Friday Afternoon Roundup - Death by Hypocrisy

The media has reluctantly broken away from its latest celebrity tabloid feeding frenzy, to shamelessly exploit the disaster in Haiti, and everyone from credit card companies to aid groups to the news media to the corrupt government of Haiti are looking to profit from the disaster.

Accompanying this are attacks on anyone who points out that would have been a manageable disaster everyone else, is unmanageable in Haiti because it lacks a working society.

Rush Limbaugh is being savaged for questioning Obama's willingness to throw 100 million and troop deployments to Haiti, at a time when Americans at home need help, some no less so than Haitians. But the United States has been helping Haiti all along, with no good result, as the National Review points out.

Since 1973, the United States has been the world’s largest foreign-aid donor to Haiti, which ranks among the world’s poorest countries.

From 1990 to 2005, the U.S. sent $1.46 billion to Haiti in aid from development assistance and children's health through the Economic Support Fund, the U.S. food program, the Peace Corps, and foreign military training (although that was only $4.6 million, with $3 million coming in 1995). More recently,

In May 2008, the Bush administration announced that it would send an additional $25 million in emergency food aid to Haiti, bringing its total emergency contribution to $45 million . . . Congress provided $100 million for hurricane relief and reconstruction assistance for Haiti and other Caribbean countries in the FY 2009 continuing appropriations resolution, signed September 2008. Haiti received an estimated $287 million in regular appropriations for FY 2009.

So much for Clinton's "modest aid"... And all the aid in the world won't do any good, when your country is run like this.

Since 2004, a 9,000-strong U.N. peacekeeping force has been on the ground. Haiti is the third most corrupt country in the world, according to corruption watchdog Transparency International, compounding the difficulties agencies face in delivering aid in an accountable and transparent way. Power lies in the hands of a few elite, leaving ministries unable to implement policies and divert funds to the local level.

Aid to Haiti is the same old, "give a man a fish" routine that makes most of our attempts to help the world's hungry and needy so ultimately pointless. More aid won't help Haiti, regime change might.

Haiti isn't responsible for the earthquake, but it is responsible for a mismanaged society that isn't capable of taking care of earthquake victims. And while I sympathize, I have to ask when was the last time Haiti or any of the countries we help out sent us aid.

Bill Clinton, the UN's special envoy to Haiti, who will be heading up relief efforts... bears some of the responsibility for the current state of Haiti today.

And you can't have a disaster without celebrities blaming Bush, or in this case the failure of the Copenhagen talks.

Danny Glover, one of the smartest actors working in Hollywood today, explained that earthquakes are caused by global warming

“What happened in Haiti could happen to anywhere in the Caribbean because all these island nations are in peril because of global warming.” “When we see what we did at the climate summit in Copenhagen, this is the response, this is what happens, you know what I’m saying? We have to act now!”

This is the response? Is Glover claiming that the earthquake was a response by mother earth to China's sabotage of Copenhagen? Figuring that out would require someone to translate from stupid to English. But Glover's hysterical "act now" mantra is a familiar one to anyone who has listened to global warming advocates rant on and demand that we stop questioning and take immediate action! Right now! You know what I'm saying!

And it can't be ruled out that given a day or two, Dr. Michael Mann will emerge with a new explanation that has global warming affecting tectonic plates by agitating the earth's crust, or something equally stupid, but reproducible in Time and Newsweek and on the CBS Evening News with Botox Barbie herself. (Previously NASA's global warming advocates had blamed global warming for Alaskan earthquakes, but Haiti is a bit too warm to blame on the glaciers, unless someone can find glaciers off the coast of Haiti.)

But they've all been topped by Haiti's consul in Sao Paulo who had the following to say;

The consul of Haiti in Brazil, George Samuel Antoine, said the tragedy was being good for the country, which was becoming known. The statement was given on Thursday, not realizing that he was being recorded...

The consul also said that the earthquake may have been caused by "voodoo". "De tanto mexer com macumba...não sei o que é aquilo. O africano em si tem maldição", comentou momentos antes da entrevista. "From both mess with voodoo ... do not know what that is. The African itself is a curse," he said moments before the interview.

So far only one english language outlet has covered these remarks, and that is the British Guardian. The US media which spent days outraged over Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh's comments hasn't even picked it up. But why bother being outraged when there's no political gain to be had.

Meanwhile Israel, where over 20 percent of the population is below the poverty line and 1 in 3 children goes hungry... is sending its own aid mission to Haiti.

The IDF's aid mission to Haiti left Israel overnight Thursday with equipment for setting up an emergency field hospital. Around 220 soldiers and officers are in the delegation, including 120 medical staff that will operate the hospital in the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince.

I can understand sending teams for rescue operations, since Israel has some of the best personnel and dogs when it comes to rescue work from underneath rubble, thanks to a need created by Islamic terrorism. Aish makes a religious case for sending aid. On the flip side of that there's the Haitian ritual "bwile jwif", which means "Burn the Jew".

Debbie Schlussel also points out the consequences of Haitian illegal immigration

But liberal American lawmakers want to halt Haitian deportation indefinitely. That’s a bad move and a slippery slope. As we all know, provisions like this which don’t have sunsets, simply never end. And we don’t need 30,000 people who knew better, but broke the law, stealing American jobs permanently. I agree with the Homeland Security position which is less committed to anything long-term. Frankly, it’s unfortunate that we grant this status to people from Somalia–which has led to a huge immigration wave of extremist Muslims Somalians and, as I’ve noted, an ever-expanding crime wave against Americans committed by Somalian Muslims across our nation.

In Denmark meanwhile a Palestinian Arab attacker who opened fire at a mall got only 10 years.

Scott Ritter, formerly the darling of the left, after he went on an aggressive pro-Saddam propaganda campaign against Bush, is once again in trouble on pedophilia charges.

This isn't the first time Ritter got in trouble for this, but last time around Ritter's left wing friends who chose to use him for anti-Bush propaganda, also chose to ignore it. I wrote about Ritter back in 2007 in The pathetic disgusting saga of Scott Ritter continues.

How did Scott Ritter devolve from committed critic of the Clinton administration who argued that Iraq had extensive WMD's that needed to disarmed, by force if necessary, to a stooge for Saddam's regime who took on a post writing for Al-Jazeera, accusing America of creating death squads to murder his Baathist buddies and praising them as a "genuine grassroots liberation movement?"

A big part of the answer came when Scott Ritter was arrested twice for attempting to set up meetings with two underage girls, one whom he believed was under 14, the other 16. First Ritter lied about being arrested and then claimed the whole thing was all a conspiracy against him. The Albany arrests for Ritter made it rather obvious what his price was.

In the days of the Cold War, Soviet intelligence services were adept at exploiting drug use and sexual weaknesses in ranking foreign personnel to subvert and enlist them.

...

By 2002 though Scott Ritter was taking a guided tour of Iraq paid for by Saddam's regime and delivering a speech to the Iraqi Parliament where he declared that Iraq had no WMD's and was not a threat to anyone.

What happened specifically to Ritter after 1998? Between 1998 and 1990? Scott Ritter had continued his work this time in Russia, on disarmament. While still married to his first wife, Ritter began an affair with 19 year old Marina Khatiashvili, his Russian supplied translator and escort.

Under the USSR anyone working with foreigners, especially foreigners tied to foreign diplomatic or military service, without exception reported to the KGB. Ritter himself penned numerous reports at the time stating that the Soviets were using the "young girls" to sexually compromise the inspectors. Later Ritter would deny writing these reports. Finally Scott Ritter would divorce his wife and marry the young girl who had been provided for him and the rest of his career would get uglier and uglier.

The critic of Saddam's regime had by 2005 turned into not merely a critic of the Iraq War or the US presence, but an outright cheerleader for the Sunni Ex-Baathist terrorists, who were themselves closely tied to Russia.

There's a good deal more in my article on Scott Ritter, but my conclusion is that he was compromised by Russian intelligence services and put to use protecting Saddam from a US invasion.

Such Russian attempts at compromising US personnel in their territory are fairly routine. From the decades old story about Irving Levine just coming out now, to an attempt to recruit a US diplomat just this year with a sex blackmail tape, this sort of thing is routine operations for the KGB\FSB.

Scott Ritter came to Russia alone and left with a wife who was a member of a group of girls that Ritter himself reported were being used by Russian intelligence to sexually compromise staffers. The FBI investigated her as a KGB agent. I don't think there's much doubt what she was or what Ritter is.

The more disturbing question is just how many others like Ritter are there. How many have provided their services to help create the anti-war movement or get Obama elected.

I don't want to venture into conspiracyland here, but let's stop a moment to look at another former marine who went to Russia and came back with a wife, and then assassinated the Anti-Communist President of the United States. His name was Lee Harvey Oswald.

Oswald defected to the USSR, and yet was allowed to leave, while many other Americans who had gone to the Soviet Union, wound up sent to prison camps and executed. Not only was he allowed to leave, despite being a potentially useful asset and living in a country that treated any attempt at leaving as an act of treason, but he was allowed to leave with his newfound wife.

Here's an excerpt from a Stratfor piece on Oswald's wife.

Marina Oswald -- born Marina Prusakova -- met Lee Harvey Oswald in Minsk, where he worked in an electronics factory after having defected to the Soviet Union in 1959. She was then 19 years old. Her father had been killed in the war; she lived with her stepfather in Archangel, in the far north of Russia, before moving to Moldova as a small child and then to Leningrad at age 12. In 1955, she entered the Pharmacy Technikum for what the Warren Report called "special training." She received a diploma in pharmacology in June 1959 and then was assigned to a job in a warehouse, which she quit after a day.

Two months later, she moved to live with her uncle in Minsk, the capital of Belarus. Her uncle was a colonel in the MVD -- the Russian Interior Ministry security service. At that time, the agency -- which was a mixture of a national police force and the FBI -- carried out several functions, from running large parts of the Gulag to serving as an internal security force. According to the Warren Commission, Col. Prusakov was head of the local lumber industry, which would have certainly made him part of the Gulag apparatus and therefore part of the security structure. With a rank of colonel, he clearly had substantial responsibilities. According to the Warren Commission, Prusakov "... had one of the best apartments in a building reserved for MVD employees."

...

Now it gets interesting. On April 20, a little more than a month since their first meeting, Oswald proposes to Marina. She accepts and they are married on April 30. Let's pause here. Marina Oswald is an attractive young woman. She holds a diploma in pharmacology from a first-rate technical school in Leningrad. Her uncle is a senior official in the MVD. Lee Harvey Oswald is a foreign defector, without any real future and -- we are handicapped here by our glandular bias -- not a great looker or sharp dresser. But he must have been a hell of a dancer, because they were married about six weeks after they met with much of the courtship having taken place in a hospital.

OK -- it may have been uncontrollable love at first sight. Stranger things have happened, we suppose. The problem was that in order for Marina to marry Oswald, they needed to get special permission from the state, because he was a foreigner. That would have been true if he were the head of the Polish Communist Party. But Oswald wasn't just a foreigner, he was an American defector. Given the Soviet bureaucracy, someone in Moscow was going to have to sign off on this one -- and it had to have kicked off one heck of a security review in her uncle's office, but permission nevertheless was granted in 10 days.

If that is hard to believe, try the next one. After about a month of marriage, Oswald tells Marina that he's tired of the Soviet Union and wants to go home. She apparently says "whatever" and they start making arrangements to leave the Soviet Union. At this point, she told the Warren Commission, her aunt and uncle became upset and stopped speaking to her. A great deal has been made of the U.S. Embassy's willingness to allow Oswald to return to the United States, but not nearly enough has been made of the fact that the Soviets permitted not only Oswald, but also Marina, to leave the country.

I don't want to spend too much time on this, but people in Russia back then rarely "quit" jobs. And family members of high ranking security officials were not allowed to leave the country, and virtually every exception involves men who became spies or women who were married to people who were then "used" by the Soviet Union. I could go into more detail, but that's well beyond the scope of the topic.

JFK's assassination is a textbook case in how spreading conspiracy theories can help cover up the obvious truth of what really happened. The devil's best bet is to convince the world he doesn't exist. Where there are conspiracy theories, they are usually there to hide an obvious truth, that those with the most obvious means, motive and capabilities are the responsible parties.

Moving on, Caroline Glick has biting commentary on Code Pink's Egyptian Adventure

Unfortunately for the lucky 100 who were permitted to enter Hamastan, the diversions didn't end at the Egyptians border. Hamas immediately placed them under siege. The Palestinian champions had planned to enjoy home hospitality from friends in Gaza. But once there they were prohibited from leaving the Hamas-owned Commodore Hotel and from having any contact with local Gazans without a Hamas escort.

Rather than being permitted to judge the situation in Gaza for themselves, they were carted onto Hamas buses and taken on "devastation tours" of what their Hamas tour guides claimed was damage caused by the IDF during Operation Cast Lead. And then these international protesters were forced to participate in a Hamas-organized march to the Erez crossing.

As Hass tells it, in "a slap to many feminist organizers and participants," no Palestinian women were allowed to participate in the march, which "turned into nothing more than a ritual, an opportunity for Hamas cabinet ministers to get decent media coverage in the company of Western demonstrators."

But they didn't really mind. Reacting to her effective imprisonment in the Hamas-owned hotel, one of the demonstrators, an American woman named Poya Pakzad, cooed on her blog that the Commodore Hotel was "the nicest hotel I've ever stayed at, in my life."

Pakzad did complain, however, about what she acknowledged was the "farce" devastation tour she was taken on. She claimed that her Hamas guides were ignorant. In her studied view, they understated the number of Palestinians rendered homeless by the IDF counterterror offensive last year by some 60 percent.

This should be the ultimate question in the You Know You're a Terrorist Sympathizer questionnaire, when people like this actually accuse Hamas of being excessively pro-Israel.

By happily collaborating with Hamas in its propaganda extravaganza, these demonstrators demonstrated that the rights of Palestinians are not their concern. Their concern is waging war against their own societies and against Israel. They are more than happy to have their pictures taken with the likes of Hamas terror master Ismail Haniyeh. And while they will never acknowledge that his organization's terror war against Israel is illegal and immoral, or care that Hamas's founding charter explicitly calls for the genocide of Jewry, they will demonstrate from today till doomsday against their governments' recognition of Israel.

IN THIS, the Free Gaza movement members are but a chip off the old psychopathic block of nearly a century of far-left Western activists whose hatred for their own countries motivated them to hide the crimes of mass murderers from Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong to Fidel Castro and Ho Chi Minh to Daniel Ortega and Saddam Hussein.

In the blog roundup, at Israpundit, a look at George Mitchell, "Honest Broker". Lemon Lime Moon has a look back at Ayn Rand and Mike Wallace's famous interview. Useless Scene takes on Ron Paul's support for Al Queda. The New Centrist has his own Big Friday roundup. Sheik Yermani cites Egypt's Soccer Apartheid.

The coach of Egypt’s national soccer team says he only wants players who observe Islam and the selection of his squad is based equally on religious piety and skill.The comments by Hassan Shehata, published Thursday in Egyptian newspapers, show how sports and religion are increasingly mixing in the overwhelmingly Muslim nation of some 80 million….

Common Sense Wonder reminds us of the right of Self-Defense.