Kick a Jew Day....

Not a joke....this really happened in Florida...

Ten middle school students in Naples, Florida have been suspended after taking part in what they termed "Kick a Jew Day" at their school, school district officials reported.

The one day in-school suspensions were served earlier this week.

The incident occurred a day before red-haired students were targeted at a California middle schoool in what was a Facebook group called "Kick a Ginger Day," which some say was inspired by the popular American animation series South Park.

It's not just us...the Americans are going after some Seals....

You'd think we weren't at war....

Navy SEALs have secretly captured one of the most wanted terrorists in Iraq — the alleged mastermind of the murder and mutilation of four Blackwater USA security guards in Fallujah in 2004. And three of the SEALs who captured him are now facing criminal charges, sources told FoxNews.com.

The three, all members of the Navy's elite commando unit, have refused non-judicial punishment — called an admiral's mast — and have requested a trial by court-martial.

Ahmed Hashim Abed, whom the military code-named "Objective Amber," told investigators he was punched by his captors — and he had the bloody lip to prove it.

Now, instead of being lauded for bringing to justice a high-value target, three of the SEAL commandos, all enlisted, face assault charges and have retained lawyers.

Matthew McCabe, a Special Operations Petty Officer Second Class (SO-2), is facing three charges: dereliction of performance of duty for willfully failing to safeguard a detainee, making a false official statement, and assault.

Petty Officer Jonathan Keefe, SO-2, is facing charges of dereliction of performance of duty and making a false official statement.

Petty Officer Julio Huertas, SO-1, faces those same charges and an additional charge of impediment of an investigation.

The three SEALs will be arraigned separately on Dec. 7. Another three SEALs — two officers and an enlisted sailor — have been identified by investigators as witnesses but have not been charged.

FoxNews.com obtained the official handwritten statement from one of the three witnesses given on Sept. 3, hours after Abed was captured and still being held at the SEAL base at Camp Baharia. He was later taken to a cell in the U.S.-operated Green Zone in Baghdad.

The SEAL told investigators he had showered after the mission, gone to the kitchen and then decided to look in on the detainee.

"I gave the detainee a glance over and then left," the SEAL wrote. "I did not notice anything wrong with the detainee and he appeared in good health."

Lt. Col. Holly Silkman, spokeswoman for the special operations component of U.S. Central Command, confirmed Tuesday to FoxNews.com that three SEALs have been charged in connection with the capture of a detainee. She said their court martial is scheduled for January.

United States Central Command declined to discuss the detainee, but a legal source told FoxNews.com that the detainee was turned over to Iraqi authorities, to whom he made the abuse complaints. He was then returned to American custody. The SEAL leader reported the charge up the chain of command, and an investigation ensued.

An interesting look at France....

40 lashes for a pair of trousers...

She managed to escape the Sudan and is now in France...

Sudanese journalist Lubna Ahmed Hussein said Tuesday she had donned a full Islamic veil to sneak out of Sudan and travel to France, two months after she was freed from jail for wearing trousers.

On a visit to Paris to promote her new book, Hussein accused Khartoum of trying to block her departure and said she was determined to exercise her right to travel freely as she met Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner.

"They wanted to prevent me from leaving, I resorted to the niqab and managed to leave," said Hussein, who was jailed for a day in September for violating Sudan's clothing decency laws by wearing trousers.

"I requested documents to be able to leave, to be able to travel, and this is the only means I found to be able to leave Sudan," she told journalists. "I did not flee Sudan. I am a Sudanese citizen."

Hussein faced a punishment of 40 lashes when she was convicted in July for wearing her green trousers in public.

But a Sudanese court in September ordered her to pay a fine instead, while 10 of the 12 other women arrested with her at a Khartoum restaurant on July 3 were lashed.

After she refused to pay the fine, Hussein served a one-day jail sentence.

Hussein arrived in Paris last week to promote her new book "40 coups de fouet pour un pantalon" (Forty Lashes for a Pair of Trousers) released in French. The book is to be translated in English and other languages.

She has been hosted by the French women's rights group "Ni Putes Ni Soumises" (Neither Whores Nor Submissives) which has been outspoken on issues dealing with the repression of Muslim women.

According to the chairwoman of the group, Sihem Habchi, Hussein left Sudan by air on September 18 and flew first to Sanaa in Yemen, before travelling on to Cairo and then Amman before arriving in France.

At each stage of the trip she met with local women's rights groups. She is due to leave France on December 4 to go again to Egypt, where she is to receive an award, and does not intend to leave Sudan for good, Habchi said.

At her meeting with Kouchner, Hussein took another swipe at the Sudanese judges who told her that wearing trousers was banned by Sharia law.

"I told them: 'Show me the text that justifies this repression of women based on their clothing.'

"But no one was able to, because such a text does not exist. It only exists in their heads."

Will Sudan let her back in?

Too many Jews???

Oh my God and one member of the UK panel is.....a Zionist!

A British diplomat has criticized the appointment of two leading Jewish academics to the UK's Iraq Inquiry panel, stating it may upset the balance of the inquiry.

Sir Oliver Miles, a former British ambassador to Libya, told The Independent newspaper this week that the appointment of Sir Martin Gilbert, the renowned Holocaust historian and Winston Churchill biographer, and Sir Lawrence Freedman, professor of war studies and vice-principal of King's College London, would be seen as "ammunition" that could be used to call the inquiry a "whitewash."

Miles said the two academics were Jewish and that Gilbert was an active Zionist. He also said they were both strong supporters of former prime minister Tony Blair and the Iraq war.

"Such facts are not usually mentioned in the mainstream British and American media, but the Jewish Chronicle and the Israeli media have no such inhibitions, and the Arabic media both in London and in the region are usually not far behind," he told the newspaper.

"It is a pity that, if and when the inquiry is accused of a whitewash, such handy ammunition will be available," he added. "Membership should not only be balanced; it should be seen to be balanced."

The Hamas Children's web site incites violence....

Hamas is encouraging children around the world to jihad...

The educational content of the Hamas children's Web site Al-Fateh (The Conqueror) is not a form of pedagogy, but an "indoctrination to suicide bombing," said David Oman, the director of communications for the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-SE) on Tuesday at a press conference at the Regent Hotel.

Gert Weisskirchen, a former Social Democratic Party MP and chairman of the OSCE on combating anti-Semitism between 2004-2008, introduced the IMPACT-SE study, and said that "there is a chance to prevent the indoctrination of children and youngsters in Germany and all over Europe."

The study "Al-Fateh - The Hamas Web Magazine for Children: Indoctrination to Jihad, Annihilation and Self-Destruction" took place from September 2002 to April of this year.

Oman cited the "friends of Al-Fateh" entry of the young German-Palestinian child Muhammad Warad as growing evidence of the spread of radical, anti-Western Hamas ideology.

The Hamas Web site, according to the IMPACT-SE study, serves to demonize Israel through the use of anti-Semitic cartoons and tries to strip the country of its right to exist.

The promotion of violence is a standard theme of Al-Fateh. A telling example, said Oman, is the glorification of female suicide bomber Zeynab Abu Salam, who murdered two Jerusalem police officers in 2004.

Al-Fateh claims to receive millions of visitors, according to Oman. He said the Al-Fateh server, which has been tracked to Russia and Malaysia, frequently relocates its operation to prevent closure. The United Kingdom is listed as the site's current host.

The educational material on the site contravenes "all of the International Educational Standards based on UNESCO Resolutions," noted the study. Moreover, the authors of the study wrote that the site violates the International Convention on the Rights of the Child affirming that "every child has the inherent right to life," by inciting children to commit suicide bombings.

The pro-violence ideology of Hamas will have "implications for the West and Israel," said Oman.

"What will happen in 10 or 15 years from these children after their exposure to this type of hate?" asked Oman.

The Iranian-Hamas connection appears on Al-Fateh. The study highlighted the role of the founder of the Iranian Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini, in stoking hatred against the West and Israel.

"The Web site often uses stories of shahids [martyrs] or their last wills and testaments to convey the message of violent jihad till victory or death - a message found in the teachings of Ayatollah Khomeini," wrote the authors.

"Child abuse" was the term Oman invoked to describe the effect of Hamas's educational site on adolescents and children.

Idiotic Profs at University of Ottawa thinks anti-semitism silences them....

Here's a letter that was sent out today to a variety of Professors at the University of Ottawa. These profs somwhow believe that the 'New anti-semtism' may limit their freedom of speech, and are asking University of Ottawa President Alan Rock not to participate in a Parliamentary inquiry.

I have a few questions for these Profs:

1. How on earth are your rights threatened? Can you provide specifics?

2. Are you having a hard time getting out your anti-Israel message?

3. Are you not concerned about anti-semitism at all?

I can just imagine the type of courses that Ms. Spronk teaches...well, I think it's time for some research! Stay tuned.

Dear colleagues/chers colleagues,

I am writing to ask if you would be willing to sign a letter addressed to Alan Rock expressing our concern about the University of Ottawa's participation in the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Anti-Semitism (CPCCA). For more information on this standing committee, please feel free to contact me and I can direct you to various sources (see, for example, http://www.cpcca.ca/about.htm, and statements available on the websites of Independent Jewish Voices http://ijvcanada.org/sign-signez-petition-audiences-cpcca-hearings/, amongst others).

I apologize in advance for the short notice, but if you would like to sign the letter, please respond to this message by 16h30 today and I will forward it to Alan Rock's office by email at 17h00. This is not an open letter; it will only be sent to President Alan Rock and copied to the signatories.

Yours truly,

Susan Spronk, Assistant Professor, School of International Development and Global Studies.

PS Any volunteers willing to translate the letter into French?

University of Ottawa
President Allan Rock

We, a group of professors from the University of Ottawa, are writing to you to express our concerns related to the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Anti-Semitism (CPCCA). First of all, we are deeply troubled by the community concern that there is a rise of anti-semitism on university campuses and we share a deep commitment to fighting racism in all of its forms in the university community. However, we are concerned that the way that “new anti-Semitism” is being interpreted by this committee might be used to curtail the academic freedom and freedom of speech of faculty and students regarding the Israel/Palestine conflict.

We have understood that university presidents from major universities on campus were invited to address the CPCCA. The CPCCA website lists Ms. Francine Page the Director, Centre for Equity and Human Rights, as one of six 'representatives from' certain Canadian universities' appearing before the Panel' on November 24. We would like to know a) if you intend to represent the University during the hearings b) if Ms. Page’s submission will represent the view of the Administration of the University of Ottawa, and c) if the submission is being put forward on behalf of the University if it was approved by the Board of Governors or another governing council.

We thank you in advance for responding to our concerns.

Yours sincerely,

Pierre Beaudet
Susan Spronk
Sylvie Paquerot
Sophie Thériault


Susan Spronk, PhD
Assistant Professor / Professeure adjointe
School of International Development and Global Studies/ École de développement international et mondialisation
University of Ottawa / Université d'Ottawa
Pavillon Tabaret, pièce 378H
550 rue Cumberland
Ottawa, Ontario K1N 6N5
Canada

Iranian newspaper shut down for....

...publishing a Ba'hai picture...

A popular conservative newspaper critical of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been closed down for carrying a photograph of a temple of the banned Bahai faith, media reported on Tuesday.

At the same time, the publishers of another daily, Khabar, linked to a conservative rival of Ahmadinejad, have decided to stop publication due to unspecified pressure, the Etemad newspaper said.

Etemad quoted deputy culture minister Mohammad Ali Ramin as saying both newspapers had violated media laws and had received warnings from the Islamic Republic’s press supervisory board.

Government opponents may see such action by the authorities as an attempt to muzzle criticism of the hard-line president after his disputed re-election in June, which plunged Iran into months of political turmoil.

Earlier in November, the press supervisory body banned the publication of a leading business daily, Sarmayeh, which has been critical of the government’s economic policies.

Hamshahri, which belongs to the Tehran municipality and is Iran’s highest-circulation newspaper, was closed down after it carried a front-page advertisement for tourism travel to India showing a Bahai temple of worship, media said.

An honour killing in the making????

It does look like this woman is in imminent danger...

A Federal Court judge has ordered the Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration to consider the credibility of a woman's claim that she will be the victim of an "honour killing" if deported to her home country of Pakistan.

Justice Michael Kelen found that an immigration officer reviewing evidence in the case of Roohi Tabassum, a 44-year-old Mississauga hair stylist who has been fighting to stay in Canada since 2001, made a mistake by characterizing as "not threatening" letters purportedly from Ms. Tabassum's husband in which he promised to "finish" Ms. Tabassum if she returned to Pakistan.

According to documents submitted to Citizenship and Immigration obtained by the National Post, Ms. Tabassum claims her husband, Faisal Javed, thought to be living in Dubai, began sending her letters and emails in 2006 in which he threatens to kill her for "dishonouring" his family by touching other men's hair while working at a Mississauga salon.

She also claims her husband and his family have become erroneously convinced that she is living with another man in Canada, after a friend's husband answered the phone at her apartment one night.

"What you are doing there, does it look better to you and does your religion allow you to touch other men? It is better to die hungry," says one 2006 letter translated from Urdu and allegedly written by Mr. Javed.

"Tell me everything true otherwise you know that I can do anything for my honour. Do you know how much I believed in you? Other than this you are also aware that your life is seriously in danger in Pakistan.... Everybody is against you. I am also very combative to you. If you are here, I could not leave you alive."

After asking her husband for a divorce, Ms. Tabassum received another letter dated February 2007 in which Mr. Javed alledgedly writes: "My doubts about you are real and right but keep this in mind that now I will finish you myself."

Terror recruiters charged in the US....

We've been blogging about Somalis leaving the US to fight the jihad for a while...

Federal officials on Monday unsealed terrorism-related charges against men they say were key actors in a recruitment effort that led roughly 20 young Americans to join a violent insurgent group in Somalia with ties to Al Qaeda

With eight new suspects charged Monday, the authorities have implicated 14 people in the case, one of the most extensive domestic terrorism investigations since the Sept. 11 attacks. Some of them have been arrested; others are at large, including several believed to be still fighting with the Somali group, Al Shabaab.

The case represents the largest group of American citizens suspected of joining an extremist movement affiliated with Al Qaeda, senior officials said. Many of the recruits had come to America as young refugees fleeing a brutal civil war, only to settle in a gang-ridden enclave of Minneapolis.

The men named on Monday face federal charges including perjury, providing material support to a terrorist organization and conspiring to kill, maim, kidnap or injure people outside the United States.

Law enforcement officials are concerned that the recruits, who hold American passports, could be commissioned to return to the United States to carry out attacks here, though so far there is no evidence of such plots.

New suspect linked to cartoon plot...

This keeps on getting bigger and bigger...

The fast-moving international case against a Pakistani-Canadian businessman charged with plotting a terror attack in Denmark and suspected of others in India moved into Pakistan on Monday night with news of the capture of another suspect.

Illyas Kashmiri, a former Pakistani military officer and now a reputed commander of the Pakistan-based Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HuJI) militant group, is believed to have been detained by Pakistan at the behest of the FBI, according to an unconfirmed report in The Times of India.

It's not clear when and where Kashmiri may have been taken into custody or if he is among as many as five people reportedly arrested by Pakistan in connection with the plot in recent weeks, including some former or current Pakistani military officials.

If confirmed, Kashmiri's arrest will expand the global nature of the case, which already has connections to Chicago, Copenhagen, Mumbai and Kanata. It would also highlight the intercontinental reach of suspected terrorist operations.

Canadian Tahawwur Hussain Rana, 48, and Pakistani-American David Coleman Headley, 49, were arrested in Chicago by the FBI last month and accused of plotting the murder of an editor and cartoonist at the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, which ran controversial cartoons of the prophet Mohammad in 2005. They face charges of conspiring to provide material support for terrorism and providing material support to terrorism.

The pair live in the Chicago area, though Pakistan native Rana has family in Kanata, including an ailing father and a brother, Abbas, a well-known Parliament Hill journalist with The Hill Times.

According to U.S court documents, Headley, who is co-operating with authorities, posed as an employee of Rana's immigration consultancy in Chicago to travel to Denmark and carry out reconnaissance of the newspaper. The FBI alleges they reported on the plot to a member of Lashkar-e-Taiba and al-Qaeda linked Kashmiri.

Lashkar, once nurtured by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy agency to fight India in Kashmir, also talked to them about possible attacks in India and suggested these should be given priority over the alleged plot in Denmark, according the FBI evidence, based largely on intercepted telephone conversations and e-mail traffic.

Indian Home Minister P. Chidambaram recently confirmed to the Washington Post that police in India are investigating whether the two men had links to last November's Mumbai attack that killed 166, including two Canadians.

Monckton on climategate...

One of my favorite writers on global warming...

This is what they did — these climate “scientists” on whose unsupported word the world’s classe politique proposes to set up an unelected global government this December in Copenhagen, with vast and unprecedented powers to control all formerly free markets, to tax wealthy nations and all of their financial transactions, to regulate the economic and environmental affairs of all nations, and to confiscate and extinguish all patent and intellectual property rights.

The tiny, close-knit clique of climate scientists who invented and now drive the “global warming” fraud — for fraud is what we now know it to be — tampered with temperature data so assiduously that, on the recent admission of one of them, land temperatures since 1980 have risen twice as fast as ocean temperatures. One of the thousands of emails recently circulated by a whistleblower at the University of East Anglia, where one of the world’s four global-temperature datasets is compiled, reveals that data were altered so as to prevent a recent decline in temperature from showing in the record. In fact, there has been no statistically significant “global warming” for 15 years — and there has been rapid and significant cooling for nine years.

Worse, these arrogant fraudsters — for fraudsters are what we now know them to be — have refused, for years and years and years, to reveal their data and their computer program listings. Now we know why: As a revealing 15,000-line document from the computer division at the Climate Research Unit shows, the programs and data are a hopeless, tangled mess. In effect, the global temperature trends have simply been made up. Unfortunately, the British researchers have been acting closely in league with their U.S. counterparts who compile the other terrestrial temperature dataset — the GISS/NCDC dataset. That dataset too contains numerous biases intended artificially to inflate the natural warming of the 20th century.

Finally, these huckstering snake-oil salesmen and “global warming” profiteers — for that is what they are — have written to each other encouraging the destruction of data that had been lawfully requested under the Freedom of Information Act in the UK by scientists who wanted to check whether their global temperature record had been properly compiled. And that procurement of data destruction, as they are about to find out to their cost, is a criminal offense. They are not merely bad scientists — they are crooks. And crooks who have perpetrated their crimes at the expense of British and U.S. taxpayers.

I am angry, and so should you be.

What have the mainstream news media said about the Climategate affair? Remarkably little. The few who have brought themselves to comment, through gritted teeth, have said that all of this is a storm in a teacup, and that their friends in the University of East Anglia and elsewhere in the climatological community are good people, really.

No, they’re not. They’re criminals. With Professor Fred Singer, who founded the U.S. Satellite Weather Service, I have reported them to the UK’s Information Commissioner, with a request that he investigate their offenses and, if thought fit, prosecute. But I won’t be holding my breath: In the police state that Britain has now sadly become, with supine news media largely owned and controlled by the government, the establishment tends to look after its own.

At our expense, and at the expense of the truth.

CO2 continues to increase...

No matter what we do, it will still go up...

Concentrations of greenhouse gases, the major cause of global warming, are at their highest levels ever recorded and are still climbing, the U.N. World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) said on Monday.

Barry Rubin on the terrorist trial...

More reasons why a trial in New York is a bad idea...

In the trial, the terrorists will almost certainly base their defense on the concept of "defensive Jihad." They will argue that the Islamic world was acting in self-defense in retaliating. They will give a long list of real or alleged American misdeeds, long lists of civilians killed (in Aghanistan alone they could come up with thousands), alleged sufferings during the embargo on Iraq when Saddam Hussein was rejecting his commitments after the Kuwait war.

This defense will inflame large numbers of Muslims. It will provide a great platform for the defensive Jihad theory which, most recently, persuaded Major Khalid Hasan to kill 13 American soldiers. There will be specific terrorist attacks inspired by the speeches made in New York. People will join Islamist and terrorist groups, not necessarily al-Qaida, as a result of this inspiration. You can bet on it.

In addition, the high-profile of the trials could well inspire terrorists to seize Americans as hostages to exchange for the imprisoned Jihadists. The terrorists don't have to expect the United States to make such a deal. They want the publicity and will be quite happy to kill the hostages and blame it on the Americans' stubborness.

The Arab regimes won't like it because the defendants will spend a lot of time blasting Egypt and Saudi Arabia as American puppets and urge their overthrow. Of course, the terrorists will bring in Israel, too. It will be interesting to see how much time is devoted to each of the many topics they will use to attack America.

Naively, the Administration apparently believes that this show of American fair play, equal justice for all, innocent until proven guilty, trial by a jury of their peers (if the entire jury isn't Muslim, of course, most Middle East Muslims won't accept that notion), and the rules of evidence will impress Muslims worldwide about how great a system the United States has and what great people Americans are.

Yes, a few highly educated liberals will write about such things but that will appeal to less than five percent. By the time the trial is through the masses to a large extent will not conclude that the defendents are dastardly people who murdered 3,000 innocent victims but that the prosecutors and the government behind them are dastardly villains who murdered millions.

Lord Lawson calls for public inquiry into global warming data...

I doubt he'll succeed...

In response to recent revelations contained in leaked e-mails originating from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, Lord Lawson, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the GWPF, has called for a rigorous and independent inquiry into the matter. While reserving judgment on the contents of the e-mails, Lord Lawson said these are very serious issues and allegations that reach to the heart of scientific integrity and credibility:

"Astonishingly, what appears, at least at first blush, to have emerged is that (a) the scientists have been manipulating the raw temperature figures to show a relentlessly rising global warming trend; (b) they have consistently refused outsiders access to the raw data; (c) the scientists have been trying to avoid freedom of information requests; and (d) they have been discussing ways to prevent papers by dissenting scientists being published in learned journals."

"There may be a perfectly innocent explanation. But what is clear is that the integrity of the scientific evidence on which not merely the British Government, but other countries, too, through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, claim to base far-reaching and hugely expensive policy decisions, has been called into question. And the reputation of British science has been seriously tarnished. A high-level independent inquiry must be set up without delay."

Lord Lawson added:

"Since the CRU is funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and is part of the University of East Anglia, we call on Edmund Wallis, the chairman of the NERC and Brandon Gough, the Chancellor of the UEA, to jointly commission an independent inquiry into the revelations, including, of course, their veracity."

Algerian suspected of vandalizing synagogue...

Nothing like surveillance videos...

Dresden police announced on Monday that they have found a suspect in the defacement of a synagogue that took place two days ahead of the 71st anniversary of the Nazi Kristallnacht pogrom this month.

The 39-year-old Algerian man is accused of daubing swastikas and anti-Jewish statements along several metres of a wall outside the synagogue on November 7, the Saxony state office of criminal investigation said.

Eyewitness accounts and surveillance videos helped them reconstruct the crime and apprehend the Dresden resident on Saturday.

“But there were no grounds for arrest,” spokesman Christian Avenarius said.

The man is not known to have previously committed politically motivated crimes.

He is now being investigated for incitement of hatred with symbols used by unconstitutional organisations, the spokesperson said. The swastika and other Nazi symbols are illegal in Germany.

I don't understand...why are there no grounds for arrest???

Homosexuals recruiting in Africa....

Gee, nobody told me that the recruitment is on....I would have gone...

Uganda President Yoweri Museveni mixed homophobia with anticolonial sentiments recently, warning a group of youths in his country that “European homosexuals” were recruiting in Africa.

Museveni spoke at an event in Kampala for high-achieving youths on November 14, according to the Monitor.

“I hear European homosexuals are recruiting in Africa,” said Museveni, according to the Monitor. “We used to have very few homosexuals traditionally. They were not persecuted but were not encouraged either because it was clear that is not how God arranged things to be.”

Last month, a bill was introduced in parliament that would make Uganda, a devoutly Christian country, one of the most dangerous places in the world for gay people and their The “Anti-Homosexuality Bill” would completely outlaw gay sex and the “promotion of homosexuality,” with prison sentence

s of up to seven years for people convicted of aiding and abetting gay activities.

Water..

Making Israel Disappear....

Thanks to Palestinian Media Watch, we know what the Palestinians tell themselves...

If you sit down with Itamar Marcus, you had better brace yourself for a jarring refresher course on Mideast reality. That's especially true if you tend to think like the current administrationif you believe, for example, that the Israeli-Palestinian impasse is all about borders and settlements and that the construction of 900 housing units in southern Jerusalem "could end up being very dangerous," as President Barack Obama said last week.

If it's "very dangerous" to construct Jewish housing in a city that Israel will never, ever relinquish, what should we call the effort to brainwash children into believing that Israel itself doesn't exist?

How should we describe the claim that not only East Jerusalem — captured by Israel in the 1967 war — belongs to the Palestinians, but that every other Israeli city, from Haifa to Ashkelon, belongs to them, too?

"In the world inhabited by Palestinian children," Marcus tells me, "there is no Israel." And if you give him time, the director of Palestinian Media Watch (palwatch.org) in Jerusalem will subject you to a barrage of depressing evidence for his contention.

He'll show you snippets from TV quiz shows for Palestinian kids predicated on the non-existence of Israel.

Host: "Which mountain is the tallest in Palestine? ..." Child contestant: "Mount Meron (in Israel)."

On another show, a host asks, "Which Palestinian city is called 'the flower of Galilee'?" and then names three Israeli cities!

Then Marcus will show you school geography lessons that use maps on which Israel is missing.

Do any Palestinian textbooks acknowledge the existence of Israel, I wonder. "No," Marcus replies.

The anti-Israeli content of Palestinian textbooks has been a longstanding concern for anyone who yearns for a permanent political settlement, but surely those books have improved since Yasser Arafat's death in 2004. Not really, says Marcus. If anything, he says, they devote more space than ever to depicting conflict with Israel as a solemn religious duty aimed at liberating a Muslim land.

Remember, we're talking about textbooks chosen by the Palestinian government led by the allegedly moderate President Mahmoud Abbas, not the overtly jihadist Hamas. The Palestinian Authority media, meanwhile, are full of similar Islamist references that offer no room for compromise, and that honor terrorists and suicide bombers as national heroes.

No less ominous is what Marcus describes as the Palestinian Authority's "infrastructure of hate," the relentless depiction of Jews as sinister and evil — as conspirators spreading AIDS, for example, or undermining the very foundations of the Al-Aqsa mosque.

Naturally, Jews poisoned Yasser Arafat, too — or at least that is what children are told.

In a TV tribute to Arafat earlier this month, one youngster unconsciously presented the essence of this paranoid vision: "He died from poisoning by the Jews. Well, I don't know what he died from, but I know it was by the Jews."

Rockets to continue from Gaza...

Surprise, surprise...some Palestinian factions just can't stop...

Despite Hamas's announcement that Palestinian groups have agreed to halt the attacks on Israel, three factions in the Gaza Strip said they were not aware of any agreement in this regard.

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine strongly denied that its members were part of a cease-fire agreement. The group's armed wing, the Abu Ali Mutapha Brigades, said it remained committed to the "option of confrontation and resistance against the occupation in all forms."

Islamic Jihad also denied that it had agreed to stop attacks on Israel. A spokesman for the organization in the Gaza Strip said he did not know of any Egyptian-brokered cease-fire agreement.

The spokesman said that it was inconceivable that the Palestinians would agree to stop the "resistance" while Israel was continuing its "aggression" against the Palestinians.

"We stick to our right to confront the occupiers for as long as they are on our Palestinian lands," he said. "We won't accept the principle of security for security. The enemy will leave only through resistance."

When they say leave...they mean that Israel should not exist at all...

Burka Barbie...

Finally, the perfect Christmas gift, no???

One of the world's most famous children's toys, Barbie, has been given a makeover - wearing a burkha.

Wearing the traditional Islamic dress, the iconic doll is going undercover for a charity auction in connection with Sotheby's for Save The Children.

More than 500 Barbies went on show yesterday at the Salone dei Cinquecento, in Florence, Italy.

Makers Mattel are backing the exhibition which is the work of Italian designer Eliana Lorena.

The auction is part of Barbie celebrations for her 50th anniversary this year. The UK's biggest Barbie fan Angela Ellis, 35, has a collection of more than 250 dolls.

The company director of Laird Assessors from The Wirral, Cheshire, said: 'Bring it on Burkha Barbie, I think this is a great idea.

'I think this is really important for girls, wherever they are from they should have the opportunity to play with a Barbie that they feel represents them.

More on the upcoming film about Mohammed....

Good to see them using orthodox Islamic advisors, no???

The producer of the blockbuster trilogies “The Matrix” and “The Lord of the Rings,” Barrie Osborne, is now working on a $200 million movie about the founder of Islam, the Prophet Mohammed. Helping to guide the project is Sheikh Yousef al-Qaradawi, a radical Muslim Brotherhood theologian. One quick look at this so-called “moderate” should raise serious questions among those investing in Osborne’s film and spark a call to boycott should his involvement continue.

Osborne describes his film as “an international epic production aimed at bridging cultures. The film will educate people about the true meaning of Islam.” He has chosen to use the Qatar-based Alnoor Holdings production company, which has decided to have Sheikh al-Qaradawi “oversee all aspects of the shoot,” according to The Guardian. If Osborne’s goal is to combat anti-Muslim bigotry and portray a positive image of Islam, then the influence of al-Qaradawi on the film will only do the opposite.

Al-Qaradawi is only a bit less radical than Al-Qaeda. He has repeatedly expressed support for Hamas, a terrorist group that was birthed from the Muslim Brotherhood organization to which he belongs. The Israelis believe he has directly financed Hamas by donating $21 million to a “charity” knowing that it’d be used to help the group buy land. In November 2008, the Treasury Department blacklisted a network of charities called the Union of Good for acting as fronts for Hamas. Al-Qaradawi serves as the group’s president.

He was condemned by the Islamic Council of Norway and imams in Denmark and Sweden in February of this year after the Middle East Media Research Institute translated remarks he made the previous month.

“The only thing I hope for is that as my life approaches its end, Allah will give me an opportunity to go to the land of jihad and resistance, even if in a wheelchair. I will shoot Allah’s enemies, the Jews, and they will throw a bomb at me, and thus, I will seal my life in martyrdom,” he said.

Al-Qaradawi doesn’t even bother to hide his anti-Semitism by replacing the word “Jews” with “Zionist” or some other term to differentiate between Israeli soldier and civilian, or between Israeli Jews and non-Israeli Jews. He even accuses Jews of exaggerating Hitler’s crimes and describes his treatment of them as Allah’s judgment—a judgment that he hopes will be carried out by Muslims the next time around.

“Throughout history, Allah has imposed upon the [Jewish] people who would punish them for their corruption. The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. By means of all the things he did to them—even though they exaggerated this issue—he managed to put them in their place. This was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, the next time will be at the hand of the believers,” he said.

Iraq accuses Syria of terrorism....

The Syrians are pretty bad, in many different ways...

Iraq on Sunday for the first time said that the bombers who killed more than 150 people in Baghdad on October 25 came from neighbouring Syria, but steered well clear of accusing Damascus of collusion.

"The group came from Syria but we are not accusing Syria again," said government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh on state television.

His comments followed the broadcast of confessions from three men said to have plotted the two massive bombings in the Iraqi capital that killed 153 people and wounded hundreds.

Iraq's relations with Syria plummeted when it accused Damascus of sheltering suspects whom Baghdad said orchestrated similar deadly attacks on government buildings in Baghdad on August 19, killing 100 people.

Time to free Jonathan Pollard...

He just began his 25th year of imprisonment...

Yesterday, Jonathan Pollard began the twenty-fifth year of his life sentence for passing to Israel during the 1980s classified US data concerning various Arab states, including evidence of Saddam Hussein's development of chemical weapons. This distressing anniversary is an appropriate moment to take stock of the bona fides of Jonathan's unprecedented punishment and the continued obsession of many in the US government with insuring, in the words of Jonathan's lead prosecutor, that Jonathan "never see the light of day."

One of the cornerstones of Barack Obama's presidency has been an expressed intent to make a clear break with a purported American policy of acting like a bully to the world. We would do well then to consider just who the United States was bullying and which countries it was coddling when the Pollard affair broke and whether US behavior is any different today under President Obama.

PRIOR TO the Khomeini revolution in 1979, US Middle East policy was anchored in the "Twin Pillars" of Iran and Saudi Arabia. With the overthrow of the Shah, the US sought a replacement for one of its now fallen pillars. It turned to Iraq's Saddam Hussein, the brutal dictator of a country that was on America's list of state sponsors of terror.

This US policy shift was the genesis to the Pollard. Throughout the 1980s, continuing until one week before Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in the summer of 1990, theUS government pursued a policy of craven appeasement of Iraq. America turned a blind eye to Saddam Hussein's use of chemical weapons, it allowed the transfer of billions of dollars of US taxpayer backed credits to Iraq via the Atlanta branch of an Italian bank to secretly finance Hussein's purchase of both agricultural goods and weaponry, and cooperated in the sale to Iraq by third parties of a wide variety of military equipment, including US military rocket cluster bombs, chemical weapons technology and missile technology.

Every sane government in the world today looks with grave concern at the nuclear weapons capability that Iran is on the threshold of acquiring. And they shudder at the thought of what might have been if Iraq had a nuclear weapon when it invaded Kuwait in 1990. That power was denied Saddam Hussein when Israel destroyed Iraq's Osiraq nuclear reactor in June 1981. But at the time, Israel was not thanked, but rather was subjected to near-universal condemnation, including from the United States.

In the Reagan White House, there was a consensus among vice president George Bush, defense secretary Caspar Weinberger and chief of staff James Baker that Israel needed to be punished. Weinberger persuaded Reagan to delay delivery of F-16 fighter jets to Israel and the similarly incensed Deputy CIA Director Bobby Ray Inman ordered withholding from Israel all satellite photography and other similar materials involving areas more than 250 miles from Israel's borders. This ban was then formally approved by Weinberger and converted what was until then a routine intelligence transfer into a criminal violation.

Thus, transmittal to Israel of photographs of the eastern sections of Syria and Iraq, including chemical weapons plants in eastern Iraq built and financed by US companies, became the grounds for Pollard's life sentence.

The background behind Jonathan's actions is not presented as grounds for exoneration, but rather as a reason for the mitigation of the severity of his punishment. For it is uncontestable that Jonathan is in a party of one who has been singled out from all other Americans who spied for non US adversaries.

Thus, of the more than 20 Americans caught spying for friendly or neutral countries, both before and after Jonathan's arrest, none received a sentence even remotely close to life, the average sentence being between two and four years. These included cases of spies for supposed US allies like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, who were receiving very generous American foreign aid or military protection at the time they were spying on the United States.

Most recently, Ronald Montaperto, a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst who admitted passing classified intelligence to the Chinese during a 14-year period, was sentenced to three months in prison.

And of the more than 60 spies for US adversaries over the past quarter-century, many of whom caused massive and demonstrable harm to the US, barely a handful received life terms.

CIA agent David Barnett, who sold the Soviets the names of 30 American agents, was given an 18-year sentence and paroled after 10 years. Michael Walker, for many years a key figure in the Walker family Soviet spy ring, was sentenced to 25 years and released after serving 15. William Kampiles, a CIA officer who sold the Soviets the operating manual to the KH-11 satellite, America's eye in the sky, received a 40-year sentence and was released after 18 years.

Abdul Kedar Helmy, an Egyptian-born American, transmitted classified materials to Egypt that were used in a joint weapons program with Iraq to vastly increase the range of ballistic missiles, including Iraq's Scud missiles, which were later fired on US troops during Desert Storm. Helmy received a prison term of less than four years. John Paul Lindh, an American who joined the Taliban terrorists fighting the United States, received a 21-year sentence.

9/11 defendants want a platform....

Oh, we are in for a circus...

The five men facing trial in the Sept. 11 attacks will plead not guilty so that they can air their criticisms of U.S. foreign policy, the lawyer for one of the defendants said Sunday.

Scott Fenstermaker, the lawyer for accused terrorist Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali, said the men would not deny their role in the 2001 attacks but "would explain what happened and why they did it."

The U.S. Justice Department announced earlier this month that Ali and four other men accused of murdering nearly 3,000 people in the nation's deadliest terrorist attack will face a civilian federal trial just blocks from the World Trade Center site.

Ali, also known as Ammar al-Baluchi, is a nephew of professed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Mohammed, Ali and the others will explain "their assessment of American foreign policy," Fenstermaker said.

"Their assessment is negative," he said.

Double standard for women with HIV...

She only gets house arrest...a man in her position would get years in prison...

A woman with HIV was sentenced to two years house arrest for having sex with a man and not disclosing her positive status.

Robin St. Clair, 28, who pleaded guilty to two counts of sexual assault, cried in court yesterday when she was told she would be registered as a sex offender for life and would be made to provide a DNA sample.

Prior to going into the Finch Ave. courtroom, St. Clair was all giggles and was ogling a picture of shirtless men in the Toronto Sun.

She didn't speak in court, and at times looked bored and picked her teeth.

Justice Paul Taylor said the victim "won't find favour with my decision."

"No sentence could restore (his) confidence in fellow human beings."

The man -- who can't be named because of a publication ban -- met St. Clair in March, 2007, at a Toronto house and asked St. Clair for oral sex.

St. Clair said no but agreed to have intercourse with a condom.

The man had intercourse with St. Clair twice and on the second occasion the condom ripped.

That was when St. Clair told the man she was HIV-positive, even though in 2004 she was issued with a so-called "Section-22" from public health officials that details her responsibility to disclose her status.

Hat tip: Jeremy.

The confiscation of a Jewish property....

At long last, perhaps some justice...

In a downtown Manhattan courtroom, where the lawyers and clients up front outnumbered the observers seated in the back, where a forgotten Jewish Egyptian victim challenged an omnipresent multibillion-dollar multinational corporation; in a case where history itself was both on trial and being made, the Coca-Cola Company was publicly accused of being criminally enriched following the Nasser regime's Nazi-style expropriation of Jewish property. More than that, Coca-Cola was accused of obstructing, belittling and stonewalling a decades-long effort to obtain justice, and indeed trying to create a new revisionism that questions whether anti-Jewish persecution actually took place in Egypt in the 1950s and 1960s.

On November 10, 2009, Egyptian exile Refael Bigio drove down from Montreal, his attorneys Nathan Lewin and Sherrie Savett trained in from Washington DC and Philadelphia, Coca-Cola's chief of litigation John Lewis flew up from Atlanta and the company's defense counsel Richard Cirillo only needed to make a short trip from midtown to argue whether the Coca-Cola Company quietly but consciously benefited when the Nasser regime nationalized Jewish property. The Bigios' property had long been leased by Coca-Cola and their bottle-cap factory made the caps for Coke's products. This factory, the property and related business ultimately became a multimillion dollar asset in the giant Atlanta beverage conglomerate's overseas portfolio.

The Egyptian government takeover of the Bigio family bottle-cap and tin plating factory occurred in 1962, during the openly anti-Jewish regime of president Gamal Abdel Nasser. Egypt's government subsequently ruled its Nasser-era seizure of the Bigio property was indeed illegal. Later, however, over the Bigios' objections, Coca-Cola entered into a joint venture to operate what is now the Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Egypt on the Bigios' seized property, without compensating the Bigios, according to court papers. The Bigios claim that Coke is and has been trespassing on stolen property.

Now, after years of litigation and fruitless negotiation, Bigio's attorneys have fired a stinging motion for summary judgment, asserting that the uncontradicted facts surrounding Coca-Cola's actions were so blatant that the court should immediately find the corporation liable.

"Coca-Cola is not," wrote attorney Nathan Lewin in his motion, "as it likes to portray itself, a trusting and guileless American corporation that in 1994 innocently purchased a 'minority interest' in some remote business entity that utilizes the Bigios' property. The undisputed evidence establishes that Coca-Cola witnessed how the Bigio family - with which it was intimately bound in a mutually profitable business relationship between the 1940s and 1962 - was victimized by Nasser's ethnic-cleansing policy of taking Jewish property and expelling Jews from Egypt."

Years later, Lewin asserts, after the Egyptian government took minimal steps to remedy the religiously discriminatory brutality of the Nasser regime, Coca-Cola happily took control - through entities which it now claims cannot be "pierced" - of property that Coca-Cola knows was immorally and illegally plundered from the Bigios."
10,000 square meters, the...

Lewin made the point simple: "Coca-Cola is, we submit, the occupier of stolen property. If this case concerned personalty [personal property] that had been taken in violation of international law from the Bigios, and Coca-Cola knowingly received and used that personal property in order to make enormous profits in Egypt, there would be no doubt that Coca-Cola would be civilly - and possibly even criminally - liable. The rule of law is no different when the stolen goods that are being used by the defendant are land and businesses. The receiver and user of such stolen merchandise cannot claim immunity on the ground that the entity that is directly using the stolen goods is only a subsidiary or an affiliate. Principles governing the tort of trespass and of aiding-and-abetting liability make all who partake in the illegal exploitation - and particularly the head of the entire enterprise - liable to the victims."

In response, Coca-Cola apparently has extensively disputed that the Nasser regime was actually engaged in anti-Jewish persecution, but was merely a socialist government seizing the property of many citizens. The company argues that it had no way of knowing that the property and businesses the Atlanta corporation acquired were made available only as the result of Nasser's anti-Jewish ethnic cleansing.

Bigio's lawyers answered by comparing Coca-Cola to someone witnessing a rape and murder, and then buying the jewelry stolen from the victim. Plaintiff attorneys added in their court filing that for Coca-Cola to deny persecution of Jewish citizens in Egypt is akin to "Holocaust denial."

While Coca-Cola asked the judge to dismiss the case, Bigio's attorneys asked for summary judgment immediately finding the company liable, saying that Coca-Cola's "only hope of prevailing in thislitigation is to pervert and misstate the plaintiff's legal claims." After a two-and-a-half-hour oral hearing, which included lengthy oral arguments from both sides and direct questions from federal Judge Barbara S. Jones, the judge said she would soon narrow the diverse issues and make a ruling.

Please read the whole story about the Bigio's. Jews had similar experiences all throughout the Middle East...

The Bizarre world of carbon credits....

Ukraine can both generate C02 and sell C02 credits....

Vladimir Gapor is a plumber by trade, but now he's a scavenger, prying bits of scrap steel from the ruins of his old factory and selling them for a pittance.

For others beyond this manufacturing graveyard, however, Ukraine's economic collapse has produced a potential multibillion-dollar bonanza. In an era of climate change regulation and carbon trading, Ukraine, ironically, is profiting from the smokeless smokestacks of its industrial shutdown.

How well and how long it will profit is an under-the-radar issue complicating negotiations for a worldwide climate accord being sought at a 192-nation conference in Copenhagen next month.

Gapor's old factory, which made glass for the Soviet military and space program, shut down in the early 1990s after the Soviet Union disintegrated. Private wrecking crews and desperate jobless people like Gapor then turned the town's industries, which once employed 16,000 workers, into heaps of bricks.

In the days when Ukraine was a Soviet republic, Konstantinovka was a booming town of 100,000 with 25 factories. Concert music filled its Palace of Culture, its workers were rewarded with trips to Crimea's beaches, and its children with stays at mountain "pioneer camps." Today just five workshops still operate, and the population is down to 60,000, many unemployed having migrated to Moscow, Kiev or Western Europe to find jobs, leaving families behind.

The surrounding province in eastern Ukraine, plagued by bad management and lack of investment, has lost 10 percent of its population, said Vladimir Morozov, an environmental engineer in the regional capital, Donetsk. Wealthy oligarchs, not communists, now rule the economy, he said, and they show no interest in rebuilding a wretched backwater.

The industrial collapse has been bad for jobs but good for the climate. Ukraine produces less than half the greenhouse gases it did 20 years ago, and under a trading system devised in the negotiations for the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, curbing the gases blamed for global warming, it is allowed to sell credits for every ton of carbon dioxide saved.

Countries or companies that cannot meet commitments to reduce emissions can buy these "allowances" from those that have cut emissions more than required and have a surplus to sell. Point Carbon, a Norwegian-based consulting firm, estimates 9 billion allowances are available, mostly in Russia.

Earlier this year, each one-ton allowance sold for $10 when Ukraine signed a $300 million deal with Japan. The Kiev government has almost 1 billion more tons to put on the market, said Irina Stavchuk of the National Ecological Center of Ukraine.

"The hot air business is the main goal of the government," Stavchuk said.

Income from such deals is supposed to be earmarked for clean-energy and other "green" projects. But critics have questioned how well that guideline is followed.

While Western industrial powers must cut carbon emissions, and many developing nations are asked to shift to low-carbon economic growth, a few Eastern European countries have little incentive to constrain their polluting, since they're already far below emissions limits.

In a way, these nations have the best of both worlds. They can make millions selling carbon credits, while enjoying a comfortable cushion to pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere without worrying about energy efficiency or cleaning up their factories.

Muslim Scout Troops???

This is what happens when we take 'diversity' too far...

At the website of the Norwegian royal family we can read that “H.R.H. the Crown Princess yesterday visited 14 young scouts who meet at the mosque on Calmeyers Street. Both reading from the Koran and tying of scout knots were on the schedule the kids had planned for the Crown Princess.”

We are further told that the Rabita scout troop was formed a year ago as a part of the Norwegian Guide and Scout Association’s diversity program (my emphasis), and that the troop’s meetings, which take place at a mosque, focuses both on ordinary scouting activities, such as hiking and first aid, and learning about Islam and the Koran. The scouts have also apparently put on what is described as “a thoroughly special variation” on the fairy tail of Little Red Riding Hood, which was dramatized with elements drawn both from scout life and from Islam.

After her visit, the Crown Princess tweeted about it:

Have just visited Rabita scout troop in Grønland, Oslo. They were so clever! I learned to tie scout knots.

It may be that the Crown Princess learned to tie scout knots, but it would have been interesting to know if she considers it a good idea to have separate scout troops for Muslims. When rights.no wrote about this state of affairs earlier this year, in connection with the establishment of a Muslim scout troop in Stavanger, we received reactions from the parents of scouts – specifically, the parents of ethnic Norwegian scouts. These parents could not see that separating Muslim from non-Muslim children served the purpose of integration in the slightest. On the contrary, they felt that it could only serve to weaken any sense of community. One of these parents, a mother in eastern Norway, raised the problem with the Norwegian Guide and Scout Association, but didn’t feel that the answer she received was satisfactory. As I understand it, she became so outraged that she removed her own child from the scouts – she simply didn’t want to help finance such segregation.

Read the whole thing. The Norwegian Human Rights Service is an important stop on the web - please go there often.

Leftist protesters turn fascist....

They won't let people enter to see a film about Israel in Germany...

Prominent French Jewish filmmaker Claude Lanzmann expressed "shock" last week that German leftists in Hamburg had violently prevented the showing of his debut documentary film, Why Israel, about the role of the Jewish state as a homeland for refugees.

In late October, the 1973-produced film was scheduled to be shown at the B-Movie cinema, but roughly 50 left-wing activists from diverse anti-Israel groups affiliated with the anti-Zionist International Center B5 barred visitors from entering themovie house.

In Why Israel, Lanzmann - perhaps best known for his groundbreaking documentary Shoah - depicts Israelis who found refuge in Israel after the Holocaust.

The movie house said in a statement that it had been compelled to cancel the film screening and a podium discussion because "we were threatened with violence."

According to eyewitness reports in the German media, left-wing protesters ranging in age from 16 to 70 shouted "Jewish pigs" and "faggots" to the cinema attendees. A pro-Israel left-of-center group, Kritikmaximierung, cosponsored the showing of the film.

Werner Pomrehn, a radio host for the Hamburg-based station FSK, told the The Jerusalem Post on Friday that an anti-Israel activist had struck him in the face at the screening event. Asked about the International Center B5 demonstrators, Pomrehn, who reports on anti-Semitism in Hamburg, termed the group the "Pol-Pot Left."

The protesters propagate an "anti-Semitic position" that views "Zionism as racist," said Pomrehn.

The International Center B5 activists staged an agitprop performance to block the guests' entry, setting up an Israeli military checkpoint with wooden military rifles. The protesters were armed with bicycle locks and wore fingerless fighting gloves.

Terming the film showing a "pro-Zionist event," the International Center B5 justified its protest in a statement: "Zionism proves to be a racist project that aims to artificially preserve the Jewish character and thereby maintains the present colonial culture."

Political correctness...

Stupid ads from a stupid group...

This group wants to limit travel by plane...

Airline pollution activists Plane Stupid are on a collision course with the advertising regulator after launching a graphic cinema campaign that sees CGI polar bears falling to bloody deaths to highlight the impact of carbon emissions.

Plane Stupid's ad, which breaks in cinemas and online today, features dozens of animated polar bears falling from the sky onto a city centre, bouncing off skyscrapers and landing in the street and on the roof of a car, accompanied by blood-spurting special effects.

The only sound, apart from the bone-crunching thump of the impacts, is the steadily increasing whine of a jet airliner's engines.

Plane Stupid's campaign, developed by the ad agency Mother, aims to show the impact that global warming is having on polar ice caps.

The group is aiming to point out that even short flights to the continent have a major impact on carbon emissions. Plane Stupid said that the ad was inspired by the fact that an average European flight produces 400kg of carbon, which it claims is the same weight as an average female polar bear.

Egyptian Muslims burn Christian shops...

It gives them something to do...

Hundreds of Muslim protesters on Saturday burnt Christian-owned shops in southern Egypt and attacked a police station where they believed a Christian accused of raping a Muslim girl was being held, a police official said.

Police repelled the demonstrators in the town of Farshut using tear gas and also arrested 60 people during the clashes in which seven Coptic Christian-owned shops were destroyed, the official said.

The protesters hurled stones at the police station after they heard that a Coptic Christian man accused of kidnapping and sexually assaulting a 12-year-old Muslim was being held there, he said.

Immigration scam in the UK...

Is anything like this happening here???

Immigrants who don’t understand English have been able to buy language certificates that give them the right to settle in Britain.

An investigation by The Sunday Times has found that staff at English language colleges in London and Birmingham have been offering migrants who speak little or no English Home Office-regulated English and Citizenship certificates for £250 each. Tests are rigged to allow almost anyone to pass.

Staff hand out crib sheets with questions and answers in English. Others let candidates write the sound of English words on the sheets in their own tongue, so the answers appear right, but they don’t know what they are saying.

At the UK Learning Academy in Birmingham, a staff assessor told an undercover reporter that candidates did not have to take any courses or speak any English to pass the tests. The assessor simply asked if the candidate knew their own name, date of birth and address. When told that they did, the assessor replied: “That’s all right then. That’s a guaranteed pass.”

Al Gore does it again...

More errors in his new book...

Former vice president Al Gore has always been one of the more divisive figures in the debate about manmade climate change. As one of the most visible people sounding the alarm on climate change, he is quick to come under fire. His new book “Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis” provides plenty of ammunition for global warming skeptics without them having to read even the first page.

The new tome, seen as a follow up to the Nobel laureate’s “An Inconvenient Truth” provides Gore’s solutions to end rising temperatures. Half of the cover folds back to show the earth in its relatively pristine condition today while the other side depicts how it would look after being ravaged by climate change.

When you unfold the cover, the image you see if the earth as we know it today with its deep blue oceans, rich soil, and green forests. This side of the cover reveals an artist’s rendering of an earth where unchecked global warming has wreaked havoc. We are at a crossroads. We must choose which earth will be home to future generations.
~ Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis

Hurricane expert Ryan Maue of Florida State University first noticed something wrong with the images. It is there on the cover that inaccuracies and impossibilities are depicted thus providing skeptics a chance to jump on Gore much like they did the inaccuracies in his previous works.

The retouched image depicting our planet at some point in the future, contains images of five hurricanes. One storm off the coast of Florida is turning in a clockwise motion, an impossibility in the northern hemisphere. Another hurricane is shown near Peru and the equator, a place where hurricanes cannot form. It is also a bit ironic that so many storms are depicted when hurricane activity is currently at a 30 year low.

BBC propaganda on wind farms....

They're trying to sell farmers on the idea...

When the BBC runs one of its propaganda campaigns in favour of windfarms, as Farming Today was again doing recently, the only point of interest is how many of the basic facts they leave out. One thing they invariably try to conceal is how derisory is the amount of electricity these windmills produce.

Although Farming Today interviewed one of the sternest technical critics of wind turbines, Dr John Etherington, a retired environmental academic who has just published an excellent book on the nuts and bolts of wind power, they asked him with seemingly wide-eyed disbelief how he could justify his claim that turbines generate less than 30 per cent of their capacity.

Yet, as any half-way competent journalist should know, this information is freely available on the climate change department's website. The very last thing the BBC ever wants to admit – though the information is available from the same source – is that the total amount of power produced by all the 2,300 turbines so far built in Britain amounts on average to a mere 900 megawatts, barely the output of a single medium-size conventional power station.

The other point the BBC is always careful to conceal is how much money the developers make from these windmills, thanks to the near 100 per cent hidden subsidy we all pay them through our electricity bills. Farming Today was quite happy to encourage farmers to lease their land by telling them that they could hope to make up to £20,000 a year from each 2 megawatt turbine. What they did not explain was that the same turbine will yield its developer around £400,000 a year –a cool £10 million over its 25-year life. Something else Farming Today neglected to mention was the title of Dr Etherington's book, The Wind Farm Scam.

A fashion shoot at a Holocaust Memorial.....

Talk about bad taste...

The November issue of easyJet In-flight contained two pictures of models posing at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, also known as the Field of Stelae.

The memorial is Germany's most prominent monument to the six million Jews killed in the Nazi genocide. The pictures accompanied a feature marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall.

Denis MacShane, the former Europe Minister and head of the European Institute for the Study of Contemporary anti-Semitism, criticised the airline for allowing the pictures to be published.

“This is further evidence of the banalisation of anti-Semitism and the trivialisation of the genocidal massacre of Jews in the Second World War,” Mr MacShane said.

Stephen Pollard, the editor of the Jewish Chronicle, said: "easyJet appear to have been crass in the extreme".

The Foundation for the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which oversees the Berlin memorial, said that it was not asked for permission and “does not support commercial shoots” at the site.

All copies of the issue were removed from the airline’s planes after it was alerted to existence of the pictures. EasyJet could not confirm a total number. A copy is provided for all the airline's 3.5 million monthly flights, with many re-used.

A spokesman for easyJet accepted that the pictures were “completely inappropriate” but added: “It’s not particularly obvious where they were shot. That’s why it’s taken 20 days for anyone to notice.”

In a statement, the airline said: “easyJet profusely apologises to anyone who may be offended by the inappropriate fashion photo shoot at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin featured in this month’s issue of the in-flight magazine.

UAE ejects Lebanese.....

Could you imagine the uproar if Israel did something like this????

When Hussein Massoud returned to the United Arab Emirates from his summer vacation in Lebanon on July 17, he entered the immigration line at Sharja airport like he has hundreds of times before over the past 34 years.

But on his most recent trip, the Emirati immigration officers told Massoud that his work permit and residency card had been canceled, and that he had to take the next flight back to Lebanon. Further, neither he nor his family could return.

The sense of shock that his life could change so quickly remains weeks later.

“After 34 years they cancelled it very easily, more easily than drinking a cup of water,” he said.

Massoud had made the U.A.E. his home. He is one of thousands of Lebanese who grew up in the U.A.E., where a majority of the workforce is foreign. He owns a house, land, several cars and an aluminum fabrication business that does millions of dollars of business every year. His kids were raised there.

So upon returning to Lebanon he naturally sought help at the ministry of foreign affairs, thinking all the while that his situation was unique.I n fact, he was told he was the 13th person to call with the same complaint.

Now, he among of a group of more than 200 Lebanese claiming they have been unfairly expelled from their homes, jobs and lives in the U.A.E. They include businessmen, lawyers and doctors. None was given an explanation, and they all have one thing in common: they are Lebanese Shiites.

Wahab Hajj Hassan, another Lebanese who was deported in July, was working as a legal advisor to the U.A.E. Ministry of Education for two years. He says the deportation was meant to send a signal — perhaps at the behest of the U.S. or Israel, that Lebanese Shiites shouldn’t support the Iranian backed Lebanese militia and political party Hezbollah. But he says he’s baffled, because he’s not a Hezbollah member or supporter. He didn’t even vote for them in the last election.

Ahhh..I knew they had to try and blame it on Israel...

Italians arrest 2 for Mumbai terror plot...

A father and son provided logistical support...

Italian police on Saturday arrested two Pakistani men accused of providing logistical support for last year's terror attacks in Mumbai, officials said.

The two, father and son, were arrested in an early morning raid in Brescia, police in the northern Italian city said.

The suspects managed a money transfer agency and helped fund the November 26 attacks, police said in a statement.

The day before the attacks they transferred money to activate an Internet phone account that was used by the attackers and their accomplices, said Stefano Fonzi, the head of anti-terror police in Brescia.

Educational changes in the UK???

Who needs history anyways???

The latest initiative by our "Children's Secretary", Ed Balls, is to abolish what remains of fact-based teaching of history and geography in our schools. He plans to "roll them together into themed lessons on social issues such as global warming" (funny how that seems to seep into everything nowadays).

The ruthless drive of educational progressives to eliminate history-teaching from schools has been under way since the 1960s. The aim is to ensure that children know nothing about their country's past or how the world came to be as it is, leaving their minds blankly open to whatever vacuous progressive claptrap is fed to them.

In his desire to chuck history onto what Lenin called "the scrapheap of history", Mr Balls may have to make an exception, however. A campaign is now being mounted in the European Parliament to make it compulsory for children to be taught the history of the EU. According to Mário David, the Portuguese MEP leading the campaign and a former chief of staff to the Commission President Jose-Manuel Barroso, it Is vital to counter all the "lying, cheating and mistrust" that surrounds the EU in the minds of the peoples of Europe. Our children must therefore be indoctrinated accordingly.

A year or two back, when Richard North and I were writing a comprehensive history of "the European project", The Great Deception, we were astonished to find just how horrendously misleading is the account of that history peddled by the EU itself on its Europa website. From laying claim to Churchill as father of the EU to consistently obscuring the nature of the key role played by Jean Monnet, they have come up with an official version of the origins of their "project" which bears virtually no relation to the facts. Doubtless this is just the sort of history which Mr Balls will be happy to allow in our schools – because "fact-based" it isn't.

Terror conspiracy in Texas???

Was Hasan involved in a conspiracy???

A massacre at a Texas army base that left 13 people dead is increasingly looking like part of a terror conspiracy rather than an act of a lone gunman.

The growing suspicious are related, among other things, to shooter Nidal Malik Hasan's connection to September 11 terrorists, the funds he is suspected of transferring to Pakistan, and his ties with radical Yemenite cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, associated with al-Qaeda.

By now, officials estimate that these ties were not confined to Hasan's participation in prayer sessions at Al-Awlaki's Virginia mosque and "spiritual advice". While emails exchanges between the two initially focused on religious matters, they later shifted to discussion of financial transfers for operational aims, the Washington Post reported Saturday.

The paper based its report on FBI sources who estimate that the email exchanges point to a terror conspiracy. According to the sources, the ties between Hasan and Awlaki grew closer in recent months and involved discussions regarding the secret transfer of money and other means in order to translate plans into actions.

According to the report, Hasan asked for deliveries of less than $10,000, so he would not be obligated to report them to the army.

A Palestinian embassy in India....but what about students...

India is giving millions of dollars to UNRWA for a Palestinian embassy in India..

India's representative to the Palestinian Authority delivered a check for 1 million US dollars to UNRWA director Karen Abu Zayd in Jerusalem on Friday.

The ambassador said the aid package came within India's pledge to donate 10 million US dollars for building a Palestinian embassy and residence for diplomats in New Delhi.

But, in the same article, here's a look at Palestinians in Lebanon...

Also on Friday, UNICEF issued a report saying UNRWA-registered Palestinian students in Lebanon had staggering dropout raids, including 50 percent of 17-year-olds, and 40 percent of of 16-year-olds receiving no education whatsoever.

"We are sounding the alarm that the dropout rate is too high among school-aged children from the intermediary to the high school level," said Ray Virgilio Torres, head of the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) in Beirut, according to Agence France-Presse.

"The figure is really worrisome when you consider that half of 17-year-old children are school dropouts as opposed to 40 percent when it comes to 16-year-olds," Torres said. "This is a sensitive age and if you add that to other risks they are exposed to in the camps, there is reason for alarm."

He added, "The youngsters say 'why study when I can't work afterwards.'"

Lebanese laws prevent refugees from working in a number of industries.

Shouldn't UNRWA focus on resettling refugees instead of building embassies???

Climategate continues...

Andrew Bolt in Australia has the best blog to keep track of climategate...

This time we’ll focus on the sheer thuggery of the “The Team” - how this conspiracy of powerful alarmist scientists tried to drive sceptics and non-allies out of their jobs, and even succeeded.

Here’s three examples:

Example one is the email from Tom Wigley to IPCC author Timothy Carter about the Climate Research journal, then edited by sceptic Chris de Freitas:

PS Re CR, I do not know the best way to handle the specifics of the editoring. Hans von Storch is partly to blame—he encourages the publication of crap science ‘in order to stimulate debate’. One approach is to go direct to the publishers and point out the fact that their journal is perceived as being a medium for disseminating misinformation under the guise of refereed work. I use the word ‘perceived’ here, since whether it is true or not is not what the publishers care about -- it is how the journal is seen by the community that counts.I think we could get a large group of highly credentialed scientists to sign such a letter—50+ people.Note that I am copying this view only to Mike Hulme and Phil Jones. Mike’s idea to get editorial board members to resign will probably not work—must get rid of von Storch too, otherwise holes will eventually fill up with people like Legates, Balling, Lindzen, Michaels, Singer, etc. I have heard that the publishers are not happy with von Storch, so the above approach might remove that hurdle too.

Further emails from the team in its successful pursuit of de Freitas’ scalp:

#1047388489
This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…What do others think?

#1047390562
I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor…

It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I’ve had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice !

#1051156418

This second case gets to the crux of the matter. I suspect that deFreitas deliberately chose other referees who are members of the skeptics camp. I also suspect that he has done this on other occasions. How to deal with this is unclear, since there are a number of individuals with bona fide scientific credentials who could be used by an unscrupulous editor to ensure that ‘anti-greenhouse’ science can get through the peer review process (Legates, Balling, Lindzen, Baliunas, Soon, and so on)….

You can read the rest on his blog...

Chavez praises Carlos the Jackal...

Just who will he praise next - Atilla the Hun???

Hugo Chavez has defended the alleged terrorist mastermind Carlos the Jackal, saying the Venezuelan imprisoned in France was an important "revolutionary fighter" who supported the cause of the Palestinians.

The Venezuelan president praised Carlos — whose real name is Ilich Sanchez Ramirez — during a speech Friday night saying: "I defend him. It doesn't matter to me what they say tomorrow in Europe."

Ramirez gained international notoriety during the 1970s and 80s as the alleged mastermind of a series of bombings, killings and hostage dramas. He is serving a life sentence in France for the 1975 murders of two French secret agents and an alleged informant.

"They accuse him of being a terrorist, but Carlos really was a revolutionary fighter," Chavez said during a televised speech to socialist politicians from various countries, who applauded.

In his speech, Chavez also sought to defend other leaders he said are wrongly labeled "bad guys" internationally, including Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe and Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Chavez called both of them brothers and said he now wonders whether Ugandan dictator Idi Amin was truly as brutal as he was reputed to be.

"We thought he was a cannibal," Chavez said, referring to Amin, whose regime was notorious for torturing and killing suspected opponents in the 1970s. "I have doubts. ... I don't know, maybe he was a great nationalist, a patriot."

The Parti Quebecois goes nuts....

They want to force the French language on day care centres...

Parti Québécois leader Pauline Marois has seen the enemy, and he is crawling on all fours, babbling out his first words in a language other than French.

Not content to have Bill 101 language provisions apply to Quebec schoolchildren, Ms. Marois has come out in favour of forcing immigrant and francophone parents to send their children to French-language daycares.

She told the Presse Canadienne news service this week that French is in such a precarious state in Montreal that some "electroshocks" are needed. And under a PQ government, the state-subsidized network of $7-a-day daycare centres would be in line for a zap. "We should go more towards applying Bill 101 in child-care centres," the separatist leader said.

BBC is sending 35 people to climate talks....

This shows their priorities....

The BBC is sending 35 people to next month's climate change talks in Copenhagen - creating as much carbon dioxide as an African village does in a whole year.

The corporation said its delegation of 12 presenters, along with a backup team of researchers, producers and camera crews, will spend up to two weeks in the Danish capital on expenses to cover the global summit.

Critics said the numbers were 'absolutely staggering' and accused the BBC of playing fast and loose with licence payers' money.

If all 35 BBC staff go by plane, they will generate around six or seven tons of carbon dioxide.

Conservative MP Philip Davies said: 'It's absolutely staggering. It's yet another example of how wasteful the BBC is.

It begs the question what all of these people will be doing when they are there.

'On the subject of climate change, the BBC seems to lose all its critical faculties and it will probably be just a fawning exercise over these environmentalists anyway.

'It would be nice if one of these 35 people asked some pertinent and critical questions about climate change. But I suspect they will all be subscribers to the extreme environmental agenda.'

For sure - 35 people and they won't ask one tough question...

More questions on Iran....

Where did they get their heavy water from???

The latest United Nations report on Iran's nuclear program questions Tehran's credibility regarding a recently disclosed facility built into a mountain near the holy city of Qom.

The International Atomic Energy Agency report issued Monday notes Iran's contention that it began work on the nuclear facility in 2007 in response to Bush administration threats of war as part of a plan to safeguard sensitive "organizations and activities" that could be targeted in an armed conflict.

But according to the agency's report, satellite photos showed construction began in 2002, well before Iran's nuclear program became a hot international issue. U.S. officials previously said they first detected the site in 2006.

The U.S. and other major powers worry that Iran's nuclear research program will ultimately produce weapons, an allegation Iran denies.

The discrepancy in dates is a significant measure of Iran's sincerity. Iran has long argued that because its parliament refused to ratify the Additional Protocol to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, it doesn't have to disclose new sites to international inspectors until six months before introducing nuclear material to them, a point strenuously disputed by the West and departing IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei.

But from December 2003 to February 2006, Iran was adhering to the Additional Protocol, obliging it to declare new sites immediately.

The incongruous chronology and the inspection of the site, already fitted with wiring, pipes and other infrastructure, also prompted the agency to question Iran about the possible presence of other hidden nuclear facilities.

"Iran's declaration of the new facility . . . gives rise to questions about whether there were any other nuclear facilities in Iran which had not been declared to the agency," the report says. "Iran's explanation about the purpose of the facility and the chronology of its design and construction requires further clarification."

The U.N. watchdog's quarterly report also says that Iran's nuclear program is operating at less than half-capacity, inexplicably producing the same amount of enriched uranium as six months ago and perhaps less.

In addition, inspectors found 600 barrels of heavy water at a nuclear facility in Esfahan. The plutonium in the spent fuel of heavy-water nuclear reactors can be used for nuclear bombs. The IAEA asked Iran this month for information on the barrels' origin, since Iran's heavy-water production plant near Arak is apparently not operating.

Climategate!

This is going to be quite the scandal....

If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (aka Hadley CRU) and released 61 megabites of confidential files onto the internet. (Hat tip: Watts Up With That)

When you read some of those files – including 1079 emails and 72 documents – you realise just why the boffins at Hadley CRU might have preferred to keep them confidential. As Andrew Bolt puts it, this scandal could well be “the greatest in modern science”. These alleged emails – supposedly exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists pushing AGW theory – suggest:

Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.

One of the alleged emails has a gentle gloat over the death in 2004 of John L Daly (one of the first climate change sceptics, founder of the Still Waiting For Greenhouse site), commenting:

“In an odd way this is cheering news.”

But perhaps the most damaging revelations – the scientific equivalent of the Telegraph’s MPs’ expenses scandal – are those concerning the way Warmist scientists may variously have manipulated or suppressed evidence in order to support their cause.

Here are a few tasters. (So far, we can only refer to them as alleged emails because – though Hadley CRU’s director Phil Jones has confirmed the break-in to Ian Wishart at the Briefing Room – he has yet to fess up to any specific contents.) But if genuine, they suggest dubious practices such as:

Manipulation of evidence:

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.

Private doubts about whether the world really is heating up:

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.

Suppression of evidence:

Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?

Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis.

Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address.

We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.

Fantasies of violence against prominent Climate Sceptic scientists:

Next
time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat
the crap out of him. Very tempted.

Attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP):

……Phil and I have recently submitted a paper using about a dozen NH records that fit this category, and many of which are available nearly 2K back–I think that trying to adopt a timeframe of 2K, rather than the usual 1K, addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/ regard to the memo, that it would be nice to try to “contain” the putative “MWP”, even if we don’t yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back….

And, perhaps most reprehensibly, a long series of communications discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process. How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with AGW can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority.

“This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…What do others think?”

“I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”“It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I’ve had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice !”

Hadley CRU has form in this regard. In September – I wrote the story up here as “How the global warming industry is based on a massive lie” – Hadley CRU’s researchers were exposed as having “cherry-picked” data in order to support their untrue claim that global temperatures had risen higher at the end of the 20th century than at any time in the last millenium. Hadley CRU was also the organisation which – in contravention of all acceptable behaviour in the international scientific community – spent years withholding data from researchers it deemed unhelpful to its cause. This matters because Hadley CRU, established in 1990 by the Met Office, is a government-funded body which is supposed to be a model of rectitude. Its HadCrut record is one of the four official sources of global temperature data used by the IPCC.

I asked in my title whether this will be the final nail in the coffin of Anthropenic Global Warming. This was wishful thinking, of course. In the run up to Copenhagen, we will see more and more hysterical (and grotesquely exaggerated) stories such as this in the Mainstream Media. And we will see ever-more-virulent campaigns conducted by eco-fascist activists, such as this risible new advertising campaign by Plane Stupid showing CGI polar bears falling from the sky and exploding because kind of, like, man, that’s sort of what happens whenever you take another trip on an aeroplane.

The world is currently cooling; electorates are increasingly reluctant to support eco-policies leading to more oppressive regulation, higher taxes and higher utility bills; the tide is turning against Al Gore’s Anthropogenic Global Warming theory. The so-called “sceptical” view is now also the majority view.

Iran says Canada abuses the UN.....

Good for Canada to show continued leadership on the world stage...

Iran claimed effective victory over Canada at the United Nations on Friday as a majority of world countries refused to support a Canadian-led bid to censure the Islamic republic over its human rights record.

The vote in a key 192-member committee of the UN General Assembly passed with 74 countries in favour, 48 against with 59 abstentions.

But Iran emphasized that a large majority of states did not actively support the measure, either through a no vote, and abstention, or by being absent.

"The high number of votes against or in abstention illustrates the majority of member states continue to refuse to support the proposition put forward by Canada and its allies," said said Eshagh Al Habib, Iran's deputy ambassador at the UN.

"This pattern of voting clearly indicates yet again that . . . measures should be taken to prevent certain countries such as Canada from abusing the United Nations."

Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon noted, however, that the result means the international record will reflect a censure of Iran.

"The adoption of this resolution is another clear signal of the international community's concern for the human rights of people in Iran," he said. "It sends a message of hope to the victims of violations, and to the human rights defenders who seek to effect positive change in Iran."

Send this lesbian back to the US....

We need to throw her out of Canada...and she needs a backbone to fight her battles in the US....

The Federal Court says the refugee board must reconsider the case of a lesbian who deserted from the U.S. army and fled to Canada.

Judge Yves de Montigny says the board erred last February when it rejected Bethany Smith's bid for refugee status. Ms. Smith says she fled the army because she was harassed and threatened by fellow soldiers over her sexual orientation.

She says she couldn't seek help from her superiors because she feared they might have been part of the harassment.

The judge said the board must reconsider her case because it unfairly dismissed evidence suggesting that gays face harsher treatment in the American military justice system.

Ms. Smith says she would fear for her life if she were deported and returned to the army.

Fear for her life...what bullshit.

Global warming may cost Germany 310 billion Euros...

This is the cost of fighting global warming...

Germany's ambitious plans to fight climate change will cost Europe's largest economy €310 billion, Manager Magazin reported on Friday.

Berlin wants to set targets at the United Nations conference in Copenhagen this December to reduce fossil fuel emissions from their 1990 level by 40 percent before 2020, the magazine reported.

But a study conducted by business consultancy Deloitte for the magazine’s latest issue found that German industries will have to pony up large sums of cash to comply.

The construction industry will be hardest hit by compulsory cuts in greenhouse gasses in the coming years, having to invest some €150 billion to renovate buildings for energy efficiency, the study said. But rent regulations and the results of the financial crisis will prove to be sizeable hurdles in finishing the job, according to the magazine.

Meanwhile the transportation, logistics and energy sectors will have to make the most structural changes to achieve higher energy efficiency – after already significantly reducing their consumption in recent years, the study found.

They will not only have to implement new technology and use new energy sources, but also fundamentally change their business practices much more quickly than previous adjustments, the magazine said.

And, after spending all this money, what do Germany get? Well, basically nothing. They won't affect the climate, their economy won't be more competitive.....

The West is Disappointed....

That's our response to Iran - Disappointment...

The West is "disappointed" over Iran's failure to respond positively to a UN-brokered nuclear deal, diplomats said in a statement Friday following a meeting of the UN Security Council's five permanent members plus Germany. However, no new sanctions were discussed during the meeting, according to an EU source.

"We urge Iran to reconsider the opportunity offered by this agreement ... and to engage seriously with us in dialogue and negotiations," the statement said, noting that Teheran had not responded positively to the proposal of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

An EU official said there was no mention of imposing further sanctions against Iran at the meeting. "These things are a matter of timing, and this was not the right time for it," said the official who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the matter.

They just don't get it. Iran has been stalling for years....

The EU looks ridiculous...

They pick a complete novice to be their foreign affairs minister...

The appointment as a little-known peer to become Europe's first "foreign minister" stunned and dismayed many in Westminster today, prompting a barrage of briefing against Britain's most senior female politician.

Gordon Brown looks likely to draw little credit from his Labour colleagues for installing Baroness Ashton of Upholland, the EU trade commissioner who has never held elected office, into the post of High Representative for Foreign Policy and Security.

"To think that we wanted Blair and we ended up with Cathy Ashton. It's such an indictment of Gordon," said one member of the government hours after the appointment was announced.

Lady Ashton emerged from the pack after European Socialist leaders confirmed their veto of Tony Blair but said that Britain could have the second job instead. As part of the horse trading Herman Van Rumpoy, the centre right's choice to be president, was given a virtual clear run once leaders sat down for dinner last night.

Speaking publicly for the first time this morning, she acknowledged that she was yet to establish her credentials for the job.

"Over the next few months and years I aim to show that I am the best person for the job," she told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

"I think for quite a few people they would say that I am the best person for the job and I was chosen because I am, but I absolutely recognise there are a number of candidates around, all of whom would have been extremely good, extremely able.

"I hope that my particular set of skills will show that in the end I am the best choice."

However her conciliatory tone did not prevent a welter of stories about her career as a loyal Labour peer.

According to one source, one of her first acts after becoming Labour leader in the Lords was to lock the door between her new office and the Chief Whip.

But, then Hillary Clinton became Secretary of State...

Fatah official accuses Israel of poisoning Arafat...

HSBC offers Sharia Banking....

Complete compliance with sharia...

An insult to the families of Marines killed in Lebanon....

Shame on the Obama administration for this....

On Veterans Day, Christine Devlin stood in the cold in Westwood for the unveiling of a new memorial to local soldiers lost overseas, including her son Michael, one of the 241 servicemen killed in the bombing of the US Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983.

Devlin is among 30 Massachusetts relatives of victims of the Beirut attack who have been fighting for more than a decade to get compensation for what many consider the first major terrorist attack against the United States. After a federal judge ruled in 2007 that Iran was liable for $2.65 billion in damages to be shared by 150 families seeking restitution, they believed they were on the cusp of victory.

But now, the Obama administration is going to court to try to block payments from Iranian assets that the families’ lawyers want seized, contending that it would jeopardize sensitive negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program and establish a potentially damaging precedent.

In a little-noticed filing in federal court, the Justice Department is arguing that giving the money to the victims “can have significant, detrimental impact on our foreign relations, as well as the reciprocal treatment of the United States and its extensive overseas property holdings.’’

The Obama administration’s position is a blow to those like Devlin, who is still waiting for some measure of justice for her son, who was 21 when Hezbollah terrorists rammed a suicide truck bomb into the peacekeepers’ headquarters.

“It is offensive that our government - the government that [the Marines] were fighting for, who sent them there - are against us collecting from Iran,’’ Devlin said in an interview this week. “I felt justice was going to be served, but so far it hasn’t.’’

“We can’t go on with our lives,’’ said Marlys Lemnah, 62, of St. Albans, Vt., whose husband, Richard, a Marine sergeant nearing his 20-year retirement, was killed in Beirut. “It’s not about the money. We need something tangible: responsibility and accountability. We will fight until we have no more fight left.’’

The lawsuit, specialists say, also demonstrates the enormous difficulty for terrorism victims in general to collect damages. Despite a host of court rulings in its favor and legislation passed by Congress to make it possible to sue foreign governments that sponsor terrorism, the executive branch has long resisted such payments, arguing that seizing the assets of another country could restrict the president’s ability to conduct diplomacy. There are also significant legal disagreements over what kind of assets can be seized.

“Two branches are supporting [the families’] position and the executive branch is directly trying to undermine them,’’ said David J. Strachman, a Providence lawyer who has represented numerous families in terrorism cases involving Iran, but is not involved in this case.

Even the courts have grown frustrated. Royce C. Lamberth, chief judge of the US District Court in Washington who ruled in favor of the Beirut families, wrote in a Sept. 30 opinion that “these case have consumed substantial judicial resources while achieving few tangible results for the victims.’’

Over the years, Iran, which since 1984 has been designated a state sponsor of terrorism by the US government, has been found liable for nearly $10 billion in damages for attacks on Americans attributed to the Lebanese Hezbollah and Palestinian terror groups including Hamas and Islamic Jihad that the United States says are financed and trained by Iran.

But in only a few cases have any Iranian funds been seized as compensation for the victims or their families - most notably from Iranian funds held by the US government before the two countries severed diplomatic relations in 1979.

Lawyers representing the Beirut families first went to court seeking damages in 2001, after Congress passed a law giving US courts jurisdiction over such lawsuits against nations that sponsor international terrorism.

Building the case took four years of depositions from victims’ relatives, US government officials, and even a former Hezbollah member, amounting to 30,000 pages of testimony, according to Thomas F. Fay, one of the lawyers representing the families.

The families’ first victory came in 2003 when the US District Court in Washington found that Iran’s Ministry of Information and Security helped plan and facilitate the Oct. 23, 1983, attack. Then, two years ago, the same court ruled the Iranian government was liable for the $2.65 billion in damages.

The families’ legal advisers and the Obama administration - like the Bush administration before it - disagree on how many Iranian assets could be legally seized in the case.

The Treasury Department estimates there is only $45 million in seizable Iranian assets in the United States and has argued in court that some of the property that the families’ lawyers have sought is outside the United States and cannot be legally seized.

“The total amount of judgments against terrorist states for exceeds the assets of debtor states known to exist within the jurisdiction of US courts,’’ an analysis published by the Congressional Research Service, which advises lawmakers, concluded last year.

But Fay maintains that he has identified as much as $2 billion worth of seizable Iranian assets, including securities held in a vault in New York that he said a senior US official has testified under oath is owned by Iran. Another source of funds he previously identified is an office tower in Manhattan, estimated to be worth $1 billion, that was among properties seized Thursday by federal prosecutors who assert they are owned by a foundation that is a front for the Iranian government

.

The sham of diversity......

Political correctness is killing us....

It has been 6-and-a-half years since the U.S. Supreme Court, in the case of Grutter v. Bollinger, upheld the legality of racial discrimination in university admissions for the purpose of realizing "the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body." Long-standing precedent requires the court to apply "strict scrutiny" to any claim justifying discrimination on the basis of race. Writing for a 5-4 majority, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor asserted that the court's "deference" to the "expertise" of the defendant in this case was sufficiently strict to meet this test.

But there is reason to doubt whether "diversity," as practiced by American higher education today, has any educational benefits at all -- never mind whether those benefits are sufficient to justify discrimination. Whatever its benefits in theory, diversity in practice is often anti-intellectual, replacing reasoned debate with ritualized expressions of phony emotion.

A kerfuffle at New York University (NYU) is a case in point. Last week, Tunku Varadarajan of Forbes.comwrote a column meditating on the Fort Hood massacre, which, he noted, appears to have been a religiously motivated "act of messianic violence." (Disclosure: Varadarajan is a friend and former colleague of this columnist.) In addition to his work in journalism, Varadarajan teaches at NYU's Stern School of Business, and his column set off predictable complaints from Muslim students and alumni. One alum, Haroon Moghul, wrote an essay at ReligionDispatches.orgin which he accused Varadarajan of "hate-mongering." He wrote that Varadarajan's column had caused him "pain" and "feelings of marginalization," and the headline and subheadline described him as "shocked" by Varadarajan's writing. Eventually the university president, John Sexton, was compelled to respond. While he correctly noted that it would be wrong for the university "to punish faculty officially for expressing such ideas," he also issued a declaration of disapproval:

"A journalist and NYU clinical faculty member has written a piece for Forbes that many Muslims find offensive. I understand how they feel -- I found it offensive, too. I am teaching Muslim students now, and I have taught them in the past; the portrayal of Muslims in the Forbes piece bears no resemblance to my experience; I disagree with the Forbes piece and think it is wrong.

"I say all this because as president I have not foresworn the rights I have as a member of the NYU faculty to challenge an idea that I believe is erroneous."

"This week, Rabbi Yehuda Sarna of NYU's Bronfman Center for Jewish Student Life sent an "URGENT Letter" to his email list:

"'I am writing to urge you to join me today in 'A Campaign Against Hate' celebrating diversity at NYU, commemorating the victims of the massacre at Fort Hood and responding to a recent article in Forbes magazine entitled "Going Muslim." The event, dubbed "Harmonyu," is being spearheaded by the Islamic Center at NYU. In my opinion, the article, written by an NYU professor, does not deal sensitively enough with the role and place of Muslims in America.'"

How's that for diversity? NYU's Jews and Muslims are ganging up on a Hindu columnist and accusing him of promoting "hate" -- an inflammatory charge anywhere, but especially on a university campus. Yet it's clear that Rabbi Sarna knows the charge is unjustified, since his actual criticism of Varadarajan's work -- it "does not deal sensitively enough" -- is so tepid.

Only community service????

This man threatened to kill his wife....

A muslim who threatened to kill his wife and cut out her tongue after she blocked an arranged marriage for their daughter has been banned from seeing his family.

In the first prosecution of its kind, Aurang Zeb has been convicted of breaching a Forced Marriage Protection Order taken out to stop him taking Rozina Akhtar out of Britain to marry.

But despite his chilling threats he escaped imprisonment and was given community service. Last night campaigners condemned the sentence, saying it sent out the wrong message.

'There's clear evidence that this man threatened to kill his wife, so how can he be given community service?' said Shazia Qayum of Karma Nirvana, a group which helps victims of forced marriage.

'He should have been locked up. The law just isn't strong enough at the moment, and it's time the Government made forced marriage a criminal offence.'

Zeb, a former builder, set up a marriage between Rozina and his brother's son while visiting their native Pakistan when she was just 19.

After returning home to Blackburn, his daughter decided she did not want to go through with it.

His wife, Parveen Akhtar, stepped in, explaining she had been pushed into an unhappy marriage to Zeb 24 years ago and did not want their daughter to suffer the same fate.

But he insisted Rozina had no choice, saying she was 'dishonouring' the family, magistrates heard.

Using laws on forced marriage introduced last November, police secured one of Britain's first FMPOs against Zeb, 43.

He was ordered to forfeit his passport and barred from taking Rozina, now 23, to Pakistan.

But though he moved out of the family home after February's ruling, he continued stalking them, Blackburn magistrates were told.

He would wait for Parveen in his car outside the house to accuse her of having an affair - which she denied, said Catherine Allan, prosecuting.

The father of two also harassed his son, Nasir Khan, almost running him off the road and demanding he attack Parveen and Rozina.

Did Holder and Obama make some serious mistakes....

They look like rank amateurs....

Remarks by the US president and Eric Holder, the Attorney General, forecasting a conviction for the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed could create unnecessary delays in the trial, analysts said.

Defence lawyers were sure to apply to have the charges dismissed after Mr Obama made an overarching effort to reassure Americans that the decision to put Mohammed on trial at a federal court in New York was sound.

"I don't think it will be offensive at all when he's convicted and when the death penalty is applied to him," the president said in an NBC interview on his tour of Asia, which ended late on Thursday.

Seeming to realise the potential for trouble in his answer, the president - a lawyer and former law professor - added: "What I said was, people will not be offended if that's the outcome. I'm not pre-judging, I'm not going to be in that courtroom, that's the job of prosecutors, the judge and the jury."

Testifying before Congress, Mr Holder said "failure was not an option" for prosecutors. "These are cases that have to be won," he said. Mohammed will be put on trial with four alleged co-conspirators in the suicide plane hijackings that claimed nearly 3,000 lives.

Charles Stimson, a lawyer and former Pentagon official who used to oversee detainee policy at Guantanamo Bay, told The Daily Telegraph: "The defence will file a pre-trial motion seeking to have the charges dismissed. It will say 'what juror is not going to want to now fulfill the president's and the attorney general's desire?' " Lawyers were also likely to use the comments in questions to jurors and to demand a wider jury pool, slowing the trial, and would repeatedly return to the president's and Mr Holder's comments in a bid to sway jurors.

"You are looking for that one juror, that lone wolf, who won't convict," he said. Federal courts require a unanimous verdict to convict any offence.

Calling Mr Holder "careless", he added: "This was braggadocio and puffery to convince the American people they know what they are doing, but it will create all sorts of legal issues that the defence will rightly try to exploit."

Jonathan Turley, a constitutional scholar, told MSNBC that the president knew his words were problematic.

"The great irony is that in defending this noble decision of his to give a fair trial to these men, he then crossed the line," he said.

Global warming leads to prostitution.....

Gee, I knew that....

Effects of climate change have driven women in communities in coastal areas in poor countries like the Philippines to risk dangerous jobs, and sometimes even into the flesh trade.

Suneeta Mukherjee, country representative of the United Nations Food Population Fund (UNFPA), said women in the Philippines are the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change in the country.

“Climate change could reduce income from farming and fishing possibly driving some women into sex work and thereby increase HIV infection," Mukherjee said during the Wednesday launch of the UNFPA annual State of World Population Report in Pasay City.

In the Philippines, small brothels usually pop out near the coastal areas where many women do sexual services to transient seafarers. Often, these prostitutes are ferried to bigger ships by their pimps.

Notice that this person said 'could'....

Is the UN trying to bar Anne Bayefsky....

Bayefsky is one of the most effective critics of the UN....

The United Nations detained an outspoken critic and booted her from its New York headquarters in what the woman, a human rights watchdog, is calling an effort to silence her opposition to the world body.

Anne Bayefsky claims that as retaliation for giving a two-minute impromptu speech defending Israel, her 25-year career of monitoring the U.N. is now in jeopardy — likely to be placed in the hands of a committee chaired by the genocidal regime in Sudan.

Bayefsky gets special access to U.N. meetings in her capacity as the director of a non-governmental organization, the Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust at New York's Touro College.

But the longtime U.N. observer has found herself in what she calls a "Kafkaesque" gray zone, where the U.N. confiscated her credentials, then denied to reporters that her access had been blocked.

"This is no accident," she told FoxNews.com, arguing that she is being denied access to vital meetings concerning her prime focus: defending Israel. "This is keeping [the U.N.'s] major critic absent during the heart of the year."

Following a vote Nov. 5 at the U.N. General Assembly, a microphone was set up outside the UNGA chamber for delegates to tout their endorsement of the controversial Goldstone Report, which accuses Israel of committing war crimes during its invasion of Gaza last winter.

Without an invitation, Bayefsky approached the empty podium to offer what she thought would be a counter-balance to speeches from the Libyan president of the UNGA and the Palestinian observer, who both supported the resolution.

"I didn't expect that there would be a problem at all," said Bayefsky, who noted that she and other NGOs have spoken there in the past without incident. (Archived U.N. video shows an official from the NGO Human Rights Watch speaking in praise of the U.N. at the same podium in May 2007.)

Bayefsky blasted the Goldstone Report and called the U.N. a "laughingstock" for singling out Israel and ignoring human rights violations committed by the terrorist organization Hamas against Israeli and Palestinian civilians during the three-week campaign in December and January.

"This is a resolution that purports to be evenhanded; it is anything but," she said of the document approved by the UNGA. "It is a travesty — it calls for accountability, and in fact what we see instead is impunity for the Palestinian side."

Soon after she finished speaking, Bayefsky was swarmed by four U.N. security guards, who brought her to their security office, confiscated her NGO pass and kicked her out of the building, she said.

Muslims step up efforts to ban blasphemy.....

This is a very dangerous road to travel on...

Islamic nations are mounting a campaign for an international treaty to protect religious symbols and beliefs from mockery — essentially, a ban on blasphemy.

Documents obtained by The Associated Press show that Algeria and Pakistan have taken the lead in lobbying to bring the matter to a vote in the U.N. General Assembly.

Such a ban would face great resistance in Western nations that enshrine freedom of expression as a fundamental right.

The countries that form the 56-member Organization of the Islamic Conference are currently lobbying a Geneva-based U.N. committee to accept its plan, a first step for it to eventually be put before the General Assembly.

If that occurs, Muslim countries and their allies in the developing world would stand a decent chance of mustering the simple majority needed in the General Assembly to adopt such a treaty.

Building in Gilo is fine...

I have no problem with Israel building more houses in Gilo...

Residents of Gilo on Wednesday reacted with surprise and anger to news that the US administration was dismayed by a government decision to approve 900 new homes in their neighborhood, questioning the relevance of the criticism while denouncing it unequivocally.

"It's just so ridiculous," said Silva, as she walked outside her home on the neighborhood's Rehov Shabtai Hanegbi.

"Anyone who is opposed to us building in Gilo obviously doesn't know the neighborhood very well. There are more than 40,000 people living here - it could very well be a city within itself. I never even thought that Gilo was up for discussion."

Others reacted with similar surprise, but also frustration at what they said was misguided American policy in an area considered by a wide consensus of Israelis to be just another Jerusalem neighborhood.

"Since when is anyone thinking about giving Gilo away?" asked an elderly man as he waited at a bus stop. "And if we're not giving it away, why on earth can't we build here? Obama is sitting all the way over there in the White House making demands, and really, what does he know about anything?"

Ron, a grocery store owner on Rehov Zecharia, labeled the American criticism "stupid," and said he was shocked to see the question of building rights in his neighborhood thrust into the headlines.

"When I picked up the newspaper today I couldn't believe it," he said. "The location they want to build in isn't even close to any Arab homes, and it has nothing to do with peace negotiations.

"Since when was Gilo on the table?" he asked. "To be honest with you, it's all very upsetting."

Gilo was a Jewish settlement going back decades - well before the establishment of the state of Israel. Gilo lies within Jerusalem's municipal boundaries and is geographically contiguous to surrounding Jewish neighborhoods that pre-dated the Six Day War.

Another mainstream press questions global warming....

Well, Der Speigel has noticed something...

Global warming appears to have stalled. Climatologists are puzzled as to why average global temperatures have stopped rising over the last 10 years. Some attribute the trend to a lack of sunspots, while others explain it through ocean currents.

At least the weather in Copenhagen is likely to be cooperating. The Danish Meteorological Institute predicts that temperatures in December, when the city will host the United Nations Climate Change Conference, will be one degree above the long-term average.

Otherwise, however, not much is happening with global warming at the moment. The Earth's average temperatures have stopping climbing since the beginning of the millennium, and it even looks as though global warming could come to a standstill this year.

Ironically, climate change appears to have stalled in the run-up to the upcoming world summit in the Danish capital, where thousands of politicians, bureaucrats, scientists, business leaders and environmental activists plan to negotiate a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Billions of euros are at stake in the negotiations.

The planet's temperature curve rose sharply for almost 30 years, as global temperatures increased by an average of 0.7 degrees Celsius (1.25 degrees Fahrenheit) from the 1970s to the late 1990s. "At present, however, the warming is taking a break," confirms meteorologist Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in the northern German city of Kiel. Latif, one of Germany's best-known climatologists, says that the temperature curve has reached a plateau. "There can be no argument about that," he says. "We have to face that fact."

Even though the temperature standstill probably has no effect on the long-term warming trend, it does raise doubts about the predictive value of climate models, and it is also a political issue. For months, climate change skeptics have been gloating over the findings on their Internet forums. This has prompted many a climatologist to treat the temperature data in public with a sense of shame, thereby damaging their own credibility.

"It cannot be denied that this one of the hottest issues in the scientific community," says Jochem Marotzke, director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg. "We don't really know why this stagnation is taking place at this point."

Just a few weeks ago, Britain's Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research added more fuel to the fire with its latest calculations of global average temperatures. According to the Hadley figures, the world grew warmer by 0.07 degrees Celsius from 1999 to 2008, and not by the 0.2 degrees Celsius assumed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And, say the British experts, when their figure is adjusted for two naturally occurring climate phenomena, El Niño and La Niña, the resulting temperature trend is reduced to 0.0 degrees Celsius -- in other words, a standstill.

Let's be honest - our climate models are still very, very crude.

The Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario...

Here's a horrible case from today's National Post...

Earlier this month, the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario (HRTO) awarded $5,000 to a black female newspaper carrier who insisted she had been arrested by police in early 2007 only because of her skin colour.

Early one morning, Sharon Abbott was delivering newspapers to homes in Toronto's west end. Police Sergeant Stephen Ruffino observed her car double-parked outside an apartment. Then he saw her re-enter the vehicle, turn left without signalling, drive without a seatbelt and swerve from side to side. When she got out again, Sgt. Ruffino tried to stop Ms. Abbott and give her a warning, but she failed to stop and identify herself several times. So he briefly scuffled with her, handcuffed her and detained her for 45 minutes.

Although the HRTO found no "conscious" racism on Sgt. Ruffino's part, it nonetheless concluded his actions were motivated by a deep-seated prejudice ... of which he was apparently entirely unaware.

The Tribunal also stated, without substantiation, that white people in authority have "an expectation of docility and compliance" from black people they encounter.

We guess we're behind on the latest politically correct dogma, but hasn't the traditional racist stereotype of blacks depicted them as violent, unpredictable criminals -- which is to say, the very opposite of docile and compliant? The world of official human rights has entered such a surreal la-la-land that its mandarins can't even keep it straight in their heads what stereotypes and prejudices they're supposed to be fighting.

In fact, we'll be honest: Not a single person on this editorial board had ever heard of the "expectation of docility and compliance" that is supposedly rampant in the minds of white people. It's almost like the Human Rights Tribunal... made it up.

Government officials inventing, promoting, and publishing brand new racist stereotypes. Your tax dollars at work, Canada.

Amen to the chopping off of hands...

It is very effective in fighting thieves....

Imam Mohamed El Sadi, the Muslim leader in Malta, believes chopping off the hands of thieves is a "deserving punishment".

Mr El Sadi made the statement during Monday's television programme Bondiplus, where he defended Sharia law, a judicial system used in some Islamic states and which can involve severe corporal punishments.

Contacted yesterday, Mr El Sadi stood by his comments and added the world was incurring the "wrath of God" through its permissiveness and destruction of spiritual and moral values, namely through the acceptance of "same-sex marriages, homosexuality, adultery and abortion".

Under Sharia law, such things are considered crimes that may even be punishable by death. When asked if the he agreed with such punishments he said: "Yes, of course. I agree with everything Islamic."

The TV show discussed whether crucifixes should be banned from classrooms. When presenter Lou Bondì asked Mr El Sadi if Muslims could be more tolerant and "light-hearted" in their reactions to parody and criticism, Mr El Sadi said Europe's permissive values were not necessarily ideal.

"Are same-sex marriages a value? What is this value? If in the future the majority of people want the right for men to marry cats, dogs or horses, will we make a law to fulfil these wishes," Mr El Sadi asked.

Will fighting climate change ruin world economies???

Here's Ian Plimer on Australia.....

Adelaide University professor of mining geology, Ian Plimer, said he feared Australia would become an economic backwater if due diligence was not part of developing climate change policy.

"My greatest fear is this country's lights will go out and the rest of the world will think no one is home - and they will be right," Professor Plimer said today.

"Australia will go broke and will become the laughing stock of the world if our political leaders keep making decisions on climate change based on ideology rather than on science.

"This country is heading down a very dangerous path of self-destruction if these people continue on their current path of ignorance and ignore scientific due diligence when making such important decisions about the future of this country."

Prof Plimer's comments came as he delivered the annual Essington Lewis Memorial Lecture in honour of a former chief executive and chairman of BHP.

He is one of Australia's most outspoken climate change sceptics and rejects the suggestion that increased levels of carbon dioxide are responsible for global warming.

He contends that water vapour is responsible for most of the so-called greenhouse effect.

"People have accused me of over-reacting and over-exaggerating my views on the topic but they are playing the man and not the ball," Prof Plimer said.

"I have not heard one of them base their opinion on science or intellect - and that is what needs to be debated.

"Our past is the key to the present and science does not operate by consensus, bullying, authority, government decree, fads or fashion, personal beliefs or vested interests."

Prof Plimer also used today's lecture to embrace the push for nuclear energy.

He said Australia had the potential to "rule the world" with its vast uranium resources and described nuclear power as clean and green.

"It's no secret, the more energy a country uses, the richer it becomes," he said.

"Yet in Australia we are told nuclear energy is dangerous and that climate change is human induced and dangerous.

"So on top of everything else it needs to contend with, the mining industry is now confronted by a new age of irrationality."

Job creation in Pakistan....

Gee, the Taliban is helping the economy...

An incessant spate of suicide bombings and terrorist attacks nationwide has virtually crumbled the already dismal economy, but has ironically created thousands of security and guarding jobs.

"I am lucky to get job in these circumstances, when thousands have been rendered jobless," Gul Nawaz, 24, told IslamOnline.net.

He is one of the thousands of new security guards hired by some 70,000 private schools across Pakistan fearing attacks in retaliation for the ongoing military offensive against local Taliban militants.