Israel and the Axis of Evil
Caroline Glick , THE JERUSALEM POST:
North Korea is half a world away from Israel. Yet the nuclear test it conducted on Monday has the Israeli defense establishment up in arms and its Iranian nemesis smiling like the Cheshire Cat. Understanding why this is the case is key to understanding the danger posed by what someone once impolitely referred to as the Axis of Evil.
Less than two years ago, on September 6, 2007, the IAF destroyed a North Korean-built plutonium production facility at Kibar, Syria. The destroyed installation was a virtual clone of North Korea’s Yongbyon plutonium production facility.
This past March the Swiss daily Neue Zuercher Zeitung reported that Iranian defector Ali Reza Asghari, who before his March 2007 defection to the US served as a general in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and as deputy defense minister, divulged that Iran paid for the North Korean facility. Teheran viewed the installation in Syria as an extension of its own nuclear program. According to Israeli estimates, Teheran spent between $1 billion and $2b. for the project.
It can be assumed that Iranian personnel were present in North Korea during Monday’s test. Over the past several years, Iranian nuclear officials have been on hand for all of North Korea’s major tests including its first nuclear test and its intercontinental ballistic missile test in 2006.
Moreover, it wouldn’t be far-fetched to think that North Korea conducted some level of coordination with Iran regarding the timing of its nuclear bomb and ballistic missile tests this week. It is hard to imagine that it is mere coincidence that North Korea’s actions came just a week after Iran tested its solid fuel Sejil-2 missile with a range of 2,000 kilometers.
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UNDER PERSECUTION
Prisoner: Marzieh Amirizadeh Esmaeilabad and Maryam Rustampoor
Location: Iran (Islamic Republic of)
Arrested: March 2009
Days Imprisoned: 85
On March 5, Marzieh Amirizadeh Esmaeilabad and Maryam Rustampoor were arrested by Iranian security forces and labeled “anti-government activists,” according to Farsi Christian News Network (FCNN).
Thirty year-old Marzieh and 27-year-old Maryam are being held at Evin Prison, which is notorious for treating women badly. “Both women are allowed just a one-minute telephone call everyday to their immediate families. Both are unwell and in need of urgent medical attention,” FCNN reported. During their last call on March 28, Mazieh said that she was suffering from an infection and high fever. She said, “I am dying.”
Marzieh and Maryam’s apartment was searched and their belongings were confiscated. “Their only crime is that they are committed Christians who follow the teachings of Jesus,” FCNN added. “They are being unfairly labeled as ‘anti government activists’ because of the hostility of the government towards practicing Christians.”
The women have reportedly been interrogated numerous times and were held in three different police detention centers before being sent to Evin Prison. FCNN reported an exorbitant bail amount of US$ 400,000 has been set even though Marzieh and Maryam’s families have been told on numerous occasions that a judge is not available to discuss the case.
Marzieh and Maryam’s arrest is the latest incident highlighting increased government intimidation of Christians in Iran. Believers are subjected to surveillance, arrests, imprisonment, and sometimes torture.
A Modern Witch Trial
Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal:
Men may be created equal, but not all murders are equal. Some are quickly forgotten, except by those immediately affected by them, while others—by no means always political assassinations—have a lasting political impact. Among the politically significant kind was the murder of Stephen Lawrence, a young black man, in a London suburb on the evening of April 22, 1993. Five or six white youths set upon Lawrence and a friend, Duwayne Brooks. One of the attackers supposedly shouted, “What, what, nigger?” immediately before Lawrence was stabbed to death. Brooks managed to evade the attackers, who ran away.Despite considerable circumstantial evidence against several suspects, the perpetrators escaped conviction. The police investigation into the murder was a model of incompetence of the kind that every Briton now expects of our boys in blue. Over the investigation there also hung a pall of suspected corruption, for one suspect was the son of a rich drug trafficker who, on a previous occasion when his son stood accused of a stabbing, had tried (unsuccessfully) to bribe and threaten the victim into altering his evidence.
But the Lawrence murder took on a wide social significance because of its racial overtones. The botched investigation became a cause célèbre—the presumption being that racism alone could explain the police’s failure to bring the perpetrators to justice—and the government launched an official inquiry to “identify the lessons to be learned for the investigation and prosecution of racially motivated crimes.” There followed a festival of political and emotional correctness the likes of which have rarely been equaled. It would be impossible, at less than book length, to plumb the depths of intellectual confusion and moral cowardice to which the inquiry plunged. In 1999, it released a report of its findings that won almost universal praise despite its risible shortcomings.
[...]
h/t: NRO
Christian couple convicted for anti-Muslim booklets
AFP
A Christian Singaporean couple were found guilty of sedition on Thursday for distributing evangelical publications that cast Islam in a negative light, court officials said.
Ong Kian Cheong and his wife Dorothy Chan had been charged with distributing a seditious publication to two Muslims in October and March 2007 and sending a second such booklet to another Muslim in December that same year, a district court official told AFP.
The publications were found to have promoted feelings of ill-will and hostility between Christians and Muslims, the Straits Times said on its website.
[...]
h/t: Jihad Watch
Islam’s Homemade Concentration Camp
By: Pamela Geller, IsraelNationalNews.com
The abduction and murder in Paris of a young Jewish man by a gang of Muslim immigrants calling themselves the Barbarians shocked the whole of France in 2006. But now that the accused are on trial – silence.A French judge has ordered the latest issue of the magazine Choc (“shock”) removed from the shelves. The cover showed a man with duct tape completely covering his head, except for a small opening around his nostrils. His nose is bloody. His hands are also bound with duct tape.
It was a photo of Ilan Halimi, the 23-year-old Parisian Jew who was kidnapped and tortured for 24 days by the Barbarians. His captors took the picture and sent it to his family.
[...]
The Media, Islam & Political Correctness
By Cathy Young, RCP:
Last week’s arrest of four men in the Bronx, New York on charges of plotting to bomb two synagogues and shoot down a military aircraft with a missile has revived an ongoing debate about the connection between Islam and terrorism and the twin pitfalls of religious bigotry and willfully blind political correctness.
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Israel’s Cuban Missile Crisis – All the Time
By Victor Davis Hanson:
Why would the Iranian government spend billions of dollars on trying to develop a few first-generation nuclear bombs (as nearly everyone believes is the case) when the country is so poor that it has to ration gasoline?
A lot of reasons have been offered by various experts.
Upon developing a nuclear weapon, states win instant prestige and attention beyond what they otherwise might have earned. Take away its bomb and North Korea would be in the news about as much as Chad.
Nuclear weapons also can change the nature of conventional warfare.
Israel’s Arab neighbors have not waged a full-scale traditional war against Israel since 1973 – in part because there is no longer a nuclear-patron Soviet Union around to threaten the use of nukes should Israel strike too strongly back against its aggressors.
But give Iran a bomb or two and it will be able to guarantee Hezbollah and Hamas – or a coalition of Muslim states – a secure fallback position if they attack Israel and lose.
[...]
Human Rights Council Rejects ‘Interference’ in Sri Lanka – But Not in Israel
CNSNews.com
As the United States prepares to take its seat on the U.N. Human Rights Council, the Geneva-based body once again has come under fire – this time for siding with the Sri Lankan government despite charges that its recent offensive against Tamil terrorists caused a humanitarian crisis for tens of thousands of civilians.
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John Bolton, prophet
Ethel C. Fenig
Last week, on May 20, the Wall Street Journal published former UN ambassador John Bolton’s op-ed prophetically titled “Get Ready for Another North Korean Nuke Test.”
Five days later–boom! Well, why not? As Bolton noted
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World War III has started
Eitan Haber, YNet:
One needs to be deaf, blind, and an idiot at this time in order not to understand that the nuclear bomb tested in North Korea two days ago also exploded in the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem.
The North Koreans blatantly disregarded the Americans and publically presented them as a meaningless power, yet officials in Jerusalem are still reciting the “Road Map” and making note of the evacuation of some minor West Bank outpost. The world is changing before our eyes, yet here we see Knesset members earnestly explaining that the Americans will agree that we stay in Judea and Samaria if we only evacuate some tin shacks.
Two days ago, in North Korea, World War III officially got underway – the war that would pit “crazy” states such as North Korea and Iran, for example, against states we shall characterize as “moderate,” including Egypt, Gulf states, and Saudi Arabia, which at this time leads the Arab initiative for peace with Israel.
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Canada unfazed by fact that scheme is a costly failure in Europe
By LORRIE GOLDSTEIN:
As long as politicians keep misleading us about what a cap-and-trade carbon market is — yesterday it was Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty and Environment Minister John Gerretsen — I’m going to keep calling them on it.
And this isn’t just about Ontario. Canada is going to implement cap-and-trade. So is the U.S. It’s coming no matter where you live.
Yesterday, Gerretsen claimed cap-and-trade is an environmental program to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by industrial polluters. Bull. Cap-and-trade is an economic program run by governments to charge Canadians — not “polluters” who in fact get to pass along their costs, and more, to us — for something we’ve never been charged for before.
That is, the cost of emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere when energy is produced by burning fossil fuels.
Cap-and-trade shouldn’t even be announced by the environment minister. It should be announced by the finance minister.
It means charging us more for almost everything, not just electricity, as politicians pretend.
Yes, your electricity bill is going to skyrocket because of cap-and-trade and other reasons.
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