From Zomblog:

On January 10, the war between Israel and Hamas became a global conflict. No longer confined to the Gaza Strip, the fighting spread to cities around the world: what were billed as “anti-war” demonstrations from Los Angeles to Copenhagen and beyond were in fact overtly pro-Hamas demonstrations, and on Saturday, January 10 there was an unprecedented eruption of violence and extremism in dozens of European and American cities, surpassing anything seen at anti-war rallies in recent years:

¤ In London, protesters physically attacked police officers with unrestrained abandon and no fear of arrest;
¤ In Copenhagen, Hamas supporters screamed in public that they want to kill all Jews;
¤ In Calgary, neo-Nazis marched alongside leftists and Muslim extremists, in a grand coalition of anti-Semites;
¤ In Los Angeles, a car full of Israel-supporters barely escaped serious harm when an enraged mob tried to attack them;
¤ In Duisberg (Germany), police broke into a private home and tore down a flag displaying a Star of David, to appease stone-throwing protesters;
¤ In Belfast, an Israel-owned mall kiosk was surrounded and menacingly harrassed;
…to name just a few, as you will see in the reports listed below.

One wonders: Why January 10? Was the aggression somehow coordinated among the various far-left and Islamic groups which organized the protests in each city — an attempt to “Globalize the Intifada“? Or did the simultaneous outbreak of violence and anger in several places occur naturally? We may never know. But for some reason, this particular moment in the seemingly endless battle between Israel and its neighbors has tipped the scales, and the fighting now happens not just in Gaza, but wherever in the world Hamas supporters come face to face with anyone they deem an opponent (whether those be Israel supporters or police officers). The Hamas supporters will claim that the reason for the fresh anger now is that Israel has gone too far this time, allowing too many civilian casualties and unleashing a disproportionately large response. But what seems disproportionate this time around is not the nature of the fighting in Gaza but the extent to which the media buys into the Hamas narrative, and the unchallenged propaganda coming out of the war zone.

In any case, this post is meant to be a comprehensive roundup of the many anti-Israel protests that happened on January 10, 2009. And what makes these reports especially noteworthy is that they were almost all produced by citizen journalists: In just about every city, the mainstream media failed to cover the incidents thoroughly or honestly: As protesters waved Hamas flags and screamed “Long Live Hitler,” bloggers stepped in to do the job the media wouldn’t do.

Below is a list of the outbreaks of protest violence and extremism in each location: A few videos and photos are posted here, but most of the documentation is to be found in the various links provided…

Read the rest here.

 Again the Czechs delight us.

Czech artist David Cerny has produced a work depicting his view of the member countries of the ghastly EU which should have all Europe laughing at itself, and the rest of the world laughing with it. Some are laughing, but it has aroused official fury.

Bulgaria is the angriest because it is shown as a Turkish toilet.

Holland is under water with minarets sticking out of it.

Britain is happy because it is left out.  

Read all about it here.

 From The Salt Lake Tribune:

Hollywood’s Sundance Kid is hurting poor people.

So say some East Coast ministers and conservative activists, who took to the streets in front of a downtown Salt Lake City theater on the eve of Robert Redford’s Sundance Film Festival to accuse the actor of holding down low-income Americans with his opposition to oil and gas drilling near national parks in Utah.

The protesters, led by the Congress of Racial Equality’s national spokesman Niger Innis, suggested Redford should "relinquish his wealth" and live like a poor person. They complained that the filmmaker’s anti-drilling stance could lead to higher energy prices for inner-city residents, forcing them to accept a lower standard of living.

The clergymen prayed for Redford "to see the light" and linked his environmental activism with racism.

 

 This from Canada Free Press:

Citigroup has become the principal beneficiary of the $350 million that has been spent under the Troubled Asset Relief Program. The megabank, thus far, has received $45 billion from Uncle Sam – – $20 billion in November and $25 billion in October. And now the firm is crying out for an additional transfusion of billions more in order to become financially solvent.

Sure, it’s nice for Americans to help Americans and to take preventive measures against a full-scale depression.

But the $45 billion shelled out to Citigroup may do little to aid the plight of Main Street Americans.

The firm is not owned by U.S. bankers and businessmen but rather by the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, a sovereign wealth consortium of oil-rich Middle Eastern countries, who gained control of the megabank in November 2007. Presently, the largest single shareholder is Prince al-Waleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia.

 Green outside, red inside – that describes Obama’s pick for a ‘czar’ of climate and energy policy, Carol Browner.  Greener and redder than a czar ever was, she’d be better described as the climate and energy ‘commissar’. 

 Green outside, red inside – that describes Obama’s pick for a ‘czar’ of climate and energy policy, Carol Browner.  Greener and redder than a czar ever was, she’d be better described as the climate and energy ‘commissar’. 

This from Investor’s Business Daily:

Carol Browner, who’ll run the new White House office of climate and energy policies, isn’t new to Washington. The public will recognize her name from the years she served as Environmental Protection Agency administrator under Bill Clinton.

The public, however, knows little or nothing about her work with Socialist International, a group that describes itself as a worldwide organization of social democratic, socialist and labor parties that envisions a "new, democratic world society" and typically takes anti-U.S. positions.

Within its declaration of principles there are clear signs it’s comfortable with using the authority of the state to establish a global socialist regime.

Equally as telling are its member groups, including Nicaragua’s Sandinista National Liberation Front, Democratic Socialists of America, and socialist and labor parties from dozens of nations.

Browner was linked to Socialist International through her leadership post on the group’s Commission for a Sustainable World Society. The Washington Times reports Browner was also listed as an individual member of Socialist International.

In her role as a White House aide, Browner should be looking out for U.S. interests. Yet, according to the Times, Socialist International’s Commission for a Sustainable World Society not only wants America, as well as other developed nations, to cut their current levels of consumption. It has called for a "fair approach" to global warming and climate change that "must be centered on solidarity and aim to reduce the disparity between the developed and the developing countries."

Reducing the disparity will come, of course, at the expense of wealthy nations. Socialists dream of an egalitarianism that is reached not by lifting the fortunes of everyone but by redistributing wealth downward. They pretend to be interested only in taking care of the planet. But another purpose seems to be containing or even shrinking thriving economies. They are little more than socialists disguised as activists.

Evidence of Browner’s association with Socialist International has been largely scrubbed from the group’s Web site. Someone in the incoming administration — Browner herself? — must have felt it wouldn’t be wise for people to know about it.

This we can understand. What we can’t understand is why those ties didn’t disqualify her for the job.

 

From Yahoo! news:

Secretary of State nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton intervened at least six times in government issues directly affecting companies and others that later contributed to her husband’s foundation, an Associated Press review of her official correspondence found.

The overlap of names on former President Bill Clinton’s foundation donor list and business interests whose issues she championed raise new questions about potential ethics conflicts between her official actions and her husband’s fundraising. The AP obtained three of the senator’s government letters under the Freedom of Information Act…

The letters and donations involve pharmaceutical companies and telecommunications and energy interests. An aide to the senator said she made no secret of her involvement in many of the issues. Bill Clinton’s foundation declined to say when it received the donations or precisely how much was contributed.

"Throughout her tenure, Senator Clinton has proven that she acts solely based on what she believes is best for the state and people she represents, without consideration to any other factor," said spokesman Philippe Reines. "In these instances, she was doing what the people of New York elected her to do: Work hard on the issues of importance to them."

Hillary Rodham Clinton and the Clinton Foundation both declined to answer questions about whether the senator tried to step away from issues directly affecting donors to her husband’s charity, and whether the foundation tried to screen out money from those on whose issues the senator had intervened.

"Generally, through a combination of rigorous adherence to Senate and FEC income and asset disclosure rules, coupled with the voluntary and unprecedented release of the names of every single Foundation supporter since its inception, the Clintons are by far the most financially transparent former first couple in American history," Reines said.

 Joe the Plumber reports from Israel on PJTV.

In our view, this modest, intelligent, independent, sensible, honest man – brave too, making sure others get into a rocket-shelter before himself, as the video shows – embodies much that is good about America. 

We’d also like to think of him as typical of Americans, but after the recent election we know that cannot, unfortunately, be the case.

The New York Times claims that President Bush turned down an Israeli request for bunker-busting bombs and permission to overfly Iraq so that the Israeli Air Force could disable or destroy Iran’s nuclear-bomb production.

The NYT cannot be trusted to report the truth, but in this instance it’s not easy to see how lying would be in the interests of that traitorous newspaper.

If the report is true, then Bush has imperiled the world. By letting Iran become a nuclear power, he becomes a co-author of the terror and destruction Iran will inflict on Israel and all of us.  

We praise President Bush for eliminating the tyrant Saddam Hussein, for leading America to victory in Iraq, and for keeping Americans safe from more terrorist attacks after 9/11.

But if he is now tolerating Iran’s arming itself with nuclear bombs, he is undoing the good he has done. A nuclear armed Iran is a far greater threat to America than Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden ever were.

President Clinton had a number of opportunities to kill Osama bin Laden and each time made the bad judgment not to do so. If President Bush has really stopped Israel from destroying Iran’s bomb-producing sites,  he has made a worse misjudgment. America will pay dearly for it.

All hope that the US itself will act effectively to stop Iran ends, we believe, with the Bush presidency. It seems to us most unlikely that Obama will do anything but make futile attempts to appease that evil regime.

 Mark Steyn writes and comments – right-on as always:

"I want Hizb’Allah to wipe the state of terrorism off the planet…"   

"The state of terrorism – Israel – will be wiped off the planet, Inshallah."

Teheran? Ramallah? Islamabad? No, a speaker at yesterday’s demo in Toronto. And, for those who patiently point out that measured criticism of Israeli government policies is not anti-Semitism, check out the lady yelling, "Jewish child, you’re gonna f—-in’ die!"

During the last year, as the Canadian Islamic Congress and their eunuch stooges in the "human rights" commissions attempted to criminalize my books and columns as "hate crimes", various leftie groups – including PEN Canada and the Canadian Association of Journalists – came to see the country’s censorship laws as incompatible with freedom. The only public defenders of the "human rights" commissions were, of all people, the Canadian Jewish Congress, B’nai Brith Canada and other "official Jews" (in Ezra Levant’s words) who insisted state censorship was necessary in order to cow the last three "white supremacists" in Saskatchewan into submission and prevent such horrifying crimes as scrawling swastikas at knee height in public toilets.

So the Canadian Jewish Congress made common cause with the Canadian Islamic Congress and the neo-Nazi takeover of the prairies (or, at any rate, prairie toilets) has been prevented. And now explicitly genocidal eliminationist threats against Jews are being bellowed out at public rallies. But that’s okay, because it’s not a hate crime, unlike my book. Which may explain the curious silence of the CJC and the toilet warriors.

Congratulations to the CJC on helping build a tolerant hate-free Canada. In 20 years’ time, I hope there’ll still be enough Jews in Toronto and Montreal to man the CJC offices. Or maybe by then the Canadian Jewish Congress will be operating out of a PO box in the Turks and Caicos.