Friday, December 22, 2006
- Episode Of Blonde, from When I Was Cruel by Elvis Costello
- Footprints, from Roll Away the Stone by Kelly Joe Phelps
- All My Life, from One by One by Foo Fighters
- Railroad Bill, from Shaken By a Low Sound by Crooked Still
- Long As You Know You're Living Yours, from Belonging by Keith Jarrett
- Tractor Pull, from Handwritten Notes by Preston Reed
- In the Highways, from O Brother, Where Art Thou? by Sarah, Hanna and Leah Peasall
- Eyes Of The World, from Finn Brothers by Finn Brothers
- Hymn to Mary, from Hymns by Beth Nielsen Chapman
- In the Sweet By and By, from Lookout for Hope by Jerry Douglas
Open the playlist in a new window.
An Indian from the Kerala region narrowly escaped being beheaded in the religious apartheid kingdom of Saudi Arabia, for the capital crime of entering a Muslims-only area in the “holy” city of Medina: Death penalty: Saudi court spares Keralite. (Hat tip: a.)
A Keralite, who was reportedly facing death sentence in Saudi Arabia, has been set free due to timely intervention of Indian authorities.
Jojo Joseph of Edathua in the district was on Monday ordered to be beheaded for entering the holy place of Medina despite a bar on non-Muslims.
According to Jojo’s family members in Edathua, the Saudi authorities later took a lenient view of the case after they were convinced that he did not deliberately commit the mistake.
Jojo, employed in an electronic shop in Jeddah, ran into trouble while rushing in a cab to a hospital where his wife had given birth to a child. The taxi driver took a wrong route and strayed into the prohibited area, his family members said.
The Indian was then spotted by religious volunteers, who handed him to police.
Just in time for the holiday season, the government has halted the Secure Flight anti-terrorism screening program, thanks to the efforts of privacy advocate groups: Report Says TSA Violated Privacy Law. (Hat tip: AJ Strata.)
Secure Flight, the U.S. government’s stalled program to screen domestic air passengers against terrorism watch lists, violated federal law during a crucial test phase, according to a report to be issued today by the Homeland Security Department’s privacy office.
The agency found that by gathering passenger data from commercial brokers in 2004 without notifying the passengers, the program violated a 1974 Privacy Act requirement that the public be made aware of any changes in a federal program that affects the privacy of U.S. citizens. “As ultimately implemented, the commercial data test conducted in connection with the Secure Flight program testing did not match [the Transportation Security Administration’s] public announcements,” the report states.
The finding marks the first time that the Homeland Security Department has acknowledged that the problem-plagued Secure Flight program has violated the law. It comes at a time when a separate program to screen international passengers is under attack for officials’ failure to disclose until recently that they were creating passenger profiles that would be stored for 40 years.
The report on Secure Flight says that “the disparity between what TSA proposed to do and what it actually did in the testing program resulted in significant privacy concerns being raised. . . . Privacy missteps such as these undercut an agency’s effort to implement a program effectively, even one that promises to improve security.”
Congress has halted Secure Flight, except for testing, until it can allay privacy and security concerns.
Should be faster to get through check-in, anyway.
Everybody wants the credit for the Democrats’ success in the mid-term elections: Al Qaeda Sends a Message to Democrats. (Hat tip: LGF readers.)
Al Qaeda has sent a message to leaders of the Democratic party that credit for the defeat of congressional Republicans belongs to the terrorists.
In a portion of the tape from al Qaeda No. 2 man, Ayman al Zawahri, made available only today, Zawahri says he has two messages for American Democrats.
“The first is that you aren’t the ones who won the midterm elections, nor are the Republicans the ones who lost. Rather, the Mujahideen — the Muslim Ummah’s vanguard in Afghanistan and Iraq — are the ones who won, and the American forces and their Crusader allies are the ones who lost,” Zawahri said, according to a full transcript obtained by ABC News.
Zawahri calls on the Democrats to negotiate with him and Osama bin Laden, not others in the Islamic world who Zawahri says cannot help.
“And if you don’t refrain from the foolish American policy of backing Israel, occupying the lands of Islam and stealing the treasures of the Muslims, then await the same fate,” he said.
UPDATE at 12/22/06 3:17:34 pm:
The verdict from the Kos Kidz on this disquieting shout-out from one of the world’s most rabid terrorists: “The analysis is quite accurate.” (Hat tip: Killgore Trout.)
What I find remarkable is al-Zawahari’s insight into American politics. He understands the last election was about George Bush’s war. He understands that we are Americans first and that party affiliation is, where foreign policy is concerned, less relevant. He warns all Americans that we share the responsibility as a country for allowing George Bush to occupy Iraq, and ignore the plight of the Palestinians. The warnings are strong, and the analysis is quite accurate.
It’s a subject that’s been covered at LGF many times, so it’s good to finally see an article like Max Boot’s in the mainstream media: Hitler’s Mideast helpers.
In Ahmadinejad’s view, shared by countless others across the Middle East, whatever the Nazis did is no business of theirs, so why inflict the “Zionist entity” on their region? It is only a small step from this position to claiming that Israel’s destruction is justified.
Pointless though it may be to argue with a madman, it is worth noting that Muslims were not as blameless in the genocide of the Jews as Ahmadinejad and his ilk would have it. Arabs were, on a small scale, cheerleaders and enablers of the Final Solution. The most famous example was Haj Amin Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem (and uncle of Yasser Arafat), who took refuge in Berlin in World War II. A rabid Nazi, he personally lobbied Hitler to kill as many Jews as possible and even helped out by recruiting Bosnian Muslims to serve in the Waffen SS.
Robert Satloff, one of the world’s smartest Arabists, reveals other links between the Arabs and the Holocaust in his groundbreaking new book, “Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust’s Long Reach Into Arab Lands.” He shows how the Nazis set up the machinery of death in North Africa. Although “only” 4,000 to 5,000 Jews died before the Allies liberated the area in 1943, many more were consigned to forced labor camps in hellish conditions.
“Arabs played a role at every level,” Satloff wrote. “Some went door to door with the Germans, pointing out Jews for arrest. Others led Jewish workers on forced marches or served as overseers at labor camps.”
The picture is not entirely one-sided because, although most Arabs were either apathetic or sympathetic to the Nazis, a small number helped their Jewish neighbors. Satloff uncovered lost tales of “righteous Gentiles,” such as the wartime rulers of Morocco and Tunisia. And on the whole, he found that Arabs behaved no worse under German occupation than did Europeans.
But that isn’t saying much because almost every country on the Continent was heavily complicit in the extermination of their Jewish populations.
What will it take for the United States to acknowledge that Iran is openly at war with us, and has been for decades? Here’s a ruling that gives some legal weight to that position: Judge: Iran owes $254M in terror attack. (Hat tip: LGF readers.)
WASHINGTON - The Iranian government financed a 1996 terrorist attack that killed 19 Americans in Saudi Arabia and must pay $254 million to the victims’ families, a federal judge ruled Friday.
The ruling by U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth allows families of the victims of the Khobar Towers bombing to seek their compensation from assets that have been seized from the conservative Islamic regime in Tehran.
On June 25, 1996, a truck bomb exploded in a military housing area known as the Khobar Towers dormitory near Dhahran. U.S. authorities have long alleged that the bombing was carried out by a Saudi wing of the militant group Hezbollah, which receives support from Iran and Syria.
Though Lamberth has previously ruled that a survivor of the blast could seek payment from Iran, Friday’s ruling was the first time Tehran has been blamed for the deaths of the Americans in the bombing.
“The defendants also provided money, training and travel documents to Saudi Hezbollah members in order to facilitate the attacks,” Lamberth wrote. “Moreover, the sheer gravity and nature of the attack demonstrate the defendants’ unlawful intent to inflict severe emotional distress upon the American servicemen as well as their close relatives.”
Syria and Iran’s terrorist army Hizballah is extending its reach into southeastern Turkey near the Syrian border: The Southeast and the Hezbollah. (Hat tip: mc.)
I have written a couple of times in my column in the Hürriyet daily that as we engage with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) canker in the Southeast, a far-reaching movement in the depth is taking root among the regions’ people: Hezbollah.
Unlike the PKK, the movement, at least for now, is not resorting to violence. It directly addresses the social structure and deals with poverty. It brings health and education services to the citizens and gives them food. Its method is very similar to the Hezbollah of Lebanon or to that of Hamas in Palestine.
I once wrote, “As the Southeast is being cleaned of the PKK, measures to keep it from falling into the lap of Hezbollah, the ascending organization in the region, should be taken now.”
The Hezbollah issue was taken up in the last National Security Council (MGK) meeting.
UPDATE at 12/22/06 3:27:32 pm:
Correction: according to FAS, Turkish Hizballah is a Sunni extremist group unrelated to the Lebanese Shi’ite group. (Hat tip: zellmad.)
Rep. Virgil Goode (R-Va.) is the latest target of the radical Islamist front group known as the Council on American Islamic Relations, after he wrote a letter to constituents criticizing Keith Ellison for using a Koran at his swearing-in ceremony: Goode won’t retract letter critical of Ellison. (Hat tip: Gates of Vienna.)
You can find the full letter at TPM Muckraker, a “progressive” site that’s beating the racism drum as hard as they can: Virgil Goode Archives.
Rep. Goode’s comments are at best insensitive, and at worst, over the top. But the level of outrage directed at him is also over the top, and is part of a concerted, ongoing effort by CAIR to silence critics of their Saudi-funded Islamist agenda, aided by useful idiots like the TPM crew. Unfortunately, Goode’s ham-fisted remarks gave them ammunition.
Keith Ellison, for his part, says there’s “really nothing to fear” from Muslims.
But for some reason, the Franklin County police department is on alert at Goode’s public appearances.
Franklin County Sheriff Quint Overton said he had extra officers at the courthouse Thursday because Goode had received several threatening phone calls.
Asked at the press conference whether he had received any death threats, Goode responded, “No comment.”
The Council on American-Islamic Relations said Goode’s remarks sent “a message of intolerance that is unworthy of anyone elected to public office,” and called on Goode to apologize.
Iowahawk has been first-draft dumpster-diving again; this time he’s surfaced with an early version of Wall Street Journal columnist Joseph Rago’s attack on the blogosphere.
The blogs are not as significant as their self-endeared, preening, narcissist curators would like to think. Real journalism requires journalists, who are at least fitfully confronting the digital age — it takes hardbitten, cynical J-school trained newshounds in fedoras and trench coats, willing to dig and probe and expense whatever it takes to break the big story, getting their facts straight the first time, and making sure they’ve saved all the relevant fact-gathering receipts. The bloggers, for their part, produce minimal reportage. Instead, these filthy, bottom-feeding parasites are like aquatic lice, clinging to the underside of leeches who suck blood from the remora fish who cowardly ride along the belly of this proud, aging shark I call “professional journalism.”
More success is met in purveying opinion and comment. Some thoughtful critics note that blogs tend to disinhibit, and are responsible the coarsening and increasing volatility of political life; and, for that reason alone, these critics note that blogs should just go screw themselves. Maybe so. But politics weren’t much rarefied when proto-blogger John Wilkes Booth was venting his opinion at FordTheater.com back in ‘65. The larger problem with blogs, it seems to me, is quality. Most of them are pretty awful. Many, even some with large followings, are downright appalling. Seriously bad, to the point of physical, gastrointestinal revulsion. Full-on, projectile vomit stuff.
Don’t believe me? Go read some blogs. Go ahead, I’ll wait.
Read the whole thing. As a member of the keening blog rabble, it is your duty.
Despite Jimmy Carter’s imperious (some might say cowardly) refusal to debate Alan Dershowitz, leftist professors at Brandeis University want Carter to shill his new anti-Israel book without being challenged: Brandeis group pursues Carter visit.
 President Jimmy Carter may yet come to Brandeis University to speak about his controversial new book about Israel — and even get the stage to himself.
Some professors are planning to craft a new invitation to Carter to give a lecture without having to debate an opponent.
Last week, the former president told the Globe he declined an invitation to Brandeis because of the string attached. President Jehuda Reinharz, at a trustee’s suggestion, invited Carter to campus to debate “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid” with a vehement critic of the book, Alan Dershowitz, a professor at Harvard Law School. Carter said Dershowitz knows nothing about the situation in Palestine.
Several dozen Brandeis professors have been trading e-mails on what could be done, according to two professors on the e-mail list of left-leaning faculty.
Patricia Johnston, a professor of classics, said she and many colleagues have offered to chip in perhaps $100 each to pay for whatever travel and security costs a Carter visit would entail.
(Illustration by David Lunde.)
At a Hamas rally in the West Bank, Jimmy Carter’s friends reenact the abduction of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. This celebration of kidnapping and murder was broadcast on Hamas television, December 17, 2006. (Courtesy of MEMRI TV.)
The Islamic cleric who inspired and masterminded the horrific Bali nightclub bombings, Abu Bakar Bashir, has been cleared of all charges by the supposedly “moderate” state of Indonesia: Indonesia overturns terror conviction.
JAKARTA, Indonesia - Indonesia overturned a terror conviction Thursday against the militant Islamic cleric Abu Bakar Bashir, who served 2 1/2 years for conspiracy in the 2002 Bali nightclub bombings that killed more than 200 people.
Australian Prime Minister John Howard said he was upset for the families of the 88 Australian victims but was powerless to help. Australia, along with the United States, publicly accused the aging cleric of being a top leader of Jemaah Islamiyah, an al-Qaida-linked Southeast Asian terror group.
“Of course it is the court system of another country and we can’t change that,” Howard told the Nine Network television. “But it doesn’t stop us feeling upset, and I know there will be a feeling of anger on the part on the parents and loved ones, and I am feeling for them this morning very much.”
Howard noted, however, that those who carried out the bombings and those who were directly responsible for them have been convicted.
Bashir, 69, who was released from prison in June, has long claimed that the government in the world’s most populous Muslim nation succumbed to pressure from the West when it arrested him soon after the Bali attacks.
Bashir’s son, Abdurrahmin, said his father had received word of the verdict.
“Thank God the Supreme Court has finally revealed the final truth,” he said by telephone from Bashir’s hometown on Java island. “He is praying now to say thanks to God that his prayers have been accepted.”
Thursday, December 21, 2006
A Palestinian child fires a shot from a rifle held by a militant of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a group affiliated with the Fatah movement, during a rally in the West Bank city of Nablus, Thursday, Dec. 21, 2006. (AP Photo/Nasser Ishtayeh)
At least they’re not claiming this one is a “toy gun.”
The reports being filed by Palestinian stringers for the wire services are an ongoing case study in delusional doublethink, as they continue to insist there’s a truce that has ended the violence—in the same sentence with an account of heavy gunbattles: Gunbattles rage between Hamas and Fatah.
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip - A series of heavy gunbattles between Hamas and Fatah militants broke out in Gaza City early Friday, despite a two-day-old truce that had largely ended factional violence here.
The early morning street fight came after two Hamas militants, including a senior member of the Islamic group were kidnapped late Thursday night, security officials said. The kidnappers of one of the men fired assault rifles in the streets and injured a bystander.
Hamas blamed the kidnapping on a clan affiliated with Fatah that was trying to avenge the killing of two of its members in the earlier round of violence.
The factional violence, which broke out last week, killed 16 people and left dozens injured across Gaza. A truce agreed to on Tuesday largely ended the fighting.
UPDATE at 12/21/06 6:20:25 pm:
Gaza breathes a sigh of relief as ceasefire holds.
ABC News has released a surveillance video showing the terrorist attack against the US embassy in Damascus on September 12 of this year.
In this New York Times write-up of Cat Stevens, aka Yusuf Islam, aka Yusuf, you’ll find no mention of his donations to Hamas, his association with the “Blind Sheikh” Omar Abdel-Rahman, or his support for the Islamic death sentence for author Salman Rushdie: The Return of a Man Once Called Cat. (Hat tip: David.)
It’s as if his past has been wiped out of existence. Instead, we get this:
Mr. Islam is a British citizen and has spoken repeatedly against terrorism.
Another search through different avenues has failed to turn up AP’s source for more than 60 reports of atrocities and murders: The AP (non-)responds and another search comes up empty.
Big LGF kudos to Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper, who does not mince words when it comes to terror gangs: Canada’s PM won’t deal with ‘genocidal’ Hamas, Hezbollah: report.
OTTAWA (AFP) - Canada will not hold talks with “genocidal” groups Hamas and Hezbollah to try to secure Mideast peace, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said in an interview with broadcaster CTV, to be aired Saturday.
“We will not solve the Palestinian-Israeli problem, as difficult as that is, through organizations that advocate violence and advocate wiping Israel off the face of the Earth,” Harper said.
“It’s unfortunate because with Hamas, and with Hezbollah in Lebanon, it has made it very difficult to have dialogue — and dialogue is ultimately necessary to have peace in the long term — but we are not going to sit down with people whose objectives are ultimately genocidal.”
“I think all of the civilized world is agreed — and it’s not just Canada — we can’t deal with organizations whose principle and only objective is terrorism and the eradication of the other side.”
ABC News analyst Fawaz Gerges accidentally let his mask of tolerance drop in an interview with NPR recently: ABC News Analyst Fawaz Gerges Says Jews of the Holocaust, Palestinians Suffered ‘Similar Historical Injustices’ .
Gerges is a consultant and analyst for ABC News and holds the Christian A. Johnson Chair in International Affairs and Middle Eastern Studies at Sarah Lawrence. He made the comments near the end of the 35 minute program, during which time he consistently attempted to blame the Israelis for what he admitted were growing “anti-Jewish feelings” in the Middle East.
Gerges’s tactic throughout the interview was to manipulate the discussion of why Iranian president Ahmadinejad held the conference, and why the Middle East is home to a rising tide of anti-Semitism, to blame the Israelis and to draw a moral equivalency between the Holocaust and the treatment of the Palestinians.
Here are a few choice pull quotes from my own transcription of the show. I have removed only “ums” and “ahs”:
“I think it would be very misleading to see that, to say, as some people in the United States and the West argue, that anti-Semitism has migrated from its home base in Europe, particularly Germany and other counties, to the Muslim world.”
“When I talk to Muslims and Arabs, the first question, you say, ‘well look, this, say we are Semites ourselves; how can we be anti-Semites?”
“And when we say anti-Jewish feelings, there’s also a great deal of anti-Arab and Muslim feelings in Israel, as you know. There are tens of thousands of settlers who would basically ship the Palestinians, or would like to ship the Palestinians, overnight to their neighboring countries and basically enjoin the slogan, ‘kill the Arabs and the Muslims.’”
“There’s a great tragedy in place, Lynn, I mean, you have military occupation, you have Palestinians are being killed on daily basis. The Palestinians live in the largest prison in Gaza. I mean, there’s war.”
“Lynn, there have been a great many Arab and Muslim scholars who have made it very clear that denying the Holocaust does great moral damage to the cause of the Palestinians.”
“Look, you have tens of thousands of Palestinians who have been killed. You have hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have been killed. Look at the history of colonialism. ‘How can the oppressed people,’ they say, ‘Jews, turn around and do injustice to the Palestinians?’ Why the Palestinians have to pay for the crimes committed by Europeans, after all?”
“While on the one hand, we can say that any kind of denial, any kind of second-guessing, is basically a moral crime, we also must acknowledge at the same time, that there is a crime being committed against the Palestinians. There is a military occupation taking place, that there are crimes committed in Iraq and in Palestine.”
British authorities are warning that a Christmas attack on London by the Religion of Peace™ is imminent.
British intelligence and law enforcement officials have passed on a grim assessment to their U.S. counterparts, “It will be a miracle if there isn’t a terror attack over the holidays in London,” a senior American law enforcement official tells ABCNews.com.
British police have been quietly carrying out a series of key arrests as they continue to track at least six active “plots” tied to what they call “al Qaeda of England.”
Officials said they could not cite any specific date or target but said al Qaeda had planned previous operations during the Christmas holidays that had been disrupted.
“It is not a matter of if there will be an attack, but how bad the attack will be,” an intelligence official told ABCNews.com.
Authorities say they are seeking at least 18 suspected suicide bombers.
The Associated Press won’t use the word “terrorist” to describe people who blow themselves up on schoolbuses in Israel. They won’t use it to describe people who videotape beheadings in Iraq. They won’t even use it to describe the people who flew planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. They call Osama bin Laden a “Saudi dissident.”
But someone perpetrates an attack in Jordan, and look out! It’s a terrorist! Terrorist sentenced to death in Jordan.
How does this Islamic terror attack differ from all those other Islamic terror attacks that the AP says were committed by “activists” or “militants?”
The French and the Russians are bickering over a set of utterly useless proposed sanctions against Iran: Paris warns against ‘altering’ Iran sanctions. (Hat tip: Ron.)
PARIS, Dec 20, 2006 (AFP) - The French government Wednesday warned against any attempt to “alter the scope” of proposed UN sanctions over Tehran’s nuclear programme, after Moscow said it opposed some of the measures.
“It is important to preserve the unity of the Security Council, but not if that means altering the scope of the resolution,” foreign ministry spokesman Denis Simmoneau told reporters.
“That is why discussions are continuing, notably on what shape to give to restrictive measures against entities and persons responsible for sensitive activities targeted,” he said.
“We are still following the timeline we set ourselves,” which was to secure a Security Council vote on the text before Christmas, he said.
The five veto-wielding members of the Security Council — Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States — are trying to reach agreement on a European package of targeted UN sanctions against Iran over its refusal to halt sensitive nuclear fuel work.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Wednesday that Moscow objects to including a travel ban for certain Iranian officials in the proposed resolution because it would amount to unwarranted “punishment”.
I’m sure Ahmadinjead is quaking in fear at the thought of a travel ban.
UPDATE at 12/21/06 8:27:44 am:
Ahmadinejad: Britain, Israel, US to ‘vanish like the pharaohs’.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has predicted that Britian, Israel and the United States would eventually disappear from the world like the Egyptian pharaonic kings.
“The oppressive powers will disappear while the Iranian people will stay. Any power that is close to God will survive while the powers who are far from God will disappear like the pharaohs,” he said Wednesday, according to Iranian news agencies.
“Today, it is the United States, Britain and the Zionist regime which are doomed to disappear as they have moved far away from the teachings of God,” he said in a speech in the western town of Javanroud. “It is a divine promise.”
Ahmadinejad’s comments were the latest salvo by the deeply religious president against the West and Israel.
Wednesday, December 20, 2006
Here’s a fascinating look back at Jimmy Carter’s long association with the Arab Lobby, including his disgraceful appearances at the United Arab Emirates think tank/lunatic asylum known as the Zayed Centre for Coordination and Followup: Jimmy Carter and the Arab Lobby.
Other luminaries who visited this fine establishment (for substantial speaker’s fees) include James Baker, Al Gore, Bill Clinton, and Jacques Chirac. LGF was one of the first internet sources to draw attention to this very well-funded center of Holocaust denial and hatred, and they noticed us. The Zayed Centre web site is now closed down, although it wouldn’t surprise me to find the actual institution still operating under a different name. Here’s a search for our entries about it.
UPDATE at 12/20/06 6:28:51 pm:
And of course, our 404 error page is based on one of the Zayed Center’s weird rants.
Syrian President Bashar Assad, left, meets U.S. Senators John Kerry, right, and Christopher Dodd, second left, in Damascus, Wednesday, Dec. 20, 2006. (SANA)
The chinless ophthalmologist gets around; the day before he was in Moscow: Bashar and Vlad. (Hat tip: H.D.)
Michelle has a summary of what’s been discovered to date about “Iraqi police Capt. Jamil Hussein,” the source for more than 60 AP reports who is amazingly hard to locate: Tracing ‘Jamil Hussein’s’ footsteps and ignoring anti-blog hatred.
After receiving initial reports from a Civilian Police Advisory Training Team (CPATT) source two days ago and investigating further, here’s what I can tell you:
According to two CPATT officials—one in the U.S, one in Iraq—there is no one named “Jamil Hussein” working now or ever at either at the Yarmouk or al Khadra police stations. That is what they have said along and nothing has changed.
The Baghdad-based CPATT officer says there is no “Sgt. Jamil Hussein” at Yarmouk, which contradicts what Marc Danziger’s contacts found. I have another military source on the ground who works with the Iraqi Army (separate and apart from the CPATT sources) and is checking into whether anyone named “Jamil Hussein” has ever worked at Yarmouk.
Meanwhile, See Dubya has been digging through the “Jamil Hussein” stories to produce a map of all the Baghdad neighborhoods where the AP has reported incidents with Hussein as the source.
We’ve turned Najaf over to the Iraqis, but this little vignette (reported by the Associated Press) makes it a bit difficult to feel enthusiastic about these forces being a civilizing influence.
“Transferring responsibility is an indication of the increased capacity of the Iraqi police and the Iraqi army,” Maj. Gen. Kurt Cichowski said at the ceremony.
But Cichowski added that U.S. troops would continue to provide support if called upon. “We will be quite literally just up the road.”
About 1,500 police officers and soldiers paraded on a soccer field, and other officers drove shiny new patrol cars and motorcycles around a dusty track ringing the field.
At one point, a small group of elite Iraqi special forces officers wearing dark green T-shirts stepped forward with a live rabbit and ripped it apart with their teeth.
The leader chomped out the animal’s heart with a yell, then passed around the blood-soaked carcass to his comrades, each of whom took a bite. The group also bit the heads off frogs.
Elite Iraqi forces have demonstrated their toughness by chewing on live animals during military ceremonies since the time of Saddam Hussein’s rule.
It sounds so gruesome I immediately doubted the AP report. But here’s a picture. (Do I need to warn anyone?)
And here’s another.
Danish art group pokes fun at Iranian president. (Hat tip: Sugiero.)
COPENHAGEN (Reuters) - A Danish art group that pokes fun at world leaders targeted Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Wednesday by placing an advertisement in a Tehran newspaper with an insulting hidden message.
Beneath a picture of the president, a series of apparently sympathetic statements were arranged such as “Support his fight against Bush” and “Iran has the right to produce nuclear energy”. The advert was attributed to “Danes for World Peace”.
However, the first letters of each phrase, when read from top to bottom, spell out “S-W-I-N-E”.
The English-language Tehran Times, the conservative daily that printed the half-page advert, had apparently not detected the hidden message. But its impact is likely to be limited as the paper has a circulation of only a few thousand.
“We thought we would poke fun at Ahmadinejad because we don’t think he’s very liberal or sensitive,” said Jan Egesborg, a member of the art group Surrend. “We think he represents an extreme ideology,” he told Reuters. ...
Egesborg, 44, who teaches at the Danish School of Fine Art, said: “We did it to cause a reaction. There is a young population there (in Iran) which wants more liberalisation. Hopefully they will be inspired,” he said. “It’s nothing against the country or the people, it’s (against) the person in power.”
Tom Carew has a fact-filled post about the recent uncovering of jihadi cells in Ireland.
What else did British authorities expect to happen, when they decided to allow people wearing full body masks to go through airport security unchecked? Police killer suspect fled Britain in a veil.
A man who was being hunted for the murder of a policewoman is understood to have escaped from Britain by disguising himself as a veiled Muslim woman.
Mustaf Jama, a prime suspect in the fatal shooting of PC Sharon Beshenivsky, assumed his sister’s identity — wearing the niqab and using her passport — to evade supposedly stringent checks at Heathrow, according to police sources.
The use of the niqab, which leaves only a narrow slit for the eyes, highlights flaws in British airport security. At the time, Jama was Britain’s most wanted man, while Heathrow was on a heightened state of alert after the 7/7 terrorist atrocities in London five months previously.
The Times has learnt that British immigration officers rarely carry out a visual check to match a passport photograph with a departing female passenger’s veiled face.
Details of Jama’s disguise emerged yesterday as his younger brother, Yusuf, awaited a life sentence for the murder of the police officer, who died during an armed robbery at a Bradford travel agency in November last year.
Detectives believe that Jama, 26, was allowed to board an international flight from Heathrow because no attempt was made to uncover his face.
Reuters reports on the capture of a top Al Qaeda leader with maximum skepticism: U.S. forces say seize a top al Qaeda leader in Iraq.
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - U.S. forces have captured a senior al Qaeda in Iraq leader accused of killing hundreds of Iraqi civilians, including women and children, the U.S. military said in a statement on Wednesday.
The military said the “terrorist leader,” whom they did not identify, was captured on December 14 in the northern city of Mosul in a raid which also netted five other suspects.
“The terrorist leader was captured when Coalition Forces raided a known terrorist meeting place. (He) was attempting to flee from the location when Coalition Forces chased him across a street and detained him,” it said in a statement.
“He was personally responsible for hundreds of civilian deaths, including women and children. He housed foreign fighters to be used in suicide bombing attacks against the Coalition and the Iraqi people.”
A very special Christmas greeting from Ayman to all of you, via Scrappleface.
Another video release from the Egyptian physician (broadcast by JihadTV, of course), playing to the American left more than to the jihadis: Zawahiri vows attacks on US, slams Hamas.
DUBAI (AFP) - Al-Qaeda’s second in command Ayman al-Zawahiri has vowed in a videotape that his group will pursue attacks on the United States and slammed Palestinian Hamas for joining the political process.
Only jihad, or holy war, can liberate occupied Palestinian territory, not elections, Zawahiri said in the video broadcast on Qatar-based pan-Arab television Al-Jazeera Wednesday without explicitly naming the Islamist movement.
Zawahiri said Al-Qaeda, which claimed the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, will not stop attacks on US soil as long as the United States strikes Muslims on their own land.
“If we are hit in our countries, we will not stop striking you in your country,” he said.
Zawahiri said he believed the United States will ultimately have to talk with “the real forces” in the Islamic world in order to extricate itself from Iraq and Afghanistan, in a reference to Islamist extremists.
“It seems you will undertake a painful journey of failed negotiations before being forced to go back, God willing, to negotiation with the real forces,” said a turbaned Zawahiri.
Osama bin Laden’s number two also said US President George W. Bush was deceiving Americans by telling them he was going after “terrorists” in Afghanistan and Iraq in order to keep them away from the United States.
“Your safety lies in the following equation: you will not dream of security until we live secure in Palestine and all Muslim lands,” Zawahiri said.
Before September 11, 2001, Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden rarely mentioned the Palestinians. Now that they’ve recognized the propaganda value of this overriding Islamic obsession, the quest to destroy Israel is their constant refrain.
“Accepting the legitimacy of Mahmud Abbas, the head of the national authority, America’s man in Palestine, and mandating the PLO which recognizes Israel to negotiate with Israel is an abyss which will ultimately lead to eliminating the jihad and recognizing Israel,” Zawahiri said.
Flanked by an automatic rifle, Zawahiri chided “some brothers in Palestine” who had been dragged into “elections on the basis of a secular constitution” because they had overlooked the realities of “the conflict between infidelity and Islam.”
Participation in the polls in turn led to “respecting international (UN) resolutions,” which was followed by accepting to form a government of national unity, and later by attempts to “get them (Hamas) out of government,” he said.
“How come they did not demand an Islamic constitution for Palestine before entering any elections? Are they not an Islamic movement?” Zawahiri asked.
He said it was “the duty of every Muslim” to recover Muslim land.
“Hence, as Muslims, we cannot give up one inch of Palestine to Israel — there’s no difference between 1948-Palestine and 1967-Palestine as far as we are concerned. All of it is Palestine and it all belongs to Muslims,” he said.
UPDATE at 12/20/06 9:42:50 am:
In case you missed the obvious appeal to the Iraq Surrender Groupies, the Associated Press spells it out for you: Al-Zawahri: U.S. talking to wrong people.
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frank says:
