Friday Afternoon Roundup - A New Decade and the Mutants of Gaza

Last decade it was the first year of a new millennium, and now it's the first year of a new decade. It is a decade that begins in the shadow of terrorism, in the shadow of Islam. Nidal Malik Hasan's killing spree and Umar's attempted attack on Northwest 253 mark an uptick in domestic terrorism, even as the suicide bombing struck CIA agents in Afghanistan to showcase one of the worst attacks on the US in Afghanistan.

That they all took place within a short time of each other, under Obama, is likely no coincidence at all. Obama had his window to show whether he would be a capable leader or not. The terrorists took his measure. Now the real testing has begun, first with "lone wolves" and the testing phase is likely to be followed by a large scale organized attack.

And naturally the government's weakness toward terrorism has only helped the terrorists. Former Gitmo detainees are helping Al Queda run their civil war in Yemen. Despite this Obama's Attorney General insists on trying 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a civilian court, and Obama insists on exporting and importing Gitmo terrorists. Most Americans however want to see strong measures used against terrorists.

58 percent of Americans want to waterboard Umar. The surveys also show that a third of Americans think Al Queda is winning and that most support US control over security measures at foreign airports. 65 percent believe torture works. 58 percent think that Obama's release of the CIA memos endangered national security. 63 percent blame political correctness for allowing Hasan to carry out his massacre at Fort Hood.

Essentially the numbers suggest that a loose majority of Americans is to the right of Obama and the media on such basic issues. Barely a third rank the government's response to the Airplane bombing positively. Those numbers mean that Obama has lost on national security. The question is how key will national security be in 2012.

That puts the US into an Israel type scenario in which terrorists can help dictate the course of a US election, and in which the Obama administration might be tempted to cut behind the scenes deals with Al Queda to avoid an attack during the election season.

Meanwhile in another setback for Washington D.C.'s crusade against soldiers and contractors, the charges against the Blackwater security guards have been tossed out.

A federal judge threw out all charges on Thursday against five Blackwater Worldwide security guards accused of killing 14 Iraqi civilians in 2007, saying the U.S. government had recklessly violated the defendants' constitutional rights.

Naturally the same people who celebrated when 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was scheduled for a civilian trial and Osama's bodyguard Salim Hamdan was set free, are outraged over this.

The bottom line is that the Blackwater guards responded to an attack and defended themselves. In the aftermath of which evidence was covered up, and the State Department chose to use them as a sacrificial goat.

Continuing the roundup, Elder of Ziyon handily discredits the now commonly circulated claim that Israeli weapons caused birth defects in Gaza. The claim has been repeated on Al Jazeera and a lot of left wing blogs.

Palestinian Arabs keep trying to claim that Israeli weapons in Operation Cast Lead caused all sorts of genetic mutations in Gaza.

Dr. Muawiya Hassanein, director of the Emergency Ministry of Health in the Gaza Strip, tells Palestine Today that there have been over 75 cases of babies born with heart defects in Gaza since Operation Cast Lead.

A quick calculation shows that, in the US, about 0.9% of all babies are born with congenital heart defects (36,000 a year.) In Gaza, this would translate to over 500 babies born with such a condition every year. Perhaps those evil Israeli chemical and radiological weapons had a positive effect on Gaza children!

But more insidiously, Hassanein claims that these weapons have caused Gaza men to have abnormal sperm, low sperm counts and, tragically, infertility. To many Arabs, this could be worse than birth defects, as it attacks the very source of their manliness, and nothing is more important than that.

But indeed there are mutants in Gaza. They just weren't caused by Cast Lead or Israeli weapons. They're caused by MARRYING YOUR COUSINS.

There are an unusually high number of male pseudohermaphrodite births in the Gaza neighborhood of Jabalya, where Nadir and Ahmed live.

Dr. Jehad Abudaia, a Canadian-Palestinian pediatrician and urologist practicing in Gaza, says he has diagnosed nearly 80 cases like Nadir's and Ahmed's in the last seven years.

"It is astonishing that we have [so] many cases with this defect, which is very rare all over the world," Abudaia says. He attributes the high frequency of this birth defect to "consanguinity," or in-breeding.

"If you want to go to the root of the problem, this problem runs in families in the genes." Abudaia says. "They want to get married to cousins... they don't go to another family. This is a problem."

No doubt the "experts" will find a way to blame Israel for Palestinian Muslims marrying their cousins. But I don't think Israel has developed or deployed a "cousin bomb" yet, along the lines of the supposed "gay bomb", so this one is really not our fault.

Meanwhile reports say that the kidnapping of Peter Moore was the work of an Iranian backed terrorist group

The five men, who were kidnapped from a government ministry building in Baghdad in 2007, were reportedly taken to Iran just a day after their abduction where they were held by the al-Quds brigade of the Guard.

An unnamed former Revolutionary Guard told The Guardian: "It was an Iranian kidnap, led by the Revolutionary Guard, carried out by the al-Quds brigade.

"My contact works for al-Quds. He took part in the planning of the kidnap and he watched the kidnapping as it was taking place. He told me that they spent two days at the Qasser Shiereen camp. They then took them deep inside Iran."

A serving Iraqi government minister with links to Iran also told the paper: "This was an IRG (Iranian Revolutionary Guard) operation. You don't think for a moment that those militia groups from Sadr City could have carried out a high-level kidnapping like this one."

As late as last month Foreign Office officials privately harboured suspicions Mr Moore was being held in Iran. The hostages were employed on a project to install software that would track money movements within the ministry. Intelligence officials investigated allegations that new equipment would expose a practice through which coalition funds were routinely diverted by Shia officials to Iranian security forces in return for arming and training militias.

“That they were held in Iran is a possibility given the lack of leads about their whereabouts in Iraq even after the security forces became more effective,” one British diplomat said.

The US's former commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, had said he was "90 per cent certain" that the Britons were held in Iran for part of their period in captivity.

BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner put the question directly to Gen Petraeus - who was commander of multi-national forces in Iraq at the time of the kidnap and now heads US Central Command - at a conference in Bahrain on December 13.

"He didn't hesitate. He said 'I'm absolutely certain. I'm 90% certain'," Mr Gardner told Radio 4's Today programme.

"I said is this a personal view or have you seen hard intelligence, and he thought for a minute and he said 'I am pretty sure I've seen hard intelligence on it' ... that they were held in Iran for some of the period of their captivity."

This means that Iran has now on several occasions, attacked, kidnapped, and held Britons hostage. For the Britain of old or even the not so old, that fought Argentina, this would be an act of war. For New Britain, terrorism seems to be only another missed business opportunity.

But we are disarming ourselves equally well. In the wake of the Northwest 253 attack, it is instructive to note that Obama had already made planes safer for terrorists, by rescinding the armed pilot carry program.

After the September 11 attacks, commercial airline pilots were allowed to carry guns if they completed a federal-safety program. No longer would unarmed pilots be defenseless as remorseless hijackers seized control of aircraft and rammed them into buildings.

Now President Obama is quietly ending the federal firearms program, risking public safety on airlines in the name of an anti-gun ideology.

The Obama administration this past week diverted some $2 million from the pilot training program to hire more supervisory staff, who will engage in field inspections of pilots.

This looks like completely unnecessary harassment of the pilots. The 12,000 Federal Flight Deck Officers, the pilots who have been approved to carry guns, are reported to have the best behavior of any federal law enforcement agency. There are no cases where any of them has improperly brandished or used a gun. There are just a few cases where officers have improperly used their IDs.

Fewer than one percent of the officers have any administrative actions brought against them and, we are told, virtually all of those cases “are trumped up.”

And while the Obama Administration goes after the CIA, contractors and anyone and everyone but the terrorists, it naturally throws those cases in the courts.

A federal judge is slamming the Obama administration for refusing to take a position in a lawsuit brought against the Palestinian Authority in connection with an alleged terrorist attack in 2000 that claimed the life of a 25-year-old American, Esh Gilmore.

In an opinion filed Monday, U.S. District Court Judge Gladys Kessler complained that the Obama administration was "particularly unhelpful" and the State Department "mealy-mouthed" in refusing to provide official guidance on the complex foreign policy issues involved in the case. Kessler was attempting to decide whether the Palestinian Authority should be granted a trial it recently sought or forced to pay a default judgment because of past decisions not to defend itself against the lawsuit. Gilmore's family claims the Palestine Liberation Organization's Tanzim branch was responsible for his death in the shooting outside an Israeli government office in East Jerusalem.

"The Executive Branch of the United States has been particularly unhelpful in resolving this difficult Motion," Kessler wrote. "The Court requested that the State Department file a Statement of Interest in order to understand the international ramifications of any order it might enter, and to be apprised of our Government’s position about such ramifications. In this case, as in Knox v. The Palestinian Liberation Organization... the State Department declined to do so. Instead it filed the identical mealy-mouthed Notice there as it did in this case. That Notice, for all practical purposes, said nothing and certainly provided no substantive guidance whatsoever to the Court regarding the Government’s position or concerns about any impact a decision might have on the delicate situation in the Middle East."

The U.S. government's two-page filing last month in the Gilmore case is, indeed, vague. After explicitly declining to take a formal position, the government lawyers said this: "The United States supports just compensation for victims of terrorism from those responsible for their losses and has encouraged all parties to resolve these cases to their mutual benefit. At the same time, the United States remains concerned about the potentially significant impact that these default cases may have on the defendants’ financial and political viability."

Kessler seemed to be arguing that it was unfair for the executive branch, which under Obama and his predecessors so often urges judges not to interfere in matters of national security and foreign relations, to cast the court adrift in this case.

Naturally the Obama Administration is unwilling to take a position, after all Obama's first phone call after his election was to the head of Fatah, the same organization that carried out the murder of Esh.

But of course they're not "terrorists", they're activists, according to the AP and the New York Times, and many others.

The trend began with calling terrorists, militants. And now the left wing media has defined it down to activists. Just like Mother Theresa but with AK47's.

And today with the recent murder of Rabbi Chai, the entire PA leadership attended the funeral of his killers.

Back in the US, Ron Paul crawled out of his hole in the ground, to defend Al Queda. Anyone living in Paul's district, or for that matter outside, might consider backing Tim Graney. a tea party activist who's running against Ron Paul.

Genuine GOP Mom asks whether his son Rand Paul, also running for office, is any better than the father, or do the Al Queda sympathies run in the family (just like the employment Paul provided to his family members at public expense).

Rand Paul has not answered the question regarding whether or not he believes 9/11 was our fault, but he has stated to the Wall Street Journal that there are only "minor areas" where he disagrees with his father overall. Is there a bigger issue than 9/11 and the terrorism that caused it?

Rand Paul has a big problem if he answers that question. If he agrees publicly with his father that Islamic terrorism is America's fault, it will be the nail in the coffin of his campaign here in Kentucky. If he denies his father's claim with any clarity, he will lose his base, and that would also be the nail in his campaign's coffin. It's as simple as that.

Rand Paul needs to be asked the question repeatedly if he believes America is to blame for the acts of terror perpetrated against her, particularly 9/11 and the latest attack in Detroit. It's the most important question of our time. He needs to have the guts to be as clear about his position on this as his father is, no matter the political fallout. Kentuckians should accept nothing less than a clear answer on this question.

It's not too difficult to find anti-military sentiment coming from Rand Paul, despite his unwillingness to answer the question on 9/11. In this video, starting at about the 11:00 mark, he compares the turning over of high school students' names to military recruiters to the actions of Napolean and Hitler. The Pauls
see the American military as aggressors.

Ugly. Ugly as hell.

World Net Daily has a fun fact about Judge Goldstone, the Apartheid judge.

Our own Dov Hikind made news by once again proposing profiling terrorists.

State Assemblyman Dov Hikind has revived his proposal for racial profiling by security personnel, in light of the attempted bombing of a passenger jet landing in Detroit.

"I think this is a unique situation," said Hikind, who introduced a similar bill in 2005 after the London subways were attacked and NYPD officers began randomly searching the bags of some passengers.

Hikind told me by phone that if there is a "compelling governmental interest" to consider race in college admissions, as the Supreme Court affirmed in the case of Grutter v. Bollinger, the same is true in a climate of heightened security risk.

"If this isn't a compelling government interest to do this, the war on terror, then what is? Why is there a difference?" Hikind said. "No one is saying we shouldn't check Norwegians--blonde, blue-eyed people--but we're saying let's be realistic about it. Their profile happens to be young, Muslim men of Middle-eastern and South Asian background. Is that the only thing you look at? Of course not."

The Daily Mail looks at the student visa loophole that's importing terrorists like Umar into the UK.

Israpundit's Ted Belman has an interesting debate on the right vs the left, that's worth reading.

Avid Editor links to Emanuel Winston's profile of Khameni

Urban Adder asks whether we can trust Obama to serve and protect

Asleep at the switch--once again. Obama diddling on the golf course, enjoying the privileges of his exalted postion gained honestly or not, once again, while the jihad makes inroads. The "failure" of the Nigerian intent on killing Americans should not fool us. His handlers have learned a bunch.

That they certainly have. Now it's time for us to begin learning.