Network TEN News (Australia) video:Belal Khazaal is freed from Australia's highest-security prison, the GoulburnsSupermax in New South Wales, after being granted a retrial and having served three years of a twelve year sentence.
The former Quantas employee -and accused Jihadist- with a yen for writing about killing and assassinating innocent people, not to mention, shooting down passenger planes in his 110-page tome, "Provisions of the Rules of Jihad: Short Judicial Rulings and Organisational Instructions for Fighters and Mujahideen Against Infidels,"will have a number of requirements imposed on him by polite society in Australia while he awaits a new trial in November.
According to Sunday's edition of The Australian, the Lebanese-born Khazal must
live with his wife and family and not change his abode without giving 24 hours' notice. He must also report to Bankstown police daily and declare any visitors received in the previous 24 hours. He must also stay at least 1km from any overseas points of departure and not speak at gatherings that advocate violence.
Oh, and not insignificantly, his family had to pay sureties in excess of $400,000, which have to be paid if he tries to leave Australia in the rear-view mirror.
Read the rest of the article here to see what this character is all about:
It will be very interesting over the coming weeks to see how the U.S. Mainstream Media -outside of ABC News- reports on this angle of this week's Osama bin Laden story, given how early on, the MSM seemed eager -almost devoted!- to framing anyone who said anything along the lines of what they're now reporting as fact at ABC News' The Blotter, http://abcnews.go.com/blotter, as either stupid, paranoid or possibly even racist.
Well, don't hold your breath waiting for the MSM to now suddenly see the error of their condescending and patronizing ways and suddenly apologize to those very individuals, many of whom spoke of the environmental role of prison life as a factor leading to Muslim conversions among minority prisoners, a topic which, itself, is one that has been reported on to the point that it's Common Knowledge.
And yet if you weren't a certified Beltway 'expert' and said this same thing, look out below!
ABC News The Blotter Osama Bin Laden's Anti-U.S. Strategy: Exploit Minority Converts By Pierre Thomas, Richard Esposito, Lee Ferran May 7, 2011
Osama bin Laden aspired to damage the United States not only through persistent terror attacks, but also by attempting to inflame race and class tensions in hopes of tearing down the country from the inside out, according to officials briefed on the evidence trove recovered from the al Qaeda leader's Pakistan compound.
According to materials in the cache of documents recovered in the U.S. Navy SEAL raid that brought down the terror leader, bin Laden planned to specifically recruit African-American Muslim converts to carry out attacks on the homeland.
If, like me, you don't get C-SPAN 3as part of your cable or satellite package, you can watch the House Homeland Security Comm. congressional hearing titled "Extent of radicalization among American Muslims" that I wrote about yesterday at: http://www.c-span.org/Live-Video/C-SPAN3/
The entire four-and-a-half hour meeting will be re-run again this afternoon on C-SPAN 3, and will also be shown in its entirety on C-SPAN starting at 10 p.m. tonight.
If you want to see a tone-deaf article that completely mis-characterizes both the purpose of the hearing and the reason why it's long-overdue, I've got just the article for you, and trust me, the confusion is neither accidental nor is it due to language or translation problems. That's my way of saying to those of you who have wondered from time-to-time, via emails, why I mention so many things here that are related to either Swedish or Scandinavian sources -short answer: because I can and they're interesting- that I'm not going to give you a link here to something that's all in svenska. I'm really not.
No, the offending article that stands common sense on its head is one that is easily found on one of the world's most popular media sites, The Telegraph, which I have been reading in print or online, for more than thirty years. That dates back to my days atIU in Bloomington when I had one of the most distinguished professors of comparative politics and British politics in the country as a teacher and sounding board, the late James B. Christoph. http://www.grad.ubc.ca/awards/james-b-christoph-prize
I took every undergraduate class on British politics that he taught and was fortunate enough to be among several British Politics students asked to attend an annual barbecue he hosted at his home for folks who were really, really into the subject.
He was a great professor who knew his subject inside-and-out and inspired his students to think more clearly and wisely for themselves. What else can you ask for? Prof. Christoph's wisdom, keen insight and thoughtful comments on the interplay between politics, human behavior and cultural tradition, and why some systems work and others don't, during what were then the early days of the Margaret Thatcher administration, still ring in my ears.
What also rings in my ears are the names of the myriad books and the newspapers he both required -and strongly recommended- we read, even if we might disagree with them politically, to get the true nuance and context. Obviously, for both reasons of history and the quality of its writing, The Telegraph was on that list. That was enough for me.
A few years ago, once I started this blog, I even ran some of their widgets on this site in order to give them the widest possible circulation, but they had technical problems too often so I had to remove them.
Early this morning, I left a comment at The Telegraph relative to the Alex Spillius column titled, US hearing on radical Islam: a waste of time, but not witch hunt http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/alexspillius/100079257/us-hearing-on-radical-islam-a-waste-of-time-but-not-witch-hunt/
Spillius definitely seems like he could pass that rigorous employment process at NPR and start work tomorrow. And yes, you know exactly what I mean when I say that.
Today's Rassmussen Reports has a poll detailing results of how Americans feel about some of the issues mentioned in today's hearing: 39% Say Government Not Focusing Enough on Threat of Domestic Islamic Terrorism Thursday, March 10, 2011
A House committee is expected to begin controversial hearings today about the potential danger of domestic Islamic terrorism, and a sizable number of voters think the government is not paying enough attention to this possible threat. Most voters still worry, too, about homegrown terrorist attacks.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 39% of Likely U.S. Voters believe the federal government does not focus enough on the potential threat from domestic Islamic terrorism, although nearly as many (38%) say the government’s anti-terrorism focus is about right.
Read the rest of the report at:http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/general_politics/march_2011/39_say_government_not_focusing_enough_on_threat_of_domestic_islamic_terrorism
For more information, see:www.homeland.house.gov Zuhdi Jasser of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, its President and Founder, had many good common sense points to make, esp. between 1 and 1:30 p.m., the last hour of the meeting, and I encourage you to go to their website and learn more about their efforts.
Their goal:"taking back Islam from the demagoguery of the Islamo-fascists." http://www.aifdemocracy.org/
Above, 9/11 pilot Mohammed Atta's Florida Driver's License
While living in Arlington County, I followed the9/11 Commission hearings VERY closely, more than just about anyone I knew, watching or taping many of them off of C-SPAN, and, consequently, often staying-up late at night to catch up on their activities. Though it seems obvious now, while I'd heard from many sources that some of the hijackers had used Broward County Library computers to access the Internet to send messages -and book their flights- it never dawned on me to think about where, specifically, they had lived in South Florida.
But despite how much of the hearings I watched, I couldn't see everything, so it wasn't until another Washington-area friend who worked on Capitol Hill -also originally from Florida- pointed it out to me one night at a sports bar, that I found out that 9/11 pilot Mohammed Atta lived in Hollywood. In fact, 4.6 miles from my father's home in Hallandale Beach.
(Not the subject of the column below, true, but just wanted to mention it all the same. Also relevant: On the morning of 9/11, I was working directly across Pennsylvania Avenue from the Dept. of Justice, the FBI and The National Archives. I was working on a litigation project for the law firm Crowell & Moring, a projectinvolving DODthat was supposed to send me and my team to Dayton for a few weeks that Fall, but that was cancelled for obvious reasons. From the firm's large windows facing Pennsylvania Avenue -and even more so from the large balcony that overlooked the street that were clearly perfect viewing for Inauguration Day festivities- I and the dozens of us on my flooor could clearly see the dark smoke arising in the SW from The Pentagon, just past our view looking towards the Old Post Office. More about my 9/11 experiences in Washington, D.C. here, from a Sept. 2011 post, http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/911-george-f-will-on-american-landscape.html) Well, I've been sitting on them for a while now. Wondering, wondering, wondering just when to run them in this space, but this excellent common sense perspective by liberal columnist Ruth Marcus in today's Washington Post about voluble Rep. Peter King of Long Island, and his resolve to finally have some long overdue congressional hearings on radical Islam in the U.S., despite protests from the usual suspects and however an imperfect a vehicle for that overdue development she thinks he might be, just might be the sign I've been waiting for.
So what's the them? My sign to let you know that coming soon to the blog will be some delicious articles, columns and video about Islamic radicalism and not-so-democratic Muslim immigrants (not at all interested in assimilation) that I guarantee you you haven't seen or heard about elsewhere in the American Mainstream Media.
At least, as represented by the Miami Heralds andNPRs of the world, where news stories and real-life actualities that don't fit their political or social template never see the light of day in print or make the airwaves.
That's largely because even some liberals can see the lie of the fiction long articulated by the MSM, in the U.S. as well as in Europe, that EVERY Muslim -esp. immigrants- are just like Jane & John Q. Public, whether they live in Northern Virginia, Queens, London, Parisor Malmö. Nope. Some are but more than you think are NOT. Just because the press wants it to be so doesn't change reality -or human behavior.
I know something of this first-hand because my first roommate at IU was a great guy named Salim who just also happened to be a Kenyan-born Muslim from Oman, who was at school on a World Health Organization (WHO) scholarship. Salim was very appreciative of the opportunity he had to live and study in the United States and loved IU and the beauty and friendliness of Bloomington more than many of my other friends, who were blase about it, and because of his personality and willingness to talk about what he knew about growing-up in a life different than ours, Salim made friends easily. A later roommate in the Washington area was a completely different story.I had known many Iranian-born friends as a kid growing-up in North Miami Beach, even seeing Grease at a drive-in with two -count 'em two- ridiculously cute and vibrant Iranian sisters in our family's convertible when I was in high school.
Their brother was a soccer teammate of mine and as I've related here previously, I sometimes went with him and his family to anti-Shah rallies at the JFK Torch of Freedom on Biscayne Blvd. in downtown Miami because members of his own family had been tortured or killed by the Savak. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,912364,00.html
The Iranian-born medical student I was somewhat forced to live with in Arlington once another roommate moved-out just weeks before the lease was up -a know-it-all with with a real superiority complex- told me plenty of amazing stories about ways that Iranian students he knew played the State Dept. reps in Europe at the embassy or consulates for fools, in order to get visas. They accomplished this by telling them the appropriate narrative that would allow them to be admitted into the country. He said there even was a list of which State Dept. consular offices were more easy to fool than others, and since it was important to get to the U.S., they didn't mind the additional costs of flying out of whatever European country they might be living in in order to get to a consular office with a reputation for letting people in.Fly from Germany to Copenhagen or Portugal or...He knew that for a fact because it worked for HIM.
If college students knew how to game the system, do you honestly think that well-trained people with nefarious intentions and unlimited resources can't do even more?
Some people can never let go of their internal anger, never really want to fit in and are keenly disposed to wreck havoc on civil society wherever they can, even if that means corrupting freedoms or denying other people's guaranteed rights.
And when they're caught on film, they... yes, often celebrate their anti-social behavior. That is, until they realize that it will make them look bad once it is shown on TV or the Internet.That moment of clarity is always a sight to see! As you will soon see here for yourself, there's almost nothing better on TV then when the often-dubious world of Reality TV slams head-first into the behavior of the 'Real World' that the Left and its apologists in the media has been making excuses for for years.
That it happened in Sweden is not so surprising, sorry to say, but I can't help but think that if it had happened on a British TV show, where the conversation would've been in engelska, we'd all have long since seen the video by now and that it would be sure-fire water cooler conversation once20/20orNightline or Sixty Minutes highlighted the behavior for Americans.
That is, if people still really have water cooler conversation as shown on The Office, instead of sipping their dopey Five-Hour drinks and $4 fruity organic drinks from their desk when there's a perfectly good cold Dr. Pepper in the soda machine looking to add drinking satisfaction.
----- The Washington Post Islamic radicalism: The questions that Rep. Peter King is right to ask By Ruth Marcus Wednesday, March 9, 2011 One of the odder exchanges I've ever seen during a congressional hearing involved Attorney General Eric Holder, Texas Republican Rep. Lamar Smith and the phrase "radical Islam."
Smith, at a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee last May, cited three recent terrorist incidents: the Fort Hood shooting rampage, the underwear bomber and the Times Square bomber. "Do you feel that these individuals might have been incited to take the actions that they did because of radical Islam?" he asked Holder. The attorney general did his best not to go there. "There are a variety of reasons why I think people have taken these actions," he said. "I think you have to look at each individual case." Smith tried again - and again. Holder repeatedly resisted, before grudgingly acknowledging the obvious. "I certainly think that it's possible that people who espouse a radical version of Islam have had an ability to have an impact on people like" the accused Times Square bomber, he said. Read the rest of the excellent column at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/03/08/AR2011030804487.html ---- Dr. Pepper TV commercial, 1960's http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpByXzdMQfk When I first got to Bloomington in August of 1979 and told people I met at my dorm, Briscoe Quad, or people I met on and off the IU campus that I was from North Miami Beach, it was very quickly obvious that they imagined that my life down here in high school on weekends was probably not unlike the end of this commercial, albeit many years later, with grill parties at the beach, throwing frisbees and footballs around and cute girls prancing around everywhere...
Believe me, it was very disappointing to have to tell them the truth about how boring and mundane late 1970's life in NMB was, or how many great opportunities or locales were wasted.
Haulover Beach on the Intercoastal side could get crazy on weekends, but it was never fun like life depicted in films or TV about teen life in SoCal, whom I envied. You know, where people describe every other thing they go to as "epic"? If only we had had cell phones and digital cameras and the Internet then...
The amazing diversity of a city called Malmö... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtUopabsELM Earlier today, quite unexpectedly, I heard an on-air promo for the BBCWorld Service on an "Open Eyes" segment airing on Jan. 19th, dealing with racial tensions (and illegal immigration?) in M... No, not perpetual ethnic and crime hothouse Miami, but Malmö, only an ethnically diverse city with one of the most well-educated populaces in the world. Hmm-m-m... (And, as it happens, it's home to some friends of your faithful blogger, some of whom were alluded to in my post about Crown Princess Victoria's wedding, who drove to Stockholm and got-up early to find good places to watch the ceremonies.) Malmö is sort of like the more interesting and charming parts of Baltimore, Pittsburgh and Indianapolis I've been to, where you meet nice, friendly, well-educated and well-rounded people, and see why they really love it there and want to raise their families there. Their idea of happiness is NOT a high-rise condo near the water in an area that's beset with gridlocked traffic and out-of-control city and county governments that specialize in raising taxes and lip service. They have very different criteria for a nice Quality-of-Life, and proximity to Nordstrom's or The Cheesecake Factory is NOT one of them. It really makes you think!
And like those three American cities that I'm pretty familiar with, which have very good colleges there, Malmö has been busy successfully re-inventing itself as a home to education, technology and innovation.
And whether you tend to believe Wikipedia in general or not, according to the current Wikipediaentry onMalmö, which seems mostly accurate as I read it,
"Immigrant Muslims comprise a little over 25% of population and their share keeps on rising. It is predicted that Malmö would be more than 50% Muslim by 2020."
As of now, I don't know what time the segment will air on the BBC on the 19th, but I will keep checking every so often and let you know here once I find out.
When I put my ear to the ground to listen for the sound of approaching hoof-beats -my Indian name is "Discerning voice that carries" -I sense (fear) another well-intentioned but ultimately politically biased and self-fulfilling report akin to so many over-the-top NPR segments I heard broadcast under Bush 43, that seemed designed to marginalize the legitimate concerns of real people with real problems, in this case, the residents ofMalmö, in order to engage in agitprop under the guise of journalism.
The likely result?
Mockery of the town and a blown opportunity to understand a complicated issue that has finally
resulted in the Sweden Democrats, Sverigedemokrarna,i.e SD, finally getting into the Riksdag, the Swedish parliament. http://sverigedemokraterna.se/
To me, this is an entirely predictable result, and not unlike the rise of the Tea Party and their activists in the U.S., as a vocal response to Obama's public policies, it was the proof that for every action, there is an opposite and equal reaction.
Some of those NPR stories I heard then were always sort of hard to pigeonhole and figure out just who they were trying to "educate." "But next, a feminist leader in Ecuador talks about the Vagina Monologues finally coming to Quito." Yeah, too many curious stories like that with not so thinly-veiled political bias made me realize that listening to NPR so much was just a poor use of my time, which is why I rarely listen to it now.http://www.npr.org/ Frankly, now it just sounds too much like White House and DCCC propaganda, once-removed.
As to the upcoming BBC program, there are many things I wonder about, mostly, to what extent it will have a fair-minded prologue accurately describing the situation that average Swedish citizens find themselves in -a box they can't get out of.
For instance, though it will change after this year, until now, non-European students who come to Sweden get their university education for FREE, paid for by Swedish citizens.
In Sweden, local governments, not the national govt. in the form of the Riksdag, pay the majority of the real costs associated with immigration and assimilation policy, legal and illegal, which are REQUIRED, not optional.
In that sense, local governments there have an 'unfunded mandate,' but there's nobody like
the Dept. of Homeland Security, ICE or DOJ with pots of grant money or stimulus funds
to help a town reconcile their budget costs. YOU HAVE TO PAY.
As you might imagine, this has a profound effect on municipal budgets in ways that, well, certain large U.S. cities and newspaper editorial boards with pro-amnesty sensibilities, like the Miami Herald, can't possibly imagine or appreciate.
It's a simple fact that at some Swedish colleges, the Masters programs are more than 50% full of Asian students who DON'T pay, which means that Swedish taxpayers are not only paying for someone who is NOT from their own country, but who, possibly, are elbowing out their own son or daughter of their higher education. THAT brings the issue home in a very tangible way.
Nope, with no money trees to shake in Washington, with high-paid lobbyists, the favored South Florida approach, local Swedish governments and citizens pay close to the full freight for an immigration policy they can't change. Imagine you were them, how would THAT make you feel?
So when was the last time you read or heard about this in a mainstream media news story in the U.S.? When the time comes during the course of the year for local Swedish governments to set their budget priorities and make them public, do elected officials vote to close a popular library because of the costs associated with immigration assimilation education programs, or do you cut certain Parks & Recreation programs for kids, or close the park a few days a week, so that you can pay for some program for Somali or Turkish emigres? Hmm-m-m...
Around the time of the Swedish parliamentary elections in September, which saw the return to power of Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, the first center-right prime minister to lead the country for two periods in a row, this time, with a four-party Red-Green coalition, I came across a fascinating budget story that really brought home to me the costs of their ridiculous immigration policy, though the truth is, I came across it while looking for something else. This story concerned a northern Swedish town called Gävle, which is roughly about half the size of next-door Hollywood (FL), but like Hollywood, located on the water, in Gävle's case, on the Baltic Sea. It's also one of the oldest towns in the entire country.
In a September 8th story that appeared in Gefle Dagblad, http://gd.se/ the local chairman there, Roger Hedlund, argues that the government grant of 40 million SEK only covers 22 percent of the costs of refugee protection. Guess who pays the rest?Do the math!
Here's an excerpt from the story from September: Sverigedemokraterna vill skrota orkestern Orkestern och flyktingar kostar för mycket enligt SD
Statsbidraget för flyktingmottagandet täcker bara 22 procent av kostnaderna, hävdar Sverigedemokraterna och hänvisar till Sveriges kommuner och landsting.SKL säger att siffran är mellan 70 och 90 procent. Om Gävle kommun säger upp avtalet med Migrationsverket blir det 153 miljoner kronor över.Pengar som kan satsas på bland annat parboendegaranti och en skattesänkning med 55 öre.Siffrorna presenterades av Sverigedemokraterna i går, när de lade fram sitt lokala valmanifest och en skuggbudget för Gävle kommun.
Ordföranden i Gävle, Roger Hedlund, hävdar att statsbidraget på 40 miljoner kronor bara täcker 22 procent av kostnaderna för flyktingmottagandet.
Would people in South Florida, esp. the pro-amnesty crowd at theMiami Herald's editorial board and and local TV stations' management, and their decisions about what is and is not aired on local newscasts, look at immigration differently if 70-90% of the cost of services given to and provided by the U.S. to immigrants, illegal or otherwise, was borne NOT by the federal government, but by the individual state, county and city and the citizens who live HERE?
Not money coming out of some abstract wallet, not money being printed on some U.S. Treasury printing press, but directly out of their own individual wallet, purse and bank account, affecting their life and their family's?
At the local level, where they can see exactly what local and state govt. services are necessarily eliminated or cut back because of the costs involved in dealing with immigrants? Guess what, that's the reality of the average Swedish citizen.
They and their family have to make do without something because their money is being used for a purpose that they are opposed to, and yet when they complain about something being amiss in their representative democracy, and the costs of this, they are called, at a minimum, selfish and racist, and often quite worse by the condescending domestic and international news media, plus many of their fellow citizens. Hmm-m-m... sound familiar? Below, a very typical NPR view of what happened in the Swedish election, with zero context or understanding, but then they never understood Ross Perot's appeal, either, did they? http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2010/09/20/129995071/anti-immigrant-party-in-sweden-wins-seats It sounds exactly like what we all heard and read constantly by the American news media about The Tea Party this year. THAT kind of condescending and dismissive attitude, without any proper context, I suspect, is exactly what theBBC may well have in store for the city of Malmö and its citizens in less than a fortnight.
