So little has really changed since 9-11-2001

 Mark Steyn recalls a UN Conference held in South Africa just before that fateful day.

There is no great issue facing the world today that can't be made worse by having a UN conference on it. But even so the grand comedy in Durban this week has effortlessly surpassed all expectations....

Fidel Castro, hailed by South Africa's foreign minister as leader of 'the most democratic country in the world'; there was the Organisation of African Unity's demand that reparations for the Hutu slaughter of the Tutsis should be paid - by the Americans, naturally; there were the major disagreements on the more general reparations front between the African-American bloviators, who wanted whitey's payments to go to individuals, and African presidents, who thought it would be more convenient if the West just dropped off one big cheque at the presidential palace ...

Even so, some of you may be wondering how it is that when one Rwandan tribe wages genocide on another Rwandan tribe it's the Yanks who get sent the bill for compensation. The OAU's argument is that the ultimate blame for the Hutu attack on the Tutsis rests with Washington for not intervening earlier. Therefore, the UN must persuade the US to acknowledge its responsibility by paying reparations to 800,000 Tutsis. Rwanda is a sovereign nation, and the United States has no connection with it, historic or present. Nevertheless, when one bunch of Rwandans decides to hack up another bunch of Rwandans, it's Uncle Sam who's supposed to pony up.

And just as in 2001, the American Left is ready and willing to take money from American workers, to demand that farm boys die in foreign wars, to pay for the sins, the greed, and stupidity of the Ruling Class. 

Time for someone else to #FundUNRWA

This is why the Trump administration is a new broom that sweeps away the old.

The Trump administration recently announced that it will “reassess” American aid to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine (UNRWA). That’s the agency charged with overseeing Palestinian refugees displaced in 1948 and, of equal importance, their descendants. The United States will now voluntarily contribute to the agency only $60 million rather than the expected contribution of $360 million, with all subsequent funding subject to further consideration...

And UNRWA is hardly the “relief” and “education” organization portrayed in Western and Arab media. During Israel’s 2014 war with Hamas, its hospitals and schools were commonly used to stockpile Hamas weapons and explosives. The agency “strongly condemned” the use of its hospitals and schools in this way, but these condemnations somehow didn’t stop the practice. In the past two years, moreover, illegally built tunnels have been found beneath UNRWA schools in Gaza. By propping up the UNRWA, the United States was helping to fund anti-Israel terrorism while at the same time helping to fund Israel’s defense against that terrorism.

Great News! Freedom-Hating Lesbianic Socialist Harpies From The UN Still Hate America

The three horsewomen of the feminist apocalypse say they were mystified as to why women seem to like America. So let me spell it out for them. America is still the land of opportunity for women and men from all nations. Any Polish and Costa Rican woman would gladly come to America for a better life, and, although it pains me to say it, I suspect English women will not be far behind.

Because third-wave feminism believes that all gifts must flow from state coffers, it cannot appreciate why brave, hard-working female doctors, entrepreneurs and others might want to come to a place that will reward the value they contribute to the economy.

They’d rather America was like Sweden, where they say all the right things about feminism, even if uncontrolled immigration and lies about crime have made Malmö the rape capital of Europe, as hordes of Muslim migrants rape Swedish girls with impunity. Just as long as every child gets a free “MEN SUCK!” leaflet from the government.

I understand the Grand Grievance Tour continues, and these three stunning and brave specimens are now off to speak to Obama’s people about what a terrible place America is. (Obama no doubt agrees.) So for now we’ll have to warm ourselves with anticipation at the publication of their full report in June 2016 — just in time for liberal politicians to shove the dodgy stats, special pleading and professional victimhood down the necks of so-called “low-information voters.”

Anyway, as I say, well done America. If the UN hates you, you’re on the right track.

Will Obama Join Islamofascist Out to Destroy Israel in the UN ?

OBAMA PLOTS TO BYPASS BIBI WITH UN ACTION

Mark Steyn: "Behead All Those Who Insult Free Speech"

Encouraged by President Obama’s and Secretary Clinton’s prostrations before the howling mob, the U.N.’s No. 2 honcho explains free speech:

Free speech is a “gift given to us by the [Universal] Declaration of Human Rights,” said Deputy Secretary General of the United Nations Jan Eliasson during a press conference on October 2nd at UN headquarters in New York.  It is “a privilege,” Eliasson said, “that we have, which in my view involves also the need for respect, the need to avoid provocations.”

Free speech is a gift given to us in 1948 by U.N. officials? Who knew?
The only appropriate response of free-born peoples to such a statement is: **** off, ******. Free speech is not in the gift of minor Swedish timeserving hack bureaucrats, either to grant or withdraw.

Read Mark Steyn 

Barack Obama, Global Has-Been

Brett Stephens in the Wall Street Journal recounts the failures of Obama's foreign policy:

Consider the record. His failed personal effort to bring the 2016 Olympics to Chicago. His failed personal effort to negotiate a climate-change deal at Copenhagen in 2009. His failed efforts to strike a nuclear deal with Iran that year and this year. His failed effort to improve America's public standing in the Muslim world with the now-forgotten Cairo speech. His failed reset with Russia. His failed effort to strong-arm Israel into a permanent settlement freeze. His failed (if half-hearted) effort to maintain a residual U.S. military force in Iraq. His failed efforts to cut deals with the Taliban and reach out to North Korea. His failed effort to win over China and Russia for even a symbolic U.N. condemnation of Syria's Bashar Assad. His failed efforts to intercede in Europe's economic crisis. ("Herr Obama should above all deal with the reduction of the American deficit" was the free advice German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble offered this year.)

President Barack Obama.

In June, the Pew Research Center released one of its periodic surveys of global opinion. It found that since 2009, favorable attitudes toward the U.S. had slipped nearly everywhere in the world except Russia and, go figure, Japan. George W. Bush was more popular in Egypt in the last year of his presidency than Mr. Obama is today.

The American people will decide in less than 80 days  whether to make Obama's failures their own.  Stephens:

I tend to think that the buzz about American decline mistakes the mediocrity of the president for the destiny of the nation. But we have an election on, the outcome of which will decide whether one man's mediocrity becomes a whole nation's destiny. Mr. Obama is now the world's leading has-been, trying to revive a career on the strength of a talent that was greatly exaggerated to begin with. But a country that's willing to reward mediocrity with a second chance risks becoming a has-been itself.

I'm too young to be a has-been.

The UN's Plan for You: Poor, Cold and Smelly.

Via Small Dead Animals: Come Back, al-Qaeda

You missed a spot.

If you think al-Qaeda's objective of taking over and imposing a dark-age on the world in the name of Allah was a one-off, the UN's plan for you is eerily similar in the name of Climate Change. Among other things they think that living on $10,000 per year is plenty. And if that means that air conditioning and hot water for showers is out, that's exactly the objective. As for heat in winter, get out your sweaters and long johns because your energy ration won't heat your house. However, I have the funny feeling that the "energy czars" at the UN will have the resources they need (the heat, the light, the A/C, the food, limos and the private jets) to control you, because they work soooo hard for you.

James Delingpole at the UK Telegraph

What’s amazing about this stuff – and believe me, there’s plenty more where this came from – is the unblushing shamelessness with which it advocates this economic insanity. Here is the world’s most powerful intergovernmental institution essentially arguing for the destruction of the global economy, enforced rationing, Marxist wealth redistribution, greater regulation, the erosion of property rights and global governance by a new world order of technocrats and bureaucrats. And being so upfront about it they actually issue press releases, telling us what they’re planning to do and encouraging us to write about it.

This is the thing that amazed while I was researching my book Watermelons. If the global green movement is any kind of conspiracy, then it’s a conspiracy in plain sight. The people in power who are advancing its agenda – be it President Obama’s house eco-activists John Holdren and Carol Browner, Green MP Caroline Lucas, and all those faceless apparatchiks at the UN and the EU – make absolutely no bones about what it is that they want to do to save the world from the peril of “Climate Change”: the end of Industrial Civilisation.

One of the objectives of the Left (and by that I mean especially the Obama administration) is to transfer more power to the UN and other transnational organizations. The adventure in Libya is exhibit "A," a NATO effort where the US military was essentially "lent" to that organization for the purpose of aiding a revolution in that country.

But these international organizations are essentially run by an assembly of kleptocrats whose primary objective is to translate their power over their dirt-poor countries into power over the entire world.  This press release by the UN is an excellent example.

DSK and the IMF's Culture of Corruption

From the Wall Street Journal ...

The IMF was well aware of Dominique Strauss-Kahn's (DSK) treated the IMF female staff is his personal harem.

"Despite my long professional life, I was unprepared for the advances of the managing director of the IMF," wrote Piroska Nagy, an IMF staff economist whom Mr. Strauss-Kahn pursued until she agreed to a brief affair in 2008. "I did not know how to handle this," she added in a letter to a law firm investigating the affair. "I felt, 'I was damned if I did and damned if I didn't.'"

This letter apparently did not influence the board of the IMF which gave DSK a clean bill of health in 2008.

Ms. Nagy's letter—which added that Mr. Strauss-Kahn was "a man with a problem that may make him ill-equipped to lead an institution where women work under his command"—has received considerable media attention in recent weeks, and rightly so. But perhaps its real interest lies in the way none of Ms. Nagy's points seem to have found their way into the firm's October 2008 report to the IMF Executive Board.

On the contrary, the report, conducted by three lawyers at the firm of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, concluded that "there is no evidence that the MD [managing director], either expressly or implicitly, threatened the female staff member in any way to induce her to engage in the affair or to keep it confidential." The IMF board gave Mr. Strauss-Kahn merely a wrist slap for a "serious error of judgment," along with board assurances that the episode would "in no way affect the effectiveness of the Managing Director in the very challenging and difficult period ahead."

And that famous watchdog press? Nothing to see folks, move along.

Compare that to the treatment that Paul Wolfowitz got.

Remember that Mr. Wolfowitz's alleged sin was that he had arranged a job transfer, along with a substantial raise, for his companion Shaha Riza, a bank employee at the time Mr. Wolfowitz took the helm in 2005.

But any suggestion that favoritism had been involved quickly fell apart when it came to light that Mr. Wolfowitz had disclosed the relationship with the bank's board before taking the job; that he had sought to recuse himself from the matter; that the bank's ethics committee had forbidden him from recusing himself; and that the committee had also directed him to arrange a promotion and pay raise for Ms. Riza "on the basis of her qualifying record" and out of concern for the "potential disruption" to her career for a conflict of interest that was not of her own making.

So let's see, Wolfowitz was told by the board of the IMF to promote his girlfriend and give her a raise, for which he was smeared in the press and forced to resign.

The problem appears to be with the IMF itself.

...his sexual pursuit of underlings forgiven, Mr. Strauss-Kahn was treated in the media as a hero for pushing vast sums on bankrupt economies like Greece. Even now, with the bailouts failing and their mastermind on bail, he is seen as a visionary brought low by his fatal flaw.

Yet what ought to be clear is that the reason Mr. Strauss-Kahn was so popular within the IMF (female company excepted) was that his own behavior was so in tune with the ethos of the institution. Here is a place where power can be exercised without electoral accountability, privileges can be enjoyed without scrutiny, salaries can be claimed without taxes, and other people's money can be spent with abandon.

The IMF is not the only international organization that is a law unto itself, that rewards its employees handsomely with tax free pay and perks, and that appears to be unaccountable to anyone. The UN is such an organization. The size of these rogue institutions has metastasized since the 1950s and it's time to send some of them riding into the sunset.

UPDATE:  More is being released from the letter that Piroska Nagy wrote.  Here's an interesting tidbit: 

“I believe that Mr. Strauss-Kahn abused his position in the manner in which he got to me."


“I provided you the details of how he summoned me on several occasions and came to make inappropriate suggestions to... I did not know how to handle this; as I told you I felt that I was ‘damned if I did and damned if I didn’t.’"


"[DSK is a] brilliant leader with a vision for addressing the ongoing global financial crisis. He is also an aggressive if charming man..."

Despite being treated as a part of DSK's harem, a disposable peace of meat, she calls her seducer brilliant and charming. She's a perfect member of the IMF.

I'm from the UN and I'm here to kill you.

Laboratory tests have confirmed that Nepalese UN Peacekeepers accidentally caused the death of 5,000 Haitians from cholera. 

A war to enable other wars.

Mickey Kaus on Libyan War = World Government? Not that there’s anything wrong with it.

It’s one thing for a supra-national authority–the U.N.–to authorize a war against someone who has committed cross-border aggression, or who has repeatedly violated earlier U.N. resolutions left over from a previous war. That was the case with Saddam in 2002–in theory.*

It’s another to let the U.N. authorize a war on what Obama calls ”humanitarian grounds”–whether it’s to stop actual killings or some less severe variety of “human rights violation.”

So far, atrocities in Libya are a little light on the ground. Sure, K. Daffy made some blood curdling threats, but how does the insurrection  in Libya compare in bloodshed to some of the countries in which the UN has not interfered?

But I would think it would deeply trouble those mainstream, non-libertarian conservatives who’ve been fretting about world government for decades. Now that world government is finally arriving, only Ben Stein seems alarmed. (I may have missed others.)

And how do non-Conservative Libertarians feel about it?

UN to appoint Earth contact for aliens

This is no more surprising that having a comedian testify at a congressional hearing.

"When we do, we should have in place a coordinated response that takes into account all the sensitivities related to the subject. The UN is a ready-made mechanism for such coordination.”

Professor Richard Crowther, an expert in space law and governance at the UK Space Agency and who leads British delegations to the UN on such matters, said: “Othman is absolutely the nearest thing we have to a ‘take me to your leader’ person.”

WHO criticizes Amnesty report into NKorea health

The debate about health care in the US always involves statistics from international organizations and one of the most frequently cited is the World Health Organization (WHO), an arm of the United Nations (UN).  In its latest report it ranks the US #37, behind #1 France, #2 Italy and #3 Andorra.  These "unbiased" statistics are always cited to close debate about whose health care system reigns supreme; anyone who disagrees is accused of being uninformed, biased or in the pocket of Big Pharma.

Its spokesman, Paul Garwood, has now come out in defense of the North Koran medical system.  He has to because his boss was recently quoted as delivering effusive praise of health care in the North: 

The issue is sensitive for WHO because its director-general, Margaret Chan, praised the communist country after a visit in April and described its health care as the "envy" of most developing nations.

Amnesty International, on the other hand, describes North Korean health care this way ...

Amnesty's report on Thursday described North Korea's health care system in shambles, with doctors sometimes performing amputations without anesthesia and working by candlelight in hospitals lacking essential medicine, heat and power. It also raised questions about whether coverage is universal as it — and WHO — claimed, noting most interviewees said they or a family member had given doctors cigarettes, alcohol or money to receive medical care. And those without any of these reported that they could get no health assistance at all.

WHO learned from Obama after the election of Scott Brown to the "Kennedy Seat" in Massachusetts.  Remember how he said the election of Brown confirmed the fact that the people were angry about Bush and that's why Brown was elected?  So WHO ("North Korea is the envy of the developing world") and Amnesty ("North Korean medical care is a shambles") were really saying the same thing.

Garwood and WHO spokeswoman Fadela Chaib insisted that Amnesty's report was complementary to their boss' observations, and sought to downplay Chan's praise for North Korea. Instead, they focused on the challenges she outlined for North Korea, from poor infrastructure and equipment to malnutrition and an inadequate supply of medicines.

In the end they gave the game away.  Just as CNN whitewashed Saddam Hussein's Iraq just to maintain access to that country, WHO does the same for North Korea.

Asked Friday what countries were envious of North Korea's health, Chaib said she couldn't name any. But she highlighted the importance of maintaining the health body's presence in the country, where officials do their best to save lives despite "persisting challenges."

"We are an organization dealing with member states, and we respect the sovereignty of all countries," Chaib said. "We need to work there to improve the lives of people."

H/T Bloodthirsty Warmonger

The next time you hear WHO cited as the definitive word on health care in the world, keep this in mind: WHO has told us whose medical system it admires most and is a model for the developing world.

NRA News: UN Doomsday Treaty With Ginny Simone

This is worth watching ...



The people who wish to deprive you of your individual rights to defend yourself are wealthy, upper class, influential intellectuals. They can afford their own protective forces. They can demand and get real-time police protection. For the vast majority, police are a reactive force who come to the crime scene after your are victimized.

I was recently burglarized in broad daylight, the thieves carrying off a flat screen TV, a favorite of the current crop of burglars. The police showed up about 15 minutes after I called on arriving home. At least 5 officers eventually showed up at my home over a two hour period after my discovery. They were polite, searched the house for the burglars who were long gone, took some pictures and dusted for prints. There is zero chance that I will get my TV back. But that's what police do for the ordinary citizen: take notes and records after the crime has been committed and the perpetrators have left. Sometimes the criminal is particularly stupid and leaves witnesses; but most crimes are never solved and police are not responsible for preventing crimes. The best the can hope for is catching the criminal. And that's not much recompense for someone who home or body has been violated.

An armed citizenry is not a perfect solution, but protecting oneself with locks, alarm systems and - eventually - guns is better than waiting for the police to mark off the crime scene.

Nuclear Fallout

Mark Steyn on "puzzling" deaths at the UN ...

Strange developments at the Iranian nuke talks:

A British nuclear expert has fallen to his death from the 17th floor of the United Nations offices in Vienna.

The 47-year-old man died after falling more than 120ft to the bottom of a stairwell. He has not been named.

He worked for the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, an international agency charged with uncovering illicit nuclear tests.

A UN spokesman in the Austrian capital said there were no "suspicious circumstances" surrounding the man's death...

Four months ago another UN worker also believed to be British fell from a similar height in the same building, it has been reported.

Hmm. I'd advise Mohammed El Baradei's surviving colleagues to take the elevator, but then again the aunt of Kofi Annan's discredited sidekick Benon Sevan fell to her death accidentally stepping into an empty elevator shaft shortly before she was due to be questioned about the Oil-for-Food scandal. If you work at the UN, get a gig on the ground floor.

The UN is bigoted against Isreal

Hamas Wired School to Explode!

Noah Pollak on the Gaza school incident in which school children were killed:

Allow me to propose a metric for evaluating whether a journalist is behaving responsibly or not: If he reports that Israel bombed a UN school and killed 30 civilians, he is irresponsible. If he reports that Hamas used a UN school as a weapons cache and base of operations for launching mortars at the IDF, and the IDF’s return fire killed the Hamas cell along, tragically, with a yet-unspecified number of civilians, then he is behaving responsibly. If he wishes to be particularly scrupulous, he might additionally note that Hamas had rigged the school with explosives which detonated after the IDF took out the mortar team, killing a large additional number of civilians. And he might add that you can go to the IDF’s Youtube channel to view footage from 2007 of Hamas using the very same school as a mortar-launching base.

Journalists who abjure reporting the vital details of this story should be called what they are — activists masquerading as reporters.

I checked out his links.

From the Jerusalem Post: Witnesses: Hamas fired from school

Two residents of the area near UN school that was shelled by the IDF on Tuesday said that they had seen a small group of terrorists firing mortar rounds from a street close to the school. The two spoke with The Associated Press by telephone on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.

And

The school grounds were being used by terrorists to fire mortar shells at troops stationed nearby, and the soldiers responded by firing mortars back, the army said. According to the IDF, the dead included members of the Hamas rocket cell, including senior operatives Imad Abu Askhar and Hassan Abu Askhar.

Defense officials told The Associated Press that booby-trapped bombs in the school had triggered secondary explosions that killed additional Palestinians there.

The UN is disputing the claim. But then, the UN is driving terrorists around in their ambulances.

When Hamas Absolutely, Positively Has To Get There

The UN is always ready to deliver terrorist to anywhere in the world, overnight.

Comes fully equipped with seating for eight, weapons storage, flashing lights, sirens, and stylish UN decal package. Unfortunately not IAF proof, but does come with a small dead body for AP/Reuters photo ops when hit.

H/T Small Dead Animals

Ith Americath Faulth Nom Nom Nom Nom

From "House of Eratosthenes "

Oh, I’m sure the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) might be doing something to alleviate the problem of world hunger besides blaming America…and holding press conferences to blame America…and distributing press releases that blame us…and holding conventions to blame us…

…but that’s about all I’ve seen or heard of them doing. Maybe they are doing other things. Maybe they’re coming up with some plans to “end world hunger.” But the making of the plans, consistently, gets a lot more news coverage than the content of those plans once made. You know, I think if everyone was willing to do whatever it took to end world hunger, once the content of such a plan was made clear and thought to be viable, it would travel to the four corners of the world like jungle telegraph.

All I’ve ever heard of, is bitching away about how the United States doesn’t kick in enough money.

And the menu for the latest bitch-fest…as reported by the AP…

Tuesday:
• Vol-au-vent (pastry puffs) with corn and mozzarella
• Pasta with a sauce of pumpkin and shrimp in cream
• Veal rolls with cherry tomatoes and basil
• Spinach Roman-style
• Fruit salad with vanilla ice cream
• White wine from Orvieto

Wednesday:
• Cheese mousse
• Pasta with vegetables and cherry tomatoes
• Chopped beef
• Butter beans
• Pineapple with ice cream
• Cabernet

Thursday:
• Zucchini pie
• Parmesan Risotto
• Ragout of veal with legumes
• Sauteed potatoes
• Lemon mousse with raspberry sauce.
• Pinot Grigio

Yummy.

Read the rest.

FITNA And Islamofascist Rage

Pre-emptive Rage by Diana West in the Washington Times was written before the film was released:

The film is by Geert Wilders, a Dutch member of parliament who wants to reverse the Islamization of Europe and believes the Koran should be banned along with Hitler's "Mein Kampf" for inciting hatred and violence. The film is called "Fitna," Arabic for upheaval. And just the thought of "Fitna" has Europe in upheaval, cowering before widely anticipated Islamic outrage expected to range from diplomatic huff, to economic boycott, to rioting, even bloodshed, over this still unseen ten-minute film.

Such mass psychosis has erupted before — Satanic Verses Rage, Koran Rage, Cartoon Rage, Pope Rage, even Teddy Bear Rage. But never has an Islamic "rage" begun to build without actual cause. For the first time, we are seeing rage preparations and precautions before "offense" has been given or taken.

The Film was 16 minutes, not 10 and was shown on LiveLeak. LiveLeak has taken it down because of threats to its personnel.

The reaction from the supposed defenders of Western freedom was nothing short of sickening:

At a press conference earlier this year, the online Dutch site NIS News Bulletin reported that Mr. Balkenende "stressed repeatedly and with irritation that Wilders and no one else was responsible for any violence that might break out after his film's release." And when Sheikh Tantawi indicates that providing "protection" for Mr. Wilders is a bad idea, it not only sounds like a mafia don calling for a hit, it also echoes the dean of Dutch journalists, Henk Hofland. As Thomas Landen of The Brussels Journal reports, Mr. Hofland urged the Dutch government to withdraw state protection from Mr. Wilders, who lives under constant threat of assassination. "Let him feel what it is like for those whose lives he endangers," said Mr. Hofland, adding that any murders committed in retaliation for Mr. Wilders' opinions on Islam would be the responsibility of Mr. Wilders, not the murderers.

Volokh watched it:

Parts of it are an indubitably sound reminder of the dangers posed by extremist Islam, and the support that it finds from some traditional Islamic religious teachings.

Other parts assert that extremist Islam is a problem at the heart of the Islamic world generally, and of Islam in the Netherlands and in Europe, and not just a tangential matter (the way that fundamentalist Mormon outliers are tangential to modern Mormonism, or, even more extremely, the way the Branch Davidians were tangential to the Seventh-Day Adventists from whom they sprang). But here too Wilders' view seems sound: Unfortunately, while by all accounts most Muslims do not adhere to the extremists' views, the extremist movement is prominent enough in Middle Eastern and European Islam that it is indeed a peril to freedom.

Nor does the rhetoric strike me as excessive. This is of course a rhetorical work, not an academic inquiry, and it's trying to stir people emotionally. But I didn't see much of hyperbole or gratuitious insults. Wilders is arguing against an important and dangerous ideological movement; my sense is that his approach is well within bounds of legitimate criticism.

The Belmont Clubs Wetchard

By publishing the film Wilders has accepted responsibility for crossing a line in the sand. This act will provoke two possible responses. Protests, boycotts, demonstrations and legal action are almost certain to follow demanding the withdrawal of the film of Wilder's censure. There is also a high probability that attempts will be made to attack Western targets in general in reprisal. Radical Islamists, perhaps accustomed to authoritarian social situations, may regard the Dutch broadcasters unwillingness to broadcast Wilder's film as a mere exercise in "plausible deniability" and hold Western society "collectively responsible" anyway.

But the real significance of Wilder's film is to illustrate the growing loss of control by Western governments over the narrative over the nature of the War on Terror. By criticizing Islam itself, a growing number of voices including Geert Wilders and recent convert Magdi Cristiano Allam (who called Islam "inherently evil") have taken one more step towards tearing down the notion, so carefully constructed by George Bush after September 11 of separating terrorism from the "religion of peace".

This is an incredibly important point. Thanks to the connectivity of the Internet, ideas that governments consider "dangerous" can't be stifled any longer. That's why when LiveLeak dropped it, the FITNA has already been downloaded to literally thousands of computers who spread it like a virus. I have several links.

Scott at Powerline

The Dutch Prime Minister says he rejects the interpretation, but he seems to do so because he fears that it has some merit. His comments put me in mind of the bumper sticker "Support mental health or I'll kill you."

The film would not be worthy of note were it not for the fear and threats of violence that the its release has generated. The Iranian regime that commits mass murder in the name of Islam has condemned the film as "hideous" and called on European governments to block the showing of the film. Or else, I guess.

From Little Green Footballs:

Following the release of Geert Wilders’ film Fitna, the European Union is quick to reassure the Islamic world that the whole idea of “free speech” is probably overrated: EU condemns Dutch anti-Islam film.

I have in the past deplored the lack of respect shown for various religions, especially when they could be considered blasphemous ("Piss Christ" is an example that comes to mind). However, that horse has left the barn, at least in regards to Christianity and Judaism. Those who are in the forefront of trying to silence Wilders were also the ones manning the barricades in support of Andres Serrano . The motivations appear to be a mixture: hatred of Christians and Jews, hatred of Western Civilization and rank cowardice.

And today via ReutersU.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Friday condemned as "offensively anti-Islamic" a Dutch lawmaker's film that accuses the Koran of inciting violence.
The story was reported by Lewis Krauskopf and edited by Mohammad Zargham. You can't make this stuff up.

Here’s a video presentation on the radical Marxist, dictator-supporting Jean Ziegler, and why he should never be anywhere near the UN Human Rights Cou

Video: UN Watch on Another Corrupt UN Human Rights Official