31 January 2007 @ 9:46PM >> “[A]t least a dozen Democratic senators who in the past have called for more troops in Iraq,” the Washington Times reports, “now support a resolution condemning President Bush’s plan to do just that.”

If the Democrats win the White House in 2008, what will the party’s foreign policy be? Without President Bush to reflexively oppose, I don’t think they’ll have any way to figure it out.

30 January 2007 @ 8:53AM >> From the Evening Telegraph in Peterborough, England:

A growing minority of young Muslims are inspired by political Islam and feel they have less in common with non-Muslims than their parents do, a survey revealed.

The poll found support for Sharia law, Islamic schools and wearing the veil in public is significantly stronger among young Muslims than their parents.

While the majority of Muslims feel they have as much, if not more, in common with non-Muslims in Britain than with Muslims abroad, the figure dropped from 71% of over-55s to 62% among 16-24 year olds, the survey for independent think-tank Policy Exchange found.

The percentage who said they would prefer to send their children to Islamic state schools increased from 19% for over 55 year olds to 37% of 16-24 year olds.

The number who said they would prefer to live under Sharia law than British law increased from 17% of over-55s to 37% of 16-24 year olds.

Munira Mirza, the lead author of the report, said the results suggested Government policy was to blame for sharpening divisions between Muslims and non-Muslims.

She said: “The emergence of a strong Muslim identity in Britain is, in part, a result of multicultural policies implemented since the 1980s which have emphasised difference at the expense of shared national identity and divided people along ethnic, religious and cultural lines.”

27 January 2007 @ 5:46AM >> Given the current state of the world, you’d think that this story would get far more attention than it has:

Last January, a Russian man with sunken cheeks and a wispy mustache crossed into Georgia and traveled to Tbilisi by car along a high mountain road. In two plastic bags in his leather jacket, Georgian authorities say, he carried 100 grams of uranium so refined that it could help fuel an atom bomb.

The Russian, Oleg Khinsagov, had come to meet a buyer who he believed would pay him $1 million and deliver the material to a Muslim man from “a serious organization,” the authorities say.

The uranium was a sample, just under four ounces, and the deal a test: If all went smoothly, he boasted, he would sell a far larger cache stored in his apartment back in Vladikavkaz, two to three kilograms of the rare material, four and a half to six and a half pounds, which in expert hands is enough to make a small bomb.

The buyer, it turned out, was a Georgian agent. Alerted to Mr. Khinsagov’s ambitions by spies in South Ossetia, Georgian officials arrested him and confiscated his merchandise. After a secret trial, the smuggler was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison.

The case has alarmed officials because they had thought that new security precautions had tamped down the nuclear black market that developed in the 1990s, after the Soviet Union collapsed.

[...]

What is most worrisome about the most recent case, nuclear experts say, is the material itself: in large enough quantities, it could provide a terrorist with an instant solution to the biggest challenge in making a nuclear weapon, obtaining the fuel.

More here.

27 January 2007 @ 5:38AM >> For some reason, most Manhattanites I know reflexively oppose Wal-Mart setting up shop in our slender island borough. However, there are at least three women here who don’t. And, as if by coincidence, they all managed to simultaneously occupy the same room.

26 January 2007 @ 9:22AM >> Pajamas Media has their 2008 presidential straw poll. Pretend you’re in Chicago: vote early, and vote often!

(No purchase necessary. You may vote multiple times, but not more than once a week. Void where prohibited.)

23 January 2007 @ 10:00PM >> It looks like our old friend is at it again:

Israel and the United States will soon be destroyed, Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Tuesday during a meeting with Syria’s foreign minister, the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) website said in a report.

“Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad... assured that the United States and the Zionist regime of Israel will soon come to the end of their lives,” the Iranian president was quoted as saying.

[...]

The Iranian president also directly tied events in Lebanon to a wider plan aimed at Israel’s destruction. He called on “regional countries” to “support the Islamic resistance of the Lebanese people and strive to enhance solidarity and unity among the different Palestinian groups in a bid to pave the ground for the undermining of the Zionist regime whose demise is, of course, imminent.”

Ahmadinejad has threatened the State of Israel with annihilation several times in recent months, and has recently added the US and Britain to the list of countries he says will be destroyed.

Why can’t we just talk to Ahmadinejad? I’m sure if we sent pleasant-looking ambassadors to sit down with him, smile politely, and ask him in kind, measured tones to give up his nuclear plans and his apparent desire to see our country destroyed, maybe the nice man would find it in his heart to spare our deaths. Maybe at the very least he could be convinced to delay our deaths by a few weeks.

All we are saying, Mahmoud, is give peace a chance.

He has to listen to reason.

Doesn’t he?

22 January 2007 @ 7:02AM >> From Briefing.com:

On Friday, it was reported that the December US federal budget showed a surplus of $44.5 billion. This was well above the expected $24 billion.

The twelve month trailing deficit is now down to $208 billion.

This is amazing. The US federal deficit is now down to just 1.5% of GDP (through fourth quarter estimates).

At the end of 2003 the deficit was running at over 3.8% of GDP and was in excess of $420 billion. The forecasts were for “$400 to $500 billion yearly deficits as far as the eye can see.”

That conventional wisdom has been proved COMPLETELY WRONG. Yet, the belief seems to linger on. There are continued constant references to the “huge budget deficits” in the press on nearly a non-stop basis.

The fact is, the accumulated deficit as a percentage of GDP has fallen from 75% in 1994 to about 61% today. The deficit is shrinking not just on a current year basis, but also as a burden to future generations.

This improvement is even more remarkable considering that the Iraq war is costing approximately $100 billion per year, and that reconstruction costs for Katrina are also in the past twelve months’ data.

If not for these factors, the deficit would be nearly in balance and certainly less than 1% of GDP.

Furthermore, when state budget surpluses are taken into account, the current US government deficit is closer to just 1% of GDP. This consolidate figure including state budgets is actually a better measure of the fiscal health of US government overall and is more accurate in terms of comparing to other countries.

Speaking of which, Italy, Germany, Japan, and France continue to run deficits in excess of 3% of GDP. That is far higher than the US percentage of 1.5%, or 1% for all government. Italy’s accumulated deficit is 100%, Japan’s is 100%, and the EU as a whole is close to 65%.

It can easily be argued that there is in fact no current budget crisis in the US.

This is not to say that curtailing the deficit further would not make sense. Nor is it to ignore the long-term problems posed by the need to fund social security or Medicare. Those are budget issues that need to be addressed.

Nevertheless, the clamor over the current deficit is blown way out of proportion. It may simply be lingering pessimism in the press, or it may be supported by those advocating tax hikes.

Or, it may be that the people advocating tax hikes have a lot of allies in the press, and that both camps have an ideological vested interest in convincing people that the economy is in the tank and the federal government needs to grow even further.

I suspect the economic gloom and doom in the press will continue...at least until the next time a Democrat occupies the White House, when the same economic situation that prevails today will suddenly be reported as positive news.

21 January 2007 @ 8:59PM >> At the end of last year, I wrote about the elusive Jamil Hussein, a supposed Iraqi police captain quoted in at least 61 stories by the Associated Press. A number of bloggers digging into the story started expressing skepticism about Hussein after various governmental instutitions in Iraq found no one with that name working in the police force. AP has since admitted that the name attributed in their stories was in fact a pseudonym, even though no such acknowledgement was ever made in the many stories in which he was quoted.

Recently, Michelle Malkin went to Iraq to investigate the story that led to the questions surrounding Jamil Hussein. Her report, published in the New York Post, indicates that AP’s troubles go far beyond the true name of Jamil Hussein:

[O]ne story [Jamil Hussein] told the AP just doesn’t check out: The Sunni mosques that as Hussein claimed and AP reported as “destroyed,” “torched” and “burned and [blown] up” are all still standing. So the credibility of every AP story relying on Jamil Hussein remains dubious.

Let’s take it from the beginning.

When the AP ran its headline-grabbing and horrifying account of alleged atrocities in Baghdad last Thanksgiving, its main source was an Iraqi police captain, one Jamil Hussein.

[...]

AP Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll indignantly attacked those who had questioned the global news organization’s reporting: “I never quite understood why people chose to disbelieve us about this particular man on this particular story,” she told Editor and Publisher. “AP runs hundreds of stories a day, and has run thousands of stories about things that have happened in Iraq.”

Well, Bryan Preston and I visited the area during our Iraq trip last week. Several mosques did, in fact, come under attack by Mahdi Army forces. But the “destroyed” mosques all still stand. Iraqi and U.S. Army officials say that two of them received no fire damage whatsoever. Another, which we filmed, was abandoned and empty when it was attacked.

We obtained summary reports and photos filed at the time by Iraqi and U.S. Army troops on the scene. They contain no corroborating evidence of Hussein’s claim that “Shiite militiamen grabbed six Sunnis as they left Friday worship services, doused them with kerosene and burned them alive near Iraqi soldiers who did not intervene.”

One of the mosques identified by the AP, the Nidaa Alah mosque, had been abandoned and vacant at the time it was hit with small-arms fire, say Iraqi and U.S. Army officials. Two of its inside rooms were burned out by a lobbed firebomb, according to an Army report.

Three other mosques in the area - the al Muhaymin, al Mushahiba and Ahbab Mustafa mosques - sustained small-arms fire damage to their exteriors; the Mustafa mosque also had two rooms burned out by a firebomb.

Contrary to Hussein and the AP’s account, military reports note that Iraqi Army battalion members were on the scene - pursuing attackers, securing the area, calling the fire department, providing support and an outer cordon.

Neither The New York Times nor The Washington Post was able to confirm AP’s story.

The AP quoted one corroborating witness, Imad al-Hasimi, a Sunni elder in Hurriya, who “confirmed Hussein’s account” of the immolated Sunnis on Al-Arabiya television. When Al-Hasimi later recanted, AP implied that it was due to pressure from Iraqi government officials. The other possibility: He recanted because it wasn’t true.

Capt. Aaron Kaufman of Task Force Justice, which works closely with the Iraqi Army battalion that was on the scene and monitored events as they happened, told us: “It was blown way out of proportion, there was nobody lit on fire.”

Capt. Stacy Bare, the civil-affairs officer who took us on patrol in Hurriya, concurred: “There were no six Sunnis burned.”

---

Update: Michelle Malkin has posted a video report containing images of the still-standing mosques that were supposedly “destroyed.”

21 January 2007 @ 12:27AM >> When President Bush talks about the very real threat that radical Jihadists pose around the world, Democrats accuse him of “fear mongering.” But when a much-hyped rival poses a threat to Democratic presidential hopefuls, suddenly fear mongering is in fashion:

Are the American people ready for an elected president who was educated in a Madrassa as a young boy and has not been forthcoming about his Muslim heritage?

This is the question Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s camp is asking about Sen. Barack Obama.

An investigation of Mr. Obama by political opponents within the Democratic Party has discovered that Mr. Obama was raised as a Muslim by his stepfather in Indonesia. Sources close to the background check, which has not yet been released, said Mr. Obama, 45, spent at least four years in a so-called Madrassa, or Muslim seminary, in Indonesia.

“He was a Muslim, but he concealed it,” the source said. “His opponents within the Democrats hope this will become a major issue in the campaign.”

---

Update: Barack Obama denies that he was educated in a madrassa, and the Clinton camp denies that they were the source for the story. The story was reportedly based on a single unnamed source and has not been substantiated by a second source. (Hat tip: Ed Morrissey.)

20 January 2007 @ 12:12AM >> From the Wall Street Journal:

Saddam Hussein managed to pull off the $100 billion Oil for Food scam right under the noses of the United Nations officials charged with administering it. Now another dictator with nuclear ambitions has succeeded in a similar trick, this time manipulating the United Nations Development Program in North Korea.

The United Nations long ago devolved into a speaking society whose prime purpose seems to be providing a forum for petty tyrants to denounce the United States. More recently, the U.N. has become one giant slush fund for some of the worst dictators in the world.

All the while, American taxpayers foot the bill for 22% of the U.N.’s budget, despite the fact that the U.S. is only one of 192 members of the U.N.

It’s getting to the point where I’m beginning to wonder why we allow this abomination to occupy some of the most valuable real estate in the world...

18 January 2007 @ 9:02AM >> On July 27, 1997, the Senate voted by a margin of 95-0 that the United States would not sign a treaty structured like the Kyoto Protocol. That treaty, which proponents claimed would improve the environment, had harsher economic penalties for the United States than it did for countries like China, even though 16 of the 20 most polluted cities in the world are in China.

As a result of the Senate’s lopsided vote, President Clinton never bothered to submit the Kyoto Protocol for ratification. So it seems a bit strange that the Associated Press would claim:

The United States is no longer bound by Kyoto, which the Bush administration rejected after taking office in 2001.

First of all, the United States was never bound by Kyoto. And the reason the U.S. was never bound by Kyoto is because the treaty was never ratified. President Clinton never even submitted it for ratification. Why didn’t he? Because every Senator—Republican and Democrat alike—who voted on the 1997 resolution made it clear that they would oppose ratifying Kyoto.

All of this took place years before President Bush was in office, but it seems that AP is more concerned with blaming Bush than getting its facts straight.

(Hat tip: Glenn Reynolds.)

17 January 2007 @ 8:32AM >> Bloomberg reports that “honor crimes” have historically been ignored by British law enforcement officials:

Samaira Nazir rejected Pakistani suitors chosen by her family and planned to elope with her Afghan boyfriend. The penalty for her defiance: death from 18 stab wounds inflicted by her brother and cousin at the family home in Southall, England.

More than a dozen women are killed for violating community standards each year in the U.K., according to police. While Nazir’s killers were jailed for life, U.K. police ignore hundreds of “honor crimes” to avoid inflaming relations with Muslim enclaves as they work to head off homegrown terror plots, say lawmakers and women’s rights advocates.

“There is a kid-gloves approach on the basis that you don’t want to offend these communities,” says Usha Sood, a lawyer and lecturer at Nottingham Trent University who specializes in forced marriage cases. “If you take into account the whole range of honor offenses, the number runs into the thousands.”

[...]

Honor violence includes abduction, forced abortion and rape, police say. Most incidents involve South Asian families, Sood says, adding that counselors also help victims with Kurdish, Afghan, Nigerian and Turkish backgrounds.

[...]

Sometimes violence stems from the desire to keep women isolated from the modern world.

“Girls are being beaten up for things like having a mobile phone,” says Sanghera, 41, who runs the Karma Nirvana shelter for women in Derby, England. The group deals with seven forced marriages a week, and about four cases each month of people under the threat of murder, she says.

Typical of those seeking help is an 18-year-old who asked to be identified only as Serena. She says she sought help through Karma Nirvana after her father beat her repeatedly for six years. After a suicide attempt at 15, she was sent to Pakistan and kept there for a year before she returned to a hostile home.

“The whole house was against me — dad, mum, sisters, all of them,” she says. “Then I took a big step and went for a fresh start.” After four months on the run, Serena is taking classes and maintaining phone contact with her mother from the city where she’s in hiding. “If my uncles find out where I am, they will kill me for sure,” she says.

[...]

“Communities would prefer to turn a blind eye, and anyone who raises the issue is either a racist or an Islamophobe,” [Member of Parliament Ann] Cryer says at a tea lounge at the House of Parliament.

16 January 2007 @ 10:11PM >> Britain’s Observer reports that “[a]n undercover investigation has revealed disturbing evidence of Islamic extremism at a number of Britain’s leading mosques and Muslim institutions, including an organisation praised by the Prime Minister.”:

Secret video footage reveals Muslim preachers exhorting followers to prepare for jihad, to hit girls for not wearing the hijab, and to create a ’state within a state’. Many of the preachers are linked to the Wahhabi strain of Islam practised in Saudi Arabia, which funds a number of Britain’s leading Islamic institutions.

A forthcoming Channel 4 Dispatches programme paints an alarming picture of how preachers in some of Britain’s most moderate mosques are urging followers to reject British laws in favour of those of Islam. Leaders of the mosques have expressed concern at the preachers’ activities, saying they were unaware such views were being disseminated.

At the Sparkbrook mosque, run by UK Islamic Mission (UKIM), an organisation that maintains 45 mosques in Britain and which Tony Blair has said ‘is extremely valued by the government for its multi-faith and multicultural activities’, a preacher is captured on film praising the Taliban. In response to the news that a British Muslim solider was killed fighting the Taliban, the speaker declares: ‘The hero of Islam is the one who separated his head from his shoulders.’

Another speaker says Muslims cannot accept the rule of non-Muslims. ‘You cannot accept the rule of the kaffir [non-Muslim],’ a preacher, Dr Ijaz Mian, tells a meeting held within the mosque. ‘We have to rule ourselves and we have to rule the others.’

Britain’s Jihadists aren’t stupid. They know that the soft underbelly of the West is our blind support of multiculturalism. Assimilation is rejected in favor of each community maintaining its own separate oasis. And thanks to political correctness, anyone who questions the wisdom of this is immediately branded an insensitive bigot. So most Westerners, whose social behaviors have been molded by an educational system in which being labeled a racist is perhaps the worst human offense, keep quiet because the threat of Jihadists among them is not yet apparent. The question is, will the West wake up before it’s too late? Only time will tell.

In the meantime, the video taken from within the so-called moderate mosques is chilling. If this doesn’t serve as a wake-up call, I don’t know what will.

---

Update: The entire Dispatches: Undercover Mosque program is now available on Google Video.

16 January 2007 @ 11:19AM >> As president in the late 1970s, Jimmy Carter was a leader of legendary impotence. For the last 444 days of his presidency, Islamic revolutionaries in Iran held Americans hostage in the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. According to the hostages, one of those terrorists was a man named Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Today, Ahmadinejad is the president of Iran. And Jimmy Carter is an apologist for terrorists. In his new book, which compares the state of Israel to the segregationist apartheid regime that once ruled South Africa, Carter writes:

It is imperative that the general Arab community and all significant Palestinian groups make it clear that they will end the suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism when international laws and the ultimate goals of the Roadmap for Peace are accepted by Israel.

In other words, keep those attacks coming until Israel does what is demanded by “the general Arab community and all significant Palestinian groups.”

I can only imagine that by venturing into the territory of pure wingnuttery, Carter’s book is part of some elaborate scheme to make the foreign policy of his administration seem sensible by comparison.

11 January 2007 @ 9:26PM >> There’s something about our psyche which seems to make self-criticism the new national pastime. Naturally, our political leaders know this. They know that when hundreds of newspapers and television stations align in a daily tearing-down of the war effort, the American people will eventually lose their nerve and want to give up. Others know this, too, which is why al Qaeda distributed copies of Black Hawk Down as a means to understand how the media can be used to amplify a relatively minor military failure and drive the United States from the field of battle. If terrorists provide enough negative footage to our media, they know we’ll turn and run. But if we fight too vigorously, that will be held up by our own media as evidence of our inherent evilness. More >>

10 January 2007 @ 8:22PM >> At Pace University—a school that until September 11th, 2001 stood in the shadows of the World Trade Center—showing a film critical of radical Islam is apparently considered a hate crime:

Pace University administrators threatened to sic the cops on a Jewish-student club if it went ahead with plans to screen a critically acclaimed film about radical Islam, the head of the group charged yesterday.

Michael Abdurakhmanov, president of Pace Hillel, said two deans warned that showing the documentary film would implicate club members as suspects in two hate crimes involving the desecration of the Koran at the university’s lower-Manhattan campus last fall.

In addition, Abdurakhmanov said an assistant dean physically restrained him as he attempted to defend the film and his group in a meeting with administrators.

“The message was pretty clear, if you show this film, you’re going to incriminate yourself,” Abdurakhmanov said.

[...]

“Her words were if you show this film, the police will be looking into your records further,” Abdurakhmanov said.

9 January 2007 @ 7:49AM >> The Blue Fund is an investment portfolio that—among other criteria—only holds stock in companies whose political contributions favor Democrats. Not surprisingly, the fund invests in the New York Times and CBS.

8 January 2007 @ 9:41PM >> Mine Your Own Business is a soon-to-be-released film documenting the detrimental effects that trendy environmentalists can have on underprivileged communities throughout the world. Not every society has yet been fortunate enough to reap the economic benefits of the industrial revolution, and some activists want to keep it that way, preferring to impose impoverishment on other cultures in the name of quaintness.

You can view the trailer for Mine Your Own Business on YouTube or read more about the film here.

The film debuts in New York on Friday, January 19th and in Washington, D.C. on January 24th. Both screenings start at 7PM. If you wish to attend either screening, you can sign up here.

Disclosure: Mine Your Own Business was created with the assistance of the Moving Picture Institute, which was also instrumental in enabling the completion of another soon-to-be-released film, Indoctrinate U.

8 January 2007 @ 1:05PM >> A while back, I wrote about the Microsoft tax, the fee included in the price of nearly every personal computer that covers the cost of Microsoft Windows. The thing is, not everyone uses Windows. Some people (like me) use Macs, and therefore avoid the Microsoft tax altogether. But others use alternative operating systems like Linux.

Most people who use Linux manually install it on machines that came with Microsoft Windows pre-installed at the factory. If they remove Windows altogether, then they’ve ended up paying for a product that they’re not using. One intrepid Linux user tried to get a refund from Dell after removing Windows from his computer. Believe it or not, he was successful, and he outlines the steps that others can follow to avoid paying the Microsoft tax.

4 January 2007 @ 9:01AM >> London’s Daily Telegraph is reporting yet another case of sexual abuse—with victims as young as 12—at the hands of United Nations personnel:

The abuse allegedly began two years ago when the UN mission in southern Sudan (UNMIS) moved in to help rebuild the region after a 23-year civil war. The UN has up to 10,000 military personnel in the region, of all nationalities and the allegations involve peacekeepers, military police and civilian staff.

The first indications of possible sexual exploitation emerged within months of the UN force’s arrival and The Daily Telegraph has seen a draft of an internal report compiled by the UN children’s agency Unicef in July 2005 referring to the problem.

This paper has learnt of more than 20 victims’ accounts claiming that some peacekeeping and civilian staff based in the town are regularly picking up young children in their UN vehicles and forcing them to have sex. It is thought that hundreds of children may have been abused.

“I was sitting by the river the first time it happened,” said Jonas, 14, one of more than 20 children who claimed they had been abused this way.

“A man in a white car drove past and asked me if I wanted to get into the car with him. I saw that the car was a UN car because it was white with the black letters on it. The man had a badge on his clothes. When he stopped the car, we got out, he put a blindfold on me and started to abuse me. It was painful and went on for a long time. When it was over we went back to the place we had been, and he pushed me out of the car and left.”

[...]

Many of the children who claim to have had sex with UN personnel in Juba belong to southern Sudan’s “lost generation”, separated from their families by the recent civil war, who now sleep rough on the streets of Juba, the regional capital.

This paper has gathered more than 20 victims’ accounts claiming that peacekeeping and civilian staff based in the town are regularly picking up young children in their UN vehicles and forcing them to have sex.

It is thought that hundreds of children may have been abused.

Hundreds of children reportedly suffer abuse at the hands of U.N. staffers, but I guarantee this story will be short blip on the media’s radar. Meanwhile, when terrorists are allegedly treated badly by U.S. forces, the story becomes front page news for months.

Responding to the abuse allegations, one U.N. official adopts the grand tradition of sexual predators blaming their victims. James Ellery is a regional coordinator for the U.N. in Sudan:

“I will refute all claims made on this issue,” he said in an interview last May. “We investigated all allegations made and no evidence was forthcoming. None of these claims can be substantiated. This is the most backward country in Africa and there are lots of misunderstandings as to the UN’s role. Over 90 per cent of people here are illiterate and rumours therefore spread very quickly.”

What a class act this guy is. The victims are illiterate, they live in a “backward” African country, and they don’t understand the U.N.’s role. Therefore, it couldn’t have happened.