Where is the AFL/CIO? How about some strike funds for these brave worker?

It is all so predictable

First they came for the Jews -

July 31, 2002 - Terrorist bombing at Hebrew University cafeteria

Nine people - four Israelis and five foreign nationals - were killed and 85 injured, 14 of them seriously, when a bomb exploded in the crowded Frank Sinatra cafeteria on the Hebrew University Mt. Scopus campus shortly after 13:30. Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack

And celebrated -

October 21, 2009 - Students terrorized

ISLAMABAD/LAHORE: The provincial governments on Tuesday ordered the closure of government and private educational institutions across the country following an attack on the International Islamic University Islamabad (IIUI) in which six people, including three female students, were killed and 29 others injured. . . .

The first blast targeted the cafeteria adjacent to a girls’ hostel around 2:10pm, while the second one targeted the Sharia and Law Department building.

The Taliban took responsibility though they did not dare celebrate in public.

Listen to AP report. It contains not a single word of censure. It simply presents the bombing as an expected Taliban response to the government decision to regain control of the Northwest territory. And who do the students demonstrate against? The Taliban. No way. Their own government -

At least officials feel outrage though their claim that the perpetrators they could not be Muslims for Muslims would not do such a thing is absurd.

LAHORE: Punjab Governor Salmaan Taseer on Tuesday condemned the suicide bombings at the International Islamic University in Islamabad and expressed concern over the loss of precious lives in the incident. He said the attackers were not followers of Islam and had nothing to do with humanity. Taseer said such inhuman acts would not deter the government’s efforts to eliminate terrorism. staff report

Denial is a true and tested Muslim method. Do not forget that Iranians claim that we should not worry about their nuclear development as Islam forbids the use of nuclear weapons.

Will the Muslim silent majority ever dare to insist on the return of red lines? Given the media/intellectual acceptance of such viciousness, it is unlikely.

Still today the founder of Human Rights Watch stood up against his own organization's nihilism as evidenced in the Goldstone report, so maybe be there is reason to hope anyway.

Iran's real intentions can be fathoms from its objection to French involvement in nuclear talks Why?

Tehran claims that France, which has taken a tough line on Iran in recent weeks, has broken previous agreements to supply nuclear materials.

America and Russia are also at the table in Vienna, but Mr Mottaki's words, delivered in Tehran, cast a chill over the talks. Negotiations began on Monday, but formal discussions came to a halt yesterday.

Western officials regard Iran as a uniquely difficult negotiating partner. Whenever an agreement of any kind is reached – such as the supposed deal on Oct 1 – Iranian officials generally seek to reopen the issue and then demand further concessions in return for delivering what they have already agreed.

Now read the following optimistic headline:US hopes for Iran nuclear deal in next few days

Why am I even more skeptical than usual? El Baradei is the negotiator and he is keeping the details of the proposed deal secret.

The deal was in talks between Iran, Russia, the United States and France, and was sent to governments for approval by the end of the week, said Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

El Baradei declined to reveal any details about the draft document, but diplomats said it included demands that Iran ship out most of its stockpile of low-enriched uranium for further processing by another country.

It is a mad world not only in Tehran!

Of course, Olmert's personal humiliation is nothing compared the disaster he enabled an international body misnamed"Human Rights Commission" to bring on the entire state of Israel with the help of the now "saddened" court Jew Richard Goldstone. The affair is a tragedy deserving of Shakespeare master piece.

It began when a tired warrior and his ambitious side kick devised a plan that would enable Israel to move forward (Kadima) and leave a troublesome battlefield named Gaza. To reduce the possibility of ever having to return, thousands of Jews were enticed or forced to leave their homes. The global media that descended on Gaza saw civilians and soldiers crying together as they destroyed their homes and emptied their synagogues to prevent them from being defiled.

The Israeli assumption was that Palestinians and their supporters would have every incentive to make a show piece out of Gaza in order to incentivise Israelis to repeat the exercise in the West Bank. Israeli"occupation" of Gaza was over. As happened after Oslo, Israel and the Jewish diaspora planned to do their best to help Palestinians economically. They already began gifting the profitable Jewish built hot houses to the Gazans.

Sharon founded a new center party called Kadima (forward) and called for elections to ratify his audacious gamble. The country did. It has never wanted anything more than to move forward beyond the Palestinian conflict. Sharon promised it can afford to do so and live. So, Sharon was reelected prime minister. It was at this point that a stroke felled the gambling warrior and saved him from having to confront the losses of his last disastrous gamble. That fate belonged to his deputy, Ehud Olmert.

Hopes that this time the Palestinians will break the pattern and miss and opportunity to miss an opportunity were dashed with the destruction of hot houses, the electoral victory of Hamas and the escalating missile attacks on Southern Israel. Opponents of the disengagement from Gaza warned of such outcomes but were told that the Israeli army could always return to Gaza and put an end to the attacks.

The reality, of course, turned out to be different. So, Olmert did his best to ignore a problem called Sderot. Then came the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit and Olmert decided to test the military doctrine on which the disengagement was based. The results were less than encouraging. Not only was extricating a captive soldier and ending the mobile missile attacks more difficult than has been assumed but Hezbollah opened a second front against Israel in the North. The result was the 2006 Lebanon War which left Hamas, if not Hezbollah, stronger than ever. It also revealed the propaganda efficacy of terrorist use of human shields.

A couple of years of unrelenting and increasingly more deadly missile attacks on Southern Israel followed. International efforts to use"smart power" to convince Hamas to cease and decease the shelling came to naught. Finally, even candidate Barack Obama admitted that had his daughters lived in Shderot, he would have resorted to military means to stop them being shelled, lawyer Olmert believing he had proven Israel's case beyond a shadow of a doubt, went to war against Hamas ruled Gaza.

The army had made good use of learning the lessons of the Lebanon War. It had successfully reduced the number of Israel casualties and tried to do the same with Palestinian civilian casualties. Do not take my word for it. Take the word a man who knows of what he speaks, Col. Richard Kemp, the former British commander in Afghanistan who delivered the following address to the UNHRC:

Thank you, Mr. President.

I am the former commander of the British forces in Afghanistan. I served with NATO and the United Nations; commanded troops in Northern Ireland, Bosnia and Macedonia; and participated in the Gulf War. I spent considerable time in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, and worked on international terrorism for the UK Government’s Joint Intelligence Committee.

Mr. President, based on my knowledge and experience, I can say this: During Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli Defence Forces did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare.

Israel did so while facing an enemy that deliberately positioned its military capability behind the human shield of the civilian population.

Hamas, like Hizballah, are expert at driving the media agenda. Both will always have people ready to give interviews condemning Israeli forces for war crimes. They are adept at staging and distorting incidents.

The IDF faces a challenge that we British do not have to face to the same extent. It is the automatic, Pavlovian presumption by many in the international media, and international human rights groups, that the IDF are in the wrong, that they are abusing human rights.

The truth is that the IDF took extraordinary measures to give Gaza civilians notice of targeted areas, dropping over 2 million leaflets, and making over 100,000 phone calls. Many missions that could have taken out Hamas military capability were aborted to prevent civilian casualties. During the conflict, the IDF allowed huge amounts of humanitarian aid into Gaza. To deliver aid virtually into your enemy's hands is, to the military tactician, normally quite unthinkable. But the IDF took on those risks.

Despite all of this, of course innocent civilians were killed. War is chaos and full of mistakes. There have been mistakes by the British, American and other forces in Afghanistan and in Iraq, many of which can be put down to human error. But mistakes are not war crimes.

More than anything, the civilian casualties were a consequence of Hamas’ way of fighting. Hamas deliberately tried to sacrifice their own civilians.

Mr. President, Israel had no choice apart from defending its people, to stop Hamas from attacking them with rockets.

And I say this again: the IDF did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare.

Thank you, Mr. President.

The UNHRC could not care less about Hamas. It found Israel guilty of crimes against humanity thereby legitimizing a global campaign against the Jewish state. It's purpose was to use a report signed by a self aggrandizing useful idiots named Richard Goldstone to punish Israel and send a warning to other democracies not to fight terror too efficiently. To achieve that purpose, it ignored not only the Israeli efforts to prevent civilian casualties in Gaza but also history and geography. Ignoring the disengagement, it insisted that Gaza was still"occupied" and ignoring the fact that Gaza borders Egypt as well as Israel, it only blames Israel for the Gaza blockade.

And what about the Arab/Israeli peace process? It is dead. Every Israeli knows that giving up control of any inch of land means providing an impeccable enemy anther inch of land from where to attack it. Moreover, any attempt to defend itself will result in global opprobrium. Under such circumstances, would you give up control of such an inch of land?

Indeed, I would suggest that the Obama administration study carefully the Israeli example before it decides to turn over (actively or passively) parts of Afghanistan to the Taliban. Not everybody can be as lucky as Sharon and be spared having to watch the results of an dreadful error. They might share Olmert's fate instead.

Now, bin Ladin and az-Zawahiri would probably prefer to have the central front again in the Arab world. But in Afghanistan and Pakistan they have wars that their side might win. Now, or in the not too distant future, it may be impossible operationally and philosophically to tell the difference between Arab al-Qa'ida and Afghan and Pakistani radical groups, which have as a loadstar the Pashtun militants who comprise the neo-Taliban on both sides of the border. The foot-soldiers of this cause are not as worldly as their Arab forerunners; they do not have any noteworthy thinkers drawing large crowds.

But they do offer the promise of great success: within Pakistan and India are highly-educated Muslims who just might join the cause. Arab al-Qa'ida never enlisted first-rate--not even second-rate--scientific talent. Pakistan and India, with vastly better educational establishments than the Arab world, might just provide what modern holy warriors have so far lacked: the requisite skill to deploy weapons of mass destruction against the United States.

Read it all. I would merely like to add that Islamism thrived in the subcontinent for centuries. Pakistan was created by modernizers. Islamists stayed in India. Today, the Pakistani/Indian rivalry is making the efforts to pacify Afghanistan even tougher.

Channel surfing I came upon this exchange between Greta Van Sustern and Rice history professor Douglas Brinkley:

VAN SUSTEREN: But is it something that -- in theory, is the award for something that you have done, something that you've accomplished, or is it something for sort of an extraordinary background and inspiring hope because those are two very different concepts? . . .

BRINKLEY: I think most of them are for something very concrete, more of a Camp David-like peace accord, when you know, Begin and Sadat won, for example. That would be classic. . . . Ralph Bunch won, a U.N. diplomat. He won in 1950, an African-American. Many people thought Ralph Bunch got it because he was a leading African-American in the diplomatic world. . . .

I could not believe my ears. In truth, Ralph Bunche won the Nobel prize precisely for a very specific achievement - a precursor to the Camp David accords - the 1949 armistice agreement between Israel and the Arab states. Amazingly, Douglas Brinkley did not know that and implied he got it for the color of his skin.

In 1946, UN Secretary-General Trygve Lie «borrowed» Bunche from the State Department and placed him in charge of the Department of Trusteeship of the UN to handle problems of the world's peoples who had not yet attained self-government. He has been associated with the UN ever since.

From June of 1947 to August of 1949, Bunche worked on the most important assignment of his career - the confrontation between Arabs and Jews in Palestine. He was first appointed as assistant to the UN Special Committee on Palestine, then as principal secretary of the UN Palestine Commission, which was charged with carrying out the partition approved by the UN General Assembly.

In early 1948 when this plan was dropped and fighting between Arabs and Israelis became especially severe, the UN appointed Count Folke Bernadotte as mediator and Ralph Bunche as his chief aide. Four months later, on September 17, 1948, Count Bernadotte was assassinated, and Bunche was named acting UN mediator on Palestine. After eleven months of virtually ceaseless negotiating, Bunche obtained signatures on armistice agreements between Israel and the Arab States.

Bunche returned home to a hero's welcome. New York gave him a «ticker tape» parade up Broadway; Los Angeles declared a «Ralph Bunche Day ». He was besieged with requests to lecture, was awarded the Spingarn Prize by the NAACP in 1949, was given over thirty honorary degrees in the next three years, and the Nobel Peace Prize for 1950.

Why is professor Brinkley ignorant about the achievements of a leading African American diplomat?

Because Bunche advocated integration, opposed the militancy of Black Nationalists and decried their build up by the mainstream media. All in all, a position not so different from that of another Nobel Prize winner, Martin Luther King. Of course, it is a position in variance with the protege of Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the new Noble Peace laureate, President Barack Hussein Obama.

Unfortunately, so total was the victory of the Black militants that an American history professor of the caliber of Douglas Brinkley does not have to worry that dissing an opponent of Malcolm X would be challenged by contemporary African American historians.

I suspect if MLK had lived, he would have been consigned to Ralph Bunch's fate for he shared the man's values. It is worth reading what Bunche said about Black militancy:

The approach of the black Muslims is ridiculous.

I picketed drug stores and swimming pools in Los Angeles when I was a teenager. I take the position that I am an American first and a Negro second, an American of Negro descent. The people from whom I am descended helped build this country, and now I'm demanding my birthright. I'm not going to quit and I'm not going to surrender. And I'm not going to relinquish my birthright, as the black Muslims propose.

To set the Negro off is defeatism and cowardly and totally unacceptable. I'm never going to give up. It's an absurdity beyond belief that the black Muslims come out on the same side as the white supremacists. The first to come out for this separation were the communists in the 20s with their doctoring of self-determination for the Negro in the black belt—The boys sitting over in Moscow thought there was a nationalist Negro movement, believing the line taken by Marcus Garvey, you know, back to Africa. There was nothing practical about it, they didn't know where the hell they were going in Africa. They enjoyed the uniforms, it was a form of escapism. At the same time in Chicago and elsewhere they came up with the 49th state idea.

The press has behaved scandalously in building up Malcolm X far beyond the size of his following.

Malcolm X describes me as an"international uncle Tom" in part because of the attack I made on him a year ago at the NAACP convention in Atlanta. After that plane crash with all the people from Atlanta he said out in Los Angeles may there be one every day. I said anyone saying such a thing had to have a sick mind.

I think the NAACP in the long view has led the struggle—it's the base for all the progress that's been amde [sic]. It has run into difficulty now because it has competitors, and there's a disposition to go faster and faster. When in the opinion of the mass of people, the leaders don't zhow [sic]enough forcefulness, new leaders appear. But I've no doubt in my mind that the mainstay is the NAACP. If it had not been for the work of the NAACP, the new organizations would not have had the base upon which to build any progress.

As long as this problem of race remains, no government or administration can be said to have done enough.

Why do I care so much? The same media and intellectual preference for Militant Muslims is currently undermining democratic progress in the Middle East and is responsible for America being forced to fight two wars there. Moreover, I am disgusted by the fact that American historians so downplayed the achievements of Black moderates as to make historians such as Douglas Brinkley ignorant of them.

Candidate Barack Obama correctly argued that strategically Afghanistan cannot be severed from Pakistan. At first President Barack Obama acted as if he meant it. He put General Stanley McCrystal in charge, asked to devise a strategy for victory and in the meantime increased the number of troops available to the new man. His envoy went to Pakistan to convince the Bhutto government to move against the Taliban on the Pakistani side of the border. Improved Pakistani cooperation led to the elimination of a number of Taliban commander. Ramadan was a peaceful month in Pakistan. The American/Pakistani cooperation seemed to be bearing fruit but not in Afghanistan.

To do the job in Afghanistan, Gen. McCrystal needed even more troops. Busy with health care Obama sought to delay making a decision. Sec. Gates obliged him by putting the McCrystal report on ice while American soldiers were getting killed. Somebody decided to leak the report. The ice melted an an internal battle royale began between McCrystal and Biden with Obama playing Hamlet.

Biden and company argued that Pakistan was no longer in danger, the Jihadis left Afganitan and that the imperfect elections provide Washington with a perfect justification to cut Karzai lose and return the country to the Taliban provided Mullah Omar promises to end his relationship with Al Qaeda.

Forget the betrayal of the Afghani women, the behavior of the emboldened Taliban in Afghanistan demonstrates the deficiency of such a game plan. It made clear that the fall of the Afghani domino is bound to have serious consequences in nuclear armed Pakistan. Moreover, there is no more way to differentiate between the Taliban, Arab, Chechen and Wiegur jihadists and Al Qaeda than there was in differentiating between the Viet Cong and North Vietnam. The only difference is that the Vietnamese were not about to follow Americans home while militant Muslims have already demonstrated that they will do precisely that. After all, leaving would prove that Bin Laden is right. Jihadis can replicate the achievements of their glorious ancestors. All they need is patience.

It is bad enough to have to fight emboldened Jihadists in hellhole like Afghanistan, American soldiers and commanders should not be forced to do so without the full backing of their commander in chief.

Of course, Iran wants to 'blow up the heart of Israel' if their nuclear facilities are bombed and even if they arn't. This is hardly news.

But, like the totalitarian fanatics they are, the Mullahs are also executing their own children. Visit Iran Solidarity to sign petitions against it. If only Obama would open his prize winning mouth . . .

Iran Solidarity is outraged at the imminent executions of several other child offenders by the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Islamic Republic of Iran executes more per capita than any country in the world and is one of the few remaining states that continues to execute minors.

This Sunday, October 11, Behnoud Shojaee and Akram Mahdavi are scheduled to be executed in Evin prison in Iran.

On October 21, another juvenile, Safar Angooti is scheduled to be executed and the Islamic Supreme Court is also deciding the fate of another minor on death row, Ali Mahin Torabi.

At least 160 juveniles are on death row in Iran, including for homosexuality, apostasy, sex outside of marriage and involvement in school or street fights that have resulted in murder.