For years now the “unbiased” BBC has been firmly of the opinion that Israel is a racist, apartheid state.

Even when occasionally its own reports indicate the contrary, such as the one we quote from here, they fail to plant the least doubt in the mind of that institution, nor cause it to wonder why, if Israel is a racist, oppressive state, so many black refugees try to reach it for asylum and survival.

Human rights groups say Bedouin smuggling gangs are holding over a hundred African migrants for ransom in the Sinai desert. …

So a BBC reporter, Rupert Wingfield-Hayes, goes to the desert and questions some Bedouin holding such hostages. Notice that the hostages are called “migrants”, not refugees, and that Mr Wingfield-Hayes does not mention what they’re fleeing from.

“Often the Africans do not have any money, but we still have to feed and house them. Out of 30 maybe only 10 can pay. In this situation we lose money.”

As if to prove they do not mistreat their clients the smugglers then produce two young African men from out of the night.

One is barely past childhood. He tells me in broken English that his name is Amar, he is just 15 and from Eritrea.

As we talk, it rapidly becomes apparent that Amar is being held hostage..

He has been waiting with the smugglers for a month to cross to Israel but they will not let him go until his family pays up.

“How much do they want?” I ask.

“Tonight my brother called to say he can send US $2000. They are trying to make a deal,” Amar says. …

If you want to get an idea of the full horror of what can happen out in the desert you have to cross the border to Israel.

Ah, now comes the full horror. In Israel.

No? No. That’s not quite what he means. It’s just that there the refugees can speak freely about their ordeal.

African migrants get medical and legal assistance from Israeli NGOs.

There are over 30,000 African migrants in the country who have entered illegally from Egypt.

At a Tel Aviv clinic run by the group Physicians for Human Rights, there are hundreds of Eritreans, Ethiopians and Sudanese crowded into the waiting room.

One young woman from Ethiopia agrees to talk. …

“We had been told to pay $2,000, but when we got to the Sinai they [the Muslim Bedouin] said the price was $3,000,” Amira recalls. “Those who refused to pay were beaten.”

She says the men were then forced to watch as their wives were raped in front of them. …

Depressed and weakened by the beatings and dehydration, Amira’s husband died in the desert.

Doctors at the clinic are documenting more and more cases of this kind. More than a third of the migrant women they treat have been raped. A quarter of the migrants tell of being tortured.

“It is in order to extort money,” says Dan Cohen, director of Physicians for Human Rights.

“The smugglers use different methods like torturing. The women are raped and men are buried in sand and left for days to put pressure on them and make the families send money.”

More than a thousand Africans are staggering out of the desert to arrive in Israel each month, hoping to start a new life.

New Year’s is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls and humbug resolutions. ~Mark Twain

WE WISH OUR READERS A PROSPEROUS NEW YEAR

On the eve of the new year, this is our Picture of the Year 2010.

At a US airport, a Muslim searches a nun for hidden weapons.

Nuns have been attempting to blow up planes.

One tried to light explosive material in her shoe, another in her underwear, while flying to America from Europe.

A nun put a bomb into a plane that blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988.

Nuns started hijacking aircraft and holding crews and passengers hostage in the late 1970s.

Never forget that 19 nuns hijacked four planes on 9/11, flew two of them into the World Trade Center in New York, one into the Pentagon, and crashed another, killing some 3,000 people, in the name of their Holy Trinity.

And those are only a few examples of a long list of their violent attacks, carried out or planned, in recent years.

Christians in general are waging a holy war against the rest of the world, using the method of terrorism.

Muslims are doing everything they can to defend their fellow human beings from this relentless onslaught.

“Let us arise and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time” – as Churchill said (more or less) when Chamberlain sold Czechoslovakia to Hitler in return for a worthless promise of peace.

Now it is the freedom of the internet that is under threat, not only by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), but – even worse – by Islam.

Pamela Geller – she who alerted America to the Ground Zero mosque plan – writes at the American Thinker:

Late last September, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which assigns internet domain names, approved a huge change in the way it operates. Europe and North America will now have five seats on its Board of Directors, instead of ten, and a new “Arab States” region will have five seats as well. …

This has been a long time coming.

Back in October 2009 … ICANN ended its agreement with the U.S. government. …

The new agreement gave other countries (including dictatorships and rogue nations) and the U.N. the ability to set internet use policies. …

The ICANN action in September gave the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) and other unfriendly nations a prominent internet role — something they never could get during the administration of George W. Bush. …

The OIC is the main engine of the stealth jihad against the West. See our post Europe betrayed, February 11, 2010 for its role in the quiet conquest of Europe by Islam, now well under way. (And see also The trusted envoy, February 20, 2010, which is about the appointment by President Obama of a Muslim terrorist sympathizer as a US representative to that nefarious organization.)

In practice, the new arrangement makes it much easier for Muslim countries to dictate what stays on the internet and what doesn’t… Anti-jihad sites like … AtlasShrugs.com and the JihadWatch.org site … will likely lose their domain names. It will become harder and harder to find the truth about jihad activity, or any resistance to it, on the internet or anywhere else. …

The new “net neutrality” rules approved last week by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will just make that easier as well… [by taking] the operation of the Internet away from the heterogeneous and diversified interests of the private sector that has created it and [concentrating] it in the hands of an unelected and unaccountable board of political appointees atop a federal bureaucracy. …

James G. Lakely, the co-director of the Center on the Digital Economy for the Heartland Institute, a free-market think-tank … charged that FCC chairman Julius Genachowski, an Obama crony, wants to “claim for the FCC the power to decide how every bit of data is transferred from the Web to every personal computer and handheld device in the nation.”  … [in]  an attempt to limit the freedom of internet users by subjecting what [has] always been a free-market give-and-take to government regulation. In short, the FCC would control how all information reached personal computers.

An internet censored by Muslim ideologues and controlled by the feds. Do you see your freedom of speech slipping away?

We see all our freedom slipping away. Obama is not even selling but gifting America to Islam.

For a long time now it has been pretty darn obvious that the waging of war – or rather the waging of social work under the misnomer of war – in Afghanistan is pointless. Now it is blindingly clear that it is stupid.

How dare a government ask its bravest citizens to risk their lives in a stupid cause?

Diana West calls the war “sanity-defying”. Which is close to saying it is insane – even worse than stupid.

In an article mostly concerned with the unfair treatment of a US soldier killed by a jihadist, she tells us this:

The U.N. believes about 1 million Afghans between the ages of 15 and 64 – roughly 8 percent of the population — are addicted to drugs. The publication Development Asia estimates 2 million Afghan addicts.

Depending on whose figures you read next, some staggering number of these same addicts ends up in the Afghan National Police (ANP). Fully “half of the latest batch” of police recruits tested positive for narcotics, the Independent reported in March, drawing on Foreign Office Papers from late 2009. Also in March 2010, the Government Accounting Office (GAO) reported, depending on the province, 12 to 41 percent of Afghan police recruits tested positive. The GAO added: “A State official noted that this percentage likely understates the number of opium users because opiates leave the system quickly; many recruits who tested negative for drugs have shown opium withdrawal symptoms later in their training.” The problem was dire enough, the report continues, to place under consideration “the establishment of dedicated rehabilitation clinics at the regional police training centers.”

Pederasty, misogyny and corruption aside: This drug-addled ANP is part of the Afghan National Security Forces that the U.S. government fully expects — no, completely relies on — to secure Afghanistan against “extremist networks” and is spending $350 million per day in Afghanistan until that happens.

My question: Who’s high here? Illiterate Afghans on drugs, or educated Americans on fantasy?

Like a legion of buttoned-down and uniformed Don Quixotes seeking the impossible COIN (counterinsurgency theory) — winning Afghan hearts and minds from Islamic loyalties, constructing a heretofore unseen Afghan “city on a hill,” training Afghan police (literacy rate 4.5 percent) while simultaneously weaning them from addiction, and don’t get me started on “ally” Pakistan — the United States has plunged into a depth of denial only an extravagant “intervention” could reverse.

It has to stop.

Pity General Petraeus struggling to achieve the impossible, and let him off the slow spit.

Let the Afghans pursue their drug-addled, illiterate, savage way of life. What does it matter to the rest of the world? Only be ready, if they hit America or any American interest ever again to hit them back with the worst America’s got. Real war. All-out for victory. Fast and devastating.

Of course such an attack by American forces can never happen under Obama. But that pusillanimous figure will, fortunately, not be commander-in-chief forever.

Iran’s nuclear program is stuck.

Maybe because of the Stuxnet worm? (Just a suggestion.)

This report inspires the thought:

Israel’s Deputy Prime Minister in charge of Strategic Affairs, Gen (ret.) Moshe Yaalon, told a radio interviewer that Iran was not currently able to manufacture a nuclear bomb because of technical difficulties but he estimated it would attain this capability within three years. …

His estimate represented the first official Israel evaluation of the scale of the destruction and havoc the Stuxnet malworm has wrought to Iran’s most secret nuclear weaponization facilities. Up until now, only the nuclear reactor at Bushehr and the uranium enrichment plant at Natanz had been admitted to have been affected by the invasive virus.

Three years delay, then. That is, if Israel knows anything at all about the worm and what it can do.

At the very least we have the pleasure of seeing egg on Ahmadinejad’s face. And a lot can happen in three years. It’s even possible that the deferring of the Iranian threat could lead to its being permanently averted.

Contrary to the pro-Castro, anti-America propaganda put out by Michael Moore in his movie Sicko, health care in Cuba is bad, very bad (except of course for the Castro brothers, their henchmen, and those they choose to privilege.)

Jay Nordlinger has written an account of the true state of affairs on the island. It is detailed, convincing, and depressing.

He relates:

Hospitals and clinics are crumbling. Conditions are so unsanitary, patients may be better off at home, whatever home is. If they do have to go to the hospital, they must bring their own bedsheets, soap, towels, food, light bulbs — even toilet paper. And basic medications are scarce. In Sicko, even sophisticated medications are plentiful and cheap. In the real Cuba, finding an aspirin can be a chore. And an antibiotic will fetch a fortune on the black market.

A nurse says to a visiting journalist –

“We have nothing. I haven’t seen aspirin in a Cuban store here for more than a year. If you have any pills in your purse, I’ll take them. Even if they have passed their expiry date.”

Diseases spread and the sick suffer helplessly:

So deplorable is the state of health care in Cuba that old-fashioned diseases are back with a vengeance. These include tuberculosis, leprosy, and typhoid fever. And dengue, another fever, is a particular menace. …

Read the whole thing here.

Here is a story that should – but won’t – shame Western feminists:

Kainat Soomro should have stayed silent. After being battered and gang raped for four days her traditional, conservative village in rural Pakistan expected the 13-year-old girl to keep her story to herself.

She refused.

That was almost four years ago. Today Kainat is a vocal campaigner for women’s rights as she struggles for justice in her own case and tries to overturn the traditional, conservative culture that expects rape victims to suffer in silence.

It’s a surprising story of extraordinary courage and persistence, worth reading in full.

And here is another:

On Thursday, December 9, 2010, a unique and unbelievable incident took place in Kolkata [Calcutta]. Over 2000 divorced and destitute Muslim women assembled at College Square. … These unfortunate women were either divorced by oral ‘triple talaq’ or simply driven out by their husbands along with their children.

They selected the date 9th December as on this date the Muslim lady Begum Rokeya Shakhawat Hussain… died in 1932. She spent her life for the uplift of the Muslim women and founded the first Muslim Girls’ school, the Shakhawat Memorial School, in Kolkata for educating the Muslim girls. But her activities were highly condemned and bitterly criticized by the Muslim clerics, who wanted to see Muslim women illiterate. It is needless to say that these clerics were in favour of using women as sex objects and as machines for producing children as many as possible. In fact, they practically excommunicated her from the Muslim society. The bitterness went to the extent that when she died on December 9, 1932, the clerics refused to bury her body in Muslim burial ground.

And here’s a sample of what a Western female academic, Professor Jane Smith, has to say about  the subjugation of women in Islam (from the abstract of an article accessible – at a price – through this page):

The Qur’än cites men as the protectors of women, the righteousness of the latter defined in terms of obedience to males. A predominant theme in contemporary Muslim writing, expressed by both sexes, is the naturalness of the circumstance in which women because of their innate qualities and characteristics have clearly defined roles and cannot appropriate functions reserved for men. Their somatic and psychological differences determine the distinct—but complementary—duties prescribed for each. Few Muslim women, even those who may be critical of the restrictions imposed by Islam, are sympathetic to much of what they see as characteristic of Western feminism. In Islam women are freed from many of the problems and concerns that are assumed by men, a situation which they often feel is not easily to be given up.

Tell that to the women who were divorced and left destitute by their husbands, and dared to complain of their plight at the gathering in Calcutta.

So what is feminism all about? This definition comes from an article by a feminist :

Feminism is defined by dictionary.com as: “The doctrine — and the political movement based on it — that women should have the same economic, social, and political rights as men.”  This is a very accurate definition of the word Feminism.

But it’s for Western women only, you see.

Roger L. Simon, an admirably robust conservative writer, rightly compares the periodically reconvened UN  “World Conference Against Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance” (shortened to the “World Conference Against Racism”, aka Durban I, II and, coming up, III),  which, as he says, would be more accurately named the “World Conference for the Promotion of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance” – to the Wannsee Conference.

That was the one, convened on January 20, 1942, in a mansion in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, at which the Nazis decided on just how they would physically annihilate the Jews.

Here is more of Simon’s article:

I now regard the UN as a kind of global racket with three principal, often related, areas of … special interest: propaganda for totalitarian countries, massive corruption (e.g. Oil-for-Food) and spying.

The latter rose to the fore recently when Wikileaks revealed email from Hillary Clinton, urging her minions at Turtle Bay to snoop on their fellow diplomats. Quelle surprise, as we would say in the old langue diplomatique. Anyone with the slightest interest in the UN has known for years it was cesspool of spies …

Also of note in recent years is the UN’s continuing meretricious and power hungry approach to global warming – excuse me, “global climate disruption” – spearheaded by the IPCC. This off-shoot of the international organization has earned a special place in the history of the abuse of science for its manipulation and misrepresentation of data for ideological, bureaucratic and larcenous purposes. …

I attended Durban II in Geneva … and I can say … that I have never seen anything as quite literally insane. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the keynote speaker of a human rights conference. …

Durban II, held in Geneva, was boycotted by the US, by Israel of course, and also by Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Poland.The Czech Republic delegates walked out on the first day. The conference – like Durban I – was a festival of anti-Semitism and spite against the West. The discrimination, intolerance, and persecution of minorities that characterize Third World societies were not mentioned.

So far the only countries that have announced they will not be attending Durban III are Israel and Canada.

You would think they wouldn’t want to repeat such a disgrace but… here they go again with Durban III this September… and in New York, of all places. …

UN attention to tiny Israel (still with under eight million population — less than L.A. county) is nearly as big as all other states combined. … By 1992 alone there were 65 resolutions concerning Israel. By January 2009, this number rose to 225. All these resolutions are largely led by Islamic states that are basically judenrein, although many of them had substantial Jewish populations in the past.

It’s a black comic moral travesty and our money is paying for it. …

Enough already. When the new Congress comes in in January, they should move to defund the UN if they persist in promoting these proto-fascistic conferences that have more to do with Wannsee than they do with human rights. We elected them to cut the budget. They should start with the UN.

UN delenda est.

The UN must be destroyed.

“Western misunderstandings and misreporting help make the world a worse and more dangerous place.” Barry Rubin writes.

We agree.

The example he gives is the misunderstanding and misreporting of the firing of rockets into Israel from Gaza, the territory Hamas rules dictatorially.

If I had to pick one paragraph that shows what’s profoundly wrong with Middle East coverage in the Western mass media, it would be from the following New York Times article: “A rocket fired from Gaza fell close to a kindergarten in an Israeli village on Tuesday morning. Earlier, the Israel Air Force struck several targets in Gaza in retaliation for a recent increase in rocket and mortar shell fire. Small groups appear to be behind the fire, but Israel says it holds Hamas, the Islamist organization that governs Gaza, responsible.”

What the West, or a powerful part of it at least, the news media, seem not to understand – Rubin rightly points out – is that Hamas is a dictatorship, a totalitarian tyranny.

“Small groups” do not operate freely to attack a neighboring country from a totalitarian tyranny.

What [Hamas] wants to happen happens; what it doesn’t want to happen doesn’t happen, or if it does, someone is going to pay severely for it. There are smaller groups allied with Hamas, notably Islamic Jihad.

Nothing could be more obvious than the fact that Hamas uses these groups as fronts so it can attack Israel and then deny responsibility for doing so.

Of course it may be that the New York Times, and the media generally, are disingenuous, and know perfectly well that when Islamic Jihad fires rockets on Israel it is Hamas who “permits” – ie requires – the group to do so. That would mean that the Western media are largely sympathetic to Hamas and only too happy to  help the Islamic tyrants put out their propaganda lies.

Impossible to believe? Or at least an exaggeration, an unfair accusation? Funnily enough, without stretching our imagination in the slightest, we find we can believe it. In fact, we’re convinced of it.

Yet we also believe that the West does find it hard to grasp what a dictatorship  is; how a totalitarian tyranny operates.

Take the case of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, for instance. He’s the man who was found guilty of placing the bomb in the PanAm plane that blew up over the Scottish town of Lockerbie on December 21, 1988.

On strong evidence of his involvement, the US and Scotland indicted him in November 1991, and requested his extradition from Libya. Colonel Gaddafi refused the request for three years, but eventually, under diplomatic pressure, let him go to be tried in the Netherlands under Scottish law. His trial lasted from May 3, 2000, to January 31, 2001, when he was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment.

He served less that nine years. In August 2009 he was released and returned to Libya. The excuse the Scottish authorities made for letting him go was that he was dying of cancer and had only about three months to live. Fifteen months later he is still alive, and WikiLeaks have confirmed what was strongly suspected: that his release had actually been part of a British trade deal with Colonel Gaddafi, and the “compassionate grounds” for it had been a hunk of baloney. (See our posts, Oily gassing villainous politicians, August 23, 2009, and Being really nice to democratic Libya, September 28, 2009.)

We recall all this because the Megrahi case is another example of the West’s misunderstanding – whether genuine or sham – of the nature of dictatorship.

There are no freelance terrorists running round in Gaddafi’s Libya. Gaddafi is the dictator of Libya, and Megrahi was a  highly-place official in his intelligence service.

The only person in Libya who can give the order for an American civil aircraft to be bombed, is Colonel Gaddafi himself. He would leave the detailed planning to his underlings.

When he finally handed Megrahi over for trial, he no doubt promised his man that he, Gaddafi, would do everything he could to get him back. Which he did. Megrahi was the tyrant’s fall-guy – which is not to say that he wasn’t active in carrying out the atrocity, but he would never have thought of doing it, would not have been able to do it, and would have had absolutely no reason to do it on his own initiative. He carried out a Libyan operation for the autocratic ruler of Libya. He served his master well, even enduring over eight years of imprisonment for him. Not once in his trial did he try to save himself by saying that he was carrying out Gaddafi’s orders. No wonder the dictator received his faithful servant with open arms and a hero’s welcome when Megrahi stepped out of the plane that flew him back to Libya, and to what passes for freedom in that unfree land.