the blog quebecois

Call me Captain Courageous, but the latest tape of Osama bin Laden doesn't scare me much. There he is with his Dickee Dee skullcap, a dead cat nailed to his face, and he's not moving around an awful lot, like -- maybe? -- they propped him up for the camera and got him to lip-synch the deal, though I note his lips aren't moving too much, either. E's turning a bit green round the edges, mate.

That smell of bad cabbage emanates not from al-Jazeera, but from the Iraqi government, which is crapping its collective bloomers with the thought that al-Qaeda has hitched its wagon to the soon-to-be-extinct Saddam.

I am cynical, but not that cynical. The exquisite timing of all this shrieks CIA, but the CIA isn't smart enough to time it correctly.

bin Ladin or his successors are. They're all going down together.

I expect to be blown up for this; but really, what kind of a self-respecting Muslim terrorist organization names itself after a pig's hind quarters?

Am I talking about you, Hamas?

I couldn't be talking about Hizbollah, because then it wouldn't be funny.

So it must be Pigbutt, er, Hamas.

Hey, I didn't give you the name.

So sue me, or blow me up, or just blow me. Your call.

Steven Den Beste turns his analytical mind to terrorist bluster here.

And if you haven't read it yet, you should: Tom Junod's harrowing essay in Esquire, "The Falling Man."

Never mind the technological superiority of the West -- the day the Arab press starts churning out articles of the above quality is the day I start to worry.

TRIPOLI/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Libya, a pariah state for decades, said on Friday it would abandon its weapons of mass destruction programs and allow unconditional inspections, drawing praise from Washington and London for its move toward rejoining the international community.

You know, for a moron, George Bush seems to be engineering something of a seismic shift in the Middle East.

Of course, it's probably just coincidence. How much you want to bet Boy Assad makes some similar move in the next few months?

James Astill
Sunday January 4, 2004
The Observer

A woman aged 97 was rescued from the earthquake rubble of her home in the Iranian city of Bam yesterday, having survived for eight days without water or food.

'She's a little dehydrated but apart from that she has no complaints at all,' said Dr Paul Odberg, chief medical co-ordinator of the International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC) in Bam. 'She has one complaint - she doesn't like the intravenous needle.'

[ . . . ]

Mazandarani complained the tea was too hot, and asked the volunteer to spoon-feed it to her.

A team of Revolutionary Guards promptly sprang into action and reinterred the ingrate.

President Mohammad Khatami was quoted as saying, "Kvetch, kvetch, kvetch. Shainera menchen haut me gelicht in drert."

He further was heard to exclaim "Oy, this is just meshuganah! I'm such a putz!" as Guards dragged him away.

This is from an Associated Press report on the Iranian elections that ran in the local paper today. I haven't been able to find it online, so I decided to type it up here. Mainly because I really like the name "Ghodratollah."

Ghodratollah. Ghodratollah versus King Kong. The Ghoderminator! Gharrrrr!

"The vote was not a sham election. It was a fair and free election," conservative Ghodratollah Alikhani said in an emotional speech. He gestured so violently that his turban fell off.

I hate it when that happens.

When one reformer told him to stop shouting, Alikhani shot back, "Shut up, you idiot," and ran toward the legislator, throwing punches in the air. Legislators intervened to keep Alikhani back.

That too.

Dog of Flanders poses this stumper:

If Y was the "spiritual" leader of Hamas, and Rantisi replaces him, why then isn't anyone calling Rantisi the new "spiritual" leader?

a) He's still short three merit badges.

b) "Spiritual leader?" No thanks, look what happened to the last one.

c) He's actually a very confused Methodist.

d) He can't grow required saintly beard -- children snicker behind his back, call him "Fred Flintstone."

we don't need no education
we don't need no thought control
no dark sarcasm in the classroom

-- pink floyd

Traffic was unusually heavy over the weekend. While I start cleaning up the 1500+ spam comments that some jerk dumped on me, amuse yourself by contemplating the rich irony of this:

Palestinian businessmen have made millions of pounds supplying cement for Israel's "security barrier" in the full knowledge of Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader and one of the wall's most vocal critics.

A damning report by Palestinian legislators, which has been seen by the Telegraph, concludes that Mr Arafat did nothing to stop the deals although he publicly condemned the structure as a "crime against humanity".

I mean, it's almost like the Palestinian Authority is . . . corrupt or something.
--

I see that Muqtada al-Sadr has again unleashed his fierce Mehdi Army to Fight The Power.

Score so far: Marines 2 KIA. Jihadis 300 KIA.

This isn't an insurgency. It's a cattle cull.

-

President McChimphitlerster further destabilizes the Middle East:

Dear Boy Assad,

My Air Force is bored and has a bunch of new bombs. It wants to try them out on something. Your thoughts?

Hugs 'n' kisses,

Dubya

cc: Ayatollah whatever, Tehran.

Haaretz.com:

WASHINGTON - Syrian President Bashar Assad is offering to make peace with Israel and says he is ready to cooperate with the United States in stabilizing Iraq, a former senior State Department official said Wednesday.

"Something is going on in Syria and it is time for us to pay attention," said Martin Indyk, assistant secretary of state for the Near East and U.S. ambassador to Israel during the Clinton administration.

Interesting news from Lebanon. No, not Lebanon, Ohio. Expatriate American teacher Tyler Golson in the Daily Star:

Abandoning my lesson plan for the moment, but curious at this sudden display of interest in the election, I ventured: "Who do you want to win?" "Bush," said Rahaf, while a number of others nodded in solid agreement. I pressed them further for a few minutes, asking individual students why they liked Bush. The same ideas came up again and again: he is a strong leader, an honest man, and, most of all, a believer. Like the winning margin of American voters this year, these Middle Easterners related to Bush's sense of religious conviction and his confident steering of a nation and culture they admired.

I think in years to come, Arab opinion of Bush will parallel the admiration for Ronald Reagan among Central and Eastern European democrats.

Via NealeNews

I haven't so much as looked at the pictures from Qana. I don't need to see them: War is hell. I don't need to see slain children to understand the concept.

But other people have looked at them, and are starting to question some glaring discrepancies in the Hezbollah/MSM accounts of what happened.

Why would the civilians who had supposedly taken shelter in the basement of the building not leave after the post-midnight attack? They just went back to sleep and had the bad luck to wait for the building to collapse in the morning?

National Public Radio�s correspondent reported that residents of that building had left and the victims were non-residents who chose to shelter in the building that night. They were �too poor� to leave the down, one resident told CNN�s Wedeman. Who were these people?

What we do know is that sometime after dawn a call went hour to journalists and rescue workers to come to the scene. And come they did, in droves.

While Hezbollah and its apologists have been claiming that civilians could not freely flee the scene due to Israeli destruction of bridges and roads, the journalists and rescue teams from nearby Tyre had no problem getting there.

Lebanese rescue teams did not start evacuating the building until the morning and only after the camera crews came. The absence of a real rescue effort was explained by saying that equipment was lacking. There were no scenes of live or injured people being extracted.

There was little blood, CNN�s Wedeman noted: all the victims, he concluded, appeared to have died while as they were sleeping � sleeping, apparently, through thunderous Israeli air attacks. Rescue workers equipped with cameras were removing the bodies from the same opening in the collapsed structure. Journalists were not allowed near the collapsed building.

Rescue workers filmed as they went carried the victims on the stretchers, occasionally flipping up the blankets so that cameras could show the faces and bodies of the dead.

But Israelis steeled to scenes of carnage from Palestinian suicide bombings and Hezbollah rocket attack could not help but notice that these victims did not look like our victims. Their faces were ashen gray. Their limbs appeared to have stiffened, from rigor mortis. Neither were effects that would have resulted from an Israeli attack hours before. These were bodies that looked like they had been dead for days.

You would think that the hard-bitten cynics (as they style themselves) of the MSM would be making some inquiries into these matters.

Alas, that wouldn't slot so neatly into their pre-written templates of Israeli brutality.

Lazy, incurious and credulous. It's starting to remind me of the Massacre of Jenin.

Without a transcript, it's difficult to know if I heard this correctly; but on The National tonight:

UN Human Rights Commissioner Louise Arbour arrives in Gaza, bringing with her the gays of the outside world . . .

Certainly a dramatic gesture, though I don't know exactly what she was trying to accomplish.

BBC:

Members of the UN Security Council have condemned Israel ahead of an emergency session over Israel's deadly raid on a flotilla of ships carrying aid to Gaza.

At least nine pro-Palestinian activists, some Turkish, were killed when Israeli commandos stormed the ships in international waters.

Turkey's foreign minister called Israel's actions "murder by a state".

Israel's UN envoy said troops acted in self defence when activists attacked them, charges the campaigners deny.

"This flotilla was anything but a humanitarian mission," Israel's deputy UN ambassador Daniel Carmon said.

He said the activists had used "knives, clubs and other weapons" to attack the soldiers who boarded the ship.

I spent a good deal of time this afternoon looking unsuccessfully for a clip from 2002 showing Canada's most famous anti-zionist battling with Israeli border guards (he didn't win, following a bit of a shoving match). He wanted to go to Ramallah to see his hero, Yassir Arafat, but the Jewish oppressors were having none of it.

Well, he's needed more than ever now in Gaza for his combat and/or jewel-thieving skills.

Where have you gone, Mr. Robinson/A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

MEMRI:

In an unfortunate result of translation, Pakistani diplomat Akbar Zeb will not become the next Pakistani ambassador to Saudi Arabia. Zeb’s credentials seem in order: He is the former ambassador to the United States, India and South Africa. He held the post of High Commissioner Designate of Pakistan to Canada and is the former director general of Pakistan's Foreign Ministry.

But despite Mr. Zeb’s impressive career, the 55-year-old diplomat’s name proved to be the immovable hurdle. When translated into Arabic, Akbar Zeb means “Biggest Dick.” In a region that stresses modesty, particularly in public, this could not stand.

The Atlantic:

Nowhere is the gap between sinister stereotype and ridiculous reality more apparent than in Afghanistan, where it’s fair to say that the Taliban employ the world’s worst suicide bombers: one in two manages to kill only himself. And this success rate hasn’t improved at all in the five years they’ve been using suicide bombers, despite the experience of hundreds of attacks-or attempted attacks. In Afghanistan, as in many cultures, a manly embrace is a time-honored tradition for warriors before they go off to face death. Thus, many suicide bombers never even make it out of their training camp or safe house, as the pressure from these group hugs triggers the explosives in suicide vests. According to several sources at the United Nations, as many as six would-be suicide bombers died last July after one such embrace in Paktika.

Via Five Feet of Fury

McClatchy Newspapers:

Egypt's military rulers told human rights advocates Monday that at least 7,000 civilians have been sentenced to prison terms by military courts since Hosni Mubarak was ousted — an astoundingly high number likely to fuel debate over how much the revolution has changed the country.

Advocates said the military promised to review the cases and vacate any improper guilty verdicts and commute the sentences. But the advocates voiced skepticism and demanded more information about civilians in military custody.

"This is not the first time they've promised," said Mona Seif, a member of a rights group called No Military Trials that met with the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, Egypt's ruling body. "We were offered no guarantees whatsoever."

The use of military courts to try people who've been detained in anti-government protests in recent months is highly charged here. One of the complaints against Mubarak's regime was that it silenced dissidents by quickly prosecuting them in military courts. The caretaker government that took over after Mubarak's resignation has done little to alter the practice, however.

Same as the old boss. If not worse.