I first read this article in the Detroit Free Press. It annoyed me at its simplistic and biased premise. Then it showed up on Little Green Footballs. And it bothered me more. I'm not going to jump on the "let's trash LGF" bandwagon, but for somebody who seems to pride himself on getting all of the information before entering into a fray, this post seems more of a knee jerk by Charles Johnson.
At age 45, after giving birth to 13 children in her village of thatch roofs and bare feet, Beatrice Adongo made a discovery that startled her: birth control.
"I delivered all these children because I didn't know there was another way," said Adongo, who started on a free quarterly contraceptive injection last year. Surrounded by her weary-faced brood, her 21-month-old boy clutching at her faded blue dress, she added glumly: "I fear we are already too many in this family."
On a continent where fewer than one in five married women use modern contraception, an explosion of unplanned pregnancies is threatening to bury Adongo's family and a generation of Africans under a mountain of poverty.
Promoting birth control in Africa faces a host of obstacles — patriarchal customs, religious taboos, ill-equipped public health systems — but experts also blame a powerful, more distant force: the U.S. government.
Under President George W. Bush , the United States withdrew from its decades-long role as a global leader in supporting family planning, driven by a conservative ideology that favored abstinence and shied away from providing contraceptive devices in developing countries, even to married women.
As I recall from just being alive for the past 50 or so years, Uganda has had other problems that have been much larger than a lack of contraception. Remember Idi Amin?
Idi Amin Dada, who became known as the 'Butcher of Uganda' for his brutal, despotic rule whilst president of Uganda in the 1970s, is possibly the most notorious of all Africa's post-independence dictators. Amin seized power in a military coup in 1971 and ruled over Uganda for 8 years. Estimates for the number of his opponents who were either killed, tortured, or imprisoned vary from 100,000 to half a million. He was ousted in 1979 by Ugandan nationalists, after which he fled into exile.
That's got to slow down a society's rise no matter how many children women are having. They got rid of him, but as always on the African continent, more troubles followed. Today, Uganda faces The Lord's Resistance Army, as twisted a group of primitive barbarian thugs as I've ever read about.
The Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) , led by Joseph Kony, operated in the north from bases in southern Sudan. The LRA committed numerous abuses and atrocities, including the abduction, rape, maiming, and killing of civilians, including children. In addition to destabilising northern Uganda from bases in Sudan, the LRA congregated in the Bunia area in eastern Congo. They linked up with the Army for the Liberation of Rwanda (ALIR) and other rebel groups battling with forces from the Rally for Congolese Democracy (RCD)
Then there is the AIDS problem and the lack of tourism. Frankly, I'd want to know that I'd be safe from marauding bands of the LRA before I went to visit Uganda. And increased access to contraception will to what to slow down the spread of AIDS? Does the spread of AIDS have any effect on the economy? I'm guessing "yes."
To believe that poverty in Uganda is being caused by lack of birth control is naive. To present it as a news story in order to promote a "green" agenda and take another whack at the Bush Administration is dishonest. Treating the Ugandan population as pawns in this green Bush trashing article is criminal. How does this help Uganda rise out of poverty? It doesn't. In order to raise their standard of living, Ugandans would have to increase their "carbon footprint", and among Greenies that is a mortal sin. Better they should remain poor but have fewer children. That means fewer tiny poverty stricken carbon emitters, and the Greenies can pat themselves on the back for reducing the number of Ugandan poor.
As a final question, once contraception is available to Ugandan women, what will the excuse for Ugandan poverty be in a generation when women only have a child or two? Or will the greenies even care any more?
Thanks to advances in the Internet, I can get into arguments with people anywhere the world, at any time, and for as long as I'm interested in banging my head against a wall. As if there weren't enough ways to waste time already on the computer. I wasted a good amount of time on this one. The argument had already begun. I was merely watching it on The Jungle Hut (and I can't seem to find the post that the argument took place on). But then, words were printed that I couldn't ignore from an Algerian Muslim woman named Lilia. It was some of the same sick anti-Semitic crap that I've heard before, and I couldn't just let it go.
The debate continued here on Conservative Outrage. And I shouldn't have even been a participant there. I accidently linked over from Blowing San #1. Nobody told me that the debate had moved there. But the argument did continue until the Muslim woman decided that I was an islamphobic, bigoted dunce who was too stupid and hateful to admit the truth of her words. Of course, her words were idiotic. There is a huge population who would agree with her though. They have other problems too.
I only thought the debate had ended though. Lilia snuck up on me here where once again I proved my duncehood and hatefulness. Maybe she thought one more attack on my stupidity would do the trick.
Of course, it didn't. I proved to be much too thick.
I did accuse her repeatedly of being anti-Semitic, a charge she denied. After all, she didn't hate Jews, and she wasn't blaming all of the problems of the world on Jews, but on Zionists. Recently though, the reality of "anti-Zionism" has been exposed.
I don't want to rehash the entire argument here. But basically, according to her, it was the Israeli Mossad who assassinated JFK and who brought down the World Trade Center. Furthermore, Mohammed did not ethnically cleanse the Arabian peninsula of Jews. Jews somehow corrupted Islamic scripture when it came to that unfortunate episode. To be fair, she only compared Israelis to Nazis once. The argument was also joined by a woman from NYC, who also tried desperately to help me understand the truth, but I proved to be much too pigheaded for even the two of them combined.
The thing is, I was able to answer their arguments while they ignored most of mine, preferring to bring new charges against Israel and the Zionists (not Jews). In fact, Lilia claimed to know the difference between real Jews and Zionist Jews. I was less than kind to her in my response to that moronic, insulting claim. In my sudden doubt as to whether I was a real Jew according to her Islamic standards, I pressed her on the subject. For some reason, she backed down on that one.
Except for the one regarding the Jews of Arabia, I'd heard all of these claims before and read some of the twisted thought behind them, so I know the bizarre claims that are out there. And I know that a lot of people, not only in the Islamic world, but all over the world believe that crap. That's the worst part of it. But don't try to convince me that this idiocy is real. Don't try to convince me that the psychotic killers of Hamas and Hezbollah are the moral equivalents of the IDF. And just crawl away quickly before blaming Zionists - not Jews - for the problems in the Middle East and the Muslim world.
One thing I take care to do on mine or any other blog that I comment on, is to not use my anonymity to say things that I wouldn't say to a person's face. So when Lilia made the insane claim that Jews - oh wait - I mean Zionists, were at least partially responsible for the Holocaust, I did get a bit excited, but I thought I showed great reserve. Had we been face to face, I probably would have gotten even more insulting.
I called Lilia anti-Semitic because to her, Jews were not people, rather, they are a collection of stereotypes, scapegoats who cause no end of trouble for everyone. And she has the audacity to think she can decide who is and who isn't a real Jew? To her, the real ones deny the legitimacy of Israel. Imagine that. To her, my avarice and hook nose wouldn't be enough to pass her "Jew test".
I decided at that point that it wasn't up to her, or me, or anyone else in the world to judge the legitimacy of the State of Israel, the one Jewish nation on the planet, and the only one whose legitimacy is questioned - even though we're told that this opposition has nothing to do with anti-Semitism. Right. I brought up some of the real atrocities in the world that are being ignored because they don't involve Jews defending themselves. There were no responses from either Lilia or Elizabeth, the woman form NYC.
That's something else I've noticed in this debate, when I've had it with Israel bashers and non-anti-semites who blame all the evils in the world on Zionists or the Mossad, but not the Jews; when you ask them the tough questions, they have no logical answer. And when they have no arguments left, they always resort to name calling. It's happened to me every time I've engaged any of these dopes in debate.
As for being called an islamophobe. Let's look at it this way. Anti-Semites create paranoid fantasies where Jews, or Zionists, or the Mossad are part of some insidious conspiracy to take over the world, or spread Zionism, or oppress the "Palestinians" or control the government. It used to be contained in the fetid fever swamps of delusional weirdos on the fringes of society. But now, thanks to the advance of Islam into the West, and their willing progressive dupes in the media and on college campuses, it's become another respected point of view. And that does have me concerned.
"Islamophobes" merely read the news and pay attention to the depravities being committed by Muslims around the world. And we take them seriously instead of trying to excuse them in fits of multicultural "understanding". And we certainly don't believe it when a Canadian newspaper can find no pattern in the arrests of suspects in a terror plot who all just happen to be Muslims. Nor do we ignore the fact that French "youths" who are torching cars every night in the suburbs of Paris are Muslims. Reports like this and this and this and this just from the past two days on Little Green Footballs help to fuel the fire of distrust of the Muslims world in this islamophobe. It doesn't even include the anti-Israel aspects of professional women's tennis that LGF and Debbie Schlussel are reporting on. And if you notice, Islam or Muslims are never responsible for any evil done by Muslims in the name of Islam, never ever. It's not a Muslims man's fault he can't control his sexual urges. It's the fault of women, who must be covered from head to to in a shapeless garment so nobody can know who or what is under it.
OK, so that's only true in some Islamic countries. In others, women can show their faces. Wow, that's a huge step toward freedom!
So with all of the vicious hatred coming from the Muslim world, I will continue to be on my guard, and I will continue to stand up for the one democracy in the Middle East, the one Jewish country in the world, no matter how much anyone with a morally inverted view of the world tries to convince me with their mental gymnastics and delusional thinking that good is evil and evil is good.
As expected because it happens every time Israel takes the gloves off and defends itself, the MSM has decided that the big bad Israelis are hurting the poor defenseless Gazans. As Michael Oren reports,
International's coverage of Saturday's fighting in Gaza concluded at midnight with a rush of images: mangled civilians writhing in the rubble, primitive hospitals overflowing with the wounded, fireballs mushrooming between apartment complexes, the funeral of a Palestinian child. Missing from the montage, however, was even a fleeting glimpse of the tens of thousands of Israelis who spent last night and much of last week in bomb shelters; of the house in Netivot, where a man was killed by a Grad missile; or indeed any of the hundreds of rockets, mortar shells, and other projectiles fired by Hamas since the breakdown of the so-called ceasefire. This was CNN at its unprincipled worst, grossly skewering its coverage of a complex event and deceiving its viewers. Yet Israel should not have been surprised.
What's even more sickening, hypocritical, and downright evil is that, as we all know, there is real oppression going on in the world. As Nat Hentoff points out,
If Eleanor Roosevelt were still here, she would be enraged and sickened by the utter failure of the United Nations, which she nurtured into being, to stop the continually mounting horrors inflicted on the people of Zimbabwe by its insatiably evil president, Robert Mugabe. While the United Nations just mutters away, in a Dec. 7 lead editorial, the Washington Times got to the rotting core of his rule: "People are starving and compete in the countryside with baboons, jackals and goats for roots and wild fruits; health care has imploded and cholera is on the march as water and sewer systems collapse; and refugees by the millions have left the country." Some of those refugees bring cholera with them to neighboring states.
South Africa keeps shaming itself by continuing only to "mediate" this virulent crisis as if it's possible to mediate relations with a plague. And the 15-nation Southern African Development Community also continues its minuet with deadly Mugabe. Only Botswana and Kenya face the naked truth and call for his removal." Said Mugabe (Associated Press, Dec. 19): "Zimbabwe is mine."
And don't forget other places where innocent people are being slaughtered for one reason or another. But the world can't be bothered to care as Israel must be condemned because those uppity Jews just don't know their place in the world. And it's not just Muslims who expect dhimmi behavior from Israel, most of the rest of the world does too.
At some point, though, don’t we need to ask, “How innocent are those ordinary Gazan civilians, anyway?” Just two weeks ago, tens of thousands of these civilians attended an enormous Hamas rally glorifying the Qassam rockets they launch into Israel. The entertainment was an ugly “play” in which a Palestinian dressed as kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was “humiliated” onstage.
[ . . . ]
At some point, though, don’t we need to ask, “How innocent are those ordinary Gazan civilians, anyway?” Just two weeks ago, tens of thousands of these civilians attended an enormous Hamas rally glorifying the Qassam rockets they launch into Israel. The entertainment was an ugly “play” in which a Palestinian dressed as kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was “humiliated” onstage.
Debbie Schlussel makes an important point as to the ineptitude of current Israeli leadership. We can only hope that they sharpen up immediately. They've taken the initiative. They'd better keep it.
Over at Little Green Footballs, a fairly bizarre video was posted, its creator alleging that it's a North Korean anti-American video. After watching it, I randomly picked another one to watch by the same person. About 1 minute and 19 seconds into this video, it gets too hilarious for words. Could this be a hoax? If so, it's much more entertaining than the one from that arthole from Yale. Only an idiot could believe that the claims in this video are real, but there are a lot of idiots in this world. In any event, watch it and get a good belly laugh.
Debbie Schlussel has some great reasons here and some even better reasons here to not vote for Obama. If that weren't enough (and for me it is), there is this at Little Green Footballs. It's most troubling point is that Obama proclaims:
“Once I’m elected, I want to organize a summit in the Muslim world, with all the heads of state, to have an honest discussion about ways to bridge the gap that grows every day between Muslims and the West.”
And that was not a one-time-and-then-forget-that-he said-it statement. Yesterday on CNN, he stated again that he would sit down with our friends and enemies, or as Abe Greenwald calls it, he would maintain a position against our enemies calling for
. . . a doctrine of pre-emptive appeasement and the perfect advisory team to institute it, . . .
Ahh, but that's not all, boys and girls, for over at American Digest, we have this.
By now everyone has weighed in on the Pew survey on Islamic extremsim. I'm not sure there's much left to say. The enablers of Islamism try to spin the results in order to lull us into complacency. We shouldn't worry about that "tiny minority of extremists". As Imam Elahi says in this Detroit News report,
"Our tradition leaves no place and no justification for suicide bombings," said Imam Mohammed Ali Elahi, the leader of the Islamic House of Wisdom in Dearborn Heights.
"I think that if other Americans read this stuff they'll say, 'Wow, and they are right next door.' " Elahi said. "But I am 17 years in this country and I haven't faced any young individuals who say it is OK in Islam to have a suicide bomb and to support suicide bombings."
Obviously if Elahi hasn't seen it, it doesn't exist. After all, he's been in this country for 17 years. Why doesn't that comfort me? The fact that news outlets can report on this survey and not find it the least bit interesting that Islam is the only religion that promotes this kind of violence as they try to put a happy face on it is mind boggling.
Here is a good piece on the current Muslim Cartoon Mania from Charles Moore at the Daily Telegraph.
It's some time since I visited Palestine, so I may be out of date, but I don't remember seeing many Danish flags on sale there. Not much demand, I suppose. I raise the question because, as soon as the row about the cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in Jyllands-Posten broke, angry Muslims popped up in Gaza City, and many other places, well supplied with Danish flags ready to burn. (In doing so, by the way, they offered a mortal insult to the most sacred symbol of my own religion, Christianity, since the Danish flag has a cross on it, but let that pass.)
Why were those Danish flags to hand? Who built up the stockpile so that they could be quickly dragged out right across the Muslim world and burnt where television cameras would come and look? The more you study this story of "spontaneous" Muslim rage, the odder it seems.
The complained-of cartoons first appeared in October; they have provoked such fury only now. As reported in this newspaper yesterday, it turns out that a group of Danish imams circulated the images to brethren in Muslim countries. When they did so, they included in their package three other, much more offensive cartoons which had not appeared in Jyllands-Posten but were lumped together so that many thought they had.
It rather looks as if the anger with which all Muslims are said to be burning needed some pretty determined stoking. Peter Mandelson, who seems to think that his job as European Trade Commissioner entitles him to pronounce on matters of faith and morals, accuses the papers that republished the cartoons of "adding fuel to the flames"; but those flames were lit (literally, as well as figuratively) by well-organised, radical Muslims who wanted other Muslims to get furious. How this network has operated would make a cracking piece of investigative journalism.
By the way, this article and the one in my previous post were linked by commentators on Little Green Footballs.
Some Muslim ambassadors expressed anger that the Danish government could go no further, repeating earlier distaste at any "expression, action or indication that attempts to demonise groups of people on the basis of their religion or ethnic background."
. . . unless you're demonising Jews, as we can see from these cartoons from the Arab world.
According to a post at Little Green Footballs Muslim students at Harper College in Chicago protested this art exhibit. In true dhimmi fashion, it was closed within hours, free speech and freedom of expression be damned! But are any Muslims anywhere in the world outraged at this atrocity commited by Muslims on Christians?
JAKARTA, Indonesia - Unidentified assailants attacked a group of high school girls on Saturday in Indonesia's tense province of Central Sulawesi, beheading three and seriously wounding a fourth, police said.
The students from a private Christian high school were ambushed while walking through a cocoa plantation in Poso Kota subdistrict on their way to class, police Maj. Riky Naldo said. The rural area is close to the provincial capital of Poso, about 1,000 miles northeast of the Indonesian capital Jakarta.
He said the heads of the three dead girls were found several miles from their bodies.
Indonesia is the world's most populous Muslim nation. But Central Sulawesi has a roughly equal number of Muslims and Christians. The province on Sulawesi island was the scene of a bloody sectarian war in 2001-2002 that killed around 1,000 people from both communities.
At the time, beheadings, burnings and other atrocities were common.
A government-mediated truce ended the conflict in early 2002 but since then, there have been a series of bomb attacks and assassinations targeting Christians. A market attack in the predominantly Christian town of Poso killed 22 people in May.
Oops! Wait a minute. As I reread the article I see that the Christian girls were attacked by "unidentified assailants". It must have been a subtle unconcious Islamophobia within me that made me assume the beheaders were Muslim. The killers could be from any of the numerous and varied religious terrorist groups that target Christians in Indonesia and behead their victims.
I sure hope the Muslim students from Harper College don't get upset with me for assuming that any vicious unprovoked attack on, and subsequent beheading of innocent Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddists, or Muslims is necessarily perpetrated by Muslim terrorists.
This opinion piece was linked to at Little Green Footballs but it should be linked to from as many sites as possible. As many of us should read it as possible. Go read it, and report back to me.
When the alleged Koran abuse story was posted last week on Little Green Footballs, it followed on the footsteps of another report, this one about a teenaged Muslim girl being severly beaten by her brother for dating an infidel.I left the following comment on LGF as sonofsheldon:
MEMO To: The Police From: The Muslim Community Re: Responding to crimes in the Muslim community.
If we murder our daughters, that is our business, not yours. Stay away.
In all cases of Koran desecration, real, contrived, phony, or imagined; get here NOW.
cc: to the FBI
From my point of view, that of a caring father, some in the Muslim community have their priorities mixed up.
Now we find, according to Michelle Malkin (and from today's Detroit Free Press) the whole incident was a big misunderstanding.
It turns out, you see, that the burnt Koran was left at the mosque by…a Muslim student.
According to the AP, a Muslim Virginia Tech student took responsibility saying he dropped off the burned Koran and other singed materials at the mosque, hoping "it could be given a respectful disposal." Police Lt. Bruce Bradberry reported that the student, who was not named, apparently contacted police last week, "saying he was going to be traveling abroad and didn't know what to do with the Koran, which had been burned in a 2004 house fire. The student said he placed the book and other fire-damaged materials in a bag and left the bag at the Islamic Center with a note, which apparently blew away."
Whoops.
We know that neither CAIR nor any of the other organizations representing the American Muslim community will apologize for their agonized cries of racism, islamophobia, hate crime, un-American behavior, and what ever other claims they could invent to stoke the fires of victimhood. I can live with that. They have their agenda. It's clear to anyone who will listen.
What bothers me are the infidel Americans who buy into this twisted thought process. I still don't know why so many in the MSM side with the enemy. Do they hate Bush so much that they've become irrational? Have they so lost their faith in western values and civilization that they're willing to play into the hands of an inferior, theocratic, culture that is trying to swallow us? I've read and listened to the explanations by pundits that I trust; Dennis Prager, Victor Hanson, and others, but it still doesn't make any sense.
Western civilization has given more to the world in terms of morality, wealth, and innovation than any civilization that has ever existed. No we are not perfect. There is no perfection this side of the grave. But how can people who have landed at the top in terms of wealth, quality of life, and influence embrace such a hateful regime?
As Iowahawk wrote here and especially here in two masterful satirical pieces that earned the wrath, and demonstrated the stupidity of some on the left especially at the Daily Kos:
And the next time one of you chicken martyrs puts on a keffiya and starts babbling about “solidarity with the resistance,” remember this: just because we are planning to kill you last doesn’t make you our buddy.
That doesn't sound very funny, but like the best satire, it tells the truth. And that is definitely the truth. So why don't those resentful dopes on the left get it?
This is the latest attack on Buddists in Thailand by - dare I say it? - Muslims. Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs has been linking to almost daily reports of Muslim attackers shooting and beheading Buddists in a local terror campaign.
Chicken trader Tonkui Saephoo, 72, was shot dead at a food market in Yaring district of Pattani province by unidentified gunmen, police said, adding that investigators were still at the scene.
In the same province, 52-year-old Thanat Nilvisut, a janitor at Pattani Technical College, was shot dead as he traveled to work.
More than 720 people have died in near-daily attacks or clashes with security forces since January 2004, when a bloody raid on a weapons depot triggered an uprising in the three majority-Muslim southern provinces bordering Malaysia.
In Narathiwat province, suspected Islamic insurgents spray gunfire at teachers' homes, resulting in at least one teacher being shot in the arm.
Suspected Muslim insurgents shot and then beheaded a local official in southern Thailand on Wednesday in an attack believed to be part of ongoing sectarian violence in the area, police said.
Surin Somchit, an employee of the community water authority, was shot and wounded by four bullets fired near his office in Narathiwat province's Rangae district, police Capt. Songphol Juimanee said.
The as yet unknown number of attackers then cut off their victim's head with a machete and dumped it by the roadside, he said.
According to witnesses, Surin was supervising more than 10 workers laying a water pipe in a rubber plantation, when two gunman arrived on motorcycle and shouted at them in Yawi _ a dialect of Malay spoken mainly by local Muslims _ to run for their lives before they opened fire.
"It seems that the attackers targeted him as a Buddhist, that's why they shout in Yawi," Songphol said. Buddhist Thais generally do not speak much Yawi.
Songphol said police suspect the attackers were Islamic insurgents who are seeking to separate the Muslim-dominated south from the rest of Thailand.
The insurgents launched a campaign of violence at the beginning of last year that has met with a sharp response from authorities and claimed more than 880 lives in Thailand's three southernmost provinces, Yala, Pattani and Narathiwat.
The beheading was the sixth carried out this month and the second to take place in daylight hours. Only three other beheadings have taken place in the 18-month wave of violence, one in May last year in Narathiwat, and two others in November.
All of the victims who have been beheaded, including the one on Wednesday, were Buddhists, and Thai officials believe the attacks are an attempt to terrorize Buddhists in the south into leaving the area.
In another incident Wednesday, a gunman on the back of a motorcycle shot and killed a roadside vendor in another area of Narathiwat, police said. On Tuesday, suspected Islamic insurgents fatally shot four people.
Drive-by shootings and bombings have become near daily occurrences in the three southernmost provinces.
The escalation in violence has been attributed to the return of a decades-old separatist movement thought to have disappeared after a government amnesty in the 1980s.
Southern Thai Muslims have long complained of unfair treatment by the central government, mainly in jobs and education, and have expressed dissatisfaction at heavy-handed government efforts to quash the latest violence.
I've got two questions, first, the obvious: How is it that Muslims are complaining of mistreatment as they murder and desecrate the bodies of people of other religions? Second, why is it that the only time I've read about the murders in Thailand was when Thai officials were accused of abusing Muslim suspects a few months ago? In our politically correct news reporting, have Buddists become as expendable as Jews and the truth? Let's face it - Muslims do not work and play well with others. Eventually the MSM has to admit to that fact no matter how much it enrages Muslims.
I linked to this story called, "Are Arab Professors masterminding terror?" by way of Dr. Sanity
It has been called “the most significant terrorism trial” since 9-11: the first time alleged leaders of Islamic Jihad, self-confessed killers of more than 100 Israelis and two Americans, are being tried in an American court; the first time the controversial Patriot Act has lassoed jihadists of this magnitude; and the first time that Arab professors in an American university who have claimed “academic freedom” for their pro-Palestinians views have been indicted for using their university offices to direct and finance terrorist activity.
Yet most New Yorkers are oblivious to this case because The New York Times, let alone most other northern newspapers, has decided not to cover the extraordinary testimony being heard now in a Tampa, Fla., courtroom.
Charged with racketeering, conspiracy, materially aiding terrorists and running the American office of Palestinian Islamic Jihad are Kuwaiti-born Palestinian Sami Al-Arian, former professor at the University of South Florida; Sameeh Hammoudeh, a former instructor at the university; and two Islamic activists, Hatim Fariz and Ghassan Ballut.
Also mentioned in the indictment is Ramadan Abdullah Shallah, who was an adjunct professor of Middle Eastern studies at USF before returning to Syria when he was appointed leader of Islamic Jihad in 1995. Shallah came to the United States on a visa sponsored by Al-Arian.
Government prosecutor Walter Furr declared to the jury that Al-Arian at one point from his Tampa office was the most powerful man in all of Islamic Jihad.
There have been other remarkable trials this month. The Times ran Michael Jackson’s acquittal in a multi-column banner across the front page, and provided daily coverage to the trial of Edgar Ray Killen, the former Klansman convicted of manslaughter in the deaths of three civil rights workers in Mississippi 41 years ago.
Clearly the Mississippi trial warranted that coverage, but one can make the case that Islamic Jihad is to the 21st century what the Klan was to the 20th and that the trial of Al-Arian is every bit analogous to Killen’s.
The Times, however, after three stories covering the opening of the Al-Arian trial has decided to take it off the daily beat.
Eric Lichtblau, the Times reporter on the case, wrote in an e-mail to The Jewish Week, “It’s uncertain when I’ll be back in Tampa, but we’ll be monitoring the trial and probably doing occasional stories along the way on key witnesses, the start of the defense, closings and the verdict. That’s the norm for a case of interest like this one. There are very few trials that we or other national media cover on a day-to-day or even weekly basis, and the slow start for the prosecution in Al-Arian didn’t suggest there would be enough to warrant frequent coverage. But if you hear of something interesting on it, let me know.”
It's a fascinating article both because of the subject and because of what it demonstrates about our Mainstream Media. Neither this article nor the next one are mentioned in my own Detroit News and Detroit Free Press. I looked. They aren't there.
The largest terrorist WMD trial in history is opening in Jordan. 13 Al-Qaida and Al-Zarqawi loyalists are being tried for an attempted and nearly succcessful catastrophic chemical weapons attack on Jordan.
Developments: * Defendents throw shoes in court! * Defendents chant "Allahu akbar" for over a half an hour to disrupt the court * Defendent, Al-Jayouzi threatens tribunal with "Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi will chop off your heads and stuff it up your mouths!" * The terrorists communicated with "secret ink"!
"Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi will chop off your heads and stuff it up your mouths, you God’s enemies!" Al-Jayouzi threatened during initital proceedings in May.
Ten of the captured Al-Qaida terrorists on trial in Jordan for attempting to explode roughly 20 tons of chemical weapons with explosives. Authorities captured the weapons coming into Jordan through Syria.
The most dangerous terrorist plot ever foiled and brought to trial is being prosecuted right now in Jorddan. Al-Jayouzi, a follower of Al-Zarqawi, is on trial for planning and attempting to execute a Chemical Weapons attack in Jordan that could have killed as many as 80,000 civilians:
Al-Jayousi, identified as the head of a Jordanian terror cell, said he first met al-Zarqawi in Afghanistan, where al-Jayousi said he studied explosives, "before Afghanistan fell."
He said he later met al-Zarqawi in neighboring Iraq to plan the attacks, but was not specific about when.
"I have pledged loyalty to Abu-Musab to fully be obedient and listen to him without discussion," al-Jayousi said in the 20-minute videotape.
The commentator on the tape, who wasn't further identified, said the plotters targeted Jordan's secret service, its prime minister's office and the U.S. Embassy.
"At least 80,000 people would have been killed," the commentator said. Al-Zarqawi "is the terrorist" who plotted this operation."
This article is pasted together from many sources, but it gives quite a picture of the destruction and slaughter these psychos are willing to commit. It also shows quite clearly that they have no morals, that they are evil, and that they deserve no sympathy. Those who excuse their crimes and attemted crimes are as twisted as the perpetrators.
MADISON HEIGHTS -- The Oakland County Prosecutor's Office on Thursday will attempt to permanently end the parental rights of a Madison Heights couple who police say neglected to seek medical help for their daughter after her older brother allegedly beat her over her relationship with a non-Muslim boy.
The 15-year-old girl, who is a Madison Heights Lamphere High junior, suffered a broken back in the beating, according to court documents. The trial to determine whether parental custody rights should be terminated is set for Thursday before Oakland Circuit Judge Joan Young.
The girl's brother, Ahmad Abdelmomen, 21, is charged with aggravated assault in the April 29 incident at their home in Madison Heights.
As more unassimilated Muslims populate the United States, we are hearing more and more about crimes like this. In a Muslim country, it would remain a family matter. As they work to turn our country in a Muslim theocracy, with help from the multi-cultural, anti-capitalist left and the anti-American press, some Muslims are trying to keep attacks like this one a secret. They refused to give their daughter medical attention and made her lie about the incident.
The most disturbing part is this is only a few miles from my house. Sometimes I see Muslims at my local Sam's Club. The women always have their heads covered, and sometimes there is the very obedient Burka-clad wife with her husband. I often think of walking up to them with a hearty "Shalom!" and offer to shake the husband's hand. Then I think: Would they shake hands with a Jew? Are they terrorists, or merely terror supporters? If they had the chance, would they murder me and my family because we are Jews?
These thoughts probably make me a racist and an "islamophobe" in the eyes of some. So what. I'm a realist as far as I'm concerned. I don't like having these kinds of thoughts. I never had thoughts like this before September 11, 2001. Something must have happened that day to change the way I think. I wish I could remember what.
I know many Muslims in the U.S. just want to be free to raise their families, and left alone to live the American Dream. They aren't the ones driving the debate though. They'll get caught in the crossfire if we allow our country to follow in the footsteps of Europe.
By the way, I couldn't find this story in the further left leaning Detroit Free Press. Maybe they didn't want to stir up negative feelings against our Muslim neighbors, just because one Muslim family did something vile and abhorrent to a disobedient daughter.
My thanks go to Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs for yesterday's reminder that it was World Refugee Day. Somehow it competely slipped my mind.
World Refugee Day? I too, at first, thought it was just another Hallmark Holiday designed by those greedy capitalist cardmakers to force us to purchase more cards. But no, it's sponsored by those crafty anti-semites at the U.N. in order to remind us once again that those poor Palestinians, after 57 years, are still wasting away in squalid refugee camps. Oh, wait, they're not wasting away, they're reproducing like rabbits, busily creating the next generation of homicide bombers. But let's face it. They are supposed to garner our sympathy.
I have no sympathy for them. At the same time Palestinians were fleeing their homes so that five Arab armies would have the room they needed to rain death and destruction on the newly born nation of Israel, Jewish refugees were being driven out of their homes all over the Arab world. Where there used to be almost a million Jews in the Arab world, now it's close to being Juden-free.
And yet 57 years later, when the number of Palestian "refugees" has tripled, there are no Jewish refugees. What happened to all of those Jewish refugees? We know the answer to that. They created a vibrant democratic society smack dab in the middle of a bunch of festering theocratic dictatorships. And what do they get for their troubles? Decades of villification from foreign governments, protests from brainless, terror-supporting leftists, and war from their jealous neighbors.
How dare a bunch of Jews create wealth in the middle of poverty! How dare they make the desert bloom! How dare they create industry, agriculture, educational opportunity, and military superiority amongst the most repressive, fascistic cultures on Earth! How dare they create real ecomomic opportunity (jobs) for Palestinians! How dare they show the Muslim world that Jews do NOT have to bow down to them in order to thrive! How dare the Jews not come crawling to the World Body as victims, like the Palestinians are doing now.
Nobody is doing the Palestinians any favors by allowing them their self-conferred victim status. It's way past time for them to stop trying to destroy Israel, stop whining about how they've been wronged, and start building a real society.
World Refugee Day? I think not! John Bolton as U.S. ambassador to the U.N. I think so.
I found this lovely, heartwarming family photo over at Little Green Footballs a few days ago. It certainly gives me the warm fuzzies as I contemplate how the Palestinians demonstrate their overwhelming overtures of peace toward the Israelis.
Uh oh! I hope no members of the American anti-gun crowd get a load of this photo! They will be outraged!
I found the link to this ariticle by Nicholas D. Kristoff over at Little Green Footballs. It's called A Policy of Rape. It's about conditions in Sudan, which if you read the piece, you may agree, are much worse than in the "gulag" at Gitmo. You have to wonder if the dopes at AI pay attention to situations like this. Or are they so upset that Israel and The United States aren't perfect according to their standards, that they can't focus on the real human rights abuses in the world.
I linked to Tehran's Killing Fields from Little Green Footballs. It's a disturbing article but being obnoxious and somewhat anonymous, I was ready to offer sarcastic comments on how the world and "human rights" organizations would blame the Jewish/American/Zionist/Crusader/Bush boogy man, until I got to this line:
The quality of Iranian education is high, comparable to Western countries.
I'm not sure if says more about Iran or more about the West, but it does make one wonder how we're going to maintain our civilization. We're under attack from the outside. We're under attack from the inside. And we're not educating our children as well as a theocratic, barbaric nation, whose population is under the thumb of criminal mullahs, and where the biggest concern when stoning an innocent woman to death is the size of the stones.
You can do anything but stay off of my Blue Suede Koran
I was blog bouncing, following stories about the fake but innacurate report from Newsweek on the Koran flushing incident, starting at Little Green Footballs then checking out Michelle Malkin; linked from her to USS Neverdock and from there, linked to The Beleaguered Christians of the Palestinian-Controlled Areas, by David Raab. It's a lengthy but enlightening and valuable article. Remember the siege of the Church of the Nativity? According to the article:
When the siege finally ended, the PA soldiers left the church in terrible condition:
The Palestinian gunmen holed up in the Church of the Nativity seized church stockpiles of food and "ate like greedy monsters" until the food ran out, while more than 150 civilians went hungry. They also guzzled beer, wine, and Johnnie Walker scotch that they found in priests' quarters, undeterred by the Islamic ban on drinking alcohol. The indulgence lasted for about two weeks into the 39-day siege, when the food and drink ran out, according to an account by four Greek Orthodox priests who were trapped inside for the entire ordeal.... The Orthodox priests and a number of civilians have said the gunmen created a regime of fear. Even in the Roman Catholic areas of the complex there was evidence of disregard for religious norms. Catholic priests said that some Bibles were torn up for toilet paper, and many valuable sacramental objects were removed. "Palestinians took candelabra, icons and anything that looked like gold," said a Franciscan, the Rev. Nicholas Marquez from Mexico.
Should we be surprised? We know there's a double standard when it comes to Islamic desecration of Jewish and Christian holy sites. And even when it comes to slaughtering innocents, how much outrage is expressed when a busload of Israelis is killed by a homicide bomber, compared to the outrage over this non-crime against Islam?
Also, as Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs reminds us, Newsweek is ready to take the word of a lying jihadi, but doubts the veracity of our own army spokesmen.
Last night I went to the opening night of the local high school production of The Music Man. Back when I was in high school, I sat through our thespians' production. This production was far better. My son was in it. He didn't have a big part, but he shined. Last year they did Fiddler on the Roof, and my then fourth-grade daughter was in it along with my son. It was a wonderful show, and wouldn't you know it, better than when my high school put it on back in the olden days. My daughter couldn't get a part this year, because, as it was explained to me, they wanted to give more of the little kids a chance. Had she been in it, of course, it would have been an even better production.
Why bring this up? Like other parents around the world, I want my children to be exposed to many different aspects of life. I want them to have choices, to "know what's out there". Over the years they've had after school activities like so many other kids: dance, piano, guitar, plays, karate, soccer, basketball, Hebrew School, art camp, and on and on and on . . .
As we can see from the photo, courtesy of Associated Press, some parents have other ideas of how to raise children and the kinds of extra-curricular activities they approve for their children.
Two Views of Raising Children
For people who claim to want peace, the Palestinians have a strange way of raising their children. Lest you think this is an isolated case, check out this slideshow over at little green footballs. It makes one wonder if they really will be satisfied living side by side with Israel.
"No one can find a safe way out for himself if socety is sweeping towards destruction. Therefore everyone, in his own interests, must thrust himself vigorously into the intellectual battle. None can stand aside with unconcern; the interests of everyone hang on the result." -- Ludwig von Mises
War's legitimate object is more perfect peace. Flavius Vegitius Renatus
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CHALLAH AKBAR
