Bloodthirsty Liberal

Because they [bleeping] owe us money!

You’ve got till Friday, Mahmoud, or every mother[bleeping] mullah in Qum is going to wake up with his brains in his turban. Capisce?

An Israeli advocacy group won a $323 million judgment in a US court against Iran and Syria for supporting Palestinian militants that killed an American teenager and ten others in a 2006 bombing, the group’s director said Tuesday.

Nitsana Darshan-Leitner of the Shurat HaDin Israel Law Center that represents victims of Palestinian violence said Tuesday that the group had won courtroom victories against Iran but never before against Syria.

The center was representing the family of 16-year-old Daniel Wultz of Florida, who was among 11 killed when an Islamic Jihad suicide bomber set off his explosives at a Tel Aviv restaurant six years ago. Daniel’s father was severely injured in the attack.

Darshan-Leitner said that Iran supports the Islamic Jihad movement financially while Syria had granted the group a haven to train in its territory.

US District Judge Royce Lamberth said in the Monday ruling, “When a state chooses to uses terror as a policy tool – as Iran and Syria continue to do – that state forfeits its sovereign immunity and deserves unadorned condemnation. Barbaric acts like the April 17, 2006 suicide bombing have no place in civilized society and present a moral depravity that knows no bounds.”

That’s going to cost you, shorty.

“Barbaric acts”? Surely he means “acts of legitimate resistance”. Let’s ask the victim. What say you, Daniel?

Oh dear, I’m sorry, Daniel can’t answer. He was murdered six years ago.

Even $323 million won’t bring him back, but if it makes a state sponsor of terrorism think twice about dispatching a mentally ill young man to set off a girdle of Semtex and hex bolts in a crowded restaurant, then it may buy us a measure of peace.

For Daniel and his family, it is sadly too late.

PS: How can we not keep in mind the “barbaric acts” committed by the Arab/Muslim world in any discussion of the Middle East? Aren’t they the defining acts of the region, of the “conflict”? How can one side’s olive trees or another side’s garden shed even rate a mention when these (and I quote) “barbaric acts” are still committed as regularly as opportunity allows? (Just ask the Fogel family or Asher and Yonatan Palmer if you don’t believe me. Oops—dead again!)

You know how I often say the UN is incompetent at best, malevolent the rest of the time? Well, anyway, I just did.

Here’s just another reason why:

“There is no food and no clean water, nothing,” Mahmoud, a 12-year-old boy from Homs, Syria, told Reuters Thursday. “There is no shop open and we only have one meal a day. How can we live like that and survive?”

According to the World Food Program, half a million people don’t have enough to eat in Syria. Fears are growing that the regime is using hunger as a weapon.

This is the kind of emergency which should attract the attention of the UN Human Rights Council’s hunger monitor, who has the ability to spotlight situations and place them on the world agenda. Yet Olivier de Schutter of Belgium, the “Special Rapporteur on the right to food,” is not going to Syria.

Instead, the UN’s food monitor is coming to investigate Canada.

That’s right. Despite dire food emergencies around the globe, De Schutter will be devoting the scarce time and resources of the international community on an 11-day tour of Canada—a country that ranks at the bottom of global hunger concerns.

Yes, but there are excellent hookers in Montreal! Or so I am told by the Secret Service.

Anyhow, back to those gaunt Canadians:

I asked De Schutter if his time wouldn’t better be spent on calling attention to countries that actually have starving people.

“Globally, 1.3 billion people are overweight or obese,” he responded via his spokesperson, “and this causes a range of diseases such as certain types of cancers, cardio-vascular diseases or (especially) type-2 diabetes that are a huge burden.”

In other words, the hunger expert is not even that interested in hunger, but the opposite. Sure, we should all eat less fries, but do Canadians need a costly UN inquiry to tell us that?

What’s that, Mr. De Schutter? I can’t understand you with your mouth full of coq au vin and moules marinière.

But you thought I cited this article as an example of UN incompetence, didn’t you? Guess again:

First, consider the origins of the UN’s “right to food” mandate. In voluminous background information provided by De Schutter and his local promoters, there’s no mention that their sponsor was Cuba, a country where some women resort to prostitution for food. De Schutter does not want you to know that Havana’s Communist government created his post, nor that the co-sponsors included China, North Korea, Iran and Zimbabwe.

These and other repressive regimes are seeking a political weapon to attack the West.

…

De Schutter’s consistent argument is that if there is hunger, Western countries are to blame. His attacks on international trade are so ideologically extreme that even Pascal Lamy, head of the World Trade Organization and a member of the French Socialist party, criticized De Schutter’s approach for threatening to drive food prices higher and “exacerbating the negative impacts on poor consumers.”

Second, even when they visit the right countries, Ziegler and De Schutter reach the wrong conclusions. Ziegler went to Cuba, but it was a staged visit that hailed Castro’s policies as almost divine. De Schutter went to Syria—in 2010, long before the current crisis — and mentioned several problems, but his report took pains to repeatedly praise the Assad regime.

My experience is that when you hear the phrase “Special Rapporteur” you should put one hand over your wallet and the other over your testicles (sorry, ladies) because one’s about to get picked and the other about to get kicked. I’ve come to believe that the UN is so malevolent, it uses incompetence as a mere means to its baleful ends (awesome word from my online thesaurus!).

I don’t mean to generalize or offend anyone—but the Arabs are a really [bleeped]-up people (that wasn’t too offensive, was it?):

Following are excerpts from an interview with Dr. Osama Al-Mallouhi, a member of the Syrian opposition, which aired on Al-Nas TV on March 26, 2012:

Israel is doing everything it can to keep Bashar Al-Assad in power. It is using international lobbies to exert pressure on other countries, to keep Bashar Al-Assad in power and to keep the world on the sidelines, making do with verbal condemnations, which will never amount to real pressure on Bashar to stop the bloodshed. I have said that Israel is delighted to see rivers of blood of Syrian Muslims being spilled at the hand of that arch-murderer, and therefore, it enables him to survive to the end.

So as I said: This is strange. Maybe [there is truth] to the story, attributed by historian to Jewish books, that says that on Passover, the Jews prefer the matzos that they eat to be mixed with the blood of non-Jews. There was an incident in Damascus in the 19th century, in which a non-Jew was killed, so that his blood could be taken and mixed into these matzos and eaten. This is a Jewish tradition.

The Jews have denied this, but if this tradition really isn’t true and if they really subscribe to a monotheistic religion, why do they keep silent, encourage [the massacre], silence the world, and prevent it from exerting pressure on Bashar, so that he can continue to spill Syrian blood? Do they want Syrian blood for their matzos of Zion?

I can’t speak to Israel’s ultimate goals (or to the ingredients in matzoh), but Syria under the Assads (père et fils) have warred against Israel twice (’67 and ’73), assassinated all but the most compliant puppets in Lebanon (where they also sponsor and protect Hezbollah), hosted and protected the leadership of Hamass (until those rats slunk away in the dark of night), and probably a whole lot of crap I can’t remember right now. (Correction: Hafez Assad didn’t assume power until 1970-71.) And this guy is an opposition leader! If he speaks for more than himself, Israel would be excused for wanting to keep Assad in power.

But as far as Israel is concerned (or as far as I’m concerned), the only good Assad is a dead Assad (excepting the lovely Asma, of course, Lady Macbeth though she may be).

That’s all right, darlin’. You’ll always have safe haven in Bloodthirstan.

Officials say that the EU foreign ministers have slapped sanctions on the wife and other close relatives of Syrian President Bashar Assad in a continuing attempt to stop the violent crackdown on opposition.

We won’t slap you with sanctions. Not that there’s anything wrong with a slap or two, among consenting adults, of course.

Oh, and could you fly by way of Jordan and pick up that lovely Queen Rania? The Royal Hot Tub here has plenty of room.

If I knew Arab dictators could attract such beautiful women, I would have changed my major in college.

What a knucklehead!

…“Every single commitment I have made to the state of Israel and its security, I have kept,” he told The Atlantic magazine. “Why is it that despite me never failing to support Israel on every single problem that they’ve had over the last three years, that there are still questions about that?”

The question deserves an honest answer, though the truth is not likely to cut through the fog of presidential self-pity. A man who compares himself to Lincoln, Gandhi, King, Mandela and FDR isn’t the sort to welcome disagreement.

And that is the heart of his problem. Obama is certain he knows what’s good for Israel. Given his record and the Iranian threat, it’s an impossible sell.

He came into office thinking Israel was the obstacle to Middle East peace; three years later, his policies are producing more signs of war than peace. The Palestinians won’t negotiate for their own state because the president foolishly urged them to make a ban on Israeli settlements a precondition.

He was wrong from the git-go, and still is. But facts don’t stand a chance. As a Democrat who speaks to Obama about the Mideast told me, he has a “stubborn worldview.”

How stubborn will be revealed today and tomorrow during crucial meetings with Israeli leaders. The Iranian march to nukes will top the agenda, but Obama’s view on Iran is typical of how he sees the region and his role in it.

Stripped of nuance, the gist is that Israel and America are oppressors and Muslims are oppressed. He remains obsessed with the idea that all will be well if only we prove to Muslims that we’re not bigots.
…
His approach to Iran is similarly misguided. Despite its thugocracy, he refuses to accept that his policy of engagement has failed. The White House even says it sees Iran as a “rational actor,” and Obama told The Atlantic that military action against Iran could work to its advantage.

“At a time when there is not a lot of sympathy for Iran and its only real ally [Syria] is on the ropes, do we want a distraction in which suddenly Iran can portray itself as a victim?” he asked.

Huh?

This is Obama at his faculty-lounge worst. Trapped by his own prejudices and misreading of history and culture, he continues to suggest that Iran is open to persuasion if he can find the right words. It’s not. It’s an evil regime that tortures its people, kills American soldiers, sponsors terrorism and wants a nuclear bomb to use against Israel and to dominate Arab countries.

A friend who recently met with top Israeli officials says the bottom line they will explain to Obama is that there are two things no Israeli government can ever do. First, it cannot allow a mortal enemy to get a weapon of mass destruction or the ability to make one. Second, it cannot entrust its survival to a third party, including the United States.

The policy that flows from those principles is obvious. Israel will attack when it feels Iran is close to getting the bomb. And Israel is more likely to reach that conclusion sooner because it doesn’t trust Obama’s resolve or time line.

I agree with the Israeli perspective. Obviously they cannot trust their survival to a wishy-washy, Neville Chamberlain Leftist who doesn’t seem to like them much to begin with. And they appear to have better intelligence (in both senses of the word) than the US. But my concern is that they lack either the military might or the chutzpah to do what needs to be done. Iran is not Iraq or Syria.

Uh, in case Obama still doesn’t get the skepticism that so many American Jews feel, this is from today’s NY Times:

They will be pushing on an open door. Democrats and Republicans, divided on so much, are remarkably united in supporting Israel and in ratcheting up pressure on Iran. The Senate voted 100 to 0 last year to pass legislation isolating Iran’s central bank, over the objections of the White House.

- Aggie

Oh boy, Uncle BTL’s dream come true!

The London-based Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper reported Tuesday that Jordan’s Queen Rania recently phoned Syrian President Bashar Assad’s wife Asma to ask about the situation in the battle-torn country. Assad’s wife responded: “Our situation is excellent and we have no concerns, thanks to allah.”

A Jordanian source added that Asma then told Rania: “But we have heard worrying reports from your country and wish to make sure you are doing ok.”

You know, with anyone that delusional and blind, I might just stand a chance. (Have you seen their husbands? Bridge trolls are better looking.)

Be it ever so humble:

Listening to Hillary Clinton berate China and Russia for their refusal to condemn Syria’s crackdown on its own people—”It’s just despicable,” she said last week at the anti-Assad “Friends of Syria” conference in Tunis—it’s almost possible to forget that this administration was once eager to get on Bashar’s good side, too.

Not here it ain’t. We quote Madame Secretary every day. And as the sun just rose above the horizon:

“Only a year ago, this country’s government was being vilified as a dangerous pariah,” the New York Times’s Robert Worth reported in March 2009. “Today, Syria seems to be coming in from the cold.” Top administration envoy George Mitchell paid Assad a visit that June, seeking, he said, “to establish a relationship built on mutual respect and mutual interest.”

Then, as the Syrian uprising began a year ago, Mrs. Clinton continued to paint Assad as a “reformer.” It took President Obama more than six months (and 2,000 murdered Syrians) to call for Assad to step down.

Even now, the administration has no plan to get Assad to step aside, other than to call on him to do so. A U.N. resolution on Syria vetoed last month by Russia and China was the usual mush of exhortation and condemnation. Friday’s Tunis meeting ended with a ringing call for, well, nothing: “They still give this man [Assad] a chance to kill us, just as he has already killed thousands of people,” said an opposition fighter in Homs, sizing up what Hillary Clinton’s cheap solicitude means for him and his besieged city.

Compared to this, the position of the Russians is at least intellectually defensible. Say what you will about Moscow’s despotic allies, mercenary interests and autocratic principles, Vladimir Putin has been consistent in sticking up for all three. That’s more than can be said for a U.S. administration that urges democracy, nonviolence and human rights for Syria—and pays nothing but lip service to each.

While calling four-star generals fighting terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq liars.

[T]he administration has come around to the idea that being on the side of democracy is good U.S. policy. But here’s an irony: Just as it has become the conventional wisdom that Mr. Assad’s downfall is the only way to detach Syria from Iran, the administration has adopted a purely rhetorical attitude toward regime change. I have no doubt Mrs. Clinton has come around to loathing Mr. Assad as much as some wild-eyed neocons did a few years ago. But loathing combined with inaction still amounts to the worst form of indifference: the willful kind.

Which brings me back to Mrs. Clinton’s tirade on Friday. There is a good case to be made that we should apply sufficient military pressure on Assad to help tip the scales in favor of the opposition, as we did in Libya. There’s also a plausible case to be made that the last thing the U.S. needs is another military entanglement on behalf of a cause we barely know for the sake of a goal we can only hazily define.

But there is no case for lecturing Russia on its own long-standing record of engaging its faithful clients in Syria, much less for invoking the suffering of a people she has no serious intention of saving. Even chutzpah has its limits, Hillary.

Case in point:

The U.S. has repeatedly said that it is reluctant to support the direct arming of the dissidents. Why?

Clinton: Well, first of all, we really don’t know who it is that would be armed.

Maybe the real reformers? (File under Smart-Ass Power.)

Running the country and the world (not to mention your mouth) ain’t as easy as it looks, is it?

UPDATE
Elliot Abrams is just crushing.

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.

…

“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

How long did Boy Assad give refuge to the duplicitous pond scum leadership of Hamass? Years, right?

And this is the thanks he gets. (I’d say he took it on the chin, if he had one.)

Leaders of Hamas turned publicly against their long-time ally President Bashar Assad of Syria on Friday, endorsing the revolt aimed at overthrowing his dynastic rule.

The policy shift deprives Assad of one of his few remaining Sunni Muslim supporters in the Arab world and deepens his international isolation. It was announced in Hamas speeches at Friday prayers in Cairo and a rally in the Gaza Strip.

Hamas went public after nearly a year of equivocating as Assad’s army, largely led by fellow members of the president’s Alawite sect, has crushed mainly Sunni protesters and rebels.

In a Middle East split along sectarian lines, the public abandonment of Assad casts immediate questions over Hamas’s future ties with its principal backer Iran, which has stuck by its ally Assad, as well as with Iran’s fellow Shiite allies in Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement.

…

[A]s the Sunni-Shiite split in the Middle East deepens, Hamas appears to have cast its lot with the powerful, Egypt-based Sunni Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose star has been in the ascendant since the Arab Spring revolts last year.

“This is considered a big step in the direction of cutting ties with Syria,” said Hany al-Masri, a Palestinian political commentator. Damascus might now opt to formally expel Hamas’s exile headquarters from Syria, he said.

Banned by deposed Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak, the Muslim Brotherhood has moved to the center of public life. It is the ideological parent of Hamas, which was founded 25 years ago among the Palestinians, the majority of whom are Sunni Muslims.

Why, it seems like only yesterday, that Hamass, like Hillary Clinton, thought of Asshat as a reformer—because it was:

The Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) on Monday [December 5, 2011] categorically denied media reports about the departure from Damascus of families of the movement’s leaders. According to these reports, these families have secretly left to the Gaza Strip amid the violent events taking place across Syria.

Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum said in a statement on Monday, “the movement (headquarters) are still in Syria, and continue to work as usual, following the Palestinian issues, without any significant change.” According to Barhoum, the reports about Hamas leaders leaving Syrian territory are just a “failed and miserable attempt to create the strained relationship between the movement and the Syrian regime.”

Yes, well, that was two months ago. Times change, you see. One must change with them, don’t you know.

PS: You almost have to feel sorry for the Boy Genocidist, don’t you? Almost. The world that once termed him a “reformer” has turned against him, his hot wife has gone underground, and he still looks like… what he looks like. He never lived up to his daddy, never got into the whole Vera Wang gown thing like Qaddafi. He’s just a charmless, faceless (you can say that again), Arab tinpot dictator. He is the remaindered book of despots, the Ted Kennedy bio, the Hillary Clinton memoir, a doorstop in Time’s library. Sad, really.

It’s a real pity what’s going on in Syria:

“Widespread, systematic and gross human rights violations” amounting to crimes against humanity in Syria have been conducted with the “apparent knowledge and consent” of the country’s “highest levels,” a U.N. commission said Thursday.

U.N. bodies probing the crimes should identify perpetrators and hold them accountable, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic said, stressing that “urgent, inclusive political dialogue” is needed to end the crisis.

“The government has manifestly failed in its responsibility to protect the population,” the report said. “Anti-government armed groups have also committed abuses, although not comparable in scale and organization with those carried out by the state.”

The commission said it has documented “crimes against humanity and other gross violations.”

It made similar assertions in November, underscoring its belief that policies to mistreat civilians were issued at the “highest levels of the armed forces and government” and that the state is “responsible for wrongful acts, including crimes against humanity, committed by members of its military and security forces.”

November?

Try last March!

Here is a transcript of the March 27 exchange:

10:31AM ET

BOB SCHIEFFER: Madam Secretary, let me start with you. Tens of thousands of people have turned out protesting in Syria which has been under the iron grip of the Assads for so many years now. One of the most repressive regimes in the world, I suppose. And when the demonstrators turned out the regime opened fire and killed a number of civilians. Can we expect the United States to enter that conflict in the way we have entered the conflict in Libya?

HILLARY CLINTON: No. Each of these situations is unique, Bob. Certainly we deplore the violence in Syria. We call, as we have on all of these governments during this period of Arab awakening, as some have called it, to be responding to their people’s needs, not to engage in violence, permit peaceful protests and begin a process of economic and political reform.

…

There is a different leader in Syria now. Many of the members of congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he’s a reformer. What’s been happening there the last few weeks is deeply concerning. But there’s a different between calling out aircraft and indiscriminately strafing and bombing your own cities than police actions which frankly have exceeded the use of force that any of us would want to see.

Ah well, who among us hasn’t said something so extraordinarily and criminally stupid? It’s like when I said of the sweaty terrorist, Samir Kuntar, that he just had funny taste in facial hair and gestures of greeting:

I thought he was just saying “Hi mom, check out the ‘stache I grew in prison!” I still blush over that one.

Thank goodness Secretary Clinton said this on CBS News’ Face the Nation. If anyone had actually seen it, she’d never live it down!