The NY Times publishes a whining mass of platitudes that laments the failure of the USA to buckle under to the UN. Junkyard Blog rips it to shreds. It’s too involved to excerpt but worth popping over for a read.
The US and some EU countries lately informed the Palestinian NGOs that, prior to entering into funding agreements, they must sign the pledge, which is entitled “Certification Regarding Terrorist Financing.”
According to the document, the Palestinian NGOs pledge not to “provide material support or resources to any individual or entity that advocates, plans, sponsors, engages in, or has engaged in terrorist activity, including but not limited to individuals and entities,” based on the US Executive Order 13224.
[…] The new conditions set for financing the NGOs have enraged the Palestinians, who accuse the US of trying to blackmail them by asking them to sign the antiterror document.
Clearly, it’s just wrong for the USA and EU to put any conditions on the use of their own money.
Just ask Californian sex therapist Dr. Susan Block, who last month published at her website an anti-war piece entitled Rape of Iraq:
The supreme victory for the rapist is proof that his victim “enjoyed” it. Though he may force his way into her property, demolish her home, murder her loved ones, pillage her belongings, though he may terrify and humiliate her, beat and batter her, break her bones and tear her flesh, spill her blood, wound her organs and lay waste to her very soul, if, in the midst of the rape, between tears and shrieks of agony, if his victim should, for a moment, for some reason, any reason, if she should smile, or, better yet, orgasm, the rapist is redeemed; he is even (in his mind) heroic.
Block’s perverse symbolism was noted and subsequently warped by Islamist media in Turkey, which used the Block piece to promote the idea that US soldiers were physically raping Iraqis. Words matter, Susan:
Nurullah Kuncak says his father, Ilyas Kuncak, was boiling about the rumored rapes just before he killed himself delivering the huge car bomb that devasted the Turkish headquarters of HSBC bank last month, killing a dozen people and wounding scores more.
“Didn’t you see, the American soldiers raped Iraqi women,” Nurullah said in a recent interview. “My father talked to me about it. . . . Thousands of rapes are in the records. Can you imagine how many are still secret?”
The articles in the Islamist press are based in part on comments allegedly made by a US sex therapist who denies having written or said anything about soldiers raping women. The therapist, in an online column, explicitly and graphically described the US invasion as a rape, but says that this was clearly a metaphor unrelated to the actions of individual US soldiers, and that she has no knowledge of any physical rapes.
On the last weekend of the year, Slobo won a seat in Serbia’s legislature, as did his fellow “alleged” (as Wes Clark would say) war criminal Vojislav Seselj, and Seselj’s extreme nationalist Serbian Radical Party won more seats than anybody else. […] Even though the court forbade Milosevic and Seselj from actively campaigning in the Serbian election, they somehow managed to. In other words, ”international law” is unable to enforce its judgments even in its own jailhouse.
I’m sure they glared at Milosevic very hard when they heard he was campaiging against orders.
[source]
Afghanistan’s constitutional convention agreed on a historic new charter on Sunday, overcoming weeks of division and mistrust to hammer out a compromise meant to bind together the war-ravaged nation’s mosaic of ethnic groups.
That will make some interesting reading when the official copy is published.