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Posts Tagged ‘barbarism’

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More Islamic outrage in Lebanon

Posted by Richard on June 2, 2006

Oscar Wilde said, "If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you." Oscar Wilde apparently wasn’t familiar with radical Islam, a belief system that seems totally bereft of a sense of humor. Islamists will kill you for trying to make them laugh.

Riots erupted in Lebanon when a TV comedy poked fun at Sheik Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah:

Calm returned early Friday to Beirut and other parts of the country after Shi’ite Muslims rioted overnight, blocking roads and burning tires, to protest a TV satirical program that mocked the leader of the militant Hezbollah group.

Several thousand Shi’ite Muslims enraged by a TV comedy that mocked the leader of Hezbollah took to the streets of southern Beirut on Thursday night, burning car tires and blocking roads – including the highway to Lebanon’s international airport, police and witnesses said.
…

Rioters began dispersing early Friday after Nasrallah, speaking on Hezbollah’s Al-Manar television by telephone early Friday, appealed to his supporters "to end the gatherings and go home." Also, the producer of the TV program apologized, saying he did not mean to offend Nasrallah.

Ah, yes — "the gatherings." By "militants."

So, what kind of intolerable mockery would trigger such outrage? Apparently, it doesn’t take much:

The satire did not carry any insulting words of the leader, but ridiculed the group’s continued assertion of resistance against Israel. One questioner asked the person acting as Nasrallah whether he would lay down his arms, and the man replied by implying the group will use every excuse not to surrender its weapons.

The mere depiction of Nasrallah, a middle-ranking Shi’ite cleric, was enough to enrage his supporters. …

OK, the Islamo-whackos are going to have to do a better job of explaining their rules to the rest of us. When the Danes published those cartoons, we were told that the "mere depiction" of Mohammed was a grave offense, justifying widespread riots, violence, mayhem, murder, and threats of mass beheadings. Some of us thought they were a bit too touchy about this prophet of theirs. I mean, the Baptists didn’t torch pickup trucks over "Piss Christ."

Now it turns out that it’s not just Mohammed — these clowns also go berserk at the "mere depiction" of some "middle-ranking" cleric whose chief goal in life seems to be the recruitment and training of suicide bombers to kill Jews.

What else will set these nutjobs off? The "mere depiction" of their drill sergeant? Disrespecting their greengrocer? Poking fun at their favorite camel?

Meanwhile in Iraq, just to prove that the Shia branch of Islam doesn’t have a monopoly on religious whackjobs, an audio tape by al-Zarqawi condemned the Shiites for being practically "atheist" and for not being sufficiently anti-Israel and anti-American:

"Oh Sunni people, wake up, pay attention and prepare to confront the poisons of the Shiite snakes who are afflicting you with all agonies since the invasion of Iraq until our day. Forget about those advocating the end of sectarianism and calling for national unity," al-Zarqawi said. …
…

"There is no difference between Shiites of Iran and the Shiites in the rest of the Arab world either in Iraq, Lebanon. their beliefs are the same .. their hatred of Sunnis is the same," he said, adding, "The roots of Jews and the Shiites are the same."
…

He said Shiite leaders in Iran and Lebanon _ including the Hezbollah guerrilla movement _ only pretend to confront Israel and the United States. He mocked Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for "screaming and calling for wiping Israel from the map," but doing nothing, referring to anti-Israeli comments earlier this year.

Sigh. Would it be feasible to secretly spike the water supplies in large parts of the Middle East with anti-psychotics?
 

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Desert stops blooming

Posted by Richard on May 15, 2006

Before they were forced out of Gaza by their own government, the Jews of Gush Katif ran some of the most sophisticated agricultural operations in the world. Their greenhouses produced most of Israel’s produce, along with over $100 million a year in exports to Europe. These greenhouses were the quintessential example of how the Israelis had "made the desert bloom." And they provided employment for over 4000 Palestinian Arabs.

In the days before Gaza was turned over to the Palestinian Authority, some of the Jews being evicted talked about destroying everything they had created, rather than turning it over to those who couldn’t duplicate their achievement and hadn’t earned a right to it. Think Howard Roark and Cortland Homes. But a group of rich American Jews came up with $14 million to buy the greenhouses of Gush Katif and give them to the PA’s Palestinian Company for Economic Development. At the time, Robert Spencer of Dhimmi Watch took a dim view of their philanthropy:

Moral blindness, dhimmitude, naivete, and more. Will the recipients of this largesse now realize that the Jews are not as bad as they have thought? No. They will laugh at their weakness and continue the jihad.

Spencer was soon shown to be prescient. Looting and destruction began almost as soon as the last Israeli soldiers were gone:

A week after they descended like locusts on the greenhouses that Jewish settlers nurtured in Gaza, looters continue to pillage what should be a prize asset for a fledgling Palestinian state.

And the Palestinian Authority, which took over Gaza after the Israelis evacuated the territory, appears powerless to stop them.

When a Daily News correspondent visited abandoned Jewish settlements in Gaza, he found brazen vandals dismantling farms that once produced some of the world’s finest tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers.

Samir Al-Najar had a ready explanation for why he and his crew were demolishing a half-acre greenhouse:

… Al-Najar insisted the land was his family’s before Israel occupied it in 1967 and that he was reclaiming it.

"I want to reorganize the land so we’re clearing it out for now," Al-Najar said as two workers carried off a stack of tall metal support beams. Asked whether he intended to sell the materials, Al-Najar shook his head. "We’ll probably rebuild with them, but I want the greenhouses to be our own, not Jewish ones," he said.

That was in September. No word on Al-Najar’s "reorganizing" of the land or his promise to build a non-Jewish greenhouse.

By December, the Palestinians were having problems managing the greenhouses they hadn’t destroyed, and consequently provided a textbook illustration of the concept of chutzpah (emphasis added):

The Palestinians who took over the Jewish greenhouses in the Gaza Strip when Israel withdrew its communities from the area now are asking expelled farmers for advice after reportedly failing to reproduce the region’s famous insect-free vegetables, WND has learned.
. . .

Earlier this month, the Palestinians now running the greenhouses reportedly told the Israeli-Palestinian Economic Cooperation Fund they failed in their efforts to grow bug-free produce.

Now the Palestinian owners have asked the United States Agency for International Development, which has been involved in reconstruction efforts in Gaza, to hire former Jewish Gaza greenhouse owners as consultants for their declining vegetable businesses.

Eitan Hederi, a former Gaza farmer who represented Gush Katif residents in the Wolfenson greenhouse transfer told WND, "The Palestinians are privately turning to U.S. AID to hire us because we are experts in this kind of farming. It’s a really complex process that we engineered."

As of this past weekend, the barbarians were still bent on destroying the artifacts of civilization that they couldn’t create, understand, or maintain:

Several greenhouses belonging to the former settlement of Morag in the Gaza Strip were destroyed over the weekend during an attempt by dozens of gunmen to take control of the area.

The Palestinian Company for Economic Development, which is in charge of thousands of greenhouses that used to belong to Morag and other settlements in Gush Katif, said the attack, which took place on Friday, was the latest in a series that began almost immediately after the settlements were evacuated.

The company revealed that hundreds of greenhouses and other agricultural installations have been sabotaged over the past few months, expressing its outrage over the recurring phenomenon. …

Hat tip to Dhimmi Watch, where commenter special_guest said it well (emphasis added):

I hope they were environmentally conscious enough to re-use the scrap metal from the destroyed hothouses in the only industry that thrives in "Palestine", manufacturing weapons that will be used to kill unarmed civilians.

It is just pure nihlism, there is only darkness and depravity in all that they touch.

It’s not without reason that someone coined the term "paleostinian."

UPDATE: Welcome, Pajamas Media "Best of the Blogs" readers, including the visitor from Riyadh! Please look around while you’re here. Check out some of the intriguing titles to the left, or visit the main page, where you’ll find my 20 most recent posts.
 

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Non-news: suicide bombers not Iraqis

Posted by Richard on July 1, 2005

LGF posted an AP story earlier today announcing breathlessly that the vast majority of suicide bombers in Iraq have been foreigners. Yawn. The only people who might be surprised by this probably dismiss it as a Rove trick.

Readers of the Grand Junction, CO, Daily Sentinel heard this straight from the horse’s mouth a couple of weeks ago. Shortly after, so did readers of Chrenkoff and my blog. In the Daily Sentinel story about Grand Junction’s Col. Jim West, he not only reported that most suicide bombers were non-Iraqis, he said that not all of them went willingly to their fate:

"He was trying to drive into a busy checkpoint and the Marine guards wounded him and disabled his car before he could reach the intersection and activate the bomb," West wrote. "When they opened the door to remove him, they found him chained to the seat with his hands taped to the steering wheel. He had an activation switch on his body that he could use but they also found a remote-control activation device under the front seat. It was hidden in the floor of the car so he probably didn’t know it was there… He was going to die whether he wanted to or not."

A guard activated a radio-jamming device immediately so the bomb couldn’t be detonated, West wrote.

The driver was "yelling and very agitated and had a glazed look," West said in a telephone interview. It turned out he also was heavily drugged, West said.

The AP story does add breadth and detail to the story of foreign suicide bombers. Of course, some of the details aren’t presented as accurately as one might wish:

There have been a few exceptions.

On election day Jan. 30, a mentally handicapped Iraqi boy, wearing a suicide vest, attacked a polling station.

The poor kid didn’t "attack" a polling station. The jihadists strapped explosives on him and made him start walking toward the polling station. The kid didn’t know what was happening, but he became confused or scared and turned around. Started walking back where he came from.

They remotely detonated him.

Attacked a polling station, my ass.

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The difference between us and them, part 3

Posted by Richard on June 28, 2005

In this episode, we revisit our Islamofascist enemy. Courtesy of LGF, we’re treated to Lt. Col. Gordon Cucullu’s account of what he learned on a recent visit to Guantanamo:

… Our group went to GITMO to check out tales that the military was being too tough on these terrorist detainees. We left convinced that America is being extraordinarily lenient – far too lenient.

After speaking with soldiers, sailors, and civilians who collectively staff Gitmo, I left convinced that abuse definitely exists at the detention facilities, and it typically fails to receive the press attention it deserves: it’s the relentless, merciless attacks on American servicemen and women by these terrorist thugs. Many of the orange jumpsuit-clad detainees fight their captors at every opportunity, openly bragging of their desire to kill Americans. One has promised that, if released, he would find MPs in their homes through the internet, break into their houses at night, and “cut the throats of them and their families like sheep.” Others claim authority and vindication to kill women, children, and other innocents who oppose their jihadist mission authorized by the Koran (the same one that hangs in every cell from a specially-designed holder intended to protect it from a touching the cell floor – all provided at U.S. taxpayer expense). One detainee was heard to tell another: “One day I will enjoy sucking American blood, although their blood is bitter, undrinkable….” These recalcitrant detainees are known euphemistically as being “non-compliant.” They attack guards whenever the soldiers enter their cells, trying to reach up under protective facemasks to gouge eyes and tear mouths. They make weapons and try to stab the guards or grab and break limbs as the guards pass them food.

Lt. Col. Cucullu reminds us that the Gitmo detainees are a select group:

Of the estimated 70,000 battlefield captures that were made in Afghanistan, only a tiny percentage, something on the order of 800-plus, were eventually evacuated to GITMO. These were the worst of the worst. More than 200 have been released back to their home country – if the U.S. is assured that the detainees would not be tortured by local authorities upon return. These men were freed because they were deemed by ongoing official military review processes to no longer pose a threat, or to possess no useful intelligence. And this process has proven too generous at times: more than 10 released GITMO detainees have been killed or recaptured fighting Americans or have been identified as resuming terrorist activities.

The top commanders at Gitmo seem to be fans of gentle treatment and "establishing rapport" with the prisoners:

Some questioned whether it were wise to give these radical Islamic fundamentalists the religious supplies that ended up landing them in Gitmo in the first place. “Giving them the Koran is simply something that we think we ought to do as a humane gesture,” said second-in-command Brigadier General Gong. “We’re Americans. That’s how we operate.”

… JTF-GITMO commanding officer Brigadier General Jay Hood radiated confidence and determination when fielding challenges from our group about his overly lenient treatment. “It works,” he says simply. … As proof that “establishing rapport” with the detainees is far more effective than coercive techniques, General Hood refers skeptics to the massive amount of usable intelligence information JTF-GITMO continues to produce even three years into the program.

Lt. Col. Cucullu concludes that concern over Gitmo is warranted, but not the kind that Sen. Durbin expressed:

You are right to worry about inhumane treatment taking place at GITMO. But your concern should be for the dedicated, well-trained, highly professional American men and women who are subjected to a daily barrage of feces, urine, semen, and spit hurled at them along with vile invective as they implement a humane, enlightened system of confinement on men who want nothing more than to kill Americans. These quiet professional Americans, who live under the motto “Honor Bound for Defense of Freedom,” deserve our utmost respect and concern. Shame on anyone who slanders or disrespects them for short-term and short-sighted political advantage.

And double shame on those who believe without evidence every accusation made by murderous jihadists, but are immediately suspicious of statements by members of this administration and American men and women in uniform.

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The difference between us and them, part 2

Posted by Richard on June 28, 2005

Last week in part 1 of this topic, I noted that "People like Nancy Pelosi and Dick Durbin are convinced that U.S. detention centers are cesspools of evil, as bad as the worst detention facilities anywhere, anywhen." To further disabuse such people of that absurd notion, Captain Ed offers a look at this story of the ten years of torture endured by a Tibetan nun at the hands of the Chinese:

Ngawang Sangdrol was just 13 when she was first imprisoned by China in Tibet. She was so small her prison guards found it easy to pick her up by the legs and drop her, head first, on to the stone floor of her cell.

They beat her with iron rods, placed electric shock batons in her mouth and left her standing in the baking heat until she collapsed of exhaustion. They called her the "ballerina", because when the pain became too much for her, she would stand on the tips of her toes like a dancer. "The more we cried out in pain," she said, "the more they laughed."

Captain Ed explains:

I point this out just in case anyone still doesn’t understand the difference between systemic torture as policy and genocide as a state goal on one hand, and isolated cases of abuse by rogue personnel who get prosecuted for their actions on the other.

I’m sure quite a few people still don’t understand, Captain. Fortunately, according to this poll, it’s only about 20% of the American people.

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The difference between us and them

Posted by Richard on June 24, 2005

People like Nancy Pelosi and Dick Durbin are convinced that U.S. detention centers are cesspools of evil, as bad as the worst detention facilities anywhere, anywhen. For the sake of argument, assume that we sincerely want to change their minds and that their minds are capable of being changed. How can we demonstrate that there’s no moral equivalence between our soldiers and the enemies they fight? How can we illustrate what makes us different?

Opinipundit suggests that a recent discovery in Western Iraq illustrates the difference nicely:

We have manuals on how to properly handle the Koran and humanely treat prisoners, paying respect to their cultural sensitivities, they have manuals on how to properly torture and decapitate hostages.

Baghdad, 23 June (AKI) – US Marines have found manuals on taking hostages and decapitation during a raid on a guerrilla hideout in the Iraqi village of Karabla, near the town of Qaim, close to the Syrian border. The Arab newspaper Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports that in the hideaway the troops also found several hostages who were being held there by Islamic militants. The hiding place was being used as a centre for the interrogation and torture of hostages, and contained electrodes and other instruments of torture.

The manuals found were used as Jihad (Holy War) handbooks. The first was titled: "How to choose the best hostage", the second covered decapitation and was called: "Rules for cutting off the heads of infidels", and the third manual, "principles of the philosophy of the Jihad", was more theoretical.

The three documents, the last of which is 574 pages long, carry the name Abdel Rahman al-Aliya, which the newspaper says is probably a cover name to hide the identity of the real author. The hideout – in the volatile western Anbar province which has been the scene of fierce fighting between insurgents and the US-led forces – is believed to have been used by the group led by the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He is credited with introducing the practice of decapitation to the activities of the Jihadist movement.

Who are the barbarians Sen Durbin?

Good question. Anyone who has trouble answering or mumbles something insincere followed by "but…" needs to be smacked with a cluestick.

I’ve seen a decapitation video. I don’t recommend it and wouldn’t inflict it on anyone. Nevertheless, the American people need to know much more about the Islamofascists — their beliefs, goals, tactics, methods, etc. That means, for those willing, exposing them to some things that aren’t for the squeamish. I’d like to see a non-profit put together and promote to the public some "Know the Enemy" educational programs and materials.

I’m willing to consider force-feeding the stuff to members of Congress.

(HT:Michelle Malkin)

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If the Palestinians had a state, what would its goal be?

Posted by Richard on May 18, 2005

The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) has posted excerpts from the latest official Friday sermon by an official Palestinian Authority cleric on Palestinian Authority TV. You can watch the video if you want. Here’s a sample:

"With the establishment of the state of Israel, the entire Islamic nation was lost, because Israel is a cancer spreading through the body of the Islamic nation, and because the Jews are a virus resembling AIDS, from which the entire world suffers.

"You will find that the Jews were behind all the civil strife in this world. The Jews are behind the suffering of the nations.
…
"We have ruled the world before, and by Allah, the day will come when we will rule the entire world again. The day will come when we will rule America. The day will come when we will rule Britain and the entire world – except for the Jews. The Jews will not enjoy a life of tranquility under our rule, because they are treacherous by nature, as they have been throughout history. The day will come when everything will be reli[e]ved of the Jews – even the stones and trees which were harmed by them. Listen to the Prophet Muhammad, who tells you about the evil end that awaits Jews. The stones and trees will want the Muslims to finish off every Jew."

Yeah, I can’t wait until this organization governs a sovereign state and joins the "family of nations." They’ll fit right in at the UN. Probably get a seat on the Human Rights Commission. Probably start a nuclear research program…

HT: EconoPundit

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Explaining Darfur

Posted by Richard on May 7, 2005

Glenn Reynolds pointed to a Joseph Britt post at Belgravia Dispatch about Darfur. He suggested reading the whole thing, and I enthusiastically echo that. This is the finest commentary on Darfur that I’ve seen. Heck, it’s the finest commentary on Arab culture that I’ve seen. I can’t help quoting big chunks:

… Arabs in Darfur seem to use rape as a weapon more often than Arabs from Saudi Arabia or Ramadi, and explosives not as often. But these look like details to me, a case of different people relying on different chapters of The Savage’s Handbook.

I know all the likely rebuttals to this deliberately brutal and inflammatory language. None of them explain the Arab genocide in Darfur; the silence of other Arabs about Arab genocide in Darfur; or the Western media’s silence about Arabs’ silence about Arab genocide in Darfur. Friedman, for example, seems oblivious to the subject. Kristof, who is not, follows the conventional practice of American journalists witnessing something awful. This is to demand that the American government do something about it.
…
We all saw in the last decade how many people in the former Yugoslavia had to die while European powers fiddled around waiting for the Americans. Europe had the means to stop the fighting sooner, but not the will. … At the end of it all European governments had the grace to show some sense of guilt and remorse about the whole sorry business.

The Arab world isn’t even doing that about Darfur. No peacekeepers, no aid, no media coverage, and for damn sure no guilt. …
…
You don’t need to be a master geo-strategist or have a doctorate in comparative anthropology to figure out that a culture and religion indifferent or worse to murder on a large scale is going to be a problem for the civilized countries. Egyptian, Saudi, and other Arab Muslims who object to this characterization of them have it within their power to prove me wrong, or not, by what they finally do about Darfur.

Bravo.

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