The closure of the Karni goods crossing from Gaza to Israel for three weeks in January and now for ten days and counting in February has led to immense financial loss for the Palestinian farmers and the corporation that took over the greenhouses in August.
[…]
a series of attempted attacks by Palestinian terrorists near Karni and the discovery of what the IDF thinks may be smuggling tunnels underneath the terminal have prompted the long closures, the IDF said.
Yes, that’s the clearly the work of a people dedicated to self-improvement. Wherever there is a source of prosperity and potential peace, destroy it with violence.
Israeli soldiers shot dead two Palestinian terrorists planting bombs along the Israeli border yesterday, one of them the son of Hamas co-founder and senior leader Abdul Fattah Dukhan, a newly-elected member of the Palestinian parliament.
I’m sure it was unauthorized mistake of a misunderstanding.
A Sudanese man has been forced to take a goat as his “wife”, after he was caught having sex with the animal.
The goat’s owner, Mr Alifi, said he surprised the man with his goat and took him to a council of elders. They ordered the man, Mr Tombe, to pay a dowry of 15,000 Sudanese dinars ($50) to Mr Alifi.
Actually, I would have voted for that myself. Very appropriate. But maybe, to fit in better with the neighbors, he should look at moving to Washington State.
If the United States launches an attack on Iran, the Islamic republic will retaliate with a military strike on Israel’s main nuclear facility.
Dr. Abasi, an advisor to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, said Tehran would respond to an American attack with strikes on the Dimona nuclear reactor and other strategic Israeli sites such as the port city of Haifa and the Zakhariya area.
So, if we bombed Iran, we would also get to shoot down their airforce? What are we waiting for?
Since a new reporting system was introduced last year, the UN has investigated—wait for it—295 complaints of sexual abuse against its amusingly-named peacekeeping forces. Further cases are expected:
It could take several more years to reform the system fully, says Jordan’s UN envoy who last year urged changes.
In 2005 the UN admitted that allegations of sexual abuse and exploitation by UN staff had more than doubled—but, as enlightened and sensitive UN officials pointed out, there is often a fine line between forced and willing sex.
The last link is worth quoting as well:
UN regulations for soldiers usually forbid sex with anyone under 18 and forced prostitution. But often officials found there was a fine line between forced and willing sex. [emphasis added]
And yet people say “[UN Ambassador John] Bolton is trying to destroy the UN” as if it were an insult.
[source]
The dome of the Golden Mosque was blown up. […] Al Qaeda is suspected of this attack, but al Qaeda no longer publicly takes credit for attacks, in order to deflect criticism for their violence against civilians and religious place.
So Al Qaeda is still blowing things up, but doesn’t want credit? It’s hard to believe that their terrorism has gotten even more senseless, but there it is. Yet their apologists still thrive in the Modern American Left.
Bernard Lewis on anti-semitism in the Middle East.
Anti-Semitism is something quite different. It is marked by two special features. One of them is that Jews are judged by a standard different from that applied to others. […]
The other special feature of anti-Semitism, which is much more important than differing standards of judgment, is the accusation against Jews of cosmic evil. Complaints against people of other groups rarely include it. This accusation of cosmic, satanic evil attributed to Jews, in various parts of the world and in various forms, is what has come to be known in modern times as anti-Semitism.
One sees that anti-Americanism is, in effect, simply an echo of judenhass.
To hear the ALA talk, librarians are the last bulwark defending our most cherished civil liberties against government assault. Yet two recent examples show again that self-anointed guardians of the public good can be very selective about the people, and rights, they choose to protect.
One example came from Newton, Mass., on Jan. 18, after someone used a public-library computer to email a terrorist-attack threat to Brandeis University. Many school buildings were evacuated, and FBI agents rushed to the library hoping to track down the email sender in time to prevent an attack. Once there, however, they were held off for some nine hours by library director Kathy Glick-Weil—because they didn’t have a warrant. Newton’s mayor later praised Ms. Glick-Weil for “protecting the sense of privacy of many, many innocent users of the computers.” More important, it seems, than protecting the lives of many, many innocent people who could have died if the threat had turned out to be imminent.
More revealing than a single librarian’s awful judgment is the ALA’s forked tongue when it claims to defend all library freedoms. Since 1998, Cuban authorities have arrested and imprisoned citizens who operate “independent libraries,” and destroyed their collections. Often based in houses, these libraries provide books and other information, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, considered criminal by the Communist dictatorship.
Human-rights organizations, including Amnesty International, have condemned the repression and called for the librarians’ release. Yet the ALA refuses to even acknowledge their suffering Cuban counterparts. It apparently accepts the Cuban government’s assertion that “the dissidents” don’t qualify as librarians and that freedom of information flourishes on the island.
A cat jumped out of the bag at the ALA’s January meeting in San Antonio, though, when keynote speaker and Romanian-born author Andrei Codrescu blasted the organization for abandoning the independent librarians. “Is this the same American Library Association that stands against censorship and for freedom of expression everywhere?” To add insult to injury for apoplectic ALA leaders, a subsequent informal poll of the rank-and-file in an electronic newsletter suggested that 75% want the organization to stand up for the Cubans.
On Sunday, ALA President Michael Gorman emailed the newsletter’s editor to say that “we would be better off without these polls.”
One is left struck at the irony of a librarian saying that what we need is less information.
Just yesterday, Hamas came into power. As I noted, its first order of business was to indemnify itself — rhetorically, if not legally — from the obligations of Oslo, and to assert that, no, the nation of Israel does not have the right to exist in this world.
[…]
Can you guess what the second order of business was? That’s right: to condemn Israel’s decision to cease sending cash to the Palestinian Authority.
The ony question here is how long it will be before Europe (and later, US Secretary of State Rice) will start pressuring Israel to fork over the money as a “confidence building” measure. While lots of noise will be made about the PA promising to recognize Israel, in the end the PA will just promise to look at the issue once Israel fills their coffers. Afterwards, like the PLO charter, nothing will be changed and no pressure exerted on the PA or Hamas.
Hugo Chavez has had a bad week. Everywhere he went, he found protests, except this time they were all protests by his supporters, not by opposition groups. And much like when the opposition held protests against him, Chavez showed his intolerance towards dissent, telling them to shut up in the name of the revolution and respect for him.
As farmers posted themselves all week in front of the Presidential Palace in protest, Chavez went around the country only to find the same, more protests. In Zulia, it was people asking for homes. The protetsers held placards asking to talk to him. But all they found was the President‘s ire. He told them the “leader” was talking and asked them to shut up. The scene occurred twice more during the week. Once he threatened to leave if people kept protesting. During the other, students protested and Chavez told them, once more, to shut up or he would simply leave.
Meanwhile, in the pro-Chavez area of Catia, in the West of Caracas, public transportation stopped for a full day, as drivers protested the death of another driver by criminals. As the President of the National Assembly accused the CIA of generating the protests, the head of the Catia public transportation union, said he did not know anyone from the CIA and challenged the President of the Assembly to even walk in Catia without bodyguards, guaranteeing that he would be robbed.
Any bets on whether this gets in to Old Media?
Here’s a PDF of a letter sent from the mayor of the Iraqi city of Tall’afar, thanking the 3rd Regiment for what has done in that city. In addition, the mayor wants the 3rd to stay on in the city. This has, of course, not been reported in Old Media. One can only imagine the reporting should the letter been a curse.
There is no women’s ski jump competition in the Olympic Games.
The International Ski Federation has ruled that ski jumping is too dangerous for women, making it the only winter Olympic sport that has male competitors and no female counterparts.
“It’s like jumping down from, let’s say, about two meters on the ground about a thousand times a year, which seems not to be appropriate for ladies from a medical point of view,” the federation’s president Gian Franco Kasper said on National Public Radio.
I would agree that I see it as not appropriate for women. But I also see it as inappropriate for men as well. Beyond that, given the amounts of sports injuries in other sports such as women’s figure skating, this argument doesn’t seem very persuasive.
[source]
The Democratic Party has undertaken an organized campaign to drive Col. Stephenson, two fellow servicemen and the families of servicemen who were killed in Iraq off the airways. The Democratic Party has officially pronounced that Col. Stephenson and his ads are “un-American.” That such a thing could happen is almost beyond belief—a Marine officer with more than ten years of active duty labeled “un-American” for supporting America’s foreign policy—but it is nevertheless true.
Listen to Col. Stephenson and the two ads and judge for yourself whether they are “un-American.”
Let’s see now. One is not allowed to support the invasion of Iraq if one has not served there (the “chickenhawk” argument). Now we have the other rule, one is not allowed to support the invasion of Iraq if one did serve there. So much for the “absolute moral authority” of people who have made sacrifices.
The Iraqi prisoner abuse photos too shocking for even Old Media to show you.
The Jawa Report has obtained new photos from a new prisoner abuse scandal in Iraq. The photos show Iraqi prisoners being murdered by troops. The photos have not been published by a single mainstream news outlet.
[source]
The way I look at it, Cheney took the opportunity to show the White House press corps that it is not the natural conduit to the nation-at-large; and it has no special place in the information chain. Cheney does not grant legitimacy to the large news organizations with brand names who think of themselves as proxies for the public and its right to know. Nor does he think the press should know where he is, what he’s doing, or who he’s doing it with.
[…]
How does it hurt Bush if for three days this week reporters are pummeling Scott McClellan over the details of when they were informed about Cheney’s hunting accident? That’s three days this week they won’t be pummeling Scott McClellan over the details of this article from Foreign Affairs by Paul R. Pillar, the ex-CIA man who coordinated U.S. intelligence on the Middle East until last year.
It’s fascinating to watch a group of people so wrapped in the cocoons of their own egos that the White House can get them to do the dirty work of discrediting themselves. It was obvious how useful this would be in the long run in absorbing and distracting the efforts of Old Media. Well, obvious to everyone except Old Media.
Fifteen years after communism was officially pronounced dead, its spectre seems once again to be haunting Europe. Last month, the Council of Europe’s parliamentary assembly voted to condemn the “crimes of totalitarian communist regimes”, linking them with Nazism and complaining that communist parties are still “legal and active in some countries”. Now Göran Lindblad, the conservative Swedish MP behind the resolution, wants to go further. Demands that European ministers launch a continent-wide anti-communist campaign — including school textbook revisions, official memorial days and museums — only narrowly missed the necessary two-thirds majority. Yesterday, declaring himself delighted at the first international condemnation of this “evil ideology”, Lindblad pledged to bring the wider plans back to the Council of Europe in the coming months.
Wow! Is Europe actually recovering from its ideological failures? Of course, the author of this piece goes on to defend Communism and the historical revisionism that makes Communists look bad, but it’s the whining of someone on the losing side of history.
At 2:00 this afternoon, the Select Bipartisan Committee to Investigate the Preparation for and Response to Hurricane Katrina will release its final report after more than five months of investigation. POPULAR MECHANICS obtained excerpts of a draft copy of the report last night.
We’ve given the report an initial read and found it riddled with poor logic, internal contradictions and exaggerations…
For now, though, here’s a quick overview of what seems to be the report’s most troubling shortfall: consistently blaming individuals for failing to foresee circumstances that only became clear with the laser-sharp vision of hindsight.
For example, the report states:
“Fifty-six hours prior to landfall, Hurricane Katrina presented an extremely high probability threat that 75 percent of New Orleans would be flooded, tens of thousands of residents may be killed, hundreds of thousands trapped in flood waters up to 20 feet, hundreds of thousands of homes and other structures destroyed, a million people evacuated from their homes, and the greater New Orleans area would be rendered uninhabitable for several months or years.”
This statistic is referred to often, and refers to computer modeling of a direct Category 5 hurricane landfall in New Orleans. However, it’s also a distortion. According to the data the Committee itself examined, 56 hours prior to landfall, Katrina was a relatively weak Category 3 storm, heading west in the Gulf of Mexico. Over the next few hours, it began its turn north, but where the storm was going to make landfall along the Gulf Coast was any weatherman’s bet (the average 48-hour margin of error is 160 miles). In fact, it was not until the next day, Saturday, that it became more of a certainty that the hurricane was heading toward New Orleans. Furthermore, hurricane forecasters and emergency managers tell PM that until about 24 hours before landfall, hurricanes are too unpredictable to warrant the sort of blanket evacuation orders the report describes.
And according to transcripts obtained by POPULAR MECHANICS of the Sunday, August 28, videoconference between FEMA, DHS, Gulf State authorities, the National Weather Service and the White House, as late as Sunday—only 24 hours before landfall—National Hurricane Center storm tracks predicted: “There will be minimal flooding in the city of New Orleans itself.” The death tolls listed in the congressional report presuppose: A) certainty that the storm would hit New Orleans directly, and B) certainty the storm would strengthen to a Category 4 or 5. Neither of these propositions was certain 56 hours prior to landfall. And, in fact, the hurricane was a Category 3 storm when it did hit.
The Committee report also criticizes the DHS and FEMA for not including the Department of Defense in their pre-storm and immediate post-storm planning. However, the same August 28 transcript shows that DoD was included from the beginning. In reality, despite organizational shortcomings, the rescue spearheaded by the National Guard and the Coast Guard turned out to be the largest and fastest in U.S. history, mobilizing nearly 100,000 responders within three days of the hurricane’s landfall. While each of the 1072 deaths in Louisiana was a tragedy, the worst-case scenario death toll would have been 60,000. [emphasis added]
What do you call an report by a Congressional majority that inaccurately makes its own party’s administration look worse? A blackwash?
[source]
Australia’s SBS television uncovered more photos from Abu Ghraib and promptly put them on television. They were also immediately published in the Sydney Morning Herald. Oddly, even though they will undoubtedly inflame Muslim sentiment all over the world, neither media outlet believed it was sufficient to merely describe the photos in plain English.
It is worth repeating the original observation, that Old Media clearly makes its decision based on whether the loonies will be mad at them. A more subtle observation is that Old Media doesn’t consider being mad at the West to be being mad at them.
Tim Blair is following a very amusing story concerning Michael Leunig, an Australian cartoonist. It seems that in response to the Comic Jihad, the Iranian mullahocracy decided to “strike back” by having a contest for the best Holocaust denial cartoon. Some one then submitted a Leunig cartoon which was immediately accepted. Despite this un-authorized submission, no one familiar with Leunig’s work found it implausible. Leunig, however, is quite upset. I hold to the view that if you don’t want to win theocratic anti-semitic cartoon constests, don’t draw cartoons that could win.
“We implore the students of the Kennel Club to show the nation this weekend what makes Gonzaga different,” Kennel Club advisers David Lindsay and Aaron Hill wrote in a letter in the student newspaper, the Bulletin. “We challenge the students of the Kennel Club to exhibit the class, the creativeness and the competitive drive that has become a foundation of this great university.”
Fans of No. 5 Gonzaga have been asked to stop yelling “Brokeback Mountain” at opposing players. The reference to the recent movie about homosexual cowboys was chanted by some fans during Monday’s game against Saint Mary’s, and is apparently intended to suggest an opposing player is gay.
While there is the obvious point that Lindsay and Hill are implicitly claiming that there is, in fact, something wrong with being gay, it seems to me that this is one more case where the alledged victims (if any) seem to view things quite a bit differently than their concerned “protectors”, what with the public embrace of homosexuality by that community. On the other hand, maybe it’s like race relations, where whether certain words are insulting is based on the race of the speaker, not the word itself.
Meeting in Chicago today, the ABA’s Council of the Section on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar will vote on new “equal opportunity and diversity” standards. If they are approved, any law school that seeks to maintain or acquire ABA accreditation will be required to engage in racial preferences in hiring and admissions, regardless of any federal, state or local laws that prohibit of such policies […]
Apparently it’s not real law if the ABA doesn’t like it.
THAT EXCEPTIONALLY WISE diplomat Sir Frank Roberts once observed that “Roosevelt and Churchill were susceptible to Stalin because he did not fit the dictator stereotype of the time. He was not a demagogue; he did not strut in flamboyant uniforms. He was soft-spoken, well organised, not without humour, knew his brief — an agreeable façade concealing unknown horrors.”
Roosevelt was definitely the more susceptible of the two. Paradoxically, this came from his own vanity. Proud of his famous charm, he was convinced that he alone could win Stalin to a postwar partnership after the wartime alliance. But such a transformation was highly unlikely. Roosevelt overestimated his own abilities and completely underestimated Stalin’s paranoid schizophrenia, xenophobia, ruthlessness and cruelty.
Roosevelt’s instinctive generosity and vision in 1941 must be recognised when he decided to throw his country’s industrial might into supporting the Soviet Union immediately after the Nazi invasion. The letters in My Dear Mr Stalin, a collection of the correspondence between the two, remind us of the staggering scale of US aid. In October 1942, at the height of the Battle of Stalingrad, Stalin provided a shopping list for delivery each month: 500 fighter planes (he understandably rejected the American Kitty Hawk as obsolete and demanded the newer Airacobra); 8,000 to 10,000 trucks; 5,000 tons of aluminium; and 5,000 tons of explosives. “In addition to this,” Stalin continued, the USSR needed “two million tons of grain” over 12 months as well as “fats, food concentrates and canned meat”. Machine tools, smelters, even refineries were to be shipped.
The great irony, unacknowledged by Russian historians even today, is that had it not been for the hundreds of thousands of Dodge and Studebaker trucks, the Red Army would never have reached Berlin before the Americans.
Roosevelt refused to attach strings to aid. Nor, more surprisingly, did he intervene or protest when it was discovered that the Soviet Military Mission in the US was spying shamelessly and flying quantities of stolen documents from the Manhattan Project out of the country.
Why not? What did Stalin ever do that FDR found objectionable?
David Gregory (NBC): “Why was the White House relying on a Texas rancher to get the word of Cheney’s hunting accident out over the weekend”, asked Gregory, accusing McClellan of ‘ducking and weaving.’
“David, hold on… the cameras aren’t on right now,” McClellan replied. “You can do this later.”
“Don’t accuse me of trying to pose to the cameras,” the newsman said, his voice rising somewhat. “Don’t be a jerk to me personally when I’m asking you a serious question.”
“You don’t have to yell,” McClellan said.
“I will yell,” said Gregory, pointing a finger at McClellan at his dais. “If you want to use that podium to try to take shots at me personally, which I don’t appreciate, then I will raise my voice, because that’s wrong.”
“Calm down, Dave, calm down,” said McClellan, remaining calm throughout the exchange.
“I’ll calm down when I feel like calming down,” Greogry said. “You answer the question.”
“I have answered the question,” said McClellan, who had maintained that the vice president’s office was in charge of getting the information out and worked with the ranch owner to do that. “I’m sorry you’re getting all riled up about it.”
“I am riled up,” Gregory said, “because you’re not answering the question.”
Not a parody. And someone slip some extra in McClellan’s paycheck.
Now, in addition to Senator Hillary Clinton getting mash notes from the Saudi Entity, Al Gore is attacking President Bush for being too soft on the Saudis. Maybe the Bush partisans are correct and Bush really is putting the hurt on the Saudi Entity.
“I’d be very pleased if Hillary Clinton would become the next American president,” [former Chancellor of Germany Gerhard] Schroeder said to applause from a largely Saudi audience at the Jeddah Economic Forum, which opened here Saturday. “But don’t quote me too loud. I hope I’m not harming her by saying that.”
Probably not, actualy. Those who see the problem already don’t like HRC and those who like her aren’t much concerned with reality.
Now that violence is directed at European targets, I have heard nothing about the “cycle of violence” and “violence begets violence”. All the threats and embassy burnings go only one way. So much for all that sage advice about conflict resolution.
— werner
There has been quite a bit of ragging on the State Department for its response to the Danish Cartoon Controversy which I think is unjustified. As far as I can tell, it stems from Old Media once again getting a story completely wrong by rewriting it to suit their own views, instead of reporting the facts. Here is the section of the actual transcript, which is quite different from what was reported in Old Media. I take a back seat to no one on bashing the State Department, but in this case I think it is a fine response for the State Department. It’s not what I would say, but I’m not in charge of American diplomacy.
QUESTION: Yes? Can you say anything about a U.S. response or a U.S. reaction to this uproar in Europe over the Prophet Muhammad pictures? Do you have any reaction to it? Are you concerned that the violence is going to spread and make everything just —
MR. MCCORMACK: I haven’t seen any — first of all, this is matter of fact. I haven’t seen it. I have seen a lot of protests. I’ve seen a great deal of distress expressed by Muslims across the globe. The Muslims around the world have expressed the fact that they are outraged and that they take great offense at the images that were printed in the Danish newspaper, as well as in other newspapers around the world.
Our response is to say that while we certainly don’t agree with, support, or in some cases, we condemn the views that are aired in public that are published in media organizations around the world, we, at the same time, defend the right of those individuals to express their views. For us, freedom of expression is at the core of our democracy and it is something that we have shed blood and treasure around the world to defend and we will continue to do so. That said, there are other aspects to democracy, our democracy — democracies around the world — and that is to promote understanding, to promote respect for minority rights, to try to appreciate the differences that may exist among us.
We believe, for example in our country, that people from different religious backgrounds, ethnic backgrounds, national backgrounds add to our strength as a country. And it is important to recognize and appreciate those differences. And it is also important to protect the rights of individuals and the media to express a point of view concerning various subjects. So while we share the offense that Muslims have taken at these images, we at the same time vigorously defend the right of individuals to express points of view. We may — like I said, we may not agree with those points of view, we may condemn those points of view but we respect and emphasize the importance that those individuals have the right to express those points of view.
For example — and on the particular cartoon that was published — I know the Prime Minister of Denmark has talked about his, I know that the newspaper that originally printed it has apologized, so they have addressed this particular issue. So we would urge all parties to exercise the maximum degree of understanding, the maximum degree of tolerance when they talk about this issue. And we would urge dialogue, not violence. And that also those that might take offense at these images that have been published, when they see similar views or images that could be perceived as anti-Semitic or anti-Catholic, that they speak out with equal vigor against those images.
QUESTION: That the Muslims speak out with equal vigor when they see — that’s what you’re asking?
MR. MCCORMACK: We would — we believe that it is an important principle that peoples around the world encourage dialogue, not violence; dialogue, not misunderstanding and that when you see an image that is offensive to another particular group, to speak out against that. Anti-Muslim images are as unacceptable as anti-Semitic images, as anti-Christian images or any other religious belief. We have to remember and respect the deeply held beliefs of those who have different beliefs from us. But it is important that we also support the rights of individuals to express their freely held views.
QUESTION: So basically you’re just hoping that it doesn’t — I’m sorry I misspoke when I said there was violence, I meant uproar. Your bottom line is that both sides have the right to do exactly as they’re doing and you just hope it doesn’t get worse?
MR. MCCORMACK: Well, I —
QUESTION: You just hope it doesn’t escalate.
MR. MCCORMACK: I gave a pretty long answer, so —
QUESTION: You did. I’m trying to sum it up for you. (Laughter.)
MR. MCCORMACK: Yeah. Sure.
QUESTION: A couple of years ago, I think it was a couple of years ago when, I think it was the Syrians and the Lebanese were introducing this documentary about the Jews — or it was the Egyptians — this Administration spoke out very strongly about that and called it offensive, said it was —
MR. MCCORMACK: I just said that the images were offensive; we found them offensive.
QUESTION: Well, no you said that you understand that the Muslims found them offensive, but —
MR. MCCORMACK: I’m saying now, we find them offensive. And we certainly understand why Muslims would find these images offensive.
Yes.
QUESTION: One word is puzzling me in this, Sean, and that’s the use of the word “unacceptable” and “not acceptable,” exactly what that implies. I mean, it’s not quite obvious that you find the images offensive. When you say “unacceptable,” it applies some sort of action against the people who perpetrate those images.
MR. MCCORMACK: No. I think I made it very clear that our defense of freedom of expression and the ability of individuals and media organizations to engage in free expression is forthright and it is strong, you know. This is — our First Amendment rights, the freedom of expression, are some of the most strongly held and dearly held views that we have here in America. And certainly nothing that I said, I would hope, would imply any diminution of that support.
QUESTION: It’s just the one word “unacceptable,” I’m just wondering if that implied any action, you know. But it doesn’t you say?
MR. MCCORMACK: No.
Organizers of a vintage car rally have hired karate experts to protect vehicles from marauding native parrots, a media report said Friday.
[…]
Denis Callesen, manager of the nearby Hermitage Hotel, said bird lovers needn’t be concerned that the karate experts would use martial arts moves on the parrots, which are a protected species. Their job would simply be to scare the birds away, he said.
Well good! I couldn’t sleep nights if there was some possibility that the karate guys might use some of those moves on parrots.