More on Carla Del Ponte

As mentioned last night, Carla Del Ponte, the former ICTY prosecutor, gave an interview to the BBC in which she talked about the possible use of nerve gas by the Syrian “rebels”. Below is footage excerpted from that interview.

This clip has lain buried for three and a half months, with only 1,600 views. I can’t see the Beeb giving it any more publicity now. I wonder what it would take to make it go viral…

Hat tip: Kitman.

Gates of Vienna News Feed 8/27/2013

U.S. President Obama, U.K. Prime Minister Cameron, and French President Hollande are all pushing for military action against Syria. However, Italian Foreign Minister Emma Bonino says that Italy will not join any military operation without a mandate from the UN Security Council. Informed sources say that the war is scheduled to start on Thursday. American aircraft have been arriving in Cyprus, and reports from Greece say that the U.S. has asked Greek permission for the use of its coastal waters, airspace, and military bases.

In other news, the mayor of the French town of Bollène is under investigation, and may face prosecution and imprisonment, for refusing to marry a lesbian couple.

To see the headlines and the articles, click “Continue reading” below.

Thanks to C. Cantoni, Erick Stakelbeck, Fjordman, Henrik Ræder Clausen, Insubria, JD, Jerry Gordon, KP, McR, RR, Vlad Tepes, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Notice to tipsters: Please don’t submit extensive excerpts from articles that have been posted behind a subscription firewall, or are otherwise under copyright protection.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

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Whose Chemicals?

Carla Del Ponte is a Swiss lawyer, a retired UN official, and a former prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). These weighty credentials qualify her as the most prominent non-Russian skeptic so far on the issue of the Syrian regime’s use of chemical weapons in Damascus.

This is not Ms. Del Ponte’s first dissent against received wisdom: she gained notoriety a few years ago while still at ICTY by exposing the Kosovars’ harvesting of organs from Serbian prisoners of war. Her efforts on behalf of Serbian victims show that she is not in thrall to the NATO narrative, but she is hardly a lapdog for the Russians — her prosecutorial position with the ICTY is evidence enough of that.

Thus her opinion will be hard to dismiss, and may yet put a damper on the plans of Messrs. Obama, Cameron, and Hollande to rendezvous in Damascus — if, that is, her statements ever spread widely enough in the legacy media.

According to AINA:

Syrian Rebels Used Sarin Nerve Gas, Not Assad’s Regime: U.N. Official

Testimony from victims strongly suggests it was the rebels, not the Syrian government, that used Sarin nerve gas during a recent incident in the revolution-wracked nation, a senior U.N. diplomat said Monday.

Carla del Ponte, a member of the U.N. Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria, told Swiss TV there were “strong, concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof,” that rebels seeking to oust Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad had used the nerve agent.

But she said her panel had not yet seen any evidence of Syrian government forces using chemical weapons, according to the BBC, but she added that more investigation was needed.

Damascus has recently facing growing Western accusations that its forces used such weapons, which President Obama has described as crossing a red line. But Ms. del Ponte’s remarks may serve to shift the focus of international concern.

Ms. del Ponte, who in 1999 was appointed to head the U.N. was crimes tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, has sometimes been a controversial figure. She was removed from her Rwanda post by the U.N. Security Council in 2003, but she continued as the chief prosecutor for the Yugoslav tribunal until 2008.

Ms. del Ponte, a former Swiss prosecutor and attorney general, told Swiss TV: “Our investigators have been in neighboring countries interviewing victims, doctors and field hospitals. According to their report of last week, which I have seen, there are strong, concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof of the use of sarin gas, from the way the victims were treated.”

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Islam’s Servile Helpers

The following editorial by Lars Hedegaard was published earlier today at Dispatch International.

Perhaps prompted by the news that the repentant Danish imam Ahmed Akkari has been added to the growing list of Danes who have to live under police protection after being targeted for death by radical Muslims, Mr. Hedegaard aims his righteous ire at the Danish government and legal system:

Editorial: Dracula in charge

If you have been the victim of an assassination attempt as I have followed by Danish-speaking Muslims who want to kill you all over, you can react in several ways.

You can cry, tremble, break down or apologize for what you have done to an old pedophile highway robber and serial killer.

My reaction is rage.

I’m afraid that I started shouting, when a kindly man from the Danish intelligence and security service, PET, called me yesterday. He wanted to assure me that the police are in full control of the Islamic groups that want me dead. “We are keeping an eye on them,” he said.

So the PET, which to my knowledge has a staff of 800, is keeping an eye on every mosque and Islamic organization and network in Denmark, which ex-imam Ahmed Akkari has just said are all run by extremists.

No they don’t! The contact between them means that the sly rulers of the mosques, paid by well-heeled bandits in the Middle East, take the police in and use them and the politicians they advise to further their mendacious message that Islam is fundamentally peaceful and lovable.

The PET has just announced a new “anti-radicalization” strategy whose aim is to ask the mosques to exert their influence in order that young Muslims refrain from extremism and holy war.

Their next move will probably be to put Dracula in charge of a blood bank.

But of course the police must obey the government. The very government that has looked on while Danes have been subjected to Muslim violence, murder, rape and other crimes which their religion permits — or even orders them to commit.

The perpetrators’ conscience is clean. Or rather: They have no conscience. All they need to do is read in the Koran and if they cannot read, listen to their imam, who will tell them what to do with apostates and infidels.

My rage is not directed at the followers of the prophet. They only do what Muhammed has told them to do if they want to go to heaven and avail themselves of 72 lusty virgins, drink buckets of wine and — if that is their sexual preference — mount willing boys.

As Winston Churchill remarked in a book from 1899, there has never been a more retrograde and stupid religion.

I refuse to believe that various Danish governments are more ill informed than Winston Churchill and countless other authors who have described Islam in thousands of books.

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A Musical Interlude While We Wait

In old movies about World War II there are the required scenes from home: families gathered around a large radio, listening for reports “about the boys”. In between urgent announcements of “news from the front” filled with crackly static, radio stations would play musical interludes to distract their audience from the distant low grumblings of the dogs of war.

So here we sit again, waiting to see if President Obama blinks, which is what the Baron thinks he’ll do (I read somewhere this morning that NINE percent of Americans approve of what he is threatening to do to Syria). I hope the B is right since the consequences for surrounding countries will be dire indeed. So much for that ill-advised Nobel Peace Prize. Do you think Norway permanently devalued that award? They certainly made the man even more insufferable.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

And as our musical interlude, we offer this young man’s talent. May it, too, distract you for awhile, or tame those dogs:

Young Mr. Lapps has titled this piece “For the West”. Our translator JLH and I have been debating whether or not the composer meant “Western Civilization” or if he intended this merely for California. Since I don’t know the answer, I’ll choose our civilization. It needs all the help it can get.

In my Sunday sermon while the Baron was away, I talked about the necessity of developing an aesthetic sense. I didn’t say, but wish I had, that the Chinese, recognizing the utilitarian value of Western music — i.e., many studies have proved that learning to read and to play Western classical and baroque music develops young minds — making them more proficient at mathematics and science. Perhaps a specialist in epigenetics could tell us why?

To this day I am grateful that the future Baron was so diligent in learning to read and play music, specifically the piano, twelve string guitar, and to some extent, that whole body instrument, the organ.

Was he a prodigy?

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An Imam Repents

Ahmed Akkari is one of the infamous imams who made the trip from Denmark to the Middle East back in 2006 and enraged his fellow Muslims by showing them the Danish Mohammed cartoons. As reported here last weekend, Mr. Akkari recently went public with his repentance for his actions, and apologized for what he did back then. His change of heart has caused dismay among his former allies, and enraged Muslim zealots both in Denmark and abroad.

Last Thursday Ahmed Akkari was the featured speaker at a meeting of the Free Press Society (Trykkefrihedsselskabet) in Copenhagen. Below are video excerpts from his remarks, and from the Q&A session that followed. Many thanks to Henrik Ræder Clausen for recording, production, and translation, and to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling:

It’s worth noting that between August 22 and yesterday — a period of four days — “Danish” mujahideen in Syria managed to record and distribute a video of themselves shooting at a photo of Ahmed Akkari taken at the Free Press Society meeting. Mr. Akkari was part of a lineup of illustrious Danish targets that included Morten Storm, Lars Hedegaard, Naser Khader, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, and Kurt Westergaard:

(Thanks to Vlad Tepes for editing and annotating the above video.)

This does not constitute proof of Mr. Akkari’s sincerity. However, since Syrian jihad fighters are not known for subtlety, their publicly expressed hatred may be exactly what it seems, which means the Danish imam is now considered an apostate by Islamic purists.

Transcript of the first video:

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Gates of Vienna News Feed 8/26/2013

Secretary of State John Kerry warned Bashar al-Assad that his regime’s use of chemical weapons was undeniable, and that Syria will be held accountable. According to The Daily Telegraph, Britain and the United States will launch an air war against Syria within days.

In other news, the European Commission has delivered an ultimatum to Croatia — which joined the EU only recently — demanding that it eliminate its restrictions on the use of the European Arrest Warrant within its borders. If it fails to comply, it will face sanctions.

To see the headlines and the articles, click “Continue reading” below.

Thanks to C. Cantoni, Fjordman, Insubria, JD, McR, Steen, Van Grungy, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Notice to tipsters: Please don’t submit extensive excerpts from articles that have been posted behind a subscription firewall, or are otherwise under copyright protection.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

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Democrats on the Road to Damascus

Perhaps our readers with more political and military acumen than I can discuss America’s drunken weaving in and out, the pitfalls we dig before forgetting them and thus falling into those very same craters. Lord knows the examples of our failed policies are multitudinous…or perhaps the policies would have been reasonable in other hands with more ability to execute them.

In contradistinction to what goes on now, GW Bush’s foray into Iraq was preceded by a long period of attempts to find other means to rein in Saddam Hussein’s destabilizing powers in the Middle East. For this he had the backing of Congress and eventually the cooperation of much of the West (via the UN) in what we now see as “misguided” attempts to install the structure and forms of Western forms of government is an area which has proved repeatedly its immunity to democracy.

I never doubted the reality of WMD in Iraq. The fact that they were packed off to Syria always seemed the most reasonable explanation for their “disappearance”. Bush had his faults as an executive but to a large extent he played by the U.N.’s rules. Otherwise, he could never have gotten Colin Powell’s consent for the actions he proposed or the material support from Europe.

We’ve come a long way from those early years of the New Century. President Obama’s strategies, the chief of which was ballyhooed as “leading from behind” seem increasingly inchoate and reactive at best. There is not even a pretense at using the checks and balances of legislative “advise and consent” to guide his war-making. Instead we have seen a destructively down-sized and emasculated military used in random hit-and-run attacks on or within the borders of sovereign nations. The drone attacks in Yemen, the deliberate destruction of Libya, the meltdown in Egypt designed to install the Muslim Brotherhood…have I missed anyone?

The lead-from-behind idea might have worked had we not then started on the attack throughout MENA. Even a different Secretary of State might have been enough to save our bacon. But in some kind of political pay-off Obama installed a retro 20th century Clinton to implement his foreign policy. Not only did she play footsie with the OIC (Obama’s infamous “fifty-seven states” he promised to visit in his first campaign), but she thoroughly fouled the nest with the debacle in Libya. Her contribution to the political lexicon may well prove to be her angry attempt to stop the Congressional questioning about Benghazi. In obvious high dudgeon, captured on endless You Tube clips you can watch her furious meltdown. Red-faced and fueled on righteous indignation she bellows: “What difference at this point does it make?”

What ‘difference’ indeed. It’s the same kind of difference that motivated her husband’s random choices: to ignore the obvious and clearly defined slaughter in Rwanda while jumping into the complicated and centuries’ old conflict in Kosovo.
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Sunday Sermon

This post is but a poem, a poem with asides. For example, this first aside will tell you the post began as “Sunday Morning Sermon” because that’s when it started in an email sent by reader, MA.

But then The Interruptions began when the Baron came through the front door to say the hickory nuts are falling early and thus the “Morning” aspect of this sermon became moot.

Oh dear. Those hickory nuts are following this year’s pattern where everything has arrived or left out of season, as though someone stole the music of the spheres off the stands, forcing them all to take wild guesses as to the proper sequence of their own tunes in the larger season’s hymnal. Thus, the B was taken by surprise at the unexpectedly early sounds of hickory nuts following the law of gravity (at least that one is still in place). He stopped by my computer to give me the news from the front yard. Among his many talents he can imitate the sounds of falling hickory nuts. They are arrhythmic dull percussions – an intermittent series of sssws-thunks – that surely set little squirrels hearts to beating faster.

I must admit to a certain pleasure when the B display yet another heretofore hidden talent. Has his failing eyesight caused his hearing to sharpen so that he can now discern the first sound- the soft sssws – from the note of closure – that dull thunk?

A second aside: it is a good and fitting thing to have one’s mental furniture re-arranged from time to time. This task is not something one can do for oneself; it is undergone rather than scheduled or arranged ahead of time. Sometimes it’s annoying and inconvenient, isn’t it? Like a minor earthquake rattling the place settings as your guests arrive at your dinner party – the one you were forced to give as part of the exigencies of your husband’s continued employment because if they were your customers, it would be pizza and beer at the local…

This poem sent by MA is just one more rearrangement. Knowing where to have Oscar Wilde is convenient. But when he shows up out of order, saying things you didn’t know he considered at all, well…it’s…it’s what exactly? Disconcerting, maybe? But in the long run, salutary. Whenever my vast ignorance about things literary is even slightly reduced, ‘tis a salutary thing indeed.

Another aside follows after Mr. Wilde’s appearance with his sonnet.

ON THE MASSACRE OF THE CHRISTIANS IN BULGARIA

Christ, dost Thou live indeed? or are Thy bones
Still straitened in their rock-hewn sepulchre?
And was Thy Rising only dreamed by her
Whose love of Thee for all her sin atones?
For here the air is horrid with men’s groans,
The priests who call upon Thy name are slain,
Dost Thou not hear the bitter wail of pain
From those whose children lie upon the stones?
Come down, O Son of God! incestuous gloom
Curtains the land, and through the starless night
Over Thy Cross a Crescent moon I see!
If Thou in very truth didst burst the tomb
Come down, O Son of Man! and show Thy might
Lest Mahomet be crowned instead of Thee!

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The Perils of the Road

I’m off to visit relatives again and will be gone overnight. Those pesky relatives! And they live so far away…

However, with luck I’ll be able to swing by Mare Imbrium on the way home and take a few photos from the rim of Eratosthenes. And maybe even get a shot of Copernicus.

In the meantime, Dymphna will be in charge. She isn’t as attentive about moderating comments as I am, so be patient — your comment will appear eventually (assuming you mind your p’s and q’s).

The news feed will resume tomorrow evening.

Gates of Vienna News Feed 8/24/2013

The United States and Britain are reportedly preparing to go to war with Syria, with the casus belli being the Assad regime’s alleged gas attack on civilians. The USA, Israel, and the EU assert that the Syrian government is responsible for the attack, while Russia and Syria insist that the rebels were behind it. Iran has condemned the action without assigning blame. The Syrian government says that its soldiers discovered chemical weapons in one of the rebels’ tunnels.

The medical charity Médecins sans Frontières says it has treated thousands of victims for symptoms of neurotoxin poisoning. Independent groups come down on both sides of the issue, and some even maintain that the observed symptoms do not correspond with the effects of weapons-grade chemical agents.

In wine-related news, Italy is expecting a bumper crop of grapes this year, with white varietals in particular predicted to reach high production levels. The new European Commissioner for Consumer Protection — who is Croatian — says that the EU will increase its efforts to distinguish Croatian prosek, a sweet red dessert wine, from Italian prosecco, a dry sparkling white, so that wine consumers understand the difference and make their bibulous purchases accordingly.

To see the headlines and the articles, click “Continue reading” below.

Thanks to C. Cantoni, Fjordman, Gaia, Insubria, JD, Jerry Gordon, KP, MC, McR, Papa Whiskey, Vlad Tepes, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Notice to tipsters: Please don’t submit extensive excerpts from articles that have been posted behind a subscription firewall, or are otherwise under copyright protection.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

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Hold Up Four Fingers for Sharia!

A demonstration in support of the Muslim Brotherhood and deposed President Mohamed Morsi was held on Parliament Hill in Ottawa today. The video below was taken by a reader and sent to Vlad Tepes, who edited it, annotated it, and uploaded it:

So what’s the deal with the four fingers? Pakistaniyan notes that they’ve become a symbol for supporters of Mr. Morsi’s regime since the military crackdown earlier this month:

Have you seen the yellow and black colored four fingered hand sign on social media recently and want to know that what is it? Why people are posting about it on internet? Raaba/Rabia or R4BIA is four in arabic, and this hand sign by raising 4 fingers has become the symbol of the massacre in Egypt as well as Rabaa al-Adawiya Square where the anti-coup protests take place.

And Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has used the same symbol in solidarity with Muslim Brotherhood supporters:

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An Extremist Group of One

Shortly after the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks began to purge their political enemies. The Czarists, the aristocracy, and businessmen were obviously their first targets, but it wasn’t long before they turned on their former allies on the Left. First came the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Anarchists, then the Mensheviks, and then factions within the Bolsheviks themselves that threatened the dominance of Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky.

To purge rivals whose ideology differed only marginally from one’s own required creative adaptations of political terminology to justify their liquidation. The Party hunted down “counter-revolutionaries”, “deviationists”, “right extremists”, “reactionaries”, and many other arcane neologisms coined especially for the occasion. In the 1930s, after the ascendancy of Fascism in Italy at the expense of the Communists, the term “fascist” came into vogue as the preferred designation for an enemy of the state. From then on the Bolsheviks pursued and destroyed “fascists” wherever they found them, and their ideological heirs are still doing the same thing today.

A similar process seems to be underway in the National Security State that is now administered by the Obama administration, with the preferred targets designated as “extremists” and “hate groups”. The pursuit of such “extremists” did not begin with the current administration — Homeland Security was, after all, the brainchild of the Bush administration — but under Janet Napolitano and Eric Holder it has reached a baroque elaboration that the Bush functionaries could only dream of.

In order to justify investigating and prosecuting Muslim terrorists — who really would kill people and blow up infrastructure if they were not obstructed — the feds are obliged to pursue at least as many infidels, in order to demonstrate that no “profiling” is taking place. With the hard Left currently holding the levers of power, this imperative guarantees an open season against “right-wing extremists” — which means virtually anyone who fails to support the full Socialist agenda.

After five years of diligent effort on the part of the nomenklatura who run the federal bureaucracy, we have reached the point that a patriotic American waving the flag on the Fourth of July is demonstrably an “extremist” — and maybe even a potential “terrorist”.

Last month we reported on the question put by ICLA to the official representative of the United States at the OSCE meeting in Vienna about the federal government’s use of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as a resource to determine which American organizations are “hate groups”. Readers may remember that the representative dodged the question. He affirmed only that the SPLC has the right of free expression under the First Amendment, and never addressed the issue of its use by the government to separate the ideological sheep from the extremist goats.

Confirmation of the current drift of official policy — in which no left-winger is ever an “extremist”, while every right-winger is at least suspected of being one — was reported on Thursday by Judicial Watch. Below are excerpts from their press release about Air Force training materials they uncovered via the Freedom of Information Act:

Judicial Watch: Defense Department Teaching Documents Suggest Mainstream Conservative Views “Extremist”

Defense Document Suggests Colonists Fighting British Rule were members of “extremist movement”

(Washington, DC) — Judicial Watch announced today that it has obtained educational materials from the Department of Defense (DOD) depicting conservative organizations as “hate groups” and advising students to be aware that “many extremists will talk of individual liberties, states’ rights, and how to make the world a better place.” The documents repeatedly cite the leftwing Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as a resource for identifying “hate groups.”

Judicial Watch obtained the documents in a response to a Freedom of Information Act request (FOIA) filed on April 8, 2013. The FOIA requested “Any and all records concerning, regarding, or related to the preparation and presentation of training materials on hate groups or hate crimes distributed or used by the Air Force.” Included in the 133 pages of lesson plans and PowerPoint slides provided by the Air Force is a January 2013 Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute “student guide” entitled “Extremism.” The document says that it is “for training purposes only” and “do not use on the job.” Highlights include:

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