February 10, 2010 – 11:51 pm
Tomorrow, February 11th, is the anniversary of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. According to this item at Iran’s Press TV website, the Dear Leader — no, wait a minute, I mean the Supreme Leader; I always get these totalitarian Axis Of Evil types muddled up — has an anniversary present to [...]
February 5, 2010 – 11:56 am
As I mentioned in the previous post, the Kafkaesque trial of Geert Wilders has been postponed while the schedule is worked out for the testimony of the few witnesses he will be allowed to call. It appears the trial will not resume until July at the earliest.
A discussion of all this is underway at View [...]
February 4, 2010 – 5:53 pm
Yesterday the judge in the free-speech trial of Geert Wilders ruled that only three of the eighteen witnesses Mr. Wilders had hoped to call to testify about the true nature of Islam will be permitted to appear, and must do so behind closed doors. There may now be a long delay while these appearances [...]
December 29, 2009 – 12:07 am
There was an article in yesterday’s Times about friction between European Muslims and their host culture. In it we find the following:
Youcef Mammeri, a writer on Islam in France and member of the Joint Council of Muslims of Marseille, says that the debates over minarets, burqas and national identity have angered many French-born Muslims and [...]
December 16, 2009 – 12:03 am
It is no easy thing for an American president to wage an unpopular war. To make war effectively requires both secrecy and resolve, and neither can be relied upon under the American system. The transparency of government and freedom of the press that stand as bulwarks against tyranny and corruption make secrecy difficult and undependable [...]
December 2, 2009 – 9:17 pm
I watched the President’s speech last night. It was not encouraging. It had something for everyone: escalation for the hawks; an exit date for the doves; the usual rot about “distorting and defiling a great religion”, to keep the Muslims off the streets; some bean-counting for the frugal; some American exceptionalism for the true believers; [...]
November 28, 2009 – 12:12 am
A recent item in the Long War Journal informs us that it appears that al-Qaeda is consolidating a Waziristan-style presence in Eastern Syria. Nothing happens in Syria without the consent of the Ba’ath Party, and the story does indeed tell us that there appears to be a working partnership in place between al-Qaeda and former [...]
November 8, 2009 – 2:34 pm
For those of you who were puzzled by the sudden withdrawal of challenger Abdullah Abdullah from the runoff election in Afghanistan the other day, the Asia Times has the answer: he did so under U.S. pressure, as part of a complex deal brokered by our Secretary of State during her recent visit to Pakistan. Mr. [...]
November 4, 2009 – 2:36 pm
On the front page of today’s Times is a story I’m surprised I hadn’t heard about before. It seems that the Iraqi security forces are using a bomb-detection gizmo that seems, quite obviously, to be nothing more than an expensive, tarted-up divining rod.
The gadget in question is called the ADE 651, and the Iraqis [...]
October 30, 2009 – 10:02 am
On the front page of today’s Times there’s a photo from Pakistan: Hillary Clinton — the West’s most powerful diplomat, an inspiration to women everywhere, and an essential symbol and embodiment of Western liberty, strength, and confidence — in a Muslim headscarf. Again.
Oh well, at least it will be a few [...]
October 28, 2009 – 7:10 pm
Over at Der Spiegel Online is an interview with Charles Krauthammer, in which he assesses Barack Obama’s stewardship, to date, of our nation’s affairs. I have to say I find precious little to disagree with.
Here are some excerpts.
Related content from Sphere
October 12, 2009 – 6:37 pm
Here, with a hat tip to Dymphna at Gates of Vienna, are some video clips that should be of interest to all: Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant testifying before the Canadian Parliament’s Justice and Human Rights Committee, as part of an inquiry into the inquisitorial powers of the Canadian Human Rights Commission regarding censorship of [...]
October 6, 2009 – 11:28 pm
President Obama is grappling with a momentous and extremely difficult choice in Afghanistan. It is a grim situation, and there are really no good options; there is also no consensus amongst his advisers, or the punditry at large, about what we ought to do. Reader JK, who always has his ear to the ground, has [...]
September 23, 2009 – 12:09 am
The situation in Afghanistan is very bad. If we leave, the consequences will be dire, not least for the many hopeful and trusting Afghans who have taken our side against the monstrous Taliban; those who have cooperated with us will surely be slaughtered. And if we give up the fight, it is not hard to [...]
September 18, 2009 – 11:35 am
The U.S. has decided to abrogate its agreement with Poland and the Czech Republic to deploy advanced missile-defense systems in those Eastern European nations. This sort of inconstancy is a well-known issue with democracies such as ours, where the internal balance of power shifts every few years, but the Poles and Czechs — [...]
August 5, 2009 – 11:37 pm
In today’s New York Times, Tom Friedman comments on the U.N. Development Program’s Arab Human Development Report, which first came out in 2002, and which has just been updated.
Apparently the news is not good; it seems that, for some reason, the Arab world is rather a depressed and backward place.
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Bill Clinton, who has always had a gift for picking up women, has done it again, even if this time he had to travel a bit farther afield.
I’m certainly glad that the two hostages, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, have been released, and I suppose it would be churlish of me not to give [...]
Tonight we have an item from a few days ago that offers, perhaps, a little insight into Kim Jong-il’s heir apparent, the youngest of his three sons. Apparently the boy may have been educated, under an assumed name, at a Swiss school a few years back.
It seems he really likes basketball. Story here.
Related content from [...]
When you have a lot of links on your blogroll, it’s hard to keep up with them all. One of the links on our sidebar is the website of military correspondent Michael Yon, who provides excellent independent coverage from the world’s strife-torn regions, some of them extremely dangerous and remote. Reader JK reminded us to [...]
We see in today’s news that Pakistan has announced that it is in contact with the fugitive Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, and would like to arrange negotiations between Omar and the US.
Have we learned nothing? What possible value could such negotiations offer? What conceivable compromise could there be between the Taliban and a secular [...]
French president Nicolas Sarkozy announced yesterday that the burqa — the head-to-toe garment worn by some Muslim women — is “not welcome” in France, and the French National Assembly is now preparing an inquiry into whether the enshrouding of women to shield them from the view of men other than their [...]
We’re talking about opinions, of course. Here are two takes on the situation in Iran: from Fouad Ajami, and from Pat Buchanan.
And if you have a little more time, and would like to be better informed about elections in Iran generally, and about that nation’s political structure, read this.
Related content from Sphere
As the situation in Iran devolves further into violence, we note that two Ph.D. candidates at Columbia have done some clever statistical work on the official election results, and have concluded that they are almost certainly fake. Story here.
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With a hat tip, once again, to reader JK, here’s a thoughful item by Leslie Gelb on how the situation in Iran may evolve.
It is heartening to see the momentum changing, for the moment at least, in the Muslim world. The excesses of the Taliban have provoked a vigorous response, it seems, in northwestern Pakistan, and there are reports that an al-Qaeda exodus to Yemen and Somalia may be beginning – which may in many way be more [...]
North Korea, which is by some accounts facing catastrophic internal crises as Kim Jong-Il attempts to engineer the transfer of absolute power to his youngest son, has pressed its policy of brinkmanship even further by sentencing two US reporters to 12 years in a labor camp for an alleged border violation.
Everyone is, as might [...]
I’ve finally had a chance to read President Obama’s speech to the Ummah. Mr. Obama is a remarkable orator, who knows very well that these early days of his presidency are a historically unique opportunity — and although there was much that I might quibble about, I will say that he rose to [...]
As has been the case for over thirteen centuries, East and West are still glowering darkly at one another across a deep cultural divide. One hopes always for harmony and rapprochement — themes that Mr. Obama will, I am sure, focus on in his upcoming speech from Cairo — and [...]
The link in the previous post was taken from a comment thread in a blog-post called to our attention by reader JK. The post, from the Federation of American Scientists’ Strategic Security Blog, is an attempt to assess the import of North Korea’s recent nuclear test (if that is indeed what it was).
Related content from [...]
The latest phase in the persecution of the brave Burmese dissident Daw Aung San Suu Kyi by Burma’s odious and repressive ruling junta is underway, and today testimony was given in this bizarre case by the American John Yettaw, who swam across a lake to reach Ms. Suu Kyi’s house on May 3rd, and spent [...]
The Pakistani army’s new offensive against the Taliban has been underway for several weeks now, and it does appear that they have applied considerable heat. In today’s Wall Street Journal we find an article by Fouad Ajami in which the noted Mideast scholar weighs in on the struggle for the survival of the secular Pakistani [...]
The government of Sri Lanka has announced that the leader of the “Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam”, Velupillai Prabhakaran, was killed in the sanguinary denouement of that nation’s long civil war.
This news will certainly come as a great relief to a great many people in that tormented island. Mr. Prabhakaran was a ruthless terrorist who [...]
We note that President Obama is planning an address to the Muslim world, to be given from Cairo on the fourth of June. I wonder what he will say. Probably it will be the usual bromides about respect, with reassurances that we still regard the the virulent form the religion has taken in a great [...]
The dazed and tottering government of Pakistan, humiliated by its attempt to appease the Taliban in Swat, is now making a conspicuous display of indignation. It has nullified the pigeonhearted agreement it signed with the vile jihadists, and has instructed the army to head back up there and have another go.
They will no doubt push [...]
In an update to yesterday’s story, CNN is now reporting that the hapless Samantha Orobator will not face the death penalty after all, because she is pregnant. She became pregnant while in custody, which for a 20-year-old British woman facing capital charges in a Laotian prison probably does not mean that she fell in love [...]
April 30, 2009 – 10:33 am
We note that women in Kenya have decided to exert political pressure on a fractious and argumentative coalition government by organizing a nationwide sex strike.
The “soft power” of women is often overlooked in the political and strategic calculation of powerful men, but as I have mentioned elsewhere, if properly organized, a Ghandi-style female satyagraha [...]
There are those of us who would prefer that our president not seem quite so eager to be pals with absolutely everyone. The spectacle of Mr. Obama schmoozing gaily yesterday with the grotesque Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez — a man who is no friend of our nation or culture, and who has missed [...]
April 17, 2009 – 10:25 am
For those who like to keep an ear to the ground, Information Dissemination, as always, offers some noteworthy items.
First, it’s beginning to look like al-Qaeda may be putting the squeeze on Somali pirates. And big things may be afoot once again in the Caucasus; it looks like Russia is mobilizing.
Related content from Sphere
April 13, 2009 – 10:04 pm
In case there was any doubt in anyone’s mind about the Taliban’s victory over the Pakistani government in the northwestern valley of Swat, President Zardari today formalized his nation’s abject surrender with a signed document.
This means that the imposition of the Taliban’s barbaric totalitarian theocracy, a central feature of which is the sexually perverted and [...]
The US Navy SEALs have rescued Captain Phillips. He jumped overboard for a second time, and the SEALs (probably, according to my sources, with their “ears on the lifeboat’s hull” and using Drager rebreathers to avoid showing bubbles) shot and killed the pirates in the lifeboat before they could recapture him as they did before.
The [...]
There are new facts emerging in the Maersk Alabama hijacking. Apparently an 18-man guard detail is aboard, as reported here and here.
Interested observers may also find this item relevant. And as always, InfoDiss is following the story attentively, here, here, and, with informative background analysis, here.
Related content from Sphere
Readers have probably heard by now that a US-flagged Maersk ship has been hijacked by Somali pirates. This is surprising, to say the least; it seems odd that a ship of the Maersk line, which provides logistical services to many U.S. government agencies, would be operating in these perilous waters without adequate security, indeed without [...]
We note that a British-owned ship has just been hijacked by pirates in the Gulf of Aden. This bears watching: the British, however much their star may have fallen in the world, do not fool around when it comes to matters naval, do not look kindly upon piracy, and will not have forgotten that it [...]
In an important step toward bringing the noble and vitalizing spirit of Juche to faraway worlds, the peaceable space program of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea took a great leap forward today with the launch of a mighty rocket, carrying a glorious payload of prosperity and self-reliance into space.
Meanwhile, the running dog lackeys of [...]
March 17, 2009 – 11:14 pm
I am more than a little concerned about our new president’s stewardship of the vital friendship between the U.S. and Britain. Mr. Obama gave Prime Minister Gordon Brown the cold shoulder during his recent visit, saying he was “too tired” for a state dinner, and later a Foggy Bottom staffer blithely dismissed the snub, saying [...]
From the AP comes a fine example of the moral rectitude of Islamic law. A woman from Iran was attacked with acid by a suitor she rejected (which seems, by the way, to be an increasingly popular way to brutalize Muslim females these days, and I expect Middle-Eastern acid merchants are doing well even in [...]
Anyone who has been paying any attention to world affairs will by now have heard of the traffic “accident” Friday in which Zimbabwean Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai was injured, and his wife killed.
Tsvangirai has been a thorn in dictator Robert Mugabe’s side since leaving the ruling party, Zanu-PF, in the early 1990’s. Since then he [...]
February 14, 2009 – 9:58 pm
Tomorrow is a big day in Venezuela: a vote is scheduled on a term-limits referendum intended to assist the swaggering egomaniac Hugo Chávez in the further consolidation of his fascist dictatorship.
It appears that “El Comandante” is slightly in the lead. It will be interesting to see what happens if he loses.
Related content [...]
February 13, 2009 – 12:43 pm
Things are not going well in Afghanistan. A resurgent and emboldened Taliban has been harrying the Karzai government and its Western allies with renewed truculence, even going so far as to make a brazen attack this week in the heart of Kabul. Meanwhile the Russians, who have for centuries vied with the West for dominant [...]
February 10, 2009 – 8:35 pm
Apparently the British government has now refused entry to the Dutch politician Geert Wilders. Wilders, who has made a name for himself with his outspoken criticism of Islam, and by his vociferous opposition to its increasing presence and influence in the dangerously multiculturalist West, has lived under police protection in Holland since the release of [...]