Business Insider: Cat On The Field!

Tony Manfred|February 06, 2012
Some cat interrupted the Liverpool-Tottenham game today.
The best part of this video is ESPN announcer Ian Darke pointing out, “There was a fox once.”
Here’s the video:

From Yahoo News:

In this video, an either brazen or oblivious cat walks out onto the field of a live Liverpool-Tottenham English Premier League soccer match.

The crowd cheers in delight and even the coaches can’t help laughing as the cat scurries across the field, stopping about 20 seconds into the video to take a brief rest next to Tottenham goalie Brad Friedel.

Live soccer matches are no stranger to overly enthusiastic fans taking to the field. Though as the announcer notes, “I don’t think that cat is going to handcuff himself to the goalpost, as we saw recently.”

After about half a minute on the field, the cat then trots off “of its own volition” before being gently scooped up over the field barrier by part of the stadium’s security team.

Back in December, a fox was spotted running onto the field during a local Dallas high-school football game. You can watch video of that encounter here.

More here:

• Liverpool’s Anfield cat becomes Twitter star
• Hello Kitty: Cat that invaded Anfield soccer pitch now has 35,000 Twitter followers
• Cat Appears on Pitch at Anfield During Match…Livens Up Snoozefest

Completely Unrelated Snow Leopard Photo from Gramfan:

Investigation of illegal trafficking in human bodily organs in Kosovo has revealed more victims besides the Serbs who were kidnapped, killed, and butchered for their organs during the Kosovo War and its aftermath. Once the supply of Serb victims ran out, the criminals used fraud to obtain kidneys from desperately impoverished living donors, and transplanted those kidneys into unwitting recipients. The organ donors never received the promised financial recompense, but were simply dumped out after the surgery to fend for themselves.

Kosovo organ trade probe tracking victims abroad

AFP/Pristina

EU prosecutors in Kosovo trying seven people accused of organ trafficking in a landmark case said yesterday that they had asked Russia, Ukraine, Israel and Turkey to help them identify victims of the scam.

“We have several requests for legal assistance out to many countries including most importantly the Russian Federation, Israel, Ukraine and Turkey, requesting legal assistance to identify and locate victim donors as a matter of urgency,” EU special prosecutor Jonathan Ratel told AFP.

The seven suspects are accused of organ trafficking and of being part of an organised crime ring in the so-called Medicus case, named after the Pristina clinic where the crimes allegedly took place.

The main defendants in the case, which is being heard before EU judges in a Pristina court and prosecuted by EU lawyers, are former Kosovo health secretary Ilir Rrecaj and Lutfi Dervishi, a prominent Pristina urologist.

Other suspects in the case include Turkish doctor Yusuf Sonmez, who is accused of having carried out illegal operations to remove organs, and Moshe Harel, an Israeli accused of recruiting and bringing the victims to Kosovo. They are both indicted in Turkey.

According to the indictment, the victims were recruited from poor eastern European and Central Asian countries. They were promised about 15,000 euros ($19,440) for organs, while recipients were charged up to 100,000 euros.

The charge sheet alleges that around 20 victims identified so far were not paid the promised amount for their organs but were left to their own devices after their kidneys were taken from them.

“They were literally cast aside at the airport. They were discarded as used material after the operation,” Ratel said.

The Medicus clinic was raided by police in 2008 after Turkish national Yilman Altun, 28, nearly collapsed at Pristina airport waiting for a flight back to Istanbul after donating a kidney to an Israeli man.

After that incident in Kosovo, Altun disappeared.

“He is still missing. And he is probably the most important witness,” Ratel said. “I need to find him. I need this witness.”

The prosecutor is also working with the US, Canada, Germany and Britain to find more victims.

“We are working aggressively with all those countries and pursuing that with everything we have, (so we can) locate and identify and have those victims as witnesses,” he said.

On Monday an American witness, New York store manager Joseph Koralashvili, testified via video-link how he had joined his late father Raphael from Israel on a trip to Kosovo to receive a kidney transplant in October 2008. “His kidneys were no longer functioning. That’s why he was very ill,” the 41-year-old said.

Koralashvili, whose father died three months ago from leukaemia, told the court that no one at the Medicus clinic had identified himself or herself as a doctor to him and his father during their six-day stay in Pristina.

“Did you know where that kidney your father received came from?” Ratel asked him by video link.

“No,” replied Kotalashvili whose testimony was secured with the help of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

It is the first such case with an international dimension tackled by the European rule of law mission EULEX, which has about 3,000 members and which was launched after Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008.

The Medicus clinic was mentioned in the report of Council of Europe special rapporteur Dick Marty, who alleged that Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci and some his associates from the ethnic Albanian guerrillas were involved in organised crime and organ trafficking during the 1998-1999 war with Serbia.

However Ratel insisted that “there is no clear evidence of any link between the private clinic Medicus and any other allegation during the conflict at this time”.

Ratel is being deceptive here. Dick Marty’s report is well known, but the EULEX investigators are simply unwilling to investigate or publicize any cases where Serbs are the victims.

This may look like “Rule 5 Friday” at first glance, but it’s way more important than that. Be sure to read the article too!

Daily Mail (UK): Belgian politician risks Muslim backlash after using teenage daughter dressed in burka and bikini for campaign against Islam

(h/t: Blazing Cat Fur)

By Rick Dewsbury
Last updated at 1:33 PM on 3rd February 2012

A Belgian politician has risked causing uproar among Muslims after starting a ‘Women Against Islamization’ campaign featuring his 19-year-old daughter wearing a burka and a bikini.

Filip Dewinter, leader of the far-right Vlaams Belang party, uses a shot of his daughter An-Sofie Dewinter in the dark blue bikini for the political campaign.

The glamorous teenager dons a burka that covers her head and face, while the rest of the Muslim garment is draped over her back.

The provocative image is likely to inflame tensions among Islamic groups and nationalists in the racially-divided country.

The poster shows the words ‘Freedom or Islam?’ written on a red bar across Ms Dewinter’s breasts.

Further down the poster a black panel with the words ‘You choose!’ is seen covering the teenager’s crotch.

The extremist Vlaams Belang party claims that it wants to convince women to take a stand against Islam.

Ms Dewinter told the Belgian press she does not feel used by the party.

She said: ‘I’ve suggested (the poster) myself, I have learned to live with it but I have had everything up to death threats made at me.’

She said that she ‘ wanted to make this statement.’

She added: ‘What is the greatest contrast with a niqab? Nude.

‘The campaign fits in perfectly with how I feel about the whole issue. As women, we must choose: freedom or Islam.’

The teenager claimed that she had been threatened by Muslim groups

She added: ‘Death threats and criticism no longer scare me off.’

Her father, the party’s leader, said: ‘Women are always the first victims of Islam. We want to make clear that they have a choice.’

The potentially incendiary poster comes after The Islamic fundamentalist group Shariah4Belgium was slammed for its aggressive stance.

The group opened the country’s first Sharia court, a putting it on a collision course with the country’s nationalists.

Vlaams Belang spoke out against the Muslim courts and said that all legal disputes should be settled in the country’s civil judicial system.

More here.

Let’s expose some of the “spin” in the Daily Mail article:

First of all, there’s this phrase in the article title: “…using teenage daughter in burka and bikini…” Filip Dewinter is not “using” his teenage daughter in this campaign. She suggested the poster; it is not unduly revealing; and, at 19, she is of age to make the decision to be photographed. As a young adult who grew up in a political family, she thoroughly understands and accepts the risks involved. Kudos to her for participating in the Women Against Islamization campaign.

“…likely to inflame tensions among Islamic groups and nationalists in the racially-divided country.” Yeah, we get it; if you object to the burqa or the niqab, you must be a raaaaacist. Belgium is divided in two different ways, neither of which have to do with race: by region (socialist French/Walloon versus conservative Flemish) and by ideology (Islam versus freedom). Islam is a totalitarian ideology; it is no more a “race” than communism is, and non-Muslims have the right to reject it.

“Filip Dewinter, leader of the far-right Vlaams Belang party…” Here we go again. Patriotism in western Europe has become a dirty word. Any European political party or organization that takes a stand for national sovereignty or against Islamic infiltration will be labeled as “far-right.” In the mainstream media, “far-right” is a code word for raaaaacist or neo-Nazi. This smear against conservatives is especially misleading in view of the fact that Hitler was a Marxist, always a man of the Left.

“The extremist Vlaams Belang party claims that it wants to convince women to take a stand against Islam.” Extremist is another code word that the mainstream media uses to make a person, group, or idea seem too far outside of the mainstream to be a respectable topic for discussion. On the one hand, jihadi violence is blamed on a “tiny minority of extremists” within Islam, rather than on mainstream Islamic doctrine set forth in the Qur’an, the hadiths, and the schools of Islamic jurisprudence. On the other hand, any party opposing Islamic expansionism is labeled extremist, as a ploy to make the reader feel secretly ashamed for agreeing with it.

More here:

• Filip Dewinter (Flemish language)
• Vlaams Belang (Flemish language)
• The Flemish Republic

Iran threatens Jews overseas. How very Nazi-like.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Uploaded by SDAMatt2a on Feb 4, 2012

Nice pals ya got there, liberals.

“The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdullah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews.”
=============
The status of Israel has become a pivotal issue in all talks about the Middle East. Israel’s legitimacy rests, not just on United Nations resolutions or Zionist aspirations, but, for many, on Biblical narratives and the historical connections of Jews with the Holy Land. A minority of Muslims find justification for the Zionist enterprise equally in the Bible and the Qur’an and believe that the Qur’an offers divine sanction for the establishment of a Jewish state in southern Syria. However, the majority cite other Qur’anic verses and passages from the Hadith (purported records of the Prophet Muhammad’s actions and sayings), stating the exact opposite. This second, negative attitude toward Jews is expressed in sacred texts and in the body of Shari’a (Islamic law) where Jews, like all non-Muslims, are assigned a status that does not permit their becoming rulers over Muslims or over Muslim territory.
Traditionally, this has not been an issue. Under the different Muslim empires, Jews were kept firmly in their place and represented no sort of threat to the ruling order. It is only in the modern period that this has become a burning issue. Thus, the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the British Mandate to modern Israel has been as much a religious as a political clash. The Arab onslaught of 1948 was religiously motivated, as is modern opposition to Israel by Islamist groups.

The Hamas charter asserts that “the Islamic Resistance Movement [i.e. Hamas] regards Palestine as an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future generations until Judgment Day.” A waqf is a religious endowment bestowed by God. Consequently, “neither it, nor any part of it, should be squandered: Neither it, nor any part of it, should be given up. Neither a single Arab country nor all Arab countries, neither any king or president, nor all the kings and presidents, neither any organization nor all of them, be they Palestinian or Arab, possess the right to do that. Palestine is an Islamic Waqf land consecrated for Muslim generations until Judgment Day.”

The charter is not unique: It represents a mainstream view among Muslims today. In contrast, several Muslim spokesmen have recently claimed that the Qur’an promises Israel to the Jews and that the claims of Hamas, Hezbollah, and allied groups are illegitimate on Islamic grounds. This is a comforting message, which some of these spokesmen have taken to Jewish audiences, reinforcing the idea that the Islamic jihad imperative against Israel is simply the province of a tiny minority of extremists and that the voices of reason, moderation, and Qur’anic authenticity will eventually prevail.

Although an extremely comforting message to supporters of Israel, it is not true and is based on a partial and inaccurate reading of the Qur’an.

- Robert Spencer

In view of the above story, the Iranians have no basis for complaint when the Israelis make fun of them in an advertisement. Because a Samsung tablet was shown in an “insulting” ad for Israeli cable TV services, Iran is threatening a boycott of Samsung. Yes, Samsung should indeed apologize – NOT for the ad, but for having traded with Iran in the first place.

He who sups with the devil should have a long spoon.

Iran banning Samsung products over an Israeli Ad (Subtitled)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Uploaded by Concord9000 on Feb 3, 2012

A senior lawmaker says Iran’s Majlis is considering a plan to cut off the country’s economic transactions with South Korea’s Samsung in reaction to the company’s anti-Iran teaser.

Head of Majlis Energy Committee Arsalan Fat’hipour said the double-urgency plan, aimed at imposing a complete ban on buying all Samsung products, would make the company regret making the insulting teaser.

South Korea’s giant manufacturer of electronic devices and home appliances produced a teaser shortly after the assassination of the Iranian scientist Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan by Mossad agents in Tehran, in which Iran had been depicted as a primitive society.

The clip also implies that Israel is powerful enough to easily destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities or assassinate the country’s nuclear scientists.

The Iranian lawmaker added that forgetting the high volume of its trade with Iran, the company has produced the teaser to curry favor with Israel.

Fat’hipour said Samsung’s apology to the Iranian nation, though necessary, would not be enough and that the company must be held accountable for producing the teaser.

Meanwhile, Samsung’s Dubai office has issued a statement condemning the production of the teaser by the company’s Israel office.

Samsung’s public relations official in Tehran, Elaheh Taheri, told reporters on Thursday the clip had nothing to do with the South Korean company and that it had been produced by an Israeli cable TV station, Hot.

When anyone refers to Hitler or the Nazis as “right-wing” or “extreme right,” they are either mistaken or deliberately lying. There is a definite reason why the Nazi Party called itself the National Socialist German Workers Party.

The Independent: Hitler and the socialist dream

(h/t: Blazing Cat Fur)

He declared that ‘national socialism was based on Marx’. Socialists have always disowned him. But a new book insists that he was, at heart, a left-winger.

George Watson – Sunday 22 November 1998

In April 1945, when Adolf Hitler died by his own hand in the rubble of Berlin, nobody was much interested in what he had once believed. That was to be expected. War is no time for reflection, and what Hitler had done was so shattering, and so widely known through images of naked bodies piled high in mass graves, that little or no attention could readily be paid to National Socialism as an idea. It was hard to think of it as an idea at all. Hitler, who had once looked a crank or a clown, was exposed as the leader of a gang of thugs, and the world was content to know no more than that.

Half a century on, there is much to be said. Even thuggery can have its reasons, and the materials that have newly appeared, though they may not transform judgement, undoubtedly enrich and deepen it. Confidants of Hitler. such as the late Albert Speer, have published their reminiscences; his wartime table-talk is a book; early revelations like Hermann Rauschning’s Hitler Speaks of 1939 have been validated by painstaking research, and the notes of dead Nazis like Otto Wagener have been edited, along with a full text of Goebbels’s diary.

It is now clear beyond all reasonable doubt that Hitler and his associates believed they were socialists, and that others, including democratic socialists, thought so too. The title of National Socialism was not hypocritical. The evidence before 1945 was more private than public, which is perhaps significant in itself. In public Hitler was always anti-Marxist, and in an age in which the Soviet Union was the only socialist state on earth, and with anti-Bolshevism a large part of his popular appeal, he may have been understandably reluctant to speak openly of his sources. His megalomania, in any case, would have prevented him from calling himself anyone’s disciple. That led to an odd and paradoxical alliance between modern historians and the mind of a dead dictator. Many recent analysts have fastidiously refused to study the mind of Hitler; and they accept, as unquestioningly as many Nazis did in the 1930s, the slogan “Crusade against Marxism” as a summary of his views. An age in which fascism has become a term of abuse is unlikely to analyse it profoundly.

His private conversations, however, though they do not overturn his reputation as an anti-Communist, qualify it heavily. Hermann Rauschning, for example, a Danzig Nazi who knew Hitler before and after his accession to power in 1933, tells how in private Hitler acknowledged his profound debt to the Marxian tradition. “I have learned a great deal from Marxism” he once remarked, “as I do not hesitate to admit”. He was proud of a knowledge of Marxist texts acquired in his student days before the First World War and later in a Bavarian prison, in 1924, after the failure of the Munich putsch. The trouble with Weimar Republic politicians, he told Otto Wagener at much the same time, was that “they had never even read Marx”, implying that no one who had failed to read so important an author could even begin to understand the modern world; in consequence, he went on, they imagined that the October revolution in 1917 had been “a private Russian affair”, whereas in fact it had changed the whole course of human history! His differences with the communists, he explained, were less ideological than tactical. German communists he had known before he took power, he told Rauschning, thought politics meant talking and writing. They were mere pamphleteers, whereas “I have put into practice what these peddlers and pen pushers have timidly begun”, adding revealingly that “the whole of National Socialism” was based on Marx.

That is a devastating remark and it is blunter than anything in his speeches or in Mein Kampf.; though even in the autobiography he observes that his own doctrine was fundamentally distinguished from the Marxist by reason that it recognised the significance of race – implying, perhaps, that it might otherwise easily look like a derivative. Without race, he went on, National Socialism “would really do nothing more than compete with Marxism on its own ground”. Marxism was internationalist. The proletariat, as the famous slogan goes, has no fatherland. Hitler had a fatherland, and it was everything to him.

Yet privately, and perhaps even publicly, he conceded that National Socialism was based on Marx. On reflection, it makes consistent sense. The basis of a dogma is not the dogma, much as the foundation of a building is not the building, and in numerous ways National Socialism was based on Marxism. It was a theory of history and not, like liberalism or social democracy, a mere agenda of legislative proposals. And it was a theory of human, not just of German, history, a heady vision that claimed to understand the whole past and future of mankind. Hitler’s discovery was that socialism could be national as well as international. There could be a national socialism. That is how he reportedly talked to his fellow Nazi Otto Wagener in the early 1930s. The socialism of the future would lie in “the community of the volk”, not in internationalism, he claimed, and his task was to “convert the German volk to socialism without simply killing off the old individualists”, meaning the entrepreneurial and managerial classes left from the age of liberalism. They should be used, not destroyed. The state could control, after all, without owning, guided by a single party, the economy could be planned and directed without dispossessing the propertied classes.

That realisation was crucial. To dispossess, after all, as the Russian civil war had recently shown, could only mean Germans fighting Germans, and Hitler believed there was a quicker and more efficient route. There could be socialism without civil war.

Now that the age of individualism had ended, he told Wagener, the task was to “find and travel the road from individualism to socialism without revolution”. Marx and Lenin had seen the right goal, but chosen the wrong route – a long and needlessly painful route – and, in destroying the bourgeois and the kulak, Lenin had turned Russia into a grey mass of undifferentiated humanity, a vast anonymous horde of the dispossessed; they had “averaged downwards”; whereas the National Socialist state would raise living standards higher than capitalism had ever known. It is plain that Hitler and his associates meant their claim to socialism to be taken seriously; they took it seriously themselves.

For half a century, none the less, Hitler has been portrayed, if not as a conservative – the word is many shades too pale – at least as an extreme instance of the political right. It is doubtful if he or his friends would have recognised the description. His own thoughts gave no prominence to left and right, and he is unlikely to have seen much point in any linear theory of politics. Since he had solved for all time the enigma of history, as he imagined, National Socialism was unique. The elements might be at once diverse and familiar, but the mix was his.

Hitler’s mind, it has often been noticed, was in many ways backward-looking: not medievalising, on the whole, like Victorian socialists such as Ruskin and William Morris, but fascinated by a far remoter past of heroic virtue. It is now widely forgotten that much the same could be said of Marx and Engels.

It is the issue of race, above all, that for half a century has prevented National Socialism from being seen as socialist. The proletariat may have no fatherland, as Lenin said. But there were still, in Marx’s view, races that would have to be exterminated. That is a view he published in January-February 1849 in an article by Engels called “The Hungarian Struggle” in Marx’s journal the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, and the point was recalled by socialists down to the rise of Hitler. It is now becoming possible to believe that Auschwitz was socialist-inspired. The Marxist theory of history required and demanded genocide for reasons implicit in its claim that feudalism was already giving place to capitalism, which must in its turn be superseded by socialism. Entire races would be left behind after a workers’ revolution, feudal remnants in a socialist age; and since they could not advance two steps at a time, they would have to be killed. They were racial trash, as Engels called them, and fit only for the dung-heap of history.
[...]
Much more here.

Coldwarrior has the story on 2.0: The Blogmocracy

(Reposted with permission)

This report does not look good. Frankly, he is highlighting what we are already hearing and have suspected from reading various other reports and hearing from on the ground from people in our own lives.

Please check out the LTC’s website linked here. He knows this will wreck his career by not going along. We need more leaders like him, not like the current batch of ‘leaders’.

Here is the article in full from Armed Forces Journal:

BREAKING:

Truth, lies and Afghanistan: How military leaders have let us down
By LT. COL. DANIEL L. DAVIS

I spent last year in Afghanistan, visiting and talking with U.S. troops and their Afghan partners. My duties with the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force took me into every significant area where our soldiers engage the enemy. Over the course of 12 months, I covered more than 9,000 miles and talked, traveled and patrolled with troops in Kandahar, Kunar, Ghazni, Khost, Paktika, Kunduz, Balkh, Nangarhar and other provinces.

What I saw bore no resemblance to rosy official statements by U.S. military leaders about conditions on the ground.

Entering this deployment, I was sincerely hoping to learn that the claims were true: that conditions in Afghanistan were improving, that the local government and military were progressing toward self-sufficiency. I did not need to witness dramatic improvements to be reassured, but merely hoped to see evidence of positive trends, to see companies or battalions produce even minimal but sustainable progress.

Instead, I witnessed the absence of success on virtually every level.

My arrival in country in late 2010 marked the start of my fourth combat deployment, and my second in Afghanistan. A Regular Army officer in the Armor Branch, I served in Operation Desert Storm, in Afghanistan in 2005-06 and in Iraq in 2008-09. In the middle of my career, I spent eight years in the U.S. Army Reserve and held a number of civilian jobs — among them, legislative correspondent for defense and foreign affairs for Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas.

As a representative for the Rapid Equipping Force, I set out to talk to our troops about their needs and their circumstances. Along the way, I conducted mounted and dismounted combat patrols, spending time with conventional and Special Forces troops. I interviewed or had conversations with more than 250 soldiers in the field, from the lowest-ranking 19-year-old private to division commanders and staff members at every echelon. I spoke at length with Afghan security officials, Afghan civilians and a few village elders.

I saw the incredible difficulties any military force would have to pacify even a single area of any of those provinces; I heard many stories of how insurgents controlled virtually every piece of land beyond eyeshot of a U.S. or International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) base.

I saw little to no evidence the local governments were able to provide for the basic needs of the people. Some of the Afghan civilians I talked with said the people didn’t want to be connected to a predatory or incapable local government.

From time to time, I observed Afghan Security forces collude with the insurgency.

From Bad to Abysmal

Much of what I saw during my deployment, let alone read or wrote in official reports, I can’t talk about; the information remains classified. But I can say that such reports — mine and others’ — serve to illuminate the gulf between conditions on the ground and official statements of progress.

And I can relate a few representative experiences, of the kind that I observed all over the country.

In January 2011, I made my first trip into the mountains of Kunar province near the Pakistan border to visit the troops of 1st Squadron, 32nd Cavalry. On a patrol to the northernmost U.S. position in eastern Afghanistan, we arrived at an Afghan National Police (ANP) station that had reported being attacked by the Taliban 2½ hours earlier.

Through the interpreter, I asked the police captain where the attack had originated, and he pointed to the side of a nearby mountain.

“What are your normal procedures in situations like these?” I asked. “Do you form up a squad and go after them? Do you periodically send out harassing patrols? What do you do?”

As the interpreter conveyed my questions, the captain’s head wheeled around, looking first at the interpreter and turning to me with an incredulous expression. Then he laughed.

“No! We don’t go after them,” he said. “That would be dangerous!”

According to the cavalry troopers, the Afghan policemen rarely leave the cover of the checkpoints. In that part of the province, the Taliban literally run free.

In June, I was in the Zharay district of Kandahar province, returning to a base from a dismounted patrol. Gunshots were audible as the Taliban attacked a U.S. checkpoint about one mile away.

As I entered the unit’s command post, the commander and his staff were watching a live video feed of the battle. Two ANP vehicles were blocking the main road leading to the site of the attack. The fire was coming from behind a haystack. We watched as two Afghan men emerged, mounted a motorcycle and began moving toward the Afghan policemen in their vehicles.

The U.S. commander turned around and told the Afghan radio operator to make sure the policemen halted the men. The radio operator shouted into the radio repeatedly, but got no answer.

On the screen, we watched as the two men slowly motored past the ANP vehicles. The policemen neither got out to stop the two men nor answered the radio — until the motorcycle was out of sight.

To a man, the U.S. officers in that unit told me they had nothing but contempt for the Afghan troops in their area — and that was before the above incident occurred.

In August, I went on a dismounted patrol with troops in the Panjwai district of Kandahar province. Several troops from the unit had recently been killed in action, one of whom was a very popular and experienced soldier. One of the unit’s senior officers rhetorically asked me, “How do I look these men in the eye and ask them to go out day after day on these missions? What’s harder: How do I look [my soldier’s] wife in the eye when I get back and tell her that her husband died for something meaningful? How do I do that?”

One of the senior enlisted leaders added, “Guys are saying, ‘I hope I live so I can at least get home to R&R leave before I get it,’ or ‘I hope I only lose a foot.’ Sometimes they even say which limb it might be: ‘Maybe it’ll only be my left foot.’ They don’t have a lot of confidence that the leadership two levels up really understands what they’re living here, what the situation really is.”

On Sept. 11, the 10th anniversary of the infamous attack on the U.S., I visited another unit in Kunar province, this one near the town of Asmar. I talked with the local official who served as the cultural adviser to the U.S. commander. Here’s how the conversation went:

Davis: “Here you have many units of the Afghan National Security Forces [ANSF]. Will they be able to hold out against the Taliban when U.S. troops leave this area?”

Adviser: “No. They are definitely not capable. Already all across this region [many elements of] the security forces have made deals with the Taliban. [The ANSF] won’t shoot at the Taliban, and the Taliban won’t shoot them.

“Also, when a Taliban member is arrested, he is soon released with no action taken against him. So when the Taliban returns [when the Americans leave after 2014], so too go the jobs, especially for everyone like me who has worked with the coalition.

“Recently, I got a cellphone call from a Talib who had captured a friend of mine. While I could hear, he began to beat him, telling me I’d better quit working for the Americans. I could hear my friend crying out in pain. [The Talib] said the next time they would kidnap my sons and do the same to them. Because of the direct threats, I’ve had to take my children out of school just to keep them safe.

“And last night, right on that mountain there [he pointed to a ridge overlooking the U.S. base, about 700 meters distant], a member of the ANP was murdered. The Taliban came and called him out, kidnapped him in front of his parents, and took him away and murdered him. He was a member of the ANP from another province and had come back to visit his parents. He was only 27 years old. The people are not safe anywhere.”

That murder took place within view of the U.S. base, a post nominally responsible for the security of an area of hundreds of square kilometers. Imagine how insecure the population is beyond visual range. And yet that conversation was representative of what I saw in many regions of Afghanistan.

In all of the places I visited, the tactical situation was bad to abysmal. If the events I have described — and many, many more I could mention — had been in the first year of war, or even the third or fourth, one might be willing to believe that Afghanistan was just a hard fight, and we should stick it out. Yet these incidents all happened in the 10th year of war.

As the numbers depicting casualties and enemy violence indicate the absence of progress, so too did my observations of the tactical situation all over Afghanistan.

Credibility Gap

I’m hardly the only one who has noted the discrepancy between official statements and the truth on the ground.

A January 2011 report by the Afghan NGO Security Office noted that public statements made by U.S. and ISAF leaders at the end of 2010 were “sharply divergent from IMF, [international military forces, NGO-speak for ISAF] ‘strategic communication’ messages suggesting improvements. We encourage [nongovernment organization personnel] to recognize that no matter how authoritative the source of any such claim, messages of the nature are solely intended to influence American and European public opinion ahead of the withdrawal, and are not intended to offer an accurate portrayal of the situation for those who live and work here.”

The following month, Anthony Cordesman, on behalf of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote that ISAF and the U.S. leadership failed to report accurately on the reality of the situation in Afghanistan.

“Since June 2010, the unclassified reporting the U.S. does provide has steadily shrunk in content, effectively ‘spinning’ the road to victory by eliminating content that illustrates the full scale of the challenges ahead,” Cordesman wrote. “They also, however, were driven by political decisions to ignore or understate Taliban and insurgent gains from 2002 to 2009, to ignore the problems caused by weak and corrupt Afghan governance, to understate the risks posed by sanctuaries in Pakistan, and to ‘spin’ the value of tactical ISAF victories while ignoring the steady growth of Taliban influence and control.”

How many more men must die in support of a mission that is not succeeding and behind an array of more than seven years of optimistic statements by U.S. senior leaders in Afghanistan? No one expects our leaders to always have a successful plan. But we do expect — and the men who do the living, fighting and dying deserve — to have our leaders tell us the truth about what’s going on.

I first encountered senior-level equivocation during a 1997 division-level “experiment” that turned out to be far more setpiece than experiment. Over dinner at Fort Hood, Texas, Training and Doctrine Command leaders told me that the Advanced Warfighter Experiment (AWE) had shown that a “digital division” with fewer troops and more gear could be far more effective than current divisions. The next day, our congressional staff delegation observed the demonstration firsthand, and it didn’t take long to realize there was little substance to the claims. Virtually no legitimate experimentation was actually conducted. All parameters were carefully scripted. All events had a preordained sequence and outcome. The AWE was simply an expensive show, couched in the language of scientific experimentation and presented in glowing press releases and public statements, intended to persuade Congress to fund the Army’s preference. Citing the AWE’s “results,” Army leaders proceeded to eliminate one maneuver company per combat battalion. But the loss of fighting systems was never offset by a commensurate rise in killing capability.

A decade later, in the summer of 2007, I was assigned to the Future Combat Systems (FCS) organization at Fort Bliss, Texas. It didn’t take long to discover that the same thing the Army had done with a single division at Fort Hood in 1997 was now being done on a significantly larger scale with FCS. Year after year, the congressionally mandated reports from the Government Accountability Office revealed significant problems and warned that the system was in danger of failing. Each year, the Army’s senior leaders told members of Congress at hearings that GAO didn’t really understand the full picture and that to the contrary, the program was on schedule, on budget, and headed for success. Ultimately, of course, the program was canceled, with little but spinoffs to show for $18 billion spent.

If Americans were able to compare the public statements many of our leaders have made with classified data, this credibility gulf would be immediately observable. Naturally, I am not authorized to divulge classified material to the public. But I am legally able to share it with members of Congress. I have accordingly provided a much fuller accounting in a classified report to several members of Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, senators and House members.

A nonclassified version is available at www.afghanreport.com. [Editor’s note: At press time, Army public affairs had not yet ruled on whether Davis could post this longer version.]

Tell The Truth

When it comes to deciding what matters are worth plunging our nation into war and which are not, our senior leaders owe it to the nation and to the uniformed members to be candid — graphically, if necessary — in telling them what’s at stake and how expensive potential success is likely to be. U.S. citizens and their elected representatives can decide if the risk to blood and treasure is worth it.

Likewise when having to decide whether to continue a war, alter its aims or to close off a campaign that cannot be won at an acceptable price, our senior leaders have an obligation to tell Congress and American people the unvarnished truth and let the people decide what course of action to choose. That is the very essence of civilian control of the military. The American people deserve better than what they’ve gotten from their senior uniformed leaders over the last number of years. Simply telling the truth would be a good start. AFJ

Please visit afghanreport.com.

Remarks from 1389:

Relying on “local troops” is insane, all the more so when those “local troops” are Muslim.

Peace never comes from peace conferences, peace studies, peacekeeping, Nobel Peace Prizes, or anything like that. It comes only from defeating our enemies so thoroughly that they can trouble us no more.

If we cannot let our warriors be warriors, we will be defeated every time.

Conan, what is best in life?

(h/t: mfhorn):

Click here to view the embedded video.

JDL Rally For Freedom with Paul Weston from the New Freedom Party in England

Monday, February 20, 2012 —– 7:30 pm
Toronto Zionist Center, 788 Marlee Avenue, Toronto, ON

Please join us Monday, February 20th @ 7:30pm for a truly important evening with Paul Weston, leader of the new British Freedom Party in England.

Following in the footsteps of Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party of the Netherlands, Mr. Weston’s goals are to counteract the spread of …fundamentalist Islam in Britain.

His platform consists of:

• Stopping Immigration from Countries that promote the Muslim Brotherhood.
• Repairing the damage done to the nation’s education system.
• Tackle the growth in crime.
• Promote British values and culture.

We have witnessed the spread of fundamentalist Islam across Europe and are witnessing the same trend in North America. An evening with Paul Weston will shed light on this issue and how to keep North America free.

Michael Coren with Paul Weston, British Freedom Party

(h/t: Blazing Cat Fur)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Uploaded by SDAMatt2a on Dec 8, 2011
Paul Weston, leader of the British Freedom Party, joins Michael Coren to discuss his party’s raison d’être.

The Roberts also looks classier than the Volt.

I noticed that Chevrolet’s Volt website showed photos of the Volt in remote locations that it most likely could not reach on a 40-mile charge. True, unlike the Roberts, the Volt is a hybrid, but still…

Here is a more realistic view of this Obama administration government-subsidized boondoggle:

115-year-old electric car gets same 40 miles to the charge as Chevy Volt

By Chris Bedford – The Daily Caller

Meet the Roberts electric car. Built in 1896, it gets a solid 40 miles to the charge — exactly the mileage Chevrolet advertises for the Volt, the highly touted $31,645 electric car General Motors CEO Dan Akerson called “not a step forward, but a leap forward.”

The executives at Chevrolet can rest easy for now. Since the Roberts was constructed in an age before Henry Ford’s mass production, the 115-year-old electric car is one of a kind.

But don’t let the car’s advanced age let you think it isn’t tough: Its present-day owner, who prefers not to be named, told The Daily Caller it still runs like a charm, and has even completed the roughly 60-mile London to Brighton Vintage Car Race.

If you didn’t know there are electric cars as old as the Roberts, you aren’t alone. Prior to today’s electric v. gas skirmishes, there was another battle: electric v. gas v. steam. This contest was fought in the market place, and history shows gas gave electric and steam an even more thorough whooping than Coca-Cola gave Moxie.

But while the Roberts electric car clearly lacked GPS, power steering and, yes, air bags, the distance it could achieve on a charge, when compared with its modern equivalent, provides a telling example of the slow pace of the electric car.

Driven by a tiller instead of a wheel, the Roberts car was built seven years before the Wright brothers’ first flight, 12 years before the Ford Model T, 16 years before Chevrolet was founded and 114 years before the first Chevy Volt was delivered to a customer.

As the New York Times reported September 5, “For General Motors and the Obama administration, the new Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrid represents the automotive future, the culmination of decades of high-tech research financed partly with federal dollars.”

Like “green technology’s” most powerful proponent, President Barack Obama, the 1896 Roberts was made in Chicago. Obama, who supports the $7,500 tax credit for the Volt, is not fazed by its 40-mile electric limit — he only drove the car 10 feet.

[Source]

Ezra Levant on John Miller aka “The Journalism Dork”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Uploaded by SDAMatt2a on Feb 6, 2012

John “The Journalism Dork” Miller has had his @&$ handed to him a number of times by Mark Steyn (just Google it), but he keeps coming back for more. This time he’s critical of Ezra and Sun News.

He calls himself “The Journalism Doctor” but he’s no such thing.

Douglas Murray with Michael Coren: Islam-Europe is Confused and Lost

Click here to view the embedded video.

Uploaded by anu123km on Oct 1, 2011
No Islamofascism
Nowhere Nowhere

Douglas Murray’s Views on Multiculturalism

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Uploaded by Itchy2000uk on May 31, 2011
Douglas Murray On Multiculture

Douglas Murray – Terrorism, Charity, Hamas, Tuition Fees

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Uploaded by MuggedVideos2 on May 21, 2011
http://www.socialcohesion.co.uk/

Douglas Murray – Jobs, Alcohol, Tuition Fees & Olympics

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Uploaded by MuggedVideos2 on May 21, 2011
http://www.socialcohesion.co.uk/

Douglas Murray atomises Tariq Ramadan

Click here to view the embedded video.

Uploaded by EXTREMECENTRE1 on Sep 15, 2011

Version sous-titrée en français visible ici : http://extremecentre.org/2011/09/15/douglas-murray-atomise-tariq-ramadan/

Voici comment l’écrivain britannique Douglas Murray atomisait Tariq Ramadan, le 28 février dernier, à l’occasion d’un débat sur la construction de mosquées à Athènes, organisé conjointement par le British Council et l’Intelligence Squared Greece (IQ2). Un grand moment à savourer sans modération. Boudiou que c’est bon !

Douglas Murray – Profile at The Henry Jackson Society

Associate Director
douglas.murray[at]henryjacksonsociety.org
+44 (0) 207 340 4520
Download high-res image

Douglas Murray is the Associate Director at the Henry Jackson Society, having joined in April 2011. He previously founded the Centre for Social Cohesion, a think tank studying extremism and terrorism in the UK. A bestselling author and award-winning political commentator, Douglas is a columnist for Standpoint and writes frequently for a variety of other publications, including the Spectator and Wall Street Journal. A prolific debater, Douglas has spoken on a variety of prominent platforms, including at the British and European Parliaments and the White House. He has authored books on neoconservatism, terrorism and national security as well as on freedom of speech. His latest book, Bloody Sunday: Truths, Lies and the Saville Inquiry, was published in November 2011.

See all of Douglas Murray’s work

Media Experience: Extensive – across all BBC platforms, including Question Time and Newsnight; Sky News; Al-Jazeera; Fox News

Expertise: Middle East, specifically Israel and Iran; National security and defence; US and UK foreign policy; Northern Ireland; terrorism; domestic radicalisation; multiculturalism

Current Project: Iran; Israel & NATO

Publications and Analysis

• Islamist Terrorism: The British Connections, Henry Jackson Society, July 7, 2011

External Publications

• Victims of Intimidation: Freedom of Speech within Europes Muslim Communities – Centre for Social Cohesion
• Hate on the State: How British libraries encourage Islamic extremism – Centre for Social Cohesion

Selected Articles

• Push off now, Press TV, and take your conspiracy theories with you, Spectator, January 20, 2012
• Ignore European Court and Deport Abu Qatada Now, , January 18, 2012
• Hague’s misplaced optimism, Spectator, January 13, 2012
• After Spring, Winter, Spectator, November 26, 2011
• St. Paul’s Occupied Cathedral, The Wall Street Journal, November 2, 2011
• The paucity of the “99 per cent”, Spectator, October 30, 2011
• The End of a Delusion, Spectator, October 22, 2011
• Pro-Israel? Time for a British media Fox hunt, The Jewish Chronicle, October 19, 2011
• Must all conservatives answer for the actions of a psychopath?, Spectator, August 8, 2011
• Phone-hacking debate in the Commons: panel verdict, The Guardian, July 6, 2011
• Britain’s line on Israel is a cover for its impotence, The Jewish Chronicle, June 16, 2011
• Rights of terrorists suspects have now overtaken those of the general public, The Telegraph, February 3, 2011
• A Bonus Bonanza for Enemy Combatants, The Wall Street Journal, November 23, 2010

Video on the UN Durban Conference:

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View more videos featuring Douglas Murray

From YouTube:

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Uploaded by lector0003 on Jan 26, 2012
Probably Douglas Murray’s finest speech delineating the inane moral fetor emanating from Western academicians on the Iranian nuclear crisis (and the hapless Jewish state Europe hates).

More from Douglas Murray here.

From Zilla:

You know how you’ve suggested that I get off Blogger and go to my own server? Well I have owned my domain for a very long time and only just yesterday learned that it comes with a server too! So I have a New and Improved Zilla of the Resistance blog at http://marezilla.com – where I will not be at the mercy of Google if they ever get complaints about me.

I am still tinkering with it, and have been for going on 2 solid days now, but it is up and running if you want to stop by! I’ll be leaving the old blog up because I could not import everything and would like to keep access available to my archives, but the new place is the place to be now.

Zilla of the Resistance at MareZilla.com

 - Mare (Zilla)

ACT for Australia has the story:

Australians are becoming increasingly aware that many Muslims refugees:

• Abuse our hospitality. E.g., Mansor Almaribe threatened to sue the Australian Government after they had lobbied the Saudi Government when he was arrested on charges of blasphemy, helping to get his sentence drastically reduced .
• Import barbaric sharia. E.g., the man who strangled his wife with her veil, because she ‘shamed’ him by leaving him after many years of abuse.

So when growing public anger forces our government to restrict Islamic immigration, Islamic countries will have to think of new strategies to gain entry. It won’t be easy, as evidence of the repressive nature of Islamic countries is continually being exposed.

The Barnabas Fund reports:

• The media is banned from producing or broadcasting any programme “that humiliates Allah or his prophets or the holy Quran”.
• Foreign workers and tourists can practise their faith only in private. It is also illegal to carry or display in public books on religions other than Islam.
• In October 2011 a Christian teacher from India working in a school on Raa Atoll was imprisoned for transferring Christian songs on to a school laptop and keeping a Bible in his home.

In 2010, it was reported that legislation was planned to ban all non-Muslim places of worship in the Maldives:

• … the bill would make it illegal to build non-Muslim places of worship or to practise non-Muslim faiths in public… Punishment would be a jail term of three to five years or a fine of between US$2,800 and US$4,700.
• … Muttalib, MP… said that the purpose of the legislation was to maintain Islamic principles and to prevent the spread of non-Muslim faiths. He mentioned too the phenomenon of “wedding tourism” , which would “indirectly set up churches in this country”.
• Sheikh Mohamed Shaheem Ali Saeed… commented that non-Muslim places of worship are necessary only in countries where there is religious diversity. This did not apply in the Maldives… whose constitution does not permit Maldivians to follow a non-Islamic faith.
• Nazam Rashid MP agreed the bill was important because human rights organisations were trying to impose freedom of religion on the Maldives.

The Maldives has no freedom of religion, and denigrates and oppresses any who follow another religion.

Its pretense of being moderate in order to attract tourists has resulted in some bizarre situations, as when a wedding celebrant was caught out insulting tourists:

• The celebrant, who conducted the ceremony in the local language at an upmarket resort fringed by white sand and turquoise water, had been arrested …
• A video of the ceremony, during which the hapless couple are taunted and subjected to a series of insulting and religious-tinged abuse, was posted on YouTube and has sparked fears for the country’s tourism-dependent economy.
• President Mohamed Nasheed announced his government would introduce strict guidelines on conducting wedding ceremonies … he expressed “disgust” at the incident … saying “bad behaviour, such as that depicted in the YouTube video, can cause enormous damage to the country’s tourism industry”.
• The Vilu Reef hotel… said it was “unforgivable” that a staff member had read out the sexual and religious slurs in the Dhivehi language.“You are swine,” the couple were told. “The children that you bear from this marriage will all be bastard swine.”

Muslims are encouraged to denigrate and curse other religions, so Nasheed would have been shocked, not by the celebrant’s behaviour, but that this story leaked out.

That’s the problem with deceit: sooner or later the mask slips, and the perception that the Maldives is just like any other luxury resort, with alcohol aplenty and people in skimpy clothing relaxing by the pool, is shattered by the reality of Islam, as when the government tried to close down all spas:

• The Maldives government is looking to rethink a decision to close down all spas after the tourism industry threatened protests if the decision was not reversed.
• A protest was called by the opposition Justice Party and several other groups that accuse President Nasheed’s government of compromising principles of Islam and want strict Islamic law.
• The protesters also have called on authorities to stop the sale of alcohol, shut down brothels operating in the guise of what they said are “massage parlors” and demolish monuments gifted by other countries marking a South Asian summit because they are “idols.”
• An angry protest also followed a call by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay for the Maldives to end floggings of women being punished for adultery.

Some Maldivians are aware of the contradictions:

Lured by the exotic brochures they come to visit the Maldives. Sun. Sand. Sea. holiday. Paradise.

The visiting tourist knows he is going to a 100% Muslim Nation. But he is unaware that his Paradise package that mustached man sold him at the travel fair is going to land him in Hell.

Mamduh Waheed explains it all at Minivan News:

…the Maldivian constitution…clearly states that a Maldivian citizen can only be a Muslim. And from this follows other laws and regulations which prohibit Maldivians from consumption of alcohol and any other behavior that is deemed outside of the Muslim moral code. And tourism regulation in the country is perhaps a good example of this. We facilitate tourists to travel thousands of miles and spend as much dollars to travel to the beautiful islands of the Maldives (of which we are the inhabitants) and do things we believe will only take them closer to hell; drink alcohol, engage in sex outside marriage, wear revealing clothes in public, etc. So we have a situation where we ourselves refrain from the bad things but actually help others who do not belong to our community to do these very sinful things. The same laws of the land has different provisions to different persons, and while some laws describe us as having certain unalienable rights, others deny us those very same rights.

For many centuries, the Maldives were populated by Buddhists from Sri Lanka. They were converted to Sunni Islam in 1153, and, in true Islamic fashion, virtually all traces of the indigenous culture have been obliterated.

Under the Constitution, Islam is the basis of all laws in the Maldives and no laws contrary to any tenet of Islam can be enacted. Only Muslims can be citizens or own land. Non-Muslims may not vote or hold public positions.

Eventually, this must put an end to the wedding and other tourism: in the meantime, there are still many wealthy/naïve tourists who are drawn to the luxury resorts.

But no worries: when tourism dries up, they can always invade neighbouring countries and plunder their wealth. Luckily, President Nasheed is on the ball, using the climate change pretext to announce his plans to use tourism money to purchase land in Australia, for his people to relocate should rising sea levels due to climate change inundate the country.

We know Muslims would get a welcome from the Greens:

The Greens have pledged that they will:

“Establish a new climate refugee visa to help those displaced by climate change.”

Our elite media is also on their side.

An editorial published in The Age and elsewhere lectured us on our obligations:

THE idea of government ministers donning scuba gear to attend an underwater cabinet meeting seems to conjure up a scene from surrealist drama, but in the Maldives it really happened. In 2009 President Mohamed Nasheed and his cabinet did just that to draw attention to the fact that their country might literally disappear beneath the waves… If the sea level rises by 59 cms in the course of the century… most of the republic’s 200 inhabited islands will have to be abandoned.

Rising sea levels are one of the key indicators of human-induced global warming, which is perhaps why skeptics contest the evidence for it so vigorously… But the inhabitants of the Maldives… have no doubt that the IPCC’s predictions are a pointer to their future…

Australians tend to think about the Maldives, Tuvalu and Kiribati…as paradisal holiday destinations…The islands’ proximity, however, is a reminder that the threat to the low-lying states’ existence is not only a problem for the islanders themselves.

If the Maldives were to vanish, their 350,000 human inhabitants would have to go somewhere…Australia, Sri Lanka and India, would be their most likely destinations.

These islanders would not be asylum seekers in the strict sense, because they would not be fleeing persecution. But as victims of a catastrophe not of their making they would certainly have a claim on the rest of humanity. Two of the most divisive issues in Australian politics in the past two decades, climate change and immigration, would have coalesced.

At last year’s UN climate-change conference in Durban… delegates agreed to begin work on a new global treaty…on carbon emissions, to come into force by 2020.

To Nasheed, 2020 will be too late. He wants world leaders to bring the date forward, but he is also keenly aware that the Maldives… lacks diplomatic clout. That may well doom his plea, and ultimately his nation, too. But Australia should remember that our neighbours’ interests are also our interests.

How can our neighbours’ interests also be our interests when Australia is a democracy, with egalitarian values and freedom of religion, whereas, behind a façade of an idyllic holiday destination, The Maldives is a totalitarian Islamic state?

Fairfax’s Sydney Morning Herald are also on side:

THE Maldives will begin to divert a portion of the country’s billion-dollar annual tourist revenue into buying a new homeland – possibly in Australia – as an insurance policy against climate change that threatens to turn the 300,000 islanders into environmental refugees, the country’s first democratically elected president has said.

Mohamed Nasheed… said the chain of 1200 islands and coral atolls… is likely to disappear under the waves if the current pace of climate change continues to raise sea levels.

“We can do nothing to stop climate change on our own and so we have to buy land elsewhere. It’s an insurance policy for the worst possible outcome. After all, the Israelis [began by buying] land in Palestine.”

The President – a human rights activist who swept to power in elections by ousting Maumoon Abdul Gayoom…said he had broached the idea with a number of countries and found them to be receptive.

He said Sri Lanka and India were targets because they had similar cultures, cuisines and climates. Australia was being considered because of the amount of unoccupied land available.

Environmentalists say the issue raises the question of what rights citizens have if their homeland no longer exists.

“It’s an unprecedented wake-up call,” Tom Picken, head of international climate change at Friends of the Earth, said. “The Maldives is left to fend for itself. It is a victim of climate change caused by rich countries.”

Nasheed is a rising star in Asia, where he has been compared to Nelson Mandela. Before taking office the President asked Maldivians to move forward without rancour or retribution – an astonishing call, given that Nasheed had gone to jail 23 times, been tortured and spent 18 months in solitary confinement.

The Maldives is one of the few Muslim nations to make a relatively peaceful transition from autocracy to democracy. The Gayoom “sultanate” was an iron-fisted regime that ran the police, army and courts and which banned rival parties.

Public flogging, banishment to island gulags and torture were routinely used to suppress dissent and the fledging pro-democracy movement… However, public pressure grew and last year Gayoom conceded that democracy was inevitable.

Nasheed said that without an emergency bail-out from the international community, the future of the Maldives as a democracy would be in doubt.

“It’s desperate. We are a 100 per cent Islamic country and democracy came from within. Do you want to lose that because we were denied the money to deal with the poverty created by the dictatorship?”

Amazing that an Australian newspaper can publish an article which claims that The Maldives is a democracy, Nasheed a Human Rights Activist, climate change is the fault of rich countries and if we don’t let them in, we will be destroying their ‘democracy’.

Come to think of it, aren’t the Arab countries rich? Plus they have “they had similar cultures, cuisines and climates”. Moreover, the Emirates are the biggest environmental vandals, so surely it’s their fault too! Maldivians would feel right at home in Dubai or Saudi Arabia, both of which have sharia and despise human rights and democracy.

Mind you, The Age recently published a revealing article on The Maldives, so I guess that’s pretty even-handed!

WHEN the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay visited the Maldives, she urged that the practice of flogging women for having sex outside marriage – and very rarely punishing men in the same way – should be abolished.

“This practice constitutes one of the most inhumane and degrading forms of violence against women,” she told local reporters.

The response was as vicious as it was unexpected.

The next day protestors rallied outside the UN building, carrying placards that read “Ban UN”, “Islam is not a toy” and threatened to “Flog Pillay”. A website promised to “slaughter anyone against Islam”.

Anecdotal reports suggest female circumcision is undergoing a resurgence in the Maldives, particularly on the outer islands.

Maldives President Nasheed conceded an emergent religious fundamentalism had changed the way women were viewed, and were treated, in his country.

He said he was distressed by groups who campaigned for girls to be circumcised [FGM] or to be kept home from school.

“We were a matriarchal society, our inheritance, also, in the past was from women. But with a new kind of radical Islam, the perceptions some of them have on women are not familiar to many Maldivians.”

Sadly, our Government promotes the idea of a moderate Islam.

Journalist Peter Day writes:

In 2004, the Australian Government produced a glossy promotional booklet on Islam – Muslim Australians: Their Beliefs, Practices and Institutions… authored by Professor Abdullah Saeed, the Sultan of Oman Professor of Islamic Studies and Director of the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Islam at Melbourne University.

… the booklet’s treatment of the right of Muslims to leave Islam (apostasy) is … an example of the booklet’s overall approach to explaining Islam. This topic is dealt with in a section headed ‘Stereotypes and Misconceptions,’ where the proposition that ‘People who leave Islam (apostates) will be killed’ is listed as one of the ‘misconceptions’. The text that addresses this explains Muslim teaching on the matter as follows:

From a religious point of view, the Qur’an stipulates that ‘there is no compulsion in religion (2:256), and a person can neither be forced to become a Muslim nor to stay in the religion.

It is also stated that in the time of the Prophet, if a person left Islam because of their own religious choice, then in general there were no repercussions. This is because the Qur’an instructed the Prophet that his duty was to preach the message of Islam but that ‘If then they turn away, We have not sent thee as a guard over them. Thy duty is but to convey [the Message].

It seems fair for a reader to conclude from this that Islamic teaching is summed up in the words… ‘a person can neither be forced to become a Muslim nor to stay in the religion’. But Professor Saeed, is also co-author of a major book on this very topic, Freedom of Religion, Apostasy and Islam, which takes a very different view. His book … will be an eye-opener to anyone who has gleaned what they know of the religion from his Muslim Australians… he summarises the consensus position on apostasy among Muslim religious scholars as follows:

While there is general consensus that coercion should not be used to convert anyone to any religion … the right of religious freedom is not extended to a Muslim who wants to change his or her religion to another.

He goes on to tell us that, according to ‘the majority of Muslim jurists’, to flout the prohibition on leaving Islam ‘is to commit the crime of apostasy, and a person so doing should be put to death.’

Based purely on the information presented in Professor Saeed’s Freedom of Religion book, it is clear that the Muslim Australians booklet falls well short of an accurate presentation of contemporary Muslim teaching on this issue.

It is clear… that most current Muslim teaching and practice in this area is in direct contravention of both Article 18 and Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The Maldives rather neatly exemplifies current trends on human rights in the Muslim world generally. A revised Maldivian constitution …makes it a formal requirement for all citizens of that country to be Muslims; and that explicitly subordinates all of its citizens’ human rights to Sharia. Notwithstanding this, the Maldivian foreign ministry announced in 2008 that it was joining other members of the UN… to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). There the country’s UN representative unblushingly stated: ‘In today’s Maldives, the ideals and principles contained in the Universal Declaration have found real-world form in our proud new Constitution.

As in the Maldives, so elsewhere in much of the Islamic world: there are greater restrictions on freedom of thought and expression, including the continuing threat of punishment for apostasy; and greater enforcement of Sharia, accompanied by an ever more strident insistence that ‘human rights’ are being fully respected.

So the question must be asked: should our government, media and leaders be promoting an illusory moderate Islam which is perfectly compatible with democratic values?

Or should they tell the truth, and risk offending those determined to suppress criticism of Islam?

Related reading: Seems the Maldives is flavour of the month – The Age has a piece on it and surprisingly, not a complimentary one!

By Cassandra

Also see:

• Vlad Tepes Blog: MPs approve bill to outlaw places of worship for non-Muslims: Maldives
• Maldives government highlights the impact of climate change… by meeting underwater
• Islamic coup of Maldives? President resigns

Can you find the cat in this picture? Yes, there actually is one!

Twitter member @DealSpaceIN asks:

Bored?? Let’s play a game… Find the CAT in the picture…
Share it if you find & Comment if you didn’t http://t.co/plDp1vvN

Click for full-size view.

Curious Snow Leopard Cub Steals Camera Trap

By Katie Scott, Wired UK

A camera trap set on the Afghan Border has captured images of a leap of elusive snow leopards, but also the moment when one of the cubs made off with one of the cameras.

The cameras were set up in the Zorkul nature reserve close to the Afghan border in Tajikistan at the beginning of August, and left there until October. Dr Alex Diment is the Capacity and Development Manager for the Eurasia Programme for the charity Fauna & Flora International (FFI). He told Wired.co.uk that the FFI and Panthera team set up the camera traps to cover an area of around 15 sq km, which stretched across eight separate valleys.

The 11 cameras photographed five separate snow leopards living in one of these valleys, and this included a family with two cubs — one of which took a shining to the cameras and carried one off.

Diment says that the camera traps have made a huge difference in conservationists. “Camera traps have been an amazing piece of technology, and are really maturing as a technology, becoming reliable and giving great results. They are giving us the ability to research animals, which were previously almost entirely unknown.”

More here.

PoliceOne.com has the story:

MONTPELIER, Vt. — A Vermont prison inmate who makes stationery and license plates has gotten the best of the state police by adding the image of a pig to the state decal on their cruisers.

One of the spots on the cow in the state crest has been changed to the shape of a pig, a derogatory term for police. The 16-inch car door decals are made by prisoners in Windsor.

State police discovered the pig images Wednesday. They say they believe the decals have been added to about 30 cruisers in the past year.

Who made the modification and when is being reviewed by the Department of Corrections. Corrections Commissioner Andy Pallito said Thursday new decals will be made by Monday for about $800.

The Burlington Free Press newspaper first reported the pig decals.

Read all of the comments here.

Says commenter djbadback:

30 decals for $800? That’s the crime, someone is stealing from the state!

Is THAT ever the truth!

Evidently, silhouette images of pigs aren’t halal.

Too bad the officialdom of the State of Vermont can’t take a harmless joke. Many of the cops on the above forum think it’s funny and advocate keeping the stickers with the pig image.