#1
at the [notoriously anti-Israel, BR] U.S. consulate in Jerusalem
Anti-Israeli? Who in the hell posted this guy to Israel? I feel like I'm getting a glimpse into some weird parallel universe. Was this guy posted by Hillary and therefore approved by Obama?
#3
Sadly, when the youtube riots calm down the Guardian, the NYTimes, BBC, the WaPo, etc. which are working overtime to protect the PC version, will be back to it again.
Posted by: lord garth ||
09/13/2012 18:57 Comments ||
Top||
#1
Leno reveals himself to be a prototypical Leftard. For him, as with all the Democrats and leftists, it's all about "compassion" or "feelings" or "emotions" however you want to phrase it.
They don't give a rat's ass about results or reality for anyone else as long as they get theirs.
#2
On the one hand, Leno did just take a 50% pay cut (at his own suggestion) to keep people whom NBC was going to lay off on the payroll. (Hope he had a really good lawyer draft that agreement.)
On the other hand, I read a few years back that he said he didn't really hire Republicans for his show. I stopped watching that night - why waste my time on bigots?
(By the way, no, I'm not a Republican. But just imagine if someone (other than the RNC) had said they wouldn't hire Democrats - you'd still hear the screaming - about not only bigotry, but racism.)
Posted by: Barbara ||
09/13/2012 14:44 Comments ||
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#3
I still find Leno fairly amusing. And FAR less biased than Letterman or all the other competitors in the nighttime talk show genre. Plus he has a cool car collection.
[Dawn] A POWERFUL car boom on Monday shattered the relative calm that had prevailed in Parachinar over the last few months. The bomb went kaboom! in a market, killing and injuring a number of people. A similar blast had struck a bazaar in the Kurram Agency ...home of an intricately interconnected web of poverty, ignorance, and religious fanaticism, where the laws of cause and effect are assumed to be suspended, conveniently located adjacent to Tora Bora... capital in February. The TTP's Ghazi group -- a hitherto unknown outfit -- has grabbed credit for the attack, saying it was targeted at Shias. However, man does not live by words alone, despite the fact that sometimes he has to eat them... too much effort should not be spent on scrutinising the names of groups, as Death Eaters have a habit of regularly splintering into factions and re-branding themselves -- such is the amorphous nature of militancy in Pakistain. In this case, there are suggestions that the attack could have been the handiwork of some elements from the TTP chapter in Darra Adamkhel.
While many parts of the country are currently being affected by sectarian terrorism -- and Parachinar cannot be detached from this wider narrative -- the region also has its own particular dynamics, as tribal vendettas get intertwined with sectarian politics. Yet while some degree of tension has existed between Kurram's Shia and Sunni tribes in the strategically important area for the past few decades, in the current situation it has been witnessed that elements from outside the Agency are working to sabotage peace efforts. Such attacks often occur whenever normality is beginning to take root in Kurram. Hence, the security forces need to concentrate their efforts on ensuring that Death Eaters from outside Kurram are unable to sneak in to carry out acts of terrorism.
It has been noted that the opening of the Thall-Parachinar road last October has made jihad boys' access to Kurram easier. When the arterial road was closed for several years, it presented a different set of difficulties for Kurram residents, severing communication links with the region and the rest of Pakistain. Now that the route is open, blocking the jihad boys' access must be ensured. Thankfully, there has been no communal violence after Monday's bombing. But if the situation is not contained, tensions can easily escalate. The area has witnessed horrific violence in the past. The security establishment must increase troop deployment in all troubled areas to reassure residents while the state should take tribal representatives and elders into confidence in an effort to maintain communal harmony. The tribes in the past have pledged to work towards peace, hence all external irritants attempting to harm the grinding of the peace processor must be neutralised. The intelligence apparatus must also work towards thwarting further attacks while most importantly, there's a need for security forces to remain vigilant regarding elements from outside Kurram trying to get in and disturb the peace.
Posted by: Fred ||
09/13/2012 00:00 ||
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Top|| File under: Lashkar e-Jhangvi
[Dawn] IN an already enigmatic case, a mysterious piece of reporting has appeared that carries potentially disruptive implications for Pakistain's most tortuous bilateral relationship. The interview of the placed in long-term storage ... anything you say can and will be used against you, whether you say it or not... Dr Shakil Afridi that has been published on the Fox News website and is highly critical of the ISI prompts many questions: where and how was it carried out? How did the news hound gain access to the doctor? When Dr Afridi spoke to the news hound, was he aware that he would be quoted in a widely available interview, and did he do so willingly despite knowing he would still be at the mercy of Pak police and intelligence the next day? Knowing the answers to these is important because, for one, the fate of Dr Afridi has become a point of disagreement between Pakistain and the US, and the authenticity and reliability of such sensitive reporting on the issue needs to be established. Second, Dr Afridi appears to make broad claims about the ISI's strategies, tactics and turban links, and it is unclear what qualifies him to do so. A domestic audience may be able to determine how much is speculation and how much fact, but internationally, his words will be taken as further evidence of Pak duplicity whether or not they are rooted in actual knowledge of the ISI's links and actions.
Much of this could have been avoided if Dr Afridi had had access to a fair and transparent judicial process. Instead, carried out under the Frontier Crimes Regulation and charging him with crimes that had nothing to do with the Abbottabad ... A pleasant city located only 30 convenient miles from Islamabad. The city is noted for its nice weather and good schools. It is the site of Pakistain's military academy, which was within comfortable walking distance of the residence of the late Osama bin Laden.... raid, his trial has only given rise to suspicions at home and abroad that the goal of the Pak authorities is to detain him one way or another. It has also raised legitimate questions about why they want to do so despite Dr Afridi being either unaware of his role in the plot or, even if he was aware, helping to capture an enemy of both Pakistain and the US. Sadly, it is Pakistain's own dubious treatment of Dr Afridi that has left it vulnerable to the further accusations that this interview will lead to.
Posted by: Fred ||
09/13/2012 00:00 ||
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Top|| File under: Govt of Pakistan
[Dawn] BARBARIC and bumbling, leaping over boulders in sockless high top sneakers, their faces hidden behind black cloth, the Taliban of yesteryear seemed a scruffy lot with sinister intentions.
When Paks first heard of them, long before Sept 11, 2001 and long before they showed up in Swat ...a valley and an administrative district in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province of Pakistain, located 99 mi from Islamabad. It is inhabited mostly by Pashto speakers. The place has gone steadily downhill since the days when Babe Ruth was the Sultan of Swat... or recruited allies in Sialkot, they appeared incapable of orchestrating anything more than the random attack.
This was accomplished not because it required planning or support or strategic sense but because it was inordinately easy to throw a bomb into a crowd of unarmed civilians.
The war-weary Afghans may have let them roll into their streets, gather up and burn their CDs and take apart their cellphones but this would never happen in Pakistain.
Paks would not let their schools be burned down or the faces of women blackened on posters on their street corners. Pakistain was not the hinterland Afghanistan had become, some said. Paks were moderate, another echoed.
Years passed and the picture of the Taliban as a ragtag, amateur terrorist group in Afghanistan remained stuck in Pak heads.
Few questioned their image; after all, how could any group want to appear illiterate and even inept or wish to cultivate a barbarous anti-intellectualism built on the bonfires of books?
In the rest of Pakistain of the late 1990s, at least the members of the flat-renting, hatchback-driving middle class lining up for admissions to English-medium schools and cramming for exams they hoped would lead to jobs could not quite fathom such a thing.
The Taliban with their school burnings and floggings seem to belong to some netherworld, real but not quite touching the consciousness of the urban Pak mired in the task of trying to get access to water, electricity and a job all at the same time.
In the meantime, as the 1990s wore on into the millennium, the Taliban continued to develop their brand. Halfway through the first decade of the new century, the Pak brand emerged. They, the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistain, made their sales pitch to those at the bottom of Pakistain's social strata.
In remote villages where the poorest of Paks were having trouble imagining a better life, they sold the story not of an existence improved but of an order imposed.
A large number of groups came to be united under the 'Taliban' label. This simultaneous unity and disunity meant that a single umbrella could encompass all.
It was not the only contradiction they embraced; while burning books and torching schools they kept their name, 'Taliban' or 'students', never once betraying a self-consciousness at what would seem an unwieldy burden eluding justification.
Critics and analysts relished these incongruent directions, forecasting that an illiterate bunch including 16-year-old soldiers and with a fetish for floggings could never take over the hearts and minds of a country for any sustained period.
In the meantime, from a branding perspective, the Taliban's capacity for inclusion gave even the most derelict and hapless young boy from the most remote and forgotten region the power to be a part of something big and powerful.
The recruits from Miranshah ... headquarters of al-Qaeda in Pakistain and likely location of Ayman al-Zawahiri. The Haqqani network has established a ministate in centered on the town with courts, tax offices and lots of madrassas... and Mingora and Malakand lined up and were taken in. If their lives lacked hope before, they now had meaning. If they had felt inadequate before, the inspirational aspects of an organization that called all its members eternal 'students' absorbed them.
The Taliban always knew that Pakistain has far more of these -- the forgotten, the rural and the constantly marginalised. They did not care what the others thought and it did not matter.
It was a ruse perpetrated on those who thought that the existence of democratic institutions -- however flailing -- and religious moderation -- however silent -- would save the country from being overtaken by those who did not believe in them.
At the core of the Tehrik-e-Taliban's success then lie some sharp and sophisticated calculations about Pakistain, human nature and the desires of the disenfranchised. If those that supported liberal democracy in Pakistain remained focused on the future, on the idea that education would deliver and democratic institutions represent, the Taliban focused on the people too crushed to see education as an option, too daunted by the prospect of fighting for seats in schools that barely offered an education in the first place.
If quota systems in Pak universities and government institutions asked for domiciles and required favours and connections, the Taliban practised open recruitment and took everyone. If liberal democracy and progressive ideas relied on what is good and hopeful in mankind, the Tehrik-e-Taliban relied on what is despondent and dark; the part of us that obeys from fear and follows from cowardice.
A poem, quoted by James Caron in an essay on the Taliban, goes thus "Once more my poor heart breaks out into naras/ The Taliban come to my memory like flowers/ Oh Lord, what happened to those red and white birds/ The Taliban come to my memory like flowers/ Much time has passed my dear since our meetings ended/ The Taliban come to my memory as flowers".
A poem in praise of those who have killed poets and flogged musicians cannot but sting. But in its unapologetic embrace of contradiction it shows exactly the recipe employed by the Death Eaters who have harnessed the darkness in Pakistain's soul, appropriated its poetry and its patriotism and brought Paks to consider a conquest they could not, even a short 10 years ago, have imagined.
Posted by: Fred ||
09/13/2012 00:00 ||
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Top|| File under: al-Qaeda in Pakistan
#1
The Taliban are more popular in Pakistan than Afghanistan.Says it all which country is the bigger enemy.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Kurram Agency
IN an already enigmatic case, a mysterious piece of reporting has appeared that carries potentially disruptive implications for Pakistain's most tortuous bilateral relationship. The interview of the 
...a valley and an administrative district in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province of Pakistain, located 99 mi from Islamabad. It is inhabited mostly by Pashto speakers. The place has gone steadily downhill since the days when Babe Ruth was the Sultan of Swat...
