New Media

A lot closer than most people realized. A new Guardian documentary reveals “a ruling elite so unsettled by the uprising that it had a plane on standby ready to fly the president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, to Syria at a moment’s notice.”

What might have been.

H/T to Harry’s Place

As reported at Nexus, George Galloway has been soundly defeated in Bethnal Green and Bow. He will undoubtedly remain an annoying demagogue, but he will do so without the aura of respectability conferred by membership in the British House of Commons.

Now, how much longer will we have to wait for Galloway to be charged for providing materiel support to a terrorist organization? Perhaps it would have been too unseemly to go after him while he was still an active member of parliament. Those political considerations have changed.

The US President hit the nail on the head at the Washington Nuclear Summit as to why we are more at risk from nuclear attack now than in the last decades of the Cold War: radical Islamists of the Al Queda or Iranian regime template. I explain in my latest essay in the Mark, The New Nuclear Threat, as to why this threat seems more urgent than when we were facing off against a revolutionary regime willing to imprison and murder millions of its own citizens in order to retain power:

Islamist theocracies and terrorist groups, however, are very different. It’s not because they aren’t rational actors. They may be perfectly rational. It’s just that they’re working from an entirely different set of assumptions.

Islamist ideology is all about rejecting the decadence and wickedness of this corrupt world for a better existence in the afterlife. Even for Islamists ensconced within relatively comfortable Western countries, electric cars, iPads, and medical technology that can extend life by decades are no consolation for the fact that Satan rules this plane of existence.

How do you escape this hell on Earth? Why, please God and go to heaven of course. What’s the easiest way to do that according to their ideology? Kill infidels. How do you kill the largest number of infidels in the least amount of time? Nuke them.

But what if this results in a counter strike by the infidels? Even better, say the Islamists. All those tens of millions of Muslims who could be killed in a nuclear retaliation would also go to heaven. Mutually Assured Destruction becomes a win-win.

The saga of Amnesty International’s decision to stand by an extremist who characterizes the armed struggle type of jihad as “tourism” has gone from bad to worse. Gita Saghal, who was suspended from her position as head of Amnesty’s Gender Unit for criticizing this relationship in public, succinctly sums up the nefarious themes at work in a recent interview:

Amnesty has come out with a statement saying that Mozzam Begg defends something called defensive jihad. He believes in this concept and we do not believe, (that is Amnesty’s senior leadership) that it is antithetical to human rights. Now that is a most extraordinary statement which they have not made before they were forced to the media and to defend their position in the media…

Now it appears they feel his views are not antithetical to human rights and it seems that they do not understand anything about what defensive jihad means…

Is is extremely worrying if they think that ideologies that are promoting systematic violence and discrimination against women, against religious minorities…

This concept of jihad, according to Begg in an article he wrote, is an individual obligation on all Muslims. Now many Muslims would say that jihad is a spiritual obligation, it’s about an intellectual and spiritual struggle. Not everyone believes it’s about war. He specifically rejects that idea. He thinks that it is about war, and that it is an individual obligation and that people should go and fight.

What do you do when the leaders of an organization most associated with the protection of human rights decide to partner with someone whose agenda would lead to the systematic destruction of human rights? Revoking your membership with Amnesty International and canceling your monthly donations could be a start.

Gita Saghal on Amnesty and Mozzam Begg

H/T to Harry’s Place.

It’s looking more and more like a strong possibility. The odd support of the left around the world in support of an extreme right wing violent agenda may make this a reality:

This problem is not exactly new, though the trends have certainly worsened over the past few years. For years after Oslo, virtually everyone agreed on a two-state solution. This made sense, since Palestinians themselves were asking to remain separate from Jews.

But now, we hear lots of talk of a one-state solution, in which the Jewish remnant in a unified nation would very soon lose its unique character through simple demography. “It would have been beyond the pale years ago, but now they talk of an Apartheid state, even though Israel is a multicultural country where all citizens, Jew and Arab alike, have the very same civil rights — and next door in the Palestinian territories and the Arab lands, Jews were kicked out of their homes and would not be safe in those countries today. Yet none of this is even discussed.”

Read the full article, The Case of the Kidnapped Conscience