Archives for September 2006

Leave the wild animals alone, folks: ‘Crocodile Hunter’ Irwin killed.

Today’s other articles from Maria
Bush backs off ‘Islamic fascists’. Tones down war rhetoric to appease Muslim groups

DEM HARA-KIRI

Faust (no relation), Andrew Sullivan, and jihad: Why abduct us? We cede our values for free

Cancer cell ‘executioner’ found: Scientists have developed a way of “executing” cancer cells.

And a picture from Maria

(click to enlarge)

Update
Captain Ed’s been looking at France: Sarkozy To Fight The 60’s Mentality In France. As the Captain said,

French politics have finally become interesting.

With Millions in 9/11 Payments, Bereaved Can’t Buy Green Cards

In the end, 11 awards went to the survivors of illegal immigrants. All those victims had worked at the restaurant Windows on the World. Although they had earned modest wages, many were upwardly mobile and supported relatives back home, factors that increased the payouts. Their awards ranged from $875,000 to $4.1 million.

First of all let me make clear that I believe it is right that the survivors were treated the same as other survivors when it came to the monetary awards. That is not the point of this post.

Of the eleven families affected, at least three lived abroad at the time of the attack and remain there.
Now to the gist of the story:
At least three millionaire families continue to live here violating the law, even when they have hired lawyers and financial advisers. And they’ve learned to squeeze the system. Here are two instances:

A woman that was awarded $1.6 million stays here because

Her son, 17, is a senior at a private school in Manhattan, his tuition paid by a private foundation. A gifted photographer, he dreams of studying design, but the colleges he is interested in require Social Security numbers.

Let’s hope the private foundation money comes from the $1.6 million his mother inherited. However, that’s highly unlikely since he’d have to have a Social Security number, wouldn’t he?

As in this instance,

Her son was 4 when his father, a grill cook, died on 9/11. The Windows of Hope Family Relief Fund, which helps families of the restaurant workers, pays the boy’s tuition at a private elementary school in Manhattan. But this woman lives outside Newark and has no car. So she takes her son to and from school, a daily commute totaling six hours.

The “Mexican woman with the soulful eyes and a sweep of dark hair”, who spends six hours taking her 9-yr old son to the school whose pricey tuition is being paid by The Windows of Hope Family Relief Fund, has $2.2 million. You read it right:

$2,200,000 I couldn’t believe my soulful eyes.

Now excuse me while I pull my dark-yet-graying hair, thinking of all the people who have moved to this country legally and observe this country’s laws, and all the people (of all financial backgrounds) in this country whose children are denied admission to those schools in the name of “diversity”, and who don’t get to be heard by The Grey Lady.

(technorati tags New York Times, Illegal immigration, Illegal Aliens)

In today’s NYT, a champion of the proletariat:

Caracas Mayor Lays Claim to Golf Links to House Poor

No place in this country symbolizes the resilience of Venezuela’s moneyed elite more than the Caracas Country Club, a bastion of tropical luxury from the 1920’s, conceived in part for foreign oilmen and designed by American landscape architects who invoked the feeling of a vast coffee plantation.

Now read what A. M. Mora y Leon of Publius Pundit, who has actually been to the place, reported last Wednesday: CONFISCATION ON THE GREEN

But there is one important exception – it’s in the municipality of Chacao, and it’s called the Country Club. I was there – and it’s not quite as elite as you might think. The Country Club is a private recreation club where any resident in the area can buy a membership and where even without a membership, everyone visits and socializes. It’s safe there, nobody gets mugged, and it’s like a privately financed neighborhood community center. It has an inexpensive restaurant, some tennis courts, and a little golf course. It’s not a real big establishment, and it’s no more luxurious than a nice San Diego mall in some place like Encinitas.

Venezuela News and Views knows well the mayor of Caracas, who the NYT hails as champion of the proles:

Eventually Chavez named him Mayor of Caracas for his work at stirring the shit. That 2004 election was without a contender for reasons not of this post, but Barreto then barely got 15% of the potential vote of the city if you consider the ~75% abstention. However Barreto committed the original sin of people of his nature, he thought that the election was actually meaningful, that Caracas saw in him its legitimate mayor, that he reached office for other reasons than Chavez naming him candidate. He could not have been more wrong. A few days after his election he was foolish enough to attend a concert where the crowds booed him so strongly that it created a minor commotion. That was the last time he was seen at a cultural event. Since then, as in your B series movie, Barreto has been plotting his revenge against the kings of the prom and those who cheer them. No matter what other political considerations one might think of, this personal flaw of Barreto is the main drive in his actions.

Feathers blog:

We will see what will happen with this story that to me is another red cloth trown from the chavismo to the venezuelan opinion to divert the topic to the real important one: the elections.

And the NYT bought it, whole cloth and all. Just as it accepted the charismatic-leader-helping-the-poor-offering-free-health-care-education-adult-literacy-and-job-training-initiatives-that-help-millions-of-Venezuelans^tm ad last year.

(technorati tags Caracas, Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, golf)

French police are doing an extraordinary job stopping drug shipments from Venezuela:
Today’s headline: Spanish and French police seize 3.5 metric tons of cocaine, arrest 11

MADRID, Spain Spanish and French police staging a joint operation seized 3.5 metric tons (3.9 U.S. tons) of cocaine in a sailboat off the Canary Islands and arrested 11 people, authorities said Friday.

Officials said the cocaine was shipped from Venezuela and had a street value estimated at 350 million euros (US$450 million).

Saisie record de cocaïne aux Canaries (Record cocaine seizure off the Canary Islands. Article in French: my translation)

This record amount seized of “very pure” drug, with an estimated value of 200 million euros, was carried out thanks to the Franco-Spanish co-operation which made it possible to dismantle a “important network” between Europe and Latin America.
. . .
Earlier this summer, the joint Franco-Spanish investigation determined that the traffickers were about to leave for Venezuela, some by boat, some by plane.

BBC News also has a small item with the story. France2 has a video report in today’s broadcast (in French; available until approx. 2PM EDT tomorrow).

Last March I posted that

A group of French policemen busted a large container ship in the high seas, seizing the ship and 18 tons of cocaine. The policemen arrived at the ship by means of inflatable motor boats and a helicopter, and took charge of the ship and its crew shortly after.
. . .
The ship, which had left Havana and was loaded in Caracas, was on its way to the EU

The France2 broadcast tonight said that the European cocaine trade is estimated to be over 200 tons, so if you add both busts, it comes to an astonishing 10% of that amount, with both shipments originating from Venezuela.

Additionally, in April the Mexican army seized 5½ tons of cocaine worth more than $100 million from a commercial plane arriving from Venezuela. Back then The Scotsman commented,

It is significant that the drugs came via Venezuela, because the Colombian army has long alleged that Venezuela’s socialist president, Hugo Chavez, is sympathetic to the Marxist rebels.

Last June I linked to an article in Janes’ Intelligence Review titled (PDF file) South American cocaine trafficking operations shift towards Venezuela (via Venezuela Today):

Key points:

• Cocaine seizures in Venezuela in the past two years have increased tenfold over 1990s levels, indicating its growing statues as a trasit country.
• Several Colombian cartel bosses are believed to have relocated to Venezuela to escape law enforcement pressure in Colombia.
• Allegations of corruption and complicity in drug trafficking among some Venezuelan military personnel reflect the potential for narcotics revenue to corrupt state officials

Continental revolutions are extremely costly enterprises, and, as Aleksander Boyd said last April,

it is argued that +80% of the cocaine produced in neighbouring Colombia and the region enters the international markets via Venezuela, as heretofore unseen quantities have been seized in various countries.

The French are on the trail, and they’re doing an excellent job.

READ ALSO Aleksander Boyd’s article The Venezuela Connection, in last April’s Real Clear Politics.

Related post: Caribbean oil, Caribbean drugs, and major players.

Update Gateway Pundit: Hezbollah Is Working Openly in Venezuela!!
(link corrected, with my apologies). Update September 2 Via SC&A, LGF also has the link. Gustavo Coronel has the details.

(technorati tags Venezuela, drug trade, France, Spain)

This morning Wretchard brought to my attention this Belgian senate report (in French) dated May 4, 2006.

The report states that thousands of documents dated from 1930-1950 relating to the persecution and deportation of Jews in Belgium in the 1930s and 1940s were systematically destroyed “on a massive scale”. Padded in the language of bureaucratese, the report says that essential documents from the Attorney General’s Office pertaining the involvement of government officials, church authorities, local magistrates, and the royal family, specifically King Leopold III, during the German occupation were purposely destroyed, some as late as the 1990s.

Brussels Journal explains (emphasis added):

The systematic destructions of the records of police and judiciary from the 1930s and ’40s happened chiefly in Brussels and Wallonia, the French-speaking south of Belgium. The Senate report states that in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking north of the country, archives have been saved thanks to conscientious archivists. “This policy – of having competent archivists manage dead archives – contrasts with the disastrous situation at the offices of the public prosecutors in Brussels and Wallonia.”

While the records about the persecution of the Antwerp Jewry have been kept intact, documents about the fate of the Jews in Brussels and in French-speaking cities with large pre-war Jewish communities, such as Charleroi and Liège, were purposely destroyed. In Charleroi all the archives relating to the 1930s and the war years have vanished.

The report specifically states that the lack of professional archivists in Charleroi is one of the causes why police procedure wasn’t followed in order to preserve the files. Additionally,

In Brussels the judicial archives are present “until the early 1930s, while there is (almost) nothing left of the period thereafter,” the report says, adding that “Reference is often made to the 1944 fire of the Palais de Justice to explain this lack of archives […] However, there is no doubt that large parts of the Brussels judicial wartime archives were destroyed after 1944.”
. . .
Records relating to the so-called “phantom trains” have also disappeared. The “phantom trains” were convoys of “unpatriotic” Belgians, such as Flemish-Nationalists and Communists, and non-Belgian citizens, most of them Jewish fugitives from Germany and Poland. They were arrested by the Belgian authorities at the beginning of the war and deported to France.
. . .
After the war Robert De Foy resumed his position as head of the Belgian secret police. No wonder no-one ever investigated how and on whose orders the Belgian secret service had assisted Heydrich before the war. Nor did Belgium ever pay damages to the “phantom train” victims. On the contrary, it even refused to repatriate the bodies of the 21 victims in Abbeville.

As Pamela points out, 25,257 Belgian Jews were deported from Dossin de Saint-Georges Barracks (Malines/Mechelin) to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The persecution of the Jews in Belgium didn’t end with the war: Brussels Journal continues,

The historian Nico Wouters told the Senators during the hearings that even after the war the Belgian authorities continued to arrest German Jews who had survived the holocaust by going into hiding, under the pretext that they were “citizens of a hostile nation.”

Brussels Journal points out that

Though the Senate report dates from 4 May the Belgian press has not yet mentioned the affair.

However, just last month a Belgian newspaper was calling for the extermination of Israel.

Ironically, Belgium (which in spite of the recent exhibit at the Royal Museum in Brussels, continues to be in near-complete denial of the vast crimes it perpetrated in Congo) is a member of the commission responsible for the International Tracing Service (ITS), which maintains the vast Nazi German archive documenting war crimes which were recently authorized to be opened to the public.

Note: If you liked this post, please vote for it at Real Clear Politics.

Update More shennanigans in a country that, up to recently, granted itself the right to try foreign leaders for international war crimes in its own courts.

Update, Saturday September 2
Paul comments:

I would also like to react about the allegation on the mass-murders in Congo during the colonization, since it has been proved that they never happened, at least not at the scale that some people might believe they did.

The basic error comes from the way that Stanley (who explored Congo on behalf of king Leopold II) did travel Congo, and counted the inhabitants of the country.

Stanley mainly travelled along rivers. He counted the people living down these rivers, and extrapolated these numbers for the country as a whole.

He did not take into acount that more people live along rivers than further away from them.

Many years later, when the Belgian autorities decided a full-scale counting of the people living in Congo (recensement,as we say in french), they found several millions of people missing, according to the counting that Stanley made. And so the legend of the Belgian genocide was born, especially in Great Britain, that was not very happy about the Belgian colonization of the Congo.

These “missing” people, as a matter of fact, never existed!

And this legend still lives on. Not so long ago, the Belgian television showed a documentary based on this story (I think the title was White King, Red Rubber, Black Death).

That is not to say that we, Belgians were great colonizators. Indeed, we probably were as bad as, let’s say the French. But still, the truth has its rights.

If you want to know more about this, I know that the Belgian academic Jean Stengers wrote a book about it.

I found two books by Jean Stengers,

Stengers is also listed as one of the editors of this book:

(technorati tags Belgium, Holocaust, Israel, Anti-Semitism)

. . . when Algore’s flogging pseudoscience at the MTV awards, complete with a photo of a glacier melting.
(Flogging as in “hard-selling”. Not flogging as in “beating with a bullwhip”. At least not for now.)
Update, Sunday September 3 Now that Al’s realized that he can’t fill POTUS’s shoes, he’s borrowing Ron White‘s suits.

Today’s articles from Maria
Amir Taheri: ‘TALK TO IRAN’? IT ALWAYS FAILS

Ralph Peters: AFGHAN REALITY: PAKISTAN’S DOUBLE GAME

So Pakistan is playing both a short game and a long one. It cooperates with us against al Qaeda – and doesn’t want to take the rap for another major terror attack in the West. At the same time, it makes sure that the Taliban has “survival rations.” It doesn’t expect the Talibs to return to Kabul any time soon, but it does expect to see a Taliban-dominated coalition in Afghanistan eventually.

That mustn’t happen. And if we don’t walk away, it won’t. Meanwhile, we can be satisfied and proud that our actions have made a dirt-poor, deeply flawed, feudal state on the other side of the world a better place for the average human being within its borders. Oh, and we ripped the guts out of al Qaeda, too.

Live Long? Die Young? Answer Isn’t Just in Genes

MOVIE REVIEW | ‘THIS FILM IS NOT YET RATED’: Some Material May Be Inappropriate or Mystifying, and the Rating May Be As Well

More blogging, on a story Wretchard just brought to my attention, later.