Archives for October 2005

Ladies in White win Sakharov Prize
Babalu and Free Thoughts have the news: Cuban activists celebrate Sakharov award

The Ladies in White are the wives and supporters of 75 political prisoners held by Fidel Castro’s government. The detainees are serving prison terms ranging from six to 28 years. The European Union says the dissidents must be freed if Cuba is to have better relations with Europe. Among those held are journalists, intellectuals, religious activists and members of dissident political groups.

The European Parliament awarded the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought yesterday:

The prize committee recognized two organizations for their work: Reporters Without Borders, an international non-government organization defending journalists and the freedom of the press, and Cuba’s Women in White movement, which comprises wives and family members of dissidents imprisoned under Fidel Castro. In addition, Nigerian lawyer Hauwa Ibrahim, who came to the world’s attention for defending local women sentenced to be stoned to death for adultery, was also honored.

The Ladies in White have been holding a weekly march the last two years to protest the Cuban government’s jailing of their activist husbands.

Their husbands are still imprisoned.

“For Canadians, Cuba is a tourist paradise. But for Cubans, it is like a big jail”.

https://faustasblog.com/2005/10/1803/

It’s book day at TBHB!

In the sprit of enlightment and capitalism, I’m featuring a book on each post. You can order the books through my Amazon Associates program.

I’m opening with Do As I Say (Not As I Do), by Peter Schweizer, who was interviewed by Kathryn Jean Lopez yesterday. Among the juicy bits, the book reveals that Michael Moore is a Haliburton stockholder. Yes, that Haliburton. Barbra Streisand’s lawn watering bill is $22,000/year. And on and on. But the message of the book is serious,

the ideas the left want to impose on the rest of us are so fundamentally bad that they don’t even try to live by them. At the end of the day, when all the fun is done, I hope people view this as a book about ideas and the failure of liberal/Left ideas. They don’t work for the leading lights of the Left. How could they possibly work for our country?

Or for any country, at that?

https://faustasblog.com/2005/10/1802/

Hurricane damage in Cuba

The city of Havana has had a sea wall for several centuries now, and hurricane Wilma’s force breached the sea wall for the first time in decades. Flooding swamps Havana, where scores are rescued

Giant waves crashed onto Havana’s sweeping seaside boulevard, the Malecon, inundating hotels, apartment buildings, neo-colonial-style homes and the U.S. diplomatic mission with water as deep as 6 feet.

The problem is, due to lack of maintenance to the infrastructure, the waves ripped off chunks of the famous Malecón seawall and caused extensive flooding, as you can observe in this picture.

Castro’s oppresive regime is destroying Cuba’s cultural heritage:

Coyula said three studies showed Cuba needs underwater breakers to soften the waves’ blow, but cost estimates in the millions make the project prohibitive.

But while the images of waves thrashing against the Cuban Foreign Ministry were dramatic, Coyula said storm surge is just one part of an ongoing problem.

”The waves were more spectacular, but it’s the daily problem of sea salt that damages the brick, steel and paint,” Coyula said. “It’s a very serious price for the privilege of living by the sea. The flood just aggravates the situation.”

He said heavy rainfall is actually much worse for the buildings, but the older ones tend to stand up to it more than those built between 1910 and 1940. A survey of the damages will be done today, now that the water has receded, he said.

Quintana said 70 percent of Havana’s housing stock is in precarious condition, meaning in the United States, they would be condemned.

He said almost all the buildings are in urgent need of repair, and the regular onslaught of storms doesn’t help. The 500-year-old Cuban capital holds the world’s largest collection of Spanish colonial buildings, but many are so deteriorated that they regularly crumble under heavy rainfall.

About 1,400 buildings must be abandoned each year for fear of collapsing.

The Cuban government said Wilma damaged 2,000 homes.

Take a look inside the book Cuba: 400 Years of Architectural Heritage so you can see what massive damage looks like. Then see how The Real Cuba desintegrates.

Blame the embargo? As I posted previously, no embargo kept that $3,900,000,000 from enriching fidel during the period of 1996 and 2003. A portion of those billions might have saved the Malecón.

Update, October 27 Storm damage photos
Peter Krupa with yet another instance of Associated Press Deficit Disorder.

https://faustasblog.com/2005/10/1801/

Hitchens on Galloway
No scare quotes here, Calling Galloway’s Bluff: The Senate uncovers a smoking gun

Yet this is the man who received wall-to-wall good press for insulting the Senate subcommittee in May, and who was later the subject of a fawning puff piece in the New York Times, and who was lionized by the anti-war movement when he came on a mendacious and demagogic tour of the country last month. I wonder if any of those who furnished him a platform will now have the grace to admit that they were hosting a man who is not just a pimp for fascism but one of its prostitutes as well.

I wouldn’t count on it.

I highly recommend Hitchen’s Love, Poverty, and War

(yesterday’s post here)

(technorati tags George Galloway, Oil-For-Food)

https://faustasblog.com/2005/10/1800/

Don’t miss La Shawn Barber’s round-up on Rosa Parks
Rosa Parks, 1913-2005. La Shawn links to nearly a hundred posts on Mrs. Parks, a great woman of honor and courage.

A few years ago The Economist carried a book review of Douglas Brinkley’s biography of Mrs. Parks, explaining how her faith inspired her actions,

Mrs Parks was a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) who had helped lead black voter-registration drives in Alabama, then a white-supremacist southern state. Her act of defiance on the bus was spontaneous, but, as Douglas Brinkley shows, she had been coached to play a significant part in the civil-rights struggle. Sponsored by a liberal white couple, she had enrolled in a training workshop on “radical desegregation” at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, where former pupils included Martin Luther King. Its founder and head, Myles Horton, had studied under one of America’s most influential Christian thinkers, Reinhold Niebuhr, and was a promoter of the “social gospel”. It was Horton’s wife, Zilphia, who, along with two troubadours, Guy Carawan and Pete Seeger, made the hymn “We Shall Overcome” the anthem of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Mrs Parks was in her element at Highlander, for religion was, and remains, just as central to her life as it was to Simone Weil’s, though she comes out of a different tradition. She is a steadfast member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, a radical denomination which became known as “the Freedom Church” during the pre-civil war campaign to abolish slavery.

The book, part of the excellent Penguin Lives series, is available at Amazon.

https://faustasblog.com/2005/10/1799/

Shelby Steele’s article, Witness: Blacks, whites, and the politics of shame in America
in the WSJ, is a must read:

No doubt it is easier to overcome racism than an inferiority of development grounded in centuries of racial persecution. Nevertheless, if New Orleans is a wake-up call to government, it is also a wake-up call to black America. If we want to finally erase the inferiority that oppression left us with, we have to first of all acknowledge it to ourselves, as whites did with their racism. Our scrupulous witness of whites helped them become more and more responsible for resisting the shame of racism.

Read it all.

Maria sent the link. For some reason, the WSJ page doesn’t show Mr. Steele’s full name.

I highly recommend Shelby Steele’s book The Content of Our Character. I’m pre-ordering his upcoming White Guilt right now.

https://faustasblog.com/2005/10/1798/

Yes
Draft Constitution Adopted by Iraq Voters
Iraq’s voters have approved the new constitution, according to official results from the nationwide referendum held earlier this month.

https://faustasblog.com/2005/10/1797/

Mr. Galloway went to Washington so he could lie, and later left daughter behind so he could run
Galloway lied over Iraqi oil payments, says Congress report

George Galloway, the British MP, was last night accused of lying by a US Congressional committee when he testified earlier this year that he had not received any United Nation food-for-oil allocations from the deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

In a report issued here, Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman and his colleagues on the Senate Subcommittee for Investigations claim to have evidence showing that Mr Galloway’s political organisation and his wife received vouchers worth almost $600,000 (£338,000) from the then Iraqi government.

The Beeb has the charges in scare quotes, Galloway accused of Senate ‘lies’. While this BBC article states GG’s assertion that

“They have been cavalier with any idea of process and justice so far, but I am still willing to go to the US and I am still willing to face any charge of perjury before the senate committee.”

another Beeb story repeats it, just so you get it, I guess.

Hard to argue those charges, though, when Ex Deputy Prime Minister of Iraq Tariq Aziz himself is the one that made the accusations.

GG’s been having a rather rough two months. First Hitchens resoundedly kicked his butt at the debate, someone set up an adopt a sniper auction on ebay, and later on Jane cancelled the bus tour on him. Then there ws the time last April when, in a moment of panic, he forgot his daughter Lucy (h/t to Militant Islam Monitor):

A mob of young Islamist extremists allegedly threatened to hang anti-war campaigner George Galloway last night as as the country’s most bitter election battle spilled into violence on the streets of the East End.

The Respect candidate, who is fighting Labour’s Oona King for the Bethnal Green and Bow seat in East London, was meeting locals in a tenant association’s room last night with his daughter, Lucy, when a 40-strong group of militants burst in, his spokesman said today.
. . .
He said that there were no Respect supporters at the meeting except for Mr Galloway and Lucy, 23. When the two policemen arrived, they asked Mr Galloway if he wanted to leave the meeting, and escorted him to the car outside.

He said: “One cop took him out to Jay’s car, put him in and told him to get out of there as quickly as possible. The other policeman rather bravely put himself between George and the mob.

Locking the door behind them, the mob allegedly held Mr Galloway and his daughter captive for a few minutes and made threats.

“The police said to us: ‘You shouldn’t stay where you were going to stay tonight because they know where you live.’ So we stayed somewhere else.”

As Mr Galloway left in his son-in-law’s car, his distraught daughter was temporarily left at the scene. She was escorted to safety on the top floor of the property on Globe Road by officers.

A fracas then broke out outside, and three men were arrested, Scotland Yard said. They were detained for alleged possession of an offensive weapon, public order offences and actual bodily harm. One person was treated in hospital for a minor head injury and later discharged.

TBHB has not been able to contact Lucy for comment.

Mrs. Galloway, a.k.a. The Palestinian scientist who fell for a ‘hero MP’, is divorcing him “because she could no longer tolerate her husband’s behaviour”. No, not his Oil-For-Food behavior, from which she’s allegedly received £100,000, but because she had received calls from women claiming to have had romantic links with him. Considering Galloway had been married before, and that the current Mrs. states she had received calls from women (in plural), that means there’s been at least four women interested in GG, a fact that totally mystifies me.

In more Oil-For-Food news, the BBCA TV news broadcast had the phrase new evidence in scare quotes when saying that George will have to face new evidence. The Beeb’s fondness for quotation marks carries on to this story from last August: Oil-for-food chief ‘took bribes’, not only in the headline, but in the two subheadings:

‘Money from aunt’ claim

‘Sacrificed’

But they’re improving, after all, only two out of three subheadings in the Galloway story had scare quotes, namely

‘Smoking gun’

and

‘Cavalier’ attitude

How fitting.

No scare quotes were used by the Beeb in this story, UN resists Hariri probe extension. Resists is one way of saying it. Doctoring is more like it.

Update: Scott points out that Galloway was thrown out of the Labor Party not merely

in response to mere “anti-war comments”, but expelled Mr. Galloway when he suggested that British soldiers disobey orders, a very different thing.

While you’re at Scott’s blog, send him a contribution.

Update 2 Independent Sources points out that George Never Said Anything About Options To Purchase Oil

Update 3 Via Tigerhawk, Hitchens has the goods on George (pdf file)

Update 4 Seixon has Every Penny In, Every Penny Out of the evidence.

Update 5, Wednesday, October 25 Hitchens on Galloway

(technorati tags George Galloway, Oil-For-Food)

https://faustasblog.com/2005/10/1796/