Bloodthirsty Liberal

How do you say “Go [bleep] yourself” in Albanian, Belorussian, Chadian, Danish, Eritrean, etc, etc.

EU climate cash pledge ‘not enough’ say small nations

Developing countries and aid agencies have derided the latest pledges by richer states to tackle global warming.

EU leaders ended a Brussels summit with a three-year deal to pay 7.2bn euros (£6.5bn; $10.6bn) to help poorer nations cope with climate change.

…

But leaders of poorer nations and some aid agencies described the sum offered by the EU as inadequate.

I don’t always agree with reader Joe, but I refuse to be shaken down by a passel of grifters from a pathetic pack of pygmy states. Are these ingrates not familiar with the precarious position beggars take vis a vis choosing?

How do you say “not one red cent” in the local Paraguayan dialect? Or “drown for all I care” in Seychelles?

Yet more proof, though no more is needed, that “climate change” is yet another scam by socialist elements among international institutions to bleed money from states that make it to states that don’t.

How do you say “beat it” in Somalian?

Let me condense this story down to its building blocks—cut to the chase, in other words:

The US State Department once again expressed its disapproval Tuesday night over Israel’s eviction of two Palestinian families from their homes in the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah.

The American officials made a phone call to Israel’s Ambassador to Washington Michael Oren and protested the move. Foreign Ministry officials in Jerusalem stressed Wednesday that the call was not a reprimand.

On Monday Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called the eviction “deeply regrettable” and “provocative.”

…

The European Union has also criticized Israel for the eviction, expressing “serious concerns” over the action.

…

Robert Serry, the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, called Sunday’s evictions “totally unacceptable.”

How will our hero get out of this jam? A neat gadget pulled from the Bat Belt? Nope, bats are not kosher. Superhuman strength? Well, one doesn’t wish to boast. A fine point of law that turns the whole situation upside-down, leaving people gasping at its brilliance?

You’re getting warmer:

The evictions were carried out early Sunday morning after the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Jewish families who claimed ownership. The families had maintained that the homes were owned by Jews dating back to the late 19th century, and were abandoned during a spate of Arab attacks in the area in the 1920s and ’30s.

My country, America, under this administration, now agrees with the likes of the EU and the UN. I could just stop there and hang my head in shame, but I must face the truth. While the Holocaust might have taken things a bit too far, we now tolerate, even tacitly encourage, lesser assaults on the Jewish people. Centuries and millennia of ownership mean nothing; only the snapshot, the Weegee flash of how things looked when the Jews were burned out of their homes. To the well-thinking liberal minds of the world, this is how things ought to be.

What is even worse, they are not stupid. Hillary Clinton cannot be ignorant of the crimes against Jewish people in country after country throuughout the Middle East, decade after decade. Barack Obama must have had it explained top him that Israel is a Jewish state not merely out of destiny and pride, but out of necessity. Surely, the EU and the UN know that the Israeli Supreme Court is no friend of land grabs, after it ordered the separation barrier moved (more than once, I believe) to be fairer to Palestinians.

But they are mute on those facts.

Last point: Israel was not founded as a safe-haven for Jews after a European decade-long genocide against them, as the American and Iranian presidents seem to think. The genocide was a lot broader than that, and lasted a lot longer.

But while genocide was the immediate cause, no fair appraisal of the history and culture of the Middle East can deny the claim the Jews have to that land. The three great holy books of the religions that trace their origins there agree on the point; contemporary Roman histories reinforce it; archeology confirms it. One doesn’t have to be Jewish, or even religious, to see the justice of a Jewish state on the land granted to them by someone a lot more powerful than Barack Obama, and on which they have lived (with interruptions for occasional genocides) for thousands of years.

Somehow, a Palestinian deed of ownership clipped from the back of a cereal box just doesn’t measure up.

It took some doing to find a worse job than mining coal in China, but your intrepid reporter has done it: making light bulbs in China. (Of course, any job in China would be at the bottom of my list.)

WHEN British consumers are compelled to buy energy-efficient lightbulbs from 2012, they will save up to 5m tons of carbon dioxide a year from being pumped into the atmosphere. In China, however, a heavy environmental price is being paid for the production of “green” lightbulbs in cost-cutting factories.

Large numbers of Chinese workers have been poisoned by mercury, which forms part of the compact fluorescent lightbulbs. A surge in foreign demand, set off by a European Union directive making these bulbs compulsory within three years, has also led to the reopening of mercury mines that have ruined the environment.

Doctors, regulators, lawyers and courts in China - which supplies two thirds of the compact fluorescent bulbs sold in Britain - are increasingly alert to the potential impacts on public health of an industry that promotes itself as a friend of the earth but depends on highly toxic mercury.

Just one broken bulb in your house is enough to alert everyone in the neighborhood to another Bhopal—can you imagine what an entire factory of these things is like?

BTW, I broke one once, and swept it up like anything else. You don’t see me kldfhidfih;apisu8efpabvksnbso

PS (I’m feeling better, thanks for asking): Turns out, that wasn’t even the best (worst) news out of China:

Officials in China have reportedly been told to puff their way through four and a half million cigarettes a year.

Staff at local government offices in Hubei province were given the order in a move intended to set an example for the rest of the nation, according to state media.

And if they fail to smoke their way through 230,000 packs of locally-produced cigarettes, the officials could face fines.

Brands such as Huanghelou have been earmarked as part of the official quota.

“The regulation will boost the local economy via the cigarette tax,” local official Chen Nianzu was quoted as saying in the Global Times.

The measure may also be a ploy to boost sales of local cigarette brands, under pressure from competitors in neighbouring Hunan province.

Some 350 million Chinese - including more than half of all male doctors - currently smoke, with around a million dying from smoking-related diseases every year.

There are more smokers in China than there are people in America.

I thought the 21st Century would be China’s—but they won’t live to see it out. Looks like it’s ours again, Americans, if only by default.

Can we all agree that however one feels about President Obama’s economic policies, those policies are based on the European model of democratic socialism (a model much of Europe is trying to undo)?

How’s that working out for them?

EU economies will contract by 4% this year, the European Commission has forecast, in a massive revision from its earlier prediction.

The worsening of the global financial crisis, dropping levels of world trade and continuing house value falls had prompted the downgrade, it said.

Europe’s economy would not start recovering until the second half of next year, the commission added.

It also predicted unemployment in the 27-nation EU would reach 10.9% in 2010.

The jobless figure would be 11.5% across the 16 countries using the euro, known as the eurozone, it added.

We might envy a contraction of only 4% (ours contracted over 6% in that last quarter alone), but an unemployment rate of 11.5%? We’d have riots in the streets.

Isn’t fairness the unifying theme of the Obama administration? (I’d call it envy and resentment, but David Axelrod inexplicably rejected those slogans.) What’s fair about not having a job—just knowing that some corporate fat cat is out of one too?

And check out these other headlines from the BBC site:

THE EURO ECONOMY
LATEST NEWS

Ireland unveils emergency budget
Eurozone’s GDP revised downwards
Eurozone unemployment rises again
Irish unemployment at fresh highs
Germany’s unemployment rate rises
Irish credit rating cut by S&P

All the social safety nets in the world aren’t going to save you if you’ve got no money to pay for them.

They are so sophisticated and I just love the food and beer.

Ex-Nazi guard freed on technicality in Austrian court
By (Reuters)

A former Nazi concentration camp guard who was deported from the United States on Thursday is now a free man because he cannot be prosecuted in Austria, the Austrian justice ministry said on Friday.

Josias Kumpf, who by his own admission, aided in the killing of 8,000 Jews the Trawniki labor camp in Nazi occupied Poland in 1943 , arrived in Austria on Thursday after the United States deported him following the revocation of his citizenship.

Austrian justice ministry spokeswoman Katharina Swoboda said Vienna had warned U.S. authorities in the past that Austria would be unable to prosecute Kumpf because the statute of limitations relating to his crimes had expired.

“We have always pointed out to the United States that he cannot be charged here with the crimes of which he is accused,” Swoboda said.

The main reason was that Kumpf was younger than 20 at the time of the crimes.

The fact Kumpf had never been an Austrian citizen, and that the crimes which he is accused of were not committed in Austria, also made prosecution in Austria impossible, she said.

Kumpf was born in the part of Yugoslavia that is now Serbia, as a member of the ethnic German minority there. After joining the SS as a guard in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Germany, he moved on to Trawniki in German-occupied Poland.

The U.S. Department of Justice said on Thursday that Kumpf helped guard around 8,000 Jewish prisoners — including some 400 children — who were shot and killed in pits at Trawniki in a special operation in November 1943.

The department cited Kumpf as saying his assignment was to watch for victims who were still “halfway alive” or “convulsing” and “shoot them to kill” if they attempted to escape.

Kumpf was deported to Austria because it was the country from which he came when he entered the United States in 1956, she said.

Swoboda said with his U.S. citizenship revoked, Kumpf was now stateless and had no residence permit in Austria, which technically made him an illegal alien.

But since he could not be extradited to another country, he would be able to stay on. He would have to register his address.

Pass the Wiener schnitzel, please.

- Aggie

No one knows better than I how futile is the effort to try to make sense of the Palestinians.

But trying to make sense of everybody else: isn’t that a worthy effort?

Nope:

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on Monday told delegates gathered for an international donors’ conference aimed at reconstructing the war-torn Gaza Strip that a cease-fire deal between Israel and the Palestinians was of utmost importance.

In his opening address to a gathering of high-profile world figures on Monday morning, Mubarak said that the goal of the gathering was to help the two sides reach a truce.

“I see a momentum in peace efforts. I look forward that this year will be the year of peaceful settlement between Israelis and Palestinians,” Mubarak said.

He also told donors that aid was needed for Gaza but could not compensate
for the 1,300 Palestinian lives lost during the 22-day Israeli offensive. “I reach to you with an appeal from the heart to declare tangible pledges,” he said.

Mubarak warned Hamas - who was not invited to the conference - that it mustn’t treat the donors’ pledges as a conquest of war.

…

He called on Palestinian factions to work toward reconciliation and forming a unity government to oversee the rebuilding.

Great idea, Hosni! How come nobody thought of that before?

But did you get that? In a conference dedicated to pouring money down the sinkhole of Gaza, the elected government of Gaza was persona non grata. Only in Arabia.

So how much money are we talking about?

Gulf Arab states plan to pledge $1.65 billion in aid over a period of up to five years.

The United States will pledge $900 million, of which $300 million will be earmarked for Gaza. The rest will be to support the Palestinian Authority’s economic reforms and budget shortfalls.

The European Commission will pledge 436 million euros ($552.6 million) both to the reconstruction of Gaza and the reforms of the Palestinian Authority.

Britain said it would pledge £30 million ($43 million) to help rebuild Gaza’s economy.

My back-of-the-envelope calculation indicates that Hamass will net about $2.6 billion out of Operation Eat Lead. That 1,300 dead Palestinians is a lie, by the way, but assuming it’s true, that’s $2,000,000 per terrorist corpse.

I value life, all life. It’s just that I value the life of a Palestinian terrorist at significantly less than two million bucks. Two bits, more like.

Don’t European donors have other things they could spend their money on?

Most EU countries fail to compile statistics on anti-Semitism, a new report says, complicating efforts to gauge the level of animosity toward
Jews within the 27-nation bloc.

Often, anti-Semitic incidents do not make it into official records because they are not labeled as such or because victims or witnesses do not report them, the Vienna-based European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights said in Monday’s report.

“The agency’s data collection work shows that most member states do not have official or even unofficial data and statistics on anti-Semitic incidents.”

And what are the Palestinians spending their money on? Wouldn’t you think waste management would be job number one (and number two, pun intended)?

The flow of waste from the Alfei Menashe sewage line to area streams will cease thanks to cooperation between the Alfei Menashe Local Council and the council of the Palestinian village of Havle. Residents of both localities have recently suffered from the flow of sewage in area streams and repeated blockages in Alfei Menashe’s main sewage line, which meets the needs of all area residents.

The root of the two problems lays in the absence of a system for channeling waste in the Havle area, which has led village waste to be emptied directly into the Alfei Menashe sewage line, via open pits, without filtering solids. This resulted in blockages and the flow of wastes into area streams.

Let me decipher: Alfei Menashe is an Israeli “settlement” in the West Bank (Samaria to some of us), next to the quaint Palestinian hamlet of Havle. Yet the “settlement” has functional sewage facilities, while the village has open pits of s**t. So the people of the “settlement” have to pay over $4,000 filter out the dung of villagers, which would otherwise overflow into the rivers and streams.

Moral of the story? Love they neighbor, people, and thank God he’s not Palestinian.

Hamas sure has made a lot of nice friends

The Czech Republic, which takes over the European Union’s presidency on January 1, defended Israel’s strikes against Hamas on Tuesday.

UN chief urges end to violence; Shalev: Hamas responsible for deaths in Gaza

While the EU has called for a cease-fire to end the violence between Israel and Hamas that has killed almost 350 Palestinians since Saturday morning, Czech Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg insisted Israel had the right to defend itself, according to the Reuters news agency.

“Let us realize one thing: Hamas increased steeply the number of rockets fired at Israel since the cease-fire ended on December 19. That is not acceptable any more,” Schwarzenberg told the daily Mlada Fronta Dnes in an interview.

The country currently holding the EU presidency, France, has condemned Israel’s strikes and the rocket attacks from Hamas terrorists and called for both sides to stop immediately.

It also said it deplored the many civilian casualties and condemned Israel’s “disproportionate use of force,” echoing comments from UN Secretary-General Bank Ki-moon, who has also called for a cease-fire.

Schwarzenberg, a staunch ally of the United States, said Hamas had excluded itself from serious political debate due to its rocket attacks on Israel. He also hinted the group’s putting its bases and gun warehouses in densely populated areas was the reason for the Palestinians’ growing death toll.

“Why am I one of the few that have expressed understanding for Israel? … I am enjoying the luxury of telling the truth,” Schwarzenberg told the daily.

He’s right: It is a luxury to be able to tell the truth.

- Aggie