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.

Why would the Arab states not let in their brethren who fled from Israel in 1948?

An equal or greater number of Jews fled Arab states, many of them to Israel, where they were resettled.

The answer is as simple as it is appalling: The Arabs wanted them to suffer in order to stir pity in the Western world so that compassionate public opinion would compel the Western powers to press Israel to readmit them. In other words, the Arab refugees were cynically used by fellow Arabs without conscience to stir the consciences of others and emotionally blackmail them for political ends. Wise politicians would have been disgusted and angry over the cruel maneuver, but if such beings exist they are a rare breed, and with most political leaders throughout the world the ploy worked all too well.

That this exploitation of the refugees was Arab policy is beyond dispute. The historical facts demonstrate it: no Arab country will integrate Palestinian refugees. It was confirmed to me personally by a leading Palestinian academic.

I quote from my book The PLO: The Rise and Fall of the Palestine Liberation Organization* (it did fall and nearly die, but was tragically resuscitated by Western governments and Israeli leftists):

Professor Sari Nusseibeh, Oxford-trained teacher of Islamic Philosophy at Bir-Zeit University, and a member of one of the oldest and most respected Arab families of Jerusalem, said to me as we sat and talked in his beautiful house in the old city of Jerusalem: ‘We do not want to solve the Palestinian problem in terms of “human rights”, what we want is a political solution.’

I asked what plan he had in mind to advance such a solution. Had not the PLO let every opportunity for a political settlement slip away by refusing to adapt to political realities?

‘I admire my people more for clinging to their dreams,’ he said, ‘than if they were to compromise with what others call political realities.’

So for the Palestinians in the camps there was no message of hope. They had been sacrificed to the incontinent ambitions of Haj Amin al-Husseini [the Mufti of Jerusalem], Nasser [president of Egypt], Arafat, Assad [president of Syria], and the other Arab leaders, and still they were not to be redeemed. …

The tragedy of the Palestinians is that they were led by people who despised or were devoid of political realism; and Palestinian affairs and concerns were made subordinate to those of the Arab states, which were, of course, pursuing their own self-interest.

Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, friend of Adolf Hitler and advocate of the Final Solution, is thought to have  personally advised the Arabs to leave when the Arab armies invaded the new state of Israel in 1948,  and to return when the Arabs had won. I always asked people  in the refugee camps in Lebanon in 1983 why they had left their homes, and the invariable reply (through my Arab interpreter) was that they had been advised to go and come back when the Jews had been defeated. When I asked who had advised them to do so, most of them  gave vague answers, amounting to “everyone told everyone else”. But some were sure that the Mufti had “said it on the radio”.

Fast forward to a conversation, reported by the New York Times on December 2, 2010, held between the Israeli novelist Amos Oz and Professor Sari Nusseibeh, in Berlin, where the two men had come to share an award. The conversation was “moderated” by Serge Schmemann, editor of the International Herald Tribune editorial pages.

OZ: … [T]he first issue we need to deal with is the refugee issue, because this one is really urgent. … The refugees are hundreds of thousands of people decomposing in dehumanizing conditions in refugee camps. Israel cannot take these refugees back or it would not be Israel. There would be two Palestinian states, and there would be no Israel. But Israel can do something, along with the Arab world, along with the entire world, to take those people out of the camps, into homes and jobs. Peace or no peace, as long as the refugees are rotting in the camps Israel will have no security.

The description of refugees “rotting” and “decomposing in dehumanizing conditions” may still be true of their lives in the Lebanese camps, but not now on the West Bank or in Gaza. Still, wherever they are, their lives and opportunities are restricted, and they exist as it were in a state of suspension, awaiting emancipation.

This was Nusseibeh’s response:

NUSSEIBEH: I agree. Whether there is or isn’t a solution, the refugee problem is a human problem and it needs to be resolved. It cannot just be shelved day after day after day in the hope that something will happen. The human dimension is far more important in this whole conflict than the territorial.

Let’s not call this a contradiction. Let’s not conjecture that he has forgotten his acquiescence in the long held policy of all the Arab states. Let’s say that he has simply changed his mind. That would be fine if only he understood that while he had been of his previous mind he had contributed to the plight of the refugees which he is now deploring. A regret needs to be expressed, an admission of responsibility needs to be made, a resolution to apply remedies even at this late date needs to be decided upon. It is the lack of those corrections which is so enormously, so frustratingly provoking.

Highly pertinent is this further extract from the same conversation:

SERGE SCHMEMANN: Gentlemen, both of you in your memoirs write about the same historical moment, the founding of the state of Israel, but it is as if you are writing about totally different events.

In your book, Sari, you write: “The year of my conception, 1948, witnessed the collapse of the Palestinian dream…”

And in your book, Amos, that same moment is one of redemption, when your father tells you: “From now on, from the moment we have our own state, you will never be bullied just because you are a Jew and because Jews are so-and-sos. Not that. Never again.”

Oz and Nusseibeh discussed their different views of what happened in 1948 – that is, of the establishment of the state of Israel – amicably.  But the point had been made by Schmemann. For the Jews, 1948 was one of the most important dates in their very long history; the most important date since 70 C.E.. It is the year of their return to their homeland from which they were exiled by a conquering power.

For the Palestinians, it was the year in which they came into existence as a distinct people, as much the creation of the State of Israel as are the Israelis. Before that date there had been no separate “Palestinian” identity, they had been Arabs among Arabs in the Ottoman Empire. (And Sari Nusseibeh, we learn from the extract, was conceived in that very year, so he was born a Palestinian, into the new nation of Palestinians, and is exactly as old as his people.) What could “the Palestinians’ dream” have been before they even existed as a people?

What we have to remember is that there never was, in all history, a State of Palestine, and that the Palestinian people were brought into existence, which is to say named “Palestinians”, in order to lay claim to the State of Israel. That was their creators’ purpose; their suffering, inflicted and maintained by their fellow Arabs, was the means.

The Arabs were humiliated by their defeat in 1948, and again in 1967. Their fight is as much for revenge as for territory. To strengthen their cause they made it an Islamic issue after 1967, thus multiplying the numbers on their side by many hundreds of millions.

And the United Nations have helped to keep the Palestinians economically dependent and, through their UNRWA schools, full of bitterness and hatred. (UNWRA denies this, but I saw the materials used by the Palestinian teachers in Lebanon, and know for sure that they are rabidly anti-Israel and anti-Jewish, designed to teach bitterness, hatred, revenge, murder and martyrdom by suicide bombing, generation after generation, paid for by Western liberal democracies.)

There is a story in a book by Gita Mehta called Karma Cola ** about a mendicant in India bringing his little daughter, aged six, to a temple outside Katmandu where tourists were gathered. The child was –

.. naked with matted hair that fell in knots on her scarred shoulders. Through each cheek her father had inserted an iron nail. There were scars down the front of her body and her back was crisscrossed with the marks of the lash. Her father carried a whip made of rope to which were attached the blades of small knives … The father led the child by a rope tied to her neck. Outside the temple when a sufficiently large crowd had collected, he took the whip out of his bag and flayed the child. People flung money at them in recognition of their asceticism and in respect for the child, who everybody realized would be reborn a saint for the penances she was undergoing in this life.

That child’s story is the story of the Palestinian people. Her father was no more blamed then are the Arab leaders. The values of the cultures are not questioned. What a gift has been bestowed on the refugees – the opportunity for martyrdom.

Weep and throw money!

Jillian Becker   December 23, 2010

*St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1984 page 227

**Jonathan Cape, London, 1980 page 160

We’re all constantly being lectured by our self-annointed moral superiors to the effect that “the vast majority of Muslims”  want only to live in peace, and do not support Islam’s “Holy War” or the terrorist methods being used to wage it.

In a short and to-the-point opinion column, Paul E. Marek explains why, even if this article of faith were proved to be true, it would be irrelevant:

We are told again and again by “experts” and “talking heads” that Islam is the religion of peace, and that the vast majority of Muslims just want to live in peace. Although this unquantified assertion may be true, it is entirely irrelevant. It is meaningless fluff, meant to make us feel better, and meant to somehow diminish the specter of fanatics rampaging across the globe in the name of Islam. The fact is, that the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history. It is the fanatics who march. It is the fanatics who wage any one of 50 shooting wars world wide. It is the fanatics who systematically slaughter Christian or tribal groups throughout Africa and are gradually taking over the entire continent in an Islamic wave. It is the fanatics who bomb, behead, murder, or honor kill. It is the fanatics who take over mosque after mosque. It is the fanatics who zealously spread the stoning and hanging of rape victims and homosexuals. The hard quantifiable fact is, that the “peaceful majority” is the “silent majority” and it is cowed and extraneous.

Communist Russia was comprised of Russians who just wanted to live in peace, yet the Russian Communists were responsible for the murder of about 20 million people [about 4 times as many as that according to Solzhenitsyn – JB]. The peaceful majority were irrelevant.

China’s huge population was peaceful as well, but Chinese Communists managed to kill a staggering 70 million people.

The average Japanese individual prior to World War 2 was not a war mongering sadist. Yet, Japan murdered and slaughtered its way across South East Asia in an orgy of killing …

History lessons are often incredibly simple and blunt, yet for all our powers of reason we often miss the most basic and uncomplicated of points. Peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by the fanatics. Peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by their silence. Peace-loving Muslims will become our enemy if they don’t speak up …

We must pay attention to the only group that counts; the fanatics who threaten our way of life.

He includes Nazi Germany in his article. He quotes a German friend who claims that very few Germans were “true Nazis”. Whatever he might mean by “true Nazis”, the number of Germans who actively or vocally opposed Nazism was very small. It’s amazing how the German “Opposition” to Nazism has grown bigger every year since the Second World War ended.

So we wouldn’t take Nazi Germany as an example of a majority silently opposed to the evil actions of vicious leaders.

But we do agree that the supposed opinions of “most Muslims” are of no account in the war with Islam.

Walter Williams writes a short, perfect essay titled “Who owns us?” Here’s a substantial part of it:

I am my private property and you are yours. If we accept the notion that people own themselves, then it’s easy to discover what forms of conduct are moral and immoral.

Immoral acts are those that violate self-ownership. Murder, rape, assault and slavery are immoral because those acts violate private property. So is theft, broadly defined as taking the rightful property of one person and giving it to another.

If it is your belief that people do not belong to themselves, they are in whole or in part the property of the U.S. Congress, or people are owned by God, who has placed the U.S. Congress in charge of managing them, then all of my observations are simply nonsense.

Let’s look at some congressional actions in light of self-ownership. Do farmers and businessmen have a right to congressional handouts? Does a person have a right to congressional handouts for housing, food and medical care?

First, let’s ask: Where does Congress get handout money? …

The only way for Congress to give one American one dollar is to first, through the tax code, take that dollar from some other American. It must forcibly use one American to serve another American.

Forcibly using one person to serve another is one way to describe slavery. As such, it violates self-ownership.

Government immorality isn’t restricted only to forcing one person to serve another. Some regulations such as forcing motorists to wear seat belts violate self-ownership. If one owns himself, he has the right to take chances with his own life.

Some people argue that if you’re not wearing a seat belt, have an accident and become a vegetable, you’ll become a burden on society. That’s not a problem of liberty and self-ownership. It’s a problem of socialism, where through the tax code one person is forcibly used to care for another.

These examples are among thousands of government actions that violate the principles of self-ownership. Some might argue that Congress forcing us to help one another and forcing us to take care of ourselves are good ideas.

But my question to you is: When congressmen and presidents take their oaths of office, is that oath to uphold and defend good ideas or the U.S. Constitution?

When the principles of self-ownership are taken into account, two-thirds to three-quarters of what Congress does violate those principles to one degree or another as well as the Constitution to which they’ve sworn to uphold and defend. …

If we accept the value of self-ownership, it is clear that most of what Congress does is clearly immoral.

Read all of it here,

It’s simply true.

It’s a libertarian conservative’s delight.