Michael Young in the Times of London:
In recent weeks the idea that the United States and the UK should “engage†Syria, but also Iran, to stabilise Iraq has been all the rage. On Tuesday, in an east Beirut suburb, Lebanon’s industry minister, Pierre Gemayel, showed what the cost of engagement might be. The scion of a prominent Christian political family was assassinated in broad daylight. This was the latest in a series of killings and bomb attacks that the UN investigator looking into the murder of the late Prime Minister, Rafiq Hariri, has determined are linked.
Mr Gemayel’s allies quickly accused Syria or its allies of the crime, and it’s difficult to disagree. With the late minister dead and six pro-Syrian ministers having just resigned, Lebanon’s Government is near the stage where it will be constitutionally forced to resign.This is a priority for Syria as it would undermine Lebanon’s formal endorsement of the court being established by the UN to try suspects in the Hariri case. Syrian officials fear being fingered by the UN investigation.
Syria has encouraged its powerful Lebanese ally, Hezbollah, to bring down the Government. The recent ministerial resignations were led by the party which has been planning demonstrations to force the Government out.
Meanwhile, in the UK:
A former Russian spy who died in an apparent poisoning signed a statement in the waning hours of his life blaming Russian President Vladimir Putin and accusing him of having “no respect for life, liberty or any civilized value,” friends said Friday.
Putin’s government strongly denied involvement, calling the allegation “nothing but nonsense.”
. . . .
Litvinenko worked for the KGB and its successor, the FSB. In 1998, he publicly accused his superiors of ordering him to kill tycoon Boris Berezovsky and spent nine months in jail from 1999 on charges of abuse of office. He was later acquitted and in 2000 sought asylum in Britain, where Berezovsky is now also living in exile.
On the day he first felt ill, Litvinenko said he had two meetings, the first with an unnamed Russian and Andrei Lugovoy, an-KGB colleague and bodyguard to former Russian Prime Minster Yegor Gaidar.
Later, he dined with Italian security expert Mario Scaramella to discuss the October murder of Politkovskaya.
Scaramella said he showed Litvinenko an e-mail he received from a source naming Politkovskaya’s killers, and naming other targets including Litvinenko and himself.
And yet:
Russia’s trade and economics minister said Tuesday there was a “real chance” to complete the country’s entry into the World Trade Organization next year after striking a landmark bilateral deal with the United States.
“There is a real chance to complete all these procedures in 2007,” Trade and Economic Development Minister German Gref told reporters.
The minister, however, said that Russia was willing to delay joining the powerful body that sets the rules for global trade if more time was needed to negotiate favorable conditions for its membership.
So far, the international left seems not to have had time to begin organizing Guantanamo-style protests regarding the human rights issues. Russia’s Jews are ominously silent, but for better reason. Jimmah demonstrates his evenhandedness on Israel/Palestine. Maybe he’ll get some of the money that might otherwise be awarded to David Irving.
Rwanda and France exchange allegations.
Not really sure what to make of this, but there should be a UN investigation, non?
Nevertheless:
France will get to host the project to build a 10bn-euro (£6.6bn) nuclear fusion reactor, in the face of strong competition from Japan.
The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (Iter) will be the most expensive joint scientific project after the International Space Station.The Iter programme was held up for over 18 months as parties tried to broker a deal between the two rivals.
. . . .Officials from a six-party consortium signed the deal in Moscow on Tuesday, for the reactor’s location at the Cadarache site in southern France.
French President Jacques Chirac thanked member countries of the European Union, as well as Russia and China, who crucially lent their support to the French bid: “It is a big success for France, for Europe and for all the partners of Iter,” he said in a statement.
The European Union, the United States, Russia, Japan, South Korea and China are partners in the project.
Japan earlier withdrew its bid, after a deal was worked out for the “runner-up” to receive a generous concessions package
Oh, and thanks to China for the excellent take-out.
Only because they haven’t had time to dream up a Bush connection. There is no evil that springs from anywhere but 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
France and Russia? But are these not the upstanding and morally superior nations that resented our unilateral action in Iraq. I mean, sure, they were making millions by thwarting U.N. sanctions, but that doesn’t stop them from… erk, gah! I can’t keep the sarcsm going that long. It starts to hurts my upper intestines.
Dan,
You just about choked me with your Chinese Takeout pun!
The packaging of human organs does bear an unfortunate resemblance to the soggy box that my Mushu Pork came in last night.
What’s next? Pasteurized, enriched blood plasma in handy, resealable milk cartons?
While I thought it was a fictional work, I loved Micheal Bay’s “The Island.” Now, it’s uncomfortably close to present-day reality.
-Steve
I love Armageddon on ice, the morning after Thanksgiving.
I mean, I guess I’ll go shopping. If I have to watch our own destruction, I might as well have high def.
Just another thing to worry about. The Chinese takeout reference reminds me why the only good thing about Nancy Pelosi is her undying hatred of Chinese tyranny and human rights atrocities.
But of course, GWB must have looked Hu in the eye and decided he was a man to be trusted. Like the poisonous venomous midget from Moscow.
But closer to home,Canada is too close to the US border [!?!] and some of the toxic seepage coming across into the Detroit area has infected Judiciary Chairman John Conyers, but I digress. Just when I think the spineless whack-jobs to the North are irredeemably twisted like former PM Chretien’s mouth [and garbled gargling diction like Vermont Sen. Leahy, our Senator from Canada], a few great polemicists like Mark Steyn and this gentleman linked above give me hope that their brains are not totally Molsonized. This from Terry Glavin of Thetyee.ca:
“My personal view is that we should crush fascism wherever it comes up,” [Muslim moderate] Hashmi told me, “but many people on the left don’t even see it when it’s there. And one of the most dangerous things that is happening is that the left and the Islamists have found common cause, and it’s very frightening.”
Islamist doctrine—as opposed to Islam, the religion– rejects modernity and the separation of church and state, and counsels theocratic government based on interpretations of Islamic law. Earlier this year, a group of well-known progressive Muslims such as the novelist Salman Rusdhdie, Toronto’s Irshad Manji and the Netherlands’ Hirsi Ali authored a widely-distributed summation that described Islamism as “a new totalitarian global threat…a reactionary ideology which kills equality, freedom and secularism wherever it is present. Its success can only lead to a world of domination: man’s domination of woman, the Islamists’ domination of all the others.”
But are Islamists really the same as fascists? Fred Halliday, the Middle East scholar and professor of international relations at the London School of Economics, says he doesn’t think so, but writing in the online journal Open Democracy, Halliday argues that it hardly matters, because just like fascism, Islamism is antithetical to everything the left has ever stood for. It is the sworn enemy of the left, “that is, the left that has existed on the principles founded on and descended from classical socialism, the Enlightenment, the values of the revolutions of 1798 and 1848, and generations of experience.”
But if you regard the United States as a greater enemy of the left than even Islamism, “what you end up with,” says Hashmi, “is ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend.’” And that brings us back to the degeneracy of the “anti-war” activism represented by Galloway and his followers in Britain and in Canada, in their alliance with Islamists.
International Socialists
“We can’t try to hide this anymore, and people should know what is going on,” Raza told me the other day. “All this is making it very, very hard for us to do our work. There are leaders of the Canadian Islamic Congress, too, that are just as bigoted as the rest of them. These people are idiots, and as Muslims, we need to say it. And many of these people are very dangerous.”</blockquote>
Fred Halliday and Maxim Rodinson [RIP] are two Marxists who are not buying the Eurotrash/Canuck version of a multiculti Islam as just another patchwork part of the quilt of nationalities and religious cultures on the playing fields of western civ.
But if you read the emphasized text above, you will notice that weirdos like Galloway, who is a corrupt fool unmasked and revealed as a feckless impostor by Christopher Hitchens in NYC last year, hate the US as the repository of Western values that they wish to dissolve and eliminate so an Oprah-fied nanny-state like the passive Finlandized Euroweenie social model will prevail everywhere.
Even some Canadians can understand that consumerized zombies not reproducing themselves—as Mark Steyn points out is happening in Canada, Europe and Japan in his excellent book America Alone—is not the answer to the great questions of the future.
Even smart leftists like Halliday and Rodinson figured that out.
Huh? No such thing as a fusion reactor yet. People keep trying, though. I imagine the reporter or the spokesperson got it wrong.
LLNL has the National Ignition Facility which is doing work in fusion. I don’t know who else is doing it.
Fusion is always 20 years in the future. I hope we get there some day, but I doubt the UN will be behind it when we do.