Nasrallah Demoted to Housecat by Iran

Some of Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah's responsibilities have been taken away by the organization's backer Iran, the pan-Arabic daily Asharq Alawsat claimed Thursday

Reportedly, Nasrallah is no longer in control of the organization's military wing, which is now headed by Nasrallah's deputy Sheikh Na'im Kassem.

The Iranian official Asharq Alawsat cites as the one who demoted Nasrallah is none other than Iran Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Type rest of the post here

Western intelligence sources cited by Asharqreported that Teheran was furious over Nasrallah's conduct during the Second Lebanon War and that was the reasoning behind the decision to diminish Nasrallah's authority.

Sources close to Iran's Revolutionary Guards quoted an officer in the Iranian elite force as saying Kassem was chosen after he and Nasrallah had disagreements regarding the organization of Hizbullah's military wing. Khamenei's representative in Lebanon.

"Kassem isn't only Hizbullah's second-in-command but also Khamenei's representative in Lebanon and Palestine."

Hizbullah's budget in the last 18 months has been $1 billion, to compensate the organization for the losses it suffered during the war. Hizbullah's yearly Iranian budget stands on $400 million, the officer added.

Reportedly, Khamenei appointed a committee of top Revolutionary Guards commanders and entrusted them with restructuring Hizbullah's military and intelligence wings. Among the commanders in the committee is the Kuds Brigade commander Kassem Suleimani and the former head of Hizbullah's intelligence wing Imad Mughnia, who is one of the top names on the US's most wanted terrorists list

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Iranian Women Beaten Bloody for Not Covering Hair

Sick, sick stuff. "One strap of hair is the distance between improper veil and a bloody face," an Iranian blogger writes. "Yesterday, 7-Tir square [where the incident happened] smelled like blood," writes another.

The tyrannical mullahs are cracking down harder and harder on their own people and spend all their country's money waging war on Israel and America, sending guns and rockets to Iraq and Lebanon and Gaza. A revolution has to come to Iran too.

A lot of religions hate women it seems. The more religious the more they hate women. Islam is bad but Bnei Brak is not good either. When a whole bus full of men sit by while other men shove and kick her for sitting in the wrong section, something is very sick.

Many women are being killed under Islamic law and maybe men in Europe are letting Islamic law spread there because this is how they want women to be and how they want to have power. I don't know.

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Melanie Philips on Islamism vs. Liberalism

These two concepts, Islamism and liberalism, are currently engaged in a fight to the death. My argument is that liberalism is in danger of losing this fight because it has so badly undermined itself and departed from its own core concepts that it is now paralysed by moral and intellectual muddle.

The Big and Little Satans themselves, America and Israel, are proxies for liberalism and modernity. That's why Islamism says they must be destroyed. Qutb famously went to America and concluded from seeing men and women dancing at a church hop that America was one giant brothel. And much of the bitter hostility to the Jews who started returning to Palestine in the 1920s was because the women wore shorts and were sexually free.

The Islamist goal is to destroy the virus of freedom and modernity before it infects the Islamic world, and to replace it with Islam. That is the core of the profound threat it poses to the west, a threat mounted through the pincer movement of both terrorism and cultural takeover.

First of all, let me define my terms and say what I mean by Islamism and liberalism. Islamism is the politicised version of Islam which mandates jihad, or holy war against the infidel and conquest of the non-Islamic world for Islam. I�m well aware of the argument that there�s no difference between Islamism and Islam: that�s a theological argument for others to have.

By liberalism I mean the commitment to a free society, founded above all on the separation of secular government from religious worship � from which follow the concepts of equal respect for all people, freedom of conscience, tolerance and the rule of law.

This cultural takeover, or the aim to Islamise the west, was explicitly laid out in a programme of subversion for Europe by the Wahabbi Muslim Brotherhood almost 30 years ago. In 1978, the Organisation of the Islamic Conference sponsored a seminar in London which said Muslim communities in western countries must establish autonomous institutions with help from Muslim states, and lobby the host country to grant Muslims recognition as a separate religious community as a step towards eventual political domination. CONTINUE
Liberalism is the creed of modernity. The driving force behind the Islamic jihad is the fight against liberalism and modernity. All the iconic conflicts � Iraq, Israel, Kashmir, Chechnya, Sudan �are secondary to the fundamental aim of the jihad to prevent liberalism and modernity from destroying Islam.

The founding ideologue of modern Islamism, Syed Qutb, made clear in his writings that at the core of the salafi interpretation of Islam was opposition to the separation of religion and temporal power that resulted in liberalism and democracy. His governing impulse was the fear that the instinct for liberty was so powerful it would spread to and infiltrate the Muslim mind unless it was checked by the most repressive possible form of Islam.

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Charles Krauthammer on Prelude to the Six Days War

There has hardly been a Middle East peace plan in the past 40 years -- including the current Saudi version -- that does not demand a return to the status quo of June 4, 1967. Why is that date so sacred? Because it was the day before the outbreak of the Six-Day War in which Israel scored one of the most stunning victories of the 20th century. The Arabs have spent four decades trying to undo its consequences.

In fact, the real anniversary should be now, three weeks earlier. On May 16, 1967, Egyptian President Gamal Nasser ordered the evacuation from the Sinai Peninsula of the U.N. buffer force that had kept Israel and Egypt at peace for 10 years. The United Nations complied, at which point Nasser imposed a naval blockade of Israel's only outlet to the south, the port of Eilat -- an open act of war.

Why is this still important? Because that three-week period between May 16 and June 5 helps explain Israel's 40-year reluctance to give up the fruits of that war -- the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, the West Bank and Gaza -- in return for paper guarantees of peace. Israel had similar guarantees from the 1956 Suez war, after which it evacuated the Sinai in return for that U.N. buffer force and for assurances from the Western powers of free passage through the Straits of Tiran.

All this disappeared with a wave of Nasser's hand. During those three interminable weeks, President Lyndon Johnson did try to rustle up an armada of countries to run the blockade and open Israel's south. The effort failed dismally.

It is hard to exaggerate what it was like for Israel in those three weeks. Egypt, already in an alliance with Syria, formed an emergency military pact with Jordan. Iraq, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Tunisia, Libya and Morocco began sending forces to join the coming fight. With troops and armor massing on Israel's every frontier, jubilant broadcasts in every Arab capital hailed the imminent final war for the extermination of Israel. "We shall destroy Israel and its inhabitants," declared PLO head Ahmed Shuqayri, "and as for the survivors -- if there are any -- the boats are ready to deport them."

For Israel, the waiting was excruciating and debilitating. Israel's citizen army had to be mobilized. As its soldiers waited on the various fronts for the world to rescue the nation from its peril, Israeli society ground to a halt and its economy began bleeding to death. Army Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin, later to be hailed as a war hero and even later as a martyred man of peace, had a nervous breakdown. He was incapacitated to the point of incoherence by the unbearable tension of waiting with the life of his country in the balance, knowing that waiting too long would allow the armies of 100 million Arabs to strike first his country of 3 million.

We know the rest of the story. Rabin did recover in time to lead Israel to victory. But we forget how perilous was Israel's condition. The victory hinged on a successful attack on Egypt's air force on the morning of June 5. It was a gamble of astonishing proportions. Israel sent the bulk of its 200-plane air force on the mission, fully exposed to antiaircraft fire and missiles. Had they been detected and the force destroyed, the number of planes remaining behind to defend the Israeli homeland -- its cities and civilians -- from the Arab air forces' combined 900 planes was . . . 12.

We also forget that Israel's occupation of the West Bank was entirely unsought. Israel begged King Hussein of Jordan to stay out of the conflict. Engaged in fierce combat with a numerically superior Egypt, Israel had no desire to open a new front just yards from Jewish Jerusalem and just miles from Tel Aviv. But Nasser personally told Hussein that Egypt had destroyed Israel's air force and airfields and that total victory was at hand. Hussein could not resist the temptation to join the fight. He joined. He lost.

The world will soon be awash with 40th-anniversary retrospectives of the war -- and exegeses on the peace of the ages that awaits if Israel would only to return to lines of June 4, 1967. But Israelis are cautious. They remember the terror of that June 4 and of that unbearable May when, with Israel in possession of no occupied territories whatsoever, the entire Arab world was furiously preparing Israel's imminent extinction. And the world did nothing.

Read it all here at the Washington Post

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Putin With a Shovel in the Face

Putin, the guy with that "just hit in the face with a shovel eastern European look " likens the US to the third Reich of Nazi Germany. Alzheimer's is a terrible disease. I think the shovel exacerbates the problem. But I digress ( I always wanted to say that in a post.. now I got to!)

Guys like this lie. It is their way of life. They can't help it. They are raised this way. They exaggerate , lie , and pull out all the stops to gain what they want. They are morally bankrupt and spiritually void. These are the facts.

Condoleeza is upset at him over all this. She sees him consolidating power and it worries her.

She said " The Russians, I think, do not accept fully that our relations with countries that are their neighbors, that were once part of the Soviet Union, are quite honestly good relations between independent states and the United States."

Condoleeza, you are a nice lady but very naive. The Russians( I use the term lightly as Putin is not a Russian and neither are a lot of those dummies over there) don't care what our relations are with anyone. They are not interested in getting along and etc. Grow up now.

They are thugs, criminals, thieves, murderers, extortionists, mafioso.
These "governments" are really rule by thugs who are taking their people for all they can get and want to take the rest of the world too.

Read more at Lemon Lime Moon

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Granola State Broadcasts Al Jazeera

Via LittleGreenFootballs

A cable company is offering the Al-Jazeera network in its cable package, one of only a few in the nation to do so. Burlington Telecom, a city-owned cable company that serves 1,200 households in Vermont’s largest city, began offering the Arab-operated network about six months ago. “We were certainly squeamish about it at first, given its reputation in the United States,” said Tim Nulty, director of Burlington Telecom. “But if you look at it, it looks like BBC. I think it’s more mainstream and more objective than CNN.”

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Brit Terror Gang Plotted to Nuke

THE Muslim terror gang that plotted a devastating bomb blitz of Britain were told by a judge yesterday: "You have betrayed the country that has given you every advantage in life."

The gang's most frightening plot was to buy a "dirty" nuclear bomb from the Russian Mafia and blow up a crowded city centre.

Apart from the mass killing, the explosion would have left radioactive fall-out over a wide area.

The five extremists planned to massacre thousands of their fellow countrymen in up to 30 explosions across the country.

Packed pubs, clubs, High Streets and trains were on the terrorists' hit list as well as major gas and electricity plants.

Khyam, who once dreamed of playing cricket for England, also planned to lead his gang in the slaughter of hundreds by blowing up the Bluewater shopping centre in Kent and London's trendy Ministry of Sound nightclub.

They even talked about dropping a bomb on the House of Commons during Prime Minister's Question Time to "take out" Tony Blair and every MP in the land.

Khyam and some of his gang were disciples of radical clerics including hook-handed Abu Hamza and and Sheikh Abdullah Al-Faisal, now both behind bars. The gang planned to detonate remote-controlled bombs across
Britain in revenge for the Iraq war.

They gloated over the prospect of carrying out atrocities on the scale of 9/11 in America and the 2004 bombings in Madrid, where 191 were killed.

Read the rest here

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Muslims Like Al-Queda

“Attitudes toward al Qaeda are complex. On average, only three in ten view Osama bin Laden positively. Many respondents express mixed feelings about bin Laden and his followers and many others decline to answer,” WorldPublicOpinion.org said.

More than half believed al Qaeda’s goals included achieving a strict application of Sharia law in every Islamic country, with more than 70 percent agreeing with that aim.

More than 50 percent believed the militant Islamist group was pushing the United States to remove its bases and military forces from all Islamic countries and 63 percent agreed with that goal.

But the poll found uncertainty about whether al Qaeda was responsible for the September 11 attacks on the United States in 2001. Some 20 percent believed the U.S. government was behind the attacks.

“On average less than one in four believes al Qaeda was responsible for September 11th attacks. Pakistanis are the most skeptical — only 3 percent think al Qaeda did it,” said WorldPublicOpinion.org.

“There is no consensus about who is responsible for the attacks on New York and Washington; the most common answer is ‘don’t know’.”

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Lemon Writes About Threat to Internet Radio

Congress is about to put an end to free internet radio broadcasting. Most of these stations are absolutely free to you but their owners pay stiff royalty fees to keep on the air. The fees are about to go so sky high that most will not be able to remain on the air.
A good number of the people running these stations are disabled as are a great number of those who listen in.
For some it is their only way to have contact with other people.
Stations like "Live 365" which offers a tremendous amount of programming..something for everyone!!...might be forced to close down.

Read more here

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Media Themselves Lied about Jessia Lynch

American Thinker

There are two facts that get left out of this type of reporting:

a) Jessica Lynch is a hero just by serving her country whether she fired a shot or was knocked out immediately during the ambush that injured her severely and

b) the story of her shoot-out with Iraqi forces was not a product of the US military but of the US media.

The US media created this recounting of her exploits from vague, unofficial statements by "undisclosed officials" and having been revealed as rumor mongers started looking for someone to blame. Who else would they pin it on but the US military?

We all know it is hard to prove a negative, in this case that the US military did not create the shoot-out scenario reported by the media. So we have to instead ask questions. If the US military did so, who specifically did it? Do we have a name in all this media hype about the misleading Pentagon reporting? Where was the claim first made? Who was the source?

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Israel Redeemed

Sultan Knish writes on The Redemption of Israel and a second part.

Human beings quickly learn to take things for granted. 75 years ago the prospect of a Jewish state was as likely as a city on the moon. There were those who busily worked, agitated and struggled for it, but to the majority of Jews it was a distant dream. And yet as in a dream it exists. It is a matter of a plane ride for a Jew anywhere in the world to arrive there and walk its streets.

Most people think of miracles as entities of smoke and flames. As insubstantial things you cannot see or touch. The incredible and the unbelievable. But those are wonders. Miracles are everyday things whose wonder is difficult to hold in your mind. The tree that shades the lane. The sun that shines above. A state built out of the ruins of fallen empires rising like a green shoot in springtime to the light.

Now that the State of Israel exists too many take it for granted. Others have unknowingly slipped into the narrative crafted by our enemies, whose goal is to portray the State as a terrible burden, both for the Jews and for everyone else. A burden that is best dismantled.

Miracles after all are not supposed to exist and people react badly to them. When the Jews multiplied in miraculous numbers in Egypt, Pharaoh shuddered and brought out the chains and whips and murdered their children. When G-d threw open the gates of Egypt, still he pursued them into the very sea.

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Love Your Children and Teach Them To Behead Others

KILI FAQIRAN, Pakistan - The boy with the knife looks barely 12. In a high-pitched voice, he denounces the bound, blindfolded man before him as an American spy. Then he hacks off the captive’s head to cries of “God is great!” and hoists it in triumph by the hair.

A video circulating in Pakistan records the grisly death of Ghulam Nabi, a Pakistani militant accused of betraying a top Taliban official who was killed in a December airstrike in Afghanistan.

Captions mention Mullah Dadullah, the Taliban’s current top commander in southern Afghanistan, although he does not appear in the video. The soundtrack features songs praising Taliban supreme leader Mullah Omar and “Sheikh Osama” — an apparent reference to Osama bin Laden, who is suspected of hiding along the Afghan-Pakistan border.

The footage shows Nabi making what is described as a confession, being blindfolded with a checkered scarf. “He is an American spy. Those who do this kind of thing will get this kind of fate,” says his baby-faced executioner, who is not identified.

A continuous 2 1/2-minute shot then shows the victim lying on his side on a patch of rubble-strewn ground. A man holds Nabi by his beard while the boy, wearing a camouflage military jacket and oversized white sneakers, cuts into the throat. Other men and boys call out “Allahu akbar!” — “God is great!” — as blood spurts from the wound.

The film, overlain with jihadi songs, then shows the boy hacking and slashing at the man’s neck until the head is severed.

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Pallie Terrorists Hit American School

GAZA (Reuters) - Palestinian militants blew up parts of the American International School in Gaza on Saturday, causing damage but no injuries, Palestinian security sources and witnesses said.

The security sources and school officials said the militants detonated three explosive devices in two of the buildings of the school in the northern Gaza Strip. The blast occurred before the start of the school day and no one was injured in the attack.

“A large number of masked gunmen attacked the school at dawn. They poured petrol all around and blew up several explosive devices and destroyed some of the premises,” said Rebhi Salem, the school’s director.

See full story

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Crazy Islamofascists Want Veggie Gender Segregation

""It's happening daily," Lt. Col. Keith Gogas said Thursday in an interview at an Army base in Muqdadiyah, 60 miles northeast of Baghdad. "Our read on it is that the more moderate, if you will, Sunni insurgents are finding that their goals and al-Qaida's goals are at odds."

American commanders cite al-Qaida's severe brand of Islam, which is so extreme that in Baqouba, al-Qaida has warned street vendors not to place tomatoes beside cucumbers because the vegetables are different genders, Col. David Sutherland said."

Seattle Times

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Mark Steyn on: A Culture of Passivity

On Monday night, Geraldo was all over Fox News saying we have to accept that, in this horrible world we live in, our “children” need to be “protected.”

Point one: They’re not “children.” The students at Virginia Tech were grown women and — if you’ll forgive the expression — men. They would be regarded as adults by any other society in the history of our planet. Granted, we live in a selectively infantilized culture where twentysomethings are “children” if they’re serving in the Third Infantry Division in Ramadi but grown-ups making rational choices if they drop to the broadloom in President Clinton’s Oval Office. Nonetheless, it’s deeply damaging to portray fit fully formed adults as children who need to be protected. We should be raising them to understand that there will be moments in life when you need to protect yourself — and, in a “horrible” world, there may come moments when you have to choose between protecting yourself or others. It is a poor reflection on us that, in those first critical seconds where one has to make a decision, only an elderly Holocaust survivor, Professor Librescu, understood instinctively the obligation to act.

Read more here

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Lemon Lime Moon Speaks on Curse Words on Blogs

There is a movement by some bloggers to clean up the internet. It is a good idea as long as the goal is the clean up all language and not just "some" language for which there is an agenda. The main thrust seems to be cleaning up comments and ephithets hurled at the bloggers themselves. They would also like a set of commenting rules.

Another good idea is for bloggers to clean up their mouths themselves.
When blogs are liberally interspersed with the "f" word in various guises and even in abbreviations used to show shock and surprise as in : WT_, it shows a decided lack of values doesn't it?

Read more here at Lemon Lime Moon

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Heroes and Victims in Virginia Tech

Via Sultan Knish

At the Munich Olympics, when the Palestinian terrorists broke into the rooms of the Israeli athletes, Yosef Gutfreund threw his weight against the door giving others a chance to escape through the windows. That legacy was alive when Virginia Tech Professor Liviu Librescu blocked the door with his own body so that his students could escape through the windows. The 76 year old man held the gunman back long enough to allow all but two of his students to reach safety. And then he died on the same classroom floor his feet had paced energetically for so many years.

One escaping student, in a letter sent to Professor Librescu's wife, writes of looking back at the professor through the other side of the window from the ledge. "I saw your husband still standing there. He was holding the door closed and looking over his shoulder to make sure everybody else was safe. It was the bravest thing I have ever seen and I will always remember his courage."

In this YouTube generation, Librescu's story of heroism has been overshadowed by the story of Jamal Albarghouti, related to arch-terrorist Marwan Barghouti, who filmed some footage of the attack and sold it to CNN. Stories written about Albarghouti repeatedly describe him as a "Palestinian from the West Bank", characterizing his actions as "intrepid", "daring" and "bold". As if such words can be used about a man whose uselessly filmed an ongoing attack and then profited from it.



It's hard to find a greater contrast between a man who risked his life to save others and another man who stood around taking video footage of it and then sold it to CNN for an undisclosed and undoubtedly sizable sum of money. It is more than a contrast between cultures or generations. It is the contrast between running into a burning building and slowing down to watch the aftermath of a car crash.

Shortly after 9/11 articles began to appear in the media complaining about the "Cult of the Hero" they felt had evolved after the attacks, which worshiped soldiers, rescue workers and police officers. Virtue, they felt, had been reduced to a matter of brawn. But of course they had it wrong. It doesn't take brawn to be a hero. Europe is filled with muscular men who do not lift a finger against the Muslim violence brewing in their cities. Against torched cars, rape gangs and Mosques preaching Jihad.

Librescu was no titan or atlas. He was an elderly man who gave his life to save others, not because of his physical strength, but his moral strength. Because he saw the willingness of a man to sacrifice himself for others, as the most natural and responsible act a man can do. His actions serve as a rebuke to a political and media culture that preaches passivity at home and abroad. Which celebrates "citizen journalists" like Albarghouti who stand around videotaping a tragedy, but smears the American soldier in Iraq facing bullets and bombs and the Israeli soldier trying to keep the next suicide bomber from boarding the Number 19 bus.

The rejection of heroism is the rejection of the idea that people can be anything other than victims. The media prefers the complacent viewer who watches but does not act, videotapes but does not intervene. It is unsurprising that television stations which view getting footage of an attack as more important than actually stopping the attack, prioritize Jamal Albarghouti over Liviu Librescu.

Liberalism too prefers the victim to the hero. Rather than strengthening people, it prefers to weaken them. As the media prefers tears to strong arms and figures slumped in misery to men and women raising their heads high, its ideological wellspring of liberalism has replaced "The Cult of the Hero" with the "Cult of the Victim."

It is ironic but not surprising then that under some of the British boycotts proposed against Israeli universities and even Israeli academics and faculty, Liviu Librescu would have been barred in favor of a Jamal Albarghouti. The Palestinian sympathizer is after all the chief worshiper at the bloody altar of "The Cult of the Victim" endlessly magnified. In the amoral transmogrification required to justify Palestinian terrorism, morality and responsibility are eliminated by arguing that feelings of helplessness and hopelessness topple all human obligations and human norms. Once rendered helpless, the "victim" is set free to behave in a completely amoral manner. The "Cult of the Victim" then becomes the cult of the terrorist and the criminal, treating them as nothing more than helpless pinballs in a political and economic system that has left them incapable of doing anything other than committing the atrocities they perpetrate.

The continuing heroism of American and Israeli soldiers and civilians in the face of a constant onslaught of terrorism only further enrages the followers of “The Cult of the Victim" who view apathy or cowardly brutality as the only proper responses to a crisis. Failing to be proper victims, Israelis and Americans after 9/11 are accused of having become just like the Nazis. These are the only two possible categories that exist in the mindset of liberalism. You are either a victim or a Nazi. Liviu Librescu had been a victim of the Nazis, but his actions repudiated these categories. He chose to be a hero.

Romania has conferred the "National Order of the Star of Romania" posthumously on Liviu Librescu. His body will be transported to Israel for burial. A hero returning home.

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Iran and Syria Lead UN Disarmament Commission

On April 9, 2007 there was a United Nations believe-it-or-not moment extraordinaire. At the same time that Iran’s President Ahmadinejad declared his country was now capable of industrial-scale uranium enrichment, the U.N. reelected Iran as a vice chairman of the U.N. Disarmament Commission.

Yes Ripley, the very U.N. body charged with promoting nuclear nonproliferation installed in a senior position the state that the Security Council recently declared violated its nonproliferation resolutions.

So in Iran at the Natanz nuclear facility Ahmadinejad gloated: “With great pride, I announce as of today our dear country is among the countries of the world that produces nuclear fuel on an industrial scale.” And in New York, courtesy of his U.N. platform, Iranian Disarmament Vice-Chairman Seyed Mohammad Ali Robatjazi railed against “noncompliance with the NPT [nuclear nonproliferation treaty] by the United States” and “the Zionist lobby.”

It took the U.N. a mere five days to rehabilitate Iran after the British kidnap victims made it home alive. Just the night before on April 8, Faye Turney, the only female victim, revealed her Iranian abductors stripped her to her underwear, caged her in a tiny, freezing cell, and subjected her to mental torture such as leading her to believe that her death was imminent.

But while this was actually happening to Faye Turney, Ambassador Luis Alfonso de Alba of Mexico, the president of the U.N.’s lead human-rights body — the U.N. Human Rights Council — was making this announcement, March 26, 2006:

I would like to make the following statement adopted by the Council. One,...the Human Rights Council has in closed meetings examined the human rights situation in...the Islamic Republic of Iran...Two, the Human Rights Council has decided to discontinue the consideration of the human rights situation in the Islamic Republic of Iran...Three,...members of the Human Rights Council should make no reference in the public debate to the confidential decisions and material concerning [the Islamic Republic of Iran]...

This is not simply a very bad joke. The U.N. is feted by many as the go-to address for international progress in the world today. Congressman Tom Lantos, chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, declared at a hearing on U.N. reform in February that “the U.N. provides vital support to core U.S. foreign-policy initiatives” including on Iran and the way forward is to “ratchet up our level of diplomacy there.”

Read more here

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PBS Documentary on Moderate Islam Suppressed

A 52-minute documentary film exploring the struggles of moderate American Muslims at the hands of their radical brethren has also become a showcase for the struggles between right and left in the news media.
The producers of "Islam vs. Islamists" say their taxpayer-funded film has been shelved by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in "an ideological vendetta," and because the production team includes conservative columnist Frank Gaffney Jr., founder of the Center for Security Policy.
"This is a well-documented, textbook case of the abuse of taxpayer funding by elements in the public broadcasting system to advocate their agenda and ensure that people who have different agenda don't get on the air," Mr. Gaffney said yesterday. "The public ought to be allowed to see a film which PBS doesn't want them to see."
His partner Martyn Burke also accused CPB and PBS of stifling the film "on political grounds."

CPB says the film simply needs work but stands a chance to be aired eventually as a "stand-alone" program in the future. " 'Islam vs. Islamists' has not been canceled. It is a work in progress," said CPB spokesman Michael Levy.
"I am incredulous that PBS would invest so much of our tax money into contracting professionals for a documentary on a subject -- the struggle for the soul of Islam -- which is one of the most vital debates of the 21st century and then censor its release," said Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, chairman of the Arizona-based American Islamic Forum for Democracy who is featured in the documentary.
"Until mainstream media and mainstream America understands the need to help this debate and expose the plight of moderates who push back against the Islamists within the Muslim community, we will continue to lose ground against militant Islamism," Dr. Jasser said. "The censorship of this documentary tells us a great deal about the level to which our government is facilitating the ideology of Islamism which runs directly counter to our foundations of Americanism."
Originally, the film was intended to be shown on "America at a Crossroads," a six-night series which begins Sunday. The series comprises 11 independently produced films depicting the political and cultural complexities of a post-September 11 nation. Mr. Gaffney and partners Mr. Burke and Alex Alexiev received $675,000 in funding last year, ultimately producing an unvarnished look at Islamic fundamentalist threats and intimidation of some Muslims.
Their work did not go over well with Leo Eaton, the series producer, or Jeff Bieber, executive producer at WETA, where the series originated. Mr. Gaffney received a series of critical "notes" between November and February which said, among other things, that the film would "demonize Islam" and promote public fear of Islamic organizations.
The critique, Mr. Gaffney said in a March 6 rebuttal, "is itself 'a point of view' ... an apologia for Islamist extremism."
Mr. Gaffney continued, "This documentary has been the subject of an ideological vendetta." He later accused CPB and PBS of suppressing the content and message of the film and ignoring the public interest.
Officials counter that there simply wasn't room.

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Burqa: The New License to Steal

via Debbie Schlussel

Recently, we told you about how burqas (full Muslim face veils plus dresses) and niqabs (full Muslim face veils) were being used by Muslim cop-killers and terrorists to escape the West and justice.

Well, the veiled threat continues. Now, Muslim women in burqas are using the concealing garb to steal jewelry from shops in India. That's why some Indian jewelry shops are banning women in burqas from shopping there.


Yet another reason why I applaud Hamtramckstan, Michigan Judge Paul Paruk's ruling against allowing witnesses wearing the face veils in his courtroom to give testimony.

And BTW, it's very difficult to eat spaghetti while wearing one.

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