>
Please do not paste long URLs!
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.