The People Behind The Mosque

We Hate Jews More than We Love Our Children

For any of you who have not figured it out yet, of course, 'Islamophobia' has nothing to do with violence against Muslims. This is John Hinderaker from Power Line.

There are any number of serious human rights issues in the world today, some of them involving mass murder on an industrial scale, none of which the U.N. has managed to do much about. But the existence of actual human rights crises never distracts the U.N. from pandering to the fantasies of the OIC. Thus, yesterday's report: Islamic states push U.N. to condemn Koran burning:

Islamic states sought on Wednesday to have the United Nations human rights council condemn a U.S. pastor's suspended plan to burn Korans, saying it was part of a pattern of global anti-Muslim violence.

A resolution submitted by Pakistan for the 57-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) asks the council to speak out against what it dubbed "the recent call by an extremist group to organize a 'Burn a Koran Day'."

The resolution, which diplomats said was likely to be passed as the OIC and its allies have a majority on the 47-nation body, made no reference to condemnation of the plan by President Barack Obama and other U.S. and foreign leaders.

If you try to bring a Bible into Saudi Arabia, they will destroy it. That's different, of course.

The current resolution does not exist in a vacuum; it is part of a long-term strategy to de-legitimize resistance to Islam, now widely known as "Islamophobia."

Read the whole thing.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem

Scary: POTUS still Doesn't Understand What Iran About

Anne Bayefsky compares President Obama's UN General Assembly address with President Ahmadinejad's and concludes that Obama doesn't understand what's at stake.

When Obama took center stage at the U.N., it got off to a bad start and only got worse. The president arrived late and, as leader of the host nation, delivered his speech one slot after its originally scheduled time. He then spent just a few short sentences on the most lethal threat to peace and security today: the acquisition of the world’s most dangerous weapon by the leading state sponsor of terrorism, Iran. In those few minutes, Obama chose not to speak the plain truth — that Iran seeks nuclear weapons — or to commit his government to stopping them, period. He said instead that Iran had not yet demonstrated peaceful intent and asked Ahmadinejad to “confirm” this intent. Obama’s primary message was that “the door remains open to diplomacy should Iran choose to walk through it.”

Ahmadinejad has heard this plea from the Obama administration so many times before that he has clearly stopped counting. Ahmadinejad understands perfectly well that confronting Iran is out of sync with the “new era of engagement” that is the trademark of Obama’s foreign policy. “Engagement” looks like this: The president of the United States keeps talking about “extended hands” and “open doors,” and the president of Iran keeps building nuclear weapons. As recently as September 19, even Secretary Hillary Clinton told Christiane Amanpour, “We’ve said to the Iranians all along…we still remain open to diplomacy. But it’s been very clear that the Iranians don’t want to engage with us.”

Ahmadinejad, therefore, took the opportunity provided by the U.N. to slam the door once more in President Obama’s face. While he lectured about the “lust for capital and domination” and “the egotist and the greedy,” the American U.N. delegation sat stoically in their seats. They had instructions to tough it out until Ahmadinejad really got offensive — though what would count as sufficiently offensive was never publicly announced.

...

In fact, President Obama played to his U.N. audience just as the president of Iran did. Obama made the centerpiece of his speech an overt squeeze on the state of Israel. Before a U.N. audience infamously hostile to Israel, he demanded that Prime Minister Netanyahu renew the moratorium on building “settlements.” He made no such specific demands of the Palestinian side. Instead, he painted a picture of moral equivalence between the terrorists that seek Israel’s annihilation and Israel’s reasonable skepticism of a negotiating partner that still refuses to accept a Jewish state, referring to “rejectionists on both sides” that “will try to disrupt the process with bitter words and with bombs.”

Ahmadinejad got the message. Israel is vulnerable with President Obama in office, and Iran has no serious reason to believe that hate and terror will be on the losing end any time soon.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem

2010 09 23 MSNBC Scarborough Country Christine O'Donnell Stop the Whole ...

Christine O'Donnell on evolution

Muslim Homicide Bomber Wounds 42 in Russia

More daily jihad......... Daghestan has been the scene of bloody clashes between forces loyal to Moscow and Muslims fighting for a state separate from Russia. So what else is new?

At Least 42 Injured In Suicide Bombing In Russia's North Caucasus Radio Europe

Russian media reports say a suicide bomber has blown himself up in the republic of Daghestan, injuring at least 42 people, including several police officers.

The bomber broke through a police cordon in the capital, Makhachkala, where security officers were battling militia fighters.

At least two Islamist rebels were killed in that incident.

{..]
The region is plagued by almost daily violence.

Red Carpet Spy

Red Carpet Spy
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
Published: September 24, 2010
SANTA FE, N.M
VALERIE PLAME WILSON, America’s best-known ex-spy, was looking chic in black bustier and flowing white pants, posing for paparazzi on the red carpet earlier this month at a film festival in Deauville, France.

A few days later, she was standing in her Santa Fe dining room, sans makeup, in sneakers and sweatshirt, fighting off jet lag as she presided over some run-of-the-mill domestic chaos. She had children — 10-year-old twins Samantha and Trevor — to hustle to school and a frisky dog to walk. Her husband, Joe, a former ambassador, had just returned from a business trip to Baghdad and was on the phone, squabbling with the airline over lost luggage. Their refrigerator was practically empty and Samantha had proclaimed her English muffin “disgusting.”

Ms. Wilson took a bite. “Sourdough,” she announced, handing the offending muffin to her husband. He dug in with feigned relish, musing that it might taste better with some worms. The little girl rolled her eyes.

For Ms. Wilson, a former undercover operative for the C.I.A. whose exposure in 2003 engulfed the Bush White House in scandal, the hectic morning was a precious sliver of normalcy in a life that has had anything but. She and her husband fled Washington’s echo chamber for Santa Fe three years ago, seeking peace and seclusion after the so-called Plame Affair destroyed his international consulting business, wrecked her espionage career and nearly took down their marriage.

Now she is making her re-entry, this time on her own terms.

The woman who spent decades guarding her privacy has found a new voice through a very public enterprise, the movie business, which is why she was in Deauville. “Fair Game,” a film based largely on her 2007 autobiography of the same name (starring Naomi Watts as Valerie and Sean Penn as Joe), is set to open this fall.

You might call it “The Spy Who Went Hollywood,” though if you did, you would get some serious pushback from Ms. Wilson. “Please, no,” she said, shaking her head. “We have had just enough peek into the world of Hollywood to know that it is just not of interest to us. It really is high school with money.”

Perhaps. But Ms. Wilson is smart enough to know that Hollywood has a bigger megaphone than Washington does, and she is making adroit use of it to reclaim her own narrative and burnish her credentials. She was featured this summer alongside a bevy of world leaders in “Countdown to Zero,” a documentary about nuclear proliferation, a topic she knew well as a C.I.A. officer tracking weapons of mass destruction. But her focus at the moment is promoting “Fair Game,” directed by Doug Liman.

THE film, which also draws on Mr. Wilson’s 2004 book, “The Politics of Truth,” will have its premiere in New York and Washington next month. It recounts how Ms. Wilson’s C.I.A. cover was blown by the conservative columnist Robert Novak after her husband, who had traveled to Niger at the C.I.A.’s behest to assess whether Saddam Hussein was pursuing nuclear weapons, challenged the Bush administration’s rationale for the Iraq war on the opinion pages of The New York Times A special prosecutor investigated the leak, which led to the conviction on obstruction of justice charges of I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, then Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff.

In Washington, where the Wilsons — especially Mr. Wilson — remain persona non grata in Republican circles, the movie will no doubt roil the waters. In 1991, Mr. Wilson was the last American diplomat in Iraq before bombs fell; upon his return, the first President Bush praised him as “a true American hero.” But loyalists to the second President Bush regard him as a publicity-seeking blowhard — “pompous, self-centered, egotistical,” wrote Karl Rove, the former Bush political strategist, who was spared indictment in the leak inquiry. Mr. Rove’s lawyer, Robert Luskin, predicts the movie will be a snooze; he says the Wilsons are “a little past their ‘sell-by’ date.” Mr. Wilson, still in “us vs. them” mode, says the movie “goes after them with a stiletto, rather than a butcher knife.”

Republicans still snicker at the way the Wilsons posed in Joe’s Jaguar convertible — he with an arm dangling over the side, she masked by a headscarf and dark glasses — for Vanity Fair at the height of the scandal. The photograph, along with a collection of signed political cartoons, hangs in the Wilsons’ guest bathroom in Santa Fe, one of the few signs of their Washington life. (The Jaguar is gone; Ms. Wilson insisted her husband sell it when they moved.)

As much as it is a political movie, “Fair Game” is a personal one, the story of the tensions that nearly ripped the couple apart as he publicly accused the Bush White House of a “smear campaign,” while she remained silent, terrified for her children and her C.I.A. “assets,” people she had cultivated overseas. As her career crumbled and his consulting clients fled, they struggled, as Ms. Wilson wrote in her book, “to stop the slow slide of our marriage into nothingness.”

For Mr. Liman, the movie’s director, whose credits include “The Bourne Identity,” it was the elusive Ms. Wilson who was especially captivating. “She’s clearly a survivor,” he said. “She definitely loved her life as a spy, and worked very hard to earn the position that she had achieved, and all that was taken away from her. Yet you don’t get the feeling like she’s holding a grudge.”

Indeed she says she is not, though in her own controlled way she still seethes over what she calls “the Republican playbook, denigrating me and discrediting Joe.” The safety fears linger; for this article, Ms. Wilson preferred to be photographed outside her home, not in it, and the children were off-limits.

Santa Fe is, psychically and geographically, far removed from the toxic political climate of Washington, which is why the Wilsons moved here, to a sprawling adobe house on a ridge overlooking the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Aspens line their driveway, wildflowers bloom in the fall and their hummingbird feeder once attracted a bear. Ms. Wilson had come to know the city from business trips to Los Alamos National Laboratory nearby; she and her husband left Washington as soon as the Libby trial was over.
“We kind of looked at each other, and said, ‘Now, why are we here?’ ” she said, during a morning hike with the dog. “We didn’t have any jobs. We didn’t have any family there. It just seemed ...” Her voice trailed off, but the sentence did not need finishing. They had to escape to survive.
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Alex Wong/Getty Images

Ms. Wilson, right, at a news conference with the Global Zero U.S. Chairman Richard Burt and Queen Noor of Jordan.
Related

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Times Topic: Valerie Plame

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Valery Hache/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Arriving at the Cannes film festival with the actress Naomi Watts, who plays Ms. Wilson in “Fair Game.”
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Anne-Christine Poujoulat/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Ms. Wilson and her husband, Joe, at Cannes.

The early months here were a blur, as she fretted over the bills while “living on air.” They met the director of the Santa Fe Opera, who was enchanted with Trevor and cast him as Falstaff’s page. Mr. Wilson “became an opera dad,” his wife said, “staying for the whole rehearsal, sitting in the back, growing a beard.”

Today, Ms. Wilson can barely walk down Santa Fe streets without turning heads. When she arrived for lunch at a local cafe, the hostess was beside herself.

“Naomi Watts! Spectacular! How do you feel?” the woman gushed.

“A little nervous,” Ms. Wilson replied.

The Wilsons had just come from a church, where they had told their story to senior citizens. In a city that voted 3-to-1 for President Obama, the crowd, not surprisingly, was friendly. The first question: “Why aren’t Dick Cheney and George Bush in jail?”

When the talk was over, a gentleman approached and reached into a small bag. Ms. Wilson eyed him warily as he withdrew a pair of smooth buckeye nuts — good luck tokens, he said. He asked where their children went to school.

“A local public school,” Ms. Wilson replied cryptically. The man persisted, saying he was a retired educator. Ms. Wilson sized him up and relented, naming the school.

Later, at the cafe, over champagne and a vegetable frittata, she talked about her “life passage” from private spy to public figure. She feels “more integrated” now, she said. One thing she has learned: “I’m not terribly confrontational, but I’ve gotten better at holding my ground.”

Hollywood has opened doors. “Countdown to Zero” has offered her a chance to put her C.I.A. expertise to use in the public sphere — and to befriend Meg Ryan and Queen Noor of Jordan, fellow advocates of eliminating nuclear weapons. Both films took her to Cannes last spring, where Giorgio Armani hosted a party on his yacht for “Fair Game,” and where Ms. Wilson strode the red carpet with Naomi Watts at her side. At the “Countdown” New York premiere in July, she dished with Whoopi Goldberg and Elisabeth Hasselbeck on “The View.”

But when “Countdown to Zero” was shown at C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va., in a secure auditorium known as The Bubble, Ms. Wilson was not there.

“I wasn’t invited,” she said wistfully. “It would have been awkward.”

Both Wilsons were consultants on “Fair Game,” taking turns on the set in New York so that one or the other could be home with the twins. Mr. Penn visited them in Santa Fe (“I made him clean up after dinner,” Ms. Wilson said), and she and Ms. Watts are now pals, trading “funny, gossipy e-mails,” the actress said.

“This is her new life, and she didn’t choose it, but why shouldn’t she enjoy it and embrace it?” Ms. Watts said. “She’s using her voice, and her beliefs.”

Still, it seems a reluctant embrace. Spies do not reveal themselves easily, and there is more in the public domain about Ms. Wilson than she can disclose. Her book was published with big chunks blacked out after a protracted legal battle with the C.I.A., and she is bound by its secrecy agreement. Inquiries about her work — or whether certain scenes in “Fair Game” are truthful — are met with raised eyebrows and a standard reply: “I can’t speak to specifics.”

At 47, Ms. Wilson wants her story known, but does not want the scandal to forever define her. “It’s a piece of our fabric, not the entire fabric,” she says. Last year, her husband, now 60, became chairman of the Africa subsidiary of Symbion Power, a construction company, and Ms. Wilson works part time doing community outreach for Santa Fe Institute, a scientific research organization. She is also collaborating with Sarah Lovett, a local author, on — what else? — a spy novel.

But for now she has a movie to promote. On the way back from Deauville, she stopped in Paris for interviews, and visited the Mariage Frères tea salon in the Marais. All the while, she said, she was wishing Trevor and Samantha could be there. She wanted to sip lemonade with them at the Café de Flore, and take them to the top of the Eiffel Tower.
NYTimes