Do sheep love to be slaughtered?

Al Qaeda, with the very likely connivance of Tehran (yes, I know they are supposed to be Shiites, but they have already corrupted their faith by con-fusing religion and politics, and they are the one who would benefit from a civil war in Iraq) is destroying Islam most holy shrines, Serbia is protecting Mladic, Syria is governed by an esoteric sect (anathema to Sunnis), &c.

Have you seen many demonstrations against these real abuses and more? No. What do Muslims do instead?

Police in Pakistan have used batons and tear gas to disperse protesters trying to stage a rally against cartoons satirising the Prophet Muhammad.

If only western powers had the guts or even the intelligence to exploit these contradictions, militant Islam would be destroyed quickly and, most importantly, by the Muslims themselves. As we stand now, Islam is being highjacked by extremists and rapidly disappearing into a satanic cult.

Moral seriousness in this case means political seriousness. Insist on going ahead with the ports deal so that Arab governments who have stood with us in the war on terror are not told to get lost when one of their companies acquires port management contracts in the United States. Make a real effort to destabilize Ahmadinejad in Iran. Do what it takes to defeat Zarqawi and secure Iraq. Stand with Denmark, and moderate Muslims, against the radical mob. This is no time for dishonorable retreat. It is time for resolve--and competence.

I would love to blog during this period; unfortunately work commitments do not leave me much time. Thank you all for having followed my ramblings this far and apologies for the disappointing frequency of posts.

Islam, Muslims, Terrorism

Saddam Hussein to start hunger strike

Does anyone give a f**k?

Iraq, Saddam

Buy Danish!
Let's toast the fascists.

Denmark, Europe, Islam, Terrorism

Danish cartoons: a crisis and an opportunity

What a splendid opportunity to identify, arrest and deport all fundamentalists in Europe!

Denmark, Europe, Islam, Terrorism

Culture of hate

Iran said sending the case to the UN would mean "the end of diplomacy".

What diplomacy? Iran has been only buying time, blackmailing, lying and spying. Time to drop the mask, all of us. Can we please start taking these monsters at face value? Can we please stop responding to threats with empty statements full of "concern" and "dismay" Can we please stop turning the other cheek and ask to "clarify"? What's to clarify about "destruction of Israel"? "Annihilation of America"? "World domination"? While the West wastes time in interminable meetings the culture of hate gains precious time.

In an appalling regurgitation of relativism, Bill Clinton at Doha said:

Clinton described as "appalling" the 12 cartoons published in a Danish newspaper in September depicting Prophet Mohammed and causing uproar in the Muslim world.

The Muslim world is up in arms for some cartoons, but we just whimpered when Ahmadinejad swore to "wipe Israel off the map" or Hamas swears to destroy another nation. Let's stop this appeasing nonsense once and for all at whatever cost. I would be willing to use a bicycle and candles just so I wouldn't have to listen to terrorists' blackmailing obscenities.

In the meantime, buy Danish!

PS: Following the Dutch cartoons' Muslim fake rage, Palestinians have demanded that Danes, Norwegians and Swedes (sic) leave immediately; could Europe please reciprocate? Fair is fair. Some terrorist group have also threatened suicide attacks in Denmark.

Iran, Hamas, Ahmadinejad, Terrorism

Zimbabwe and the IMF, update

A number of NGOs and various blogs are hoping that the IMF relents and does not expel Zimbabwe, despite the abusive, incoherent and corrupt economic policies that the regime erratically pretends to implement. Some even ask for the IMF to cancel Zimbabwe's debt. Do they think that the money loaned or saved would go to benefit ordinary people instead of continuing to fatten up Mugabe and his henchmen? How naive can they be?

Corruption, IMF, Zimbabwe, Mugabe

The shadow war on terror

SANKABAR, Ethiopia - This is the war on terrorism that most Americans don't know about:

A small U.S. military task force in East Africa is installing water pumps, rebuilding schools and health clinics, making medical house calls, and training national armies - all part of a mission to stabilize a region that is seen as a potential breeding ground for terrorist groups.

"We are coming out of drought because of the pump," Omar Ahmed, a Sankabar elder, said. "So we say thank you, America. And thank you, Mr. Reed. He is the first guy to give us help."

What is happening here provides a glimpse of the Bush administration's global war on terrorism, which is being fought - mostly in the shadows - elsewhere in Africa and across the Middle East, South Asia and Southeast Asia using different combinations of military, covert, economic and diplomatic weapons.

Separated from the Middle East by only a narrow waterway, the Horn of Africa is home to 90 million Muslims, many of whom live in crushing poverty and political isolation. Al-Qaeda has had success in the area, bombing U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, attacking the USS Cole off the coast of Yemen in 2000 and nearly shooting down an Israeli charter plane over Kenya in 2002.

The 1,500 troops of the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa have been stationed since 2002 at Camp Lemonier, a former French base on the Red Sea in the tiny coastal nation of Djibouti. They were sent to hunt down al-Qaeda operatives in East Africa, but there are few known terrorist cells working in the area - two-thirds the size of the United States - and the troops have not made many arrests.

Instead, theirs has become a humanitarian mission, with public relations benefits.

Read it all.

Ethiopia, Africa, US, WOT

Israel should join NATO

Echoing a concept already expressed brilliantly by Jose Maria Aznar (machine translation) as a means to dampen Iran's destructive ambitions towards Israel, Mr Martino, the Italian defense minister, said today:

NATO should consider allowing Israel to join the military alliance to guarantee the security of the Jewish state in the event of an attack against it by Iran, Italy's defence minister Antonio Martino said Monday. "In the light of the serious and worrying Iranian position the time has come to think of admitting Israel into NATO, so that an eventual attack against Israel would be regarded as an attack against the whole of NATO,"

Martino said that Israeli membership of NATO was also motivated by "the incapacity of the European Union to adopt a united and cohesive foreign policy," with regard to the Middle East.

Israel, NATO

Mugabe is cutting the branch he sits on

Six years after instituting a policy of nationalizing white-owned farms and evicting their owners, Zimbabwe's government has begun to seize white-owned land in urban Harare...Police arrived before Christmas and said they were going to build houses for themselves on Gletwyn. Ian Ross, 68, said the police started harassing and evicting hundreds of workers from their homes. "They arrived to evict the workers, which they did piece by piece, village by village, compound by compound. They were loaded onto police trucks in the rain, which most of the time arrived without fuel," he said. "They forced workers to buy fuel for them. They took them to various parts of the country. They were basically dumped, they lost all their furniture, saturated in the rain, but within days they all started to come back with a reed mat, a couple of blankets, a pot. They came back to work, but were hounded day and night. They moved into sheds, where they could sleep. The guys moved in to chicken runs; they were living like rabbits, like little rats in a hole."

Mugabe knows - he has admitted as much - that the army and police are the only things that keep him alive. He has therefore to try and keep them happy as he can; since he can't pay them enough, he looks the other way when they abuse their power, allowing them to loot at leisure. The same thing happens with his henchmen in Zanu PF: there is very little he can do to rein them in, even if he really wanted to.

To avoid this mess to be widely published and the horrors of starvation and suffering to become public, he has to tighten media laws:

Zimbabwe's national security minister Didymus Mutasa has warned that "the net will soon close in" on journalists he claims are threatening national security, a state-controlled newspaper reported on Friday.

Why not ask China's technical advice on how to censure the web?

One thing we should be grateful for is that dictators never learn their lessons. Mugabe has used Hitler's veterans in the past to do his bidding and it cost him dearly. He is using the army and police this time, but the game is much, much more dangerous.

Zimbabwe, Mugabe

Three scenarios for Palestine

All dictators try to make sure that after their demise things go as wrong as possible in the stupid hope of being remembered ("it was better when he was in charge"); Arafat was no exception and this is his legacy.

Hamas' victory can have one of three outcomes:

1) Civil war: there are already signs of fighting between Fatah and Hamas, but don't be too hopeful.

2) Hamas renounces violence and puts all its energy into the political arena: not on your Nelly.

Most important, Europe and the US (Israel knows) should at all costs avoid to fall for the old PLO trap: carry out acts of terrorism (directly or by proxy: i.e.: Hamas) while denying involvement and pretending to continue negotiations. Whatever Hamas will do, it must be held accountable as any government would; they wanted power? Let them have its responsibilities too. It goes without saying that as of now, any bomb, missile, rocket launched from the territories into Israel will have to be considered an act of war against a sovereign nation.

3) Going for broke: an all out war against Israel with help from Iran and Syria. This would represent a last chance for all of them to impose their sick ideology to the Arab world and might even be a blessing in disguise, as it would force the West and Israel to react accordingly.

At the moment, the only losers are the Palestinians. However, it is better to have all the filth out in the open than hidden under the carpet of a hypocritical diplomacy.

Palestine, Israel, Syria, Iran, Hamas, Fatah

The Iranian regime's real nature

Watch this presentation and the video "A Few Simple Shots".

Iran, Human Rights

Condemning communism

FIFTEEN years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Council of Europe last night became the first international body to condemn crimes against humanity committed by the communist regimes of the Soviet Union and other states. However, in a vote that was bitterly contested by Russia and Western Europe’s left-wing parties, the 46-nation council failed to raise the two-thirds majority needed to approve a tougher resolution by a Swedish MP that called on former communist states to teach the truth about their former regimes and create days of remembrance.

Conservative estimate of deaths attributed to Soviet and other Communist regimes in the European Council document presented yesterday (1917-present day): 94.5 million

A timid start, but a start nevertheless.

PS: I look forward to hear Castro's comments.

Communism

WMD in Syria

This:

The man who served as the no. 2 official in Saddam Hussein's air force says Iraq moved weapons of mass destruction into Syria before the war by loading the weapons into civilian aircraft in which the passenger seats were removed.

And this:

MORE THAN TWO MONTHS AGO, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Pete Hoekstra requested 40 documents captured in postwar Iraq as he sought better understand the activities of the Iraqi regime in the months and years before the U.S. invasion in March 2003. On Friday afternoon, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence finally provided 39 of the 40 documents Hoekstra had requested...It is important to remember that this set of documents is a tiny percentage of the Iraqi documents that have been translated (.078 percent of the 50,000) and a mere sliver of the overall document take of approximately 2 million.

Are very good news indeed, especially as they will provide more ammunition against Syria and intelligence for the war on terror.

Iraq, WMD, Syria, WOT

Hamas wins parliamentary elections

Proof that Palestinians are genetically predisposed to suicide.

Palestine, Hamas, Fatah, Israel

Zimbabwe and the IMF

Today a team of the International Monetary Fund will hold talks in Harare with Zimbabwean officials. As much as I feel for the ordinary Zimbabwean, I do hope that Zimbabwe will be expelled from the IMF. There is no other way, in my opinion, than to isolate Mugabe and his cronies and make it difficult for them to continue to steal and rape the country. Why prolong the agony? At least people will suffer knowing that the end of the regime is approaching and that their children will have a future.

We can't expect change through Gono's stale appeals to Mugabe and other thieves "to stop the rot": they are just not credible anymore and the African Union has once again demonstrated to be a worthless and corrupt organization by rejecting on a pretext its own Human Rights Commission's report on Zimbabwe.

There are no lions left to chase away theses hyenas. Let them finish the carcass and they will start eating each other.

At least Wolfowitz seems to be on the right track:

World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz says he is willing to withhold funding or halt the approval of loans for some World Bank projects if there are concerns about corruption in a country. In an interview with Reuters late on Tuesday, Wolfowitz said he had stopped several bank projects, including one in Bangladesh, and was scrutinizing two project loans to Kenya plagued by corruption. He said the bank, the globe's biggest development institution, lending about $20 billion a year to poor countries, should be more willing to review or reject projects when corruption concerns arose. "We are going from an era where nobody wanted to say no to anything, to an era when people have to be encouraged that if there are serious problems, they bring them forward, and saying no is a good thing," Wolfowitz said.

If we don't demand accountability, we can't expect it to appear spontaneously.

Corruption, AU, IMF, WB, Zimbabwe, Mugabe

Iran and Syria

I was reading Michael Ledeen's latest on Iran and Syria when a desktop alert informed me of the bombing in south west Iran. It all started to make sense.

PS: Through Michael's article, I discovered a brilliant blog about Syria; have a look.

Iran, Syria

Bolton's right, again

The unspeakable activities of UNRWA have come under the scrutiny of John Bolton, the US ambassador to the UN.

In a related issue, Claudia Rosett examines the ongoing Procurement scandal at the UN:

The focus of the current scandal is U.N. peacekeeping, a function that consumes 85 percent of the U.N.'s procurement budget — a cost that could reach $2 billion in 2005. Like many of the U.N.'s financial dealings, it is shrouded in secrecy. And like the multi-billion-dollar Oil-for-Food scandal, it is wrapped in what the U.N.'s own investigators now call "systematic abuse," "a pattern of corrupt practices," and "a culture of impunity."

If it is true that a fish starts to rot from the head, you can imagine how this shining example has inspired the myriad (many of them useless) UN agencies' procurement offices.

Corruption, UN, UNRWA

Congratulations to Canada

Welcome back to the real world!

Canada

George Galloway, Respect Member of Parliament (MP)

Galloway, Big Brother

Neoconservatism: Why We Need It

Sometimes one reads an article, a book, a post that makes one burst out "exactly!". This review by Amir Taheri of the book in the title, by Douglas Murray, makes me feel like that (ht: Crossroads Arabia).

Murray starts by suggesting that the classical political divisions based on notions of Right and Left are now outdated, at least in democratic societies, if only because there is a consensus on the basic rules of the political game and the general economic system of society. The blurring of the distinction between Right and Left, however, has not been entirely positive. For, it has also promoted a moral relativism, itself a child of multiculturalism, in which the very notions of good and evil are frowned upon as medieval relics.

Murray believes that good and evil do exist as distinct categories and could be readily identified by anyone in possession of a system of values. Thus the principal task of politics becomes the identification of good and evil as a prelude to the promotion of the former and the combating of the latter. Neo-conservatism, far from being a conspiracy by extremist right-wingers who wish to conquer and reshape the world, is a political vision based on a hierarchy of values. It was in gestation long before George W Bush entered the White House in 2001 and, as Murray asserts, will be a key player in the international politics long after he has retired.

As might be expected Murray is a passionate defender of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He believes that the Taliban and the Ba’ath regime were evil and had to be removed for the forces of good in Afghanistan and Iraq to have a chance of building something different. That something different may not correspond exactly to the West’s ideal of a democracy. But one thing would be certain: the new regimes in Kabul and Baghdad would be better than the ones they replaced.

Murray shows that neo-conservatism does not limit itself to issues of foreign policy. In domestic politics, neo-conservatism seeks a return to the fundamental principles of capitalism, the only system in history that has produced long-lasting wealth, both individual and collective, in scores of culturally diverse societies.

Murray asks why has neo-conservatism aroused so much anger and hatred around the world? Some of that anger and hatred has come from despotic rulers and their hangers-on who feel targeted by the idea of regime change. They hate neo-conservatism because they fear it might toppled them as it did with the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, or may force them to eat humble pie as did Libya’s Colonel Kaddhafi, the Sudanese military rulers, and the Ba’athists in Damascus.

But neo-conservatism is also hated by the remnants of the left who have not yet recovered from the shock of the Soviet Union’s sudden collapse. They blame the early neo-conservatives under President Ronald Reagan for policies that made it impossible for the USSR to continue its existence at any level.

Read it all and buy the book.

Neoconservatism, Book