3 April 2009 @ 9:12AM >> Today’s Quote of the Day comes courtesy of New York Times executive editor Bill Keller:

Saving the New York Times now ranks with saving Darfur as a high-minded cause.

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.

30 November 2006 >> France launches airstrikes against an African town. Surprisingly, there are no demands yet that French foreign policy be submitted to the rest of the world for approval.

20 February 2006 @ 5:47PM >> Via the Taipei Times, AP reports:

Police and soldiers patrolled the deserted streets of the northern Nigerian town of Maiduguri yesterday, one day after thousands of Nigerian Muslims protesting caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed attacked Christians and burned churches, killing at least 15 people.

[...]

On Saturday, rioters burned 15 Christian churches in Maiduguri in a three-hour rampage before troops and police reinforcements restored order, Nigerian police spokesman Haz Iwendi said.

[...]

A reporter on the scene saw mobs of Muslim protesters swarm through the city center with machetes, sticks and iron rods. One group threw a tire around one man, poured gas on him and set him ablaze.

Chima Ezeoke, a Christian Maiduguri resident, said the protesters attacked and looted shops owned by minority Christians, most of them with origins in the country’s south.

“Most of the dead were Christians beaten to death on the streets by the rioters,” Ezeoke said.

Witnesses said three children and a Catholic priest were among those killed.

[...]

Thousands of people have died in this West African country since 2000 in religious violence fueled by the adoption of the strict Islamic or Shariah legal code by a dozen states in the north, seen by most Christians as a move to impose religious hegemony on non-Muslims.

28 June 2005 >> Mark Steyn on “Selective Ansgt“:

Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s kleptocrat strongman, destroyed a mosque the other day. It was in Hatcliffe Extension, a shantytown on the edge of Harare, razed by the “police.” Mr. Mugabe is an equal-opportunity razer: He also bulldozed a Catholic-run Aids center.

[...]

The point is the world’s Muslims seem entirely cool with Infidel Bob razing a mosque. Unlike the fallout over Newsweek’s fraudulent story about the Koran being flushed down a toilet, no excitable young men went bananas in Pakistan; no Western progressives berated Mr. Mugabe for his “cultural insensitivity.” And sadly most of the big-shot Muslim spokespersons were still too busy flaying the Bush administration to whip their subjects into a frenzy over Hatcliffe Extension’s pile of Islamic rubble.