http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2013/02/27/israels-uncertain-future President Barack Obama’s Middle Eastern tour, scheduled for the end of March, has triggered a wave of intense speculation about its objectives in recent days. It centers on reports from Israeli sources that Obama will tell Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that a “window of opportunity” for a military strike on Iran will open in […]
http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/341745 Republicans and Democrats are blaming one another for impending cuts to the defense budget brought about by sequestration. But with serial annual deficits of $1 trillion–plus and an aggregate debt nearing $17 trillion, the United States — like the insolvent Rome and exhausted Great Britain of the past — was bound to reexamine its […]
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324662404578329762977691372.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopBucket
Indonesian officials, including members of the cabinet, encourage attacks on religious minorities.
The worst fears of the Shia Muslim community in Sampang in Indonesia’s East Java came to pass on Aug. 20, 2012. That morning, hundreds of Sunni militants attacked the community, torching some 50 homes, killing one man and seriously injuring another.
The local police, warned ahead of time of the impending violence, stood by at the scene of the attack and refused to intervene. The Sampang regency’s top government official dismissed criticism of the police’s failure to provide protection for the minority Shia by saying: “I don’t care [about] human rights as long I protect those who voted for me as their leader.”
The horror endured by the Shia of Sampang stands in stark contrast to the Indonesian government’s claims of adherence to the country’s constitutional guarantee of religious freedom. A new Human Rights Watch report released Thursday exposes the increasingly routine intimidation, threats, and, too often, violence against Indonesia’s religious minorities—and the weak or nonexistent government response.
The minorities in question, including Christian Protestant groups, Shia Muslims, and Ahmadiyahs, typically are targeted by groups such as the Islamic Defenders Front (locally called FPI) that mobilize masses of “protesters” and swarm minority houses of worship. The leaders of such groups say they are defending the Muslim community against “infidels” and “blasphemers.” They disrupt the religious observances of minority faiths with loudspeakers and the dumping of animal carcasses and feces on doorsteps.
The tactics of these Islamist militants are growing increasingly violent. According to the Jakarta-based Setara Institute, which monitors religious freedom in Indonesia, religious minorities suffered 264 physical attacks in 2012, up from 216 in 2010.
http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2013/02/15/the-5-biggest-insults-to-american-manhood-by-the-rules-of-engagement-in-afghanistan/ America’s muddle in Afghanistan is not merely an unwise policy. Two prominent American authors — one a serious analyst (and former badass warrior), the other a bestselling novelist (who created one of our biggest badass heroes) — worry that it is an affront to American manhood as well. For years Bing West has argued […]
http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2013/02/27/all-the-presidents-thugs/?print=1
Hey, Bob, you can’t say we didn’t warn you. We knew this White House was capable of attacking even the great Bob Woodward for telling the truth.
You could have listened to Michael Barone. He saw it coming even before Barack Obama was elected. In October 2008, he penned “The Coming Obama Thugocracy.”
I experienced it when DOJ press harpy Tracy Schmaler yelled at a half dozen reporters, as the White House official did to you, about my under-oath testimony involving the New Black Panther dismissal. Her victims included Pete Williams, Quin Hillyer, and Shayrl Attkisson. After Schmaler’s thug tendencies were well known, she was nurtured and promoted within the Thugocracy instead of being canned as any administration before this one would have done to her — Republican or Democrat.
Schmaler has since been appointed a Made Man of sorts, entering the rarefied private sector air of David Axelrod’s shop.
Schmaler’s story is typical of this gang. Her shouting, threats, and rants at reporters would have rendered her unqualified to serve in the press shop of a state department of agriculture.
But there is something unique about the Obama White House. It borrows tactics and standards from the darker figures in history — threats, projection, unrepentant dishonesty, towering columns in stadiums, and even bloody mayhem like Fast and Furious hatched for political purposes.
Richard Nixon seems like a fluffy kitten compared to this crowd.
Which brings us back to you, Mr. Woodward. What’s happened when you, of all people, are the bad guy? Had you ventured into any cocktail party in Silver Spring or Takoma Park just a few years ago, you would have been treated like a hero – liberal Washington’s very own version of Pittsburgh Pirate Bill Mazeroski who with one swing of a bat brought down the reviled Nixon. “Maz” never had to pay for a meal in Pittsburgh after that October afternoon in 1960 when he delivered a World Series.
That used to be you, Bob. But now, you’re the problem!
You, of all people, threatened by a Democrat White House. So where are your defenders? Where are the new hipster reporters of the left to defend you? Where have all the flowers gone, they used to ask.
But this is serious stuff. When the elder statesman of the industry that guards the First Amendment is threatened by the White House, it marks a dangerous turn. When other “reporters” join in, it is even more dangerous.
Perhaps this will be enough for the usual phalanx of fools at places like Mother Jones, TPM Muckraker, and The Nation to at last wonder if we’ve come full circle, back to those days of righteous triumphs of August 1974. Outrage toward abuse of power was so in vogue. Where is the righteous indignation that seized a nation beginning in May 1973?
Maybe it was all a show, Bob. Did the wave you started have more to do with the “R” after Nixon’s name than principle? With you, I’d say it was principle. But with the rest of the liberal left, it’s starting to look like poor Dick Nixon got a raw deal compared to this mischief of rats.
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ The Israel Lobby which controls American foreign policy, but has thus far been unable to get the United States to stop funding the terrorists currently shooting rockets at its 14th largest city, has struck again as Senate Democrats voted unanimously to make Chuck Hagel the next Secretary of Defense. The dreaded Israeli Lobby, Jewish […]
http://www.steynonline.com/5430/ghost-cities
In a dispute between Hamas and Fatah, it’s tempting to take the old Kissinger line re the Iran–Iraq War: It’s a shame they can’t both lose. But, in fact, only one side wins: In Gaza, al-Aqsa University has just announced that female students will be required to attend in proper Muslim garb from head to toe — i.e., the full body bag. At present, some still wear headscarf, trousers, and a long coat, but that’s too revealing for the new Gaza, so time to get fitted for your burka, niqab, or abaya. Al-Aqsa University is funded by the Palestinian Authority — i.e., Yasser Arafat’s old Fatah — but it’s controlled by Hamas. The higher-education minister, Ali Jarbawi, fumed impotently from Ramallah that the new dress code is illegal and must not be implemented, but the hard men on the ground in the Gaza Strip regard him as just another irrelevant member of a shriveling personality cult for a dead kleptocrat with a taste for Aryan rent boys.
And so it goes across the region: Regimes that represented nothing but their Swiss bank accounts have fallen, and in their stead arises the only alternative — an Islam purified by decades in opposition to the secularists and distilled to a scorching 175 proof. What else is left?
Some years ago, for a telly documentary, the BBC sent the novelist Lawrence Durrell back to Alexandria, the setting of his eponymous Alexandria Quartet, his “prose poem to one of the great capitals of the heart.” Durrell had lived in Egypt during the war years, and did not enjoy his return. “The city seemed to him listless and spiritless, its harbor a mere cemetery, its famous cafés no longer twinkling with music and lights,” wrote Michael Haag in Alexandria, City of Memory. “His favourite bookshop, Cité du Livre on the rue Fuad, had gone, and in others he found a lamentable stock.”
Only on the Western fringe of the Ummah, in a few Moroccan redoubts, can you still discern the flickers of the way it was. Otherwise, to anyone who knew the “Muslim world” of the mid–20th century, today’s Maghreb and Levant are dull places, drained of everything but Islam. And Durrell was returning in 1977: Another third of a century on, and Alexandria’s stock is even more lamentable. Indeed, his cast of characters would be entirely bewildering to contemporary Alexandrians: an English writer (of course), a Greek good-time girl, a homosexual Jew, a wealthy Copt. In the old days, Alexandria bustled with Britons, Italians, and lots and lots of Greeks. All gone. So are the Jews, homo- and hetero-, from a community 50,000 strong down to some four dozen greybeards keeping their heads down. I got an e-mail a year or so back from the great-grandson of Joseph Cattaui, a Jew and Egypt’s finance minister back in the Twenties: These days, the family lives in France — because it’s not just that in Egypt a Jew can no longer be finance minister, but that in Egypt a Jew can no longer be. Now, in the absence of any other demographic groups to cleanse, it’s the Copts’ turn to head for the exits — as in Tripoli and Benghazi it’s the blacks’. In the once-cosmopolitan cities of the Arab world, the minority communities are confined to the old graveyards, like the rubbish-strewn Jewish cemetery of broken headstones, squawking chickens, and hanging laundry I wandered through in Tangiers a while back. Islam is king on a field of corpses.
Nowadays, for the cosmopolitan café society Durrell enjoyed, you have to go to the cities of multicultural Europe, where “diversity” is not a quirk of fate but the cardinal virtue. At Westminster, the House of Commons has just voted in favor of same-sex marriage. Almost simultaneously, a group calling itself the Muslim London Patrol posted a YouTube video of its members abusing a young man for “walking in a Muslim area dressed like a fag.” Another Londoner is made to empty his beer can: “No drink in this area.” An insufficiently covered woman is warned, “This is not so Great Britain. This is a Muslim area.”
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/2813/norwegian_minister_admits_palestinian_incitement_funding
The Norwegian government appears to be one of the first European countries to be reconsidering its untargeted aid to the Palestinian territories on the basis of recent reports into incitement and anti-Semitism.
The issue, covered in depth by The Commentator, arises from the fact that Western governments give money often without conditions, to fund the budget of the Palestinian Authority. This has led to reported abuses of the cash, including the paying of terrorist salaries, rabid and frequent anti-Semitism and incitement in school textbooks, and the dedication of cultural events and organisations to known terrorists.
These examples have been shown in detail in the Palestinian Media Watch book, Deception. Speaking about the book on NRK TV, the government-owned news station, the Norwegian State Secretary Torgeir Larsen stated, “There are examples in the book (PMW’s Deception) that clearly express hatred. There are also examples of Antisemitism, which you find in Palestinian society.”
Though Larsen went on to state that the examples given may be ‘part of an ongoing political battle’, The Commentator has shown how even reports that try to conflate Israeli and Palestinian incitement fall short of drawing legitimate parallels between the two.
Currently, Norway gives around 300 million kroner a year ($52,628,700) to the Palestinian Authority, with a recent TV report stating: “[Palestinian] children grow up learning that Jews are ‘Satan with a tail’… Adults hear that Jews are evil and not to be trusted. It is perhaps not surprising that the [Palestinian] hatred is growing. The messenger is a [PA] government that receives large amounts [of money] from Norway.”
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/2817/to_nasrallah_without_love
To the Honorable Hassan Nasrallah:
Please forgive me if that’s not the correct salutation for the leader of a terrorist group like Hezbollah, for I live half a world away as an American and a Jew (both of which I’ll return to in a moment).
You’re suffering from cancer, the media reports, and you’ve left your hideout in Beirut to get some treatment in Iran. I even read somewhere that Iran’s president sent a private plane to pick you up.
I’m not surprised by the star treatment. After all, if Tehran can send you $100 million a year as its most important terrorist client, empowering you to threaten Israel with your powerful missiles to its north and even hunt Jews far beyond the region, then it certainly can ensure that you travel in comfort.
But, if Tehran wishes you well, I hope you’ll forgive my shortcomings as a person when I acknowledge that I can’t do the same. The fault lies with me, for I have a long memory and, alas, a tendency to carry grudges.
As an American, I recall that it was barely a year after September 11 when you declared on Hezbollah’s Al-Manar TV: “Let the entire world hear me. Our hostility to the Great Satan [a.k.a., the United States] is absolute… Regardless of how the world has changed after September 11, Death to America will remain our reverberating and powerful slogan: Death to America.”
Though you didn’t take command of Hezbollah until 1992, you were a member of the group in 1983 when it set off a truck bomb that killed 63 people, including 17 Americans, at our embassy in Beirut and then another one that killed 241 U.S. servicemen at our Marine barracks in that city.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/28/world/europe/lars-hedegaard-anti-islamic-provocateur-receives-support-from-danish-muslims.html?pagewanted=1&hp&pagewanted=print
OH PROFESSOR HIGGINS, DEAR PROFESSOR HIGGINS….WHY DON’T YOU READ THE FOLLOWING FROM YOUR VERY OWN PAPER?
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/06/online-campaign-draws-attention-to-case-of-saudi-father-accused-of-rape-and-torture/
Reports that a man in Saudi Arabia, who has appeared on television as a preacher, had raped and tortured to death his 5-year-old daughter have fueled outrage online about the way the legal system works in the conservative kingdom and about the lack of protections for domestic abuse victims.
The man, Fayhan al-Ghamdi, was accused of raping and torturing his daughter Lama, who died from her injuries in October. While Saudi news organizations have reported on the case, over the past week activists in the kingdom have used the Twitter hashtag #IamLama, and its Arabic language equivalent, to draw much more attention to it.
Danish Opponent of Islam Is Attacked, and Muslims Defend His Right to Speak By ANDREW HIGGINS
COPENHAGEN — When a would-be assassin disguised as a postman shot at — and just missed — the head of Lars Hedegaard, an anti-Islam polemicist and former newspaper editor, this month, a cloud of suspicion immediately fell on Denmark’s Muslim minority.
Politicians and pundits united in condemning what they saw as an attempt to stifle free speech in a country that, in 2006, faced violent rage across the Muslim world over a newspaper’s cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. Since then, the newspaper that first printed the images, Jyllands-Posten, has been the target of several terrorist plots.
However, as Mr. Hedegaard’s own opinions, a stew of anti-Muslim bile and conspiracy-laden forecasts of a coming civil war, came into focus, Denmark’s unity in the face of violence began to dissolve into familiar squabbles over immigration, hate speech and the causes of extremism.
But then something unusual happened. Muslim groups in the country, which were often criticized during the cartoon furor for not speaking out against violence and even deliberately fanning the flames, raised their voices to condemn the attack on Mr. Hedegaard and support his right to express his views, no matter how odious.
