South Africa – Breaking News

 Lobby? What Lobby?
 
by Michael Scheuer
 
 
Last December, I spoke to the nonpartisan Jamestown Foundation’s annual conference on al-Qaeda. My talk was a worldwide survey of how America’s war against Islamism had gone in 2008; an analysis of al-Qaeda’s current fortunes and growth potential; and an assessment of whether U.S. policies were adequately protecting genuine U.S. national interests as the Obama administration began. I concluded that 2008 was a year of setbacks for America, and that the future appeared rather bleak.
 
For the speech, I took as my text a truncated version of the introduction I wrote for the paperback edition of my book, Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq. In preparing the new text I was pleased to find my predictions in the hardcover had been accurate, but saddened that Americans had not faced the fact that our Islamist foes are motivated by U.S. foreign policies and their impact. One policy I am critical of in Marching Toward Hell is the nature of the U.S.-Israel relationship. I argued that unqualified, bipartisan support for Israel damages U.S. national security, and I damned those who identify critics of the relationship as anti-American, anti-Semitic, or, in my case, according to AIPAC leader Morris J. Amitay, a man who would make Mein Kampf "required reading" at the CIA.
  Read More »Lobby? what lobby?

“New law, Racist and constitutes a thought crime”

Saed Bannoura – IMEMC & Agencies
 
As the Israeli Knesset was debating the new law, which punishes any citizen who does not recognize Israel as a Jewish Democratic State, Arab member of Knesset Jamal Zahalka, described the law as racist and a thought crime.

Zahalka said that any person who demands democracy and equality would be punished and imprisoned, and that this means dozens of Jewish and Arabs university lecturers, intellectuals and politicians who propose a bi-national state or a state for all of its citizens would be punished and imprisoned.

Read More »New law racist and constitutes a thought crime

 By M K Bhadrakumar

(source: Asia Times Online)

The Nobel Peace Prize has a tradition. In the entire period from 1901 to 2009, it has never been awarded twice to any of its 97 individual recipients.

United States President Barack Obama is thus unlikely to win a second Nobel. Yet, in an historical perspective, Afghanistan promises to become the first country in which Islamists will have been ushered into power on the wave of America’s newfound smart power.

That too may only be the beginning. "Of course Afghanistan is not an island. There is no solution just within its borders," North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) secretary general Anders

Fogh Rasmussen said at a security conference in Munich last weekend.

Read More »The winner takes all in Afghanistan

By Gwynne Dyer

(source: The MetroWest Daily News)

People often wind up believing their own cover story. Former British prime minister Tony Blair, for example, is trapped forever in the rationalizations he used in 2003 to explain why he was going along with George Bush’s invasion of Iraq. He was at it again last week, telling the BBC that "radical Islam" is the greatest threat facing the world today.

The BBC journalist went to Ireland for the interview, because Blair chose Dublin for the only live signing of his newly published autobiography: a personal appearance in Britain wouldn’t be safe. Even in Ireland, the protesters threw eggs and shoes at the man who was Bush’s faithful sidekick in the struggle to save Western civilisation from radical Islam.

But is militant Islam really a bigger threat to the world than the possibility of a major nuclear war (happily now in abeyance, but never really gone)? Bigger than the risk that infectious diseases are going to make a major come-back as antibiotics become ineffective? Bigger even than the threat of runaway global warming?

Blair has to say it is, because he was one of the people who launched a crusade against radical Islamists after 9/11. Or at least against those whom they accused of being supporters of radical Islam, although many of them (like Saddam Hussein) were nothing of the sort.

Blair has never publicly acknowledged that Saddam Hussein was actually an enemy of radical Islam: admitting it would drain the last dram of logic from his justification for invading Iraq. So he only talks in general terms about fighting "radical Islam," and hopes that the more ignorant part of the public will think that includes the Iraq war.

Read More »The great islamic threat?