Premier Wen Jiabao meets with visiting U.S. Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte in Beijing on Jan. 16.

GERTZ:Further indications of the Bush administration’s shift in policy in favor of Beijing and away from Taiwan were disclosed in Beijing last week during the strategic dialogue meeting headed by Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte.

Negroponte was quoted as saying that Taiwan’s planned referendum on joining the United Nations as a “Taiwan,” instead of its formal name, the Republic of China, would be a mistake.

"The United States thinks it certainly would have been preferable not to have such a 'referendum,'" Negroponte said.

The comment followed Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s remark in December that the referendum was a “provocative” move by Taiwan’s pro-independence government.

China has been pressuring the United States to take the anti-Taiwan stance and the Bush administration has accommodated the requests.

Senior U.S. officials, however, have made no similar comments criticizing China’s provocative actions, including the build up of missiles opposite Taiwan, its anti-satellite weapons test and its refusal to allow U.S. warship visits to Hong Kong.

The Oxford Research Group said that any U.S.-British war with Iran would plunge the Middle East into violence. A report by the think tank concluded any U.S. air strike would invite Islamic retaliation against Western interests throughout the region.

"Going to war with Iran will make matters far worse, playing directly into the hands of extreme elements and adding greatly to the violence across the region," the report, released on Monday, said. "Whatever the problems with Iran, war should be avoided at all costs."

The report was released as the British government was said to be discussing war options against Teheran with the United States. British media reports said Prime Minister Gordon Brown has pledged that the British military would help Washington in any attempt to destroy Iran's nuclear weapons program.

The Oxford Research Group urged a reassessment of the Western military strategy against Islamic adversaries. The report said the war against Al Qaida and its allies was failing and called for a Western withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq.

"If the Al Qaida movement is to be countered, then the roots of its support must be understood and

systematically undercut," said Paul Rogers, the report's author and professor of global peace studies at Bradford University in northern England. "Combined with conventional policing and security measures, Al Qaida can be contained and minimised but this will require a change in policy at every level."

Entitled "Alternatives to the War on Terror," the think tank said Iran and its ally Syria must be wooed by the West through diplomacy. Rogers said Islamic insurgency groups in Afganistan should be granted aid in an attempt to turn them into political partners.

"Failure to make the necessary changes could result in the war on terror lasting decades," the report said.

.

US President George W. Bush's administration tortures detainees in defiance of international law, former US president Jimmy Carter charged Wednesday.

"I don't think it, I know it, certainly," Carter told CNN television when asked if he believed the US administration allowed the use of torture.

Carter rejected Bush's statement last week that the United States does not torture terror suspects.

"That's not an accurate statement, if you use the international norms of torture as has always been honored, certainly in the last 60 years, since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was promulgated," Carter said in the interview.

Of course we all know the story.

If not you can find it here or here
But the question is WHY?

Were they physically afraid of a Salman Rushdie/Theo Van Gogh personal future?

Were they warned off by lawyers that the court awards would break them and cost them their careers?

Is there a university policy to cave in? 

Were legal blandishments just a part ?

Do the Al Saud et al contribute mightily to Cambridge endowments? 

Were promises made?

How fast would they have caved in to Dick Cheney, one wonders?

Is Yale University Press picking this up? 

! NOT

No more GWOT, House committee decrees

The House Armed Services Committee is banishing the global war on terror from the 2008 defense budget.

Thanks to Atlas for finding this one...stunning.

French Jews petition U.S. for asylum

More than 7,000 French Jews have signed a petition asking for political asylum in the United States because of anti-Semitism in France.

Gee...how shocking, nothing in history to indicate this ..this must all be due to Israel ...

A little exposition of the 'ancien' european hobby follows....

Kucinich Hires "Critic" of Israel , and Chomskyite critic of US for Hill Panel -Politico

SALAFI FREAK ALERT? 

Democratic Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich of Ohio has hired an avowed critic of Israel to work on his subcommittee of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), who is Jewish and a staunch supporter of Israel, chairs the full panel. Kucinich, who is again seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, hired Noura Erakat, a former grass-roots organizer, to work on the domestic policy subcommittee that he chairs. Before coming to Capitol Hill, Erakat, a Palestinian, served as the national grass-roots organizer and legal advocate for the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, a group that seeks "to change those U.S. policies that both sustain Israel's 39-year occupation of the Palestinian West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, and deny equal rights for all."

Wait until you read her self description.

Europeans spy on Jewish communities in the West Bank

Gertz...

The Islamic threat notwithstanding, the European Union has been busy spying on Jews in the West Bank. EU intelligence agencies have sent operatives to gather information on Jewish communities in the West Bank to determine whether they could be uprooted, as were those in the Gaza Strip in 2005.

Currently, the EU focus is on the tiny Jewish community of Hebron, about 500 Jews who live among 80,000 Muslims. The EU has sent at least seven German intelligence agents to gather information on the Jewish community to determine whether they could be evicted over the next two years.

The Germans have been operating under the cover of diplomats and were working with anti-Israeli activists who have worked to foment Arab-Jewish violence in Hebron. The intelligence agents were said to be working in coordination with the CIA, which has also intensified monitoring of Hebron.

This is actually funny. Germans, working with arabs against the jews? 

The aggressively photogenic John Edwards was cruising along, detailing his litany of liberal causes last week until, during question time, he invoked the "I" word -- Israel. Perhaps the greatest short-term threat to world peace, Edwards remarked, was the possibility that Israel would bomb Iran's nuclear facilities. As a chill descended on the gathering, the Edwards event was brought to a polite close. Support for Israel in the U.S. has lately become bafflingly multi-cultural, representing an alliance between diaspora Jews, traditional Zionists and evangelicals. Support from Christian zealots, who now represent about one third of Israel's tourist business, is welcomed even though, according to evangelical doctrine, Judgment Day will bring the ultimate destruction of Israel and death to most of its residents.

Update at  bottom...

Imagine if a devotee of Jerry Falwell had run over 2 muslim students...

MSNBC:

Cabbie Runs Down Students

WSMV-TV

7:12 p.m. CST February 18, 2007

NASHVILLE, Tenn. - A local cab driver allegedly tried to run over two customers after a fight over religion became heated.The incident happened early Sunday morning on the Vanderbilt campus and left one man hospitalized and a cab driver arrested, said police Two students visiting from Ohio were coming from a bar downtown when they got into an argument with their driver over religion, said police. After they paid the driver he allegedly ran them down in a parking lot. Ibrihim Ahmned, of United Cab, was arrested and charged with assault, attempted homicide and theft. One of the passengers, Andrew Nelson, managed to outrun the cab but Jeremy Invus was taken to the Vanderbilt University Medical Center with serious injuries, said police. Ahmed has been convicted of misdemeanors including evading arrest in a motor vehicle and driving on a suspended license, said police. Ahmed was charged with theft because police said the license plate on his cab was listed as stolen. His bond is set at $300,000.

 

I'm listening for the shock.

I know, maybe it's not reported because violent, seething, grievance filled violence in reaction to drunken stupidity isn't news? You know, like shooting your neighbors on saturday night? Like beating your wife and her friends after a few pops with the guys?

Oh, and there seems to be, from this SOLE STORY FOUND by searching "cabbie runs down passengers", one piece of information missing over this story of violence over religion ..the religions of the victim and alleged perpetrator.

WHY?

It's just the facts. 

Continue for update...

In an admission of the international community’s failure to hold back Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the document – compiled by the staff of Javier Solana, EU foreign policy chief – says the atomic programme has been delayed only by technical limitations rather than diplomatic pressure. “Attempts to engage the Iranian administration in a negotiating process have not so far succeeded,” it states.

Curious about the forces of the Duchy of Grand Fenwick ?

It is no pleasure to be RIGHT

By Daniel Dombey and Fidelius Schmid in Brussels

Published: February 12 2007 22:18 | Last updated: February 12 2007 22:18

Iran will be able to develop enough weapons-grade material for a nuclear bomb and there is little that can be done to prevent it, an internal European Union document has concluded.

In an admission of the international community’s failure to hold back Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the document – compiled by the staff of Javier Solana, EU foreign policy chief – says the atomic programme has been delayed only by technical limitations rather than diplomatic pressure. “Attempts to engage the Iranian administration in a negotiating process have not so far succeeded,” it states.

The downbeat conclusions of the “reflection paper” – seen by the Financial Times – are certain to be seized on by advocates of military action, who fear that Iran will be able to produce enough fissile material for a bomb over the next two to three years. Tehran insists its purposes are purely peaceful.

“At some stage we must expect that Iran will acquire the capacity to enrich uranium on the scale required for a weapons programme,” says the paper, dated February 7 and circulated to the EU’s 27 national governments ahead of a foreign ministers meeting yesterday.

“In practice . . . the Iranians have pursued their programme at their own pace, the limiting factor being technical difficulties rather than resolutions by the UN or the International Atomic Energy Agency.

“The problems with Iran will not be resolved through economic sanctions alone.”

By now at least some readers must be aware of the Israelis attempt to repair a collapsed ramp, on Temple Mount, or Haram al Sharif, take your pick.

It is or is not, depending upon whether you believe the Romans arranged things in favor of future Zionists, the site of Solomon's Temple, and then after that was destroyed, the temple rebuilt by Herod about the time Octavian was getting the better of the Roman Senate. It is also the site where Vespasian and Titus exemplified the Roman solution to rebellion, and burned it all to the ground while the jews resisted first in the Antonia Fortress and then in the temple itself, until finally when Jerusalem lay in waste, 1 million jews were dead, and the temple a pile of ash. 700 years later Umar, the 2nd Caliph, conquered Jerusalem in the Arab imperial religious invasions, and chose, not by chance to construct the mosque on top of the Jews temple site, making it forever a waqf, and the site of religious strife.

Today the ancient structure on top (all Muslim) and the Wall beneath, all that is left of the represent in 200 feet of length the root of why Islam has failed so far. Numbers of people who follow some belief, considering the sad religious history of this planet, do NOT represent success, IMHO.

So the Israelis (for all of Islam, the Jews, interchangeably, and this is the signifying fact) are trying to construct a new ramp to replace the collapsed one.

Now nearly every Imam I ever saw quoted, refuses to acknowledge that this site, where the 'Wall' is , and where the Arabs went out of their way to create a garbage dump before 1967. I would have to say that at best, the issue is not only long settled, but past doubt, or argument. However, this seems to be up there with those, like the wonderful two Mahmouds (Abbas and Ahmadinejad), who think the Holocaust also remains in the realm of questionable history.

Naturally, the ramp, since it designed by, worked on and funded by jews, is actually an attempt to destroy Al Aqsa, undermine it, or make it a Synagogue or Yeshiva. I mean what else could it be? It could't be a a repair to maintain safe access for all religions and peoples to an ancient, archaeological, religious and historic site, could it?

And then enters the BBC to report.

Immediately causing one to question the very meaning of the word.

To me it is to transmit the facts.

I just did.

But the BBC with astonishing moronic greatness, gives credit to the arab position of racist, conspiratorial, rumor - dimension.

The BBC remains ASTONISHING

The Guardian reaches new heights in the grip of it's non survival mutation. Anti Americanism, in a Britain unable to defend itself from Jihadistan is death for the heritage of Runnymede. But perhaps, the Guardian is part of a new Britain, eh?

As US power fades, it can't find friends to take on Iran: Washington has exaggerated Teheran's capabilities and intentions in Iraq. It is confused and frustrated

The shadowy outlines of a new US strategy towards Iran are exercising diplomats and experts around the Middle East and in the west. The US says Iranian personnel are training and arming anti-US forces inside Iraq, and it will not hesitate to kill them. It is sending a second aircraft carrier to the Gulf, doubling its force projection there. It is calling on Europeans to tighten sanctions on Iran until Tehran suspends its uranium enrichment programme.Is the US rattling the sabre in advance of an attack on Iran? Or is it merely rattling its cage, as it pretends still to be a power in the region in spite of being locked into an unwinnable war in Iraq? The only certainty is that Bush's strategy of calling for democratisation in the Middle East is over. Washington has had to abandon the neocon dream of turning Iraq into a beacon of secular liberal democracy. It is no longer pressing for reform in other Arab states.

On her recent trip to Egypt, Jordan, and the Gulf, Condoleezza Rice said little about democracy. Her pitch was old-fashioned realpolitik as she tried to create a regional counterweight to Iran's influence

Frankly I continue to maintain, that unless the USA continues to stress that in the end there is either commitment to democracy for all peoples, or the deluge, we are and will be no different (to foreign entities of any kind) than any other powerful nations in history. We will have amoral interests, devoid of what makes us what we are. And what makes us, quite different from others. This, I contend, is a profoundly LIBERAL view.

Gary Sick, a former National Security Council expert, argues that Washington's return to balance-of-power considerations is designed to create an informal anti-Iranian alliance of the US, Israel and the Sunni Arab states. The aim is partly to divert attention from the catastrophe of Iraq. It also reduces Israel's isolation by suggesting Sunni Arab states have a common interest in confronting Iran, whatever their disagreements over Palestine.

All HERE

The Time of London has always been a place of stalwart recognition of western values.

The fellow wanderers on the path from Runnymede in 1215 to Philadelphia in 1776 have recognized as this writer documents, a history and future which at base, seemed on both sides of the atlantic to be a given.

However, the grating insouciance and blase criticims which began about the time of the Pershing deployment plans, and graduated to amerika the land of fascism, added to the spiritual belt sanding that islamism internal to british society has been undergoing seems to have reached a point, if Mr. Parrish is correct, that Melanie Phillips has warned over many, many times.

Of course, the circular gestalt involved in this disease, besides being historically ignorant, which I will come to in a bit, dismisses those warnings because they come from, a right wing nut of uber dimension, a hysterical clanger of imaginary bells, and we all know why shhhhhhhh, she is

JEWISH

Mr.Parrish of Great Britain, and the Times of London, basically has said 'we' (the honorable protectors of western civ, the brits) aren't really sure we're going to choose sides with america any more because fundamentallly we're not so sure any longer we're on the same side.

What evidence is there for that, that america has abandoned the good side?

For the first time, and rather late in my life, I am beginning to wonder. The negative side of the scales, for so long obdurately refusing to dip, has been piling ever higher over the years. Carbon emissions and a destructive attitude towards the campaign against global warming, protectionism, Guantanamo, sponsorship of intransigence in Israel, “rendition”, torture, support for dreadful regimes in Latin America . . . and of course most recently that monster of an issue: Iraq.......

No, it’s not Iraq, but Iran that is pushing me towards a complete reassessment of the moral relativities. On Thursday, little-reported here, US forces stormed Iranian offices in the Kurdish part of Iraq and, to the fury of the Kurdish security forces, tore down the Iranian flag, and seized and took away five Iranian officials. No doubt confused and conflicting claims will now follow as to whether these premises were above board, or housed people hostile to the US presence in Iraq. We may never know. What we can be sure of is that this is not the way to behave in the most ordered and autonomous part of Iraq unless Washington has come to the settled conclusion that Iran is central to the violence and insurrection in Iraq, and — the “and” is important — that America is now ready to confront Iran directly.

Like Anatole Kaletsky on these pages, I am deeply unsettled by Washington’s perspective on the region, obediently marketed by Tony Blair as a looming stand-off between an “arc of moderation” (Saudi Arabia — don’t laugh — Pakistan and other more moderate Middle Eastern powers) and an axis of evil, dominated by Iran. Unlike Anatole, I had until recently supposed it inconceivable that this was a war the United States could really want. I thought rumours that Israel might be willing to strike, in part as proxy for the United States, fanciful.

But I am beginning to wonder. To my own internal dismay, the best argument I can find for the unlikelihood of such a turn of events is that George W. Bush cannot (surely?) imagine he could get away with it, and win. I am no longer confident that any principled objection to raising the stakes and polarising the region would be sufficient to stop the White House in its tracks. Only fear of failure might. I hope it will.

What a stupid compendium of gobbedlygook thinking!!

GAO, Mali (Reuters) - There must be at least 80 children in the classroom, the desks packed so tightly together that I wonder how those at the back have squeezed their way to their places.

Adjusting from the glare of the sun outside to the dark of the mud-brick room, I can barely make out the boys in the furthest row.

But shafts of light through the windows -- holes in the wall, without glass -- catch the dazzling colors of the girls' dresses and headscarves. The faces are black African, but the writing on the blackboard is in Arabic -- a difficult, foreign tongue to the 600 children at the Soullamou Islamic school in eastern Mali.

They are learning it to study the Koran, the holy book of Islam, in this desperately poor west African nation where 90 percent of people are Muslims.

"Why have you come?" a girl of about 13 asks me.

The truth is that I have never seen an Islamic school and am curious to compare the stereotype with the reality. In countries like Pakistan, Koranic schools or madrasas have often been viewed with suspicion in the West, and even portrayed as academies for al Qaeda.

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once famously asked if the United States was eliminating more terrorists every day than the madrasas and radical clerics were recruiting.

But in Mali, where most adults cannot read or write, the growth of private Islamic schools or medersas shows "a hunger for numeracy and literacy" in a state that lacks the means to educate all its people, U.S. ambassador Terence McCulley said.

He told me the United States is even supporting some of them through development aid -- a "soft power" counterpoint to its military training program, in which U.S. special forces are teaching Malian soldiers to fight militants in the desert.

We are using tax $$ for training the illiterate to memorize by rote the Quran? And we call this soft power?

The facts are these:

The Minneapolis St Paul International Airport has been struck by a group of apparently mostly Somali taxi drivers (an excellent job for entry onto the American 'cursus honorum') SOME of whom seem to have decided that allowing normal american (and other) passengers into their cabs, infringes on their religion ..they seem to have received a fatwa...

The fatwa proclaims that "Islamic jurisprudence" prohibits taxi drivers from carrying passengers with alcohol, "because it involves cooperating in sin according to the Islam."

Okay, so don't go the airport, and don't wait near popular bars and nightclubs, right?

But the somalis themselves are both confused and concerned...why?

An animated circle of Somalis gathered when the question of the airport controversy was raised.

"I was surprised and shocked when I heard it was an issue at the airport," said Faysal Omar. "Back in Somalia, there was never any problem with taking alcohol in a taxi."

Jama Dirie said, "If a driver doesn't pick up everyone, he should get his license canceled and get kicked out of the airport."

Two of the Somalis present defended the idea that Islam prohibits cabdrivers from transporting passengers with alcohol. An argument erupted. The consensus seemed to be that only a small number of Somalis object to transporting alcohol. It's a matter of personal opinion, not Islamic law, several men said.

Ahmed Samatar, a nationally recognized expert on Somali society at Macalester College, confirmed that view. "There is a general Islamic prohibition against drinking," he said, "but carrying alcohol for people in commercial enterprise has never been forbidden. There is no basis in Somali cultural practice or legal tradition for that.

"This is one of those new concoctions."It is being foisted on the Somali community by an inside or outside group," he added. "I do not know who."

So what's the deal with the fatwa?

The fatwa is the MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD. The Hassan Al Banna, Blind Sheikh, Ayman AL Zawalhiri, Sayd Qutb, Muhammad Qutb, Abdullah Azzam, HAMAS, Sheikh Yassin, Ikwhan is LOOKING FOR ISSUES to assert their authority and begin the long process of abrading freedom in the name of submission.

We should be aware that this action is a template, and American processes are designed to respond in a PC fashion, to accommodate the complainant. To emplace rigorous responses to ensure OUR way of life and freedoms, we will have to commit acts to change the nature of these processes which were never designed for a religious assault, purposefully committed to the abrasion of the American value set

Don't miss this , a Chicago Tribune 2004 investigative report on the Muslim Brotherhood in America

Who Betrayed Lebanon? And Who Watched it Happen?

The American Thinker ..thinks clearly ..in a stellar fisking
***or abacadabra ..we hate ourselves and the jews ..nomatter what because we actually have a mental disease, and that' swhy we can do away with facts ..they don't fit the sickness dialectic***

In the vision of certain members of the press, Israel is a colonialist mass murderer, and the word terrorist does not exist without quotation marks surrounding it. Israelis are aggressors. Islamist terrorists, be they Palestinians or Iranian backed Hezb’allah, are victims. These media types come to the Middle East with their narrative firmly in place. It is so because they believe it to be so. I was an eyewitness to a classic example of this in Jenin, in 2002. Western journalists and United Nation envoys were in an uproar over an alleged Israeli massacre of a thousand Palestinians. There were grisly, supposed eyewitness, accounts of Israeli bulldozers shoveling hundreds of corpses of helpless Palestinian refugees into mass graves. There were stories of Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian children in front of their parents and then throwing their bodies into wells and sewage pits.

Comparisons were made to ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, to Nazi war crimes and the term genocide was spoken with righteous indignation. The truth turned out to be somewhat less Baroque. There was a battle not a massacre.

In that battle some fifty Palestinian combatants were killed, as were twenty three Israeli soldiers. The battle was a ferocious one and in the Arab press there were glowing tales of the fifty Palestinian fighters who fell in glorious combat against the Zionist enemy they valiantly slaughtered. But to the majority of Western journalists the facts became a footnote on the inside pages, reported weeks after the front page banner line headlines screamed about the supposed massacre.

Nondescript....AP....

The word you are thinking of is mentioned ONCE .. and to note that some of these high energy, rambunctious youths, are indeed, ...well, you know... what we really shouldn't say in case there might some upset at the thought of profiling racism, REALITY

Youths forced passengers off three buses and set them on fire overnight in suburban Paris, raising tensions Thursday ahead of the first anniversary of the riots that engulfed France's rundown, heavily immigrant neighborhoods.

No injuries were reported, but worried bus drivers refused to enter some suburbs after dark, and the prime minister urged a swift, stern response.

The riots in October 2005 raged through housing projects in suburbs nationwide, springing in part from anger over entrenched discrimination against immigrants and their French-born children, many of them Muslims from former French colonies in Africa. Despite an influx of funds and promises, disenchantment still thrives in those communities.

About 10 attackers _ five of them with handguns _ stormed a bu