Mick Hartley

Jew Hatred

Hitchens sticks it to the appalling Mel Gibson:

There's a lot to dislike about Gibson. He is given to furious tirades against homosexuals of the sort that make one wonder if he has some kind of subliminal or "unaddressed" problem. His vulgar and nasty movies, which also feature this prejudice, are additionally replete with the cheapest caricatures of the English. Braveheart and The Patriot are two of the most laughable historical films ever made. (Englishmen don't form picket lines outside movie theaters when "stereotyped," but still.) He has told interviewers that his wife, the mother of his children, is going to hell because she subscribes to the wrong Christian sect (a view that he justifies as "a pronouncement from the chair"). And it has been obvious for some time to the most meager intelligence that he is sick to his empty core with Jew-hatred....

The Party of God

A couple of items, to put into context the deaths at Qana. Here's one (via Solomonia):

In a letter to the editor of the Berlin left-wing daily Die Tageszeitung (TAZ) a Lebanese Shia explains how after Israel’s withdrawal from South Lebanon, Hezbollah stored rockets in bunkers in his town and built a school and residence over it.

I lived until 2002 in a small southern village near Mardshajund that is inhabited by a majority of Shias like me. After Israel left Lebanon, it did not take long for Hezbollah to take have its say in other towns. Received as successful resistance fighters and armed to the teeth, they stored rockets in bunkers in our town as well. The social work of the Party of God consisted in building a school and a residence over these bunkers! A local sheikh explained to me laughing that the Jews would lose in any event because the rockets would either be fired at them or if they attacked the rockets depots, they would be condemned by world opinion on account of the dead civilians. These people do not care about the Lebanese population, they use them as shields, and, once dead, as propaganda. As long as they continue existing there, there will be no tranquility and peace.

And this, from Michael J Totten:

The situation in Ain Ebel is unbearable. Thousands of civilians have fled to the village from nearby villages and more than 1000 rockets have hit the village, there is no more food neither clean water and diseases r spreading.

Now here comes the most sickening part: Hezbollah has been firing rockets from the village since Day 1 hiding behind innocent people’s places and even CHURCHES. No one is allowed to argue with the Hezbollah gunmen who wont hesitate to shoot you and i ve heard about more than one shooting incident including young men from the village and Hezbollah.

Urgent appeals have been done through phone calls from terrified people who wouldnt give out their name fearing Hezbollah might harm or even eliminate them.

This is the true image of our brave Islamic Resistance, putting the civilians and their homes as body shields to the Israeli bombardements.

Let the message spread and let those criminals move out of the village once and for all.
Free Ain Ebel from the terrorists !

Descended from Apes Pigs and Nazis

A couple of items from MEMRI, as the Lebanon crisis continues. Here's Syrian Deputy Minister of Religious Endowment Dr. Muhammad 'Abd Al-Sattar, on Syrian TV:

"Jihad is now incumbent upon each and every Muslim, Arab, and Christian. The time has come for the duty of Jihad." [...]

"Who occupied the Al-Aqsa Mosque? Who attacked the prophets? Who killed the prophets? Even the Koran depicts the people of Israel in a very sinister and dark way. Allah did not curse any people, not even the polytheists, not even the idol worshippers. The Koran did not curse any of these. The only ones who were cursed are those murderous criminals." [...]

"The Koran used terms that are closer to animals than to humans only with regard to those people. Look at the bestiality they demonstrate in the destruction of the Arab, Lebanese, and Palestinian people. This is why the people who were given the Torah were likened to a donkey carrying books. They were also likened to apes and pigs, and they are, indeed, the descendants of apes and pigs, as the Koran teaches us."

And Jihad Al-Khazen, columnist and former editor of the London Arabic-language daily Al-Hayat, has finally worked out what happened to all those Nazi leaders at the end of World War 2 - they emigrated to Israel:

"Ehud Olmert's government perpetrates definite Nazi practices against the Palestinians and the Lebanese. He is a young Führer, and his generals, like Dan Halutz and Moshe Kaplinsky, are commando generals. The question now is: Is it logical for the survivors of the Holocaust and their descendants to do what the Nazis had done to them?

"There is a psychological explanation for this: the victim impersonates the torturer. However, I have another explanation.

"Historically, six million Jews died in the Holocaust, and 97.5 percent of the Polish Jews were killed in the gas chambers, and by other means. My explanation is that the number of the Jews who were killed might be higher. All the Polish Jews might have been killed, too, and the Nazi political and military leaders might have realized since 1944 that defeat was imminent and, therefore, assumed the identity of Jews and then fled to Palestine as Jews who had survived the Holocaust.

"If this explanation is true, Israel's present political and military leaders are the grandsons of Nazi killers rather than Jews persecuted for centuries at the hands of Western Christendom."

"I know that my explanation may be implausible, but I cannot find any other logical reason for Israel's Nazi-like practices. The phrase 'Israeli Nazism' is exactly an oxymoron, as if we say, for instance, 'Sharon is a man of peace.'"

Warsaw and Tyre

Charles Moore in the Telegraph:

Sir Peter Tapsell is, if the phrase is not a contradiction in terms nowadays, a distinguished backbencher. He first entered the House of Commons in 1959. Noted for his grand manner, he is the longest-serving Tory MP.

At foreign affairs questions in Parliament on Tuesday, Sir Peter rose. He wanted Margaret Beckett to tell him whether the Prime Minister had colluded with President Bush in allowing Israel to "wage unlimited war" in Lebanon, including attacks on civilian residential areas of Beirut. These attacks, he added, were "a war crime grimly reminiscent of the Nazi atrocity on the Jewish quarter in Warsaw".

Mrs Beckett firmly rejected the premise of the question - that Mr Bush had permitted "unlimited war" - and moved on, but I found myself winded by Sir Peter's choice of words.

What is happening in Lebanon? After the kidnapping of two of its soldiers and the firing of hundreds of rockets against its people from across the Lebanese border, Israel is trying to crush the Hizbollah fighters who have perpetrated these acts. In doing so, it has also killed civilians. Some 500 people have died in Lebanon as a result.

What was the "Nazi atrocity on the Jewish quarter in Warsaw"? There were many, of course. But Sir Peter was probably referring to the events of April-May 1943. The Nazis had earlier deported 300,000 Polish Jews to Treblinka. As news of their fate reached Jews in Warsaw, they decided to revolt against further round-ups. For about a month, they resisted. They were subdued: 7,000 of them were killed and 56,000 were sent to the camps.

Sir Peter surely knew this, yet he chose to speak as he did. Here is a man who has been in public life for more than 50 years (he was an assistant to Anthony Eden in the general election of 1955), and yet he compared Israel's attack to the most famous genocide of the 20th century. What possessed him? [...]

Sir Peter has somehow managed to live on this planet for 75 years without spotting the difference between what Israel is doing in Lebanon and "unlimited war".

As well as being morally imbecilic, this narrative is the enemy of all efforts to understand what is actually going on in the Middle East. It is so lazy.

And here's today's Telegraph cartoon.

Heisenberg and Climate Studies

Here's an odd one, from the ecoEnquirer (via AL Daily):

The widespread practice of keeping animals as pets has often caused animal rights activists to campaign for the release of those animals. With public opinion largely against such a remedy, an animal rights group has now filed a lawsuit in federal court to require financial compensation to pets.

People for the Impartial Treatment of Animals (PITA) spokesperson Flora Freebird explained, "If people insist on the enslavement of animals, then those animals should be entitled to just compensation for the freedom they are denied as well as the work they perform."

While it is not clear what pets would do with the money, Ms. Freebird said that it is only a matter of time before science figures out a way for humans to communicate with animals on a verbal, cognitive level....

"It's time we stopped treating animals like animals", explained Ms. Freebird.

Hmm. I've heard of PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), but not PITA. Then there's the article in the same issue of ecoEnquirer on the levitating islands of the Bermuda Triangle, and the fisherman made to apologise to an eagle. And I wouldn't want to ignore the radical new approach to scientific findings advocated by Dr. Elizabeth Frost of the Paraphysical Research Institute in La Jolla, California, to explain the seemingly contradictory findings that the ice volumes in Antarctica are both increasing and decreasing:

"What we believe," Dr. Frost told ecoEnquirer, "is that a new paradigm is needed in scientific thought. Since mutually exclusive sets of scientific results usually are published in respected scientific publications, we suggest that they are both true. There is a higher level of physical understanding that must be developed, one where the Yin and Yang of scientific findings are reconciled, better understood, and appreciated."

As an example of this duality in scientific results, Dr. Frost mentioned the analogy of the equivalence of matter and energy originally proposed by Albert Einstein. "A change in one direction must be matched by a change in the opposite direction, in order to preserve physical harmony in the universe," noted Dr. Frost.

We asked Dr. Frost what her theory would then predict for the issue of rising sea levels, which is the main concern if Antarctica is indeed losing ice from global warming. Dr. Frost explained, "That is quite simple. The predicted result is that sea levels will both rise and fall, depending, of course, upon the perspective of the observer."

Dr. Frost also described ongoing research into the application of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle to climate studies. Her concern is that the large number of climate researchers that are now observing the climate system are actually changing the Earth's climate because of their observations, and believes this effect needs to be taken into account in computerized climate models.

I think she may be on to something there.

Big Weather

In keeping with the weird weather we're having (It's hot! In England!! In the summer!!!) here, via Secular Blasphemy are some big hailstones, and some shelf clouds.

Terrorists' Mums

With the Juba negotiations between the Ugandan government and the Lord's Resistance Army going nowhere, the Ugandan government are now trying to get LRA leader Joseph Kony's mum to talk some sense into him:

Nora Oting, along with other family members, is to be escorted to a bush camp in north-east DR Congo, to see her son for the first time in 15 years.

Southern Sudan vice-president Riek Machar, who is hosting adjourned peace talks, will take them there.

If successful it could mark a whole new approach to negotiating with terrorist organisations.

Whoops

Last week, after Floyd Landis's crack-up in the Alps, I expressed a certain lack of enthusiasm for this year's Tour, amidst all the doping revelations. The next day Landis recorded his stupendous win, and came back from a seemingly hopeless position. Now we've had the results of his doping test after that stage:

Tour de France winner Floyd Landis has given a positive drugs test, according to his Phonak team. The 30-year-old American, who claimed victory in the Tour de France on Sunday, has tested positive for the male sex hormone testosterone.

The positive test came after stage 17 of the Tour, which saw Landis record an epic victory after struggling on the final climb the day before.

Landis has been suspended pending results of his B sample analysis.

Forging Ahead

Once you've set up such a high-class counterfeiting operation, you might as well use it (via):

China's relationship with its former satellite North Korea is unravelling fast, underlined by reports yesterday that the People's Bank of China has frozen all North Korea's accounts.

South Korean parliamentarian Park Jin said he had learned on a visit to Washington that through its action the Chinese central bank had responded to persistent North Korean counterfeiting of its currency, the yuan.

A spokesman for the People's Bank of China yesterday declined to deny Mr Park's claim, saying, however, that the bank had not yet issued a statement confirming the claim. [...]

Last year, China also accounted for 53 per cent, worth $2.1 billion, of North Korea's total trade, while China's investment in North Korea grew to $133 million.

It is thus almost inevitable that North Korea should extend its global counterfeiting to include China, its most important economic partner, with which it shares a 1400km border -- more than six times that between North and South Korea.

China's currency, slowly appreciating against the US dollar, is also strong and circulates widely throughout the region, where once the greenback was the king of trade. And Chinese goods are highly attractive to North Koreans.

And Thus Korea Defeats America

Four short films showing the paradise that is North Korea, and their struggle against the US imperialist aggressor (via Japundit). Best played at high volume to capture that full juche feeling.