Tuesday, April 14, 2009
UN Security Council 'Condemns' North Korea
As China Confidential predicted, China and Russia have succeeded in blocking a meaningful United Nations response to the illegal North Korean ballistic missile test; and the United States Ambassador to the U.N. is trying to put a positive spin on the watered-down compromise--a Security Council condemnation instead of a new resolution. Clickhere for the story.US May Attend Anti-Israel UN Meeting
Appeasement of Iran, abandonment of Israel ... the beat goes on.
In a gesture to Iran, the United States is rethinking its planned boycott of an Islamist-influenced United Nations conference on racism that will be attended by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and is likely to condemn Israel and Zionism. Click herefor the AP report.Monday, April 13, 2009
Direct Action: In Praise of America's Elite Snipers
USMC Scout/Snipers:Obama Vows Not to End Piracy But to Halt its Rise
Addressing the press like a clever lawyer/community organizer, U.S. President Barack Obama signaled that there will be no unilateral U.S. military action against Islamist-supported African Muslim pirates. His carefully worded vow to "halt the rise of piracy" as opposed to ending already risen piracy--in line with his "imminent danger" rule of engagement that probably prolonged the hostage crisis--confirms that he is adamantly opposed to doing anything that will inflame Muslim sensibilities, as China Confidential has reported.
AFP reports:President Barack Obama vowed Monday to work with US allies to "halt the rise of piracy" off Somalia's coast, as the Pentagon warned there was no purely military solution to the seaborne scourge.
The U.S. spends $500 billion a year on defense, and the Pentagon--during the Great Recession--has the audacity to announce that there is no military solution to piracy. Incredible.
As the US public savored the daring rescue of an American captain, in which US Navy snipers killed three of his four captors, Washington grappled with ways to blunt the headline-grabbing threat to international shipping.
"I want to be very clear that we are resolved to halt the rise of piracy in that region," Obama said at an event designed to highlight investments in transportation infrastructure.
"To achieve that goal, we're going to have to continue to work with our partners to prevent future attacks, we have to continue to be prepared to confront them when they arise and we have to ensure that those who commit acts of piracy are held accountable for their crimes."
His remarks were his first in public on the rescue of Maersk Alabama cargo ship Captain Richard Phillips, held hostage aboard a lifeboat adrift off Somalia's coast in a harrowing five-day standoff.
IBD comments:Somali pirates drew $150 million in ship ransoms from some 200 of the 20,000 ships that pass through the Gulf of Aden in the last year. They have networks of informants in ports throughout the world advising of ships approaching. They have much of what passes for the Somali government on their payroll, forking over 30% of their ransom take to corrupt officials. They have links to the 64,000 Somali-born refugees in the U.S. Most disturbingly they could make common cause with terror groups like al-Shabab.
Click here to read the entire editorial.
The revenge threats signal that Somali piracy is now about more than "getting paid." It's about the next logical move from crime: war, with the aim of ruling the global sea trade on pirate terms.
That requires a stronger response than what's now seen from the world community, and there's a need to move fast.
President Obama has stated a global response is necessary, and that means the U.S. and its allies will have to show the will to take the war to the pirates onshore.
Ports that accept pirated ships must be destroyed, just as the Barbary pirate lairs once were. Coastal pirate villas must be bombed. Overseas, financing avenues will have to be broken, and collaborators in the civilized world must be busted.Just as the rescue was coordinated, so must this second stage be.US Petrified by Prospect of Pakistan's Fall
The Obama administration is terrified by the prospect of the collapse of Pakistan, an Islamist-leaning, predominantly Muslim country with at least 100 nuclear weapons.
So say China Confidential analysts. According to these experts, the administration fears (a) a complete collapse of the Pakistani government, and (b) Pakistan's pro-Islamist intelligence services installing a figurehead president capable of keeping up the pretense of still being somewhat sympathetic to the West and, most important, in control of the nation's nuclear arsenal.
A collapse of Pakistan would put India, Israel, the United States, and many non-Islamist Muslim countries in imminent danger.
China has long enjoyed positive relations with Pakistan. But Beijing would not be immune to nuclear Islamist terrorism from Pakistan, which, following an Islamist takeover, could take a serious interest in the plight of restive Chinese Muslims.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Pakistan's pro-Islamist intelligence services believe that they can effectively manage Al Qaeda and the Taliban in the event of tumultuous change in Pakistan. The cynical spies would be well advised to reconsider their position. The idea of manipulating right-wing political Islam dates to the late 1800s and the Great Game between Britain and Czarist Russia. Every attempt in this regard has failed miserably. He who rides the tiger is afraid to dismount.Fidel Wins; Obama Moves to End Embargo
Four days shy of the 48th anniversary of the disastrous, U.S.-backed Bay of Pigs invasion of Communist Cuba, the island nation's internationally celebrated despot, Fidel Castro, has lived long enough to see light at the end of the tunnel--the beginning of the end of official American opposition to his murderous regime.
AFP reports:US President Barack Obama on Monday made a landmark gesture to communist Cuba, lifting all curbs on travel and money transfers by Cuban-Americans to the island for the first time in three decades.
Intact for the time being.... China Confidential analysts say the Obama administration is determined to end the embargo. The President is being pressured to improve relations with Cuba by the left wing of the Democratic Party, including members of the Congressional Black Caucus, just back from a trip to Cuba.
The White House said the move was intended to encourage an expansion of democratic and political rights in Cuba and called on Havana to respond in kind in order to help ease decades of fierce antipathy between the bitter foes.
But the move left a longstanding US trade embargo largely intact, with the White House saying it was up to the Cuban government whether Obama's steps, which were in line with his campaign promises, would result in a thawing of chilled relations between the two sides.
Regarding the Bay of Pigs ... the invasion of April 17, 1961 led to the Cuban Missile Crisis, which resulted in a U.S. noninterference pledge in exchange for the removal of nuclear-tipped, Soviet missiles.
The historical lessons are not lost on Cuba's allies, Islamist Iran and Stalinist/Kimist North Korea.Islamic Banking Threatened by Global Crisis
Bad news for radical Islam, good news for the rest of humanity.
The global financial crisis is crippling Islamic banking.
Reuters correspondents Thomas Atkins and Asma Alsharifreport from Dubai:Islamic banks hit by the real estate downturn face a crisis that could include layoffs or more rescue measures if liquidity does not improve, with some players aiming simply to survive instead of grow, leading bankers said on Monday.
Continue here.Pakistan President Surrenders Region to Taliban
Pakistan's President Asif Ali Zardari signed a regulation Monday to put a northwestern district under barbaric Islamic religous law as part of a peace accord with the Taliban.
The agreement, tantamount to a capitulation to the Al Qaeda-connected clerical fascists, follows intense pressure from members of the president's own party and other Pakistani lawmakers to end the fighting in the Swat Valley, where Islamists have massacred and murdered at will to impose Islamic religious law on the inhabitants.
The perfidious pact will solidify the Swat Valley's position as a sanctuary for Taliban and Al Qaeda fighting to take back control of backward Afghanistan.
The deal will also further destabilize Pakistan, which could collapse in a matter of months, putting its arsenal of 100 nuclear weapons in the hands of Islamists.
Pakistan has told an influential visiting U.S. senator that Washington should not put conditions on a massive aid package expected for Pakistan.
The country's intelligence services have a history of backing Islamist groups operating in Afghanistan and the disputed Kashmir region. Pakistani intelligence officers are assumed to have been involved in the 2002 kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl, an American reporter for the Wall Street Journal.
In related news, U.S. Senator John Kerry, who supports the Obama administration's attempts to diplomatically deal with supposed moderate Taliban factions (Al Qaeda is off limits to the appeasement surge), met in Islamabad with Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani. His spokesman said he told Kerry that U.S. "aid with strings attached would fail to generate the desired goodwill and results in Pakistan."
Kerry, who heads the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has backed legislation that would triple U.S. non-military aid to Pakistan, to $1.5 billion a year for five years. The measure would also require Pakistan to make measurable progress in fighting terrorism and militancy.
Kerry also met with President Asif Ali Zardari in Islamabad.Times' Roger Cohen Again Defends Iran
One of the most mean-spirited and loathsome liberal pundits, the New York Times' British-born, blame-America-first, anti-Israel, self-hating, Jewish columnist, Roger Cohen, has again defended nuclear-arming, Islamist Iran on the newspaper's Op-Ed page.
His new missive on behalf of the missile-mad mullahs is so twisted that one does not even know where to begin a response. Suffice it to say that Cohen's use of the term political realism to rationalize appeasement of Iran cries out for commentary, as does his idiotic, World War II analogy.
The Times' columnist, who has made it his mission to defend Iran, asserts that the Bush administration, consumed by irrational ideology, mistakenly overlooked an opportunity to ally with the monstrous mullahocracy in bringing Afghanistan and Iraq under control following 9/11 and the American invasions of both countries.
"Imagine if Roosevelt in 1942 had said to Stalin, sorry, Joe, we don’t like your Communist ideology so we’re not going to accept your help in crushing the Nazis. I know you’re powerful, but we don’t deal with evil," Cohen says.
The man is dangerously ignorant, or deliberately deceptive. If the Bush administration deserves criticism for not forging an effective alliance after the worst-ever attacks on American soil--a modern-day Pearl Harbor perpetrated by clerical fascist Muslims--it is arguably for not joining with China and Russia to crush radical Islamist groups and replace Islamist regimes worldwide for the benefit of civilized humanity. In other words, the U.S. should have swiftly and mercilessly obliterated the Sunni Islamist Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, even if wiping out the enemy forces meant use of tactical nuclear weapons, and destroyed every suspect nuclear site and missile installation--and every Islamic Revolutionary Guard unit--in Shiite Islamist Iran.
Would Cohen and his fellow-traveling Islamist sympathizers have backed a true, World War II-style response to the Islamist sneak attacks of September 2001? The answer is clearly no, naturally. Instead, Cohen and his ilk counseled caution and influenced a well-meaning American President to declare war on "terror" instead of on radical Islam, while praising inherently violent and reactionary Islam as "peaceful and beautiful."
Back to political realism. This reporter's late, great professor, the preeminent American political scientist Hans J. Morgenthau, himself a German Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, must be turning in his grave. Known as the father of political realism--he literally wrote the book on the subject--Morgenthau taught that the most important lesson of the run-up to World War II was the failure of the European powers to correctly understand their enemy and its intentions. Germany could not be appeased, he explained, because it was committed to an imperialist foreign policy--meaning, in political realist (as opposed to Marxist) terms, a policy of overthrowing the status quo, or power relations among nations. Instead of preventing war, Morgenthau said, appeasement made it inevitable--on Germany's terms.
The same can and must be said--over and again--about Islamist Iran. It is imperialist to the core (not merely "colonial" as Israeli President Shimon Peres put it). It is committed to destroying Israel, driving the United States out of the Middle East, dominating the region and leading a global Islamist drive for supremacy. Attempts to appease Iran have failed and will continue to fail.
POSTSCRIPT: This reporter, a former full-time professional journalist, who has published, edited, reported, and written for American magazines and newspapers, instinctively dislikes boycotts of publications. But the time has come, unfortunately, to consider a total consumer and advertising boycott of the New York Times, which, as shown by the Cohen piece, other Op-Ed articles and editorials, and the paper's overall foreign coverage, has become the intellectual voice of appeasement of radical Islam--from the terrorists of Taliban-controlled Pakistan and Afghanistan to the Hitlerian Hamas and Hezbollah of Gaza and Lebanon, respectively, and the Islamist-linked pirates of Somalia.
Decades ago, in what nowadays seems like a pre-Internet Stone Age, a great American newspaper executive and editor, Phil Hochstein, blazed the way forward. As the founding principal owner and editor and publisher of the Jewish Week, Hochstein, who had helped build the Newhouse newspaper chain--he was for many years the nation's highest-paid newspaper executive--launched a boycott of the Times that hurt the paper but failed to change its policies. The times were different, and the Times was too powerful. But the times--and the Times--have changed. The paper is hard pressed and surprisingly vulnerable to pressure; it should be bought or buried.
Tuesday, 14 April 2009
Watered-Down Reaction to Illegal Missile Test
Navy SEAL Snipers:
Perfidious Pact Puts Strategic Swat Valley Under Islamic Law; Big Boost for Al Qaeda
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