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(Reuters) – A suicide bomber attacked a Shi’ite Muslim shrine in Kabul on Tuesday killing at least 54 people in unprecedented sectarian violence a day after Afghanistan’s Western allies pledged long-term support once their troops leave.

Doctors and police struggled to count the dead from one of the bloodiest attacks in the Afghan capital since the fall of the Taliban government in 2001. The Taliban denied responsibility.

Bodies and blood were scattered across a street after the blast in the heart of old Kabul where a crowd of hundreds had gathered for the festival of Ashura. More than 100 were injured.

It was a potent reminder of Afghanistan’s troubles the day after its Western allies gathered at an international conference to pledge long-term support, even after their combat troops leave at the end of 2014.

All-American Muslim: The Perils of Propaganda Posted By Daniel Greenfield

URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2011/12/06/all-american-muslim-the-perils-of-propaganda/

All-American Muslim is on its last legs. Not only was the last episode of the show the lowest rated show in its time slot, losing again to Homeland, but it was also the lowest rated show of the night among the top 100 cable shows aimed at adults. While Homeland has improved its ratings, All-American Muslim has dropped so low that it’s hovering above the abyss.

Just to bring out the vultures, Discovery Communications is being sued by Visionaire Media which accuses it of stealing its idea for an “American Muslim Show” without compensation. At this point Discovery Communications, which oversees the disaster areas that are TLC, The Discovery Channel, Animal Planet and several other learning channels that have turned into minor variations of each other serving up the same Reality content, might consider letting Visionaire have the credit for All-American Muslim which a month later looks more like blame.

The media which enthusiastically embraced All-American Muslim has nothing more to say about it. There are hardly any more stories on it and those few that show up make it clear that the writer did not watch the show beyond the premiere episode. The deadly secret of All-American Muslim is that not even the liberals in the media want to watch it.

 http://yidwithlid.blogspot.com Holy Cow! I Agree With Ron Paul, Trump-Moderated Debate is a Circus Regular readers of this site are about read something you thought you would never find in anything written by me, but I agree with Ron Paul. In fact this time the Texas Congressman the has shown more courage than Michele Bachmann, Rick […]

Egypt’s Sham Election The military helps the Islamists to power.
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/print/284962
According to Egypt’s elections committee, the Muslim Brotherhood won 37 percent of the vote of the first round of voting in Egypt, and the Salafis, who promote a yet more extreme Islamist program, won 24 percent, giving them together a jaw-dropping 61 percent of the vote.
This stunning result prompts two questions: Is this a legitimate or rigged outcome? Are Islamists about to dominate Egypt?
Legitimate or rigged? No one took seriously Soviet elections with their inevitable 99 percent returns for the Communists, and, while the process and outcome of the Egyptian elections are less blatant, they deserve similar skepticism. The game is more subtle, but it’s still a game, and here is how it’s played:
The Muslim Brotherhood (founded in 1928) and the military dictatorship (ruling Egypt since 1952) have a parallel ideology and a long history that makes them simultaneously rivals and allies. Over the decades, they off-and-on cooperated in an autocratic system bound by Islamic law (Sharia) and in oppressing liberal, secular elements.
In this spirit, Anwar El-Sadat, Hosni Mubarak, and now Mohamed Tantawi tactically empowered Islamists as a foil to gain Western support, arms, and money. For example, when George W. Bush pressured Mubarak to permit more political participation, the latter responded by having 88 Muslim Brotherhood members elected to parliament, thereby warning Washington that democracy means an Islamist takeover. The apparent weakness of non-Islamists scared the West from further insisting on a transition to political participation. But a close look at the 2005 elections finds that the regime helped the Islamists gain its 20 percent of the seats.

Published on The Weekly Standard (http://www.weeklystandard.com)
Friends Indeed How and why the Jews have thrived in England.

In the last words of this book, the author quotes her brother Milton Himmelfarb in one of his last essays: “Hope is a Jewish virtue.” Nobody embodies that virtue more felicitously than Gertrude Himmelfarb, who over a long and fruitful life of scholarship has given hope to all who have encountered her, whether in person or in print.

Some 60 years have elapsed since her first book appeared: Lord Acton: A Study in Conscience and Politics. There she praised her noble subject for having taken “the idea of conscience out of the reign of metaphysics and placed it within the province of politics,” thereby giving his readers grounds for hope in the face of the pessimistic dictum for which he is chiefly remembered: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Like Acton and the other great Victorians to whose study Himmelfarb has devoted so much of her life, she is a “liberal with a difference”—a liberal, that is, who takes seriously humanity’s capacity to inspire despair. Such liberals are nowadays invariably seen as conservatives by the socialists who have usurped the term “liberal.” But like her late husband Irving Kristol, she is also a “conservative with a difference”—a conservative, that is, who takes seriously humanity’s capacity to inspire hope.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.10973/pub_detail.asp At last, I’ve arrived. Michael Mann, inventor of the Hockey Stick, has written to the Wall Street Journal branding me a “denier” and a “contrarian” and “silly.” These are badges of honour I shall wear with pride. The letter is interesting for lots of reasons, not least its grotesque hypocrisy. “In recent years”, he […]

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards prepare for war [TELEGRAPH] North Korea making missile able to hit U.S. – Republicans press Pentagon for long-range interceptors [WT] Obama offered his condolences and said deaths of 24 Pakistani troops were ‘regrettable’ but accidental [THE GUARDIAN] A dubious death in Dubai: Emirate police and U.S. officials tight-lipped over Iranian expat’s ‘suicide’ […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.10974/pub_detail.asp The U.S. Central Command has a new rapid-response team which uses information, rather than weapons, to combat terrorism, the New York Times recently reported. Hunting down conspiracy theories and bogus reports on Middle East websites, media outlets and in the social media sphere, the Digital Engagement Team works at “containing lies, misinformation or just […]

The Winter of Our Economic Discontent

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
What do the United States, Russia and the Middle East have in common? They all have unpopular regimes run by out of touch kleptocrats who faced popular uprisings. The opposition groups in all those place don’t have much in common, but the governments do.
Obama might have sneered at Mubarak or Putin, but for all the pretense of democracy he was sitting at the top of his own kleptocracy, doling out fortunes to supporters out of the emergency bailout and stimulus plans. The Tea Party was the outraged and vocal response of a working middle-class that was seeing its taxes and its children’s future being squandered to feed the appetites of the oligarchy.

The media elite might bemoan the Tea Party as the second coming of the Klu Klax Klan, but it was a far more honest expression of economic discontent than OWS, which limited its manufactured anger to the junior partners in the kleptocracy, while giving the men in power a pass.

Gunwalker: Friday ‘Document Dump’ Reveals Justice Dept. Misled Congress Posted By Patrick Richardson

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/blog/gunwalker-friday-document-dump-reveals-justice-dept-misled-congress/

On Friday, the Justice Department released nearly 1,400 pages of documents related to Operation Fast and Furious, which allowed more than 2,000 guns to “walk” into the hands of Mexican drug cartels. (The “Friday document dump” is a tactic used to keep controversial issues from dominating the news cycle during the week.)

According to the Associated [1] Press [1]:

[The Justice Department] provided Congress with documents detailing how department officials gave inaccurate information to a U.S. senator in the controversy surrounding Operation Fast and Furious, the flawed law enforcement initiative aimed at dismantling major arms trafficking networks on the Southwest border.

Note that AP refers to the Operation simply as being “flawed,” and as being a legitimate attempt to disrupt arms trafficking.

The most notable information in the release: DOJ is now taking the unusual step of withdrawing a letter it had sent to Congress, admitting the letter contained “inaccurate” information.” NPR reports:

Under fire for losing track of weapons that turned up at crime scenes along the Southwest border, the Justice Department has taken the extraordinary step of formally withdrawing an inaccurate letter about the episode that it sent to Congress earlier this year.