http://www.thecommentator.com/article/2678/_message_from_saddam_shoes_hurled_at_us_diplomat_in_uk_parliament On Wednesday in the UK Parliament, a former top US diplomat had shoes thrown at him in a repeat of the 2008 attack on President George W. Bush. The Commentator has obtained exclusive footage of the incident. Attendees reported that panic ensued as a protester shouted about sending a message “from Saddam Hussein”, then […]
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/2676/why_britain_s_anti_zionist_mandarins_are_grinning For many years, the British Foreign Office has been insisting that incitement and hate education is not a problem in the Palestinian Territories. Meanwhile, the Palestinians have quietly been indoctrinating their children to hate both Jews and Israel. They have done this with little to no push-back from the international community, and certainly none […]
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324590904578288132812043100.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_BelowLEFTSecond
THIS DICTATOR IS ONE OF SOUTH AMERICA’S THREE TIN POT “BOLIVARIAN” THUGS…..CHAVEZ, CORREA AND MORALES (OF BOLIVIA). AMONG THE THREE THEY SIT ON VAST NATURAL RESOURCES…OIL IN ECUADOR AND VENEZUELA AND THE WORLD’S LARGES DEPOSIT OF TIN AND LITHIUM IN BOLIVIA….RSK
Barack Obama uses his high office to conduct a permanent campaign against his opponents, often falsely attributing the basest of motives to them. That’s pretty much the style of Latin American demagogues as well. Fortunately it works less well in the United States than south of the border.
The difference is that the American in the Oval Office is constrained by limits to his power under the U.S. Constitution. Even if 24/7 campaigning makes him popular, two other branches of government can check him and the minority opposition retains its rights.
Not so in, say, Ecuador, where President Rafael Correa is a candidate for re-election on Feb. 17. Mr. Correa is a permanent campaigner and has been so since his first presidential victory in November 2006. He has spent the past six years demonizing the opposition rather than looking for common ground as a leader might be expected to do. He also has used permanent campaigning to rewrite the constitution and eliminate barriers to his absolute power.
Mr. Correa is likely to win re-election easily, and his supporters will claim that he did so democratically. Yet opening polling stations once every four years does not make a free society—and no serious person today mistakes Ecuador for a modern, liberal republic.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323511804578296170934762536.html?mod=WSJ_hps_LEFTTopStories
By DREW HINSHAW in Timbuktu, Mali, SIOBHAN GORMAN and DEVLIN BARRETT in Washington
Western forces armed with drones, jets, laser-guided bombs and state-of-the-art wiretapping technology are engaged in a cat-and-mouse hunt for fundamentalist insurgents who have disappeared into the Sahara, holed up in ancient desert hide-outs.
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Terror leader Mokhtar Belmokhtar
Elusive Target
Mokhtar Belmokhtar, age 40
Tracked by the CIA since the early 1990s after he left training camps in Afghanistan to fight Algeria’s government.
Estimated by U.S. State Department to have raised $50 million from kidnapping tourists, aid workers, miners.
Used his fortune to buy stolen arms after the fall of Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi.
Mastermind of the seizure of the Algerian gas plant in January that left at least 37 dead.
The U.S. is working with France to find the fugitives, including Mokhtar Belmokhtar, whose followers commandeered an Algerian gas plant last month in a kidnap plot that left at least 37 people dead—three Americans among them. For the past decade, the 40-year-old insurgent leader has raised tens of millions of dollars from kidnapping and other criminal enterprises to buy weapons and wage a holy war, U.S. officials said.
French warplanes, before reclaiming Timbuktu last month, fired U.S.-made bombs at hide-outs and the command center of the terrorist group, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, which for months had occupied the northern half of Mali. When French soldiers arrived in tanks a week later, they found the blitz to finish off the AQIM’s leadership had instead bombed decoy cars and empty buildings, according to French officials.
One drone has emerged as the go-to model for the U.S. Air Force and CIA. How does it work? WSJ’s Jason Bellini has the “Short Answer.” Image: Getty
Among the insurgents who escaped the French onslaught, Western authorities say, none is as elusive as Mr. Belmokhtar, a breakaway AQIM commander, whose brigade is named Those Who Sign With Blood.
The U.S. is employing the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Joint Special Operations Command in a manhunt that underscores how quickly Washington is eyeing an expansion of its counterterrorism actions in northwestern Africa following the gas-plant attack. Senior U.S. officials are pressing to add Mr. Belmokhtar to a list of U.S. targets for capture or killing.
Since arriving in the country on Jan. 11, French and African soldiers have liberated much of AQIM’s seized empire, a Texas-size stretch of northern Mali. Mr. Belmokhtar and the others have since gone deep into the Adrar des Ifoghas: a mountainous gash of petrified lava slogs and cave-pocked stone outcrops the size of the U.K. that has sheltered bandits for centuries.
“We know for sure that these terrorists have hidden themselves here,” said French President François Hollande during a visit to Mali last week.
In recent days, France has dispatched attack helicopters and fighter jets on bombing runs, so far without result. The U.S. has sent surveillance planes and is considering a drone base in neighboring Niger.
http://www.steynonline.com/5420/lars-hedegaard-defender-of-freedom
“At one of his trials – maybe it was the first, the second, the third, I forget which – Lars quoted John Milton: Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.
Milton wrote that in 1644. Three hundred and seventy years later, it falls to our generation to fight that battle all over again. Lars Hedegaard has led that fight, a fight that so many of his fellow Danes, his fellow Scandinavians, his fellow Europeans have either ducked or joined the wrong side of. In some of the oldest free societies on the planet, far too few are doing the heavy lifting for all of us, and paying a very high price. So I am honored to salute today a champion of liberty, a defender of civilization, and a European hero whether Europe’s rulers know it or not – Lars Hedegaard.”
A few days ago, a man tried to assassinate Lars Hedegaard in Copenhagen – an event Mark wrote about here and here, but about which the broader western media has been shamefully silent. Last summer, Mark had the honour of presenting Lars with a Defender of Freedom award at the European Parliament. Here is some of what Mark had to say:
Thank you. I don’t spend a lot of time in the European Parliament or in Brussels, and one of the few things that could persuade me to set foot here is the opportunity to say a word for the man we honour today, Lars Hedegaard.
After I accepted the invitation to come here, I received a couple of emails from prominent persons saying wasn’t I a bit worried that some of the people here are a bit controversial and it might not be a good idea to be seen in the same room as them. And that’s a fair point. Obviously, it would be far safer for one’s reputation to appear in the same room as less controversial figures such as the chaps appearing last weekend at the Muslim Council of Calgary’s big event in Alberta. Their keynote speaker was the Saudi-educated imam Dr Bilal Phillips, who’s on record as saying that every male homosexual should be executed. He later clarified his position: He only wants all male homosexuals in Muslim countries executed. “The media tends to take my words out of context,” he said.
Also on the bill was the moderate Muslim Shaykh Hatem Alhaj, who supports the introduction of female genital mutilation to North America. But he’s a “moderate” Muslim because he only believes in nicking the clitoris rather than slicing the thing right off. So the head of the Calgary Police Diversity Unit and multiple representatives of the Canadian state had no problem whatsoever being in the same room as Messrs Alhaj and Phillips.
There is literally nothing a prominent Muslim can say – about gays, about Jews, about women – that would render him persona non grata. That’s the world we live in: sharing a stage with a man calling for compulsory execution for homosexuals isn’t controversial; sharing a stage with Lars Hedegaard is.
I’m bored by this double standard; I’m tired of one-way multiculturalism; and I thank God that here in Europe, where you need it most of all, there are a few brave souls like Lars willing to stand up against it. Like Lars, I am guilty of crimes against humanity – I always think that looks good on a chap’s resume. And you’d be surprised how much work it brings in. As with Lars, it was a thought-crime prosecution, in which truth is no defence. Unlike Lars, I beat the rap without having to go all the way to the Supreme Court. Maclean’s magazine and I were acquitted of quote “flagrant Islamophobia” for essentially political reasons – because neither the British Columbia court nor its travesty of a “human rights” code could withstand the heat of a guilty verdict. (I never did find out quite what the difference is between “flagrant Islamophobia” and common-or-garden Islamophobia, but I think flagrant Islamophobia is a lot camper.) Unlike Denmark, where the law under which Lars was prosecuted remains on the books, in Canada just a few days ago, and as a result of my case and the publicity it generated, the House of Commons finally voted to repeal the relevant provision of Canada’s Human Rights Code. At some point, it will go to the Senate and then receive Royal Assent, and a disgraceful law at odds with eight centuries of Canada’s legal inheritance going back to Magna Carta will finally be consigned to the garbage can of history. So, for those of you fighting these battles in Denmark, in Austria, in the Netherlands and elsewhere, victories are possible. But they’re hard fought, and far too few people in the multicultural west have the stomach for them. Lars Hedegaard does.
As most of you know, Lars was charged, acquitted, re-charged, convicted, fined 5,000 kroner and forced to appeal to the Supreme Court – for the crime of expressing his opinion about Islam. He won, but he lost. He lost three years of his life. The point of these new heresy trials is that the verdict is ultimately irrelevant – the process is the punishment. After I saw off the Islamic enforcers in my own country, their frontman crowed to The Canadian Arab News that, even though the Canadian Islamic Congress had struck out in three separate jurisdictions in their attempt to criminalize my writing, the lawsuits had cost my magazine (he boasted) two million dollars, and thereby “attained our strategic objective—to increase the cost of publishing anti-Islamic material.” In Denmark, as in Austria, as in Germany, as in France, the Islamic imperialists are also achieving their strategic objective. For every Lars Hedegaard, for every Kurt Westergaard, there are a thousand cartoons that are never drawn, a thousand newspaper columns that are never written, a thousand novels that are never published, films that are never made, plays that are never produced …because thousands of people look at what Lars had to go through, and conclude that the price of raising the subject of Islam is too high. For every contrarian spirit such as Lars, there are a thousand other public figures who get the message — best just to steer clear, keep your head down, write about something else, anything else.
http://www.jpost.com/LandedPages/PrintArticle.aspx?id=302807 Israel has not only the right, but also the distinct obligation, to protect its citizens. At the end of January, 2013, although never officially confirmed, Israel launched rare airstrikes inside Syria. The core target was a truck convoy carrying anti-aircraft weapons to Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon. More than likely, these advanced weapons included SA-17 […]
The Whitewashing of Hate PMW responds to the recent report on Palestinian and Israeli schoolbooks http://palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=157&doc_id=8539 by Itamar Marcus It is hard to imagine a more flawed analysis of Palestinian Authority schoolbooks than the recent report of the Council of Religious Institutions of the Holy Land, led by Sami Adwan, Bethlehem University and Daniel Bar-Tal, […]
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3584/france-survey Hollande’s plans to bash the rich have failed to make him popular with the traditional Socialist electorate. After barely nine months in office, Hollande has lost popularity at an even faster rate then his predecessor, Sarkozy. France is the sick man of Europe — at least, that is how the French themselves apparently see […]
http://www.jidaily.com/a5930?utm_source=Jewish+Ideas+Daily+Insider&utm_campaign=79f6ac1b49-Insider&utm_medium=email **This article by Trevor Bryce appears as it was printed in Archaeology Odyssey. Full citation below. The BAS Library includes the complete version of every article published in Archaeology Odyssey.** From his capital, Hattusa, in central Anatolia, the last-known Hittite king, Suppiluliuma II (1207 B.C.-?), ruled over a people who had once built a […]
