Daily Archive

Reuters:

Six Britons accused of plotting to blow up at least seven transatlantic airliners recorded martyrdom videos saying the attacks were revenge for the invasion of Iraq, a London court heard on Friday…

…”If you think you can go into our lands and do what you are doing in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and keep on supporting those who are fighting against Muslims and think it will not come back on your own doorstep, may you have another think coming,” said Umar Islam, one of the eight defendants…

And the BBC reports:

…One man, said to be defendant Umar Islam, described his plans as “revenge” for the actions of the United States and its “accomplices such as the British and the Jews”.

He warned: “Martyrdom operations upon martyrdom operations will keep on raining on these kuffars [non-believers] until they release us and leave our lands.”…

Many might sadly say one could easily re-construct a very similar basis for an idiotic vendetta, in the precise reverse. Indeed, all too typical appears how the eloquent Mr Islam — …”Most of you are too busy watching Home and Away and EastEnders, complaining about the World Cup and drinking alcohol, too busy to care…” — spouting such while having lived his life in that same overwhelmingly non-Muslim and free Britain, obliviously avoids addressing the obvious: not only the curious question as to whether those were even really his lands (or might he be the interloper there and elsewhere?), but that it might well also be said it is a darn good thing everyone else thankfully does not interpret their religio-cultural outlooks as being so awash in, and stupidly animated by, hyper-self-pitying fetishes over “revenge”.

Another point: why does this Reuters piece fixate primarily on Iraq? (Were any of these men Shia or Kurd Iraqis?) Moreover, it informs us of their being “Britons”, despite Mr Islam himself having been recorded identifying his lands as being elsewhere. Reuters, inexplicably, doesn’t choose to explore the perhaps glaring contradiction there. For given such, it does appear rather reasonable to assert that their “Britishness” seems rather weak, at best. (One suspects, for instance, concern about the health of the Duke of Edinburgh has never been high on their individual, personal agendas.)

And speaking of fetishes, according to The Telegraph, these self-appointed paragons of global morality:

…planned to distract airport security staff who might have searched them as they boarded the aircraft by carrying “dirty magazines” and condoms in their hand luggage.

They would have hidden the explosives inside drinks bottles and hollowed-out AA batteries, which they planned to jumble together with keys, chewing gum and cigarettes…

Separately:

…As police listened in on the men using a hidden bug, they heard Umar Islam and Abdulla Ahmed Ali discuss a train bombing in which one participant wanted to take his child…

Similar to July 7, 2005, ‘cept even more deranged. Interestingly, while also using that top quote late in their piece, notice how ITN’s opening emphasis differs from that of Reuters:

A flat in Walthamstow was used as “bomb factory” by a gang of terrorists plotting to blow up planes, a court has heard.

Prosecutors at Woolwich Crown Court said the small flat in Forest Road was purchased for £138,000 in cash the month before the arrests and was also used to film “martyrdom” videos…

In an apartment in Walthamstow. Where’s that, you ask? Unfortunately, just another halfway between here, there and evidently any place . . . on this planet in our current Western world.

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Some, through personal experience, have endured a more personal, unapologetic daily “fanaticism”, up close and personal.

CNN:

James Dobson said Wednesday that presumptive Republican nominee John McCain had not been successful in uniting conservatives since capturing the nomination – and that recent moves by the senator instead “appear to be fracturing an increasingly divided constituency.”

“I have seen no evidence that Sen. McCain is successfully unifying the Republican Party or drawing conservatives into his fold. To the contrary, he seems intent on driving them away,” said the Focus on the Family founder, in a statement to the Wall Street Journal…

Well, then, one assumes that Mr Dobson and all those other “divided conservatives” will enjoy the bound to be “unifying” Obama presidency. Therefore, Mr Dobson should be pleased to discover:

A key Hillary Clinton supporter appeared to be a bit off message during a recent interview with a Canadian radio station.

“If I had to make a prediction right now, I’d say Barack Obama is going to be the next president,” Missouri Rep. Emanuel Cleaver said in a Canadian public radio interview this weekend. “I will be stunned if he’s not the next president of the United States.”…

One can only presume then that Rep Cleaver has studied the electoral map closely, and can already tell us precisely how Sen Obama will win 270 electoral votes.

For ourselves, let’s have a laugh in a very preliminary state by state “guess-timate” as to how Sen McCain might well arguably do for a start in the Electoral College — based on states as near certainly Republican to “leaning” Republican, and tossing in a couple of states that might be considered “swing”, but which one suspects (based on recent presidential elections) will go Republican:

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Of course, some few of those “McCain” states will go the other way, while some others not in his column will probably in the end go for him. So, from where he is now, it would appear he is in reasonable shape to fight the campaign.

All told, whatever media and certain representatives are hoopla-ing, the way matters are likely actually to play out in November (and assuming Sen Obama wins the Democratic nomination, which is still a big “if”) it doesn’t exactly look like a coming Obama walkover, does it? Well, at least it won’t be as long as Sen McCain stays in the race that is.

With the race “hotting” up, money raising has come to these shores. The Independent:

The invitation list is typical of the star-studded soirees that have placed Elisabeth Murdoch at the pinnacle of London’s most glamorous party circuit. Later this month, the Oscar-winning actress Gwyneth Paltrow will rub shoulders at Ms Murdoch’s home with, among others, a Swedish heiress, the fashion director of Vanity Fair and the River Café co-founder Ruthie Rogers.

But what may seem just another gathering of the capital’s mid-Atlantic glitterati at the Notting Hill house that Ms Murdoch shares with her husband, Matthew Freud, the PR guru, was given global political significance yesterday when it was announced that the occasion in question is a fundraiser for Barack Obama, with attendees paying up to $2,300 (£1,160) each into the American presidential candidate’s campaign fund…

Hopefully, those in attendance find the witty repartee truly enchanting. Although, presumably unmissed — and (elegantly, of course) undiscussed — will be another prominent Sen Obama backer, of whom Victor Davis Hanson writes:

…With Obama the likely nominee, we can also expect to hear more from, and about, his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. Reporters no doubt are scanning Rev. Wright’s massive corpus of texts and DVDs for more hate speech…

Obviously, if he gets the Democratic nod, Sen Obama’s nomination is, to borrow a turn of phrase from a famous person, not the beginning of the end, but it is the end of the beginning. You can do you own election at this link. Enjoy.

This morning in The Telegraph, Anne Applebaum shares with British readers an excellent piece on “multi-racial” Barack Obama and “race” in current America.

I won’t quote any of it: you need to read it in its entirety.

The Times:

The ebbing regime of Robert Mugabe began its fightback in earnest last night, launching raids against opposition offices and foreign journalists in what many feared was the start of a campaign of intimidation…

No one who’s knows anything about Robert Mugabe’s bloody “career” path since the days of colonial Rhodesia in the mid-1960s, should be surprised. He is unlikely to go quietly. And he doesn’t do “coalitions” either.