Arafat can fool all Europeans some of the time, but hopefully only some of them all the time. The German newspaper Die Zeit has printed an important and very thorough expose (here translated into English) of how European Union funding has directly financed hateful anti-semtic propaganda from the Palestinian Authority's Mosques and schools, and directly sponsored terrorism.
How has the EUrocrats and leading politicians responded to the growing evidence? So far, by ignoring it. Now there is a growing pressure to stop the funding of Arafat's corrupt terror regime, even as Europe is extremely reluctant to see him as anything but the Nobel Peace prize winning, smiling statesman in a keffiyeh.
It's all in there, a very thorough history of how Arafat has used EU money to conduct a terrorist war, had terrorists trained by the German federal intelligence service BND, and received full moral support from Europe to conduct his warfare against Israeli women and children. And of course the Karine A; the original smoking gun proving Arafat's personal involvement in terrorism.
The EU is proud of its policy of equidistance between the Israelis and the Palestinians. But while they criticize Premier Ariel Sharon's occupation policy, his settlement policy and his reluctance for peace, they ignore Arafat's turnaround. Nobody wants to destroy the image of the freedom fighter with the keffiyeh, as far from reality as it is. Some don't want to shatter the symbolic figure of the left, others don't want to lose their last negotiating partner. The outcome of this policy is the refusal to supply spare parts for Israel tanks, and at the same time the months-long refusal to reconsider Arafat's budgetary support. Not until this Tuesday afternoon [June 4] did the EU Budget Committe decide to suspend the payments. As long as the European Parliament doesn't affirm this decision, however, the money will keep flowing.
Europe's decade-long growing hostility towards Israel and cozy relationship to and support of Arab mass murdering dictators and terrorists is a demonstration of a deep flaw in the very soul of this continent.
"Never again," we said after Auschwitz, after Rwanda, after Srebrenica. Will we say the same thing about western Sudan in a few years?
Sudan's Islamic government and its associated militias are conducting a campaign of violence and outright genocide of non-Arab Sudanese, many of them Christians. New York based Human Rights Watch has documented 136 men from the Fur ethnic group rounded up and executed, on top of all earlier crimes.
Enter the United Nations Human Rights Commission, withholding the most damaging report about the situation in Sudan, and adopting a watered down resolution expressing "concern." The US voted against it.
"Ten years from today the only thing that will be remembered about the 60th Commission on Human Rights is whether we stand up on the ethnic cleansing going on in Sudan," US delegation head Richard Williamson told AFP news agency.
Worse even than farce, it's a shipwreck. Such is the distressing spectacle of the 60th annual session of the UN Human Rights Commission meeting from 15 March - 23 April in Geneva. For many years now, human rights activists have struggled to find words strong enough to describe the slow but constant drift of the UN's main organ that is supposed to defend these rights. Just when it seemed it could not sink any further than the Libyan chairmanship in 2003, the year 2004 brought the collapse to a new low.
Immigration has been one of the most controversial topic in Scandinavian politics for decades. Obviously, it is hardly controversial to accept immigrants from other western countries, it is the immigrants from foreign cultures that have caused controversy.
The implied argument that opposition to immigration was really rooted in racism (sometimes, no doubt, it was) has meant that serious debate about the topic has been rare, and heated quarreling has been the norm.
A new study by European Social Survey and in particular its popular interpretation illuminates how difficult this debate is, and the destructive and polarising role played by the media.
As much as 74 percent of the Norwegians participating said they think the crime levels are increasing in Norway because people from other countries who come to live here, according to a press release from NSD.
If Norwegians are compared with other countries, the survey indicates once again negative numbers as Norwegians are more sceptical to immigrants than their Nordic neighbours.
Note that the objective of this survey has been to map people's attitudes to immigrants, and to do that they ask an emotionally loaded question. But they also ask a question which has a very clear objectively correct answer. However, in the postmodern world, that doesn't matter. Your answer to such a question tells the readers whether you are negative to immigration (and, as many will interprete this, some form of closet racist), it does not measure how well you know the actual facts.
The objective reality is that immigrants, especially from the so-called third world, are far more likely to be criminals than native Norwegians. Knowing this does not make anyone a racist. And, neither does it mean he or she is necessarily negative to immigration. It is quite possible to support a certain level of immigration and accept increased crime as something we have to live with, or something we have to fight locally.
You have the right to your own opinions, but not to your own facts.
(Some statistics on immigration and crime in Norwegian. Statistics for Oslo 1998 had non-western immigrants the likely crime suspect in 55 per 1000; while the figure for was 27 per 1000 Norwegians Roughly, immigrants are twice as likely to commit crininal acts compared to native Norwegians.)
North Korean train blast: more questions than answers
North Korea's government is still mum about the train explosion in Ryongchon, but now information is leaking out from various sources, and it's a bit hard to know what to believe.
The International Red Cross says it has been told that "at least 54 people have died."
More than 1,200 people were injured, while 1,850 households were totally destroyed in the explosion in Ryongchon, 50km from China's border. [...]
According to figures relayed to him by Red Cross officials at the scene, the explosion also levelled 12 public buildings and partially destroyed 6,350 houses.
How do you totally destroy 1,850 households and 12 public buildings, etc, and kill only 54 people? There were presumably people in these buildings. That indicates the casualties are more in line with earlier estimates, which talked about 3,000 dead (or dead and injured).
The BBC's Louisa Lim, who is in Dandong, says everything appears utterly normal. Trains are running to Pyongyang as scheduled, suggesting the main line was undamaged in the explosion.
This appears to wildly contradict every other claim. A massive explision of the scale described earlier would devastate the rails. No trains would be able to follow that route 24 hours later. Is a rerouting possible?
Still, the disaster appears to have been corraborated from a number of sources. Astonishingly, most people in NK have not been told about this. Another worker's paradise fantasy that is not allowed to be disturbed by the ugly truth.
I just noticed today that Microsoft has made a European Union Flags Screensaver available for free download today. It "celebrates the European Union expansion on May 1st 2004."
Did chemical weapons in Jordan come from Saddam's arsenal?
I have no idea how credible the claims are, but this NewsMax article says that the cars intercepted in Jordan contained VX nerve gas, and that it definately came from Syria.
Quoting intelligence expert John Loftus:
"Syria dopes not make VX nerve gas - only Saddam Hussein did. So it looks as if now that Israeli intelligence and British intelligence were right - that Syria did indeed get a hold of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction just before the war."
Loftus said lab tests of the al Qaeda weapons would be key to establishing a link between the WMDs found in Jordan and Saddam's missing stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons.
I'll believe that when I have it confirmed elsewhere (more from same source).
John Lofthus has for a long time, along with DebkaFile and others, been claiming that Saddam's chemical weapons were taken to Syria shortly before the war. Neither of these have the best track record in making reliable claims about the Iraq war, at least not what we can confirm independently. Lofthus actually seems to have a fondness for, eh, unorthodox claims.
That said, if the cars taken in Jordan really contained nerve agents, they obviously came from somewhere. And it is more than scary if al-Qaeda has obtained these horrible weapons. Wasn't that what the Iraq war was about preventing in the first place?
