Archives for August 2006

Pajamas Media has continuous coverage of the air terror plot.

Pajamas Media also has The Sanity Squad, and Sigmund, Carl and Alfred are in it.

Sigmund, Carl and Alfred guest-blogs today at Fausta’s blog!
The Red Cross is seen helping Hizbollah . You know, when the RC can’t provide an ambulance to help terrorists, manpower is available.

Hugo isn’t representative of Venezuela

Now Chavez in his megalomania has turned his gaze to the Middle East where he wants to become a player. I can assure you, dear Israeli leader, or even dear any Middle East reader, that it is a decision of Chavez alone with his camarilla. We, as a people, have never been consulted on what should be Venezuela’s policy in the Middle East. And I can assure you that we will never be consulted on that topic by Chavez. In fact, he has long stopped consulting with anyone on anything except perhaps the soon to be corpse of Castro.

I can also assure you one thing: Chavez does not know much about the Middle East and its very complicated history. Nor does he care much about you. See, the only thing he wants is to screw the US in any which way he can, even if it means a close association with the Iran regime of fanatic and intolerant Ayatollahs who have no problem in subjecting women to all sorts of second class citizenship, hanging gay teenagers, persecuting Baahist faith, financing any pro Shia terrorist organization and what ever else uncivilized that one can come up with. In fact, it is difficult to imagine a country as opposed to Venezuelan values of freedom and carefree lifestyle as Iran is. That is why it is so objectionable of Chavez not to even notice that the only thing that Ahmedinejad has not yet said is “a good Jew is a dead Jew”. Never in our history we have had a president that openly supported a country whose aim is the elimination of another country.

Onwards.

Londonistan, within driving distance? The Rise Of Quebecistan, ought to scare the hell out of everybody.

…Don MacPherson projected a worrying Quebec trend with startling candour: “It’s finally becoming respectable again to express support for terrorists.”

So it has. On Sunday, 15,000 Quebecers, mostly Lebanese-Canadians, marched for “justice and peace” in Lebanon. That sounds benign, but in fact the march was a virulently anti-Israel rally, and scattered amongst the crowd were a number of Hezbollah flags and placards. Leading the parade were Bloc Quebecois chief Gilles Duceppe, Liberal MP Denis Coderre, PQ chief Andre Boisclair, and Amir Khadir, spokesman for the new far-left provincial party, Solidarite Quebec.

…however, they called for the disarming of Hezbollah as part of a negotiated ceasefire.

For this, they were roundly booed by the crowd.

…Their cultural and historical sympathy for Arab countries from the francophonie — Morocco, Algeria, Lebanon — joined with reflexive anti-Americanism and a fat streak of anti-Semitism that has marbled the intellectual discourse of Quebec throughout its history, has made Quebec the most anti-Israel of the provinces, and therefore the most vulnerable to tolerance for Islamist terrorist sympathizers.

Think about what this would mean if Quebec ever were to become independent, and detached from the leadership of politicians who know the difference between a democracy and a gang of fanatical exterminationists. You can bet that Hezbollah would be off the official terrorism list by Day two of the Republic of Quebec’s existence. By Day three, word would go out to the Islamosphere that Quebec was the new “Londonistan,” to cite the title of a riveting new book by British journalist Melanie Phillips, chronicling the rise of militant Islam in her country.

Complacent Canadians think it can’t happen here. It won’t if our political class takes its cue from the principled Stephen Harper rather than the shameless Quebec politicians who led that pro-terrorist rally. Harper needs Quebec votes every bit as much as Messrs. Duceppe and Boisclair if he expects to achieve a majority government in the next federal election, but unlike them, he isn’t willing to sell his soul.

The devil is always on the lookout for the moral relativism that signals a latter-day Faust, and it seems he has found some eager recruits amongst Quebec’s most prominent spokespeople.

Lastly, todays nomination for (posthumous) Idiot of the Year.

Guest-posted by Sigmund, Carl and Alfred

Posting will be light for the next couple of days due to family committments, but Elephants in Academia realizes that The vultures are starting to circle around a certain Caribbean dictator.

Meanwhile, Invstor’s Business Daily ponders Castro’s Dead-Enders, all sandalistas.

As for Lieberman’s defeat in Connecticutt,
I remembered Epictetus’s words:

Remember that if you adhere to your principles, those very persons who at first ridiculed will afterwards admire you. But if you are conquered by such people, you will be doubly ridiculed.

The Democrat party can’t stand by principles. And that is our loss.

Israel recalls ambassador from Venezuela,

Israel on Monday said it had ordered its ambassador to Venezuela to return home for consultations, following last week’s recall to Caracas of Venezuela’s Israel envoy, in protest at what President Hugo Chavez called Israel’s “genocide” in Lebanon.

On Sunday Chavez repeated the genocide allegation and rubbed salt in the wound by referring to Israel’s military offensive in Lebanon as a “new Holocaust”.

and Hugo says there are 3 new refineries in the works.

Al-Jazeera says Castro to make return ‘soon’. And where’s Raul?

Regardless of this news,

Hans-Hilger Ropers, director of the Max-Planck-Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin, is testing the world’s first “anti-stupid” pill

I agree with Ron White.

Reuters pulls a fast one out of the sewer:

Charles Johnson discovered it.

Dan Riehl explains it

Pajamas Media has more.

Sigmund, Carl and Alfred are guestblogging today:
As the world watches and waits, two seemingly unrelated events are unfolding. The war in the Middle East is unfolding and Fidel Castro is hovering between life and death. No matter what occurs in both instances, the world will never be the same. Boundaries are being pushed, and realities, heretofore ignored, are being faced.

In the case of the Middle East, despite all the brouhaha of the MSM and the left, it is clear that Israel’s war is existential. Dysfunctional societies have evolved in the region, carefully nurtured by some of the most oppressive and repressive regimes in the world, with stated aims of eliminating or destroying Israel, couched in religious terminology.

Try as the mighty MSM might, they have failed miserably in their attempt to convince the world that the Israelis are new age Nazis. The civilized world can connect the dots: It is those for whom bigotry, hate and racism are a way of life that are the problem. Public displays of bigotry and hate and the glorification of darkness (and the promises to “finish what Hitler started”) make distinguishing the good from evil pretty easy. The only ones who actually believe the hatred and bigotry remains hidden are the Arabs themselves. Decades of dysfunction and hate, encouraged by regimes at the expense of education, jobs and freedom, have resulted in societies that cannot even relate to civilized societies. It will take decades to undo the damage.

In Cuba, in the shadow of a great democracy, a population has been force fed a diet long abandoned. Words like colonialism, imperialism and the the like are taught and talked about incessantly, at the expense of words like ‘free elections’ or ‘free press’, and ‘free _expression,’ and so one. Oliver Stone, chronicler of the Left, cannot make history go away. Castro’s brutal repression wasn’t a revolutionary anomaly. It was and remains, an integral part of the Cuban regime’s character.

In governments that have failed it’s citizen in every way, the ‘seven cent solution’- a bullet- is a favored and economical way to maintain control. At seven cents apiece, a lot of control can be bought. In addition, both Cuba and Arab world societies have come to rely on huge secret police networks, gulags and informers. With a straight face, they tell us- demand from us, actually, that we treat them as moral equals.

In the Arab world, hatred of Jews is taught, encouraged and rewarded. Jews are easy to hate. A few religious texts, a few preachers paid to stir things up and they are in business. Democracy has to be reviled as well, because notwithstanding the occasional cold exchanges between Israel and the western world, those democracies will never adopt the Arab world agenda. When the Arab world makes it’s case in the west, it does so in camouflage- as if they expect the racism, bigotry and hate will go unnoticed.

In Cuba, there is no religious facet, of course. In it’s place, the evils of capitalism assumed a religious motif. Everything about capitalism was evil, everything in a capitalist society was poisonous. America was the great purveyor of evil and had to fought as if she were a poisonous snake- an object of dread and fear.

In both the Arab world and in the case of Cuba and similar regimes, societies and expressions of dissent of must be subjugated. Regimes that restrict freedom will always be playing ‘catchup’ with free societies.

Societies that are successful do not need to restrict their citizens. Free societies understand that their greatness and ability to progress comes about as the result of each individual free to find his or her own greatness and potential, benefiting society along the way.

Both the Arab world and regimes like Cuba have one thing in common. They are societies that need hate and need fear. They are societies that cannot stand and support themselves on their own merits. Instead, they must rely on ever expanding and convoluted fear mongering. It is impossible for societies to succeed if they only things holding those societies together are fear and hate.

In the Arab world, the deliberate and concerted effort to vilify Jews a fundamental and basic tenet of Arab and Islamic identity is a deliberate attempt by dysfunctional political and religious leaders to create and subjugate a society that cannot function. In Cuba and elsewhere there are deliberate and concerted efforts to create that same kind of dysfunctional society.

The Arab world has painted itself into a corner. The vicious hate has been brought to the fore and it can no longer be hidden. The choices the Arabs have made are now evident for all to see. They have chosen hate over education ( a recent UN report placed Arab education at the bottom of the world barrel) and bigotry over progress. Along with the spectacular legacy of deaths, murders and failures that equal those in the darkest African recesses, the only other notable Arab achievement has been hating Jews. When you consider the great oil and gas wealth that been plundered, one can only be stupefied.

Castro’s legacy is being looked at, even as we speak. How does he hide the deaths, the murders? How does his Cuba explain away the economic failures, highlighted not only by neighbor America’s successes, but the successes of other Caribbean, even smaller neighbors? A Canadian visitor to Cuba once wrote that Havana- the show city- reminded him of Montreal in the 1950’s. Is that success? Are the hotels that cater to foreign tourists (and off limits to Cubans) any different than similar hotels that were found in Moscow, not that long ago? Had the Cuba been free, she and her citizens would no doubt have been spectacularly successful. a ‘warm Canada.’

In the same way that statues to Lenin and Stalin came down, so too will the tributes to Castro’s ‘people’s paradise.’

The fact remains that what is happening in the Middle East and Cuba are related.

It’s called, ‘Sunlight.’

Posted by Sigmund, Carl and Alfred

Fresh from his grand tour of Argentina, Portugal, Belarus, Russia, Qatar, Iran, Vietnam, Mali and Benin (no stop in Cuba, and no stop in North Korea, either), where Hugo went asking for support to the Venezuelan candidacy to a UN Security Council seat, Chavez recalls ambassador to Israel

to show his “indignation” over the military offensive in Lebanon.

“We have ordered the withdrawal of our ambassador in Israel,” Chavez said in a televised speech, calling Israeli attacks in Lebanon “genocide.”

El Universal quotes Hugo in yet more slurs:

“It is outrageous to witness how the Israeli state continues using gringo airplanes and its big power to cut apart so many innocents in Lebanon,” he lamented.

James Keller, co-pastor of the Providence Presybyterian Church, believes that “Venezuela deserves U.S. respect”. Jim just came back from a chaperoned tour of Hugoland. Jim probably believes Hugo when he says that if Venezuela gets a Security Council seat he will not indulge in ideological grandstanding.

Not one to believe that money can’t buy love, Hugo’s spreading a lot of money. And how much money did Hugo spend on his shopping trip this time?

• Argentina: $112 million for two oil tankers to be built in Argentina, instead of the $72 million it would cost to build them in Venezuela.
• Belarus: the amount is not clear, but
  

  seven agreements on military-technical cooperation, trade and economic ties would be signed. Bilateral trade was nearly $16 million in 2005.

  Energy-wise, Belarus is part of a loose union, the Russia-Belarus union

• Russia: $3 billion for 24 Sukhoi Su-30 fighter jets and 53 helicopters and the installation of factories to produce Kalashnikov rifles and ammunition, among other things.
• Iran: $55 million Samand car factory; $4 billion in the explorations and developments of two oil fields in Venezuela
• Mali: $100m a year in petroleum products.
• Benin: $2.9 million in aid for a housing and microfinance program.

Bilateral trade last year between Iran and Venezuela was valued at about $1 billion.

The Vietnamese dollar amount apparently has not been made public. The Vietnamese, however, were not pleased over Hugo’s “radical, left-wing” rethoric, to use the Beeb’s own words.

I couldn’t find how much Hugo spent in Portugal, or in Qatar, but,

Following a short visit to Qatar and an appearance on the Al-Jazeera television network, Chavez arrived in Iran where he reiterated that Venezuela would “stand by Iran at any time and under any condition.” Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad described him as a “brother and trench mate.” Affinities between these two leaders go beyond their countries’ shared interests as oil producers and members of OPEC. They both have military backgrounds, an authoritarian vein and a self-aggrandized vision of their roles in shaping the world’s fate by defeating “imperialism.” More dangerously, Chavez, who also held talks with Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, supports the most radical positions of the Islamist extremists.

The Venezuelan regime’s praise of Hezbollah and condemnation of Israel has been expressed in more radical terms than that of some Arab governments. Chavez has extolled the virtues of Hezbollah’s asymmetric warfare, as an example of resistance against a superior military force, and stated his aim to model the Venezuelan reserves and the militias under his direct control after them.

Ponder that the next time you hear someone say that warning against Chavez’s danger is all a most fanciful conspiracy theory.

Hugo also has plans that

Venezuela will install an advanced air-defense system with anti-aircraft missiles capable of shooting down approaching enemy warplanes, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said Thursday.
. . .
“We’re going to armor Venezuela.”

Apparently with parts from Russia, Belarus and Iran. Nothing personal, says Vlad:

Significantly, Russian arms deliveries to Venezuela have nothing to do with Chavez’s anti-Americanism or his striving to spite Washington. Russian defense producers say this is business, nothing personal, as the meeting between the Venezuelan leader and Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin showed.
Unlike in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, or Volgograd and Izhevsk in Russia, which Chavez visited before coming to Moscow, no political statements or criticism of the U.S. was permitted in the Kremlin. Putin is strictly adhering to his policy of avoiding membership in any “holy alliances”.

I wonder what Vlad thinks of Hugo’s hopes for Russia’s aid in the construction of a $20-billion natural gas pipeline.

Next in Hugo’s plans: Hugovision USA!

In more postive news, Saab stops Venezuela arms sales

The Swedes have in the past sold anti-aircraft missiles, rocket launchers and anti-tank rifles to Venezuela worth around $150m (£80m).

Update Venezuela News and Views sheds some light on the subject.

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(technorati tags Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, Latin America, Hezbollah, Argentina, Portugal, Belarus, Russia, Qatar, Iran, Vietnam, Mali, Benin)

When it comes to Raul Castro, Best of the Web said it first,

We’re going to start calling him Raul “Waldo” Castro

Where is “Waldo”? Maybe he’s in Havana: Alan Freeman’s article says (emphasis mine)

Raul has still not made a formal public statement or been shown on TV since the statement on Monday, although he was reportedly seen yesterday in downtown Havana and greeted warmly by passersby.

Freemen says that the dead-tree Granma on its front page (not on line yet) recycled

an excerpt of a speech given by Raul Castro, the nation’s Defence Minister, to the Communist Party Central Committee on July 1, a month before the announcement of Fidel’s illness. Reuters news agency said the speech was originally pronounced in mid-June to army officers and printed in Granma the next day.

Recycled speeches or not, as of 5:52AM today Reuters was saying that “Waldo” is a no-show, and as of 3:10GMT, at the Beeb “The question of Raul Castro’s non-appearance remains unanswered”.

Meanwhile, via Linda, Where is Fidel?

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A reminder: Fausta’s blog has a new address. Please update your bookmark and your blogroll.
(technorati tags Fidel Castro, Castro, Cuba)

In today’s Granma, the official organ of the Cuban dictatorship, another statement from the Commander in Chief (n Spanish), dated August 1 but posted on August 2,

Yo no puedo inventar noticias buenas, porque no sería ético, y si las noticias fueran malas, el único que va a sacar provecho es el enemigo. En la situación específica de Cuba, debido a los planes del imperio, mi estado de salud se convierte en un secreto de estado que no puede estar divulgándose constantemente; y los compatriotas deben comprender eso. No puedo caer en el círculo vicioso de los parámetros de salud que constantemente, a lo largo del día, se mueven.

Puedo decir que es una situación estable, pero una evolución real del estado de salud necesita el transcurso del tiempo.

Lo más que podría decir es que la situación se mantendrá estable durante muchos días, antes de poder dar un veredicto
(my translation)
I can not make up good news because it wouldn’t be ethical, and if the news was bad, the only one to benefit is the enemy. Specifically, in Cuba, because of the evil empire’s plans, the state of my health becomes a state secret that can not be constantly divulged; and the compatriots should understand that. I can’t go into the vicious cycle of health parameters that change constantly throughout the day.

I can say that it’s a stable situation, but a real evolution in the state of health needs the passage of time.

The most I can say is that the situation will remain stable for many days, before one can give a veredict.

Interesting statement, indeed:

• Nowhere does one find Fidel’s name on that.
• Underneath the convoluted wording (as is usual in Granma), lies the fact that there’s no good news
• And what news there is won’t be revealed for the time being

As Mario Loyola puts it,

But there’s only one detail about Castro’s health that could possibly be a state secret: that he’s dead.

Nobody seems to know where Fidel or Raul are, and Sky news reports that

There was a small increase in police presence in poorer parts of Havana and communist neighbourhood organisations activated “rapid response groups” used to put down riots.

Interesting that they are concerned about the poorer parts of Havana when the Fidel supposedly is a-charismatic-leader-helping-the-poor-offering-free-health-care-education-adult-literacy-and-job-training-initiatives-that-help-millions-of-[insert country name here]^tm.

Cuba’s parliamentary speaker, Ricardo Alarcon, claims that Fidel’s “very alive”, according to the Beeb. The Beeb also points out that

Fidel Castro has been among the world’s longest-ruling leaders, outlasting nine US presidents

Will someone tell the Beeb that’s what happens when the “leaders” are murderous tyrants, please? To add insult to injury, the Beeb article has this a box

HAVE YOUR SAY
“Whatever you say about Fidel, he has maintained a stability in Cuba that would not occur without him“
Craig, London, UK

The stability of an island prison: As Val points out,

Meanwhile the military, CDRs, Rapid Response Brigades and police have all been mobilized and stationed throughout the island under the pretense of defending the nation from a US invasion. Truth of the matter, however, is that these forces are there to prevent Cubans from taking to the streets. The government that boasts itself the winner in the Battle of Ideas seems to be worried about its people getting any ideas.

The Economist and US News & World Report discuss what Cuba would be like under (the so far missing) Raul, who is also known (not affectionately) as La China (a nickname “that refers to his supposedly Chinese looks and his alleged homosexuality”).

From Captain’s Quarters:

If anything, governments err on the side of too much reassurance, not too little. Leaving the appearance of a power vacuum creates the same amount of danger as a real power vacuum, because under these circumstances appearances probably do not lie. And power vacuums invite all sorts of responses to the need to fill them.

After almost five decades in power, the Castro regime surely knows this. So why are Cubans being forced to ask where Dear Placeholder has hidden himself? One has to wonder whether the transfer of power to Raul went as smoothly as first indicated, and whether Fidel is in any shape to enforce it.

On Tuesday I was saying this was Fidel’s Yasser moment. So far, it continues to be. Update (since I didn’t paste this from my original draft) would it mean also that it’s Raul’s, too?

Update: Elephants in Academia writes about Rumors and ripples
Update 2: Uncommon Sense: Cuba bars international press from the island. And the carnival got cancelled.
Good question
Update 3 Welcome, Best of the Web readers! Please visit often.
Cuba refused entry to more than 150 foreign journalists

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(technorati tags Fidel Castro, Castro, Cuba)