Bloodthirsty Liberal

When disaster strikes anywhere in the world—Haiti, the Philippines, Congo, Sri Lanka (Turkey declined)—Israeli aid and personnel are among the first to arrive.

Not so with others:

A report into the deaths of 63 Libyan refugees on a small boat last May said a “catalogue of errors” by coastguards and Nato meant they were never rescued.

The Council of Europe inquiry says two Nato ships close by failed to respond to distress calls, and no country launched a search and rescue mission.

Only nine people survived the 15-day Mediterranean voyage after the boat ran out of fuel and drifted back to Libya.

Nato has said it has no record of any aircraft or ship contacting the boat.

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The report by Europe’s human rights watchdog says some 1,500 people died at sea trying to reach Europe in 2011.

Many of these were trying to flee from Libya or other conflicts in North Africa.

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The nine-month inquiry concludes that there were many opportunities to rescue the migrants, who were hoping to reach the Italian island of Lampedusa:

After 18 hours at sea in a crowded boat with little fuel and water, a distress call was sent by satellite phone to an Eritrean priest living in Italy

This was passed to the Italian coastguard which used the satellite call to establish the boat’s position

The information was passed onto other ships in the area

Nato had said the area was a military zone under its control, but failed to launch a rescue operation

Within a few hours the survivors say a military helicopter hovered over them and dropped food and water, and indicated that it would return – it never did

The boat made contact with two fishing vessels which refused to help

On around the tenth day when half of those on board were already dead, a large military boat allegedly came alongside, but despite obvious distress signals it also sailed away.

Sorry, Libyans, but that’s how Europe treated Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust. It’s how they roll.

Libyan security not too bright.

Two journalists from the UK were snatched by a Libyan militia after members of the group mistook the Welsh language for Hebrew, the BBC reported on Tuesday.

Gareth Montgomery-Johnson and Nicholas Davies-Jones were taken in Tripoli last month, after the Misrata Brigade accused them of being Israeli spies.

“They thought this was Hebrew and we were Israeli spies,” Montgomery-Johnson told the BBC, referring to a bandage with Welsh writing.

The two journalists work for Iran’s official Press TV.

First, allow me to say that it couldn’t have happened to a nicer couple of guys. How is it to work for Iran State TV? Secondly, I am just stunned at how stupid the Libyans are. This would be like confusing Arabic with Spanish. Don’t they have ears?

- Aggie

We bloggers, I mean:

A U.N. report ridiculed worldwide for lavishing praise on the Qaddafi regime’s human rights record was unanimously adopted today by the 47-nation UN Human Rights Council, with president Laura Dupuy Lasserre overruling the objection made in the plenary by UN Watch.

After it was first exposed by UN Watch last year, the report card giving high marks to Qaddafi was mocked by the New York Times, The Economist and other major media worldwide, causing a red-faced UN to postpone the report’s adoption repeatedly — until today.

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Even ardent defenders of the council are slamming the report. Echoing UN Watch’s recent protest, Suzanne Nosssel, the head of Amnesty USA and former top human rights official in the Obama Administration, described the Libya report as “abhorrent,” and called for a complete “redo.”

That’s what I would say about the Obama regime—but that’s for another time!

UN Watch tried to tell them:

In the 16th session last year we outlined our grave concerns with this report, which records this council’s 2010 review of Libya’s human rights record under the rule of Col. Moammar Qaddafi.

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As delegates here know, for years UN Watch brought victims of Libyan torture to testify before this council, including Bulgarian nurse Kristyana Valchyeva, Ashraf al-Hajouj and the brother of Fathi Eljahmi. Libyan delegates rudely interrupted them, and called them liars.

In May 2010, we pleaded for Libya not to be elected to this council. Tragically, our voice was ignored; it was elected in great numbers. Not a single country spoke in opposition.

…

For the victims, is that too much to ask?

Evidently so:

Allow me simply to point out that changes of government are normal, and the responsibilities of states continue, and what is important is the commitment undertaken by governments and the implementation thereof. […]

I propose that the council adopt the decision on the outcome of the Universal Periodic Review of Libya, as you currently see it on the screen.

I see no objection to approving this decision, therefore it is hereby adopted. Thank you very much.

No, thank you, Madame President. All the fire and brimstone I spew about the United Nations is nothing to what you all say about yourselves.

One question, though: isn’t the USA still on the Council? If the report whitewashing Qaddafi’s human rights record was approved unanimously—and it was—Obama’s representative (our representative) must have been on board.

If the UN were a pizza, it would be an everything pizza: anchovies atop pineapple, next to sausage and onions, mixed in with hot peppers and green olives. And Limburger cheese. And moldy tomato sauce. And burnt crust.

Topped with a dog t*rd.

Despite the council’s own inquiry this year finding evidence of war crimes by the Qaddafi regime, the UN Human Rights Council, according to the agenda of its current session, is planning to “consider and adopt the final outcome of the review of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya,” which lavishes praise on the disgraced regime.

I’m a people person. Was—was a people person.

“The report completely contradicts the council’s own commission of inquiry, which found evidence of Qaddafi war crimes. The review should be entirely redone, and the council should set an example of accountability by acknowledging that its original review was deeply flawed.”

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The report also includes praise of the old regime’s record by Qaddafi-era diplomats who changes sides and now represent the new government (click here for quotes). “With Libya’s own UN diplomats admitting that the Gaddafi regime was a gross violator of human rights, it would be nonsensical for the UN to adopt this false report,” said Neuer.

“We call on the council president to acknowledge that the council’s review of the Qaddafi regime’s record was a fraud, withdraw the report, and schedule a new session in which council members would tell the truth about the Qaddafi regime’s heinous crimes, which were committed over four decades yet ignored by the UN,” said Neuer. “Libya’s long-suffering victims deserve no less.”

That can’t be right. Who could possibly describe Muammar Qaddafi as as a champion of liberties?

You asked:

Iran noted that the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya had implemented a number of international human rights instruments and had cooperated with relevant treaty bodies.

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Algeria noted the efforts of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya to promote human rights

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Qatar praised the legal framework for the protection of human rights and freedoms

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Sudan noted the country’s positive experience

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The Syrian Arab Republic praised the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya for its serious commitment to and interaction with the Human Rights Council

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North Korea praised… Bahrain noted… Palestine commended… Iraq commended… Saudi Arabia commended… Tunisia welcomed… Venezuela acknowledged… Jordan welcomed… Cuba commended… Oman commended… Egypt commended… Malta fully recognized… Bangladesh referred to the progress… Malaysia commended… Morocco welcomed… Pakistan praised… Mexico thanked… Myanmar commended… Viet Nam congratulated… Thailand welcomed… Brazil noted… Kuwait expressed appreciation…

Whew! Do you people have any idea how hard we work for you?

Anyway, you know what I think of the UN; I know how most of you probably feel about the UN.

What is the point of the UN?

He heard that in the Bush years all the time. The Left would say anything that they wanted to say, and if you questioned it, you were fascist, questioning their patriotism, and, in fact, they were the most patriotic of all because they hated Bush the most.

My what a sprucing up we’ve had since Obama because King of the Hill. Now, dissent is no longer patriotic at all. It is, at best, unhelpful, and at worst, it approaches treason.

Criticism of President Barack Obama’s apology for the burning of Qurans in Afghanistanis not helpful, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Sunday in a wide-ranging interview with CNN.

“I find it somewhat troubling that our politics would enflame such a dangerous situation in Afghanistan,” Clinton said of the complaints by Republican presidential candidates and some experts about Obama’s apology.

Really, Hillary? Were you troubled when your own party went after Bush policies in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Oh, and they’re itching to go to war in Syria… and the Secretary of State position is now just a political hack job:

We have a lot of contacts, as do other countries – a lot of sources within the Syrian government and the business community and minority communities – and our message is the same to all of them: ‘You cannot continue to support this illegitimate regime because it is going to fall,’” she said.

But she said the Syrian National Council was not yet the kind of united opposition movement that toppled Moammar Gadhafi with international help in Libya last year.

The Libyan opposition base in the city of Benghazi gave the international community “an address” to deal with.

“We don’t have that in Syria,” she said. “The Syrian National Council is doing the best it can but obviously it is not yet a united opposition.”

Clinton also defended telling an audience in Tunisia Saturday that Obama would be re-elected.

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“I was asked whether the comments in the primary campaign, some of which have been quite inflammatory, represented America,” she said, adding that they did not necessarily. “I represent America.”

As America’s top diplomat, Clinton would not normally make political statements to a foreign audience.

“Probably my enthusiasm for the president got a little out of hand,” Clinton said with a laugh.

Ha Ha.

- Aggie

Amnesty International says Libya becoming more dangerous to ordinary Libyans.

Our brilliant foreign policy (and your tax dollars) at work:

As Libya marks the first anniversary of its revolution on Friday, the dozens of well-armed militia groups operating across the vast country have slipped well out of the control of the nascent government in Tripoli, making the country ever more fractured as well as dangerous to ordinary Libyans attempting to adjust to the end of Muammar Gaddafi’s 41-year dictatorship.

That assessment came on Thursday from Amnesty International, whose latest research on the country documents at least 12 Libyans who have died in militia custody since September, allegedly after being beaten, suspended upside down and given electric shocks. In a chilling 38-page report published on the eve of the anniversary, Amnesty describes a wave of terror and widespread abuse by militia groups, whose members in recent months have dragged hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Libyans from their homes or from roadside checkpoints into makeshift jails on suspicion of being Gaddafi sympathizers or having fought alongside the regime’s forces during the civil war.

Geez, I’m surprised.

- Aggie

MISS ME YET?

You will:

Gays threaten the continuation of the human race, Libya’s delegate told a planning meeting of the UN Human Rights Council today, reported the Geneva-based UN Watch monitoring group. It was the first appearance in the 47-nation body by the post-Gaddafi government, whose membership was restored in November following Libya’s suspension in March.

Protesting the council’s first panel discussion on discrimination and violence based on sexual orientation, scheduled for March 7th, Libya’s representative told the gathering of ambassadors today that LGBT topics “affect religion and the continuation and reproduction of the human race.” He added that, were it not for their suspension, Libya would have opposed the council’s June 2011 resolution on the topic.

In response, council president Laura Dupuy Lasserre said that “the Human Rights Council is here to defend human rights and prevent discrimination.”

The Libyan outburst prompted questions by human rights activists about Libya’s reinstatement on the council.

“We were happy to see the Gaddafi regime finally suspended last year,” said Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, which in 2010 led a campaign of 70 human rights groups to expel the Libyan dictator.

“Yet today’s shocking homophobic outburst by the new Libyan government, together with the routine abuse of prisoners, underscores the serious questions we have about whether the new regime is genuinely committed to improving on the dark record of its predecessor, or to pandering to some of the hardline Islamists amidst its ranks,” said Neuer.

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Despite the pledges, however, Neuer said “the restoration of the new Libyan regime to the council, supported by 123 states including all of the Western democracies, was carried out precipitously and without any record of its commitment to human rights domestically and abroad. The new rulers’ pledges are being broken.”

“Gays are now paying the price, with their right to be free from violent attacks now being undermined at the UN by a country that democratic countries fought to liberate, and by a goverment that our leaders helped install. It’s all very disconcerting.”

Call it “Arab Springtime for Libya” (winter for gays).

But you can’t take Libya out of Libya:

Several people have died after being tortured by militias in Libyan detention centres, human rights group Amnesty International has said.

It claimed to have seen patients in Tripoli, Misrata and Gheryan with open wounds to their head, limbs and back.

Meanwhile, charity Medecins Sans Frontieres has suspended operations in Misrata after treating 115 patients with torture-related wounds.

The UN says it is concerned about the conditions in which patients are held.

“The torture is being carried out by officially recognised military and security entities as well as by a multitude of armed militias operating outside any legal framework,” a spokesman for London-based Amnesty said.

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More than 8,500 detainees, most of them accused of being loyal to former Libyan leader Col Muammar Gaddafi, are being held by militia groups in about 60 centres, according to UN human rights chief Navi Pillay.

“The lack of oversight by the central authority creates an environment conducive to torture and ill treatment,” she said.

Wow, that’s almost as bad as Jews living in Judea and Samaria!

Winter for Libya and Egypt:

The Libyan revolution has not been kind to Mahmud al-Arabi. Last March, forces loyal to Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi ransacked his grocery store in Zuwara after he fled to Tunisia, stealing about $6,000 worth of supplies. When he returned in September, facing mounting debts, al-Arabi turned to selling beer and liquor — an illegal enterprise in a country where alcohol has been banned for four decades. His new business drew the attention of Islamist rebels who helped to overthrow Gaddafi. After they threatened the store’s landlord, they blew up Arabi’s shop. Out of money and out of work, Arabi spends his days in his trailer home lamenting the turn his country has taken. Says he, “I got nothing but suffering from this revolution.”

Throughout this country, Libyans are discovering that their hard fought battle to win freedoms is at risk. Puritanical Muslims known as Salafis are applying a rigid form of Islam in more and more communities. They have clamped down on the sale of alcohol and demolished the tombs of saints where many local people worship. The small town of Zuwara near the Tunisian border, dominated by a heterodox Muslim sect despised by the Salafis, is quickly becoming the battlefield for competing visions of Libya’s future.

I don’t know if Obama could have prevented all of this crap washing over Araby, but it sure is strange watching him take credit for it. This guy would have taken a victory lap after Pearl Harbor.

So goes Libya?

The Arab Spring may quickly become an Islamist Winter in Libya, reads a new report circulated among federal law enforcement and written for policymakers on Capitol Hill.

An advance copy of the report entitled “A View to Extremist Currents In Libya” and obtained by Fox News, states that extremist views are gaining ground in the north African country and suggests a key figure emerging in Libya formerly tied to al Qaeda has not changed his stripes.

“Despite early indications that the Libyan revolution might be a largely secular undertaking … the very extremist currents that shaped the philosophies of Libya Salafists and jihadis like (Abd al-Hakim) Belhadj appear to be coalescing to define the future of Libya,” wrote Michael S. Smith II, a principal and counterterrorism adviser for Kronos LLC, the strategic advisory firm that prepared the report.

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On Nov. 3, 2007, senior al Qaeda leaders announced that LIFG had officially joined Usama bin Laden’s network, according to the State Department which designated LIFG as a terrorist organization.

Belhadj, who joined the group at its inception, had fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the late 1980s. He was arrested in Malaysia in February 2004, reportedly interrogated by the CIA, before he was sent home to Libya. He was released from prison in 2009 as part of a rehabilitation program.

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“Libyans have been featured prominently in the history of core al Qaeda. Libyan LIFG member Abu Yahya al-Libi is regarded as core al Qaeda’s top Sharia official and many analysts anticipated he would be appointed bin Laden’s successor. His brother is Abd al-Wahad al-Qayid, a founding member of the LIFG who was one of the six LIFG leaders who authored the group’s corrective studies while imprisoned in Libya.”

The Kronos report says that “Libya is of such strategic interest” to al Qaeda that for years it was its own entity separate from its north Africa affiliate — al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.
Libya was considered important to al Qaeda because of its geographic proximity to Egypt and its perceived ability to “affect the jihadist political situation in Egypt.”

For this reason, among others, al Qaeda’s new leader Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri in April 2011 called on jihadis to prepare to mount an insurgency against any Western forces in Libya.

I guess I should have written as Libya goes, so goes Egypt.

Drunk drivers, welcome.

Rapists, mi casa es su casa.

Forgers and identity thieves, set a spell.

A son of a Libyan strongmen? Somebody call the cops!

The Mexican authorities say they have stopped a plot by a criminal gang organisation to smuggle one of the sons of Libya’s ex-leader Col Muammar Gaddafi into the country.

Saadi Gaddafi has been under house arrest in the West African state of Niger since he fled Libya in September.

His lawyer, Nick Kaufman, denied Mr Gaddafi had ever tried to flout a UN travel ban and escape.

Mexican officials say the plot came to light through intelligence reports.

It involved buying a number of properties in Mexico, including one near the resort of Puerto Vallarta, using false names and documents, they said.

Now, it would appear this particular son of Muammar (who had more offspring than Obama, Sr.) was not intimately involved in the family business. But I find it surprising that he’s the one guy who can’t get his toes wet in the Rio Grande. (To be fair to Mexico, they are way, way more serious about their southern border than their northern one.)

Whatever happened to “war is hell”?

Dozens of women have rallied in the Libyan capital to pressure the new government to do more to help women raped during the country’s civil war.

Some 60 women sang and chanted slogans outside the office of Prime Minister Abdurrahim el-Keib on Saturday. They said the government, in its focus to help wounded soldiers, is failing to help women sexually assaulted by Muammar Qaddafi’s forces during the war.

There are no official figures on the number of women raped during the eight-month war that toppled Qaddafi’s regime, but the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor has said there is evidence indicating hundreds of cases.

Bush was held to account for the “collateral damage” in his wars—usually inflated wildly, as in the Lancet projections.

But Obama has sashayed in and tipped over apple carts like he was making strudel, and no one mentions that radical Islam and radical rape are on the march across Araby. The only countries in the region not outrightly hostile to Israel and the West are Greece and Israel itself.

I would ordinarily sign off with “heckuva job, Bambi”, but it occurred to me this is the same careless, reckless behavior he’s exhibited at home. Ruinous stimulus packages and unaffordable and unenforceable socialized medicine deals are the rule, not the exception. Not to get all Mark Steyn on you, but I don’t know if it matters anymore who wins in 2012. We’re already as screwed as the unfortunate women of Libya, and there ain’t no way to get our virtue back.

Heckuva job, Bambi.