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The UN Connection

UN planning meeting.

The United Nations is planning a meeting with donors and other countries to discuss the relief effort for tsunami victims around the Indian Ocean, possibly next week, the UN official coordinating the aid operation said Thursday.

Odious tsunami politics.

"What they're actually doing is using dead people to make cheap points." That's how the Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan described some partisans' use of this week's deadly Indian Ocean tsunami to promote various and sundry political agendas. We think it about describes the exploitation of the tragedy by the United Nations' Jan Egeland with his "stingy" remark and the New York Times' criticism of the United States.

It being Christmastime, most world leaders were on vacation when the tsunami hit. Kofi Annan was just arriving back in New York late Wednesday. By Thursday morning he still hadn't met with U.N. humanitarian relief point man Jan Egeland - the man in charge of tsunami relief. President Bush was in Crawford, Texas, until yesterday. British Prime Minister Tony Blair was vacationing in Egypt. German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder was away, too. That's to be expected. World leaders should be judged by the job they do - not by how fast they can turn to a camera.

But that didn't much matter to the New York Times, where selective outrage is the rule. In an editorial entitled "Are We Stingy? Yes," the Times singled out President Bush for a gratuitous snarl. "President Bush finally roused himself yesterday from his vacation in Crawford, Tex., to telephone his sympathy to the leaders of India, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Indonesia, and to speak publicly about the devastation of Sunday's tsunamis in Asia," the piece read.

We'd like to ask the Times writers: Where was the outrage over the other vacationers? It's an absurdity to criticize these others over it, but by the Times' logic, one should. Mr. Annan's absence should be especially offensive to the New York Times, since in principle he is in charge of the entire relief operation. But it wasn't. The reason: that's not a means to bludgeon the president. So the Times avoided it.

Undermining UN.

United States President George Bush was tonight accused of trying to undermine the United Nations by setting up a rival coalition to coordinate relief following the Asian tsunami disaster.

The president has announced that the US, Japan, India and Australia would coordinate the world's response.

But former International Development Secretary Clare Short said that role should be left to the UN.

"I think this initiative from America to set up four countries claiming to coordinate sounds like yet another attempt to undermine the UN when it is the best system we have got and the one that needs building up," she said.

"Only really the UN can do that job," she told BBC Radio Four's PM programme.

"It is the only body that has the moral authority."

As tsunami recedes, America bashing begins.

The last wave of that Indonesian tsunami had barely swept back into the Indian Ocean before attacks began on Americans for not promising enough money in the relief effort. Bashing America after an international crisis has become as predictable as aftershocks following an earthquake.

The UN's top emergency aid official, Jan Egeland, exhibiting the contemptible character we've come to expect with UN officials, assaulted the West for being "stingy" and suggested we should be willing to raise taxes on ourselves if necessary to pay whatever the UN thinks we should.

Equally contemptible, however, was the knee-jerk reaction by our State Department to Egeland's slander - raising our aid commitment almost immediately by $20 million to $35 million. Bad timing.

We don't need to kowtow to an organization whose officials, including its secretary general, stood by and watched a million or more Iraqi children suffer and die horrible deaths for almost a decade knowing full well their deaths could have been prevented with aid monies they themselves were pilfering? Tell us about that Egeland before you lecture us on greed.

Egeland's comments, coming soon after the US announced a $15 million aid package, larger by $5 million than that of any other country, were timed to humiliate the United States in retaliation for the growing anti-UN sentiment among Americans. The fact is no one knew on Monday the true extent and nature of aid that would be needed, where it would be needed and by whom. All aid commitments were considered preliminary. That didn't matter to Egeland. Whatever the US had pledged would have been insufficient.

Aid officials like Egeland use natural disasters and health crises to further their own personal and political agendas, which are invariably leftist and anti-Western. Notice that Egeland didn't mention anything about China, Malaysia, Japan or any of the other countries in the region quite capable of providing the relief necessary.

As oil-for-food money recedes, tsunami money begins to flow.

Allah's Communist Loonies United

Letter from France: In Europe, Islam fills Marxism's old shoes.

When Azzedine Belthoub was growing up in the shantytowns outside of Nanterre, France, 40 years ago, the people who came to take the young North African kids to swim in the community pool, to register them for school and give them candy and comic books, were Marxists. The French Communist Party offered a political voice for the working classes, including the growing number of North African immigrants imported to fill labor shortages after World War II.

Today, Islam plays that role, especially in France, where men like Belthoub, wearing long beards and short djellabas, reach out to the poor and disillusioned in the country's working-class neighborhoods.

Young Arabs and Africans here have turned to Islam with the same fervor that the idealistic youth of the 1960s turned toward Marxism.

"Now, religion has become our identity," Belthoub said last week, sitting in a friend's apartment in a largely Muslim suburb north of Paris.

The question is whether Islam in Europe will follow the same path that communism did here, shedding its revolutionary extremism, electing mayors and legislators and assimilating itself into normal democratic political life.

As with Marxism in the 1960s, Islam in Europe has its radical fringe and its pragmatic mainstream. The latter is much the broader, intent on expanding Muslims' political power in French society. It has consciously mimicked many of the tactics of the left, including organizing summer camps where urban young people learn the tenets of the movement.

The narrower stream, but in many ways the more potent one, draws its inspiration from the fundamentalist clerics of Saudi Arabia and seeks to isolate its adherents from the surrounding society. Although predominantly pacifist, it contains a militant fringe analogous to the violent Marxist groups that operated in Europe decades ago.

That militant fringe makes headlines, though, and colors the whole movement, both in the way young Muslims understand their faith and in the way the larger society sees and deals with Islam, just as the bombers and kidnappers of the Red Brigades and the Baader-Meinhof Gang did to European communism in the 1960s.

But the eventual evaporation of hard-line Marxism in Europe may offer clues to how the Islamist trend could play out. Disowned by the pragmatic left, Europe's militant Marxist fringe was isolated and repressed, while governments pursued social policies that to some measure addressed the grievances of the poor and dispossessed, which had animated the radicals.

Islam's growth in Europe as the most vibrant ideology of the downtrodden is part of a wave of religiosity that has swept the Arab world in the past 30 years, propelled by frustration over feeble economies, uneven distribution of wealth and the absence of political freedom.

Like communism, it represents for many of its devoted adherents a transnational ideology tilting toward an eventual utopian vision, in this case of a vast, if not global, caliphate governed according to sharia, the legal code based on the Koran.

But the religion's appeal reaches beyond the communities of Arab and African immigrants born to the faith. There are an estimated 50,000 Muslim converts in France alone today. Many of these people have taken up the religion as a way to define themselves against traditional European culture, whose values they reject for economic or spiritual reasons.

"Islam has replaced Marxism as the ideology of contestation," says Olivier Roy, a French scholar of European Islam. "When the left collapsed, the Islamists stepped in."

Islam's role is not entirely accidental. The political left reached out to Muslims in the 1970s as other groups moved up and out of Europe's working-class neighborhoods. In France, Socialists and Communists alike established associations in the housing projects, attracting many young, politically active Arab men.

But those alliances withered, as frustrated Arab youths turned away from politics. In France, the rupture followed several defining events, including the 1981 bulldozing of an immigrant shelter in a suburb of Paris by the local mayor, a Communist. That betrayal was followed by the disillusionment of a 1985 civil rights march that brought little concrete action.

Communist cadres, meanwhile, resisted the rise of young Arabs within their party. By the end of the decade, when a young Arab was killed during a demonstration in Paris, the left's credibility in that group was dead.

Islamic organizations soon began channeling the frustrated youth toward religion.

The map of France's Islamists today largely matches that of the country's Marxists from decades ago. Many predominantly Muslim municipalities are still under Communist-led administrations, but Islamic organizations are now the active ones.

They're not insurgents - They're terrorist cockroaches!.

Since the end of major combat operations, hundreds upon hundreds of innocent Iraqi men, women and children have been deliberately targeted and blown limb from limb by foreign invaders - by the same Al Qaeda, Muslim fundamentalist terrorists who murdered three thousand Americans on 9-11, and who would gleefully kill every American man woman and child if they could.

But to the liberal media - to the left, these terrorists are merely "Iraqi Insurgents" - noble freedom fighters skillfully and willfully endeavoring to rid Iraq of the great Satan - wronged rebels attempting to righteously combat an "illegal" American led foreign "occupation." The blame-America-first crowd prefers to lay responsibility for the death of innocents at the feet of the true enemy - President Bush - Donald Rumsfeld - the American soldier - the United States!

Michael Moore, the bloated, bloviating propagandist filmmaker who was seated in great prominence at this year's Democratic National Convention, perhaps best personifies today's left. This morsel of Moore wisdom nicely sums up the liberal take on the terrorists: "The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not 'insurgents' or 'terrorists' or 'The Enemy.' They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow - and they will win."

In truth, these anti-American Americans embody the terrorists' false hope for victory. They unwittingly add fuel to the fire. As they besmirch our Nation's noble effort to provide freedom and democracy to the Iraqi people, these naysayers - these purveyors of doom and gloom only help to galvanize the terrorists - to embolden them and strengthen their resolve. Whether or not they realize it, their actions severely undermine progress in the war on terror. They have become unwitting terrorist allies. As a result of their words and deeds, American troops and innocent Iraqis have died - and will continue to die.

War is hell! It's an extremely tough road that lies ahead. The upcoming Iraqi elections will prove to be a pivotal milestone, signifying the beginning of the end for the terrorists. As they continue to ramp up their murderous efforts, don't think they don't realize it.

3 less

Three Palestinians killed in an air attack on the Gaza city of Khan Yunis.

The Palestinian News Agency said an Israeli warplane fired a rocket at a group of Palestinians in the city, killing two immediately.

A third Palestinian also died Friday from wounds he suffered a day before by Israeli army fire in the camp of Khan Yunis.

Tank-backed troops rolled into Khan Yunis Thursday in an operation that Israel said was aimed at stopping militants from firing rockets at nearby Jewish settlements.

Meanwhile in France ...

Former French hostage: Iraqi militants wanted Bush re-elected.

In a four-page account of their ordeal, one of the reporters, Georges Malbrunot, also wrote that they saw several other hostages who were later decapitated. The journalists said their captors viewed foreign businessmen working in Iraq as their enemies.

One of the captors from the group calling itself the Islamic Army in Iraq said Bush's re-election would boost their cause, Malbrunot wrote in Friday's edition of Le Figaro, the French daily he works for.

Malbrunot wrote that the Islamic Army has 15,000 to 17,000 members and that its hostage-takings are carefully organized.

WW IV > Iraq

Dozens killed in clashes as two Lebanese kidnapped.

Pitched battles between US troops and Iraqi insurgents in strife-torn Mosul left at least 26 dead including one US soldier as two Lebanese businessmen were kidnapped in Baghdad overnight.

Thousands graduate from police training.

The Iraqi police today graduated 1,938 specialized police officers, 1,190 public order police and 748 mechanized police officers who completed intensive-five week training programs conducted at the Civil Intervention Force Academy.

Militants threaten voters.

Describing the election as a "dirty farce," a statement posted on a website said anyone who took part in the election would not be safe.

The Iraqi electoral commission has denied reports that 700 election workers in the city of Mosul have resigned after receiving threats.

In Baghdad, the main oil refinery came under rocket or mortar attack.

The threat to voters appeared on the website of the Ansar al-Sunna group, believed to have been behind an attack on an US base in Mosul that killed 22 people earlier this month.

It was co-signed by the Islamic Army of Iraq and the Army of the Mujahideen.

Shia leaders, who represent the majority religious group in the country, have said that voting in the election is a religious duty.

Iraq's electoral commission denied reports by the al-Jazeera Arabic TV channel that 700 election workers in Mosul have resigned.

2 sentenced

Two bomb suspects sentenced to hang.

A state security court in Syria sentenced two men to hang for their alleged role in a bomb attack and gun fight in the capital Damascus last April.

The official Sana agency said the court ruled Ahmad Shlash Hassan and Ezzo Hussein al-Hussein should be hanged. The ruling cannot be appealed, the BBC reported.

The April bomb attack and the gun battle that followed at a former U.N. building left four people dead.

Two other defendants, Azzam al-Nahar and Abdel Basset Hassida, were sentenced to forced labor for life. Another 18 defendants received jail terms of between one and 20 years.

A Question to moderate Muslims (Day 21)

Quran 009:029 says:

"Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued."

The "People of the Book" are primarily Jews and Christians.

What should moderate Muslims say to Muslims who include Jews and Christians among "those" who should be "fought" on the basis of this verse?