Following hard in Galloway's footsteps...

Arutz Sheva - Israel National News

Former Ku Klux Klan leader and Louisiana State Representative David Duke was in Syria on Monday to express solidarity with Damascus.

Amazing how the far left and the far right really do bring the political spectrum into a full circle...

Loving Self-Hatred at the New York Times

This article in the American Thinker outlines evidence for the hypothesis that the NYT has a long and constant history of anti-semitism. Lasky details accusations of hostility to jews, stretching from its downplaying of the Holocaust to its lack of reporting of Cindy Sheehan's rank bigotry and journalistic malpractice in reporting the Columbia student intimidation scandal. Fortunately, as the article points out, with circulation plumetting the NYT is likely doomed to become no more than one more voice on the internet.

Freedom of Information Conference in Tunisia

Yes, terrific plan - lets put the UN in charge of the internet... They've demonstrated such integrity recently that its really time we gave them more responsibilities.

Professor Cees J. Hamelink has announced he no longer wishes to be a personal adviser to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. The communications professor and human rights activist does not agree with the UN's decision to hold its second World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia. 'Press freedom and the freedom of expression are essential for the exchange of information. You are not taking the theme seriously if you decide to hold the summit in a country that so flagrantly violates human rights,' Hamelink told newspaper 'De Volkskrant'.
Expatica - Dutch Advisor to UN Quits

Deadly Praise

I bet Amnesty International is going to be hard on this case...

A court sentenced a teacher to 40 months in prison and 750 lashes for "mocking religion" after he discussed the Bible and praised Jews, a Saudi newspaper reported yesterday.
Al-Madina newspaper said secondary-school teacher Mohammad al-Harbi, who will be flogged in public, was taken to court by his colleagues and students.
Washington Times - Saudi jailed for discussing the Bible

Sony - Selling Sound with Secret Software

EFF: Breaking News

News that some Sony-BMG music CDs install secret rootkit software on their owners' computers has shocked and angered thousands of music fans in recent days. Among the cause for concern is Sony's refusal to publicly list which CDs contain the infectious software and to provide a way for music fans to remove it. Now, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has confirmed that the stealth program is deployed on at least 19 CDs in a variety of genres.

Apparently one of the CD's in question is called 'Suspicious Activity' ;-)

Yes, I'm the Real Shady

The challenges for Abbas only seem to keep mounting. Perhaps take a few of troublemaker 'police' officers and send them out as ambassadors anyway. It would make for an interesting clash:

"I'm the ambassador".

"No, I'm the ambassador".

"He's not the ambassador, he's a very naughty boy..."

In another challenge to Abbas, some of the PA's ambassadors in different countries are refusing to give up their posts to newly appointed envoys.

Early Aleph Bet

A new find of an ancient proto-hebrew inscription in Israel bolsters the case for a centralized state during the David/Solomon era. Of course, like other finds connected to biblical archaeology, it could turn out to be a fake...

The inscription was found in the context of a substantial network of buildings at the site, which led Dr. Tappy to propose that Tel Zayit was probably an important border town established by an expanding Israelite kingdom based in Jerusalem.

A border town of such size and culture, Dr. Tappy said, suggested a centralized bureaucracy, political leadership and literacy levels that seemed to support the biblical image of the unified kingdom of David and Solomon in the 10th century B.C.
A Is for Ancient, Describing an Alphabet Found Near Jerusalem - New York Times

Oslo In Retrospect Still Right Move

Haaretz reports that in spite of the disappointments, a majority of Israeli's still believe that Rabin was right to pursue the Oslo Accords.

A full decade after Rabin's murder, and with the ongoing violence in Israeli-Palestinian relations, we checked whether, in retrospect, the decision to enter the Oslo process appears sound or mistaken to the Israeli Jewish public. Half the respondents assessed the decision as right, 39 percent as errant, and the rest did not know. A segmentation according to degree of religiosity (self-rating) shows clearly that the greater the religiosity, the greater the negative assessment of Rabin's decision on this issue. Whereas 62 percent of the secular approve of the decision and 26 percent view it as mistaken, over 70 percent of the religious and ultra-Orthodox criticize it and only a small minority approves.

And the winner is...

The Iranian Association of Muslim Journalists! The receive the Grand Prrize for "Who will be the first to blame the Jews". Step on up AMJ, you win a copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, personally autographed by the Secret Leadership of the World Zionist Conspiracy.
Iranian journalists call for probe into unrest in France

“We suppose that the French government has carried out the recent discriminatory and anti-human rights acts under the influence of the Zionist lobby in France to limit the social and personal freedoms of the Muslims residing in the country, which is quite unacceptable on the part of a country that claims to be democratic,” part of the statement read.

Riots spread outside France

The likelihood of angry young muslims in other European countries following the lead of the French rioters was always high. It looks like its finally getting underway. Should riots spread across Europe to the extend they have been happening in France, it will become extremely dangerous. The European Union is incapable of speedily implementing a unified plan to quell such an uprising and would be forced to accede to offers of intervention from Arab leaders whether from outside of Europe, or who rise from within the movement. From that point European autonomy will be lost entirely. And it won't be long before somebody blames the unrest on the Jews.

Apparent copycat attacks spread outside France for the first time, with five cars torched outside Brussels' main train station, police in the Belgian capital told The Associated Press.

Five cars were also set on fire overnight in a working-class district of Berlin, and police said Monday they were looking into whether those responsible were inspired by violence in neighboring France.

Odd but who knows...

The article goes on to acknowledge that the rumour is likely nonsense. Still I bookmark it here in case of prescience.
Prince Charles of Arabia - Middle East Quarterly - September 1997

Prince Charles has often surprised his future subjects, but few shocks match the allegations of a newspaper article that appeared in October 1996:2

The idea of the Prince of Wales lugging around a prayer mat and turning to face Mecca five times a day sounds a tad unlikely - but, then again, so did confessing to adultery on prime-time television a couple of years ago. So perhaps no one should be shocked by the suggestion in a forthcoming book that Prince Charles has converted to Islam.

This claim was put forward by no less a personage than the grand mufti of Cyprus: 'Did you know that Prince Charles has converted to Islam. Yes, yes. He is a Muslim. I can't say more. But it happened in Turkey. Oh, yes, he converted all right. When you get home check on how often he travels to Turkey. You'll find that your future king is a Muslim.'

A New Andalusia?

Excellent story about the Paris Intifada by Amir Taheri.
Yahoo! News - WHY PARIS IS BURNING

So what is the solution? One solution, offered by Gilles Kepel, an adviser to Chirac on Islamic affairs, is the creation of 'a new Andalusia' in which Christians and Muslims would live side by side and cooperate to create a new cultural synthesis.

The problem with Kepel's vision, however, is that it does not address the important issue of political power. Who will rule this new Andalusia: Muslims or the largely secularist Frenchmen?

Reconverting Men

An interesting article about the roots of hostility toward host societies by children of muslim immigrants. A snippet:
City Journal Autumn 2005 | The Suicide Bombers Among Us by Theodore Dalrymple

A recent survey for the French interior ministry found that 83 percent of Muslim converts and reconverts (that is, secularized Muslims who adopted Salafism) in France were men; and from my clinical experience I would bet that the 17 percent of converts who were women converted in the course of a love affair rather than on account of what Edward Gibbon, in another context, called “the evident truth of the doctrine itself.”