...born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad

 

And one more: A must-read by Julie Burchill.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:43 | link | comments (3)

 

One more tune before I go: I never did get to see Celine during our trip to Vegas. But, given the chance, here’s how I’d update the bombastic chanteuse’s most famous song, "My Heart Will Go On":

 

Every night in their dreams

They see scenes of triumph

That is why the jihad goes on.

 

Far across the planet

They scan it, see weakness.

That is why the jihad goes on.

 

Near, far, wherever we are

I believe that the jihad does go on.

Once more they try for a score

And they strike for jihad

And jihad will go on and on.

 

Hate endures forever

And lasts through the ages.

And won’t go until they have won.

 

Hateful when they told us

We’re lower than they are.

That is why the jihad goes on.

 

Near, far, wherever they are,

They believe that the jihad goes on.

Now, calm, they strap on a bomb

And climb on board a bus

Hate for us will go on and on.

 

There is some hate that will not

Go away.

 

They’re here. There’s plenty to fear,

And you know that their jihad goes on.

They’ll rage, be on the same page.

And they’ll stage scenes of gore

And encore it goes on and on.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:08 | link | comments (1)

 

See you in September: It’s time for my annual end-of-summer break. I’ll be away from my computer until Sunday, Sept. 3. All being well, I’ll be back atcha then.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:26 | link | comments

 

Return of the native: In my capacity as activist, I am compelled to scan the Globe and Mail every day. But if I have to read one more piece like this one, in which Mark “Malarkey” MacKinnon has another one of those noble natives pining for lost olive groves stolen by rapacious Jews, I might have to take drastic action.

 

In today’s “let’s feel bad for the poor, victimized Arabs” piece, MacKinnon offers up a “grizzled” elder who wants his portion of Shebaa Farms back, please. But he’s so noble that he’s willing to give up his claim if only it will bring something he longs for even more than his stolen land: an enduring peace.

 

Wow. He really is noble and selfless.

 

According to MacKinnon, that just might be possible, once Israel un-occupies the occupied land, and once Hezbollah disarms, and once Israel and Syria come to terms re the Golan Heights and…

 

In other words, there’s not a hope in Hades—and MacKinnon wants you know that it’s almost entirely Israel’s fault:

If you can bear to read them, here are the opening paragraphs:

SHEBAA, LEBANON -- If there's anyone who should want to fight for the land just beyond the tree-dotted mountains that surround this town, it's Ismail Marquise.

The grizzled, 71-year-old farmer is one of the few Lebanese who has ever seen the Shebaa Farms, a small and fertile patch of soil that Hezbollah says it has been fighting for years to free from Israeli occupation.

Mr. Marquise says that 95 hectares of the Shebaa Farms belongs to his family, who used to grow olives and fruits there when he was a young man. He hasn't seen the land since it was seized by Israel in the 1967 war, but remembers it fondly.

"It's mountainous and rocky, but greener than here," he says, nodding at the brown landscape around this devout Sunni Muslim village near the juncture of Lebanon, Syria and Israel. "There were lots of olive trees. It was easy to cultivate.

But as lush as he recalls the land being, he doesn't consider the Shebaa Farms -- which are actually 14 separate plots -- to be worth the blood that's been shed in the name of "liberating" them. Given the choice, Mr. Marquise says he'd rather have extended peace than another war ostensibly intended at freeing Shebaa. "If peace takes place, then maybe the Shebaa Farms will come back to us. We want peace first. The wars bring nothing."...

Hey, maybe the Lebanese can put this guy in charge of negotiations. He seems to be Israel’s--and the region's--best shot at peace.

 

Update: My letter to the Globe:

 

Ever since the Six Day War, when Israel captured Gaza and the West Bank (and tried, but was rebuffed, when it offered to return these areas in exchange for peace), Israel’s foes, and even some friends, have been insisting it’s about “the occupation.” If only Israel were to give back every last speck of land, it was said, the region could finally coalesce into an era or amity and peace.

 

Well, Israel returned the land—all the land—in Lebanon and Gaza, and all it got in return was missiles fired into Israeli territory and genocidal Islamists, like Hezbollah and its sponsor, Iran, crowing about their great victory and insisting that, next time, they would prevail in their goal of wiping Israel off the map.

 

Looking at the map showing Shebaa Farms—and hearing a Lebanese professor aver that Hezbollah’s “raison d’etre is resistence”—should remind us that “the thorny knot” gumming up the works here is not a few disputed acres in what may or may not be Lebanese territory. (Syria says not.) It’s the “occupation” of the entire state of Israel by Jews who deign to be sovereign over their own tiny piece of land.

 

In that sense at least, the whole issue of Shebaa Farms is less a thorny knot than it is a red herring. And frankly, like fish left out on the counter too long, it’s beginning to smell.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:17 | link | comments

 

Canada’s first family: The introductory issue of the Canadian version of Hello! magazine has just hit the stands. The cover story features a prominent Canadian family with a marked predilection for totalitarian strongmen.

 

No, not the Khadrs. The Trudeaus. From the Ceeb:

 

The premiere Canadian edition of celebrity magazine Hello! hit newsstands on Thursday with 12 pages devoted to the Trudeau family.

 

The weekly tabloid, a Canadian version of the magazine published in Spanish as Hola!, is being published by Rogers Publishing Ltd. and replaces a U.K. edition of Hello! that has been sold in Canada.

 

The glossy picture spread on Margaret Kemper and Justin and Alexandre Trudeau compares the Trudeau family to the Kennedys and calls them Canada's "royal family."

All three members of the family remark on the legacy of Pierre Elliot Trudeau and speak reverently of worthy causes such as Katimavik, WaterCan and the Trudeau Foundation. There is a separate story about Alexandre Trudeau's latest film, Secure Freedom.

 

The Trudeaus grace the cover, along with Hilary Duff, who is shown inside posing with fans and appearing at MuchMusic in Toronto…

 

I’m rushing out to buy my copy right now!

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:11 | link | comments (2)

 

Q: When is a bomb not a bomb? A: When it’s a penis enlarger: A miscommunication leads to an airport security snafu. From the Chicago Sun-Times (link via Drudge):

 

The female airport security guard held the small, black, squeezable rubber object she'd just plucked out of Mardin Amin's backpack, and eyed it suspiciously.

 

Standing next to his mother, an embarrassed Amin whispered out of one corner of his mouth that it was a "pump" -- as in a penis pump. The guard misunderstood the Iraqi man and thought she heard the word "bomb," Amin's attorney told a Cook County judge Wednesday.

"He told her it's a pump," attorney Eileen O'Neill-Burke said as a cluster of burly, snickering police officers watched the court proceedings. "He's standing with his mother. Of course he's not going to shout this out."

 

But after listening to the female guard testify she heard Amin "clearly" say the word bomb during the Aug. 16 incident at O'Hare Airport, Judge Gerald Winiecki decided there was enough evidence for the case to move forward. Amin, 29, is charged with felony disorderly conduct and faces up to three years in prison if convicted…

 

I always wondered who bought those things.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:44 | link | comments (1)

 

Live and learn: Victor Davis Hanson says there are seven lessons we should learn from the war in Lebanon. Here are the first four. From Real Clear Politics:

…First, death is the mantra of terrorists. In urban landscapes, they hide among apartment buildings, use human shields and welcome all fatalities - friendly or hostile, combatant or civilian. Death of any kind, they think, makes the liberal West recoil, but allows them to pose as oppressed victims.

Their nihilistic hatred intimidates, rather than repels, third parties - whether "moderate" Arabs, Europeans who back off from peacekeeping in Lebanon, or the Western public at large. Our enemies call Jews "pigs" and "apes" and employ racist caricatures of the U.S.'s African-American secretary of state. Meanwhile, we worry about incurring charges of "Islamophobia," when we should be stressing our liberal values and unabashedly contrasting Western civilization with the 7th-century barbarism of the jihadists.

Second, windfall petrol-dollar profits (now around $500 billion annually) financially fuel radical Islam. Iranian cash allowed Hezbollah to acquire the sophisticated weaponry needed to achieve parity in ambushes with the Israeli Defense Forces. Unless the U.S. can find a way to force oil prices back down below $40 a barrel, Islamists may eventually be better equipped with weapons they buy than we are with munitions we make.

Third, as Israel's experience in Lebanon demonstrated, air power alone can never defeat terrorists. Precision bombing is a tempting option for Westerners since it ensures few if any of our own casualties. But jihadists, through the use of human shields and biased photographers, are able to portray guided weapons as being as indiscriminate as carpet-bombing.

Fourth, the use of old shoot-and-scoot missiles - Katyushas, Qassams and worse to come - is altering the strategic calculus, as they now number in the many thousands. The fear of Hezbollah's near limitless mobile launchers enabled terrorists to put whole Israeli cities in bomb shelters and almost shut down the country's economy.

In the Middle East, neither the new Israeli border wall nor the Golan Heights guarantees security from a sky full of rockets. Israel needs a breakthrough in missile defense and may have to target the conventional assets of terrorist sponsors - the power grid, for example, of Syria - to restore deterrence…

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:27 | link | comments

 

The “Pluto” of the Liberal caucus: “Innocent Abroad” Borys Wrznewskyj has resigned his post as deputy foreign affairs critic for the Liberal party. Borys, you’ll recall, is the Liberal MP who, during an Arab-sponsored visit to Lebanon said Israel had committed “war crimes” and recommended that Canada “talk” to Hezbollah’s political wing so as to discourage its military wing (because of the vast chasm Boryn and the other useful tools perceive as existing between the two division). Borys insisted that “talking” to Hezbollah is the only way to hash out an eventual peace deal with them.

 

Borys’s suggestions landed with a thud, and the Liberal party, currently trying to restore some lost lustre and choose a new leader, distanced itself from him post haste.

 

Not that Borys has changed his mind about chewing the fat with the genocidal terrorists. Not at all. Like those wise old souls at the UN (the organization from which Borys gleaned this blinding insight), he thinks there’s much to be gained by sitting down at a bargaining table and coming to terms with people who want to efface you from the planet.

 

But then, you and I know something that Borys, the UN and lots of other useful idiots don’t, something that precludes any sort of confab: The jihad is non-negotiable.

Posted by: scaramouche at 15:54 | link | comments

 

Jew-ish, but not Jewish: Mark Steyn, Catholic on both sides, on being mistaken for a Jew. From NRO:

Earlier this year, I chanced to be at a public meeting with the great Caroline Glick of the Jerusalem Post. Afterwards, a gentleman from the audience casually made some allusion to some or other aspect of the Jewish calendar, at which I looked momentarily befuddled. And so Caroline helpfully explained to him that “Mark’s not a Jew, but he plays one on TV.”

By which she meant that, as I publicly “defend” Israel (which is, in itself, a curious formulation, implying that the issue is the legitimacy of the Zionist Entity) and as I have a suspiciously Jewish-sounding name, I’ve been routinely assumed, at least since 9/11, to be a Jew. I’m honored to be so mistaken. And, in truth, even if I weren’t, there’s not much I could do about it. Someone asked me on the radio in Australia, two-thirds into a long, long discussion, about how Jewish I was, and I answered that the last Jewish female in my line was one of my paternal great-grandmothers and that both my grandmothers were Catholic. I then filled in a bit of remaining family background for the two or three Aussies who hadn’t yet expired from total boredom.

And, of course, I’d only been off the air for ten minutes before I was deluged with e-mails triumphantly announcing, “Ah-ha, something to hide, have we, Steyn? Or should I say Stein? Or is it Goldstein? Why so defensive about being Jewish, eh? How come you don’t have the guts to declare your Jewishness every time you write about Israel? Or do your Jewish media masters encourage you to lie to your readers?”

I didn’t know I was hiding it. There’s a couple of FAQs about it on the biographical page of my website — “But why not on the homepage, Goldsteinberg, eh? Something to be ashamed of, is it?” — and, given the number of columns I’ve published about Israel since 2001, it would be a bit clunky to have to explain it every time. I did think of writing back to my correspondents wondering if they could suggest a convenient shorthand — a yellow star next to the byline, maybe.

But I realized, in fact, that this cheap crack would be doing the Third Reich an injustice. Even the Nuremberg Laws would have cut me more slack than my Internet chastisers: “Article Five, Section One: A Jew is an individual who is descended from at least three grandparents who were, racially, full Jews.” Under the 1935 German laws on race, I would have qualified as a bona fide citizen of the Reich. But the cyber-enforcers among my readers run a tighter ship than the Führer. Half my mail reads like some ancient Woody Allen pickup line: Have you got a little Jew in you? Would you like one?

Nick Cohen, of the Observer in London, found himself in a similar situation. Pre-9/11, I always thought of him as an Old Labour leftie — i.e., well to the left of Tony Blair. But he knew enough about the Iraqi victims of Saddamite totalitarianism to be unimpressed by the pre-war London “peace” marches. And so he too was deluged by mail accusing him of bad faith or, more to the point, bad blood:

“I typed out a reply that read, ‘but there hasn’t been a Jewish member of my family for 100 years.’ I sounded like a German begging a Gestapo officer to see the mistake in the paperwork. Mercifully, I hit the ‘delete’ button before sending.”

So, yes, I am a Jew, because, after all, only a Jew could “defend” Israel, right? I don’t really “defend” it on anything but utilitarian grounds: Every country in the region — Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia — dates as a sovereign state from 60–70 years ago. The only difference is that Israel has made a go of it. So should we have more states like Israel in the region or more like Syria? I don’t find that a hard question to answer...

Posted by: scaramouche at 15:24 | link | comments (1)

 

Astonomical demotion: It’s a sad day for fans of a nine planet solar system. Pluto has been stripped of its official designation and is being unceremoniously turfed our of the planet club.

 

From now on, it will be known as a “dwarf planet.”

 

Which sort of makes it the “Israel” (or “the Jew”) of the solar system.

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:57 | link | comments

 

Faux—and real—fears: Remember when folks were all freaked out about Y2K (which turned out to be a bit fat nothing) when what we should really have been worried about was the jihad and trying to connect the dots that culminated, a year and ¾ later, in 9/11?

 

That’s kind of like the situation today, but with a much longer time frame. We were all awaiting Doomsday on August 22, which has now come and gone with the world more or less intact. Meanwhile, we should really be worried about this.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:05 | link | comments

Sex and death: File this one under “too funny.” From the Toronto Star:

5 arrested after strippers perform at farm funeral

 

Five people were arrested after two groups of strippers gave “obscene performances” at a farmer’s funeral last week in Donghai County, Jiangsu province, Xinhua news agency said.

 

The disrobing was to boost attendance. “Local villagers believe that the more people who attend the funeral, the more the dead person is honoured.” 200 showed up last week.

 

It reminds me of the old Red Skelton (or George Jessel) quip about the “standing room only” crowd that turned out for the funeral of unlovable Hollywood movie mogul Harry Cohn: “Give the people what they want and they’ll show up in droves.”

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:44 | link | comments

For the love of dead Jews: From an AP story in the Toronto Star:

"OSLO—A  sprawling mansion used by Norwegian Nazi collaborator Vidkun Quisling during World War II openend yesterday as a center to oppose the intolerance, hatred and treachery he represented.

The Oslo mansion, called Villa Grande, now houses The Centre for Studies of the Holocaust and Religious Minorities in Norway. Its displays and research will focus on the Nazi-led genocide of millions of Jews and on the persecution of other minorities.”

To which I say, big whoop.

Why am I so underwhelmed? Could it be because of the European penchant for shedding crocodile tears and erecting monuments to dead Jews, meanwhile reviling the live ones? Could it be because Norway is a bastion of snillingers—clueless, dangerous do-gooders doing their utmost to abet the jihad? (For more on the subject, see Bruce Bawer’s compelling and distubing book, While Europe Slept.) Could it be that universalizing the Holocaust and making it merely one of many “persecutions” suffered by many “other minorities” is to fail to understand the specificity of the Holocaust—why this specific kind of hatred arose and was directed at a specific people, and how it resulted in the entire Continent lending a hand in what one historian has called the only pan-European collaborative effort of the 20^th Century?

Yes, yes, and yes.

And in case you think I’m being harsh on the Norwegians, I am posting this. It’s from a response written by Jewish Norwegian journalist to a piece that appeared in the Norwegian paper Aftenposten earlier this month calling for the elimination of the Jewish state. The journalist, Mona Levin, has been subjected to concerted verbal attack in her homeland for daring to support Israel, a nation most of her countrymen consider to be a font of iniquity and evil.

Which, come to think of it, is exactly what Vidkun Quisling and other Nazis used to say about the Jews. (The article was translated by a blogger, so please forgive any infelicities of language or punctuation):

…If I think that Israel is abominable, if I bow my head in shame, then I become an acceptable Jew who may live in Norway for a long time and have a friend in Jostein Gaarder [the Aftenposten writer who wrote the “get rid of Israel” column]. If I think that there are also two sides to this affair, then I’m an unbalanced Zionist, paranoid and over-reacting, and have only myself to thank for anti-Jewish reactions.

Gaarder is able to write his column No. 2, published in Aftenposten yesterday, without mentioning that there are two sides to the conflict, while I, as a Jew, am placed under pressure of obedience to distance myself from one of the sides.

When a lady by the water’s edge somewhere in peaceful Norway picks up a glove and it explodes all over the world, this shows how inflammatory the subject is, and how important it is to be careful. The telephones ring night and day. Of the almost 200 email messages I have received so far, by far the majority express warming support, followed by shock that an author with such a large international field of impact should let the cat out of the bag in such an ugly manner. The messages come from several corners of the world, and from Klassekampen [Norwegian left-wing newspaper], from international media and from private individuals. From the latter group there also come various threats, prophecies/certainties about my imminent death, delight in my destruction. Like most Jews in the world, I am secular. If once a year I visit a synagogue, it’s in the same way as many Christians visit a church on Christmas Eve – there is something moving about it, something that evokes old fragrances and memories. In Norway today it is only Jews who have to have police protection all year round when they go to worship.

In Norway the number of Jews is in inverse proportion to the ignorance about us. There are 1300 of us, all of very different political, religious, social and economic backgrounds. Not all of us are members of any Jewish congregation (there are two), but nonetheless have a Jewish identity, one we ourselves want to define. But in his column of August 6, Gaarder has redefined me in his image, which is based, through a prophecy, on medieval prejudices against Judaism.

Thomas Hylland Eriksen, professor of social anthropology, goes further. (Aftenposten, August 10). He takes my citizenship away from me by demanding that Norwegian Jews must swear allegiance to the Norwegian state. Thank you so much, professor. My family will soon have been Norwegian for 150 years. It is true that all our civil rights were taken from us in 1940-45, but we got them back afterwards. When you have removed them again, must I then publicly distance myself from Israel in order to get my passport back, perhaps stamped with a J, like the one my family had 60 years ago?

Because of Israel, Hylland Eriksen wipes out my only nationality, namely the Norwegian one. What other Norwegian citizen is demanded for allegiance in this connection? For what else must I be reprimanded apart from being a Jew?

And now I hear the cries out there: Can’t one criticize Israel without being called an antisemite? Can’t you stop harping on about the Holocaust?

I see it like this: criticism of Israel is okay. When the media are full of it every day, all year round, I don’t understand how anyone can call it taboo. Criticism of Jews because they are Jews, in Israel or outside it, is not okay. Those who criticize (and hate) must take responsibility for their use of words, so that it doesn’t end in anti-Jewish abuse.

Criticism of religion is okay. Insulting of, scorn and contempt for a particular religion, in this case Judaism, is not okay. A hotch-potch of religion, politics and collective condemnation of all the world’s Jews in all ages is very definitely not okay. Just as not okay as believing that all Muslims are fundamentalist suicide bombers.

Where the Holocaust is concerned it is hard not to talk about it, because it affects most Jews on earth. The Holocaust is an aching wound on the body of Europe, one which makes Europeans so uncomfortable about cleaning that the inflammation spreads. I myself can write about this today because I narrowly escaped deportation in 1942, when I was three years old. Most of my family did not escape. The knowledge that this happened in the so recent past, and the knowledge that Holocaust denial is flourishing today, makes it hard to forget. And if for one moment I were to forget, then Hylland Eriksen helps me to remember, he who thinks that Jews have not been humiliated enough here in Norway.

So far no one in this debate knows what I think about the war in Lebanon, because I haven’t expressed an opinion. That doesn’t mean that I support the war. It doesn’t mean that I don’t support it. I have no duty to present my view in public when I’m talking about something entirely different – namely, how cruelly the uncontrollable hatred in Gaarder’s first column struck me.

What I have expressed an opinion about is the absolute right of Norwegian Jews to walk Norwegian streets and attend Norwegian schools in safety, even if war is raging in the Middle East. I demand the right to a secure, Norwegian life, with or without a Star of David around my neck, and without being considered to be a fifth columnist. If I can’t do that, it’s a political problem, and the politicians will have to deal with it. So far the reaction has been hesitant and late, but if the politicians don’t take responsibility now, they may silently be preparing the ground for open antisemitism...

Thanks for the museum, Norway. You know where you can stick it.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:37 | link | comments

 

The final solution: Harpoon Siddiqui, quoting old gasbag Zbigniew Brzezinski, says there’s a “growing consensus” that “neither the U.S. nor Israel has the capacity to impose a unilateral solution on the Middle East.”

 

You’re right, Harpoon. Only Iran has the power to do that.

Posted by: scaramouche at 09:58 | link | comments (2)

 

Signs of the time: Some years ago, Ceeb radio used to run a serial every Sunday morning written by Thomas King. Being a Ceeb comedy show, it managed to marry irreverence with political correctness as King, a writer from a First Nations background, poked gentle fun at his own people, and, on occasion, much less gentle fun at us silly-ass white folk. The tag line that ended every show has always stuck in my mind: “Be brave. Stay calm. Wait for the signs.”

 

Not a bad way to respond to life’s roller coaster, I think--the ups and downs, the twists and turns, the loop-de-loops.

 

I hadn’t thought of that line for a while. What retrieved it from my cerebral hard drive was a Forbes headline on google news: “Iran Urges West to See ‘Positve’ Signs.”

 

Good thing that “positive” is in scare quotes, because there’s nothing positive about what Iran is doing, i.e., sending up phoney smoke signals as it continues leading us silly-ass infidels around by the nose.

 

So with nuclear capability well within reach in reach of the creepiest, kookiest and ookiest leadership on the planet, it might be a good time to repeat Thomas King’s Aboriginal mantra: Be brave. Stay calm. Wait for the signs.

 

And pray like hell that the U.S. and Israel bomb the crap out of the nuclear facilities before the mullahs have a chance to vaporize the Jews.

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:06 | link | comments

 

Ceeb asleep: On Ceeb radio yesterday evening, a journalist who had just spent the last six months in Iran told clueless Ceeb listeners exactly what they wanted to hear: Iran’s leaders may be religious fanatics with an End of Days death wish, but the Iranian people are completely different—hedonistic, irreverent, disdainful of the mully-bullies and all their religious mishegas. And since the Iranian people believe their leaders’ assurances that they only want to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes, the inference was that we should be accepting of this taqiyah as the nice (but, alas, powerless) people.

 

Two quotes are in order here. The first, which I’ve cited before, is by that great poet (but despicable Jew-hater) T.S. Eliot. Eliot once wrote (as if he had the Ceeb and its listeners in mind): “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”

 

Too true, Tom.

 

The second quote comes from corpulent Nazi Luftwaffe chief, Hermann Goering. During the Nuremburg trials, Goering had this to say (as if he had the Iranian people in mind):

 

Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.

 

Right on, Hermann!

 

Proving that a dead, fat Nazi has more insight into human biddability than the Ceeb does.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:37 | link | comments

 

Reality check: We’re still here.  At least for now.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:47 | link | comments

I’d like the Himmler burger with a side of Eichmann fries, please: If you’re visiting Mumbai this summer, here’s a restaurant you want to be sure to avoid. From Reuters:

MUMBAI (Reuters) - Israel's mission in India asked city authorities in the financial hub of Mumbai on Wednesday to get a restaurant called "Hitler's Cross" to change its name.

The restaurant, which opened last week, was promoted with posters of Hitler and Nazi swastikas, infuriating India's small Jewish population.

"We hope the Indian authorities will ensure that Hitler being such a mass murderer did not get any rehabilitation," Daniel Zohar Zonshine, Israel's consul-general in Mumbai, told Reuters.

The multi-cuisine restaurant used publicity material featuring a red swastika carved in the name of the eatery.

Its owners, who removed a huge poster of Hitler initially installed at the entrance, have said they chose the German leader's name to stand out among hundreds of restaurants.

But India's remaining Jews -- most have migrated to Israel and the West over the years -- say they could consider legal action.

Zonshine said he hoped the restaurant's owners would realise the hurt their action had caused to Jews.

"There is a limit to a gimmick. In India, we believe, if something like this hurts the sentiments of a community, it can be treated as a criminal offence," he said.

The restaurant's owners have said they were neither promoting Hitler nor the Nazi ideology, but would not change the restaurant's name.

They have said they would open two more branches in Mumbai with the same name by October.

And coming soon to Gaza and Lebanon?

 

Update: Looks like these guys may not get the chance to chow down chez Hitler.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:40 | link | comments

 

The Liberal way: Yesterday Parliamentary Secretary Jason Kenney held a press conference to offer his government’s response to the three MPs who, at the behest of a Canadian Arab organization, had traveled to war-torn Lebanon. The three MPs, one from each of the three opposition party, had opined that, sure, Hezbollah was a bona fide terrorist group, and, yeah, they had their issues with the Jews. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t talk to them. Maybe even take them off our terror list to show we understand the subtle distinction between Hezbollah’s “military” and “political” wings.

 

As we know, despite the Ceeb’s and the Toronto Star’s best effort to float that dirigible, it crashed to the ground like a concrete Hindenburg.

 

The Liberal party, whose MP, Borys Wrzesnywskyj, had compared Hezbollah’s political division to the IRA’s Sinn Fein (there’s that subtle distinction I was mentioning), quickly distanced itself from the remarks. The Liberals, after all, are trying to find a new leader, and the whole Middle East imbroglio has caused them no end of grief, leading to division in the party and the defection of some lifelong Liberals to the Tory party. (Heather Reisman as a Tory: in a million years, who’d a thunk it?)

 

Anyway, back to Kenney’s press conference. It was a joy to behold. Not mincing a single word, Kenney lit into the three MPs and said there was no way Canada was going to open discussions with Hezbollah because it’s a terrorist organization with an agenda of wiping out Israel (the agenda is set out in its charter, said Kenney). As such there is absolutely nothing for us to discuss with them. Period. Game over.

 

Kenney also remarked on the startling similarities between what happened in the 1930s and what’s happening today.

 

“We need to learn the lessons of history,” he said.  “There was another political party in the past which had democratic support, which provided social services, which played an important role in the political life of the country—Germany in the 1930s—which was also dedicated to violence against the Jewish people.”

 

May I just say this: I love you, Jason Kenney.

 

But, hey, that’s me. The suggestion that Hezbollah might have a glancing similarity with the Nazis proved too much for Liberal leadership hopefuls, who came down with a collective case of the vapours. Here’s how the Toronto Star reported it:

 

Liberals were seething over remarks by Conservative MP Jason Kenney, Harper's parliamentary secretary, who scolded Wrzesnewskyj.

 

Kenney called comments made by three opposition MPs during their visit to Lebanon this week "very disturbing." He also claimed the MPs had tried "to backpedal and duck and dodge" after their remarks in Lebanon were reported.

 

Last night, Toronto MP Joe Volpe, who's also running for the leadership, said it must be made clear that the "Liberal party's position is not Mr. Wrzesnewskyj's."

"If and when we choose a leader, then we can have that discussion," Volpe (Eglinton-Lawrence), said of the leadership convention planned for the end of November in Montreal.

 

He lashed out at Kenney, saying "he never misses an opportunity to be outrageous. "He brings in the worst elements of partisan politics anywhere. It's certainly not very helpful and productive."

 

Au contraire, Joe. He says it like it is and, like that Jack Nicholson line in “A Few Good Men ” (which, come to think of also describes what your leadership race seems to be lacking), “You can’t handle the truth.”

 

As pusillanimous and pussy-footing as the Liberals are when it comes to the standing up for Israel, the National Post notes that some Liberals—or at least one Liberal—didn’t have the same reticence about voicing support for Hezbollah. Thomas Hubert, who until a few days ago vice-president of communications for the Young Liberals of Canada in British Columbia, and who is supporting former Ontario Education Minister Gerard Kennedy in the Liberal horse race, got into some hot water when he voiced his enthusiasm for the terrorists in his blog. Here’s how it went down, according to Guy Giorno in the Post:

 

Mr. Hubert doesn’t like Israel. In fact, he appears to detest it. How long he has held that view, and how widely his opinions have been known among Liberal ranks are unclear. The secret held until this past weekend, when Mr. Hubert went public with an attack on Israel and her supporters in Canada.

 

Referring to recent defections within the Liberal party, he posted the following comment on the Internet: “The Liberal Party is stronger without these violent Zionists in our party. I am glad for them to cease influencing our foreign policy so we are free to promote Canadian values of peace. It amazes me that this community is so absurdly selfish. The only issue that matters to them is the defence of a ‘state’ that survives on the blood of innocent people. Shameful.”

 

In another place on the Web, Mr. Hubert wrote that “History will remember Hezbollah as an organization that stood up to the most vile ‘nation’ in human history.”

On his own site, Mr. Hubert declared that the “Israeli Terror State continues to hate peace.” He proudly posted a third-party claim that “Hezbollah is not a terrorist organization, Israel is”—calling it a “great article.”

 

Hubert apologized, natch, explaining he was “impulsively angry” when he wrote those words and said he was “sorry that my comments were written in a way that allowed them to be taken offensively by anyone.” But they were, they were, and Hubert resigned his post. (One good thing about the retraction: Sure it was lame and unconvincing, but at least he didn’t ask the Jewish community to assist him with his recovery, a la Mel.)

 

Not that anyone would suggest that Hubert’s views are representative of the Liberal mainstream. Perish the thought. No, the Liberals have glommed onto what they think is a fool-proof strategy for reclaiming power: hearken back (like the Islamists) to a glorious era that never existed (for the Liberals: an era of “peace-keeping” and “honest-brokerage”; for the Islamists, the Utopia that inhered when Mohammed was around), and persuade Canadians that they can somehow sit out the jihad.

 

I’d like to think that Canadians are smart enough not to fall for this line, and to realize that we have as much at stake as Israel does. But reading about how Liberals are “seething” because a Tory had the audacity to speak the truth—and to do it in public—I’m not so sure.

 

Update: My friend E. alerted me to this editorial in the Toronto Sun. Unlike the leadership of the Liberal party, which seems to have misplaced its moral compass, it’s not afraid to mince words:

 

EDITORIAL: They're terrorists, period So, interim Liberal leader Bill Graham says his party still views Hezbollah as a criminal terrorist organization -- as long as Hezbollah continues to call for obliterating Israel and killing Jews. Well, that's a relief. Ditto for Gilles Duceppe's Bloc Quebecois. But the fact that both parties' leaders even had to make such a statement this week in the wake of questionable comments from their MPs is disturbing. As for the NDP, who knows? Jack Layton says it's not about lists. Or something like that. And Etobicoke Centre Liberal MP Borys Wrzesnewskyj -- who started all this on the weekend in Lebanon with his fellow travellers Peggy Nash of the NDP (Parkdale-High Park) and Maria Mourani of the Bloc -- hasn't been much clearer. All three, who were touring wartorn areas of Lebanon courtesy of the National Council on Canada-Arab Relations, expressed concern about Canada's current terrorism law, which designates Hezbollah as a criminal terrorist organization and, as such, bans official contact with it. When asked by reporters if that designation should be changed, Wrzesnewskyj said yes. But he has since stressed that Hezbollah should still be considered terrorist because of its "war crimes" of attacking civilians. He does, however, think the law should allow talks with the group's political wing, which he compared to the Irish Republican Army's Sinn Fein. For her part, Nash said "it's just not helpful to label them a terrorist organization," noting many Lebanese consider Hezbollah resistance fighters and providers of charity. It's naive nonsense like this that leads to tolerance of terrorists in our midst -- witness the Hezbollah flags at recent rallies. Don't these MPs get it? There can be no negotiation with groups that support and fund violence through their so-called charitable and political work (including the recently banned Tamil Tigers, the focus of yesterday's arrest of three Canadians on terror charges) -- much less those that seek to wipe a democratic state and an entire people off the map. Canada's long-overdue decisions to criminalize groups like Hezbollah, Hamas and the Tamil Tigers sent a powerful statement that allies us with other democracies and necessarily crosses all party lines and bears no equivocation. There can be no appeasing or negotiating with terrorists. Suggesting anything less is not "helpful."

 

Update: If you read nothing else today, I urge you to read this piece by Mark Steyn (another non-mincer of words).

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:08 | link | comments

 

Today’s chortle: Occasionally, I like to check in on the Times Watch site, just to see what I’m missing by not reading The Most Self-Important Newspaper in America every day. (For reasons of activism, I survey the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail every morning. Were I also to scan the NYT on a daily basis, it would put me over my daily quota of moonbattiness, and I wouldn't be able to function.) This post from Times Watch made me chuckle. It pertains to the NYT headline “Widening public scepticism about airline terror threat.”

 

As Times Watch drolly notes, the scepticism seems to be confined to the NYT newsroom.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:29 | link | comments

 

The greatest love of all?: The strangest story I’ve read all day. From iafrica.com:

Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of terror group al-Qaeda, was such a fan of singer Whitney Houston that he considered marriage and having her husband Bobby Brown killed.

This is but one of several details revealed by a woman who claims she was once the sex slave of America’s most wanted man.

Sudanese poet and novelist Kola Boof, who says she was kept against her will as Bin Laden’s mistress for four months in 1996, makes the revelation in her new autobiography.

In ‘Diary of a Lost Girl’, excerpts of which appear in Harper’s Bazaar magazine, Boof claims: “Osama kept coming back to Whitney Houston. He asked if I knew her personally when I lived in America. I told him I didn’t.

“He told me Whitney was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.

“He said that he had a paramount desire for her and although he claimed music was evil, he spoke of someday spending vast amounts of money to go to America and try to arrange a meeting.”

Bin Laden wanted to shower the ‘I Will Always Love You’ singer with presents and convert her to Islam, claimed Boof who, until recently, was a writer for soap opera ‘Days Of Our Lives’.

“He said he wanted to give her a mansion he owned in a suburb of Khartoum.

“He would say how beautiful she is, what a nice smile she has, how truly Islamic she is but is just brainwashed by American culture and by her husband — Bobby Brown, whom Osama talked about having killed, as if it were normal to have women's husbands killed,” the 37-year-old writer claimed.

“He explained to me that to possess Whitney, he would be willing to break his colour rule and make her one of his wives.”

Boof claims Bin Laden raped her and kept her prisoner in a hotel in Morocco. She has previously said she had to take her son out of a school in Los Angeles after rumours circulated that his father was the al-Qaeda mastermind.

In her autobiography she reckons Bin Laden also had a taste for Western literature.

“In his briefcase I would come across photographs of the Star magazine, as well as copies of Playboy,” she wrote.

He would also “ramble on” about his favourite TV shows ‘Miami Vice’, ‘The Wonder Years’ and ‘MacGyver’, she claimed.

I’m not so sure I believe a Sudanese soap opera scribe/poet named “Boof” who claims to have been Osama’s sex slave. (Call me crazy, but something about her story strikes me as, oh, I dunno, completely implausible.) But if  her claims did turn out to be true, we’d have to look no further for proof of Osama’s derangement than his fondness for “MacGyver.” That’s something no one in his right mind would admit to.

 

Update: Of course, if Osama were to sing the song, he’d make a few crucial changes:

 

I believe the children are our future.

Teach them well to blow up like shahids.

Show them all the hatred they possess inside.

Give them a sense of pride to make it easier.

Let us all remind them how it used to be.

 

Everybody searching for a hero.

People need someone to look up to.

Mohamed is the guy who fulfills our needs.

A perfect man he was,

Performed such perfect deeds.

 

I decided long ago,

Always to walk in Prophet Mo’s shadow.

I’ll prevail, and we’ll succeed,

The infidel will beg and bleed.

No matter how they rant and rave

I’m snug as a bug inside my cave.

Because the greatest hate of all

Is happening to me.

I found the greatest hate of all inside of me.

The greatest hate of all

Is easy to achieve

Learning to hate kafirs,

It is the greatest hate of all…

 

Update: A tongue-in-cheek piece in the Boston Herald about Osama’s unrequited love is titled, “A jihadi in love,” and you know me, I just can't resist an obvious song parody.

 

With apologies to Dion and every single one of the Belmonts, wherever you are:

 

Each time I see my Whitney

Star in “The Bodyguard.”

She makes my heart beat faster.

Part of me get so hard.

Each night I ask Allah up above:

Why must I be a jihadi in lo-ove?

 

Want her for my own woman.

But my position’s grave.

Can’t get her to leave Bobby

And move into my cave.

Each night I ask Allah up above:

Why must I be a jihadi in lo-ove?...

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:41 | link | comments (6)

 

And the winner is…: Quick now--who’s the most loathsome Jew in the pantheon of Jew-hating Jews? Chomsky? Viorst? Judt?

 

Ladies and gentlemen of the Cyberspace Academy, I hereby officially nominate “academic” Norman Finkelstein. Not only because he’s probably the Jew-hater’s favourite Jew, but because he’s capable of writing the most revolting diatribes this side of the Palestinian press.

 

His latest target: Alan Dershowitz, whose defence of Israel has put him in the crosshairs of the unhinged Finkelstein.

 

Dershowitz documents this abuse in Front Page Magazine:

 

The level of “academic discourse on the Middle-East reached a new low—quite a feat considering some of the old lows—when the notorious Jewish anti-Semite and Holocaust justice-denier Norman Finkelstein wrote a screed suggesting that I be targeted “for assassination” because of my views on Israel. The obscene article was accompanied by an obscene cartoon drawn by “Latuff”, a frequent accomplice of Finkelstein. The cartoon portrayed me as masturbating in rapturous joy while viewing images of dead Lebanese civilians on a TV set labelled “Israel peep show,” with a Jewish Star of David prominently featured. The cartoon aptly represents the content of Finkelstein’s piece, which accuses me of being a “moral pervert” who “missed the climactic scene of his little peep show.” He also claims quite absurdly that I “sanction mass murder” and “the extermination of the Lebanese people.” (I’m surprised he hasn’t accused me of kicking of puppy dogs, scowling at little children, and parking in handicapped spaces.)

 

Finkelstein call me a Nazi not once, but twice, first saying that I subscribe to “Nazi ideology” and then comparing me to Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher, who was presecuted at Nuremberg by my mentor Telford Taylor.

 

The peep-show cartoon was even too extreme for the notorious “Counterpunch,” a Stalinist website that glorifies Hezbollah, Hamas and other terrorist enemies of the U.S. and Israel. Prior to its decision not to run this particular cartoon, Counterpunch seemed to have no standards, but even for them this one was apparently too much (though they kept in the “peep show” reference that inspired the cartoon)…

 

Wow. Clearly, the Fink and his cartoon crony are off their meds—and their rockers.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:03 | link | comments

 

Italy’s modest request: If Israel wants Italy to send soldiers to “keep the peace” in southern Lebanon, Israel has to agree not to do anything to prevent Iran from rearming its terror proxies, Hezbollah.

 

Of course, Italy didn’t state it that baldly, since that’s not acceptable diplomacy-speak. From the Jerusalem Post:

Israel must respect the cease-fire in Lebanon if Italy is to send troops to Lebanon as a major part of the peace force, Italian Foreign Minister Massimo D'Alema said in an interview published on Tuesday.

"From Israel, we expect a renewed commitment, and this time really binding, to respect the cease-fire," D'Alema was quoted as saying by the Rome daily La Repubblica. "It is right to insist that the Hizbullah put down their arms, but we cannot send our soldiers into Lebanon if the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) continues to shoot."

D'Alema is expected to press that appeal on Thursday when he meets in Rome with Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, a day after she holds meetings in Paris.

Italy appears to be on the verge of taking on a major role in the peace mission, aimed at keeping fighting from breaking out again after weeks of widening warfare between Israel and the guerrillas that claimed civilian lives in both Lebanon and Israel.

On Monday, Italian Premier Romano Prodi said he told UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan that Italy is willing to command a UN force in Lebanon.

Prodi, D'Alema and Italian military officials have said Italy could send as many as 3,000 soldiers, by far the largest offer of any prospective participant in the beefed-up UNIFIL force.

In the interview, D'Alema pitched for more European participation, although he played down French reluctance to send more than a few hundred troops…

If the Jews are counting on the Eurabians to protect them, they are truly doomed.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:29 | link | comments

 

Shooting the “fact-finders”: Yesterday Ceeb radio tried to fly the three MPs on an Arab-sponsored “fact-finding” mission up the flagpole, but it looks like they ain’t gonna fly. After conducting interviews—at length—with Liberal MP Borys Wrzesnywskyj, who assured listeners that, yes, Hezbollah is indeed a terrorist group, but we should talk to them anyway because, um, the UN sez so (apparently, it’s written into the ceasefire agreement), the Ceeb has done a semi-volte face. This morning, instead of asking us to entertain the MPs’ “pearls of wisdom” (“Hezbollah’s military wing and poltical wing are separate”; “Hezbollah is just like the IRA,” etc.) the Ceeb has bowed to realities, and is backing off from being cheerleader for this clueless trio.

 

Why the retreat? Aside from the obvious absurdity of their claims (not that that’s put the brakes on the Ceeb before, as it continues to regularly tout the likes of Noam Chomsky and Robert Fisk), the Ceeb could obviously see the way the wind was blowing—and it wasn’t in the Ceeb’s direction. An editorial in today’s Globe castigates the three MPs for their naivete, calling them “Innocents Abroad,” and doubts the usefulness of any report they might deliver in the House of Commons. And the Liberal party, currently embroiled in a leadership race, seems to be distancing itself from the “missionaries.” On Ceeb radio this morning, interim leader Bill Graham was said to be concerned about “the optics” of the visit (a Liberal leader concened about "optics"?--what a shocker) and says Hezbollah should retain its designation as a terrorist organization. He’s also advising Canadians not to put too much stock in the MPs’ words.

 

So why do I call it a semi-volte face? Because Graham also said that Canada must return to its traditional role of straddling the fence and playing peace-keeper (a role that exists solely in the minds of left-wing fantasists, like Graham and the Ceeb). And, as we have seen in recent day, that message has a lot more “legs” than the lame-o one being proffered by the MPs.

 

Nice try though, Ceeb. Better luck next time.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:13 | link | comments

 

How to defeat our enemies: According to this writer on the israelinsider site, our best shot is to expose and poke fun at their lies and absurdities:

 

…The key to winning in Iraq, Lebanon, Iran, Syria, et al is to totally destroy their nation's dignity, very, very publicly. This includes embarrassing their families, their history, their leaders--all with truth. It shouldn't be hard, no harder than Ahmadinejad's little "nuke."

In fact, that is why the entire Arab and Muslim world is angry with Israel, a thousandth of their landmass and a hundredth of their population. Israeli shows them just how little and impotent they are.

I mean, why does Malaysia, Indonesia and Kuwait hate Israel and refuse diplomatic relations or trade? Israel does not "occupy" one square inch of their land. If it really was the Palestinians, how come not one word was said against King Hussein of Jordan who massacred the Palestinians and threw the remainder of them out of his country in what has become known as Black September of 1971.

The simple answer is that the entire Muslim world is angry with tiny little Israel because this ragtag bunch of ex-Yeshiva buchers totally humiliated every single Arab and Muslim nation by building a gorgeous, successful country in the Middle East from sand dunes, produced one of the most incredible scientific and technological societies in the world, and then had the audacity to decimate any Arab/Muslim country that attempted to destroy them. Talk about humiliation!

And the Saudis, even with all of their oil money, are still -- so to speak -- humping camels in the desert. Check out Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Egypt, et al -- third world countries all that have not yet to develop to any modern extent. Can we blame them for hating Israel so much? How dare those arrogant little Jews embarrass a billion Muslims!

These are real answers to winning the war against terrorism, about which every single Western democracy should be concerned. If we do not begin to respond to their evil rhetoric, we will have to respond to their evil nuclear weapons. Only then, it may be a little late.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:58 | link | comments (3)

 

Blind as a bat, and manoeuvring without benefit of sonar: Here’s the situation as it stands: Hezbollah thinks it won the war; the world reviles Israel for its “disproportionate response”; and the mully-bullies and their talking head, Moo Jihad, are on the cusp of going nuclear.

 

And, oh yeah, the West still doesn’t have a clue.

 

From The American Thinker:

…The West, as usual, does not get the picture. Cognitive deficiencies produced a moral and political failure of an order no less than the Munich appeasement deal of 1938, although this time the West has no excuse. The blindness is such that western news agencies doctored photographs and slanted reports to give the impression that Lebanese casualties were far higher than they were, while “leaders” prattled on about disproportionate force as if war were an Olympic sport.

In the end, it was western powers that hammered out a deal at the UN which contravened the UN’s own previous resolutions, for among the provisions of the resolution calling for a ceasefire was a call to settle the disputed Sheba Farms area which the Secretary-General had already concluded was not part of Lebanon. But since this issue was a Hezb’allah demand, the UN had no moral compunction in ignoring its own previous rulings and international law. If the West cannot take on Lebanon, one can well imagine its even greater reluctance to take on Iran, whose nuclear ambitions, if not checked, will lead the world straight to nuclear war. But the West has not yet understood that they are dealing with an enemy who uses unconventional weapons.

Neither has Israel, it would seem. It conducted a war that left the impression it was not resolutely pursuing its enemy, but aiming instead for international brownie points. It dropped leaflets on Lebanese citizens warning them when bombings and even ground forces were coming and so warned the Hezb’allah terrorists with whom these citizens sympathized. It declared it was not engaged in war with Lebanon, thus supporting the sham position of the Lebanese government. It did not mobilize its full forces and once it did, it did not engage them in battle, quick to accept an international deal that history has shown them would be worthless.

The UN has never protected Israel from its neighbors, has ignored their violations of ceasefires, and has disappeared when they mobilized for aggression. For six years since 2000 the UN has not enforced its own resolutions on Lebanon. It allowed Hezb’allah to build up illegal rocket caches and turned a blind eye when it kidnapped Israeli soldiers. And the recent resolution notwithstanding, both the UN and the powers that supported it, chief of them France, have made it clear they are not going to disarm Hezb’allah, a group France kept off the EU terrorist list. In short, the Israeli government has made its country’s security hostage to a feckless world community that is anti-Semitic to boot.

Israel, which was supposed to be the haven for Jews in a crunch, has thereby pulled the rug out from under Jews worldwide. The Israeli government’s action in Lebanon has created a major dilemma of trust. Countries like France do not understand why Israel would have gone to war to rescue its kidnapped soldiers, but Israelis understand why. All Jews are bound one to another, and especially in Israel, which depends on a citizen army. The soldiers that do the work have to know that they can count on the solidarity of their fellow citizens, a solidarity embodied in their government.

If the Israeli government can sign on to a resolution that does not include the return of kidnapped Israeli soldiers, the future does not bode well. How will they believe that government in the future when it crosses its own red lines? What point is there to sacrifice if the government will not keep its word? And how can one explain that Israel did indeed go to war to rescue its soldiers if the government abandons that war aim so cavalierly? True, the functioning of democratic society, like all societies, has a built-in disconnect between individuals and social systems, but democracies work on the paradox of trust more than other kinds of society; and the Israeli government has certainly stretched the limit here. Perhaps since modern societies also learn from their mistakes, there will be some political and strategic housecleaning in Israel that will bring the Oslo mentality to a well-deserved end. If so, that will be the only benefit of this ill-conceived and ill-conducted war.

Of one thing Israel can be certain: there will be another war soon. The appeasement of Hezb’allah embodied in the UN ceasefire has meant only that there is a lull in the century-old war that the Arabs and the Muslims have been conducting against the Jews over Israel. Behind Hezb’allah stands Iran and behind Iran stands the threat of nuclear weapons, which, once dropped, will leave neither time nor reason for Reuters to doctor the photographs or the West to moan about Jewish perfidy…

And should Iran drop the Big One, I doubt our foolish, feckless world will harp on the “disproportionate response.”

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:15 | link | comments

The not-so-disarming French:

 

Anyone who thinks the French are actually going to insert themselves between Hellzbollocks and the Jews is—what’s the word I’m searching for in the recesses of my memory, wherein resides all my High School French; oh, yeah—fou!

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:54 | link | comments

 

In other “news,” dog bites man, they still hate the Jews, and Hellzbollocks is an Iranian-sponsored terrorist organization: Iran vows to defy the world and continue building its nukes.

 

Does that mean the world isn’t going to end tomorrow?

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:44 | link | comments

 

Sanitizing Hezbollah: Three clueless M.P.s, one Liberal, one N.D.P., one Bloq Quebecois, are visiting Lebanon as part of a fact-finding mission arranged by the National Council of Canadian Arabs. After looking around at the devastation wrought because a genocidal terrorist organization, sponsored by a genocidal Islamist dystopia, provoked the Jews, whom it plans to (and I quote) “wipe off the map,” the M.P.s have had a brainwave: It’s not Hezbollah’s mass murder schemes that are impeding peace in our time; it’s its designation as a terrorist organization. From the National Post:

BENT JBAIL, Lebanon - It would aid the cause of peace if Canada dropped Hezbollah from its list of banned terrorist organizations, two Canadian MPs on a fact-finding mission to Lebanon said yesterday.

When asked if he was in favour of Hezbollah being taken off the terror list, Etobicoke Liberal Borys Wrzesnewskyj said: "Yes, I would be."

He likened the situation in the Middle East to that of Northern Ireland, where "if there wasn't the possibility for London to negotiate with the IRA, you'd still have bombings."

"Hezbollah has a political wing. They have members of parliament. They have two Cabinet ministers. You want to encourage politicians in this military organization so that the centre of gravity shifts to them."

New Democrat Peggy Nash, who represents the Toronto riding of Parkdale-High Park, said her discussions in Lebanon had led her to believe "that it is just not helpful to label them a terrorist organization."

"If the political parties in Lebanon who may disagree with Hezbollah, and be opposed to them and their philosophy, can figure out a way to work with Hezbollah and try to get along internally, then perhaps we should take a cue from that."

Both MPs said they would bring that message back to their caucuses, and eventually to the House of Commons, when they return to Canada this week…

The Nazis, another Jew-expunging outfit, had a “political wing,” too. But I hardly think their designation as “Nazis” is, as Ms. Nash said in an interview re Hezbollah on Ceeb radio this morning, the reason the West couldn’t “draw them into democracy.”

 

Newsflash for Wrzesnewskyj and Nash: totalitarians with global ambitions aren’t much interested in being drawn into democracy. Given their druthers, they prefer to obliterate it.

 

In other words, it’s not a matter of semantics but of anti-Semitics.

 

Update: Back in 2002, Mazen Choaib, the executive director of the Arab organization that arranged the fact-finding mission, had this to say when Canada put Hezbollah on its terrorist list:

 

Mazen Chouaib, Executive Director of the National Council on Canada-Arab relations, rejected the notion that the charity and militant arms of Hezbollah are one and the same.

But when asked by Canada AM's Lisa LaFlamme how someone donating money could be sure it was being used for charitable causes and not for terrorist activities, Chouaib said: "I cannot guarantee that."

Chouaib said money raised in Canada would largely be targeted for humanitarian causes. "They are funding some orphan here, orphan there," he said.

"We see this as another effort by a pro-Israel group to change Canadian foreign policy," Chouaib said, adding that banning Hezbollah outright would perpetuate stereotypes that Canadian Arabs are involved in terrorism.

 

And there’s nothing worse than perpetuating stereotypes, is there? Especially when there’s such a clear distinction between Hezbollah’s “military” and “political” wings (says scaramouche, quoting clueless Liberal “fact-finder” Borys in an interview on Ceeb radio this afternoon). In fact, much like the distinction between the military and political wings of the Nazis.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:09 | link | comments (1)

 

Compadres:

 

 

Claudia Rosett alerts us to the firm friendship between loathsome, bespoke internationalist, Kofi Annan, and loathsome, bearded terror-Meister, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah—a relationship that goes waaay back. From NRO:

…Annan jumped that gun six years ago, by meeting in Beirut on June 20, 2000, with the same Lebanese terrorist satrap of Iran who runs Hezbollah today: Hassan Nasrallah. Against a backdrop of flowers, their handshake and grins were recorded in this (almost certainly undoctored) Reuters photo of the occasion. At the time, as a U.N. press release put it, “They talked of cooperation between Hizbollah and the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Southern Lebanon. The Secretary-General thanked the Sheikh for his restraint shown by Hizbollah during Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon.”

That meeting in Beirut was the follow-on to Annan’s meeting just two days earlier, on June 18, 2000, with Iranian officials in Tehran. On that occasion, as Annan’s office reported, “Their talks focused on the emerging political, economic and social role in Lebanon for Hezbollah,” as well as “the political transition taking place in Syria, peace efforts in Afghanistan,” and so forth.

While Annan, Nasrallah, and the tyrants of Syria and Iran might have considered that round of U.N. diplomacy in 2000 a rip-roaring success, there were no victories there for the Free World. Afghanistan’s Taliban regime went on hosting al Qaeda, which was by then planning the Sept. 11 attacks on America. Syria completed its transition from the tyrannical President Hafez Assad to his despotic son Bashar Assad. Iran, of course, carried on with its totalitarian terrorist-sponsoring ways, as well as its nuclear-bomb program, and has now brought us the messianic Hezbollah-praising President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Kofi Annan got lunch, some photo-ops, and, of course, a Nobel Prize.

And, as we now know, just four months after Annan’s handshake with Nasrallah, Hezbollah in its “emerging political, economic and social role” went on in October, 2000, to kidnap three Israeli soldiers from inside Israel — murdering them all. UNIFIL’s contribution was to hand over at gunpoint to Hezbollah the bloodstained vehicles in which the Israelis were apparently kidnapped, conceal from Israeli authorities for months videotapes of the evidence, and then “observe” for more than five years as Hezbollah trucked in weapons from Iran and Syria, honeycombed southern Lebanon with fortifications and launched the recent bout of ruinous war with the July 12 kidnapping of another two Israeli soldiers, whom Hezbollah has yet to return.

Annan himself may be oblivious to the damage done to the real cause of peace by his favored brand of thug-hugging U.N. “diplomacy,” but the rest of us will be living with it long after he has retired. Right now, Annan has no more business talking with Hezbollah than he would have visiting the Iranian exhibition of holocaust cartoons that opened Monday in Tehran. Or should we brace for that as well?

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:58 | link | comments

 

There are none so blind…: I have found the place where the “war on drugs” and the “war on terror” converge (or one them, anyway). It’s documented in the following madness, wherein Britain the Italy provided specialized equipment to Iran so it could fight the drug war, and Iran ended up giving the stuff to its terrorist protégé, Hezbollah, to use in the "war on Jews." From the San Francisco Chronicle:

Kiryat Shemona, Israel -- Israeli intelligence officials have complained to Britain and the United States that sensitive night-vision equipment recovered from Hezbollah fighters during the war in Lebanon had been exported by Britain to Iran. British officials said the equipment had been intended for use in a U.N. anti-narcotics campaign.

Israeli officials say they believe the state-of-the-art equipment, found in Hezbollah command-and-control headquarters in southern Lebanon during the just-concluded war, was part of a British government-approved shipment of 250 pieces of night-vision equipment sent to Iran in 2003.

Israeli military intelligence confirmed that one of the pieces of equipment is a Thermo-vision 1000 LR tactical night-vision system, serial No. 155010, part No. 193960, manufactured by Agema, a high-tech equipment company with branches in Bedfordshire, England, and San Diego. A spokesman for Agema in San Diego denied all knowledge of the system.

The equipment, which needed special export-license approval from the British government, was passed to the Iranians through a program run and administered by the U.N. Drug Control Program. The equipment uses infrared imaging to provide nighttime surveillance that allows the user to detect people and vehicles moving in the dark at a range of several miles.

Use of such equipment would have enabled Hezbollah to detect and record the movements of Israeli forces inside Israel, as well as its military advance into Lebanon.

Britain and Italy both have provided specialized tracking and monitoring equipment over the past decade as part of U.N.-sponsored attempts to stem the flow of heroin and opium into Western Europe from Afghanistan and Pakistan. Iran is a major route for shipment of narcotics to the West.

A spokesman for the British Foreign Office in London said Saturday, "The Israeli Defense Forces have confirmed to us they have found some night-vision equipment in south Lebanon that is apparently made in Britain. We're trying to get further details to see exactly what the equipment is, who made it and who the original buyer is."

The spokesman, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Britain participates, through the U.N. drug-fighting agency, in Iran's interception program, which is run by anti-narcotics forces along the country's eastern border with Afghanistan and Pakistan, both major opium poppy-growing countries.

"We've been encouraging the Iranians as part of their anti-narcotics program, and there was an export in 2003 ... as part of the heroin and opium smuggling program. This is an area where we try not to let the nuclear issue prevent cooperation on countering narcotics," he said, referring to Iran's dispute with the United Nations over its nuclear enrichment program…

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:37 | link | comments

 

Harpoon’s apologetics: Harpoon Siddiqui, eminence grise of the Toronto Star, can usually be found occupying his bully pulpit in the paper’s Op-Ed section. Today, however, he’s moved into the IDEAS section for a lengthy examination of what he is calling “The Muslim Malaise.”

 

What’s the malaise? Endemic poverty (the result of Western colonialism). Repressive governments riddled by corruption. A sense of powerlessness over what they perceive to be unfair U.S. and Israeli policies.

 

Is it any wonder, asks Siddiqui that so many have found solace in an “extreme” version of Islam, and are acting out in such explosive ways?

 

Not that Siddiqui is condoning this behaviour. He’s merely trying to account for it. He assures us that hatching terrorist plots and blowing up non-Muslims is completely out of character for a religion whose holy book and Prophet have a default setting of moderation. Mohammed was “a moderate himself” who “smiled often, spoke softly and delievered brief sermons”; in one of them, he told followers to “be moderate in religious matter, for excess caused the destruction of earlier communities.”

 

And if you buy that, I have some gibungous Buddhist statues for sale in Afghanistan. Of I would have, if the excesses of some of Mohammed’s less that moderate followers hadn’t contravened his doctrines and caused the destruction of that remnant of an earlier community destroyed by the jihad.

 

Let’s get real, shall we? As Robert Spencer is wont to explain, there may be moderate Muslims, but Islam is not a moderate faith. It is a religion of conquest, domination and subjugation, and it didn’t conquer half the civilized world by making nicey-nicey with non-believers. It did so through war, pillage, rape and killing all the kafirs who stood in its path.

 

Has anything changed today? Yes. Islam is making inroads in Dar al Harb—that’s our part of the world that will be embroiled in perpetual warfare until it has been conquered for Islam—through less overtly violent means; through demographics and policies like multiculturalism which have persuaded clueless, foolish, self-loathing Westerners (carrying that onerous double burden of their complicity in “colonialism” and the inherent virtue of everyone in the Third World) that all cultures and religions are equally valid—even one that enshrines “jihad” and “dhimmitude” and the primacy of Islam, the one true faith.

 

Not that Harpoon would mention such loaded words. No, he’s too busy trying to convince us that Mohammed is, well, Jesus, and that “suicide bombings, slitting the throats of hostages and committing other grisly acts” are an aberration of Islamic theology.

 

If only. Unfortunately, Mohammed was a man of war, and his book is replete with plenty of slice-and-dice-the-infidel passages which validate the actions of holy warriors and, further, hold out the enticement of an eternity in a no charge, All U Can Screw bordello for those who heed Allah’s highest calling and martyr themselves for the cause.

 

Thus, when Harpoon calls on Muslims, oppressed, poverty-ridden and angry though they may be (“too many are struggling to survive”; “nearly half live under authoritarian regimes where they can speak up only on pain of being incarcerated, tortured or killed, and they are helpless spectators to the sufferings of fellow Muslims in an unjust world order”) to DO SOMETHING, DAMMIT, about the rot  in Islam (my characterisation, of course, not his) you know he’s being immensely disingenuous. For one, how can they do anything when people like Harpoon tell them that (and us) that it’s about poverty—and doesn’t count on the Muslim nations awash in oil money to assuage the poverty? How can they do anything when the rich nations—Saudi Arabia and Iran—are more interested in funding jihad against Great Satan and his little buddy, Israel, than in building infrastructure in Yemen and Bangladesh? How can they do anything when they’ve imprisoned themselves in a cult and cage of victimhood, stewing in their “anger” and “frustration” and “humiliation” and “grievances”? Harpoon calls on them to “confront their challenges, for Allah never changes a people’s state unless they change what’s in themselves,” but how can they change anything when they are taught that the Koran is the uncreated—and thus immutable—word of Allah and that Mohammed is the most perfect human being who has ever lived?

 

In what context, Harpoon, can you amend perfection? And what’s the motivation to do so when the jihad in all its forms (a continuum that runs from “moderate” efforts, like demography, to “extreme” ones, like Gatorade terror plots) is having such great success?

 

Update: It is interesting to read this column by David Warren as a companion to Siddiqui’s piece. Warren says it isn’t at all useful at this stage to speculate as to whether “moderate” Islam (come out, come out wherever you are) can reign in “extreme” Islam; from all appearances, it can’t. What matters is that we in the West face an even more crazed and emboldened enemy:

…It is getting less and less useful to claim that we are defending a "moderate Islam" that can accommodate the West, against a "fanatical Islam" that can't. The enemy has succeeded in making the issue, Islam versus West.

The plot develops with the progressive takeover of the world Islamist movement, by the ayatollahs of Iran; and has been further thickened by the huge propaganda victory that Iran's client, Hezbollah, has just won over Israel. This has had and will continue to have the same effect on Muslim mass psychology as the Al Qaeda terror attacks. It shows the most virulent and aggressive forms of Islam to be triumphing -- to be, in effect, the wave of the future, the standard around which all Muslims may rally. It leaves all those who reject this standard not in the position of "moderate Muslims", but rather in that of isolated and irrelevant or treasonous holdovers from some "Western imperialist" past.

Numbers have nothing to do with this; for the question is, who has the guns and will use them. In Lebanon, it was Hezbollah, and by merely surviving the Israeli onslaught, they have raised the standard of 9/11 to new heights. The bitter consequences of that must now be harvested not only by Israel, but by the whole West.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:24 | link | comments

 

UNbelievable: Despite the fact that the ceasefire is supposed to hinge of UN troops acting as a buffer between Hezbollah and Israel, countries seem to be very unforthcoming with manpower. Kofi Annan has stepped up to encourage them to get with the program, assuring them that in the tried and true tradition of UN fecklessness, the men won’t actually have to do anything. Anything other that what it’s been doing in the area for the last six years, I mean, which, basically, amounts to a lot of what you might call “observing.” From AP:

UNITED NATIONS - Secretary-General Kofi Annan appealed to U.N. member states to provide desperately needed U.N. peacekeeping troops for Lebanon and assured them the U.N. force would not "wage war" on Israel , Lebanon, or Hezbollah militants.

"It is not expected to achieve by force what must be realized through negotiation and an internal Lebanese consensus," Annan said in a report to the U.N. Security Council U.N. Security Council on implementation of the Aug. 11 resolution calling for an end to the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict.

Deputy Secretary-General Mark Malloch Brown said countries needed to understand that the force wouldn‘t be offensive. "It‘s not going to go in there and attempt large-scale disarmament," he said.

Malloch Brown welcomed Italy‘s announcement that it will contribute, though it gave no numbers, and Finland‘s pledge of 250 troops. But he stressed that more European nations are needed for the vanguard force of 3,500 troops that the U.N. wants on the ground by Aug. 28 to help ensure that the truce between Israel and Lebanon holds.

"However, I would caution that the situation is still very fragile," Annan said. "I call on all parties to do their utmost to ensure that the cessation of hostilities holds and to transform it into a durable cease-fire."

Assuming the cessation of hostilities does hold, Annan said the next reinforcements for the U.N. force, up to 3,500 troops, are needed by Oct. 5, and a third and final wave of up to 3,000 troops will be needed by Nov. 4.

Annan praised the first meeting in a decade of Israeli and Lebanese generals with the U.N. force commander and the positive start to Lebanon‘s phased deployment and Israel‘s phased withdrawal.

Annan told the council that the 2,000-strong U.N. force, known as UNIFIL, has reported "only a handful of isolated violations of the cessation of hostilities since it came into effect."

The U.N. troops found "four dead bodies of Hezbollah members, which were later taken away in an ambulance," he said.

"There was no response from the other side and the situation in the area remains calm," he said.

Every day, he said, UNIFIL has observed Israeli violations of Lebanese airspace at least once and up to four times.

Annan called on the Lebanese and Israeli governments "to work resolutely towards a long-term solution and a permanent cease-fire."

"A reinforced UNIFIL is not going to wage war on any of the actors in the theater," Annan said, and it cannot be "a substitute for a political process."

Um, what political process? The one whereby the Lebanese, grateful to the terrorists for bribing them with cash and rebuilding their homes elect even more Hezbollah politicians to the Lebanese parliament? The political process whereby nothing is done to curtail delivery of Iranian missiles smuggled in via Iran? The political process which enables the mullahs to finish building their nukes while the international community continues to mull the possibility of maybe employing the potential option at some point in the near to distant future of sanctioning Iran?

 

As always, great plan, Kofi.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:15 | link | comments (1)

 

Not-so-sweet charity or: low down in High Wycombe: On of the positive aspects of Islam is the provision it makes for care of orphans and widows. Unfortunately, too often these days, the jihadis have turned charity on its ear, as the shekels earmarked for the unfortunate are redirected into what I like to call “humaniterrorism.” Such is the case, it seems, with emergency relief that was supposed to go to the poor unfortunates of an earthquake in Pakistan. It turns out that at least some of the aid ended up financing the recently thwarted terror plot in London.

 

Something for the world to consider as it sends off oodles of boodle to rebuild a Lebanon still in thrall to those Iran-backed humaniterrorists, Hezbollah.

 

From the Times Online:

 

THE Pakistan earthquake appeal has emerged as a potential link between some of the terror suspects arrested over the alleged plot to destroy transatlantic aircraft using liquid bombs, The Times has learnt.

A charity founded to help orphans and disaster victims provides a connection between some individuals being questioned by police on suspicion of plotting “unimaginable mass murder”.

Crescent Relief London was created by Abdul Rauf, from Birmingham. Two of his sons were arrested as part of the bombing inquiry and are among the 23 suspects still being held by police after the alleged attempt to bomb planes flying between London and the United States.

The Charity Commission is looking at reports of links between several British charities and the alleged bomb plot. The public gave £30 million for earthquake relief, much of it raised in mosques and donated to locally based charities.

The discovery came as the BBC reported last night that, according to sources, martyrdom videos had been discovered on at least six laptops during searches by police investigating the alleged plot.

The Government yesterday ruled out any early return to normal airport security measures despite an ultimatum from Ryanair, which said that it would sue it for compensation for delays unless usual security arrangements resumed within seven days.

The Department for Transport said it had “no intention of compromising security”, nor did it expect to change requirements in the next week. Under the new requirements, half of all passengers must be body searched and the maximum size of hand luggage has been reduced, with a ban on liquids, creams or gels.

A pilot made an emergency landing escorted by a fighter jet in Brindisi, Italy, yesterday after passengers discovered a bomb threat scrawled on a sick bag. The Excel Airways flight had left Gatwick bound for Hurghada, Egypt, at 10.45am, carrying 269 passengers. The note stated: “There’s a bomb on this aircraft.” The Boeing 767 plane was evacuated but nothing was found after a search.

The charity Crescent Relief was operating in High Wycombe when all five suspects from the Buckinghamshire town were enthusiastically helping with the earthquake relief effort, The Times has established.

A thousand tents were sent by High Wycombe to Pakistan through Crescent Relief London. An article in the Bucks Free Press said readers wishing to donate to that organisation should contact Khuram Ali and gave a mobile phone number. Mr Ali is one of the five High Wycombe suspects being held by police.

The mobile number is now obsolete but it was previously used to advertise a salvaged Mercedes from High Wycombe on the eBay auction website. Mr Ali is a self-employed car dealer…

So the guy from High Wycombe who tried to sell a used Mercedes on eBay used the same phone number to solicit money for the Gatorade terror plot?

Oh, brother. You couldn’t make this stuff up. And if you did, and you put it in a Tom Clancy-esque thriller, you'd be accused of implausibility.

 

Update: The New York Times has a report about the High Wycombe Raufs. From the sounds of it, there’s a lot more to the mishpacha than selling wrecks on eBay and raising funds for terrorism:

…Some tension between cultures in this case — possibly between traditional law and that of their adopted nation — seemed to explode for the Rauf family in April 2002.

Mohammad Saeed, a delivery driver and a brother-in-law of the elder Mr. Rauf, was stabbed to death in April 2002 at his house in Birmingham, in front of his wife and two children. He was 54.

No one was ever arrested, though the Rauf house was searched. Rashid Rauf, believed to be 29, fled shortly afterward to Pakistan.

The police never formally identified a suspect, but news reports pointed to Rashid and what was said to be a family dispute that possibly led to an “honor killing,” not uncommon in Pakistan, and often involving possible sexual misbehavior. The West Midlands police refused to comment on the case, other than to confirm that the Rauf’s house had been searched in connection with the killing.

Three years later, the family came under suspicion when violent riots between black and Asian youths broke out in Birmingham, leaving among the dead a young black man, Isaiah Youngsam. The police confirm that the Rauf family home was again searched over that killing, though eventually other suspects were arrested…

Wow. What can you say? A family that slays together stays together? (Notice how the Times scribe tries to downplay “honour” killing by describing it as having to do with “sexual misbehaviour” instead of what it really is—a crackpot religious doctrine which situates a family’s “honour” between the thighs of its female members, to be guarded at all costs by the family’s males.)

Posted by: scaramouche at 16:58 | link | comments

 

Back to school: In its Focus section, that part of the newspaper given over to incisive commentary and probing, the Globe and Mail has a lengthy profile of “Islamic firebrand Sami ul-Haq,” who runs was is essentially a Jihad High School in Pakistan near the Afghanistan border. Sami, who from his large photo in the centre spread of the Focus section looks like someone who could have benefited from the use of sunscreen to protect him from the punishing Pakistani rays (too late now; he’s as crinkly as an unironed cotton sheet), looks like the world’s scariest, sternest teacher. Either that, or he hasn’t had a really good bowel movement in a long time. In any case, Sonya Fatah, the Globe scribe who wrote the piece, is mightily impressed with the grim-visaged Sami and his fancy-dancy school (also shown in the a large centre-spread photo) where he proudly claims to have brainwashed, er, educated most of the Taliban, the jihadis who are giving our Canadian boys such a agita over there in the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.

 

Here’s an excerpt from Ms. Fatah’s semi-adoring piece. I’d liken it to reading about a Nazi “educator” bringing the Fuhrer’s pearls of wisdom to Hitlerjungen, the prerequisite for toughening them for their battle to the death with the enemy. Which is us, just in case you forget after reading this peace in which Sami and his son tout the Taliban’s “purity” (an obsession with their own purity and their enemies’ foulness being something else they have in common with the Nazis):

…Sami ul-Haq has run the school since 1988 when his father passed away. Abdul Haq was a maulana, or religious leader, who graduated from India's leading Muslim academy, Darul Uloom Deoband, and returned to Akora Khattak, where he'd been born, to start Haqqania in 1947. Over time, however, the reform agenda of the Deobandi school changed under the influence of Pashtunwali, the conservative Pashtun tribal code.

His son, as well as being a maulana, is a politician -- a member of Pakistan's senate and the leader of Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Islam (S) or JUI-S, an Islamist party that places great emphasis on the Sunnah, the tradition of Prophet Mohammed, and adherence to sharia law.

He is also a good friend of Mullah Muhammad Omar, the one-eyed former Afghan president who gave shelter to al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, the architect of the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center. Mullah Omar is the recipient of the only honorary degree Haqqania has ever granted, so it's perhaps not surprising that the school sports a rich tradition of alumni engagement with the Taliban, both as leaders and foot soldiers.

For years, it has publicly declared its admiration for the fundamentalist cause. "The whole world is against Islam," the openly anti-Western Mr. ul-Haq says in an interview. "Everyone is afraid of Islam. America, Europe, even the Far East is against us. They've perpetuated a myth against Islam, which is, 'If you don't support us against Islam, it will swallow you whole.' "

But is the "myth" really that far-fetched a notion? In neighbouring Afghanistan, "infidels" and invaders from the Russians in the 1980s to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops today have discovered just how tough it can be to wage war against radical Islam…

He’s got a point about the “myth” of Islam wanting to swallow us whole. As we have seen from all the terror plots in recent years (according to Robert Spencer, there have been 5,000 since 9/11) the jihadis are not averse to blowing us to smithereens before trying to ingest us.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:41 | link | comments

 

Mimic men: Remember that British Cabinet Minister who resigned because he was offended that the war in Lebanon were causing people to lose sight of the desperate plight of the Palestinians? Looks like he’ll be able in good conscience to reclaim his job. According to Caroline Glick, Hamas is so encouraged by Hezbollah’s recent success against the hated Z.E. that it has hitched a ride on the Iran bandwagon. Even Mahmoud Abbas, the designated “moderate” of the group, has decided to go along for the ride, even though it means grovelling like a girly-man in front of his rival, Ismail "the Hun" Haniyah; what other choice does he have if he doesn’t want to get left behind? From JWR:

…Today the Palestinian Authority is just another Iranian proxy. During the past month of war in Lebanon, it was the supposedly moderate Fatah terror group and the supposedly moderate Fatah-led Palestinian security forces that organized mass rallies in the streets of Ramallah and Gaza where they cheered on Hizbullah and called for Hassan Nasrallah to bomb Tel Aviv.

Now, in the aftermath of the ceasefire, which handed Hizbullah, and its state sponsors Syria and Iran the greatest victory in their history, forces in the PA are actively preparing for a new round of war against Israel. As Hamas spokesmen have put it, Israel's defeat in Lebanon has convinced them that it is possible to adopt Hizbullah's methods to destroy the Jewish state.

Amidst false reports that he was planning to dissolve the Hamas government and replace it with a government of technocrats, Abbas went to Gaza on Monday morning and asked Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh if Fatah could join his government.

As instructed by his commanders in Teheran and Damascus, Haniyeh has not yet agreed to Abbas's offer. Rather he set humiliating conditions which Abbas must accept first. Abbas already agreed to Hamas's demand that he allow the Islamic Jihad terrorist organization to also join the government. Abbas is similarly expected to agree to Hamas's demands that Fatah join the government as a junior partner and that it abandon its negotiations with Israel.

Throughout Gaza and the Palestinian areas of Judea and Samaria, the Palestinians are gearing up for their next round of jihad with Israel. As was the case six years ago, they are beginning with public executions of Palestinians accused of helping Israel combat terrorism. Just this week, a crowd of hundreds hooted and stomped their feet in ecstasy as unmasked murderers killed one such Palestinian "collaborator" in Jenin.

So while all eyes are glued on Lebanon, the Palestinians prepare the next war. And we know exactly how that war will look. They will use missiles, mortars and rockets that they will smuggle in from Egypt to kill Israelis in our homes in the south. They will infiltrate Israeli cities by digging tunnels under the security fence around Gaza, and from Egypt and from towns and cities in Judea and Samaria and murder us in ever growing numbers. They will receive money, weapons and combat instruction from Hizbullah and Iranian operatives in Gaza and abroad and they will attack us while protesting their everlasting dedication to jihad and their anger over Israel's "aggression."…

Sigh. I have to stop reading this stuff. It’s bad for my health.

Posted by: scaramouche at 16:50 | link | comments

 

Profiles in terror: The Toronto Star has a completely nonsensical editorial about how we should “Profile terror, not race”:

 

How can Canada best protect itself from attack by Al Qaeda and other terror groups that twist the tenets of Islam to justify mass murder?

 

Not by subjecting Canada's 750,000-member Muslim community to racial or ethnic profiling. It is a "stupid" and ineffective waste of resources, the country's top spy says.

That caution this week from James Judd, head of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, strikes a welcome note in a growing debate.

 

Canadians were deeply shaken by the recent arrest of 18 people in the Greater Toronto Area who are accused of plotting to besiege Parliament and bomb targets in Toronto. And Britain's arrest of 23 people for plotting to bomb passenger aircraft has lent urgency to the debate.

 

Not surprisingly, polls suggest Canadians are about evenly split on whether the authorities should focus anti-terror surveillance on the Muslim community.

 

But that would be counterproductive, Judd warns. CSIS does not do racial profiling because it is "fundamentally stupid," he told a gathering of Canadian judges this week in St. John's. Profiling is a misuse of scarce police resources because it targets an entire class of innocent people. And it risks turning off a major faith group that should be encouraged to repudiate and expose extremists.

 

"From a national security perspective we can't afford to have whole communities feel alienated," he said.

 

That sensible view is shared by Mr. Justice Dennis O'Connor, who headed the inquiry into Maher Arar's ordeal. If people feel unfairly targeted, that is "not healthy for agencies that are trying to develop co-operation for those communities to help with their investigations," he says.

 

Profiling is also impractical.

 

Richard Reid, the shoe bomber caught on a mid-Atlantic flight in 2001, was born in London and grew up there, the son of an English mother and a Jamaican father. No crude profiling program of Arabs or South Asians would have caught him.

 

And security agents nabbed Anne Marie Murphy at Heathrow Airport in 1986 not because she fit a classical profile but because they thought it odd that a young, pregnant Irish Catholic woman would be travelling to Tel Aviv on her own. Her Jordanian fiancé had handed her a carry-on bag with a bomb in it.

 

These cases suggest the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, CSIS, airport screeners and other security personnel are more effective when they profile terror, not race.

 

For the RCMP and CSIS, that means paying close attention to a subject's known views, associates, military training, travel and other factors, rather than focusing exclusively on race or religion.

 

And at airports and borders, officials will continue to take a special interest in people who look shifty, belligerent, sweaty or distracted…

 

Especially the Muslim ones with unpotable Gatorade and one-way tickets.

 

Here’s the letter I sent the Star:

 

While it’s true that only a tiny minority of Muslims are involved in terrorism, it is also true that the vast majority of terrorist incidents today are being perpetrated by Muslims. Thus, authorities would be remiss if they didn’t take the necessary precautions to protect the general populace from this threat—and didn't do so in the most efficient and effective way possible. That means that, for the moment at least, Muslims of every race can and should expect to be subjected to greater scrutiny than, say, Inuit seal hunters and Norwegian grandmothers.

 

That’s not “racial profiling.” That’s just plain old-fashioned common sense.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:59 | link | comments (2)

 

More Malarkey: And speaking of Mark "Malarkey" MacKinnon, he has two, count ‘em, two, stories in the Globe (which makes three today for the Malarkey-Carolyin’ tag team). The first is about how the exultant Lebanese Army, which had lifted nary a finger to prevent Hezbollah from setting up missiles in the midst of Lebanon’s civilian population, has started to “enter (the) Hezbollah heartland” as part of the UN-brokered ceasefire. Here’s an excerpt from that one:

KFAR KILA, LEBANON — Flying its country's cedar-tree flag from antiquated trucks and armoured personnel carriers, the Lebanese army began a halting deployment in Hezbollah's heartland in the south of the country yesterday, a key step toward ending five weeks of war.

But while it was a symbolic breakthrough to see Lebanese forces in what had previously been a no-go area for the regular army, its impact was called into question by the force's apparent unwillingness to disarm the Shia militia.

The makeup and arrival timetable for a beefed-up United Nations force that is supposed to bolster the Lebanese army was also thrown into disarray when France, which was supposed to lead the mission, said it would only send 200 combat soldiers to south Lebanon, rather than the thousands it was expected to contribute.

UN deputy secretary-general Mark Malloch Brown said he wanted to see a 3,500-strong international force deployed as quickly as possible, and warned that delays were threatening the fledgling ceasefire on the ground “We must convert promises into firm commitments, and commitments into rapid deployments on the ground. Every moment we delay is a moment of risk that the fighting could re-erupt,” he told a closed-door meeting of UN ambassadors, according to a published text of his remarks. “The situation on the ground is tenuous. We must all act with great urgency to construct a lasting ceasefire from the current cessation of fighting.”

Israel, which continued its withdrawal from the area yesterday, warned that its pullout was “conditional” on the ability of the Lebanese army and the UN force to take control of the area.

As the advance units of a planned force of 15,000 crossed the Litani River, the natural border of south Lebanon, President Emile Lahoud made it clear he had no expectation that the army would try to take Hezbollah's weapons away.

“It is disgraceful to demand the disarmament of the national resistance while the blood of martyrs is still warm,” he said. Like Hezbollah, Mr. Lahoud is seen as an ally of Syria. “How can they ask us to disarm the only force in the Arab world who stood up to Israel?”

How, indeed, especially when Hezbollah has yet to finish the job?

 

And here’s a bit from Malarkey's second piece, another of his trademark “boo-hiss-Israel” articles, wherein he recounts in excruciating, gory detail some of the horrible things the bloody-minded Jews have done to innocent Canadian, er, Lebanese, er, Canadian-Lebanese civilians:

A yellow Caterpillar backhoe clawed its way through the rubble of the Al-Akhrass family home yesterday, recovering the unrecognizable bodies of a Canadian family that had been buried underneath for 32 days.

But for the still furious relatives and neighbours who watched the slow and gruesome recovery effort, the retrieval of the bodies brought them no closer to understanding why the Israeli military bombed the house on July 16, killing 11 people, including eight Canadians.

"Why? They were innocent civilians. . . . There was no reason for targeting this house," said Hussein Al-Akhrass, a 28-year-old mechanic who was related to the victims.

While two empty neighbouring houses were also obliterated, no other buildings on the street were destroyed during more than 30 days of intense warfare.

Notice how he sneaked in a reference to Caterpiller, as if to give a wink-wink-nudge-nudge to like-minded Globe readers who revile the name of the heavy machinery company for its complicity in tearing down houses of innocent Palestinians in the “occupied” territories and flattening little Rachel Corrie, the Anne Frank of the intifadda.

That’s our Malarkey. Just doing his bit for the glorious cause (i.e. the jihad against the Jews).

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:25 | link | comments

 

Born to ‘splode: Carolynne Wheeler, whom no one in his/her right mind would call Malarkey MacKinnon’s “better half” (even though they happen to be hitched) has a “charming” piece on the front page of the Globe and Mail. Wheeler notes a recent trend among Palestinians. They are burdening their infant shadids-to-be with the name of a great Muslim hero, the one who, so far, has the best shot at tossing the hated Jews into the sea, or barring that, dropping a big, fat nuke on ‘em (also on all the Palestinians—but at least all the collaterally damaged, the male ones, anyway, get to reconnoitre in Paradise with scads of virgins; unlike the Jews, who, being Jews, are doomed to eternal hellfire):

He's three days old, just 6½ pounds and from the look of his sleepy eyes and screwed-up mouth, he's far more interested in his next meal than in hearing about the high expectations attached to his name.

But by the time baby Nasrallah Mohammed Daoud is old enough to understand his moniker, he'll no doubt have plenty of contemporaries. After the bloody conflict in Lebanon, Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah is gaining thousands of fans, and dozens of tiny namesakes, in the Palestinian territories.

“We dreamed of the name, and then we had the baby two weeks later,” mother Lubna Anturi said. “We love Nasrallah because we live an intifada and we are always seeking someone to help us. He has boosted our morale.”

In Lebanon, Mr. Nasrallah's popularity is greater than ever. While some Lebanese blame him for triggering the conflict by kidnapping two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid on July 12, others have gained new respect for Hezbollah and the way the militants fought off the powerful Israeli army.

And in the West Bank and Gaza, the idea of somebody — anybody — who is able to fight sustained battles against the Israeli army and inflict dozens of casualties is the subject of great celebration.

Never mind that two of his rockets nearly hit the West Bank city of Jenin. With his portrait now gracing stores in the West Bank, Hezbollah flags on sale in Gaza City and radio songs singing his praises, Mr. Nasrallah has become a new Palestinian hero…

There’s even a photo of the adorable Nasrallah Mohammed Daoud—he’s cute enough for Angelina Jolie to want to adopt. And soon enough, his proud parents will have him decked out in one of those teeny-weeny terrorist outfits, complete with face mask and Fisher-Price semtex vest.

 

It’s hardly surprising that Palestinians would want to name their babies after genocidal, Jew-hating leaders. “Palestine” is home to a dwindling number of old men who have lived their lives with the moniker affixed by parents who worshipped another Arab “hero.”

 

The name of these aging men?

 

Hitler.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:18 | link | comments

 

Happy Birthday to me: It’s my birthday today. My BIG birthday. One that has an odd number followed by a bit fat zero.

 

Microcosmically speaking, it’s a very happy birthday. Macrocosmically, however, it sucks and blows—simultaneously.

 

In honour of my BIG birthday I am stepping away from my computer for the remainder of the day. But I’d be remiss if I first didn’t post this bit of “birthday cheer” by Ralph Peters in the New York Post: 

 

August 17, 2006 -- ISRAEL'S rep for toughness in tatters. Hezbollah trium phant. Iran cockier than ever. Syria untouched. Lebanon's government crippled. An orgy of anti-Semitism in the global media. Anti-Americanism exploding among Iraqi Shi'as inspired by Hezbollah.

 

Thanks, Prime Minister Olmert. Great job, guy.

 

The debacle in Lebanon wasn't even a war. It was only round one of a war. And Israel's back in its corner, dazed and punch-drunk.

 

Israel got in a gut jab, but Hezbollah landed three ferocious aymakers:

 

* Despite the physical damage the Israeli Defense Forces inflicted, Hezbollah's terror-troops were still standing (and firing rockets) when the bell rang.

 

* At the strategic level, Hezbollah's masterful manipulation of the seduce-me-please media convinced the region's Shi'a and Sunni spectators alike that Hassan Nasrallah is the new Great Arab Hope. He's got a powerful Persian cheering section, too.

 

* While Israel couldn't plan or execute a winning campaign, it also failed to think beyond the inevitable cease-fire. But Hezbollah did. The terrorists had mapped out precisely what they had to do the moment the shooting stopped: Hand out Iranian money, promise they'll rebuild what Israel destroyed - and simply refuse to honor the terms of the U.N. resolution.

 

Israel couldn't wait to throw in the towel and start pulling out troops. Then Hezbollah's fighters emerged from the rubble of towns Israeli leaders lacked the courage to conquer - and the number of terror-soldiers who survived shocked the Israelis.

 

Politicians and generals everywhere, repeat after me: "Air power alone can't win wars; you can't defeat terror on the cheap with technology; and (in the timeless words of Nathan Bedford Forrest) War means fighting, and fighting means killing."

 

The U.N. resolution called for Hezbollah to disarm - a fantasy only a diplomat could believe. As soon as the refugees began flowing southward and packing the battlefield, Nasrallah told the international community to take a hike. He knows that U.N. peacekeepers won't try to disarm his forces - if they ever show up - and the Lebanese military not only won't try, but couldn't do it.

 

The world's response? The French (who talked so boldly) took a cold swig of Vichy water: Now they say they won't send in their peacekeepers until Hezbollah is completely disarmed - which isn't going to happen. And Lebanese leaders stated openly that not only wouldn't the Lebanese army attempt to take away the terrorists' weapons, it wouldn't even confiscate caches it stumbled on.

Sucker-punched (well, don't fight with your eyes closed), Israel's complaining to the ref. While staring around in bewilderment.

Want more good news? After finally calling our enemies by the accurate name of "Islamo-fascists," President Bush backtracked so fast the White House lawn was smoking. Then he declared that Israel had won.

 

That's about as credible as insisting the Titanic docked safe and sound…

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:18 | link | comments (2)

 

Full of Malarkey: Hezbollah—literally, God’s Army—is an organization comprised of genocidal Islamo-fascist thugs who are convinced that Allah has commanded them to expunge all the Jews so their occluded imam can unocclude and emerge from his hiding place to preside over a Judenrein End of Days. But to the Globe and Mail’s Mark “Malarkey” MacKinnon, who may as well be on their payroll considering all the great press he’s been giving them, Hezbollah is a force for good in the region. Now that there’s a hudna, Malarkey wants us to know that, after using the Lebanese populace as disposable cannon fodder for over a month, Hezbollah is rolling up its collective sleeves and has exchanged “its AK-47s for 2X4s.”

 

Yeah, they’re a regular Habitat for Humanity. Time to give Nasty Nasrallah a Nobel Peace Prize:

AITA AL-SHAAB, LEBANON — Surrounded by the misshapen remains of a town annihilated by war, Abu Hassan announced it was time to start rebuilding what he had helped destroy.

“After one day, food and water will come to this town,” the portly, bearded Hezbollah fighter said, waving at rows of what once were people’s homes. The shattered buildings had been used as shelter by both sides as Israeli troops entered the town, only to withdraw after suffering their heaviest losses of the war.

The streets were still strewn with rubble yesterday, but Abu Hassan, one of about 50 Hezbollah fighters here who held off repeated Israeli assaults on Aita al-Shaab, said he was confident that trucks carrying food and other supplies would reach the town by Thursday morning.

Three days after he received the order to stop fighting, Abu Hassan (the name means only “father of Hassan”; he refused to give his real name) was back to his peacetime job as a social worker.

Lebanese Hezbollah supporters sweep the rubble-strewn streets in a destroyed residential area in Beirut’s southern suburbs yesterday.

His Kalashnikov rifle was nowhere in sight. Instead, he carried a camera bag and was taking photographs of the destruction and making estimates of what it would cost to repair it.

The soldier-turned-surveyor went on to lay out a plan for resurrecting this town, once home to 10,000, from the rubble of more than 30 days of war. “We,” he said, will rebuild the people’s homes and give them a place to stay in the meantime. “We” will pay compensation to the families of those who died in the conflict.

For Abu Hassan, “we” is Hezbollah. Now, as before Israel’s war to uproot the Shia militia from such places, there is no other relevant authority in southern Lebanon…

Hezbollah has even formed a construction company, Jihad al-Benaa, or Holy War for Construction, to handle the rebuilding of the south…

So the outfit whose "holy war" resulted in all the deconstruction now has a Holy War construction company.

 

One thing about Malarkey: you can always count on his never having a shred of irony when he writes up this dreck.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:07 | link | comments

 

Lost innocence: The news that someone has finally been arrested for the murder of JonBenet Ramsey reminds us that there used to be a time back in the 1990s when the world was a different place. It was a time when most of us lived in  a fool’s paradise, oblivious to the threat of Islamism; a time when the most compelling story on CNN, one which gripped the public and monopolized coverage for months, was the murder of little blond moppet in Boulder, Colorado.

 

The scenes we now see on CNN—of wars against Islamic terrorists and jihadi plots to bring down large airliners using liquid explosives hidden in baby bottles—show us how distant that time is from our own, and how we can never, ever go back.

Posted by: scaramouche at 21:00 | link | comments

 

Is Israel toast?: This guy seems to think so. (Warning: don’t follow the link if you’re already feeling depressed; it could put you over the edge.)

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:43 | link | comments

 

Peace in our time, 2006: If you looked closely at the all those beaming faces at the UN who voted in favour of the pathetic, toothless joke of a ceasefire, you might have been able to discern the ghost of Neville Chamberlain, hovering in the background and smiling grimly as he clutched his worthless piece of paper. From the New York Post (link via Real Clear Politics):

 

HISTORIANS will look back at this weekend's cease-fire agreement in Lebanon as a pivotal moment in the war on terror. It is pivotal in the same sense that the Munich agreement between Adolf Hitler and Neville Chamberlain was pivotal in an earlier battle against the enemies of freedom. The accord in October 1938 revealed to the world that the solidarity of the Western allies was a sham, and that the balance of power had shifted to the fascist dictators.

 

Resolution 1701 shows that, for the time being at least, the balance has likewise shifted to the terrorists and their state sponsors. Like Munich, it marks the triumph of the principle of putting off until tomorrow what needs to be done today. Like Munich, it will mean not peace in our time, but a bigger war in our future.

 

In that sense, the cease-fire may be even more momentous than Munich, and a greater blunder. In 1938 Chamberlain and other appeasers had the excuse that they were trying to prevent an armed conflict no one wanted. Today, of course, that conflict is already here. Historians will conclude that by supporting U.N. Resolution 1701 and getting Israel to agree, the Bush administration has in effect declared that its global war on terror is over. We have reverted to the pre-9/11 box of tools, if not necessarily the pre-9/11 mindset. From now on, the worst Iran, Syria, and North Korea will have to worry about are serial resolutions in the United Nations. Terrorists will be busy dodging Justice Department subpoenas, not Tomahawk missiles.

 

Our enemies know better. They know the war is only entering a new stage, and they know who the winners and losers were last weekend.

 

The clear losers were the United States and Israel. Israel has sacrificed lives and treasure, and had its honor dragged through the mud of international opinion, for no purpose. America squandered its political capital at the start of the crisis by getting moderate Arab regimes to condemn Hezbollah instead of Israel. They did so because they thought Hezbollah was about to be annihilated. However, they soon realized their mistake. They now know Tehran and Damascus will set the agenda in the Middle East, not Washington. The Arab League's support for this U.N.-brokered deal is just one more measure of our strategic failure.

 

The other loser is Lebanon. The price of peace in 1938 was de jure dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, as Germany annexed the Sudetenland. The price of Resolution 1701 is de facto dismemberment of Lebanon. A large, well-armed terrorist army acting at the behest of a foreign power now controls the southern half of Lebanon, and pulls the strings in the other half. The facade of Lebanese self-government has been preserved. As a territorial state, it may even last longer than Czechoslovakia did (Hitler gave the Czechs five months before he annexed the rest of their country).

But other states in the region will have learned their lesson. Faced by an internal terrorist organization, especially one with links with Tehran, they will have to make accommodations. No white knight in the guise of U.S. Marines will ride to their rescue; no Israeli tanks and F-16s will do their dirty work for them. Appeasement will be the order of the day…

 

Also hovering in the distance on that black day: the ghost of Adolf Hitler, on leave from Hell, and delighted to be handed a posthumous victory by the international body that was supposed to prevent any more of his kind of Final Solutions.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:15 | link | comments

 

Shilling for Hezbollah: Rami Khouri is a Palestinian from Nazareth. You might not know that because the Globe and Mail, in which he appears frequently (twice this week!) bills him as “editor-at-large of the Lebanon Star.” From that description, one might assume he is Lebanese, and as such would have insights to offer from that perspective. Not that the Palestinian Arab perspective and the Lebanese Arab perspective are any likely to be much different—both are likely to see Israel as the aggressor/brutalizer/interloper/villain, the Palestinians/Lebanese as their innocent victims and their Islamist terror overlords (whether democratically elected, like Hamas, or self-appointed, like Hezbollah) as their champions. But in the context of the current conflict, it is disingenuous of the Globe to give readers the impression that Khouri is Lebanese.

 

In today’s piece, Khouri expresses awe for the most popular man in the Arab world, a man who—reality check—is actually a vicious, cold-blooded terror-meister and who, at this very moment, is crowing amidst the rubble about his great victory over the Jews. (If Khouri ever decides to get out of the pundit game, he could always have a career as a decoy/stand-in for Nasrallah; put a shmatta on his head and he's a dead ringer for the terror chief.)

 

Words cannot describe how sickening it is to read this pro-Hezbollah bilge in Canada’s national newspaper, and how appalling it is that the paper regularly offers him a pulpit from which to air his poisonous views.

 

As I watched Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah making his frequent television addresses in recent weeks, particularly his Monday night one, after the fighting had stopped earlier that day, he seemed to take on the veneer of a national leader rather than the head of one group in Lebanon’s rich mosaic of political parties. In tone and content, his remarks seemed like those that a president or prime minister should be making while addressing the nation after a terrible month of destruction and human suffering. His prominence is one of the important political repercussions of this war.

The intense interest of some politicians, foreign leaders and many journalists in “when and how Hizbullah will be disarmed” is understandable. Israel, the United States, others in Europe and in some quarters of Lebanon have stressed this issue for many months well before the war. But this focus is too narrow to be a useful peg for a full analysis of the political implications of this war. Hizbullah’s arms should be assessed in the wider domestic, regional and international context in which they exist and operate.

That context has been clarified by this war, which inflicted severe human and material damage on the two countries. Now its political ripples will be felt throughout the Middle East, and perhaps further afield. One of these is the prominence of non-state actors, such as Hizbullah, that act with more efficacy and, in some cases, more legitimacy than some governments in the Arab world.

The significant political fact is not only that such an organization has become very powerful in tandem with the formal Lebanese institutions of state, but also that it has in part provoked and single-handedly fought a war with a neighboring state -- and emerged in rather good shape.

So, Nasrallah speaks to the nation after the fighting stops…

No, Mr. Khouri. The “significant fact” is that Nasrallah is a fanatical Shia cleric who wants to eradicate the Jews so his Messiah can return—and that you are a shill for this evil man and his evil ideology.

 

Update: My letter to the Globe:

 

After reading Rami Khouri’s assessment of the current scene in the Middle East, I feel a few reality checks are in order.

 

Check 1: Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, articulate and appealing though he may be to many Arabs, is not only an enemy of the Jewish state and the Jewish people, whom he has asked to gather in Israel so he can eliminate them all in one go (a pre-requisite, it seems, for the return of his Messiah). He is an enemy of Western civilization and the free world as a whole. So is Iran, the ambitious Islamist state that is backing him and which may soon acquire nuclear weapons.

 

Check 2: Hezbollah, the organization Nasrallah fronts, may be engaged in all sorts of humanitarian pursuits, like building hospitals and schools. But even if Hezbollah sold Girl Scout Cookies and delivered Meals on Wheels, it wouldn’t mitigate the fact that it’s an out-and-out terrorist organization with a stated agenda of genocide, and that it has cynically exploited and harmed the Lebanese people by setting up thousands of Iranian missiles in the midst of a civilian population.

 

Check 3: Hezbollah may style itself as “an anti-occupation resistance group,” but it is in fact the very antithesis of what it claims to be. It is an army of occupation—an Iranian army of occupation—that set itself up as a state-within-a-state and has been allowed to occupy southern Lebanon for many years.

 

One final reality check: Mr. Khouri may be described as “editor-at-large” of a Lebanese newspaper—leaving one with the impression that he is from Lebanon—but he is actually a Palestinian from Israel (though now an American citizen) who sees events through an anti-Israel, anti-U.S., anti-Western prism.

 

Something Globe readers might want to consider when evaluating his pro-Hezbollah views.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:13 | link | comments (1)

 

Hezbollahland, then and now: Commentary Magazine has a link to an informative article about Hezbollah from 2003. The article is a good backgrounder about the terror organization, which is essentially an adjunct of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the kind of malign mischief (of the jihad variety) it has been engaged in over the years.

 

I was surprised to read that three years ago Hezbollah was already thought to have stockpiled an estimated 10,000 missiles in south Lebanon—the number bandied about by the media during the recent war. Surely in the following three years they managed to smuggle in a whole lot more—which means Allah only knows how many farkakteh Iranian missiles are actually there.

 

What wasn’t at all surprising was the following passage about UNFIL, the UN “peacekeeping" force in the region, and how useless it had proven to be:

 

UN peacekeepers in Lebanon have not lifted a finger to stop Hizballah's unprovoked attacks against Israel. In fact, nowhere in UNIFIL'S reports to the world body is there any mention of the thousands of rockets and missiles Hizballah has deployed or of the activities of its training bases.  

In its present form, UNIFIL has no function other than to obstruct Israel's efforts to defend itself. But one could imagine ways in which its annual budget of $120 million, mostly funded by American taxpayers, could be put to better use. This, however, would require a determined U.S.

push to expand its responsibilities, beef up its capabilities, and demand that it fulfill, and be seen to fulfill, its official mandate of restoring international peace and security.

 

This time around (and a bloody war later), there’s absolutely no reason to believe that UNFIL, which still has no mandate to shoot back at the bad guys, will prove any more effective.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:45 | link | comments

 

“Stretch” Assad and “Bitsy” Ahmadinejad: These two should hang out together more often--and we should be sure to take lots of photos of them in the act. The height differential makes them both look utterly ridiculous.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:36 | link | comments

 

No laughing matter: A Jewish producer of The Ali G. Show describes two of the high-larious comedians who've been slaying ‘em in the aisles at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe festival.

 

Don Rickles, they ain’t.

 

From the Times Online:

…I’ve seen two comics so far who have been happy to amuse their crowds with Holocaust gags. I’m not sure which to be the more concerned about.

One was a left-leaning angry Australian conspiracy theorist, Steve Hughes, whose show The Storm is an assault on all things Western. “I want to bash Condoleezza Rice’s brain to bits and kill that f****** Jew Richard Perle.” Hughes is the one at the Pleasance Courtyard while Perle is an adviser to George W. Bush as he was to Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton on foreign affairs.

The second was a far more charming African-American comic who for much of the show was thoughtful, funny and even quite sweet. But he seemed to have a problem with Jews, too. Reginald D. Hunter is doing sell-out shows in the new E4-sponsored venue, the Udderbelly. Three hundred come along every night to see Hunter’s Pride and Prejudice and Niggas. You should see the poster.

I was laughing along until he announced that he was about to be extremely controversial and break the last taboo of stand-up comedy. Long silent pause. "Jeeeeews"  Another long pause with some giggles from the audience. "You see, you’re not allowed to say that."

He went on to say how its illegal to deny the Holocaust in Austria. He has a good mind to go to Austria, stand in the street and say the Holocaust didn’t happen so that he could get arrested and tell the judge he was talking about the Rwandan holocaust. Whether or not he thought there should be a law against going to Rwanda and denying that genocide, he didn’t say.

By claiming that making a joke about Jews is the one last, great comic taboo, he simultaneously provides the moral justification for a crack at the Jews and he silences them from the right to complain, as this would only confirm the unspoken premise: that Jews are overprotected in society or even worse that Jewish media controllers are obsessed with silencing any criticism of their own.

His joke is essentially one about freedom of speech and selective Jewish control of that freedom, but he gives the lie to his true feelings by his choice of example. Of all the possible targets, of all the things he might wish to say, his complaint is that he is not permitted to parrot the greatest anti-Semitic slur of the last hundred years — that the Holocaust never happened. As a believer in free speech, I am not convinced by the criminalisation of Holocaust denial, but that does not mean I am confused about the motives of those who wish to utter it…

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:01 | link | comments (1)

 

Cats and dogs and Moo: Mike Wallace has the reputation of being a real pit-bull of an interviewer—or did, when he was in his prime. Sadly, the Wallace who interviewed the World’s Most Dangerous Man on Sunday was much diminished—more fluffy widdle kitten than killer dog. On the Front Page Magazine site, Dennis Prager has a few of the questions Wallace should have—but didn’t dare to—ask.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:23 | link | comments

 

Moo ‘toons and Mo ‘toons: When I read the following AP story on the Ceeb website, I couldn’t decide which was more revolting: the story, or the way it was reported:

An exhibition of cartoons about the Holocaust opened in Tehran this week, reflecting Iran's response to last year's Muslim outrage over a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad in a Danish newspaper.

The display, showing 204 entries from Iran and abroad, was strongly influenced by the views of Iran's hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who drew widespread condemnation last year for calling the Holocaust a "myth" and saying Israel should be destroyed.

One cartoon by Indonesian Tony Thomdean shows the Statue of Liberty holding a book on the Holocaust in its left hand and giving a Nazi-style salute with the other.

Masoud Shojai, director of the host Caricature House, said a jury looked through 1,200 entries received after the contest was announced in February by the co-sponsor, the Iranian newspaper Hamshahri.

It came following worldwide protests by Muslims against the Muhammad cartoons published by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. Many Muslims considered the cartoons a violation of traditions prohibiting images of their prophet.

Hamshahri said it wanted to test the West's tolerance for drawings about the Nazi killing of six million Jews in the Second World War. The entries on display came from nations including the United States, Indonesia and Turkey.

About 50 people attended the exhibition's opening on Monday.

"I came to learn more about the roots of the Holocaust and the basis of Israel's emergence," said 23-year-old Zahra Amoli.

The exhibition runs until Sept. 13 and the winner will receive $12,000 US. The exhibition hall is next to the Palestinian Authority's embassy, which was Israel's diplomatic site in Iran before the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Notice how AP tries to tie up the Mo ‘toons and the Moo ‘toons in one nice big tit-for-tat package, as if the two are equivalent, as if Nutjob’s Holocaust denial and Zionism-extrication program weren’t in the works long before the Danish paper published the “blasphemous” images.

 

As for “testing the West’s tolerance” for funny Holocaust ‘toons—I’m pretty sure that while some, but by no means all, of us here in the West would find these works hateful, disturbing, revolting and/or stupefying dumb, you won’t find anyone in the West—or for matter, any Jews—rampaging  through the streets and burning down Iranian embassasies.

 

We’re kind of funny that way.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:11 | link | comments

 

Salutin’ and refutin’ Salutin: This past Satuday, the Globe amd Mail ran Rick Salutin’s column in which he asserted that Israel is every bit as much a terrorist outfit as Al Qaeda and that witnessing the terror wrought by Israel during its 1982 invasion of Lebanon is what inspired Osama bin Laden to plot 9/11.

 

This odious suggestion prompted me to write the following letter to the editor, which the Globe, for whatever reason, did not see fit to print.(Well, I guess it was kind of snarky):

 

It has come to this: Rick Salutin’s anti-Israel animus has become so off-the-wall that he is now citing Osama bin Laden as an authoritative source to attest to Israeli “terrorism.” Mr. Salutin would also like us to know that Israel’s 1982  “invasion” of Lebanon (which, he neglects to tell us, occurred because the PLO was using Lebanon and threatening Israel in much the same way as Hezbollah is doing today) inspired bin Laden to hatch the 9/11 plot.

 

What next? Perhaps a choice quote or two from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad about how his quirky take on history has inspired his “relocation” plans for Israel’s Jews? 

 

Today, the Globe did print a letter about Salutin’s unhinged musings—by someone who’s as out-to-lunch as Salutin. I post it here in full so you can savour the idiocy:

 

Questions of equality

 

Bravo to Rick Salutin (Of Terror Plots, Mideast Politics And the Blue Jays—Aug. 11). I have lived in the Middle East. There is no religious war. People are not angry at our way of life. And they are not crazy terrorists. They are proud people who have been humiliated time after time by Western powers—either directly or through their own leaders by proxy.

 

The majority of Muslims don’t care if Israel is their neighbour. But they want equal treatment. If the West insists that United Nations resolutions against Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Iran must stand, they why should Israel be an exception when it comes to the UN resolutions demanding Israel end the occupation?

 

All these people want is justice. They want to be treated as equal and not as second-class citizens. Extremism and violence are the symptoms of the problem, not the roots.

 

D. DOBJE, Toronto

 

There’s so much delicious nonsense/egregious tripe in there—including the idea of Muslims, who believe in the Islamic concept of dhimmitude that accords second-class status to Jews and Christians under their rule, grousing about their lack of equal treatment—that it would be my great delight to fisk it. Sadly, I don't have the time. Instead I am posting the letter I sent in response: 

 

D. Dobje’s news that “there is no religious war” in the Middle East and that people there “are not crazy terrorists” comes as a great relief. Or would, if not for the unfortunate presence of crazed Islamists, like Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his flunky, Hezbollah terror chief Hassan Nasrallah, who want to wipe Israel off the map because it happens to be, um, Jewish.

 

I think it’s time for those, like Rick Salutin and D. Dobje, who spout the “it’s about the occupation” line to re-examine their beliefs in light of these new realities.

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:00 | link | comments (4)

 

Caving in to evil: In a symposium on NRO, Anne Bayefsky articulates our collective outrage and despair over the U.S.-brokered ceasefire:

 

The most frightening part of the U.N. Security Council resolution is that the United States agreed to allow the U.N. to play a pivotal role in the battle of our age — between democracy and terrorism, freedom and bondage, dignity and intolerance.

Kofi Annan’s wide grin, as he stood side-by-side with Secretary Rice on Friday, said it all. He won. But America and freedom’s cause lost.

At exactly the moment the “reformed” U.N. Human Rights Council condemned Israel — and only Israel — for the third time in two months, America cut a deal with the same U.N. to pin down the arms of the state on the front lines of democracy’s war.

Why is the America that guards the right of self-defense so dearly willing to deny it, in effect, to the state of Israel? Why would America permit the U.N., which has systematically sided with Arab and Islamic states in their war against the Jews for half a century, to play-act as even-handed peacemaker? Why did the administration believe that denying Israel a win over Iranian proxies this time means America is more likely to win over their Iranian bosses next time?

Everything about this resolution is an assault on the shared values of America and Israel: labeling Israel’s battle against Hezbollah partially “offensive”; failing to mention Iran and Syria — the states driving the war; designing a force for southern Lebanon incapable of disarming Hezbollah; suggesting territorial gains for Hezbollah’s terror; signing a death warrant for the kidnapped Israeli soldiers by placing their release side-by-side with the release of Lebanese killers in Israeli jails.

So why did the administration sign on? The mistaken impression that the U.N. is a good place to make real friends and allies who will be there down the road; the erroneous belief that having the intolerant and the racist inside the tent is progress; the alleged lack of an alternative. These are a lot of very bad reasons for handing an international institution unable to define terrorism a central role in combating it.

 

After last week’s thwarted bomb plot in London, President Bush reaffirmed that we are fighting a war against Islamic fascism. Yet at the same time, he is willing to sacrifice Israel—the nation in the vanguard of fighting the jihad—to placate the Islamic fascists and their international abettors.

 

It didn’t work for Neville Chamberlain, Mr. President. It’s not going to work for you.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:23 | link | comments

 

Israel’s defeat: The peerless Caroline Glick (can we put her in charge with Bibi?) analyzes the ceasefire and finds, not surprisingly, that from Israel’s standpoint, it’s a travesty and a disaster. From JWR:

There is a good reason that Hizbullah chief Hassan Nasrallah has accepted UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which sets the terms for a cease-fire between his jihad army and the State of Israel.

The resolution represents a near-total victory for Hizbullah and its state sponsors Iran and Syria, and an unprecedented defeat for Israel and its ally the United States. This fact is evident both in the text of the resolution and in the very fact that the US decided to sponsor a cease-fire resolution before Israel had dismantled or seriously degraded Hizbullah's military capabilities.

While the resolution was not passed under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter and so does not have the authority of law, in practice it makes it all but impossible for Israel to defend itself against Hizbullah aggression without being exposed to international condemnation on an unprecedented scale.

This is the case first of all because the resolution places responsibility for determining compliance in the hands of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Annan has distinguished himself as a man capable only of condemning Israel for its acts of self-defense while ignoring the fact that in attacking Israel, its enemies are guilty of war crimes. By empowering Annan to evaluate compliance, the resolution all but ensures that Hizbullah will not be forced to disarm and that Israel will be forced to give up the right to defend itself.

The resolution makes absolutely no mention of either Syria or Iran, without whose support Hizbullah could neither exist nor wage an illegal war against Israel. In so ignoring Hizbullah's sponsors, it ignores the regional aspect of the current war and sends the message to these two states that they may continue to equip terrorist armies in Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority and Iraq with the latest weaponry without paying a price for their aggression.

The resolution presents Hizbullah with a clear diplomatic victory by placing their erroneous claim of Lebanese sovereignty over the Shaba Farms, or Mount Dov — a vast area on the Golan Heights that separates the Syrian Golan from the Upper Galilee and is disputed between Israel and Syria — on the negotiating table. In doing so, the resolution rewards Hizbullah's aggression by giving international legitimacy to its demand for territorial aggrandizement via acts of aggression, in contravention of the laws of nations…

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:58 | link | comments

 

Bibi time: If Israelis haven’t been thoroughly ground down by the war and have any residual desire to survive, they will get rid of Olmert, useless, feckless, burnt-out man, and put Bibi back in charge.

 

And if you have any doubt at all that that’s the only way to go, I advise you to listen to his words. From YNet News:

...Like Olmert, Netanyahu opened his speech with condolences, noting both the harsh incidents and united Israeli spirit seen in recent days: "All of our hearts skipped a beat when our soldiers went to battle to protect us and all of our hearts grieved alongside the families of fallen soldiers or the citizens who fell victim to attacks on our cities."  

Netanyahu emphasized that "This is a moment of unity and a moment of self examination. I don't mean simply learning lessons from the recent conflict. I think that we need to examine our collective self as a state, based on one basic principle – every living thing must do two things in order to survive: it must identify dangers and it must arm itself sufficiently to protect itself from these dangers."

 

Netanyahu stated the importance of nurturing military, state, economic and spiritual strength: "A hundred years ago, our people did not have such capabilities. A leader, Herzl, saw the burning coals of anti-Semitism and understood that there was a threat of a fire that would threaten the Jews of Europe and eventually the Jews of the rest of the world. Today I say: we are standing before a grave danger. A new potential fire threatens our people. Not only our soldiers, citizens and economy, but our very existence."

 

"Yes, in each generation there are those that rise up seeking our destruction. But since Hitler, there has not risen such a bitter enemy as Iran's president, Ahmadinejad, who openly declares his desire to annihilate us and his development of nuclear weapons in order to carry out this desire. Until he carries out his scheme, he is using his covert forces: in the south, Hamas, a Sunni force, and in the north, Hizbullah, a part of the Shiite arc that extends from Tehran to Lebanon," Netanyahu elaborated.

 

The opposition chairman praised security and rescue forces, as well as citizens in the line of fire and "a third force, that came forward, the force of the entire nation…people enlisted privately…businessmen, teachers, nurses, spiritual leaders, artists, ordinary people."

 

"The nation opened their hearts and pockets and homes," he continued. "In times of trouble, the people of Israel are all brothers and, in times of trouble, we must understand that the fate of one is the fate of all and that all people of Israel are responsible for one another." Regardless, Netanyahu stated that private donations would not suffice and that government intervention would be required…

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:43 | link | comments (1)

 

Future tense: Scaramouche Nostradamus here, with my predictions for how I see events panning out. (Remember: I’m not a psychic, merely someone who has read extensively about history, politics and religion, so I predict my accuracy rate is going to be a lot higher than that of an astrologist or tea-leaf reader.)

 

Won’t happen:

 

• Lebanon won’t reign in/disarm Hezbollah.
• UNFIL won’t do anything about protecting Israel from Hezbollah’s rockets; won’t prevent Iran from shipping in more rockets via Syria into Lebanon; won’t serve any useful purpose at all but will serve as a temporary stop-gap that will allow Hezbollah to rearm and regroup.
• The world won’t do anything to prevent the mullahs from going nuclear.
• The world won’t so much as bat an eye should the Shia Nazis obliterate the Jewish state. (But, out of habit, it may erect a few granite markers to acknowledge the genocide—until such time as the triumphant jihadis insist on knocking them all down.)

 Will happen:

 

• Too many people in the West will continue to remain clueless.
• While Israel continues to exist, it will continue to be blamed for all the ills affecting the Arab/Muslim world (see Rami Khouri’s piece in the post below).
• Should Israel be destroyed, the Jews will continue to be blamed for all the ills of the Arab/Muslim world, and, for that matter, the world as a whole.
• If we don’t wake up now, we will all be living (those of us who haven’t been killed, that is) in Dar al Islam.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:15 | link | comments (2)

 

Khouri’s dangerous delusions: The jihad has kicked into high gear, fuelled by Saudi mega-bucks, Western cravenness, and the ascendance of such Islamic super-duper heroes as Moo Ahmabignutjob and Nasty “Nazi” Nasrallah. But to what does Rami Khouri, editor-at-large of Lebanon’s Daily Star attribute the rise in Islamic radicalism? Why, to none other than that tiny minority of original monotheists who deign to keep drawing breath, and to the efforts of Western authorities to protect their populace from the explosive exploits of home-grown Muslim terrorists. From the Globe and Mail:

Talk about wake-up calls. The arrest of 24 men in Britain who allegedly planned to blow up numerous airplanes over the Atlantic Ocean is about as dramatic and dangerous as it gets in the wake-up-call department. Something is driving average young men to apparently plan and execute deeds of brutal, almost unimaginable, inhumanity, targeting innocent civilians in the West who have nothing to do with whatever conflict may be at hand in the Middle East.

Good police work prevented this suspected plot. But other such operations will take place. That's because terror is a growth industry, fuelled by the cruel policies and human discontent that remain so plentiful. More important than good police work in preventing attacks is to take away the political, personal and other factors that prompt such extremism from hijacking the minds of otherwise ordinary young men. On that front, it seems the prevalent political policies of Arab, Israeli, American and British leaders are contributing to terrorism, rather than thwarting it.

It is high time that people of influence recognize that their civilians are being terrorized because opinion leaders have allowed themselves to be politically terrorized into ignoring the obvious links between conditions in Arab societies and the growth and spread of terror. There can be no doubt that events in the Arab world contribute significantly to turning middle-class men into world-class monsters.

The two most important cases are Palestine and Lebanon. Here is where Anglo-American-Israeli policies combine with the absence of serious Arab political leadership and responsibility to leave ordinary Arabs feeling helpless and vulnerable. They see, feel and must somehow react to the mass suffering, death, displacement, pauperization and dehumanization now transmitted around the world by television.

The Israeli atrocities in Lebanon have been merely the latest example of this modern legacy, but Israel's American-supported assault on the Palestinians has been just as brutal, and much older…

The issue is not whether Israel has a right to defend itself -- of course it does, as does every sovereign state -- but rather the fact that Israel tries to defend itself by ignoring its own role in provoking the battle.

The fact that Israel has simultaneously brutalized entire civilian populations in Lebanon and Gaza, largely with Anglo-American acquiescence, does not go unnoticed by other Arabs, Muslims, Asians, Europeans and decent human beings everywhere. We can expect the inhumanity they see on television every day to result ultimately in two things: extreme reactions of terror against the West by a few enraged young men, and a willingness by political leaders everywhere to consider whether current policies may be fomenting, rather than reducing, terror.

So you see, if only Israel would quit it already (with its determination to exist, that is) and stop "brutalizing" all those nice Arabs, everything would be hunky-dory.

You know, just like Hitler said it would be once the world allowed him to get rid of all the war-mongering Jews in his neighbourhood.

But then, I suppose had he been writing at the time, Mr. Khouri, would likely have blamed the rise of German extremism, a.k.a. Nazism, on the Jews, too.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:41 | link | comments

Clarity and obfuscation: Before offering an excerpt from Niall Ferguson’s piece in the Telegraph about the inability of the UN to do much of anything—except jabber endlessly and compose endless slabs of the most impenetrable bureacratese—I offer the following quotes from that master of clarity, George Orwell. They are all from his essay, “Politics and the English Language,” published in 1946:

·        A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?   

 

·        Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

 

·        In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.

And now, Ferguson’s comments on UN policy re preventing large-scale terror attacks, policy which, in the words of a former colleague of mine in the communications game, could be described as being “100 per cent content free”:

…But who seriously expects the United Nations to prevent al-Qaeda (or its latest imitator) from trying to blow up passenger planes in midair? Those who dreamt up the "Lockerbie-meets-9/11" bomb plot clearly did intend "mass murder on an unimaginable scale". All the UN has to offer in response is (as they say in New York) yada yada yada on an unimaginable scale.

I had a look at the UN website on Friday to see how the "international community" was reacting to the transatlantic horror that might have been. It didn't take me long to locate a promising page entitled "UN Action against Terrorism". Clicking on "Latest Developments" took me to Kofi Annan's "Recommendations for Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy".

Underneath was a stirring condemnation of "terrorism in all its forms and manifestations, committed by whomever, wherever and for whatever purposes", taken from the Secretary-General's report, published in April, entitled "Uniting Against Terrorism".

But my heart sank as I ploughed through the report. By the time I got to Chapter VI, "Defending human rights in the context of terrorism and counter-terrorism", I was comatose. Permit me to give you a flavour of this document (which calls to mind nothing more than Dickens's Circumlocution Office in Bleak House):

"In paragraph 109 of the 2005 World Summit Outcome, the Security Council is called upon… to ensure that fair and clear procedures exist for placing individuals and entities on sanctions lists and removing them, as well as for granting humanitarian exemptions.

Pursuant to that mandate, and in accordance with paragraph 20 of the report on the implementation of decisions from the 2005 World Summit Outcome for action by the Secretary-General (A/60/430), I have asked the Office of Legal Affairs of the Secretariat to begin an interdepartmental process, in close cooperation with the Department of Political Affairs and OHCHR, to develop proposals and guidelines that would be available for consideration by the Security Council.

"In the meantime, the Committee established pursuant to resolution 1267 (1999) has approved a partial revision of its Guidelines and is urged to continue its discussions of listing and de-listing, including those recommendations from the reports of the Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team of the Committee, which has consistently pointed to the need to address these issues."

Well, this must really scare the hell out of Osama…

Indeed.

Oh, and one more Orwell quotation that seems pertinent in light of Israel’s agreeing to the UN ceasefire, thus giving up its right of self-defense and acceding to Hezbollah’s victory: “The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.”

Posted by: scaramouche at 22:23 | link | comments

 

Sisterhood is morally bankrupt: Like most of the left, the feminist movement has lost its bearings and is perambulating in a fog of moral relativism. From an article in the Times Online written by a feminist and former peace activist:

…As a supporter of the peace movement in the 1980s, I could never have imagined that many of the same crowd I hung out with then would today be standing shoulder-to-shoulder with militantly anti-feminist Islamic fundamentalist groups, whose views on women make western patriarchy look like a Greenham peace picnic. Nor would I have predicted that today’s feminists would be so indulgent towards Iran, a theocratic nation where it is an act of resistance to show an inch or two of female hair beneath the veil and whose president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is not joking about his murderous intentions towards Israel and the Jews.

On the defining issue of our times, the rise of Islamic extremism, what is left of the sisterhood has almost nothing to say. Instead of “I am woman, hear me roar”, there is a loud silence, punctuated only by remonstrations against Tony Blair and George Bush — “the world’s number one terrorist” as the marchers would have it.

Women are perfectly entitled to oppose the war in Iraq or to feel that Israel is brutally overreacting to Hezbollah’s provocation. But where is the parallel, equally vital debate about how to combat Islamic fundamentalism? And why don’t more peace-loving feminists regard it as a threat? Kira Cochrane, 29, is the new editor of The Guardian women’s page, the bible of the Greenham years, where so many women writers made their names by staking out positions on the peace movement. She has noticed that today’s feminists are inclined to keep quiet about the march of radical Islam. “There’s a great fear of tackling the subject because of cultural relativism. People are scared of being called racist,” Cochrane observes.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:57 | link | comments

 

“Nazi leader a hero to many Germans”: You might have read something along those lines in a North American newspaper (say, the New York Times) in the late 1930s. Here’s the same headline, rewritten for modern times.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:41 | link | comments

 

At the hop: Harpoon Siddiqui says we shouldn’t join Israel and the U.S. in “their dance of tribal solidarity.”

 

Mark Steyn explains which tribal dance we should try to avoid—and it sure ain’t the Hora.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:56 | link | comments

 

“Protest”—and counter-protest—in Toronto: The Star has a photo of some “protesters” at the pro-Hezbollah rally held in Toronto yesterday (I’ve lost count—is it the second or third pro-genocide such gathering here since the start of the current war?) burning the flag of the Jewish state with what can only be described as hateful glee.

 

I’m not too concerned, though, because, as a “protest” organizer assures us in the accompanying article, only an infinitesimal fringe of protesters want to spit on and incinerate Jews, er, the Jewish flag. Most of the “protesters” are quite content to let Hezbollah do the job for them.

 

…A mostly peaceful march was marred by a few verbal skirmishes between two protesting groups and the burning of at least three Israeli flags.

 

Demonstrators marched from the Israeli consulate on Bloor St. W. to the American consulate on University Ave. and the first attempt at burning an Israeli flag took place there.

 

Organizers appointed many marshals to control the crowds, including Rammal Adel who tried to stop a group of youths from stomping and spitting on the flag before it was set on fire.

 

"Because we got some recommendations from the organizers not to burn any flags, especially Israeli flags. We want to keep the peaceful aspect of the demonstration," said Adel.

 

"They are a minority. It does not represent any organization that called for this demonstration," he said…

 

This being a free society (unlike the one Hezbollah has set up in Lebanon or Hamas has established in Gaza) protesters were allowed to have their say. And so, reluctantly, were some counter-protesters, although it’s clear that police would have preferred them to stay away:

Earlier in the afternoon, about 50 people gathered opposite the main demonstration to protest Hezbollah flags and posters in the rally.

 

But they were moved to the back, as police said two permits are not issued for a demonstration at the same location.

 

Still, those gathered held posters, chanted and shouted at the demonstrators as they filtered in to listen to speeches. Meanwhile, Gilad Eben-Ezra addressed the anti-war demonstrators through a megaphone. "Why don't you let your children hold Kalashnikovs? Why don't you march with bombs strapped on?"

 

The anti-war demonstration was organized by the Toronto Coalition to Stop the War, the Canadian Arab Federation, Muslim Unity Group, Palestine House, the Canadian Peace Alliance, the Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid, Sumoud and the Arab Students Collective.

 

Organizers said 5,000 people were in attendance.

 

Update: My letter to the Toronto Star:

 

I know I shouldn’t be too alarmed at the sight of pro-Hezbollah supporters burning an Israeli flag. After all, as one of the protest’s organizers assures us, only a “tiny minority” of protesters wanted to spit on and incinerate the national symbol of the world’s only Jewish state. Still, I can’t help but feel a bit unsettled, knowing that whether or not they actually engaged in any flag-burning, protesters at the rally were aligning themselves with a terrorist organization that has an agenda of Jewish genocide and that, if it were up to Hezbollah it would be real Jews and not just their flag that would be going up in smoke.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:33 | link | comments

 

A birthday wish: Alexandre “Sacha” Trudeau, who, as an infant, was dandled on the knee of his papa Pierre’s cher amis, Fidel Castro, offers birthday greetings to the bearded despot in a 3/4-page essay in the Sunday Star. In it, Sacha, who obviously inherited his father’s unfortunate fondness for totalitarian strongmen, touts the dictator’s “inescapable rationality.”

 

Well, he’s got it half right. I’m sure all those thousands of Cubans who’ve been imprisoned or executed by Castro over the years would agree with the “inescapable” part but might beg to differ with the part about his purported “rationality.”

 

In honour of the verbose tyrant’s 80th birthday, (Fidel is noted for giving speeches that last longer than baseball games, a favourite Cuban pastime despite its American provenance) I have penned the following doggerel:

 

Happy day to you, Fidel.

I hope you soon go straight to Hell.

You’ve murdered those who’ve disagreed

And, like Yasser, fed your greed

By stealing money from your people

And treated them like fools and sheep-le.

 

Folks will cheer when you are dead.

(Except for Sacha, who’s soft in the head.)

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:59 | link | comments (1)

 

The old face of terrorism: It’s bearded, bespectacled and is of the view that, all in all, the UN ceasefire plan is not such a bad idea.

 

Which gives you a good idea of what a bad idea it really is.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:29 | link | comments

 

The new face of terrorism: It’s white, Anglo-Saxon and extremely well-connected.

 

But don’t worry. Islam remains a religion of peace, and only an infinitesimal fringe of reverts ever become involved in exploding Gatorade plots. From the Sydney Morning Herald:

DON Stewart-Whyte is the new face of terrorism. His father was active in England's Tory Party, his sister is a leading model who was once married to French tennis star Yannick Noah and he is a recent convert to Islam.

The 19-year-old is one of 24 Britons arrested by police on suspicion of being involved in the terrorist plot to explode up to a dozen planes.

He was a Christian until he converted to Islam about a year ago, when he changed his name to Abdul Wahid. Last month he married a Muslim woman.

Stewart-Whyte is the half-brother of British model Heather Stewart-Whyte, who was married to Noah for nearly five years and had two children with him, the Evening Standard newspaper reports.

Their father was Douglas Stewart-Whyte, a Conservative activist who died in 2000. Heather, 36, was Douglas's daughter from his first marriage.

Famous for having modelled lingerie for the Victoria's Secret fashion company, she is estimated to earn about $2.5 million a year. She split with Noah in 1999.

The British arrests came as a global manhunt continued for the 29-year-old Pakistani Islamic militant named as the mastermind of the plot…

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:20 | link | comments

 

The recipe for Israel’s demise:

 

• Take 15,000 UN “peacekeepers” who lack a mandate to fight back against heavily-armed jihadi terrorists;
• Add the jubilant terrorists, crowing about their great victory over the Jews;
• Stir in a powerful state ruled by ambitious, fanatical and soon-to-be nuclear Islamists who believe with every fibre of their being that their “Messiah,” some occluded cleric who’s been hiding out in parts unknown for many centuries, can’t return until all the Jews have been exterminated;
• Cover with copious amounts of Foggy Bottom fog, which calls for the Lebanese government, a Hezbollah-loving/abetting body, to strip the terrorists of their weapons;
• Garnish with an ineffectual and plum tuckered-out Israeli leadership, which lacks the vision and the will to save their nation;
• Cook in a hot cauldron of world-wide Jew-hatred.

 Just, please, don’t ask me to swallow any of this vile concoction.

 

Update: Victor David Hanson is far more sanguine about the outcome than moi.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:18 | link | comments

 

Fish ‘n’ chips ‘n’ jihad: What would prompt such outwardly ‘normal’ individuals, folks with jobs and kids, people who like to watch soccer and eat fish ‘n’ chips, to want to siphon liquid explosives into Gatorade bottles and detonate them in large airliners over the Atlantic Ocean?

 

Could it be an ideological imperative so enticing, so compelling, that it causes people to take leave of their senses and want to become cold-blooded mass murderers—and to think that that’s what their God wants them to do?

 

My hunch, anyway. From the Toronto Star:

 

London—A pizza delivery guy, a security guard, a university student, an odd-jobs construction worker and a part-time electronics salesman are among the young British men suspected of plotting to blow up passenger jets headed to the United States.

 

The profile emerging of the alleged homegrown terrorists arrested by police in raids late Wednesday night and Thursday morning is of ordinary working-class people, most with jobs and close family ties.

 

Neighbours in the three communities where a total of 22 men and two women were taken into custody talk about normal, soccer-loving young men, most the sons of Pakistani immigrants who grew up eating fish and chips and watching British sitcoms in typical suburban townhouses.

 

Meanwhile, as investigators on three continents worked to flesh out details of the plot, Pakistani officials reported they had arrested as many as 17 more suspected conspirators in recent days. One of those, a British national named Rashid Rauf, is believed to have been the operational planner and to have connections with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Pakistani and U.S. officials told Associated Press.

 

At least three of those arrested in Britain are converts to Islam, one just within the last six or seven months, and another one is a security guard at Heathrow airport, the scene of passenger chaos on Thursday as hundreds of flights were cancelled as authorities came to grips with drastic new security measures aimed at keeping planes safe in the air.

 

No details have been released about the two women arrested, one of whom is reported to be pregnant while the other is the mother of an infant. Both are believed to be the wives of two of the accused men. Those arrested range in age from 17 to 35.

 

One of the arrested men, Waheed Zaman, 23, is a well-known Muslim representative on the student council at London's Metropolitan University, where he studies biochemistry.

His sister, who was with him in the family's east London house when police arrived to arrest her brother, told Britain's Sun newspaper he is a mainstream Muslim who is a proud Briton.

 

"He loves fish and chips and Liverpool football club," she said, adding that he is a "great believer in the importance of integration between our community and the Western world."…

 

Hard to see how you can become “integrated” into the Western world when you’re so busy trying to kill Western air travelers with exploding beverages. But maybe that’s because what he really wants is for the Western world to become “integrated” into Dar al Islam.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:58 | link | comments

 

Wrong root: According to some leading British Muslims, the “root cause” of the terrorism, including the recent exploding airborne Gatorade plot, isn’t the jihad (a word that can no longer be used in polite company in the U.K., unlike, say, expressions of profound Jew-hatred). It’s the way the infidels, especially the Jews, are fighting back against the jihad.

 

I’m so glad they cleared that up:

LONDON — Prominent British Muslims, including three in Parliament, said in an open letter Saturday that Britain's foreign policy has made it a target for extremists. The country's terror alert remained at the highest level, though flights at Heathrow Airport were expected to return to "nearly normal."

The letter, printed in several British papers, said Britain's intervention in Iraq and the failure to secure an immediate cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah militants in Lebanon were providing "ammunition to extremists who threaten us all."

"We urge the prime minister ... to show the world that we value the lives of civilians wherever they live and whatever their religion," said the letter, which was signed by three of four Muslim members of Parliament and 38 Muslim groups, including the influential Muslim Council of Britain. "Such a move would make us all safer."

Stringent security measures remained in effect at British airports, and officials kept Britain's terror alert at its highest level. The situation at Heathrow, Europe's largest airport, was to return to "nearly normal" by the end of the day, said Damon Hunt, a spokesman for chief airport operator BAA.

Investigators on three continents worked to fill in the full, frightening picture of a suspected plot to blow U.S. jetliners out of the Atlantic skies, tracking the money trail and seizing more alleged conspirators in the teeming towns of eastern Pakistan.

One arrested there, a Briton named Rashid Rauf, appears to have been the operational planner and is believed to have connections to al-Qaida in Afghanistan, Pakistani and U.S. officials said…

 

Update: Dershowitz gets to the root.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:06 | link | comments

 

Fantastic news: You know all the hoopla about British home-grown true believers wanting to blow up large aircraft using liquid explosives smuggled in Gatorade bottles and tubes of Preperation-H? Fuggedaboutit! According to Al Jazeera it’s just another of those scams cooked up by authorities to cast Muslims in the worst possible light.

 

So if you were having second thoughts about booking that trip to Disneyworld, feel free to call your travel agent right now:

 

Yesterday the British intelligence announced that it foiled a major "terror" plot to blow up at least 10 U.S.-bound planes, an attack that UK officials say could have surpassed 9/11.

 

Britain and the United States immediately raised their nationwide terror alerts to the highest levels, indicating that an attack is "imminent". UK intelligence officials say, without providing any shred of evidence, that the bombers were planning to blow up several planes by using liquid explosives carried in soft-drink bottles, and that the bombs were supposed to be assembled on the aircraft and detonated with electronic equipment.

British police, who said that the alleged attacks could have caused “mass murder on an unimaginable scale”, arrested 24 people suspected of involvement in the "terror" plot. Pakistan also arrested seven Pakistanis, including two British nationals of Pakistani origin, on suspicion that they served as local "facilitators" for the two UK nationals.

U.S. and UK officials quickly said, again without providing any evidence, that some of the suspects belonged to the terror network al-Qaeda. A federal law enforcement official in Washington simply claimed that “the scheme to strike a range of targets at roughly the same time is an earmark of al-Qaeda”, according to the Associated Press news agency.

Many of the 24 suspects arrested in the UK were said to be British Muslims, and neighbors claimed that at least three of them were new converts to Islam. Deputy Commissioner Paul Stephenson, from London's metropolitan police, claimed yesterday that the alleged bomb plot concerned "people who might masquerade within a community behind certain faiths". The term "community" is often used in Britain to refer to people from the country's minority religions and ethnic groups, particularly the 1.65 million Muslims, who account for 2.8 percent of Britain's 60 million-strong population.
 
The Muslim council of Britain, the UK’s largest Islamic organization, said that such allegations could lead to a backlash against the Muslim community. "All right-thinking people must support the police in the intelligence-led actions they take to foil plots," said MCB spokesman Inayat Bunglawala. "However, there will also be a sense of unease about how the arrests may be used by some far-right groups and others to portray once again British Muslims as a community as a huge reservoir of potential terrorists…We have seen similar high-profile raids in the past where people have been arrested only to be released without charge."

In the United States, President Bush again angered the Muslim community, by using insensitive and inflammatory terms. The American President said yesterday that the alleged terror plot showed that the U.S. was still at war with “Islamic fascists" five years after 9/11.

Edina Lekovic, a spokeswoman for the Muslim Public Affairs Council in Los Angeles, said she was concerned that Bush’s "Islamic fascists" tag would cast suspicion on all Muslims, even the vast majority who wants to live in safety. "The problem with the phrase is it attaches the religion of Islam to tyranny and fascism, rather than isolating the threat to a specific group of individuals," she said.

Meanwhile, some analysts say the revelation of the alleged "terror" plot at this critical time is carefully designed to divert the world’s attention from the ongoing Israeli offensive in Lebanon, which has so far killed more than 1,000 Lebanese civilians...

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:50 | link | comments

 

Not “mea culpa” but “they-a culpa”: Times columnist Gerard Baker says, in light of Britain’s latest home-grown terror plot, it’s time to open our eyes and stop blaming ourselves for the actions of crazed jihadis.

 

Gee, ya think? (link via Real Clear Politics):

 

THERE’S A familiar ritual each time an operation to thwart a putative terrorist incident dominates the news. After the public’s initial expressions of relief and shuddering contemplation of what might have been, a rising chorus of sceptics takes over, with a string of questions and hypotheses.

Was it really a serious terrorist plot, or only a bunch of misguided, alienated Muslim kids larking about with a chemistry set and a mobile phone? Sometimes, unfortunately, as with this summer’s ludicrously overplayed Miami “plot” to blow up buildings in Chicago, in which the plotters had got as far as purchasing some boots but not much else, overzealous authorities bring this sort of suspicion on themselves. But you can guarantee that every incident now, whatever the evidence, will be treated with such derisive doubt. If the police had got to the 9/11 hijackers or the 7/7 bombers in time, a sizeable chunk of respectable opinion would have dismissed them as idealistic young men with no real capacity or intent to cause harm.

The scepticism is then embellished by the conspiracy-as-diversion theory. How convenient, cluck the doubters, with rolled eyes and theatrical sarcasm, just as the Government’s got some new bonfire of civil liberties planned; or just as President Bush’s poll numbers are collapsing; or just as Israel is stepping up its ground attacks in southern Lebanon.

Then, of course, whether real or imaginary or government-authored, the cynics will say the plot inevitably has its roots in our own culpability. If we hadn’t invaded Iraq, if Tony Blair weren’t George Bush’s agent of oil-fuelled imperialism, if Israel weren’t killing innocents in Lebanon, this wouldn’t have happened.

It is a neatly comprehensive schema of cynicism. If the plot turns out to be a damp squib, or the police have made some ghastly error, the sceptics will triumphantly claim that it was deliberately overdone to scare us. If the plot is real, or God forbid, as with 9/11 or 7/7 it isn’t foiled in time, then they can switch seamlessly to the claim that we’ve only ourselves to blame.

In this internally pure worldview, the consistent theme is denial— denial of the reality of the mortal threat we face, denial of the reasons we face it. The villain for these people is not the jihadist, with his agenda of destroying our very way of life. It is, as it has always been, that malign continuum of institutions of our own authority that begins with the aggressive police officer and goes all the way up via the credulous media and craven officials to No 10 and the White House.

It’s too early to say with any confidence yet, but it looks as though yesterday’s plot to blow up US-bound aircraft from the UK was closer to the 9/11 tragedy than the Miami-Chicago farce. If the police and intelligence authorities have succeeded in foiling such a murderous plan, the correct response is one of immense gratitude to them, pride in our security institutions and continued vigilance against future plots.

But we should also remember that our continuing existence lies not just in inconvenient security measures and uncomfortably intrusive intelligence activities, but in a grand global strategy. Success requires, in addition to the tiresome banalities of long check-in queues and tighter limits on hand luggage, a commitment, whatever the costs, to eradicate the deep global political causes that threaten us.

And for this it just won’t do to claim it’s all about bad US foreign policy. It is repetitive but necessary to point out that we didn’t start this war when we invaded Iraq. The attacks on 9/11 were planned not only before we invaded, but during a time when the US was expending extraordinary effort to try to forge a lasting settlement between Israel and the Palestinians.

And if our actions have radicalised the jihadists we should remember that they are animated at least as much by our ridding Afghanistan of their spiritual brethren, the Taleban, as they are by whatever crimes the US may have committed in Baghdad.

The same applies to Israel and Lebanon. Not only is the current war the direct result of Hezbollah’s aggression, its deeper causes lie in the continued determination of Israel’s enemies, increasingly emboldened by Tehran, to liquidate the Jewish state…

One quibble with the above. I don’t think it’s accurate to say that “our actions have radicalized the jihadis.” What’s happening is this: the jihadis are waging a holy war against us, and we are fighting back because we have no other choice.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:52 | link | comments

 

Pushee’d out: That vile, Jew-hating United Church official has been unceremoniously tossed out of his position.

 

Hasta la vista, Rev. From the National Post:

 

TORONTO - The United Church of Canada has ousted a member from a Toronto-based committee after publication of a vitriolic e-mail exchange with a lawyer about the conflict in the Middle East. At a special meeting yesterday, the sub-executive of the Toronto Conference of The United Church of Canada removed Reverend Lawrence Pushee as co-chairman of a divestment task group. The Church has supported CUPE Ontario's call for divestment from Israeli companies involved in the West Bank and Gaza. When violence erupted between Hezbollah and Israel last month, lawyer Kenneth Wiener e-mailed the Church wondering if it planned to "divest itself of investments connected to Lebannon, Iran and/or Syria." Mr. Pushee, responded passionately and elaborately, at one point wondering if "Israel's disproportionate responses to any and all provocations" reflected "a deficiency in the intelligence quotients of those who govern Israel." The exchange -- which deteriorated to name calling and taunts from each side -- was published, with the permission of both parties, in the National Post on Aug. 5. A news release from the Church yesterday stated, "The sub-executive cannot condone the remarks Mr. Pushee made by e-mail to a member of the Jewish community, and it dissociates itself from those remarks."

 

No doubt Reverend Pushee will blame his ouster on that nefarious and shadowy “Jewish lobby.”

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:29 | link | comments

 

Rae days: Former Premier of Ontario Bob Rae, defending Israel and blasting Yasser-philic NDP spokesman (at the time) Svend Robinson. (Rae ended up resigning from the party.) From an article that appeared in the National Post, April, 16, 2002:

 

Israel's right to exist within defined and secure borders has been a foundation of both Canadian foreign policy and the democratic tradition for nearly 60 years. It is not just that Canada voted in favour of Israel's admission to the United Nations in 1948. It is the deep bond of friendship and family ties that have strengthened the labour and human rights communities in both our countries, that have changed the lives and hopes of thousands of young people, and that have built a growing economic relationship as well. Of course Canadian Jews have been at the heart of this relationship, but Canada's support for the idea of Israel and its affirmation of human values has found deep resonance across religious faiths and party lines.

Svend Robinson, the federal New Democrat spokesperson for foreign affairs, has gone to Ramallah to show solidarity with Yasser Arafat. In a recent interview, Mr. Robinson described Israel as a terrorist state and proudly declared that he had "taken sides."

Mr. Robinson's views are apparently now the official stand of the federal New Democratic Party.

They are not mine. Let me explain why.

In December of 1993 I hosted a reception at Queen's Park for members of the Jewish and Palestinian communities. Following the famous handshake between Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin, the spirit of Oslo pointed to the deep changes that needed to happen to make peace, starting with the most basic exercise in human interaction: the acceptance of the other.

Israel and Palestine need borders. They also need something more fundamental -- a willingness to accept that the mutual quest for sovereignty and recognition means the complete abandonment of the dogmas of the past. Instead, we have leaders who have rejected both the spirit and the intent of the Oslo Accords.

What has been so disheartening since Arafat's rejection of Israel's last offer at Camp David in 2000, and his subsequent decision to return to the intifada, with its culmination in a horrendous wave of suicide murders, is how far we have moved from that basic step. Arafat's grand refusal and Arafat's war led to Ariel Sharon's election. A vicious anti-Semitism has re-emerged throughout the Arab world that continues to indulge the awful fantasy that the real answer is to make the whole Middle East Judenrein. There are no Arab leaders really prepared to lead the way politically and publicly against this hatred. The region needs a Mandela. Arafat is certainly not that: He does not have the will to make a lasting deal.

Israel's military response to the horrendous assaults on its civilian population has prompted a wave of reaction from all quarters. No one can watch what is happening without the most profound sense of anguish and concern.

America's disengagement in the post-Clinton era is now, fortunately, over. U.S. President George W. Bush has endorsed the creation of the autonomous state of Palestine, the immediate withdrawal of Israeli troops from the West Bank, and a commitment to end terror from Arafat. All these are obviously critical to the achievement of peace and stability. The Canadian government is, quite rightly, supporting this initiative. It is the best that can be done in a tragic situation.

Yet Svend Robinson's outburst reflects nothing of this tension, nothing of this mutuality. Where is his solidarity with the families of the victims of the massacre on Passover? Where is his humanitarian outrage over the children killed while dancing in a discotheque or eating in a pizzeria? Even those who argue that the answer is an Israeli withdrawal from the territories or a dismantlement of most of the settlements on the West Bank miss the point that these steps, as necessary as they are, were already offered and rejected and will only produce the desired result if they are matched by a willingness on the part of others to end the practice of terrorism and to recognize the permanence of the state of Israel…
 

Bob Rae, now a leading contender for leadership of the Liberal party, from an article in today’s National Post:

OTTAWA (CP) - Bob Rae will present his prescription Thursday for an independent Canadian voice on the world stage, wading into a foreign policy debate that could prove to be the deciding factor in the Liberal leadership contest.

Rae, one of 11 contenders for the Liberal throne, is expected to underscore the differences between his approach to foreign policy and that of front-runner Michael Ignatieff. Rae has previously derided Ignatieff as "Harper-lite" for supporting a combat role for Canadian troops in Afghanistan.

The former Ontario premier will use a speech in Toronto address the conflicts in Afghanistan, Lebanon and Sri Lanka and call for an increase in foreign aid, according to campaign insiders.

He's expected to advocate an honest broker role for Canada in defusing crises in the spirit of Liberal icon Lester Pearson, the former prime minister and Nobel Peace Prize winner.

In a lacklustre leadership race that has seen the contenders agree on most issues, foreign policy is the one area that's produced any fireworks or any real differences of opinion.

Rae was opposed last spring to Prime Minister Stephen Harper's decision to extend the increasingly deadly mission in Afghanistan for two years. Only Ignatieff and Scott Brison, the sole Atlantic candidate, supported the extension.

Within days of Israel beginning its bombardment of Hezbollah guerillas in southern Lebanon, Rae called on Harper to make the case for UN peacekeepers on the Israeli-Lebanese border and a firm timetable for a ceasefire…

Interesting—and tragic—how a whiff of power can cause an otherwise honourable man to take complete leave of his principles…and his senses.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:21 | link | comments

 

Subversive body art: On the outside, they’re encased in yards of black cloth. But cast aside the constrictive Islamic garb and these days you might find young Iranian women sporting the latest covert fashion accessory…a tattoo. From the Washington Times:

 

It's an undercover movement -- literally: Tattoos have become a fad among many young Iranian women, who proudly display them in private but must keep them under wraps from authorities.

    "This is the tattoo generation," says Milad, a 24-year-old artist who does body art as a sideline in his Tehran studio. He gives only his first name, fearing police might crack down.

    "It's the new sign of being hip."

    His is a select, largely female clientele, mostly teens and twentysomethings in Tehran's most affluent and style-savvy districts. These have been the birthplaces of nearly every limit-testing trend since the strict dress codes of the Islamic Revolution began to erode in the late 1990s. It began with nose jobs, then moved to makeovers, body-hugging jackets, funky sneakers and head scarves that leave more hair exposed than covered.

    As the Islamic coverings shrink, the next fashion frontier appears to be what's underneath, and it's catching on with men, too.

    Officials don't seem ready yet for tattoos and even block access to tattoo Web sites.

    Maryam, who is 20, wears a fish-shaped tattoo on her shoulder and won't give her full name. "We have so many secrets from the authorities that they know about but can't stop: our parties, our music. This is just another one," she says.

    The tattoo wave is so new -- and with such high chic appeal -- that few people have paused to think much about the consequences of being marked for life, Milad says. The only real plan for the future is that some girls pick intimate spots that only a spouse would see -- such as places normally covered by undergarments.

    "Most girls don't want their future mother-in-law, for example, to see they have a tattoo," Milad says…

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:34 | link | comments

 

The Boomers and the world they created: While doing some research about how we in the West lack moral clarity because the Sixties “counter-culture” and its lazy moral relativism has become the mainstream culture and is inhibiting our ability to fight back, I came across this recent article by Chris Adono. I was so impressed that I’ve decided to post most of it:

 

…Brutal and murderous as Hezbollah may be, something much bigger and more sinister looms behind it. Ominously, it is against this entity that Western civilization, even when supported by American military might, may prove to be absolutely defenseless.

With each sunrise, Iran draws a day closer to nuclear capability. In response, the perennially impotent United Nations has given Iran an ultimatum to halt its nuclear program by August 31 of this year. Yet absolutely nobody, least of all Iran's fanatical president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, believes that the UN will do anything whatsoever to back up this demand.

Thus the Iranians' crude effort to join the nuclear club is in no way matched by any Western resolve to prevent it from doing so. In truth, the anemic remnants of Western Civilization are daily exhibiting less and less of a determination to stop, or even to slow any advancement of the Islamist movement spreading insidiously through the world.

Instead, Westerners seek to find solace in the appearance of pockets among the Islamic culture that do not openly advocate or accommodate violence, as if that fact somehow dilutes or neutralizes the words and deeds of those who do.

Such momentary comforts may appear to allow for a brief retreat into the memories of that era before the Islamic threat metastasized into its present state. But in the long run vain longings of this nature merely ensure that the threat will continue to grow unchecked.

Meanwhile, the Islamists press forward, intending to dominate society in its entirety. Nor have their intentions varied in the slightest during the past fourteen hundred nears. But throughout most of that time, the western culture against which they strained was as intransigent as they were devoted. Such is no longer the case.

Upon its establishment, the European Union quickly abandoned the traditions and culture that, for centuries, had immunized its member states against such encroachment. And as "moral relativism" and "political correctness" continue to dominate and supplant the cultural tenets of its past, they make its undergirding philosophy increasingly frivolous and silly.

Ultimately, it is not any moral "clarity" on the part of the Islamists that gives them an advantage. Rather, it is the moral bankruptcy of the West that renders its chances of prevailing against militant Islam to be ever bleaker.

With Vietnam, a generation of Americas learned the bitter lesson that an enemy can prevent a far superior military power from prevailing, merely by its dogged refusal to surrender. Eventually, the willingness of the North Vietnamese to stay their course exceeded the willingness of the American people to endure the hardships of an offensive war, and so they quit the fight and came home.

Since then, the comfort and prosperity enjoyed by a subsequent generation of Americans has rendered it so soft, so self absorbed, that even the load of concern over an incurring enemy on its own soil is apparently too large of a burden to carry. Hence, an increasing number of Americans are frustrated and annoyed over their government's present preoccupation with the "War on Terror," as if the option exists to simply walk away from this looming threat.

So similar is this nihilistic mindset to that of the "Sixties" generation, now entrenched in such institutions as the colleges and media, that the two forces naturally draw together to spew their anti-American, anti-Western diatribe amidst airs of moral superiority. In the minds of such people, 9-11 notwithstanding, America can simply opt to placate those who have sworn its destruction, and thereafter everyone will simply get along.

It is from this manner of thinking that much of the current anti-Semitic diatribe is being fomented, which claims that the carnage in southern Lebanon is the result of Israeli aggression, and that the United States ought not support Israel in its effort to neutralize Hezbollah as a threat to its security.

Moreover, America's abandonment of Israel might, in the minds of its critics, serve as a goodwill offering to the murderous religionists of Islamofacism. Subsequently, from such a cauldron, peace will somehow ensue.

Yet the problem goes deeper still. The very assertion by Hezbollah that the terrorist group is following the example of North Vietnam presumes the despicable cooperation from American and European leftists who cling to the subversive model they established during the height of the Cold War.

Ironically, the status quo of that era, precarious though it may have been, served to convince the cultural elites that their nations' leaders had overstated the Soviet threat. But unlike the titanic confrontations of the Cold War, fought on such an enormous scale that the common citizen could never comprehend their scope, the war against militant Islam has already reached the streets of Europe and America.

Devoid of the moral certitude necessary to confront this enemy as the true evil it is, they similarly expect that platitudes and indifference will immunize them against the malevolent intentions of the Islamists. But just as surely as Hezbollah's Katyusha rockets keep raining down upon northern Israel, if the buildup of militant Islam is not immediately brought to a halt, the nations of the west can surely expect much worse on their own soil.

 

Think I’ll send the above to the P.M. before he appoints any more “advisors.”

 

Update: It just occurred to me—should the amoral equivocators stand by and do nothing to prevent Iran from dropping the big one, it’ll give a whole new meaning to the phrase “the baby boom.”

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:51 | link | comments

 

A world turned upside down: You’ll forgive me if I feel a bit disoriented today. Stephen Harper, a man who seemed to “get it” about the West’s war with Islamic-fascism as exemplified by Israel’s war with Hezbollah, has gone and appointed a Liberal Muslim M.P.—a former car salesmen—to travel to the war-torn region and write a report offering his astute assessment of the situation. (The Prime Minister could save us all a lot of time and money if he had Mr. Khan write up his report right now since his assessment is more or less a foregone conclusion.) Meanwhile, as David Warren writes, discredited (and now retired) CBS newshound Dan Rather, a man gripped by such a severe case of B.D.S. that he has willing to stand by obviously forged documents about Bush’s military record, has spoken with a clarity and insight sadly lacking in most mainstream new reports about the Israeli-Hezbollah war:

…And even some of our more “liberal” journalists have been taken aback [by the spread of fanatical, radical Islam]. We have had such startling performances as that of Dan Rather, the retired CBS anchor, on Fox TV. He admitted that the media are reporting Lebanon without factual and historical background, that what “doesn't get reported is the bigger picture”.

“It's a problem that those of us in journalism have been reluctant to address. I do not exclude myself from this criticism. Reluctant to address that Hezbollah is a terrorist organization, committed to the destruction of Israel. It isn't committed to trying to just gain territory. It's committed to its destruction.”

And he could add, committed to our destruction. Israel is facing the same enemy all free peoples in the West are facing -- and that we, Canadians, are fighting in Afghanistan. And if we do not support Israel, we do not support ourselves.

For this expanding war cannot end until the Islamic fanatics know they are beaten. They know perfectly well they cannot defeat Western armies in open battle. But so long as they have any hope that we will capitulate, from fear of them, and from our moral reticence to strike through their human shields -- they are not beaten, and we can only look forward to stages three, and following.

How can we defeat an enemy when so many people in the West—including, according to a recent poll, the vast majority of Canadians—are adrift in a miasma of moral relativism and can’t even tell the good guys from the bad guys?

 

How about getting someone to write a report about that, Mr. Harper?

 

Update: Ezra Levant, publisher of Alberta-based conservative weekly, The Western Standard, thinks the appointment of Mr. Khan, a “moderate Muslim,” is a coup for the Tories.

 

Were that it were so. Sadly, even “moderate” Muslims, like Tarek Fatah, who resigned last week from the Muslim Canadian Congress, the secular organization he founded, don’t have much use for a Jewish nation taking up space in the heart of the Muslim world. So while the appointment may be seen by some die-hards as a political coup, at the end of the day, it’s not going to do much to help Israel’s chances of survival.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:10 | link | comments

 

Five, four, three, two, one…: Just doing the countdown until the first mention of the word “backlash” in relation to the latest terrorist plot.

 

Update: Bingo! From the Times Online:

Muslim community leaders were contacted by the police and Government officials early this morning as the first statements were released to the press.

Khurshid Ahmed, leader of the British Muslim Forum was rung by a chief superintendent from the Metropolitan Police and a senior official from the Department for Communities and Local Government just before 7am to be told the arrests had taken place.

The police also contacted Dr Muhammed Abdul Bari, General Secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain, at 6.54am. He was told that a number of arrests had taken place "for the public’s safety" but given few details.

Mr Ahmed said that he felt the operation had been handled well but he warned that if the police failed to find any evidence to incriminate the people concerned then relations between the government and the Muslim community would deteriorate further.

"I was woken up by the police who said there was a threat to blow up a plane and that a number of arrests had been made," he said. "Since then I have been in contact with people from the Home Office and the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) to find out what has been happening."

Mr Ahmed said he had spent the morning contacting local authorities, police authorities and Muslim community groups to ensure there was no "backlash" when further information was released about the identity of those arrested. He had already spoken to leaders in Bradford, London and the Midlands…

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:08 | link | comments

 

Dhimmi Garton Ash: With dhimmitude and self-loathing oozing out of every pore, Timothy Garton Ash assesses a recent Pew poll showing that, of all Muslims in Europe, British Muslims hate their country the most. The conclusion he draws is not the obvious one—that, of all the nations of Europe, Britain has done the most to placate and appease Muslims, hoping that, in so doing, the radical elements would take their terrorist plots elsewhere. No, on the day when British authorities foil yet another terror plot, this one which would have brought down several American airliners in mid-flight and likely killed hundreds of people, Garton Ash concludes that the fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the jihadis, but in ourselves. If only British society weren’t so “libertine”; if only Tony Blair’s foreign policy weren’t so “alientating”; if only the British weren’t, well, so goshdarned British, angry young Muslims wouldn’t be so angry, and would be happy to identify themselves as Brits first and Muslims second, instead of the other way around.

 

Moreover, says the cluesless Garton Ash, the Brits have a lot to learn from these moral young men, so pure, so disciplined, so aggrieved by “Western excess”:

 

Whatever the mix of causes for this alienation, we need to escape from seeing British Muslims only through the prism of two currently prevailing paradigms: the terrorism paradigm and the backwardness paradigm…The idea that these young British Muslims might actually be putting their fingers on some things that our modern, progressive liberal, secular society: the idea that rational persons might freely choose to live in a different, outwardly more restrictive way: these hardly feature in everyday progressive discourse…

 

Nor should they, Mr. G. A., because these young men aren’t driven by rationality but by it’s complete opposite, a dark, fanatical all-encompassing religious fascism that is the antithesis of--and inimical to--the free and rollicking way of life in the West.

 

That these young men would freely choose to embrace such an outwardly and inwardly restrictive way of life says a lot more about them and their hateful ideology than it does about us; that Timothy Garton Ash would see this ideology as being of value to the larger society says a lot, alas, about him.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:52 | link | comments (2)

 

Moo miffed: Remember that missive Moo sent Dubya a couple of months back, the one wherein he invited the President to come over to the dark side? Well, as he tells decrepid CBS interviewer Mike Wallace, he’s really p.o.’d that the President rebuffed his sincere and verbose invitation to come over to the dark side:

 

…Speaking about President Bush's failure to answer his 18-page letter that criticized U.S. foreign policy, Ahmadinejad said, "Well, (with the letter) I wanted to open a window towards the light for the president so that he can see that one can look on the world through a different perspective. … We are all free to choose. But please give him this message, sir: Those who refuse to accept an invitation will not have a good ending or fate. You see that his approval rating is dropping every day. Hatred vis-à-vis the president is increasing every day around the world. For a ruler, this is the worst message that he could receive. Rulers and heads of government at the end of their office must leave the office holding their heads high."

On what the "conducive conditions" would be for Iran to establish relations with the U.S., the president said, "Well, please look at the makeup of the American administration, the behavior of the American administration. See how they talk down to my nation. And this recent resolution passed about the nuclear issue, look at the wording. They have given us — presented us with a package which we are studying right now. We even gave them a date for our response. Ignoring that, they passed a resolution. They want to build an empire. And they don't want to live side-by-side in peace with other nations. The American government, sir, it is very clear to me they have to change their behavior and everything will be resolved. (George W. Bush) believes that his power emanates from his nuclear warhead arsenals. The time of the bomb is in the past, it's behind us. Today is the era of thoughts, dialogue and cultural exchanges."

Portions of the interview will appear on the CBS Evening News on Thursday, Aug. 10 at 6:30 p.m. ET/PT. The entire report will be broadcast on 60 Minutes this Sunday at 7 p.m. ET/PT.

Posted by: scaramouche at 20:30 | link | comments

 

Displaced persons: As the Islamo-Nazis on Israel’s northern border continue to deploy missiles supplied by the Islamo-Nazis in Iran, and as Nasty Nasrallah continues to hurl his genocidal threats, a British M.P. has resigned in protest over what he believes is the most crucial issue in the region, one that’s been sidelined by the whole Israel-Hezbollah conflict. From the Times Online:

…In Britain, a Labour MP announced that he was leaving his Government defence post over the conflict in Lebanon as more than 130 MPs - around half of them Labour - issued a demand for a recall of Parliament to discuss the Lebanon crisis.

Jim Sheridan, Labour MP for Paisley and Renfrewshire North, said he was standing down from his post as parliamentary private secretary to the defence ministers.

"The reason I am resigning is the current conflict in the Middle East and once again the Palestinian situation has been put on the back burner," he told Sky News.

Mr Sheridan added: "I don’t expect my resignation will have any significant impact on the Prime Minister’s objectives in the Middle East, which I genuinely believe to be honourable on his part, but I don’t believe they reflect the core values of the Labour Party or indeed the country"…

I know how he feels. It’s a real bummer that the Shia jihadis have chased the Sunni jihadis off the front page, what with the Palestinians still being so “oppressed” and “occupied” and all. Can’t wait till the war is over and we can get back to business as usual.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:54 | link | comments

 

Israel’s fate: Some, like Ariel Sharon, have opined that Israel may be destined to suffer the fate of Czechoslovakia, the nation offered up by the West in a failed effort to placate the Nazis and stave off a wider war. According to Jonah Goldberg, however, Israel is more likely to be a Poland, a nation carved up by competing totalitarians before they have at each other. From JWR:

…A popular way of thinking about all this is to believe we are at the dawn of a new religious war between the West and the Middle East. One side has launched it, Israel is fighting back, and the rest of the West is bickering about what to do and how to do it.

But this is too simplistic. At minimum, we've got two religious wars on our hands. Al-Qaida is Sunni. Hezbollah is Shiite. And relations between the two sides are growing chilly. Shiites, led by Iran, see this as their moment in the sun. Meanwhile, Sunnis — who often see nothing wrong with slipping a few bucks to al-Qaida or Hamas — are suddenly horrified by the terror threat from Hezbollah, which is why some "moderate" regimes are said to be quietly supporting Israel's effort to destroy Iran's proxy in the region. Indeed, al-Qaida-affiliated Sunni insurgents in Iraq have made it their mission to slaughter Shiites, and Shiite death squads are returning fire.

It was telling that when the Hezbollah-Israel war started, al-Qaida announced that it, too, would set its sights on Israel. Not only did this demonstrate once again that Israel isn't the "root cause" behind al-Qaida, but it also showed that two faces of the same totalitarian threat — Shia radicalism and Sunni radicalism — understand that Israel is the focal point of a new global battle between the West and its enemies.

It's clear that Israel isn't going to be a Czechoslovakia thrown over the side by the West. What's less clear is whether it might eventually become a Poland, a nation carved up under a temporary truce between twin evils (the so-called Hitler-Stalin pact) before they went at each other's throats.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:39 | link | comments (1)

 

Did you know they also sell Girl Scout cookies and deliver Meals on Wheels?: Sure, they’re a bunch of crazed genocidal Islamists who want to wipe the Jews off the map. But as the Globe and Mail’s Mark MacKinnon reports from Baalbek, the town that gave birth to Hezbollah, the jihadi terrorists also do lots of good stuff—like feeding the hungry and tending to the sick. MacKinnon, whose reports from the war scene have been so unbalanced that he seems to be  doing unpaid P.R. work for Hezbollah, even managed to find a Christian in the town (no doubt suffering from a severe case of Stockholm syndrome or else just scared sh--tless) to attest to the terrorists’ goodness and niceness:

…But just as it did before the war, Hezbollah has continued building its support base here by offering social services that the government can't provide. Though most of the offices Hezbollah once used to run its charitable network are either deserted or destroyed, residents here say the group has continued to offer the same services, often operating out of the back of cars.

Tony Sada, a Christian social worker who helps Hezbollah distribute aid to families remaining in Baalbek, said that while he feared the Shia Muslim organization when it appeared on Lebanon's political scene as a response to the 1982 Israeli invasion, he joined the ranks of its supporters when he saw "they were helping Christian people in a way that Christian leaders didn't."

"They can't damage Hezbollah," he said, referring to the Israeli army. "Hezbollah is part of Lebanese society, of the Lebanese people."

Those who remain in Baalbek in these tense times are unabashed in their support for Mr. Nasrallah's organization.

"I support Hezbollah, and the proof is that I'm still in Baalbek," said 15-year-old Fatima Osman, giggling with two other teenage girls who were walking through an otherwise empty intersection in the centre of town.

"They're helping all the people. They're giving us food, medicine, everything."

How much of what she had to say was genuine was hard to ascertain. Soon after she finished talking, a Hezbollah man in a white car pulled up and told two foreign journalists that it was time for them to leave.

Despite the bravado of many in the city, others let on that the situation was nonetheless difficult.

"There's no money. No work. One kilogram of oranges costs $3," said Abu Ali, a 34-year-old security official who said he had spent 12 years as a sniper with Hezbollah's regular forces in the south of Lebanon, once getting wounded in an Israeli helicopter attack.

While repeatedly expressing his confidence that Hezbollah would win the war, he was more concerned about matters even closer to home. He said his wife had given birth last week to twins, the couple's second pair, and he wanted to leave the country.

He repeatedly asked for money and inquired about how to get a visa to Canada.

Of course he did. And we’d be thrilled to have him, because there’s nothing we multicultural Canadian love more than opening our doors to Lebanese refugees, even those with a marked fondness for genocidal Islamists who want to kill all the Jews.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:12 | link | comments

 

The clueless left will be the death of Israel: That’s the message of peerless political analyst Caroline Glick, and I wholeheartedly concur with her assessment. From JWR:

…LEFTIST NEWSPAPER columnists and television and radio commentators are arguing that the cause of the current war is Israel's refusal, to date, to surrender the Golan Heights to Syria, and Judea, Samaria and east Jerusalem to Fatah and Hamas. In their world the fact that global jihadists are explicit about their intention to destroy "the Zionist entity," whatever its territorial boundaries may be, is studiously denied. The fact that Palestinian society is a jihadist society and that the international Left increasingly rejects Israel's very right to exist remains either irrelevant, or a matter that can be appeased away by further territorial giveaways.

Additionally, leftist opinion-makers are now arguing that the main lesson of the war is that unilateral Israeli actions are the problem. Writing in Ma'ariv last Thursday, Nadav Eyal argued that the next step will be to use the multinational force that the UN, the Olmert government and the State Department wish to deploy to Lebanon as a model that will enable future Israeli withdrawals from Judea and Samaria (and presumably from the Golan Heights and Jerusalem). By this new logic we should continue to retreat, but next time, the French and the Turks will protect us.

Many international commentators who understand what a Hizbullah victory will mean for international security rightly argue that the international community today is repeating the mistakes of the 1930s, when it refused to contend with the growing dangers emanating from Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan…

Karl Marx had it wrong. History doesn’t repeat itself the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce. History repeats itself as a similar tragedy, but in a different venue.

 

At this stage, anyone who believes it’s about giving back land should be committed to an asylum for the terminally daft and stupid.

Posted by: scaramouche at 19:26 | link | comments

 

Israel’s enemies "plan" its demise: IOL headline: UN awaits Arab peace plan.

 

Let me guess. It involves the UN “observing”--but doing nothing about--an ongoing build-up of missiles smuggled in via Syria from Iran while the Arab world screams bloody murder about the Jewish “occupation” and disproportionate Arab civilian casualties.

 

In other words, not a peace plan at all but the same old elimination scheme, recommending a brief time out in hostilities to allow the jihadis to regroup.

 

Hands up anyone who doesn’t think UN and the Arabs are in cahoots and have anything other Israel’s elimination as their ultimate goal.

 

Put your hands down, Noam (and Jimmy and Harold and Ken, etc). I mean anyone with a clue.

Posted by: scaramouche at 16:58 | link | comments (1)

 

Leaving Las Vegas: Just flew in from Vegas, and, boy, are my arms tired.

 

Sorry, couldn’t resist.

 

I did indeed spend the last few days in Sin City (my first time there), although being the sedate, abstemious, happily married matron that I am, the “sin” I experience was mostly of the “watch-the-slots-consume-my-cash-with-little-payoff” variety. One night we did happen to catch a mildly risqué show (a cartoonish, highly-stylized 1960s day-glo confection called Shag with a Twist), but other than that, what happened in Vegas didn’t need to stay in Vegas, but could have—and did in fact—safely  and unashamedly accompany me home.

 

Some random impressions: Well, yes, it’s everything they say it is—garish, overblown and overgrown, with gargantuan casinos that are wildly different on the outside, from the starkly modern Wynn to the faux-Italianate Bellagio to the faux-Egyptian Luxor to the faux-Gotham New York, New York, a structure designed in the shape of some familiar New York landmarks (ones the terrorists have not yet managed to destroy). Some, like the Bellagio, where we stayed, were very upscale, and featured similarly upscale retail outlets, like Chanel and Armani, to cater to the clientele—either those who came with plenty of moolah, or those who managed to have a streak of good luck during their stay. (Since I fell into neither category, I had to content myself with window shopping.) Inside, however, the casinos were more or less the same—dark, very smoky (a shock for someone from Toronto, where people aren’t allowed to smoke in a public place), noisy from the ding-ding-ding of slot machines toting up points and the whoops of winners or the groan of losers playing roulette or craps; poker and blackjack players, whether they won or lost, kept largely silent (a function of the type of game they were playing, no doubt).

 

I have to say there was also something surreal—an immense and unsettling disconnect, really—between the sights and sounds I was experiencing on the Strip and the sights and sounds of Israel’s fight for survival on display on my TV screen whenever I got back to my room and turned on the news.

 

Anyway, I’d love to go into greater detail about my jaunt (and perhaps I will when I’ve recovered from flying home on the red-eye and had more than two hours of sleep). For the moment, I just wanted to post something from the Las Vegas Review-Journal, a newspaper I had never read but was tickled to discover was on the side of the good guys. Here’s part of what Sherman Frederick, the paper’s publisher, had to say about “Israel and Hezbollah” this past Saturday:

 

This is either an unfortunate transition or an important transition. You pick.

 

I remain puzzled by my liberal friends who, for all their hand-wringing, can’t decide who is right in the Middle East: Israel or Hezbollah.

 

I have a theory about that. The short version is this: Liberals equate the right of any strong state to protect itself with unchecked imperialism. Israel is a mini-extension of America’s imperialistic tendencies in the Middle East. Therefore, everything Israel does to protect itself is bad, and everything Hezbollah does to resist is good.

 

What liberals ought to remember when they get confused about right and wrong in the Middle East is this: Genocide is always bad.

 

Hezbollah is quite clear in its desires to commit genocide. The official statement of Hezbollah in 1992 was this somber vow: “It is an open war until the elimination of Israel and until the death of the last Jew on Earth.” The current leader of Hezbollah, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, ore recently said he encouraged Jews to move to Israel because “it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.”

 

Unless you’re drinking what Mel Gibson is drinking, it doesn’t get any clearer than that, does, it?...

 

Alas, Mr. Frederick, it’s clear only to those whose minds haven’t been befogged by totalitarianism, fear of and/or a sneaking admiration for those who practise totalitarianism, and Judenhass, the engine that drives totalitarianism.

Posted by: scaramouche at 15:41 | link | comments (1)

 

A Midsummer Night’s Break: I’m taking a few days off to celebrate a BIG birthday (not mentioning any numbers). I hope to be back in the saddle on Wednesday, August 8^th.

 

See y’all then.

Posted by: scaramouche at 12:07 | link | comments (3)

 

The haters crawl out of the woodwork: While Mel remains contrite (at least in public) about his anti-Jewish tirade and offers to make recompense for it (my favourite suggestion: a tongue-in-cheek call for him to get circumsised), his words seem to have inspired any number of creepy crawlers to emerge from their holes. Steve Lopez, an L.A. Times columnist, lists some of the charming missives he received after writing about the inebriated star:

…And speaking of bigots, I've read far too many e-mails from readers supporting Gibson's anti-Semitic remarks, which included his accusation that "the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world."

A sampling:

"You're no better than the Jews he blamed of starting the wars."

"You kiss ass to bigoted Jews."

"You work for The Almighty Israel Lobby who owns your poor little dishonest soul."

"It was my Jewish fiance who broke my ribs and triggered my reoccurrence of cancer."

"Who cares about his comments on Jews!"

"I really don't think his opinion of Jews is completely wrong … shame on you Steve."

So "what if he doesn't like Jews…. The man is showing some humanity."

"We all know the Jewish people were looking for an excuse to find a weakness in Mr. Mel Gibson and they found it."

Great to see so much goodwill out there…

 

What, no blood libel? No mention of all the awful things the Zionists are doing to Lebanese civilians? Get with the program, L.A. Jew-haters. You’re just not doing your job. (And may I recommend a circumcision—without anesthesia—for you all.)

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:05 | link | comments

 

Silencing Fatah: You know how Daniel Pipes used to say that the cure for radical Islam is moderate Islam (although he doesn’t seem to be saying it too much these days)? This story from the Globe and Mail offers an object lesson in what happens to “moderate” Muslims who dare to speak up and speak out—they’re inundated with death threats and forced to retreat from their public role:

Tarek Fatah, the outspoken, controversial communications director of the Muslim Canadian Congress, has resigned, citing concerns for his safety and that of his family.

Mr. Fatah said he will also resign from the MCC's board, severing all official ties with the organization he helped found.

"It's not just for me. It's for my wife and my daughters," he said in an interview.

"Part of it is also to get out of the limelight."

Mr. Fatah's socially liberal views have always been controversial within the Muslim community, and in the past month he has been the subject of an e-mail campaign aimed at the Canadian news media.

In his resignation letter to the board, Mr. Fatah wrote that he wanted to step down because of "an increasing heavy load of work." He said he will stay on in his current capacity until the MCC finds a replacement.

Along with his resignation, Mr. Fatah has filed a report with Toronto Police detailing what he says are a number of threats he has received since 2003. A police investigation is under way.

"This has been a particularly stressful three months and I have tried to do my best and times I have succeeded and at other times messed up," Mr. Fatah wrote in his resignation letter.

Mr. Fatah has always carried a high profile, both with the Muslim Canadian Congress -- known for its liberal interpretations of Islam, including its support of homosexuality -- and as the host of Muslim Chronicle, a CTS TV current-affairs show that focuses on the Muslim community.

But in recent months, he said, he has been coming under increasing fire. There was the e-mail campaign and he is more worried than ever about threats after the arrests of 17 terrorism suspects in Toronto in early June.

Mr. Fatah's unpopularity among conservative segments of the Muslim community is not surprising. He is a strong advocate of gay rights for Muslims and the inclusion of secular voices in the Muslim community. He publicly and vehemently opposed the adoption of sharia law in Canada.

Recently, many Muslims were angered by his very vocal campaign against British imam Sheik Riyadh ul Haq, who ultimately was refused a visa to attend a conference in Toronto. Mr. Haq's address was transmitted live by satellite instead.

Many Muslims have also accused Mr. Fatah of hogging the media spotlight.

He is frequently a subject of animated discussions on blogs and Internet chat forums, and early last month, a student group based in Montreal began bombarding five news outlets -- The Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, The Toronto Sun, CBC and CTV -- with e-mails insisting that he does not represent the Muslim community and should not be recognized as a legitimate voice.

Mr. Fatah was quick to respond to accusations about his views.

"My position is that same-sex marriage is a human right and whether someone believes it is valid from a religious perspective is not the question. Most Muslims do not believe homosexuality is permitted but that is not the question," he said.

Mr. Fatah has fiercely advocated for a separation of church and state, although he said he has no issue with sharia arbitration as long as it is not part of the state legal system.

Still, Mr. Fatah is controversial even in liberal circles.

"He has alienated a lot of people," said Tariq Amin-Khan, assistant professor of politics and public administration at Ryerson University in Toronto.

Dr. Amin-Khan said Mr. Fatah's understanding of current events is limited by his dismissal of the imperialist global agenda. "I don't agree with many of the policies of the state, with right-wing agendas, white supremacist or mullah parties. But I find [Mr. Fatah's views] appalling. I find some of the stuff he says very, very disturbing."

On June 30, Mr. Fatah was identified by the Canadian Islamic Congress as one of four people who are anti-Islam in an article in the CIC's weekly Friday Magazine, which is sent to e-mail subscribers. The article, "Smearing Islam and Bashing Muslims, Who and Why," was penned by Mohamed Elmasry, the CIC's director and an adjunct professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Waterloo.

The list, which also included Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente, was led by Mr. Fatah, whom Dr. Elmasry wrote "is well known in Canada for smearing Islam and bashing Muslims."

Dr. Elmasry levelled similar accusations against the Muslim Canadian Congress last October.

Mr. Fatah said he is concerned because he understands the implication of statements such as "anti-Islam" and "smearing Islam."

He said they are akin to fatwas, pronouncing blasphemy, a crime that under sharia law is punishable by death.

"Anyone can issue a fatwa," Mr. Fatah said. " And anyone can issue a counter-fatwa. There is no clergy that oversees the process. This is a complete hijacking of the system, and everyone is complicit."

Wahida Valiante, vice-chair and national vice-president of the Canadian Islamic Congress, said there are "different versions and different ideologies" when asked whether the assertion amounted to a fatwa.

"We're not into fatwas," she said. "We are not a religious body. We are looking into issues. If someone is misrepresenting facts, we simply address that."…

From the sound of it, what really brought down Fatah wasn’t his support of rights for women and homosexuals, although these views certainly didn’t endear him to the Islamists. It was his refusal to fall in line with thinking about “the imperialist global agenda”—the thinking which holds that America, and not Islam, is the imperialist.

 

Seems like, even without the state’s imprimatur, the spirit of sharia law is alive and well and clamping down on freedom of expression in multicultural Canada.

Posted by: scaramouche at 09:36 | link | comments (1)

 

The “right” to remain hateful and ignorant: A Halifax man who’s irate because he can’t hook up a satellite dish so he can receive Arab TV—essential, he says, if his family is to retain its identity—is going to have his complaint heard next week by his province’s human rights body. From the Chronicle-Herald:

A dispute over a TV satellite dish installed outside a Halifax home has landed at the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission.

The commission next week will be considering the case of condominium owner Ahmed Assal, a Muslim man who wants to tune into Arabic telecasts unavailable in Nova Scotia, after he filed a complaint alleging his condo board unfairly ordered him to remove the device from his Clayton Park-area property.

He alleges the refusal by Halifax Condominium Corporation No. 4 to allow him to use the dish is discriminatory "on the basis of his religion and ethnic or national origin," a recent news release says.

"Mr. Assal alleges that other residents (who are not Arabs or Muslims) were permitted to substantially modify their properties in violation of the rules established by the condominium board," the release says.

The commission has ordered a board of inquiry to hear the case. It is scheduled to begin Tuesday, at 9:30 a.m., at Dalhousie University in Halifax. It’s to be chaired by local lawyer Royden Trainor.

Commission spokesman Michael Noonan said Friday three days have been set aside for the hearing, though sometimes these types of sessions last longer. Other times, the issue is settled by the battling parties just before an inquiry is due to start.

During the hearing, the complainant and respondent can make submissions and question witnesses, the release says. "The board chair then decides whether discrimination has occurred," it says.

Mr. Noonan acknowledged the allegations are hooked to Mr. Assal’s ethnic background.

"The reason he wished to install a satellite dish was so that he could access Arab-language (television) programming," he said. "His allegation is that was part of the reason that the condo board did not agree to allow him to install the dish, so that would cover both his religion as well as his ethnic or national origin."

Mr. Assal couldn’t be reached…

Of course he couldn’t. He’s too busy watching—and cursing out—Dr. Phil.

Update: My bad—seems the hearing is already underway. The Ceeb has more on the story:

…Assal, a condo owner in Clayton Park, is a Muslim originally from Egypt. Through his satellite dish, he gets 18 channels of religious and cultural programming in Arabic.

Without it, he says his children could not get the programs essential to their education.

"I have a family, I have children, and the serious matter is that it is for culture, religion, language," he told reporters after the hearing.

Assal acknowledges he knew about the condominium board's bylaw that prohibits satellite dishes before he bought the condo.

But he says other rules regarding pets and tree planting are not enforced. So if the board makes exceptions for other condo owners, Assal argued, why shouldn't it do the same for him?

The managers says they do not give preferential treatment.

The ban is in place because satellite dishes spoil the look of the buildings and can cause structural damage, they say.

Manager Don Buck said it is possible to make an exception to a bylaw if the request is made in writing, but he said Assal never did this.

Assal says he was told over the phone the board might allow the dish as long as it wasn't installed on a roof or a fence. He decided to put it up on a tree in a common area.

The human rights hearing is scheduled to continue for another two days.

Once the testimony is complete, board chair Royden Trainor will decide if Assal was discriminated against and what penalties, if any, should be levied against Halifax Condominium Corporation No. 4.

My prediction: The condo will be instructed to make an exception for Assal, in light of his “ethnicity” and Canadians being so tolerant and multicultural and all. The condo board will also be forced to attend sensitivity sessions so they won’t make the same mistake again.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:58 | link | comments (2)

 

The wheel of fortune spins (and reels from drunken excess): It’s amazing how quickly your life can take a calamitous turn. Take Mel Gibson. One minute, he’s on top of the world, counting the millions he made from an immensely successful but possibly antisemitic movie, and whooping it up with sundry civilians at an ocean-front bar; the next minute, he’s nabbed for drunk driving by an L.A. cop who—couldn’t you just die?—turns out to be Jewish and on whom he unthinkingly unleashes a torrent of hair-curling anti-Jewish invective worthy of a Moo Jihad. And it’s all downhill from there, as the creator of The Passion of the Christ is compelled to grovel to the objects of his disaffection, and has become so abject that he vows to attend synagogue services on Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement.

 

Sometimes, life can be a real bitch.

 

Update: Melanie Phillips on how the Mel story is playing in the antisemitic British press.

 

Not surprisingly, it’s playing very well.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:23 | link | comments

 

A (very) brief history of Jew-hatred: They (the Jew-haters) used to hate Jews because they were Jewish. This hatred kept them (the Jew-haters, European division) so hot and bothered over the years that, eventually, it culminated in that orgasm of Jew-hatred known as the Holocaust. This release left them (the Jew-haters, European division) spent (i.e. guilty) for a time. It also pointed to the need for the Jews to have a state of their own, a place where they could be masters of their own fate, a haven (so the theory went) from the Jew-haters in the rest of the world. Alas, the reality of a sovereign Jewish state was too much for the Jew-haters (Christian, secular, Leftist, Arab/Muslim and whoever else choses to jump on the bandwagon) to bear. Now, not only do the Jew-haters (A) hate the Jews because they are Jewish. They (B) hate Israel because it is Jewish and they (C) hate the Jews because of Israel.

 

What we see today is a powerful synergy between A, B, and C, each of which fuels the other in an endless, self-perpetuating and ever more virulent circuit of hatred. And, once again, the hatred is desperately seeking release.

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:34 | link | comments

 

Euthanasia in Hezbollahstan?: More evidence that Hezbollah may have stage-managed the Qana attack, using disabled children (who couldn’t exactly get up and run away) as helpless cannon fodder. From israelinsider:

 

A French language Lebanese publication, citing an unnamed source in Hezbollah, has claimed that the organization placed a rocket launcher on the roof of the notorious building in Qana to provoke an Israeli attack and brought invalid children inside to serve as victims and blacken Israel's name.

The Lebanese magazine LIBANOSCOPIE, associated with Christian elements which support the anti-Syrian movement called the "March 14 Forces," report that Hizbullah masterminded a plan that would result in the killing of innocents in Qana, in an attempt to foil Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora's "Seven Points Plan" calling for deployment of the Lebanese army in southern Lebanon and the disarming of Hizbullah. The magazine reported:

 

"We have it from a credible source that Hezbollah, alarmed by Siniora's plan, has concocted an incident that would help thwart the negotiations.... Hezbollah gunmen placed a rocket launcher on the roof in Qana and brought disabled children inside, in a bid to provoke a response by the Israeli Air Force. In this way, they were planning to take advantage of the death of innocents and curtail the diplomatic initiative," the site stated.

The site's editors claimed that Hezbollah staged the event because of Qana's symbolic significance: "They used Qana because the village had already turned into a symbol for massacring innocent civilians, and so they set up 'Qana 2'." The incident has indeed been dubbed "The second Qana massacre" by the Arab media.

The scenario described, which has yet to be confirmed by a named source, would explain the fact that the victims were not residents of the building and also the disproportionate number of small children and the lack of adult males among them.

Meanwhile, the Lebanese Red Cross reported on Monday that only 28 bodies, 19 of them children, were removed from the rubble. The count is half that of the 50-60 bodies still being reported by news agencies, quoting Lebanese security officials…

 

Not even the Nazis, the lowest of the low, would not have employed such bestial tactics.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:03 | link | comments

 

Leftists and Assyrians: Ceeb radio has a special forum this morning. They’ve invited those on “all sides” to express their opinions about the situation in the Middle East. This being the clueless Ceeb, the aim of it all is to effect a “reconciliation.” That’s going to be mighty challening given militant Islam’s designs on the entire world and the refusal of far too many infidels to acknowledge it—the dromedary in our parlour.

 

As an antidote to the Ceeb’s bromides, I offer these paragraphs from a letter sent to Steyn Online:

 

…The main thing I've learned working in Arabic countries is that every Arab brags of being descended from Assyrians, and, lays claim to fighting like Assyrians (scorched earth wouldn't cover it). The one answer to that, is that if you must fight Assyrians, one best fight “like” an Assyrian, or, prepare to die. Diplomacy, to them, is simply another way to ensure (somewhere down the road) the cry, "We win, you die."
 
You cannot negotiate with Evil. Every concession is hailed as a "Great Victory for Islam," and, becomes the foundation from which to demand further concessions, in an Infinite Loop leading to the ultimate defeat of the infidels. They're masters of the solution, morphed into a “half-solution,” leading to ceasefires that can be manipulated into rearming and restarting a war we thought won (or, should I say, those who believe in "Diplomacy," thought).
 
In the Islamic world, diplomacy is applied with the Sword...the Assyrian way.

 

If I had to lay odds on who’s more likely to come out of this alive, the clueless Leftists or the Assyrian-wannabes, I’d put my money on the faux-Assyrians.

Posted by: scaramouche at 11:33 | link | comments

 

Canadians Jews get a clue, maybe: All I can say is, it’s about time. From the Globe and Mail:

OTTAWA -- Federal Liberals are facing tough questions from their traditional Jewish support base as well as an internal caucus split over their party's position on the Middle East crisis.

"I don't know where the party's at because the party's split," said Senator Jerry Grafstein, a long-time Liberal organizer and influential party member.

"I'm somewhat concerned where the Liberal Party stands right now," he added.

Although the Conservative Party has faced most of the controversy since Prime Minister Stephen Harper characterized the Israeli response in Lebanon as "measured," the Liberal Party is also facing criticism, much of it from within.

Caucus members, including Mr. Grafstein, have written letters to interim leader Bill Graham on the matter. And senior Liberals say members of the Jewish community have been expressing concern over the party's position.

That position has been critical of Mr. Harper and calls for a more nuanced policy that would let government play a moderating role in defusing international crises.

Some Liberals believe backers of Jewish descent might take their votes elsewhere.

"I think some may," Mr. Grafstein said. "And the question is, it depends on what the new leadership does. This is not going to be solved this month or next month or the month after. This is, unfortunately, a protracted situation."

While small in number, the Jewish community is influential in major cities. Over the years, it has become well-woven into the fabric of the Liberal Party, acting as major donors and as advisers. An example is Onex Corp. chief executive officer Gerry Schwartz, a confidante to former prime minister Paul Martin.

But the community is currently anxious about Israel and some members are impressed by Mr. Harper's lack of equivocation.

And with pressure mounting from the Jewish community, a number of individual MPs, such as leadership contender Michael Ignatieff, have felt compelled to make their views on the issue public.

In an opinion piece submitted to The Globe and Mail yesterday, Liberal MP and former international trade minister Jim Peterson argued that Canadians expect their government to give unqualified support to Israel's right to security.

"I know that the Jewish community is very concerned about the attacks that have hit a third of Israel right now," he said in an interview. "I know that they are very strongly of the view that people have to defend themselves and there's just no nuancing in terms of that type of concern -- one which I share completely."

Officials in Mr. Graham's office acknowledged that the interim leader is hearing apprehensions from across the party, and has reacted by seeking a middle course.

"It's fair to say he's been feeling pressure from caucus colleagues on all sides," Liberal spokesman Patrice Breton said.

Late yesterday, Mr. Graham sent his own submission to The Globe and Mail clarifying the party's position. In it, he says Mr. Harper's government is risking Canada's ability to act as a peacekeeper and honest broker, and may be jeopardizing domestic harmony.

A group called Liberal Parliamentarians for Israel, chaired by MP Anita Neville and Sen. David Smith, has urged Mr. Graham to adopt a pro-Israeli stand. But other Liberal MPs, including Omar Alghabra and Borys Wrzesnewskyj, are calling for a stronger condemnation of the Israeli bombings.

Mr. Wrzesnewskyj said yesterday that there needs to be an "immediate and unconditional ceasefire" to stop the death of innocent civilians.

"We have to get on board with the international community and take a moral position," he said…

Um, I think getting “on board with the international community” and taking “a moral position” are mutually exclusive. As for losing the Jewish vote--no worries there. The Liberals can count on picking up plenty of votes from the Muslim community, which now outnumbers the Jews by at least two to one, and which, as a result of demographics and our cluess immigration policies, is growing larger every day.

Posted by: scaramouche at 08:26 | link | comments

 

Blair caves: It was bound to happen. Unless he’s of Churchillian mettle, how could any British leader possibly withstand the concerted attack of the infallible consensus? While Tony Blair has occasionally managed to sound a bit Churchillian, he clearly lacks that defiance, that stubbornness, that sticktoitiveness that is the mark of a great leader, one who can inspire his people to carry on in the face of an implacable enemy.

 

Tony Blair, alas, is not that kind of leader. From the Times Online (with my comments in brackets):

 

FIVE years into the War on Terror, Tony Blair called yesterday for a “complete renaissance of our strategy” to defeat militant Islam. (In other words, the numbers are against us. Time to accept our inevitable fate as abject dhimmis.)

Speaking in Los Angeles, the Prime Minister admitted that the use of force alone had alienated Muslim opinion, and said that there was now an “arc of extremism” stretching across the Middle East and beyond. He called for an “alliance of moderation” that would combat terrorism using values as much as military might. (An “alliance of panderers and capitulators,” more like.)

On a day when four British soldiers were killed by insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Prime Minister’s words were an apparent admission that the use of military force alone had failed.

His speech came amid growing Cabinet dissent and backbench unease that Britain was too readily following Washington’s lead over the Middle East. Jack Straw, the former Foreign Secretary, deliberately broke the Cabinet line last week by criticising Israel’s response as disproportionate. (When all else fails, blame the Jews. A win-win strategy for cowards, brutes and fascists.)

The Times has learnt that the Foreign Office tried and failed to get Mr Blair to call for an immediate ceasefire in Lebanon when he saw Mr Bush last Friday. It had also failed to persuade No 10 to stop US aircraft delivering weapons to Israel from using British airports. (Reverting to form. Britain is the enemy of the Jewish state.)

Aides to Mr Blair described his speech to the World Affairs Council as a challenge to the US, not a change of attitude. They said it was “nonsense” to suggest Mr Blair was having doubts about war in Iraq. But dissident Labour MPs were delighted. Fabian Hamilton, who sits on the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, said that he hoped the party and the Muslim community would welcome the speech, “even if they might say ‘ it’s about time, too’.” (Elsewhere, George Galloway, Ken Livingstone and Prince Charles got together for some celebratory champers to toast their victory.)

He continued: “It was obvious from the start that you do not fight terror by condemning a whole section of the world community as extremists and exacerbating that by supporting the dreadful bombing on Lebanon. It sounds like he has seen the light.” (More like “he has succumbed to the dark side.”)

Mr Blair said that once peace had been restored in Lebanon “we must commit ourselves to a complete renaissance of our strategy to defeat those who threaten us”. To defeat extremism, the world needed an “alliance of moderation to paint a different future in which Muslim and Christian, Arab and Westerner, wealthy and developing nations can make progress in peace and harmony with each other. (Funny, the Jews don’t get a mention in that picture of amity. An oversight, no doubt.)

“We will not win the battle against this global extremism unless we win it at the level of values as much as force, unless we show we are even-handed, fair and just in the applications of those values to the world. At present we are far away from persuading those we need to persuade that this is true.” (Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. You can’t defeat a jihad by being “even-handed and fair,” not unless you’re prepared to accept as your "world values" the primacy of sharia law.)

The West had to address issues such as poverty, climate change, trade, but above all to “bend every sinew of our will to making peace between Palestine and Israel”. Unless that happened “we will not win, and it is a battle we must win”... (Do us all a favour, Tony. Keep your bended sinew to yourself. You’re going to need it if and when you decide to regrow a backbone.)

Posted by: scaramouche at 08:09 | link | comments

 

Shaping world opinion: Washington Times columnist Tony Blankley writes that world opinion is an ass, in thrall to assorted misperceptions and dementias (at the moment, it’s being played like a well-tuned Stradivarius by those masters of manipulation, Hezbollah), but that at some point, the U.S. has to get in the game and try to cure the pathologies:

…Currently, the United States and Israel find themselves confronting a world opinion that is being shaped and manipulated by unfriendly others, and by the residue of historic malevolence, including: Hezbollah propaganda, European anti-Americanism and anti-Israelism, Muslim anti-Semitism, historic European anti-Semitism, and a mainstream world media that is tropistic to the foregoing factors.

Thus the question arises: How should Israel and the United States respond to the growing negative world opinion concerning the current Hezbollah/Israeli War? Naturally, the Europeans, the United Nations and the mainstream media -- the current majority in world opinion -- implore America and Israel to renounce Israel's and America's efforts at self defense from the hostility of radical Islamist terror: In Marcus Aurelius's phrase, to join the ranks of the insane. Both Israel and the United States should politely decline the invitation.

But nor is it in America's national interest (or Israel's) to say to hell with world opinion -- as some of the strongest advocates are currently saying. It is true that world opinion is at its most influential before the tanks roll and the bombs drop (just as the influence of a deterrent military force is strongest before it is actually tested in battle -- as Israel is sadly discovering currently).

And, importantly, it is also true that world opinion is powerless to stop the tanks rolling. So long as Israel decides to fight and America continues to give her diplomatic and re-armament back-up, world opinion can merely fume. So long as it remains in American national interest (particularly regarding our worldwide struggle against radical Islamism) to continue to back Israel, we should not be deterred by the rising fury of world opinion.

But over time, we ignore world opinion at our peril. World opinion tends -- to some extent-- to shape American voter opinion. And voter opinion tends to shape American politicians's opinion. Thus over time world opinion may weaken American will to defend itself against the amorphous but deadly Islamist virus.

Also, to the extent that defeating radical Islamism is enhanced by winning the hearts and minds of so far non-radical Muslims, corrosive world opinion against us only deepens the deep hole in which we currently find ourselves. America needs to get a lot better, fast, at the propaganda war that we are losing by default in the court of world public opinion. During the Cold War we spent billions and employed our smartest people to fight and win the propaganda war. Today, we are hors de combat.

Marcus Aurelius understood the appeal of joining the insane -- if there are enough of them. And like old Marcus -- the last of the five good Roman emperors -- we need to cling stoically to the dictates of reason in our continuous struggle for survival and victory. But it would sure help if we started trying to cure the pathology of an increasingly insane world. Our policy should be: Billions for propaganda, but not a single step back from fighting when necessary.

Sounds like a waste of cash to me. How do you win the “hearts and minds” of people whose organs have been thoroughly corroded by hatred?

Posted by: scaramouche at 07:32 | link | comments (3)

 

Method in their “madness”: Phyllis Chesler and Nancy Korbin note some creepy similarities between Naveed Aqsal Haq, the lone and supposedly mad (in both senses of the word) Muslim gunman in Seattle, and Marc Lepine, the lone and supposedly mad Muslim gunman responsible for the Montreal Massacre. From Front Page Magazine:

 

…Haq’s act is chillingly reminiscent of the Montreal Massacre which took place on December 6, 1989. Marc Lepine entered the engineering school at the University of Montreal and gunned down fourteen women and wounded fifteen others. Lepine, who had been rejected by both the Canadian Army and the engineering school…said in his suicide note that he was after the “feminist viragos” who had ruined his life.

 

The Canadian police saw this as an isolated act of a madman (as American police had once viewed Ted Bundy’s bloody trail of femicide). What the Canadian police failed to understand was the importance of certain biographical and childhood factor. For example, Lepine was born Gamile Rodrigue Gharbi to an Algerian Muslim father and a French-Canadian mother who had formerly been a nun. Lepine’s father, Liess Gharbi, physically and psychologically brutalized both his son and his wife. He probably taught his son that women are chattel property who deserve to be beaten even when they are obedient—and perhaps murdered when they are not. What is important to note is that Gharbi/Lepine blamed women for the considerable crimes of his father. As Dr. Chesler recounts in her book, The Death of Feminism, in 2001 an angry mob of 300 Algerian men conducted a three-day pogrom against Algerian women in which they tortured, stabled, mutilated, gang-raped, buried alive and murdered women in Hassi Messaoud…

Posted by: scaramouche at 17:10 | link | comments

 

Push and pull: My sister sent me a series of e-mails that were exchanged between Ken Wiener, a Toronto lawyer, and Leonard Pusser, a pastor with the United Church of Canada’s Toronto wing. That’s the division that signed up for a tour of duty with the “screw Israel” boycott, a decision it insisted had nothing to do with any animus toward “the Jews”—and certainly not one having anything to old-fangled Christian Jew-hate.

 

Wiener, a supporter of Israel, sent the following letter to Rev. Frances Combs, the minister in charge of the Toronto division, on July 13:

Reverend Combs:

In light of yesterday's unprovoked attack by Hezbollah on Israel, please advise whether your task force intends to recommend that the ChurchUnited divest itself of investments connected to , and/or . As you will have read, Hezbollah considers its attack to have been within "occupied ", not within , which it does not recognize. Surely your task force will recommend action be taken with respect to the three noted countries in order to pressure them to control Hezbollah, which is dependent upon their support.

I look forward to learning what steps you will be taking in this regard.

Kenneth Wiener

He received the following reply from Laurence Pushee, who holds the exalted title of “co-chair of the implementing task groups of Toronto Conference on Ethical Investment in the ” on July 17. Let’s see how many modern-day lies as well as age-old antisemitic canards (which I’ve bolded) we can spot in it.

 

Dear Kenneth Wiener,

Thank you for your interest in the nonviolent/economic action of Toronto Conference of the ChurchUnited regarding Israel's destructive policies and actions in the Middle East. Frances Combs is away and I am assigned the task (Herculean, by first impressions) of answering your questions concerning our church's possible relationships to so-called terrorist organizations like Hezbollah and the three Arab regimes you cited. To acquaint you with exactly the nature of our divestment and boycott iniatives, I am attaching a copy of our actual press conference statement. It will inform you that we are taking our actions againstthose corporations (4 of them American, one Canadian) that find supplying with military equipment and servicing, on an ongoing basis, a very lucrative enterprise. The motivation is that Christians need to do something about the festering crisis of Israel-Palestine and exerting economic clout might be a viable option to press Israel to consider what it has actually avoided considering for decades, earnest negotiations with the Palestinians.

To answer your question. Of course, we deplore any provocative action by extremists in or by Hezbollah from , especially when human lives and property are destroyed. However, it needs to be said that Israel's disproportionate responses to any and all provocations, even when they amount to a response to the mere embarrassment of tunnelling under Israeli security barriers (concrete and electrical!) and abducting a hapless Israeli recruit by Palestinians, not only cause the international community the gravest concern, but also the Arab world which views the indifference of that global community, plus the United States' uncritical support of Israel to the tune of close to $100 Billions, as a profound humiliation. Is this a question of a deficiency in the intelligence quotients of those who govern ? We wonder. For after almost 40 years of the same failed policy: meeting any act of Palestinian resistance to universally recognized and documented Israeli subjugation and oppression with megaton responses seems, paradoxically, only to further a Palestinian resilience and more committed resistance.

This enigma causes some to wonder if, far from an intelligence deficiency amongst Israeli government leaders, there is a deeper purpose at work in Israeli governmental strategy. And that is, (brace yourself, Kenneth Weiner), to take every opportunity to destroy any potential for Palestinians to ever manage to create a viable nation of their own. Accordingly, Israel military forces bomb all Palestinian infra-structure and institutions, carry out illegal as assassinations in the best Mafia style of potential Palestinian leadership, and arrest democratically elected Palestinian government leaders as terrorists ( Kenneth: note that a point of view is at play here; Israelis tend to see Palestinian resisters as terrorists but Palestinians see them as freedom fighters against the illegal occupiers of their lands....see various United Nations declarations on this subject, and, Oh, yes, the Geneva Conventions).

In the meantime, the Israeli government is busy stealing (such a nasty word!) Palestinian lands for Jewish settlements and have to do so by thrusting a condemned so-called security wall (termed the Apartheid Wall by the International Court of the Hague) far into the West Bank and around . Remember what the UN determined in 1948? 55% of was to be for a new Jewish state, the balance of the land was to be Palestinian? But the Wall doesn't go along the so-called Green Line for self-evident security purposes, but snakes thoughout the city of Jerusalem. And is not an international city, as the UN declared, but acity (sic) under Israeli seige, its Palestinian citizens, who also claim it as capitol, being forced out.

All this to say, Mr. Weiner, that Israel is being so greedy and greedy in such a nasty and murderous way that we find ourselves very sympathetic to the Palestinian complaints about such behaviour. Please read our press statement. We are also working for the survival of in peace and security with internationally recognized borders as much as for the same future for a Palestinian state. Israel If we do nothing, we can expect the growth of terrorist cells here in and everywhere else. Why should we be immune to this horror when we disregard the horror that Israeli policies visit upon Palestinians every day of their lives. I can witness to that and so can many others.

You challenged us, Mr. Weiner, but now it's your turn. We are sick and tired of the pro-Israeli government lobby in telling us what to understand about the 'security' issues of Israel. We are fed up with the biased press that focusses (sic) on one abducted soldier and not on the numerous unreported assassinations and abductions of Palestinian citizens whose human rights are daily violated. is out of control. You may not like to hear that said. It is true. Now the challenge is for you to explore that thesis. You can check our regular updates at the Toronto Conference website under "Ethical Investment in the " and many other sources on the internet. Or, you can rail against anyone who dares to say anything critical about Israel.

Well, these days, more and more people are going to take up that dare and challenge the fanatically promoted conventional notions about the victimization of at the hand of terrorists. I do not wish, really, to have an ongoing debate with you. You should be able to figure out now why we are about what we are about. If you do not care, no matter. I gain power from rehearsing the justice issues involved and I continue to hope that more and more Canadians, Jewish and non-Jewish, will be coming on side to demand that Israel do the right thing and cease being a menace to peace in the Middle East.

Your truly,

Lawrence Pushee, co-chair of the implementing task groups of
Conference on Ethical Investment in the Middle East

 

You can understand that Wiener was appalled by this patronizing, hate-filled, delusional rant, and sent Pushee this e-mail on the 18^th:

 

Reverend Pushee:

I have received and considered your condescending lecture. I am already familiar with your material, including GS 2. As you state you are not interested in a debate so I will be very brief. The tenor of your e-mail diatribe is one I would expect from a second year political science student at university, not a reverend of The United Church of Canada. In your view, is out of control. You challenge me to explore thatthesis, implying that you have fully considered the issues of the but I have not, being mired in "conventional notions". Hamas, Hezbollah and their Arab state sponsors are not out of control? Ehud Barak was out of control? I am a Jew entirely sympathetic with the position of the Peace Now camp in . I am not an unsophisticated ", right or wrong" supporter. Your position, however, lacks balance. Your demonization of as THE obstacle to peace is simple minded and appalling.

I note in responding to me "you gain power from rehearsing the justice issues involved". I trust you will thus be pleased when I circulate your e-mail so others can see the tenor of your response to me.

Kenneth Wiener

 

The above seemed to have hit another nerve with the touchy Mr. P., who replied the same day:

 

Dear Ken,

You reveal yourself. As a definite partisan, you are prepared to share with others, without my consent, my personal comments to you, for some defined purpose but clearly not helpful and surely unethical. This is something that I am discovering about pro-Israeli government folk, I suppose because their position is morally bankrupt. In my mind this constitutes a moral defect in yourself and I leave it to your own conscience. Now we have 8 Canadians dead because of Israeli military action. Are you a Canadian? Does it matter to you? Can you honestly imagine that 's responses on all fronts have anything to do with rescuing 3 Israel abductees? Are we talking an Israeli arithmatic (sic) here? One Israeli soldier equals so many Arabs? (Do you actually attend a synagogue? Have you not heard of the prophets and their cry to about justice?) We now think that we are approaching a point in the politics of the Middle East where we have a Vietnam on our hands and US, Canadian, British policy statements notwithstanding, we are not going to back down on Israel's responsibility to get back to the Green Line (a question, by the way, you and your folk convieniently (sic) forget to address. Have you noticed?) So, Mr. Weiner, you can publish my remarks in the Globe and Mail if you like, but such intimidation and fear mongering are most ineffectual. I will defend this position with my life. Why? Because I hear the pain of the Palestinians, I saw the Israeli assassinated Christian young man, Daniel, in his open coffin being bourne into the Church of the Nativity, Bethlehem, in April and imagine every day I live the same fate to countless other Palestinian youth whom I met, university students, leaders (translate that into 'terrorist' in Israeli parlance) and say again, and again, "Enough!" If you can't get that message. if you refuse to even consider it, I pity you. By the way, you DO have my permission to publish this statement. Do you dare?

Lawrence Pushee

 

Yikes, and they say the Jews are “pushee.”

Posted by: scaramouche at 16:35 | link | comments (2)

 

“My name is Mel, and I’m a Jew-hater…”: There’s a report that Mel Gibson wants “the Jewish cabal, er, community” to help him get over his alcohol addiction.

 

Um, can’t help you with that one, Mel, but maybe we can recommend a good 12-step program to help you overcome your Jew-hatred.

Posted by: scaramouche at 15:06 | link | comments

 

Earth to Hannah: Obsessed as I am with Hannah Arendt and her book about the trial of Adolf Eichmann, project manager of Hitler’s Final Solution, I couldn’t help but wonder what the acclaimed scholar would have thought about this latest gaggle of totalitarians—the ones who want to finish the job Hitler started. Would she, no supporter of Zionism herself, have been able to see the similarities between the German Nazis who annihilated the Jews of Europe and the Islamo-Nazis who want to annihilate the Jews of Israel? Would it have forced her to have second thoughts about her theory, seeing the primary difference between the two evil groups as more a matter of style than of substance—the Nazis, modern chaps that they were, liked the mechanized approach while Hezbollah, atavists that they are, think that there’s nothing as effective as a good decapitation, but aren’t averse to employing modern technology when it serves their ends? Would she have now acknowledged that, just as there was nothing remotely “banal” about the evil perpetrated by a man like Eichmann, who willingly and wilfully participated in the mass extermination of an entire people, albeit from the remove of his tidy office, there is nothing “banal” about the evil currently being purveyed by the likes of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hassan Nasrallah? Would she have recanted her earlier analysis and written a companion piece entitled Nasrallah in Lebanon: A Report on the non-Banality of Evil?

 

Or would she have remained steadfast in her analysis, and her belief that, given the right (i.e. the wrong) set of circumstances, just about anyone can become swept up in the vortex of evil—as she insisted Adolf Eichmann was—and commit horrific (if banal) acts?

 

Maybe I should get out my Ouija board and try to summon her up.

Posted by: scaramouche at 14:17 | link | comments

 

Polls, principles and popularity: Interesting poll on the front page of the Globe and Mail. The Globe got together with CTV to ask Canadians a number of questions that were purposely worded to skew results against Israel and the Harper’s government continuing support for it. For example, 77 per cent of those surveyed agree that “Canadians should remain neutral in the war between Israel and Hezbollah”—as if this is a localized skirmish instead of part of the larger Islamo-fascist jihad against the West. Or how ‘bout this one: 45 per cent “disagree with Stephen Harper’s support of Israel’s military actions”—not “support of Israel, but of it’s “military actions,” you know, like those awful Israeli massacres of innocent Lebanese we keep reading about; like Canadians are really going to express support for that. And here’s my personal favourite: 53 per cent “believe the Prime Minister backs Israel to be in line with U.S. President George W. Bush.” Obviously, those polled neglected to read the Larry Zolf piece I posted yesterday. They’re probably many of the same people who think Canada can sit out the jihad and “remain neutral.”

 

In a hilarious juxtaposition, the story right under the one about the new poll is about how Liberal leadership candidate Michael Ignatieff doesn’t like the direction in which the Harper government is moving the country, calls for an immediate ceasefire, and insists the Prime Minister doesn’t “grasp” the seriousness of the Mideast situation. Why, it’s almost as if Igantieff is reading the polling numbers right above him, the ones that show what happens when a leader takes a principled but unpopular stance. Liberals like Ignatieff are often so fond of power that their principles are often consigned to the backseat. 

 

Elsewhere on the Web, the Ceeb reports MPs prepare to grill Harper government over Mideast conflict. Considering that Harper is a tough, tough, bird, I suggest they first marinate him for several hours with garlic and olive oil before raking him over the coals.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:02 | link | comments (2)