Bloodthirsty Liberal

Try walking a mile in their leg braces:

Following are excerpts from a TV report on polio in Pakistan, which aired on Al-Jazeera TV on March 14, 2012.

Reporter: This girl is one of the victims of polio in Pakistan. For more than a decade, vaccination teams were forbidden from entering various regions, especially tribal areas, because some believe that the vaccination serum is non-Islamic, and leads to infertility in the long run. Today, however, things have changed somewhat.

Muhammad Habib, Head of the Committee of the Ulema of North Waziristan: Some people said the vaccinations are harmful, but this is wrong. These people rely on myths rather than on logic. Every disease has a treatment. The ulema and the doctors have refuted the claims made against the vaccinations.

Reporter: The struggle to catch up with the rest of the world in fighting polio is ongoing. 60% of all cases of polio recorded in the world last year were in Pakistan. 198 cases were recorded in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

Vaccination centers have been set up in city hospitals and clinics, and vaccination teams were dispatched to rural areas. This is no easy task, considering Pakistan’s vastness, and the prevalence of poverty and ignorance.

Wasim Khawaja, specialist in preventive medicine: There should be organized campaigns for raising health awareness. Health awareness is essential so that people are not deceived. Unfortunately, some health teams are unable to reach remote areas, due to terrorism and due to people’s objections.

Reporter : Polio has become a thing of the past in most countries of the world, but it is still widespread in Pakistan. The Pakistani government is striving to eliminate it, despite the obstacles and the lack of means.

The scandal of the US using vaccination to obtain DNA from Bin Laden’s children to confirm his presence in the house where he was assassinated last May dealt a blow to the efforts to eradicate tuberculosis. In addition, it reinforced the position of those who claim that political goals and anti-Pakistani conspiracies are behind the vaccination campaigns.

That last part can’t be right. We couldn’t have used DNA to determine his presence; we might have used it to confirm his death.

Anyway, long-time readers will remember my… frustration a few years ago when a Muslim tribal leader in Nigeria forbade polio vaccines along similar “non-Islamic” grounds. International health authorities eventually persuaded him to allow the vaccinations, but not before the disease had established a toe-hold that spread across Africa and Muslim countries. And bin Laden was alive and in the pink (figuratively speaking) when that episode occurred, so don’t even start with the American complicity angle. Their paranoia, their problem.

It would be one thing if only Muslim tribal elders were susceptible to polio, but alas that’s not the case. For all we know, they got their vaccines when they were Muslim tribal youngers.

Iranians want peace and prosperity—it’s just this regime (now 33 years old) that stands in the way.

Okay…

In the high-stakes international discussions surrounding Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, Iran’s 80 million people are often forgotten. So I, along with a small team of Israelis, decided to explore the driving forces of Iranian society. There have been signs, on the streets and over the Internet, of a battle raging between the country’s Islamic fundamentalists and the proponents of freedom. The question we set out to explore is where the majority of the people stand.

Soon we were joined by leading experts in the fields of social psychology, cross-cultural research, the Shiite Muslim religion, statistics, and dozens of Farsi-speaking volunteers.

Circumventing Iran’s “electronic curtain”—as President Obama described the Iranian government’s efforts to control contact with the outside world—our research team conducted telephone interviews in late 2011 and earlier this year with nearly a thousand Iranians. The latter constituted an accurate representative sample of Iranian society, including all of Iran’s 31 provinces as well as a representative distribution of all ethnic groups, ages and levels of education. The interviews were conducted anonymously and the country the calls came from was concealed in order to ensure the safety of the respondents.

…

An analysis of the Iranian sample showed that alongside conservative values, such as conformity and tradition, Iranian society is characterized by strong support for pro-liberal values such as a belief in the importance of self-direction and benevolence. For example, 94% of the respondents identified with the sentence “freedom to choose what he does is important to him,” and 71% of the respondents identified with the sentence “being tolerant toward all kinds of people and groups is important to him.”

Israel could not be reached for comment.

Actually, it could:

Iran upheld on a death sentence against a man convicted for assassinating a nuclear physicist two year ago, and 13 others may face the same fate after having been found guilty on Sunday for working for the Israeli Mossad spy agency.

The Tehran prosecutor said on Sunday that Majid Jamali Fashi, convicted for assassinating nuclear physicist Massoud Ali-Mohammadi, will be executed as planned, the Tehran Times reported. The death sentence reportedly will be carried out on Tuesday.

We would all love to see Iran transition to representative democracy. It’s just that Israel (recently likened to a “mosquito” by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad) doesn’t have all the time in the world to wait.

Our findings demonstrate that Iranian society as a whole is characterized by a pro-liberal value structure that is deeply at odds with the fundamentalist regime. This presents considerable potential for regime change in Iran and for the development of liberal democracy.

We know there are at least a few Iranians who fit the ACLU, Coexist, Dissent-is-the-highest-form-of-patriotism model—or were. I don’t know how many survived the purges after the last round of protests. There’s an old football saying: you are who you are. Your record, your level of play—results matter. After almost two generations of ayatollahs, isn’t Iran what it is? Why should we assume otherwise?

PS: Is “mosquito” an improvement over “black and filthy microbe”? And “cancer cell”? Is this an attempt at reconciliation, or does he still believe Israel should be “wiped off the map”?

And all I got was this lousy t-shirt:

Egypt’s grand mufti visited the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem on Wednesday, AFP reported, citing a senior Muslim official.

The official, Azzam al-Khatib, told AFP that Ali Gomaa, Egypt’s highest religious authority, “came for a religious visit to Al-Aqsa mosque” along with Jordan’s Prince Ghazi bin Mohammed, King Abdullah II’s cousin and advisor on religious issues.

The two men also visited the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Greek Orthodox patriarchate, Khatib said.

Jordan’s ministry of Islamic affairs said the visit was in accordance with a command from the Prophet Mohammed to visit only three mosques on pilgrimage — Al-Aqsa and the mosques in Mecca and Medina, Saudi Arabia.

That’s all very nice, I’m sure. But you know who’s pi**ed off?

Muslims!

I [bleep] you not:

Al-Azhar students and political activists in Egypt are calling for a protest Friday in front of Al-Azhar’s administrative office after Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa made a rare visit to Jerusalem Wednesday.

Al-Azhar students protested Wednesday in front of the Al-Azhar student residence building for the same reason.

Gomaa’s visit was in honor of the inauguration of the Imam Ghazali chair of Islamic studies under the auspices of the Jordanian Al-Bayt Foundation.

The spokesman for Egypt’s powerful Muslim Brotherhood, Mahmoud Ghozlan, told al-Arabiya the visit was “very strange.”

“Muslim clerics have taken a position that there is no visiting Jerusalem with continued Israeli occupation,” Ghozlan said. “He violated this opinion of the majority of clerics. Why, I don’t know.”

So, you’re supposed to go—and you’re not supposed to go. Why am I not surprised? Jew-hatred is a disease, after all, and its symptoms are multitudinous.

I mean “Bad Lord!” Very bad!

Lord Ahmed, 53, who in 1998 became the first Muslim life peer, was reported to have made the comments at a conference in Haripur in Pakistan.

A Labour Party spokesman said: “We have suspended Lord Ahmed pending investigation. If these comments are accurate we utterly condemn these remarks which are totally unacceptable.”

According to Pakistan’s Express Tribune newspaper Lord Ahmed offered the bounty in response to a US action a week ago.

The US issued a $10 million reward for the capture of Pakistani militant leader Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, founder of the Lashkar-e-Taiba group, who it suspects of orchestrating the 2008 Mumbai attacks in which 166 people died as terrorists stormed hotels and a train station.

The British peer reportedly said: “‘If the US can announce a reward of $10 million for the (capture) of Hafiz Saeed, I can announce a bounty of £10 million (for the capture of) President Obama and his predecessor, George Bush.”

Look, if you really want to do some good, Lord Ahmed (which I can’t type with a straight face), you could donate the money to a the Republican National Committee or a super-PAC. There are ways to get rid of a guy that don’t involve capture or violence.

Though I’m not surprised they didn’t occur to you:

Lord Ahmed, who was born in Pakistan, became Baron Ahmed of Rotherham at the age of 40. In 2007 he was highly critical of the awarding of a knighthood to Salman Rushdie, claiming the author had “blood on his hands.”

In 2009 he was jailed for dangerous driving after sending and receiving text messages minutes before being involved in a fatal motorway crash. The Court of Appeal later suspended his 12-week jail sentence.

In 1968, Enoch Powell MP delivered the infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech, decrying unchecked immigration. It marked him for the rest of his days.

As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood”. That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect. Indeed, it has all but come. In numerical terms, it will be of American proportions long before the end of the century. Only resolute and urgent action will avert it even now. Whether there will be the public will to demand and obtain that action, I do not know. All I know is that to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal.

I wonder if this is what he meant?

Oklahomans, too!

Following are excerpts from an interview with Kuwaiti cleric Tareq Sweidan, manager of Al-Resala TV, which aired on Al-Quds TV on March 26, 2012.

I studied at the Petroleum Department at the University of Oklahoma, and our dean, who was a Christian American, retired. The man they brought to replace him was completely incompetent. I went to the former dean, Dr. Guerrero, and asked him: “What made them choose Dr. Sylvester as the new dean, even though he is unworthy of this?” I was still a student back then. He laughed and said: “You noticed?” I said: “Of course. Anybody with eyes in his head would notice.” He said: “It’s because he is a Freemason.” This Guerrero began to curse the Jews and the Freemasons, saying that they control everything.

This is just a little story from Oklahoma in the middle of America. Now think what happens in New York or California, the centers of power.
[...]
When I was still in the US, we decided to try to influence a member of Congress, who seemed to be somewhat sympathetic towards us. He was campaigning in the elections, and we said: “Let us Muslims vote and raise funds for him. We raised 300,000 dollars and went to give it to him, saying: “Take this money, we support you, and you will support us politically.” He refused. We asked why, and he said: “The Jews were here yesterday and gave me 300 million.”

What’d you think, Tareq, the guy was stupid? Your measly 300 grand wouldn’t amount to a quarter’s interest on the Jews’ 300 million. Only thing, the next 300 million contribution to a Congressman—from Jews or anyone else—will be the first.

Palestine, the Holy Land – and especially Jerusalem and the Al-Aqsa Mosque – does not belong to the Palestinians. It belongs to the entire Islamic nation. You have no right to relinquish or divide it. By Allah, even if all the Palestinians accept a compromise and hand over Jerusalem, we will not agree to that. Even if you become weak and surrender, we will not weaken. We will continue to wage resistance until we liberate it. These are our holy places.

…

The most dangerous thing facing the Muslims is not the dictatorships. The absolutely most dangerous thing is the Jews. They are the most dangerous. They are the greatest enemy.

What about the Freemasons? Why do they get off easy?

PS: Think he gives a flying [bleep] about so-called “settlements”?

I tried to get there, but I didn’t make it past Fitchburg before night fell. Didn’t help that I was going the wrong direction. (Via reader Jeanette):

Taking a post-event look at the Global March to Jerusalem, it is as important to identify what did not happen as it is to look at what did occur.

The most obvious conclusion is that the GMJ organisers failed to get the numbers of participants they declared having in advance, with only single percentage numbers of their vaunted one to two million marchers actually taking part. Despite GMJ organiser Ribhi Halloum’s feeble attempts at face-saving post-event spin, any objective observer can only conclude that the project’s organisers are clearly out of touch with majority concerns and opinion.

This was also reflected in the picture around the world with, for example, a mere 50 activists turning up for the GMJ event in Germany and 100 in Ottawa. Even in London – a major hub of anti-Israel activism and home to a significant proportion of GMJ organisers and their various organisations – the turnout to shout at an empty Israeli embassy was not particularly impressive.

What they lack in quality, however, they more than make up for in quantity:

Hot on the heels of the ‘Global March to Jerusalem’ will come yet another event designed to continue the assault on Israel’s legitimacy – the April 15th ‘Air Flotilla 2? (also known as ‘Welcome to Palestine’) or ‘flytilla‘ as last year’s (Hamas approved) similar event was dubbed.

Once again, the aim is to have large numbers of international “activists“ flying in to Ben Gurion airport on one day – in the words of the organisers – as part of the “challenge to Israel’s illegal siege of Palestine”.

“There is no way into Palestine other than through Israeli control points. Israel has turned Palestine into a giant prison, but prisoners have a right to receive visitors.

Welcome to Palestine 2012 will again challenge Israel’s policy of isolating the West Bank while the settler paramilitaries and army commit brutal crimes against a virtually defenceless Palestinian civilian population.”

Am I a bad person if I think that it would be deliciously (though tragically) ironic if the only El Al planes ever to crash would be these ones carrying Moslem bigots and haters?

Of course I am.

Hey, if the fundamentalists on one side want to go back a millennium or so, why not join them?

Israel has become the only safe haven for Christians in the Middle East,

Ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, wrote in a recent op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal.

“As 800,000 Jews were once expelled from Arab countries, so are Christians being forced from lands they’ve inhabited for centuries”, Ambassador Oren stated, comparing the expulsion of Jews after the establishment of the state of Israel with the Arab countries’ current treatment of their Christian minorities.

The numbers are telling. Today there is only one Middle Eastern country where the number of Christians has grown: Israel. As documented in the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics, the Christian community that numbered 34,000 people in 1949 is now 163,000-strong, and will reach 187,000 in 2020.

In the rest of the Middle East, the drive for Islamic purity is going to banish all traces of pre-Islamic pasts. When the Islamists will have prevailed, the Middle East will be completely green, the colour of Islam.

…

Arab Christianity is near its extinction everywhere. “Christianity in Iraq could be eradicated in our lifetime, partially as a result of the US troop withdrawal”, declared Leonard Leo, chairman of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom.

In Egypt, 100,000 Christians already have left the country – after Hosni Mubarak’s fall last year. The Egyptian Union of Human Rights is denouncing this “mass exodus”.

Even more dramatic is the collapse of Christian Arab society following Israel’s handing over of large parts of Judea and Samaria to the Palestinian Authority. Christians have suffered the most from the mafia-style rule of Yasser Arafat’s kleptocracy.

Christian sites and cemeteries were desecrated by Muslims. Slogans like “Islam will win” and “First the Saturday people, then the Sunday People” have been painted on walls, and PLO flags were draped over Jesus crosses.

Ramallah was 90% Christian before the 1948 War of Independence and Bethlehem was 80% Christian. Today Ramallah is a large Islamic city and Bethlehem’s Christians are near extinction.

Given their common status as minorities within an overwhelmingly Islamic region, you might expect Christian Arabs to find common cause with Jews and Israel. But the traditional hatred of Eastern Christianity for Judaism, combined with the futile hopes for assimilation within the Arab world, have closed off that option.

What an apt companion piece for Aggie’s post below. How was your meeting with the Moslem Brotherhood, Mr. President? Did you talk about your Christian faith, your identification with Jesus in times of trouble—your halo?

What do you do on Land Day, but share the land—in the form of rocks, boulders, etc.

Land Day turned violent Friday when Arabs began hurling Molotov cocktails and stones at soldiers near the Kalandia checkpoint north of Jerusalem.

The riots began after Friday afternoon Muslim prayers – often a starting point for violence – when dozens of masked Arab youths began rioting at the checkpoint.

Soldiers responded with teargas and deployed the “Skunk” – a vehicle loaded with canons spraying a noxious-smelling liquid. A machine that transmits high frequency sound waves was also employed.

All very humane, naturally, but I wonder if the Israelis couldn’t have gotten into the spirit of the day by employing a byproduct of the land: lead.

They may yet get their chance:

Meanwhile, Jordanian news sites reported some 20,000 people are gathering in order to take part in the massive march towards the Israeli border. According to reports, 4 rabbis from the extreme anti-Zionist Neturei Karta sect were marching with them.

The stridently pro-Hizbullah Lebanese newspaper As-Safir reported 120 Hamas-provided buses will be transporting protesters to the Israeli border to participate in the “Global March on Jerusalem.”

And this isn’t even Nakba Day, which comes in seven weeks! Talk about your proliferation of holidays! But then, every day is a good day for the Daily Humiliation of the Palestinian (Arab) People™.

It doesn’t seem all that long ago that my family made the familiar slog from Teletubbies to Dragon Tales to Barney to Sesame Street to Zoboomafoo to Jimmy Neutron to Zoom.

Somehow, we missed these channels:

The Jerusalem District Prosecution indicted 18-year-old Mohammed Shuman, from Beit Hanina, for the attempted murder of an Israeli soldier in Jerusalem in early March.

Shuman stabbed 19-year-old Yehudit Aharon in her chest and hand on Jerusalem’s Light Rail. According to the prosecution, Shuman – an avid viewer of Al-Jazeera, Al-Quds and Al-Manar TV stations – was frustrated by what he perceived as the unfair treatment of Palestinians in IDF checkpoints, and decided to kill the soldier.

Hey, the Toulouse guy was named Mohammed too! What are the odds?

Anyhow, that’s why we consistently publish stories from Palestinian Media Watch and MEMRI—to demonstrate Arab/Muslim incitement to hatred and violence.

Comme ça:

The Egyptian Al-Tahrir TV station has recently begun to air the antisemitic TV series “Horseman without a Horse”, which raised a controversy when it first went on the air in 2002.

…

Following are excerpts from the series, which aired on March 18-23, 2012.

Jewish leader A : Great Britain is helping us. Herzl was right to direct all his efforts towards Britain, which has become the protector of the Zionist movement.

You did not succeed in persuading Britain to give us Sinai as a national home, which would have made us part of the British Empire.

Jewish leader B : That’s such a shame. We should have been in the Sinai four years by now. It is only a stone’s throw away.

Jewish leader C : When the Sixth Congress rejected Herzl’s proposal to settle us in Uganda – why didn’t Britain support this proposal?

Jewish leader D : That’s because Britain is after its own interests. When Herzl died last year, we found ourselves in disagreement. Some of us believe that we should accept any proposal to establish a Zionist state I whether in Palestine or elsewhere – while others maintain that it is “Palestine or nothing.”

Jewish leader E : I agree with you, but don’t forget that in the Seventh Congress, we decided to establish a national home in Palestine itself.

Jewish leader D : This will surely happen, because it is in England’s interest to have us in Palestine. This will serve to foil any aspiration for Arab and Islamic unity, so long as it guarantees the separation of Egypt from the Levant.

So, whom do we cast? George Clooney as Jewish leader D and Brad Pitt as Jewish leader E, naturally, but whom else? I see a caper movie along the lines of the Ocean’s 11 series. Call it Galilee’s Half-Dozen.

Anyhow, if this dramatization isn’t enough to make Mohammed’s all over the world go postal, this history lesson is:

Hafez Naguib : The racist Zionist movement devised a plan a long time ago, even before Christ: A peaceful Zionist invasion of all the countries of the world, with a malicious serpent as its symbol. They drew up a map for this serpent. According to this map, the serpent moves, coils, and blinds the countries of the world, enslaving them by hellish means. These means include an economic invasion which weakens these countries, and uses all methods of violence and depletion. The Zionist plan is, of course, very carefully devised, so they can spread among the world’s youth wantonness, alcohol, abomination and corruption.

[…]

The serpent is the Zionist symbol, and its progress is drawn on the map, step by step. The first step was in Europe in 429 BCE, in Greece, in the days of Pericles. The Zionist serpent devoured this country’s strength, of course. The second step was in 69 BCE in Rome, in the days of Emperor Augustus. The third step was in 1552, in Madrid in the days of Charles V. The fourth step was in Paris, 1790, in the days of Louis XVI. The fifth step was in London in 1814, after the fall of Napoleon. The sixth step was in Berlin after the Franco-Russian war, and the seventh in St. Petersburg, in 1881.

The Zionist serpent passed through all these countries, shaking their constitutional foundation. Even England and Germany, despite their strength – the Zionist serpent exceeded their economic limits, until it completed the invasion of Russia in 1905. If we follow the serpent’s steps on the map, we will find not find trace of its path, except for some arrows pointing to Moscow, Kiev, and Odessa, and another arrow pointing to the United States of America.

Zionism in 429 BC? Whatever.

BTW, I want to add the traits of zionism to our blog’s profile: wantonness, alcohol, abomination and corruption. And those are our good qualities!

Did you hear the joke about the supreme leader of all Islam who called for the destruction of all churches in the Middle East?

It wasn’t a riot. In fact, it wasn’t even a joke:

In answer to a question from a Kuwaiti delegation regarding an announcement last month by a Member of Kuwaiti legislature, Osama Al-Munawer, that he plans to submit a draft law calling for the removal of all churches in Kuwait, the Saudi Grand Mufti “stressed that Kuwait was a part of the Arabian Peninsula, and therefore it is necessary to destroy all churches in it.”

…

ZOA National President Morton A. Klein said, “It is amazing and a commentary on our times that the senior Muslim cleric, in the land that gave birth to Islam and in the country that has custody of the two main Muslim holy sites of Mecca and Medina, can call for the demolition of churches without this vicious statement attracting any significant international condemnation or protest.

“Imagine what would occur if the Pope called for the demolition of all mosques in Italy, or if the Chief Rabbi in Israel made a similar call in respect of mosques in Israel. The protests would be huge, furious and immediate. Nor would the matter die away in a week or two. Yet, when the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia calls for churches to be demolished – deafening silence. And this, despite the routine frequency of attacks already upon churches and Christians across the Middle East (with the exception of Israel), something which the Grand Mufti’s call can only serve to increase.

“We call upon the Obama Administration to publicly condemn the words of the Saudi Grand Mufti.”

Good job ending with a joke, Morton. Always leave ‘em laughing.

He’s right, of course, but what can you do? The American-born Christian in the White House acts like anything but.