If you find yourself plunged now and then into cynicism and enjoy a bitter laugh, try this report from the Washington Post:

A team of Arab League monitors began its second day of work in Syria on Wednesday as the death toll continued to climb in the restive cities of Homs and Hama and questions mounted about the observers’ methods and credibility.

The delegation, which was in Homs, is tasked with observing whether Syrian authorities are upholding an agreement to withdraw troops from cities, free political prisoners and end the use of deadly force to quell a nine-month-old uprising against the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

Syrian forces fired teargas and reportedly live ammunition at protesters in central Syrian cities despite the presence of an Arab League observer team on hand to monitor compliance with plans to stop the bloodshed.

On the monitors’ first day in Homs, residents gathered by the thousands to demonstrate against the government and plead for help from the outside world.

Saleem al-Qabani, a member of the Local Coordination Committees opposition group, said in a telephone interview that he had canceled a planned meeting with the observers because they insisted on having army officers with them, including at least one whom Qabani said he recognized as having killed protesters. …

Another activist, who is in contact with people in the area, said government forces fired from buildings in Baba Amr while observers were nearby.

Because Syria has closed its borders to journalists, it is not possible to independently confirm such reports. …

Sarah Leah Whitson of Human Rights Watch … expressed concern about reports obtained by the rights group that …  detainees [ie prisoners] were being moved, possibly in advance of planned inspections by the monitors. 

Whitson also raised concerns about whether the Arab League monitors are properly qualified for their mission. About 60 monitors are in Syria, with more due to arrive. Their names have not been released. She said the Arab League should have offered some assurances that the group had received training in human rights investigations before being deployed to Syria.

“It’s not enough to have once been in government. They need training in finding things that governments are trying to hide,” Whitson said.

She must be sitting somewhere very safe and remote from the scene to imagine that that is possible. Somewhere in the West. A bureau. Air-conditioned, sound-proofed, comfortable, where all tyranny and violence are only theoretical. Still, she has valid concerns:

Specifically, Whitson questioned what she called “troubling” information about the head of the delegation, Gen. Mohammed Ahmed Mustafa al-Dabi, a veteran of the Sudanese intelligence service.

A Facebook group of Damascus-based doctors said Dabi was a senior army officer in the 1990s, when Sudanese forces played a brutal role in their country’s ethnic war. “Many questions were raised about his knowledge of Darfur massacres,” a statement by the group said.

Questions such as: “Could he have been one of the leading perpetrators of the massacres?” With an answer such as: “Could have been and was.”  

The Arab League did not respond to requests for comments about how its monitors were selected and trained, or the circumstances under which they are conducting their mission.

Opposition activists said shelling and gunfire continued in Homs on Wednesday, killing at least three people. They also reported troops opening fire on unarmed protesters in Hama, killing at least six.

But Dabi told Reuters news agency that “the situation seemed reassuring so far” in Homs and that he had seen “nothing frightening.” 

And in any case there’s nothing much to worry about because the “international community” is keeping an eye on the Syrian civil war, even though it can receive no reliable information about it so is staring into the dark.

“Used to the dilatory maneuvers of the Damascus regime, the international community will be vigilant in the face of all attempts at dissimulation or manipulation,” Bernard Valero, a spokesman for the French Foreign Ministry, said in Paris.

– Another observer in a comfy bureau.

And here’s one more reason why we can all rest easy about Syria. The  Russians, renowned for their strictness when it comes to truthfulness and disinterested impartiality, are also seeing to it that only independent, objective monitoring will be acceptable:

Meanwhile, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, whose government until recently was a staunch ally of Assad, told reporters: “The mission [Dabi and co] should be able to visit any part of the country, any towns or villages, and come up with its own independent, objective opinion about what is happening and where.”

Ha-ha-ha!  Whoo!  Let us recover our breath.

In the Arab world it’s a farce without end!

Just how phony the claim is (put out by Obama and his henchwomen*) that the Libyan engagement is all about the “responsibility to protect” civilians, is demonstrated by this report published two days ago on July 18, 2011, by Asia News – and nowhere in the West:

Benghazi-based rebels took Brega over night. The town, which is 740 km east of Tripoli, is the country’s main oil hub. The National Transitional Council (NTC) called the fall of the city its greatest victory since the war against Gaddafi began. However, doubts remain about rebel intentions. Human Rights Watch (HRW) has accused them of retaliatory violence against pro-Gaddafi regime civilians. … HRW said rebels looted and torched homes in towns that had fallen under NTC control. In villages south of Tripoli, Gaddafi loyalists were beaten, their houses set on fire.

We have little respect for Human Rights Watch having observed their frequent incapacity or reluctance to tell the truth, but in this case their accusation is backed up by another source:

Tiziana Gamannossi, an Italian businesswoman in Tripoli, told AsiaNews that the rebels’ push is causing fear in the civilian population. …

In her view, NATO is funding and arming violent groups that lack any training or code of honour. …

For Gamannossi, a war that was launched to defend civilians is absurd. The latter watch powerless as their cities and country are torn down amid the silence of western media.

“These days, hundreds of thousands of people have demonstrated against NATO in Tripoli, Zliten, Ajaylat and Sabha, demanding an end to the air strikes. No newspaper has given such news much importance, calling the protests ‘ demonstrations funded by the regime’.”

Last week the 30-member contact group on Libya, including the United States, China and Russia, “formally recognised the NTC as the sole representative of the Libyan people. This will give the council access to about US$200 billion in Libyan government assets held in foreign banks to fund the rebel advance.”

What makes this contact group expect that the people leading the National Transitional Council will be any better for Libyans, or for other states to deal with, than Gaddafi has been?

The answer is, absolutely nothing. They may even be worse.

* Samantha Power, Senior Director of Multilateral Affairs, National Security Council;  Susan Rice, US Ambassador to the UN;  Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State.  See our post A siren song from hell, April 1, 2011.

Years and years ago in Texas, a vicious pervert named Humberto Leal raped and murdered a sixteen year old girl named Adrea Sauceda.

From a report of the murder, and the 1995 trial and conviction of her murderer:

The tragic final hours of sixteen-year-old Adrea Sauceda’s life started at an outdoor party in San Antonio, Texas. … Humberto Leal was also at the party. At some point the intoxicated but conscious victim was placed in Leal’s car. …  Several of the party members went looking for Adria … They found her nude body lying face-up on a dirt road. They noticed Adria’s head had been bashed in and it was bleeding. Her head was flinching or jerking. These party members called the police. When the police arrived, they saw the nude victim lying on her back. There was a 30 to 40 pound asphalt rock roughly twice the size of Adria’s skull lying partially on Adria’s left arm. Blood was underneath this rock. A smaller rock with blood on it was located near Adria’s right thigh. There was a gaping hole from the corner of Adria’s right eye extending to the center of her head from which blood was oozing. Adria’s head was splattered with blood. [She had been raped with] a bloody and broken stick approximately 14 to 16 inches long with a screw at the end of it … Another 4 to 5 inch piece of the stick was lying to the left side of Adria’s skull. … Leal was arrested [and his] car was impounded. … [At leal’s trial]  Dr. DiMaio, the medical examiner who performed the autopsy, testified about Adria’s injuries and cause of death. DiMaio testified that even though Adria was intoxicated when she received her injuries, she would have been aware of what was happening to her. …  Adria’s head injuries were consistent with Adria lying on the ground with somebody standing over her striking her. DiMaio testified the large rock could have delivered the injuries to Adria’s head. Based on the injuries to Adria’s head, DiMaio testified Adria would had to have been struck with the rock two or three times. DiMaio testified Adria died from blunt force trauma injuries to the head. …  DiMaio also testified about bite marks he found on Adria’s left cheek, the right side of her neck and the left side of her chest. Another witness compared the bite marks on Adria’s chest and neck with dental impressions of Leal’s teeth. They matched. The State’s indictment charged that Leal killed Sauceda … Leal was convicted and … sentenced to death.

A just sentence.

But demands that the rapist murderer’s life be spared poured over the Governor, Rick Perry.

Who were the murderer’s supporters?

A gaggle of very important lefties from all over this lefty-contaminated planet …

scoundrels slithering about  that sink of iniquity the United Nations …

and the president of the United States, Barack Obama.

From Front Page, by Mark Tapson:

The pleas came not just from the typical capital punishment opponents but from international diplomats, judges, military officials, politicians, even the United Nations. The topper was an eleventh-hour appeal from the Obama administration itself.

What is it about Leal’s case that prompted protest from such high-powered and far-ranging corners? The argument from the White House and others was that his execution “would place the United States in irreparable breach of its international law obligation.” A “Mexican national” (he had lived illegally in the U.S. since the age of two) Leal had not been informed, after his arrest, of his right to consult the crack legal team at the Mexican consulate – an oversight which the International Court of Justice at The Hague rules is a violation of the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. Leal, as such, should have been notified of his right to call up his embassy and have all that rape-murder unpleasantness wiped clean as tidily as “some New Guinean ambassador’s parking tickets,” as crime reporter Tina Trent put it in a blistering blog.

Instead, Humberto Leal and his attorney Sandra Babcock were forced to insist on his innocence, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, through forty-five hearings and appeals over a period longer than the life of his young victim, before he finally confessed at his execution: “I have hurt a lot of people… I take full blame for everything. I am sorry for what I did.” This was just before he shouted – twice – his patriotic final words, “Viva Mexico!” If Senõr Leal had lived there, of course, instead of illegally in the U.S., Adrea Sauceda would still be alive. …

“A technicality doesn’t give anyone a right to come to this country and rape, torture and murder anyone,” said the victim’s mother. Sorry, Mrs. Sauceda, but President Obama and his radical colleagues have a broader agenda in mind than justice for your insignificant daughter. Tina Trent suggests that Obama’s intervention on Leal’s behalf can be traced back to a 2003 conference called Human Rights at Home: International Law in U.S. Courts, which featured the usual suspects: the ACLU, The Jimmy Carter Center, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International. Also presenting at the conference was Leal’s attorney Babcock herself and a raft of radical elements: Bernardine Dohrn, the unrepentant former terrorist/current radical academic, and the not-so-better-half of Bill Ayres (whose c.v. is the same); Van Jones, the continually self-reinventing, race-baiting Communist “truther” … and representatives from the [sarcastically named] Open Society Institute, funded by the ubiquitous puppet master of the Left, George Soros. Radical transnationalist Harold Koh, now Obama’s State Department legal adviser and one of those who pushed for Leal’s international “rights” participated as well. The conference’s official description said that one of its purposes was to “ensure U.S. accountability for violating international human rights principles” – hence the campaign for “justice” for illegal alien and rapist-murderer Humberto Leal.

Trent reports that as a professor at Northwestern University School of Law, “Ms. Babcock’s research interest is imposing international law on the American justice system, a hobby she practices with her colleague, terrorist-cum-law-professor Bernardine Dohrn.” Dohrn is the Director of Northwestern’s Children and Family Justice Center who, like Babcock, lists “International Human Rights” among her areas of expertise. It’s ironic that “Juvenile Justice” is Dohrn’s other area of expertise, since she and her transnationalist allies haven’t put any effort toward the defense of 16-year-old Adrea Sauceda’s rights.

Dohrn is a lifelong “revolutionary anti-imperialist” who co-founded the Weather Underground domestic terrorist group, which carried out bombings on American soil, and was accused of planting the bomb that killed a San Francisco police sergeant in 1970, a charge she denies. She salivated over the Manson family’s butchery of innocents (whom she referred to as “pigs”), was a principal signatory of a Declaration of War against “AmeriKKKa,” and today links arms with her Code Pink cohorts to stand with Hamas and denounce the imaginary genocide of Palestinians being waged so ineptly by Israeli oppressors. So her concept of “international human rights” seems rather limited.

Dohrn, Babcock, Koh and the other activists from that 2003 conference all share what the National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy calls Obama’s “poorly camouflaged loathing of American power, at least when used to pursue American interests.” They are united in their intent to diminish American sovereignty and superpower status, and to usher in a “post-American” world in which the United States submits itself to the judgment of transnational institutions like the United Nations and the International Court of Justice, packed with representatives who, to put it mildly, do not have America’s best interests at heart.

We are happy to say that all protests were ignored by the Governor. Leal was executed earlier this month.

Weathering such protests is nothing out of the ordinary for Perry; a strong proponent of the death penalty, he has overseen the execution of more than two hundred “dead men walking.”

In our view, that alone recommends him as a candidate for the presidency, for which – it is said – he is thinking of standing.

Okay, he’s got religion, but so have they all, all the would-be candidates as far as we know.

And God of course is on everyone’s side. After Leal had carried out his grotesque crime, he “went home, prayed on the side of his mom’s bed.” (Are you not moved?)

And after Leal’s execution, Leal’s uncle said, “There is a God who makes us all pay.”

Anyway, the law does – unless or until Obama and the United Nations abolish it.

The values of the West are inverted among the ranks of the political left, the people who now rule Europe and (dreadful to say) America.

Many voices in the Western world continually insist that captured terrorists must be given a fair trial: they must have lawyers to defend them at tax-payers’ expense; all the safeguards that the rule of law requires, whether in civil or military courts, must be provided for those accused of indiscriminate and (usually) mass murder. Yet those same voices are silent .. or at least it is becoming hard to hear them .. they must be murmuring too softly .. or there are too few of them to make an audible chorus on the crime of terrorism itself.

We now know the name of the migrant worker from Thailand who was killed by a Palestinian rocket (see our post No, the name’s not Rachel Corrie, March 18, 2010). His death was little reported in the mainstream media. No government spokesman condemned the act of terrorism that killed him – or not that we heard. The international left whose putative heart bleeds for the moral poseur Rachel Corrie, and whose ideological sense of outrage is roused by the execution of the evil terrorist al-Mabhouh in Dubai – doesn’t apparently give a damn about the killing by terrorists of a Thai farm worker.

Human Rights Watch has usually conformed with the pattern of misplaced indignation. In this instance it has actually condemned the killing. It comes as a surprise – which is in itself an indictment of that organization.

Anav Silverman writes at Front Page:

It is not every day that Human Rights Watch (HRW) comes out with a report that accurately highlights Hamas war crimes against Israel, but in the case of the Thai worker killed by a Gaza rocket on March 18, 2009, HRW did just that.

The tragic story of Manee Singmueangphon, a Thai migrant worker who was killed when a rocket struck an Israeli greenhouse north of Gaza on Thursday March 18, was barely given any in-depth coverage in the mainstream media. Most news reports simply stated that a Thai migrant worker was killed in a rocket attack, not even giving the victim a name.

Indeed, almost no western leader or human rights organization directed words of condemnation to the Islamic terrorists who fired the rockets that killed Manee, a 33-year old husband and father with children back in Thailand, and sent shock waves among his fellow Thai and Nepalese workers…

Human Rights Watch … made it clear in its March 19 report titled Gaza: End Impunity for Indiscriminate Rocket Attacks, that … “Hamas as the de facto authority in Gaza has the responsibility to stop indiscriminate rocket attacks into Israel” …

In general, the Western’s world attitude of toleration towards Islamic terrorists and terrorism has become a very worrying phenomenon. The killing of the Hamas commander, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai, was received by shocked disapproval from the international community. Many news outlets, including AP, called his death a murder.

The fact that al-Mabhouh was key to moving arms made or funded by Iranian government to Hamas in Gaza, or for his role in the 1989 kidnapping and killing of two Israeli soldiers, did not elicit any signs of outrage in a world where Islamic terrorists are not often brought to justice.

The underlying result of al-Mabhouh’s death is that a dangerous terrorist, abetting the radical Islamic jihadist organization, Hamas, which is responsible for thousands of Israeli civilian deaths and injuries, is no longer a threat to humanity. Britain, Australia, France and other western nations, however, simply slammed Israel, the accused agent behind the assassination for carrying out the attack by using fake foreign passports. Not one word was said about the global need to successfully combat terrorism and bring terrorists to justice.

In order for terrorism to abate, the anger and words of condemnation and action need to be directed at those terrorists who commit these heinous acts. World leaders both in Europe and the West need to look beyond Islamic jihadist rhetoric and take a firm stand against Islamic terrorists whether it be in Israel, Gaza, Iraq, Afganistan, Iran, Somalia and other areas, where women and children remain their constant targets…

As long as the world tolerates those Islamic jihadists who fire rockets against innocent Israeli civilians and accepts their legitimization for it, terrorism will continue to strike innocent civilians everywhere. The killing of Manee Singmueangphon by a Gaza rocket should serve as a constant reminder that people of all nationalities are indiscriminate victims of Iranian-sponsored Islamic terrorism.