Depressing Observations about the State of the World

If you are in danger of being too cheerful in this holiday season, you might wish to take a look at these links:

@ Jihad Watch:

With that kind of inshallah-fatalism, constantly reinforced by every aspect of Islam, why work hard? If it will all be determined by Allah, what's the point? And then, as to innovation, Islam is dead set against it, has a prohibition on bid'a, or innovation. "Innovation" was, rightly, held to be worrisome, for it implied a willingness to keep one's mind and heart open to new things, to perhaps come to believe that not everything necessary was contained in the Qur'an.

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@ MEMRI: "... an interview with Sheikh Fikri Hassan, former Egyptian deputy minister of religious endowment, which aired on Al-Shabab TV on December 2, 2009."

The Swiss Labor Party is a "Zionist Party"; There's a Swiss Soccer Club Called "Zion"

Hamdi Abd Al-Maguid: "The Swiss Labor Party..."

Sheikh Fikri Hassan: "This is a Zionist party with Zionist roots, and they finance..."

Hamdi Abd Al-Maguid: "Let me tell you something, the Egyptian soccer player, the goalkeeper Essam El Hadary, used to play for a club called 'Zion' in Switzerland.[1] There is a club in Switzerland called 'Zion,' which is run by the Zionists."

Endnote:

[1] The reference is to FC Sion, the soccer team of the city of Sion, Switzerland

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@ Pajamas Media: The UN at the service of dictatorships and terrorist organizations:

Historian Richard Landes has coined the term “demopaths” to describe such institutions. Demopaths “use democratic language and invoke human rights only when it serves their interests. Demopaths demand stringent levels of human ‘rights’ but do not apply these basic standards … to their own behavior.”

The UN is the demopathic organization par excellence and its spokesmen persist in plying their trade. Its elections for the post of secretary-general have generally drawn from a pool of dubious mediocrities with little sympathy for or knowledge of the history of Western humanism, such as Kurt Waldheim, Kofi Annan, and Ban Ki-moon. The Russian and Chinese stranglehold on the Security Council has always meant that decisions favoring the West would inevitably succumb to their veto power. The Organization of the Islamic Conference effectively dominates the General Assembly, which is in any case often headed by anti-Western, socialist-inspired figures like Father Miguel D’Escoto Brockmann or representatives of tyrannical regimes like its current president Ali Abdussalam Treki, who hails from, of all places, Libya.

The United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) has dedicated its attention almost exclusively to the denunciation of Israel, the only genuine democracy in the Middle East. The Council features two agendas at its annual session: one allotted to Israel, the other to the rest of the world. Anyone speaking out in defense of Israel is liable to be removed from the premises, as happened recently to UN-accredited Anne Bayevsky, a professor of political science at York University and director of the Touro Law Center’s Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust. To add injury to injury, the UNHRC has gone soft on Sharia, announcing on June 16, 2008, that criticism of Sharia law would now be contraindicated.

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@ Islam in Europe : apropos minarets:

The Fatih mosque asked the city to allow them to call the faithful to prayer. They want to hang loudspeakers outside the mosque so that the muezzin - which calls the faithful to prayer - will also be heard out in the streets. The Fatih mosque in Beringen is one of the few Belgian mosques with a minaret.

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@ The Guardian: Off with her head...

A British court issued an arrest warrant for Israel's former foreign minister over war crimes allegedly committed in Gaza this year – only to withdraw it when it was discovered that she was not in the UK, it emerged today.

Tzipi Livni, a member of the war cabinet during Operation Cast Lead, had been due to address a meeting in London on Sunday but cancelled her attendance in advance. The Guardian has established that Westminster magistrates' court issued the warrant at the request of lawyers acting for some of the Palestinian victims of the fighting but it was later dropped.

The warrant marks the first time an Israeli minister or former minister has faced arrest in the UK and is evidence of a growing effort to pursue war crimes allegations under "universal jurisidiction". Israel rejects these efforts as politically motivated, saying it acted in self-defence against Hamas rocket attacks from Gaza.

Livni, head of the opposition Kadima party, played a key role in decisions made before and during the three-week offensive. Palestinians claim 1,400 were killed, mostly civilians; Israel counted 1,166 dead, the majority of them combatants.

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@ Gloria Center: Why All the Excuses for Palestinian Intransigence Don't Make Sense

Here's the answer: the Palestinian leadership wants total victory and Israel's elimination. They are willing to go on letting their people suffer for a century in pursuit of that goal. They hope that the world will give them everything they want without their having to make any concessions. They realize that saying "no" and letting the conflict continue gives them more-not less-leverage internationally because they make Israel look like the guilty party and think, consequently, it is being punished in European policies and public opinion.

So the arguments being made by Westerners who think they are being sympathetic to a suffering people just don't make sense. In fact, they make things worse. Indeed, they are part of a Palestinian strategy to avoid making peace and encourage such intransigence.