harmonicminer

Mr. President, could we please start drilling for our own oil so that in the future we won’t have to buy oil from Saudi Arabia?

Saudi woman sentenced to 10 lashes for driving car

A Saudi woman was sentenced Tuesday to be lashed 10 times with a whip for defying the kingdom’s prohibition on female drivers, the first time a legal punishment has been handed down for a violation of the longtime ban in the ultraconservative Muslim nation.

Normally, police just stop female drivers, question them and let them go after they sign a pledge not to drive again. But dozens of women have continued to take to the roads since June in a campaign to break the taboo.

Making Tuesday’s sentence all the more upsetting to activists is that it came just two days after King Abdullah promised to protect women’s rights and decreed that women would be allowed to participate in municipal elections in 2015. Abdullah also promised to appoint women to a currently all-male advisory body known as the Shura Council.

The mixed signals highlight the challenge for Abdullah, known as a reformer, in pushing gently for change without antagonizing the powerful clergy and a conservative segment of the population.

Abdullah said he had the backing of the official clerical council. But activists saw Tuesday’s sentencing as a retaliation of sorts from the hard-line Saudi religious establishment that controls the courts and oversees the intrusive religious police.

“Our king doesn’t deserve that,” said Sohila Zein el-Abydeen, a prominent female member of the governmental National Society for Human Rights. She burst into tears in a phone interview and said, “The verdict is shocking to me, but we were expecting this kind of reaction.”

The driver, Shaima Jastaina, in her 30s, was found guilty of driving without permission, activist Samar Badawi said. The punishment is usually carried out within a month. It was not possible to reach Jastaina, but Badawi, in touch with Jastaina’s family, said she appealed the verdict.

Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world that bans women—both Saudi and foreign—from driving. The prohibition forces families to hire live-in drivers, and those who cannot afford the $300 to $400 a month for a driver must rely on male relatives to drive them to work, school, shopping or the doctor.

There are no written laws that restrict women from driving. Rather, the ban is rooted in conservative traditions and religious views that hold giving freedom of movement to women would make them vulnerable to sins.

Activists say the religious justification is irrelevant.

“How come women get flogged for driving while the maximum penalty for a traffic violation is a fine, not lashes?” Zein el-Abydeen said. “Even the Prophet (Muhammad’s) wives were riding camels and horses because these were the only means of transportation.”

Since June, dozens of women have led a campaign to try to break the taboo and impose a new status quo. The campaign’s founder, Manal al-Sherif, who posted a video of herself driving on Facebook, was detained for more than 10 days. She was released after signing a pledge not to drive or speak to media.

Since then, women have been appearing in the streets driving their cars once or twice a week.

Until Tuesday, none had been sentenced by the courts. But recently, several women have been summoned for questioning by the prosecutor general and referred to trial.

One of them, housewife Najalaa al-Harriri, drove only two times, not out of defiance, but out of need, she says.

“I don’t have a driver. I needed to drop my son off at school and pick up my daughter from work,” she said over the phone from the western port city of Jeddah.

“The day the king gave his speech, I was sitting at the prosecutor’s office and was asked why I needed to drive, how many times I drove and where,” she said. She is to stand trial in a month.

After the king’s announcement about voting rights for women, Saudi Arabia’s Grand Mufti Abdel Aziz Al Sheik blessed the move and said, “It’s for women’s good.”

Al-Harriri, who is one of the founders of a women’s rights campaign called “My Right My Dignity,” said, “It is strange that I was questioned at a time the mufti himself blessed the king’s move.”

Asked if the sentencing will stop women from driving, Maha al-Qahtani, another female activist, said, “This is our right, whether they like it or not.”

Watch it.  It will be time well spent.

Lessons learned from the mildly idiotic plans of one Rev. Jones to publicly burn a Koran, regardless of the eventual shakeout (he’s been changing his mind a lot lately), the plan to build a mosque at Ground Zero, and remaining unanswered questions:

1)  Muslims expressing deep outrage over this have no sense of proportion.  Death threats?  Insinuations that US national security is at stake?  Compare to the reaction of Christians to the “Piss Christ” “artwork”.

2)  Virtually everyone seems to be afraid of making Muslims angry.   Could that be because they know this represents a real danger?  Why is no one afraid of making Christians angry?

3)  Americans have largely forgotten 9/11, despite the many reminders in the press and news coverage recently.  They have forgotten how they felt on 9/12.  Sadly.

4)  Christianity and Islam are not on equal footing as “religions of peace.”  Not even close.  Not by a country mile.  They don’t inhabit the same galaxy.

5)  Where is the “moderate” Muslim outrage AT the Muslims who expressed such virulent outrage and threatened violence against Rev. Jones?

6)  Why does the mainstream media stress the great patience and understanding that Americans should have for the Muslim ambition to build a Mosque at Ground Zero (!), without also suggesting that Muslims should really just ignore nitwits like Rev. Terry Jones, and not get so excited about his loony plans?

7)  Why doesn’t our president make the same connection?  Where does he get off telling Rev. Jones how destructive his plan is, but still telling Americans they should be accepting of the Ground Zero mosque, as if that plan represents some great sensitivity to American feelings?

8)  Obama’s great political insight and wisdom, his deep connection to the American people, his smooth way with an audience….  all of this is a crock, a media made-up just-so story, which the media got away with in order to get their Annointed One elected, but which the American people have largely seen through.

The biggest loser over the Ground Zero Mosque and Terry Jones stories?

Obama, I think.

It is clear that Obama’s foreign policy regarding Iran is failing, as a new report showing that Iran is on the brink of nuclear weapons is the headline du jour.

Experts estimate that 20 kgs of uranium is a significant step toward arming a warhead. The uranium would still need to have its purity raised to 90 per cent, but that is a relatively easy process.

The agency’s report comes in spite of the recent imposition at the United Nations of a fresh round of sanctions against Iran and will heighten fears of an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear plants. The prospect of an attack had receded only recently with American assurances that Tehran was more than a year away from acquiring a bomb.

The Vienna-based nuclear watchdog indicated Tehran had maintained its absolute defiance of international pressure to curb its programme despite the imposition of harsh sanctions in May. The IAEA has grown increasingly alarmed at Iran’s behaviour and the latest report, which will be presented to the agency’s governors at a meeting next week, lambasted Tehran on a series of fronts.

The country’s refusal to answer questions on its attempts to make a nuclear warhead that could be fitted on to its most advanced missiles was denounced as a violation of sanctions.

The agency also rebuked the regime for its repeated failure to co-operate with weapons inspections designed to ensure that material was held securely at Iranian plants.

Iran barred two weapons inspectors from the country in June after they reported undeclared nuclear activity by scientists. It has also systematically objected to other scientists on spurious grounds.

“The agency is … concerned that the repeated objection to the designation of experienced inspectors hampers the inspection process and detracts from the agency’s ability to implement safeguards in Iran,” the report said.

The acquisition of uranium will cause the most alarm however. Until February the Iranians were enriching uranium to levels of no more than 5 per cent at its plant in Natanz.

The government-funded Verification Research, Training and Information Centre, an expert body, has estimated that a weapons expert would have done much of the separative work to make a nuclear device from 20 kgs of 20 per cent enriched material with relatively few further obstacles.

The IAEA under Yukiya Amano, its new Japanese director general, has taken a much tougher line with Iran’s obstruction of international inspections. But the agency’s reports demonstrate that, while the Iranian economy has suffered from sanctions, the nuclear programme has not been impeded. Iran’s stockpile of low-enriched uranium, the feedstock of both civilian and military nuclear programmes, has risen by around 15 per cent since May to reach 2.8 tonnes.

I have mentioned Dr. Jasser in other posts, leader of a movement of Muslims in favor of American democracy, and I’ve linked to his website in the blog roll on the lower right of this page.  If Islam is to free itself of an dangerous radicals who want to set the tone (sometimes all too successfully) for all of Islam, the reform must come from within, in the person of spokesmen like Dr. Jasser, who prizes liberty above Sharia.

Why the media keeps going to CAIR as a representative of “moderate Islam” instead of AIFD is beyond me…  or maybe it isn’t.  After all, most of the media are hostile to Israel, and so is CAIR.  Listen to Dr. Jasser, and hope there are many more who will follow him.

Not having anything brilliant to say today (why should today be different than any other day?), I defer to George Will, in his piece titled Israel’s Netanyahu Poised to Take Out Iran’s Nuclear Sites

When Israel declared independence in 1948, it had to use mostly small arms to repel attacks by six Arab armies. Today, however, Israel feels, and is, more menaced than it was then, or has been since. Hence the potentially world-shaking decision that will be made here, probably within two years.

To understand the man who will make it, begin with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s belief that stopping Iran’s nuclear weapons program is integral to stopping the worldwide campaign to reverse 1948. It is, he says, a campaign to “put the Jew back to the status of a being that couldn’t defend himself — a perfect victim.”

Today’s Middle East, he says, reflects two developments. One is the rise of Iran and militant Islam since the 1979 revolution, which led to al-Qaida, Hamas, and Hezbollah. The other development is the multiplying threat of missile warfare.

Now Israel faces a third threat, the campaign to delegitimize it in order to extinguish its capacity for self-defense.

After two uniquely perilous millennia for Jews, the creation of Israel meant, Netanyahu says, “the capacity for self-defense restored to the Jewish people.” But note, he says, the reflexive worldwide chorus of condemnation when Israel responded with force to rocket barrages from Gaza and from southern Lebanon. There is, he believes, a crystallizing consensus that “Israel is not allowed to exercise self-defense.”

From 1948 through 1973, he says, enemies tried to “eliminate Israel by conventional warfare.” Having failed, they tried to demoralize and paralyze Israel with suicide bombers and other terrorism. “We put up a fence,” Netanyahu says. “Now they have rockets that go over the fence.” Israel’s military, which has stressed offense as a solution to the nation’s lack of strategic depth, now stresses missile defense.

That, however, cannot cope with Hamas’ tens of thousands of rockets in Gaza and Hezbollah’s 60,000 in southern Lebanon. There, U.N. resolution 1701, promulgated after the 2006 war, has been predictably farcical. This was supposed to inhibit the arming of Hezbollah and prevent its operations south of the Litani River.

Since 2006, Hezbollah’s rocket arsenal has tripled and its operations mock resolution 1701. Hezbollah, learning from Hamas, now places rockets near schools and hospitals, certain that Israel’s next response to indiscriminate aggression will turn the world media into a force multiplier for the aggressors.

Any Israeli self-defense anywhere is automatically judged “disproportionate.” Israel knows this as it watches Iran.

Last year was Barack Obama’s wasted year of “engaging” Iran. This led to sanctions that are unlikely to ever become sufficiently potent. With Russia, China, and Turkey being uncooperative, Iran is hardly “isolated.” The Iranian democracy movement probably cannot quickly achieve regime change. It took Solidarity 10 years to do so against a Polish regime less brutally repressive than Iran’s.

Hillary Clinton’s words about extending a “defense umbrella over the region” imply, to Israelis, fatalism about a nuclear Iran. As for deterrence working against a nuclear-armed regime steeped in an ideology of martyrdom, remember: In 1980, Ayatollah Khomeini said: “We do not worship Iran, we worship Allah. For patriotism is another name for paganism. I say let this land burn. I say let this land go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world.”

You say, that was long ago? Israel says, this is now:

Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, says Israel is the “enemy of God.” Tehran, proclaiming that the Holocaust never happened and vowing to complete it, sent an ambassador to Poland who in 2006 wanted to measure the ovens at Auschwitz to prove them inadequate for genocide. Iran’s former president, Hashemi Rafsanjani, who is considered a “moderate” by people for whom believing is seeing, calls Israel a “one-bomb country.”

If Iran were to “wipe the Zionist entity off the map,” as it vows to do, it would, Netanyahu believes, achieve a regional “dominance not seen since Alexander.” Netanyahu does not say Israel will, if necessary, act alone to prevent this. Or does he?

He says CIA Director Leon Panetta is “about right” in saying Iran can be a nuclear power in two years. He says 1948 meant this: “For the first time in 2,000 years, a sovereign Jewish people could defend itself against attack.” And he says: “The tragic history of the powerlessness of our people explains why the Jewish people need a sovereign power of self-defense.” If Israel strikes Iran, the world will not be able to say it was not warned.

German website Der Spiegel says examination of photographs of eight scorched Kurdish rebels shows Turkey used chemical weapons

Is Turkey using chemical weapons against Kurdish rebels? German weekly Der Spiegel reported on its website Thursday that it had obtained photographs showing the bodies of fighters from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) that had been killed by chemical weapons. The report, which is based on a report published over the weekend, claims German experts have examined and confirmed the photographs’ authenticity.

According to the report, the horrifying images show burned, maimed and scorched body parts. Kurdish human rights activists believe the people in the photos are eight members of the PKK underground, who were killed in clashes with the Turkish military in September 2009.

The photographs were transferred to a human rights delegation including German activists, journalists, and far-Left Turkish politicians.

A “far left Turkish politician” just has to be an interesting beast.  From what I can gather, they are modeled after “social democrats” everywhere, which means that socialism is more important to them than freedom.  This group seems to descend from pro-Soviet roots.

The report said the photographs were transferred to a forensics lab and were examined by experts from Hamburg University Hospital. Expert Hans Baumann confirmed the initial suspicion that it is highly probable the eight Kurds died “due to the use of chemical substances.”

This is not the first time Turkey is suspected of using chemical weapons, in violation of the international treaty to which it is a signatory. Such suspicions have led German politicians to call for an independent international probe into the matter.

It would be spectacular if those same German politicians were more serious in stopping Iran from going nuclear.  How many German banks and German industrialists are doing business with Iran (maybe through appropriate cutouts to maintain semi-plausible deniability)?  But only semi-plausible.

Gisela Penteker, a Turkey expert with the international medical organization International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, noted that Turkey has been suspected of using chemical weapons for years. “Local people have said that again and again,” she explained. Finding proof is difficult, however, she said, because bodies were often released so late that it was hardly possible to carry out a thorough autopsy.

Meanwhile, Berlin daily newspaper Die Tageszeitung, also reported that it has obtained additional, shocking pictures, supposedly autopsy photographs of six other killed Kurds.

The paper also reported that the Turkish Foreign Ministry rejected the claims, saying, “Turkey is a signatory to the Chemical Weapons Convention, and its armed forces do not possess any biological or chemical weapons.”

Well, that’s comforting.  Turkey, of course, is the newest addition to the international blame-Israel-first coalition, made up of the Arab league, most European nations, Russia and China….  and, of course, the American Left, including American academia and American media.

Good luck finding any significant American media outlet covering this, or an American academic calling for an international investigation….  of the sort they called for when Israel defended its Gaza blockade from Turkish ships.  Now, THAT really deserved an “impartial” international investigation by that neutral arbiter of peace and truth, the United Nations.

But a few Turkish Kurds killed with banned chemical weapons?  That doesn’t even make the radar screen, let alone the news.

It would seem that the Turkish government’s zone of protection from such investigation has widened, in exact proportion to its recent hostility to Israel.  After all: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. 

And to most of these people, Israel is surely the enemy.

The worm turns in Saudi Arabia, as a Saudi woman beats up virtue cop

It was a scene Saudi women’s rights activists have dreamt of for years.

When a Saudi religious policeman sauntered about an amusement park in the eastern Saudi Arabian city of Al-Mubarraz looking for unmarried couples illegally socializing, he probably wasn’t expecting much opposition.

But when he approached a young, 20-something couple meandering through the park together, he received an unprecedented whooping.

A member of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, the Saudi religious police known locally as the Hai’a, asked the couple to confirm their identities and relationship to one another, as it is a crime in Saudi Arabia for unmarried men and women to mix.

For unknown reasons, the young man collapsed upon being questioned by the cop.

According to the Saudi daily Okaz, the woman then allegedly laid into the religious policeman, punching him repeatedly, and leaving him to be taken to the hospital with bruises across his body and face.

I think I like this lady.  But I fear that in Saudi Arabia she will be treated very harshly.

In the meantime, Saudi men push for more wives

A group of young Saudi men have launched a campaign to convince Saudi men of the unappreciated virtues of polygamy.

It is a response to young Saudi women uninterested in joining a polygamous marriage, older Saudi women divorcees and Saudi men unable or unwilling to support more than one woman. The campaign seeks to counter what Saudi traditionalists see as an increasingly negative stigma attached to polygamy.

Campaigning under the slogan “Prophet of Four”, a reference to the Islamic edict allowing men to marry up to four wives, the group calls for every Saudi man to take four wives so as to rid the country of so-called ‘spinsters’, a term referring to unmarried Saudi women over the age of 30. Launched at the start of Saudi Arabia’s ‘marriage season’, the campaign’s Facebook page has already garnered a few hundred supporters.

Spinsters of the world, unite! Throw off your shackles! Marry a sexist pig who will only “beat you lightly“!

The UN continues its utter vapidity and cupidity (not to mention stupidity) with this bit of insane theater.  It’s like putting Adolph Hitler on the board of the local anti-semitism society.  I’m sure the women of Iran are comforted now that Iran is going to have a voice at the UN for women’s rights around the world.

In the meantime, Iran continues its nuclear program apace, a fact which even the densest of the international left is finally beginning to realize, and fear.  And Iran is still the single largest player in fomenting international terrorism, unless, of couse, you count the Saudi’s, who fund the madrassas that create converts to radical Islamism, and also appear to fund terrorists directly via cutouts and misdirection.  This isn’t exactly Saudi national policy, since terrorism threatens the Saudi leadership as well as the USA and Israel.  But it’s a measure of how out-of-control the Saudi government is of how its family princes spend their money outside the nation.

Oh, yeah, we really want these guys working for women’s rights.

Here is the opening part of an article titled “Tower of Terrorism at Ground Zero” at the Muslims Against Sharia Blog

America is defined by the last phrase of its national anthem: The land of the free and the home of the brave. Freedom, in all its forms, is its greatest legacy, which the nation has bravely fought many wars on many fronts to preserve against the unceasing assaults of totalitarianism of all stripes. Time and again, the heroes of the nation bravely sacrificed their lives to protect freedom and liberty.

Currently, America is faced with the insidious, multifaceted, and most deadly threat of Islamism. Since Islam has been around for centuries, there is a tendency to ignore or even deny the threat it poses to humanity. Various concessions are made, some of them as good faith offerings and some in the hope of placating the Islamists. Yet, concessions to threats are appeasements. And appeasements have never solved any problems. They only whet the appetite of the aggressor, give it more power, and make it even more dangerous.

Very unfortunately, in today’s world, Islamists [including political Islam] are set as Islam’s locomotive that takes the Islamic train on its demolition course. Instead of promoting peace, many of the so-called leaders of the ‘Muslim Ummah’ are engaged in fuelling Jihad and killing innocent people in the name of religion. And sadly, such elements are gradually growing influence everywhere in the world as well brainwashing some of the naïve global leaders like Barack Hussain Obama, who continues to appease Islamists without sensing the degree of threat it poses to his very own country.

Islam and democracy are incompatible. As democracies practice their magnificent accommodating belief, they knowingly or unknowingly lay the track for the advancing train wrecking that is Islam. Radical Islamism threatens to set a new record for brutality, contrary to the contention that there is no reason to worry about it. Jihadist Wahabism’s tentacles are reaching out from its cradle in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf Arab Emirates. The Petrodollar flush Sunni-Shia zealots are liberally financing mosques, Madrassas [Islamic indoctrination schools], Islamic centers at universities, front organizations and lobbyists to promote the Wahhabi or Shiite virulent Islamism in every part of America. That makes America the Vulnerable.

Activities of Tablighi Jamaat is gradually increasing in United States, and according to recent statistics disclosed during last year’s largest Tablighi congregations in Bangladesh, more than four hundred Tablighi groups are actively working in various so-called community mosques or in disguise mostly targeting young Americans with the goal of converting them initially to Islam and later giving them Jihadist provocations.

So begins a rather lengthy and detailed article on the various ways that radical Islamists are pursuing their agendas in the USA.

Ask yourself this simple question: is the mosque at Ground Zero being paid for with money from America’s Muslims?

Not likely.

Do you think “moderate Muslims” are paying for it?  (Here is one who probably is not.)  Is it being paid for with money from the same people and nations who fund worldwide radical Islamism?

What do you think?  And do you think they would spend their money if they didn’t expect it to produce a result in the USA?  What do you think is the result they intend?