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What a tragic irony!
In case you haven’t heard, Satyam was the fourth-largest IT outsourcing company in India, with 55,000 employees (or so they claimed). The CEO, Ramalinga Raju, recently resigned after admitting massive financial fraud. As of this writing, the company is almost out of cash.
Here we go again…
Satyam has done business with companies and governments in over 60 countries, including the U.S. This scandal appears to be even larger in scope than the Enron/Arthur Andersen scandal of late 2001. Price Waterhouse, the Indian subsidiary of PricewaterhouseCoopers, is facing close scrutiny over having signed off on Satyam’s audits.
Obviously, the much-touted Sarbanes-Oxley law enacted after the Enron/Arthur Andersen debacle did nothing to prevent the recent collapse of the U.S. real estate, stock market, and financial sector. The take-home lesson is that once any corporation becomes multinational in scope, and politically well-connected, no laws, no regulations, no bureaucratic restructuring can possibly keep it honest if its management chooses to do otherwise.
Another reason why outsourcing is wrong
Outsourcing and offshoring are always and everywhere the enemies of accountability. The further away one’s trading partners are located, the harder it is to comprehend what they are up to, and that will never change.
Why corporate cheating is contagious
Whenever one major company in an industry has been “cooking the books” to promote or exaggerate its own success, what effect do you suppose that has? Think about it! Every other executive, every other company in that industry will be pressured to match or exceed the cheater’s inflated results, by fair means or foul, or face the wrath of board members and stockholders.
Let me start by saying that I don’t care one whit who wins Serbia’s election for president. I am an American and the US is my country, not Serbia. As far as I am concerned, Serbian citizens have as much right to elect “a savior” or “an idiot” as we Americans do (and will do in the near future), and no other country (or countries) calling themselves “progressive democracies” have any right whatever to interfere in their election process.
However, this is NOT what is happening with Serbia. Western leaders, impatient with the Serbian election process, are acting like a bunch of bullies by trying to force Serbia’s citizens into electing the West’s “chosen one” candidate, Boris Tadic, and unfortunately, the Western media (both print and internet) are cooperating in this extortion.
“the singer now appears to support Tomislav Nikolic, the eurosceptic nationalist candidate of the Serbian Radical Party (SRS), who won the first round of the Serbian presidential elections last Sunday (20 January). Ms Serifovic participated in rallies organised by Mr Nikolic, including one in December in the Serbian town of Kragujevac and one on 15 January in Belgrade, singing her winning song, “Molitva” (Prayer).”[SerbBlog note: Marija Serifovic is also an ethnic Roma, AKA “Gypsy”, so the title “nationalist” gets put in the proper context here. The EU wants to punish Serifovic for simply supporting a candidate who is not “pro-EU”.]
Then consider the following statements & news stories in recent days on Serbia’s hot-button issue “Kosovo”:
“Senior western diplomats say the precise timing now (on Kosovo’s independence declaration) depends on whether the next Serbian president is Boris Tadic, the pro-western liberal incumbent, or Tomislav Nikolic, a pro-Russian nationalist…..If Nikolic, the conservative, gets elected, then no one in Europe will see any benefit in waiting any longer with the independence declaration….If Mr Tadic returns to power, however, diplomats say EU states would see merit in delaying Kosovo’s independence by a few weeks, seeking to flesh out an agreement on closer EU-Serbian relations”
“Kosovo will declare independence from Serbia with Western backing the weekend after the February 3 Serbian presidential election if the nationalist candidate (Nikolic) wins, political sources said on Wednesday. “If (Tomislav) Nikolic wins, it’s the 9th or 10th,” one of the sources told Reuters on condition of anonymity….If pro-Western incumbent Boris Tadic wins the closely-fought race, Kosovo Albanians would be expected to wait until the following weekend, and possibly until after a meeting of European Union foreign ministers on February 18, the source said. The West is “pushing for February,” the source added. The United States and major EU powers are trying to “coordinate” a declaration of independence by the Albanian majority province after almost two years of negotiations with Serbia ended in failure in December.”
I like that last line in the Reuters story — “after almost two years of negotiations with Serbia failed”. To anyone who has been following this story for the last “two years”, there were absolutely NO “negotiations” between Serbia and the Albanians on Kosovo. Both Condoleeza Rice and President Bush had already released statements months before these “negotiations” began, saying “Kosovo will become independent”, and they simply continued that same drumbeat through out the sham meetings between Serbia and the Kosovo Albanians . What that created was a sad display with Serbia on one side of the table, turning itself inside out to give the Albanians anything they wanted short of handing over their sovereign Serbian territory, and the Kosovo Albanians on the other side of the table, (with their US and EU backing) basically “buffing their nails” until the so-called “negotiations” were over, because the Albanians knew that the West had already committed to legitimize the theft of Kosovo. So why bother to even call it negotiations when the US & EU had already decided the outcome, beforehand? So that the uninformed, stupid or the corrupt, could believe and promote our US & EU governments’ lies when they say , “We tried, it failed, and then we had to do something”.
Now if the sham negotiations weren’t bad enough, the West isn’t even bothering to hide their extortion tactics anymore in the Serbian presidential elections. The message to Serbia’s citizens is clear, “Elect Nikolic and we will amputate Kosovo with a meat-ax soon, you will get no anesthetic and we will let the Albanians kill as many Kosovo Serbs as they want (and then blame it on you). Or elect “our man” Tadic and we might (if we feel like it) give you a couple of aspirin for the pain of amputating Kosovo from you and let a few more Serbs live.” It’s a “lose-lose” proposition for Serbia, as anyone can see — just as it is designed to be.
However, since the demise of Milosevic, all that Western intimidation of Serbia seems to have ever done is to drive Serbia closer to Russia. Russia’s support of Serbia in the UN Security Council on the Kosovo issue, and the Russian Gasprom deal signed with Serbia last week (which sunk the EU/US Nabucco plan and likely cost US State Department #3 man, Nicholas Burns, his job) has done more for Serbia than Western promises (and bombing) have done in the last 17 years. Combine this with the Serbian concept of “inat” (stubborn defiance in the face of bullies) and this all works in Nikolic’s favor, regardless of whether Nikolic is worth a damn or not.
But on the other hand, hope springs eternal in the human breast. For the life of them, Serbs still cannot understand why the US & EU would wish to continue punishing them and stealing their land. Serbs are Christians who speak multiple European languages and their kids want the same security & toys that other normal European kids have — and so do their parents. Based on this commonality, some Serbs believe that this torture has to stop soon — perhaps if they jump through just one more humiliating hoop then the West will see them for who they really are, perhaps if they elect just one more “pro-Western leader” then the West will recognize that Serbs ARE Europeans. This slim hope (or “wishful thinking”, depending on who you talk to) of one day maybe joining that EU “fun & goodies fraternity”, is all that Boris Tadic has to offer them. And the West knows this — which is why they had to throw in the ham-handed “club them if they don’t vote for Tadic” pressure to make the alternative even less attractive.
The big question that remains to be answered about this Western intimidation of Serbian voters to vote for Tadic in the upcoming run-off, is: “Will it work? Or will it backfire?”
Ultimately, Serbian citizens can (and should) be the ONLY ones to answer that, when they vote in the run-off election on February 3rd. It’s their fate to decide, not ours.
Program Director of the election monitoring agency Center for Free Elections and Democracy (CESID) Marko Blagojevic stated tonight that, based on 100 percent of the processed sample, it can be assessed that voters in Serbia entrusted Boris Tadic with another term in the office. Blagojevic stated that Tadic won some 2.6 % votes more than his rival Tomislav Nikolic and that difference is between 120.000 and 130.000 votes. Blagojevic announced that the turn-out was about 67% in the second round of presidential elections, which means some 4.5 million voters. Earlier, Executive Director of the CESID Zoran Lucic told the press conference that it can be stated that Tadic is the President of Serbia considering the big difference in the number of votes.
How can we possibly trust the outcome of a manipulated election?
The problem is that this election is already tainted. Once it has become so obvious that the US and the EU have an intense, vested interest in subverting an election in Serbia, how are we supposed to believe these US and EU politicians and “international observers” when they proclaim that this election is legitimate and clean?
From what was indicated by various interviews, polls, and so forth, before the runoff election, it was not at all clear that a majority of Serbs would have been willing to follow Tadic in taking the EU route.
EU membership is not worth the price
Take a good look at what’s happened in the EU lately. What with the Lisbon treaty chicanery, the bureaucratic strangulation, and the persistent sellout to jihadism, the EU is clearly turning into an ugly dictatorship itself. Maybe all of the noise that Western politicians and journalists make about Vladimir Putin supposedly being a “dictator” is only a distraction from the very real dictatorship that is taking shape in the EU.
I should be accustomed to this by now…
Like M.V. Pejakovich, I, 1389, am a US citizen, and I find it disgraceful that my own country’s government is manipulating an election somewhere else. It would be wrong no matter what the motives, but in this case, our own politicians are corrupt and they want to sell out the Balkans to petrodollar interests. It’s disgusting. But I suppose I ought to be used to it by now, considering how much vote fraud goes on in the US.
Yes, it’s very sad indeed. And although the decision is not mine to make, I would be sorry to see any more countries fall under the sway of the EU or of any organization like it.
Severing of Kosovo Province Enters the Final Stage with Boris Gump Reelected
Together with ecstatic long-winded congratulatory messages from the U.S. State Department, Javier Solana and the EU-presiding Slovenia to Boris Tadic and the “Serbian people”, after the Yellow leader barely squeezed through to get reelected as Serbian president, Serbia has received another, much more sincere, sobering message the very next day: that the illegal and unlawful EU mission to southern Serbian province of Kosovo-Metohija has been approved by the EU.
One doesn’t really need to read between the lines to realize Western leaders have breathed a huge sigh of relief certainly not because they were concerned for Serbia’s wellbeing, but simply because they understand Tadic’s razor-edge victory as a green light to proceed with the final stage of their plan of amputating Kosovo province from the rest of Serbia.
According to Tanjug, which cites its sources within the EU in Brussels, the European Union adopted on Monday, in an “urgent procedure”, a document dubbed “Joint Action” on the “legal and financial bases for sending a EU mission” to Kosovo and Metohija. Since the procedure was so urgent, one has to wonder if the EU heads were only waiting for their own candidate for Serbian presidency to declare victory, eager to push the approval of the Ahtisaari-planned EU mission through on the very same day.
Serbian news agency reports that only “a single formal step remains” until the EU mission is sent to Kosovo — a decision by the Council of Ministers on the adoption of the “Operative Plan” which gives the go-ahead for sending the mission. The mission would be dispatched only a day after the “Operative Plan” is adopted.
All this despite Serbian government’s firm opposition to sending the EU mission without an adequate UN Security Council decision, since on its own, the mission has no legal basis and it directly represents the first step of the implementation of rejected Ahtisaari plan on “supervised independence” of southern Serbian province.
But the EU now believes it doesn’t need a UN SC approval, or the approval of the Serbian government, since the man who refused to put his signature on a document that articulated unambiguous opposition to the EU mission being sent to Kosovo, offered to him by Prime Minister Kostunica in return for endorsement for the second round of elections, has been reelected anyway. And if Serbian president has no objections to the EU mission being sent to the territory of the country he’s sworn to protect, they figure that there are no obstacles to sending the mission.
“Serbian People” or Hungarian, Croat, Albanian and Muslim Citizens of Serbia?
The showering praises and gushing congratulatory messages that have poured from Washington, Brussels and Ljubljana when it was announced Tadic has managed to scrape a victory in Serbian presidential elections inevitably speak of “Serbian people” who have “chosen the European integrations” by giving their votes to Tadic.
EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana told reporters he had congratulated Boris Tadic and “Serbian people” on Tadic’s reelection, while Slovenians eulogized to the “Serbian people who have confirmed their support for democratic and European path of their homeland.” Although West’s collective desire to sell the whole deal as a Serbian choice is understandable, being that they desperately need to portray Tadic’s reelection as Serbian consent to the loss of Kosovo-Metohija province, the fact remains that Tadic’s narrow victory was neither a referendum on letting go of 15% of Serbia’s historic territory, nor the expression of the wish of predominantly Serbian nationals.
Understandably, all the praises ignore the fact that Tadic has barely managed to win by less than half percent above the necessary 50%, or 2.6 percentage points more than Tomislav Nikolic, which translates to a difference of around 100,000 votes between the two candidates. More importantly, they willfully ignore Serbia’s widely diverse, multi-ethnic society in which the sizable national minorities, such as Vojvodina Hungarians and Croats, as well as Presevo Valley Albanians and Raska (Sandzak) region Muslims (who call themselves “Bosniaks”) have voted in droves during the election runoffs, with the single goal: to prevent Tomislav Nikolic from winning.
One only needs to take a look at votes cast during the first round of elections, held on January 20, to find that the Hungarian representative, Ishtvan Pastor of Hungarian Coalition party in Vojvodina, was given almost all the votes that represent a difference between Tadic and Nikolic: 93,039 votes from Serbia’s ethnic Hungarians. At the same time, an equally marginal figure, Cedomir Jovanovic, backed by the Serbia’s Albanians and other Muslims as the only Serbian politician who supports severing of Kosovo-Metohija province, gained 219,689 votes two weeks prior to Tadic’s miserable victory. Everyone who knows the first thing about Cheda the Junkie and LSD LDP fanaticism knows fully well that they would rather pour gasoline over their heads and get collectively incinerated than see Tomislav Nikolic anywhere near a presidential office.
According to the local news sources, large communities of Hungarians and Croats populating mainly north of Serbia, have been pouring into the polling stations on Sunday, February 3, with military discipline, not so much to show support for Tadic, as to make sure Nikolic gets defeated. Some local TV stations have reported that “every single Hungarian in Vojvodina” voted against Tomislav Nikolic on February 3.
Meanwhile, according to Belgrade daily Glas Javnosti, British ambassador to Serbia Stephen Wordsworth allowed himself a luxury to publicly call the Albanians and other Muslims from Presevo Valley and Raska region to step up to the plate and cast their votes in order to ensure Nikolic loses the presidential bid. Readily responding, two Muslim parties from the Raska region have bragged about their help in defeating Nikolic on the very same day, announcing in the Serbian media that all the Raska Muslims “showed unity” by unanimously voting for Tadic.
British government has also financed CESID, a parallel structure to Serbia’s RIK (Republic’s Electoral Commission) to “count” the votes in the election runoff, and Stephen Wordsworth, the uncrowned king of cynicism, was among the first to congratulate “Serbian people” on the election results.
No Confusion in Kosovo-Metohija: Nikolic Wins Resounding 73.66% of Votes
How the actual Serbs voted is most obvious in the province of Kosovo-Metohija, where Albanians pretended no election whatsoever is taking place, so none of them took part, and where Tomislav Nikolic defeated Tadic with resounding 73.66% of votes won. Therefore, if the presidential elections in Serbia were a kind of “referendum” on the fate of Kosovo-Metohija province, Kosovo residents, whose opinion should matter far more than that of Novi Sad Hungarians, have stated their view in crystal-clear terms.
Crude EU Meddling in Serbia Elections
Right after the first round of elections, when Tomislav Nikolic surged to the top with 40% of votes won among 9 candidates, it became clear that “Serbian people” are determined to vote Boris Gump out of the office and replace him with the seasoned politician who places national interests above his personal or party-interests, and who has no intention to follow the foreign diktat, or tolerate West’s extortions, blackmails and rotten carrots.
Three days later, Reuters reporter Ellie Tzortzi noted the patently obvious EU interference in Serbian presidential elections, warning that “the EU must be wary of charges it is meddling to help pro-Western President Boris Tadic defeat nationalist Tomislav Nikolic, just as Serbia’s breakaway Kosovo province prepares to declare independence with the EU’s blessing.”
In order to boost Tadic’s prospects of defeating the challenger, the EU was prepared to offer Serbia the Stabilization and Association Agreement (SAA)—considered the very doorstep to the full EU membership—on January 28, only few days before the scheduled runoff. Tzortzi quoted Danish Prime Minister as saying “it would be a good idea” to sign a formal agreement “before the second round of the Serbian presidential election to demonstrate the positive EU attitude,” and briefly mentions that such opinion was shared by all representatives of the EU-member states, including the EU leadership, except for Netherlands and Belgium.
When that failed, the EU heads devised a non-SAA “political agreement”, which is quite unique in the sense that no other country wishing to join the union was ever proposed anything similar and, more importantly, which offers no territorial guarantees to Serbia but, through some cosmetic, superficial benefits, such as relaxed visa regimes and trade conditions, intends to anesthetize the Serbs in order to sever their Kosovo province with less noise, mess and fuss. They announced this “offer” few days before the February 3 election runoffs, as something that will be available to Serbia for signing on February 7.
But the rotten carrot and British ambassador’s crude interventions in the midst of Serbian election were far from being the only ways the Western officials have been influencing the outcome of the presidential elections in Serbia. As Neil Clark aptly noted, “the US and the EU have made […] quite clear […] the consequences which would follow if the Serbs decided to elect the Radical Party’s Tomislav Nikolic […], a man they describe as “ultra nationalist”, as their country’s new President this weekend. If Serbia does not vote the ‘right way’, the country faces ‘isolation’ and will be treated as ‘the Belarus of Europe’, western officials have warned”.
Foreign-Owned Media in Serbia Unleash Ferocious Pro-Tadic, Anti-Nikolic Campaign
Serbian media, almost entirely owned by the German, British and American corporations, has been running a similar pro-Tadic, anti-Nikolic campaign throughout, reaching the fever-pitch after the first round of elections. Serbian citizens were exposed to toxic daily fumes generated by the numerous op-eds, articles and “analysis” extolling the virtues of joining the EU, while at the same time exploiting the fears of “going back into the 1990s” — the poverty, isolation and wars, even suggesting the possibility of economic sanctions and another round of NATO bombardment (?!). The choice, as presented by the Yellow party politicians and Soros-owned media in Serbia was clear: either the bright and sunny future in the European Utopia (Boris Tadic), or return to the dark and gloomy hellhole from the time of bruising sanctions, Western aggression and merciless punishment (Tomislav Nikolic).
Apart from the unrelenting media campaign almost without exception drumming up Tadic as the only acceptable candidate, the Yellow camp showed they are not above the basest, sleaziest tricks to help them stay in power.
Yellow Camp’s Sleaze
One of the slimiest moves of Tadic’s supporters was to invent the alleged “endorsement” of Russian President Vladimir Putin, as if he personally favors Tadic over Nikolic. Even though Russian leadership, in stark contrast to the Western officials, has demonstrated an admirable level of chivalry and non-interference in staying neutral all the way and allowing citizens of Serbia to vote according to their conscious, Tadic’s team understood fully well they urgently need every inch of support they can pry, so they brazenly manufactured Putin’s support.
Being that Kremlin office takes care of even the small details and niceties such as expressions of condolences, presidential birthdays, congratulatory messages and similar, and that Tadic’s birthday happens to fall on January 15, Tadic has once again received a birthday card from President Putin’s office, just like the year before and the one before that and every year since he became Serbian president in 2004. But, unlike ever before, this time around the entirely innocent, non-committal wish for a happy birthday that coincided with the election in Serbia, was fervently publicized and advertised throughout Serbia, as Putin’s personal endorsement of Boris Tadic in the presidential elections.
According to some reports, Tadic has fought tooth-and-nail to squeeze into the Serbian government delegation on the occasion of signing the agreement with Russian energy giant, Gazprom. Such an occasion, although immensely important for Serbian state, has in no way necessitated the presence of Boris Tadic, being that it was the deal worked out by the Serbian government and Prime Minister Kostunica and that members of Tadic’s party within the government were expressly against the agreement, almost ruining the whole deal if it wasn’t for direct intervention of the Serbian Premier. But, nevertheless, using and abusing every opportunity for catching some limelight and hijacking some of the credit for any positive development was a primal urge, capable of overriding any sense of common decency.
A Wretched Victory No One Would Wish
Add to all that a relentless smear campaign against Tomislav Nikolic (charged of using services of an American PR agency to “brush-up” his public appearances, a malicious lie that was quickly denied by the agency cited; accused of planning to assign a prime ministerial post to Vojislav Seselj, rotting in the Hague prison for five years while awaiting his “trial” for politically incorrect opinions and verbal offenses to start, etc.), the reports of Tadic’s supporters visiting Serbian voters in person, door-to-door, and offering paychecks in return for votes given to Tadic and payment of utility bills, or the delivery of insulting hand-out packages of flower, sugar and cooking oil given by the Yellows to the poor and disillusioned voters on the eve of the runoffs, and still, despite everything, Boris Gump has barely managed to scrape measly half percent above the margin to get reelected.
Apart from being overwhelmingly suspicious and quite questionable, Boris Tadic’s “victory” is probably the saddest, most pathetic and morally wretched feat no decent man would ever wish for himself. For who could possibly rejoice and celebrate the victory of a man widely expected to assist in cheerful dismemberment of a state he is supposed to serve and protect?
Maj. Steve Coughlin, the expert on terrorism who was fired from the Pentagon at the behest of a jihadist mole, is back to work, and with a well-deserved promotion. Great news!
But we still have some work to do - we need to hold our officials’ feet to the fire, so that they do a thorough housecleaning at the Pentagon to remove Hesham Islam and other jihadist moles, along with those who aid and abet their careers.
* Hesham Islam, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, with his ridiculously cooked CV, should have never been given a security clearance. Hesham Islam is your picture book mole:
Hesham Islam is responsible, according to earlier reports, for the firing of Stephen Coughlin, the Pentagon’s only expert on Islamic law. But now the questions about Islam himself, and what his intentions really are, are increasing.
Federal authorities say a high-level Muslim Pentagon aide, who led a campaign to silence a Pentagon intelligence analyst for taking a hard line against Islam, is running an “influence operation” on behalf of U.S. Muslim groups fronting for the radical Muslim Brotherhood.
Hesham H. Islam, a special assistant to deputy Defense secretary Gordon England, recently criticized Maj. Stephen Coughlin, one of the military’s leading authorities on Islamic war doctrine, for making the connection between the religion of Islam and terrorism.
After Islam lodged complaints, Coughlin’s contract with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon was not renewed.
Islam also was upset with briefings Coughlin recently prepared for the U.S. military warning that major U.S. Muslim groups were fronting for the Muslim Brotherhood, a worldwide jihadist movement based in Egypt.
Islam, who was born and raised in Egypt, is heavily involved with one of the groups – the Islamic Society of North America, which U.S. prosecutors last year named as a member of the U.S. branch of the Muslim Brotherhood and an unindicted co-conspirator in a major terror-funding case.
Islam has persuaded his boss, England, to conduct various outreach with ISNA, including hosting the group’s leaders in the Pentagon and speaking at its annual convention.
The Pentagon is looking into conflicting statements about the background of Hesham Islam, a special assistant to Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England who was the focus of a dispute with a Joint Staff counterterrorism analyst.
Mr. Islam faced tough questions about his background posed by veteran journalist Claudia Rosett, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who covered the United Nations oil-for-food scandal with Iraq. Last week, Miss Rosett took the Pentagon to task by uncovering serious discrepancies about the Egyptian-born Islam that no one at the Pentagon seems willing to answer.
Writing in National Review Online, Miss Rosett revealed that certain claims about Mr. Islam’s background don’t fit.
Shortly after she wrote about the discrepancies contained in a Pentagon-written article on Mr. Islam’s background, the Pentagon removed the biography from its Web site, DefenseLink.mil.
Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said “that piece was taken down in an attempt to reduce the rhetoric and the emotion surrounding this issue while we try to determine the facts.”
The Pentagon does not comment on such personnel matters, he noted. “That said, we are looking into the matter and trying to reconcile conflicting statements.”
Mr. Morrell called later to clarify that the conflicting statements being probed relate to whether or not Mr. Islam used the term “Christian zealot with a pen” in describing Mr. Coughlin, and not about discrepancies in Mr. Islam’s background.
Mr. Islam has come under fire from supporters of Stephen Coughlin, the Joint Staff analyst on counterterrorism whose contract was not renewed. The action followed a meeting between Mr. Coughlin and Mr. Islam several weeks ago when the two clashed over Mr. Coughlin’s views on the Islamic law roots of terrorism.
After refusing comment to Inside the Ring, Kevin Wensing, a spokesman for Mr. Islam, now says that reports in this space that Mr. Islam called Mr. Coughlin a “Christian zealot with a pen” did not take place during the meeting.
Queries to other Pentagon officials familiar with the issue said the phrase was used by Mr. Islam after the meeting, not during it.
No action was taken against Mr. Islam, a Muslim adviser and confidant of Mr. England, for the anti-Christian comments.
Mr. Islam could not be reached for comment.
Miss Rosett tried — and failed — to get straight answers from Mr. Wensing about why Mr. Islam claimed that when he was 7 his family was bombed by Israeli jets at his home in Cairo, when there is no evidence the Israelis bombed the Egyptian capital during the 1967 war.
Also, Mr. Wensing could not explain why Mr. Islam said in his biography that he was on a freighter sunk by an Iranian torpedo in the Persian Gulf when there is no record of the ship being sunk.
According to his 1992 master’s thesis at the Naval Postgraduate School, Mr. Islam is highly critical of Israel and the influence of American Jews on U.S. politics, noting that U.S. ties to Israel have harmed relations to other states in the Middle East.
In 2007 Mr. Bush highlighted the aggression of “Sunni extremists” and “Shia extremists.” In 2006, he warned against “radical Islam.” In 2008, the president merely decried “assassins,” “bombs,” “extremists” and “terrorists.” Why the fuzzy focus? Why declare a “defining ideological struggle” without defining the ideologies involved?
A plea from Tom Burnett Sr. to the wonderful people of Somerset
(The ad copy below is running in tomorrow’s Somerset Daily American.)
My son Tom confronted a terrible moment of truth. Faced with a plot against our nation, he and the other heroes of Flight 93 fought back, and at the cost of their lives, foiled that plot to destroy the White House or the Capitol. Now it is time for the rest of us to face our moment of truth. Flight 93 has been re-hijacked, and I am requesting that if you can, you go down to the public meeting of the Memorial Project at Somerset Courthouse Saturday, sign up to comment at the end, and demand that a proper investigation be conducted.
THIS was no accident:
The Memorial Project held an open design competition in time of war, in-viting the entire world to enter. Guess who joined in? That group of trees that sits roughly in the position of the star on an Islamic flag is the crash site. Who do YOU think is being memorialized here?
A second Islamic feature that I also protested when I served on the Stage II jury is the minaret-like Tower of Voices , formed in the shape of a crescent, with its top cut at an angle so that its crescent arms reach up into the sky.
Every iota of this original Crescent of Embrace design remains completely intact in the so-called “redesign.” That is why Congressman Tancredo asked the Park Service this autumn to scrap the existing design entirely. Instead of getting rid of the giant crescent as Tancredo demanded back in 2005, architect Paul Murdoch only disguised it with a few surrounding trees.
Also remaining are those d—-d 44 glass blocks on the flight path. (There were forty passengers and crew and four Islamic terrorists on Flight 93.) The Memorial Project acknowledges the 40 blocks inscribed with the names of my son and the other heroes, and they acknowledge the three inscribed with the 9/11 date, but they pretend not to know about this one: the huge glass block that dedicates the entire site.
When this 44th glass block is pointed out, Project Partners say that it can’t be counted with the other blocks because it is not the same size. What? Because the capstone to the terrorist memorializing block count is magnificent, that is supposed to make it okay?
For every Islamic or terrorist memorializing feature of the crescent design, the Park Service has another equally phony excuse. Please read the exposé below of the Park Service’s fraudulent investigation, and please come to the meeting on Saturday to demand state and Congressional investigations into the Flight 93 memorial.
Bill Clinton is responsible for the murder of countless civilians. His administration, the biased media, and the liberal left have hidden this fact from the American people. The shameful attack on Kosovo is one of the most important - yet least understood - events in modern Jihad. It is imperative that the truth is exposed.
The video below talks about the Clinton lies in regard to the Kosovo War. The first 2 minutes and 25 seconds are about Jesse Jackson receiving the Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award, and second only to the Medal of Honor. After that, Savage disputes all the lies the Clinton Administration told about the Kosovo War:
More on the Kosovo War and Clinton Lies:
Mr. Clinton says he wants peace through war, and has attacked a nation that is no threat to America or to any of its neighbors. The conflict in Kosovo has arisen because Slobodan Milosevic (like Joseph Tito before him) failed to secure Yugoslavia’s border with Albania. The resulting strife helped each of them centralize power. Worse than the deliberate obscuring of facts about the history of this conflict is that NATO’s attack has silenced the democratic critics of Milosevic and caused all Serbians (and increasingly, all Slavs) to rally to the defense of their embattled nation.
From 1960-90 Tito turned a blind eye as an influx of Albanians drove Serbs from Kosovo. The immigration was pushed by the Stalinist regime of Enver Hoxha that had reduced Albania to current penury and made it a pariah among nations. Since Hoxha, Albania has lacked government in any real sense. The main powers there have been the Saudis and Iranians. Its economy has consisted of arms and drug smuggling and a series of ruinous pyramid schemes and lotteries. This sordid history is available but ignored by major western media and governments who have abandoned national interests for a global agenda that finds ready allies in radical and expansionist Islam.
IT WAS ABOUT 1995 to 1996 that the emergence of Middle Eastern crime groups was first observed in New South Wales. Before then they had been largely known for individual acts of anti-social behaviour and loose family structures involved in heroin importation and supply as well as motor vehicle theft and conversion. The one crime that did appear organised before this period was insurance fraud, usually motor vehicle accidents and arson. Because these crimes were largely victimless, they were dealt with by insurance companies and police involvement was limited. But from these insurance scams, a generation of young criminals emerged to become engaged in more sophisticated crimes, such as extortion, armed robbery, organised narcotics importation and supply, gun running, organised factory and warehouse break-ins, car theft and conversion on a massive scale including the exporting of stolen luxury vehicles to Lebanon and other Middle Eastern countries.
Notice that, whenever fraud, vehicle theft, and other property crimes are not adequately addressed, the perpetrators become emboldened and move on to other, more serious offenses.
Tim Priest explains that the existing Crime Intelligence structure was dismantled, just when it should have begun investigating a new set of offenders.
As the police began to gather and act on intelligence on these emerging Middle Eastern gangs the first of the series of events took place. The New South Wales Police was restructured under Peter Ryan. Crime Intelligence, the eyes and ears of all police forces throughout the world, was dismantled overnight and a British-style intelligence unit was created. The formation of this unit and its functions has been best described by Dr Richard Basham — as a library stocking outdated books. The new Crime Intelligence and Information Section became completely reactive. It received crime intelligence from the field and stored it. Almost no relevant intelligence was ever dispensed to operational police from 1997 until I left in 2002. It was a disgrace…
But even more frustrating for operational police were the activities of this ethnic crime group, activities that set it apart from almost all others bar the Cabramatta 5T. The Lebanese groups were ruthless, extremely violent, and they intimidated not only innocent witnesses, but even the police that attempted to arrest them. As these crime groups encountered less resistance in terms of police operations and enforcement, their power grew not only within their own communities, but also all around Sydney — except in Cabramatta, where their fear of the South-East Asian crime groups limited their forays. But the rest of Sydney became easy pickings.
The police force became weakened by mismanagement: cronyism, ineptitude, loss of expertise, and the desire to avoid outside scrutiny.
Lacking the moxie to go after the most dangerous and well-connected criminals, many of the police instead selectively pursued those individuals and groups who could not retaliate and who thus were more “politically correct” targets.
The second in the series of events began to take shape with Peter Ryan’s executive leadership team. Under Ryan’s nose they began to carve up the New South Wales Police and form little kingdoms where a senior police officer ruled almost untouched by outside influence. They then appointed their own commanders in the police stations. Almost all of them had little or no street experience; but they in turn brought along their friends as duty officers, similarly inexperienced. Some of the experience these police counted on their resumes included stints at Human Resources, the Academy, the Police Band in one case, the various cubby-holes in Police Headquarters, almost no operational policing experience — yet they were tasked to lead. Never has the expression “the blind leading the blind” been more appropriate.
The impact that this leadership team had on day-to-day operational policing was disastrous. In many of the key areas that were experiencing rapid rises in Middle Eastern crime, these new leaders became more concerned with relations between the police and ethnic minorities than with emerging violent crime. The power and influence of the local religious and minority leaders cannot be overstated. Police began to use selective law enforcement. They selected targets that were unlikely to use their ethnic background and cultural beliefs to hinder police investigations or arrests. It was mostly Anglo-Saxons and Asians that were the targets, because they were under-represented by religious leaders and the media. They were soft targets…
In hundreds upon hundreds of incidents police have backed down to Middle Eastern thugs and taken no action and allowed incidents to go unpunished. Again I stress the unbelievable influence that local politicians and religious leaders played in covering up the real state of play in the south-west.
The third event was the reforming of Criminal Investigations into a centrally controlled body called Crime Agencies. All the specialist crime squads were done away with: Arson, Armed Robbery, Drugs, Organised Crime, Special Breaking, Consorting, Vice, Gaming, Motor Vehicle Theft were wrapped up into one-size-fits-all. Ryan once boasted that by the time he finished retraining the New South Wales Police, constables could investigate a traffic accident in the morning and a homicide in the afternoon, a statement that summed up his Alice-in-Wonderland policing theories. All the expertise and experience evaporated overnight…
As if all that were not enough, the management began collecting statistics on just six crimes - a list that excluded the major offenses associated with organized crime.
Having to meet these standards forced the police on the street to focus even less on the growing problem of organized crime.
The final straw for the New South Wales Police was the OCR — Op Crime Review, which Peter Ryan and his executive team came up with. It was loosely based on the groundbreaking Compstat program of the New York Police Department, the brainchild of Commissioner William Bratton. The difference between Ryan’s OCR and the NYPD Compstat was that the NYPD model covered everything on the criminal waterfront. The Ryan-inspired OCR had just six crimes. And those six included domestic violence, random breath testing, theft, robbery, assaults and motor vehicle theft — no drugs, organised crime, firearms, shootings, attempted murders, homicides. The crimes that instil fear into the average citizen were ignored, and with plenty of innovative answers as to why. The OCR focused police attention on a limited number of crimes and allowed far more serious and deadly crimes to get out of control…
With no organised crime function, no gang unit except for the South-East Asian Strike Force, the New South Wales Police turned against every convention known to Western policing in dealing with organised crime groups. In effect the Lebanese crime gangs were handed the keys to Sydney.
The most influential of the Middle Eastern crime groups are the Muslim males of Telopea Street, Bankstown, known as the Telopea Street Boys. They and their associates have been involved in numerous murders over the past five years, many of them unprovoked fatal attacks on young Australian men for no other reason than that they are “Skips”, as they call Australians. They have been involved in all manner of crime on a scale we have never seen before. Ram-raids on expensive stores in the city are epidemic. The theft of expensive motor vehicles known as car-jacking is increasing at an alarming rate. This crime involves gangs finding a luxury motor vehicle parked outside a restaurant or hotel and watching until the occupants return to drive home. The car is followed, the victims assaulted at gunpoint, and the vehicle stolen. The vehicles are always around or above the $100,000 mark and are believed to be taken to warehouses before being shipped interstate or to the Middle East…
Australia’s racial vilification laws, along with the entire “multiculturalism” industry, worked together to keep the growing debacle concealed from public scrutiny.
Tim Priest explained where this willful blindness would eventually lead:
I wonder whether the inventors of the racial hatred laws introduced during the golden years of multiculturalism ever took into account that we, the silent majority, would be the target of racial violence and hatred. I don’t remember any charges being laid in conjunction with the gang rapes of south-western Sydney in 2001, where race was clearly an issue and race was used to humiliate the victims. But then, unbelievably, a publicly-funded document produced by the Anti-Discrimination Board called “The Race for Headlines” was circulated, and it sought not only to cover up race as a motive for the rapes, but to criticise any accurate media reporting on this matter as racially biased. It worries many operational police that organisations like the Anti-Discrimination Board, the Privacy Council and the Civil Liberties Council have become unaccountable and push agendas that don’t represent the values that this great country was built on.
The Middle Eastern crime groups and their associates number in the thousands, not the hundreds as the government and senior police would have you believe. It is the biggest crime problem we have ever faced, and it is growing. Hardly a day goes past without some violent crime involving a “male of Middle Eastern appearance”, though I see lately that description is watered down now to include “and / or Mediterranean appearance”. To an operational policeman, there is a noticeable difference between an Italian and a Lebanese male.
That these groups of males can roam a city and assault, rob and intimidate at will can no longer be denied or excused. You need only to look at Paris and other European countries that have had mass immigration from Middle Eastern countries to see the sort of problems we can expect in years to come. My prediction is that within ten years, Middle Eastern crime groups will spread rapidly across Australia as they seek to expand their enterprises. There will be no-go areas in south-western Sydney, just like Paris.
Only recently I have seen quotes from senior police and retired police who claim that race is not the issue in organised crime. Those statements are stupid and dangerous. Organised crime groups with the exception of the bikies are almost always ethnically based — any experienced detective will tell you that. The days of Anglo-Saxon gangs are almost gone, with the exception of one or two local beach gangs…
Noggia is a Spanish blogger who posts in English and with his full name: Nacho Serra. He has been for some time writing about the myths of “a Basque nation” (to which I referred myself here), without having really ANY of its supporters critisizing logically what he had written. So today I receive a mail from common friend Crispal informing me that he has been threatened with death by some scum of Basque terrorism:
“pay a lot of attention, fascist. You’re going to fly in the air”. “Euskadi will be free and you will die in the way. Gora ETA (Hail ETA). Pig. Policeman”.
The Civil Guard has already began an investigation as the author of the menaces has left a trace which can be followed. Just hope he will be caught.
As ever, the freedom of the blogosphere keeps on being menaced…
