GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) — The Islamic militant group Hamas has unveiled a memorial for nine activists killed last year in an Israeli raid on an international flotilla seeking to break a blockade of the Gaza Strip.

The memorial at Gaza’s harbor includes nine 12-yard-(meter)-high metal statues shaped as sails, and a new public park.

Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh said Tuesday the memorial commemorates “the heroes who drew the world’s attention to the siege of Gaza.”

Israel and Egypt have enforced the blockade since Hamas took power four years ago. Last week, Egypt permanently opened the border. But Israel still enforces its sea blockade and other restrictions.

The Turkish group behind last year’s flotilla is planning another one in June. Israel vows to block it.

I wonder if Director of National Intelligence James Clapper still thinks the Brotherhood is a “largely secular” group?

(JPost) — The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is using mosques as the headquarters of its party branches, and the organization is gradually seeking to create a Shari’a-based state, former Mossad chief Shabtai Shavit warned on Tuesday, during a conference on the internet’s role in recent upheavals in the Arab world in Tel Aviv.

Shabtai, who chaired the conference held at Tel Aviv University and organized by the Tel Aviv Workshop for Science, Technology and Security, said that the Muslim Brotherhood remained the only real organized political force in Egypt, and that the current military council leading the country until elections “was a link between the old hated regime and its replacement.”

He added that the foundations of the old Mubarak regime, including the ruling party, the interior ministry, and prisons were currently being dismantled in Egypt.

“The Muslim Brotherhood could not be crushed by past regimes because of its dual identity as a religious and a political movement. Every mosque is a party branch headquarters. Every cleric at the mosque is the party branch chairman. A contribution to the mosque is a contribution to the party,” Shabtai added.

The Brotherhood was maneuvering itself through the current turmoil in Egypt skilfully, Shabtai said, adding that its immediate goal was to be a balance changer in parliament, following the upcoming parliamentary elections.

Why is CNN of all places the only network looking into this?

HT: HAP

Not exactly shocking news except for the fact that they’re now admitting it.

(The Blaze) — While the theme song to the kids show Sesame Street encourages people to ask how to get there, one author just finished an expose exploring what’s really in the popular show: left-wing propaganda.

Sesame Street, with it’s loveable and fuzzy characters, is really a mouthpiece for the left’s agenda. That’s the conclusion of author Ben Shapiro, who after interviewing hundreds of industry insiders found that many of Hollywood’s most popular shows, including the popular kids program, are inundated with secret political messages. And he got top executives to admit it.

Shapiro’s new book, “Primetime Propaganda: The True Hollywood Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV,” according to it’s description “is the story—told in their own words—of how television has been used over the past sixty years by Hollywood writers, producers, actors, and executives to promote their liberal ideals, to push the envelope on social and political issues, and to shape America in their own leftist image.”

For example, Shapiro quotes Mike Dann, one of Sesame Street’s founding executives, saying it “was not made for the sophisticated or the middle class.” Using the premise, the team worked in all sorts of messages, including Grover breaking bread with a hippie and Oscar the grouch who was supposed to address “conflicts arising from racial and ethnic diversity.” Dann also admitted he used the program in the wake of 9/11 to highlight peaceful alternatives to war.

Keep reading…

The continuing religious cleansing of Christians that goes almost completely ignored by the MSM and western governments.

Mosul (AsiaNews) – Iraq’s Christian community has been the victim of another targeted killing. This morning, an Orthodox Christian was killed in Mosul, northern Iraq. The dead man had been the victim of two attempted ransom abductions in the past, but in both cases, he was able to escape from his attackers. This time, the murderers waited for him as he went to work, firing at him several times in cold blood.

Sources, on condition of anonymity for security reasons, told AsiaNews that Arkan Jihad Yacob was an Orthodox Christian, and the vice director of a cement factory.

Born in 1948 in Mosul, the married father of four was the victim of two previous abduction attempts, ostensibly to extort ransom from his family. In both cases, he was quick enough to thwart his attackers.

This morning however, the men who went after him meant to kill and they succeeded. Arkan Jihad Yacob was shot several times as he made his way to work in an execution-style cold-blooded murder. His killers used a silencer.

The local community took part in Arkan’s funeral in Mosul’s Syro-Orthodox cathedral. With his death, Iraqi Christians find themselves again under attack from Muslim extremists.

The previous incident goes back to 16 May, in Kirkuk, when the body of a Christian man was found. He had been killed after being abducted, his body mutilated, because his family could raise US$ 10,000 to pay for the ransom (see “Kirkuk: young Christian abducted, tortured and beheaded,” in AsiaNews, 16 May 2011).

Time-limited, scope-limited, kinetic military action (TLSLKMA).

(Guardian) — Nato has only one question as it prepares to unleash Apache helicopters against the forces of Muammar Gaddafi this week, and Captain Ali Mohammed, one of the defenders of the besieged rebel city of Misrata, can supply the answer.

If, as most pundits predict, tomorrow’s peace mission to Tripoli by South African president Jacob Zuma fails, Nato will hit the Libyan leader harder than it has ever hit him before.

British Apaches, together with French Tiger attack helicopters, will launch surgical strikes on Gaddafi’s forces besieging Misrata. They have the ability to destroy individual gun positions in the town of Zlitan, west of Misrata, with less risk to the civilian population kept there as human shields.

But there is a problem. This kind of war takes time, and time is the commodity Nato does not have as critics complain it has extended the original United Nations no-fly zone mandate into what is regime change in all but name.

The big question is whether the defenders will crumble under the onslaught, or fight with the same tenacity shown by their rebel enemy in Misrata. “If you use Apaches, it is sure they will run away,” said Mohammed. “There is a big difference between Gaddafi’s men and ourselves. I am defending my home, my family, my city. But Gaddafi’s forces do not believe in what they are doing.”

Another stunning display of PC run amok.

(Daily Mail) – Teachers reprimanded two seven-year-old boys for playing army games – because it amounted to ‘threatening behaviour’.

The youngsters were disciplined after they were spotted making gun-shapes with their hands.Staff at Nathaniel Newton Infant School in Nuneaton, Warks., even told the boys’ parents to ‘reprimand’ them.

A father of one of the boys said: ‘This is ridiculous. How can you tell a seven-year-old boy he cannot play guns and armies with his friends.

‘Another parent was called over for the same reason.’We were told to reprimand our son for this and to tell him he cannot play “guns” anymore.

‘The teacher said the boys should be reprimanded for threatening behaviour which would not be tolerated at the school.

Keep reading…

If we keep flushing our Judeo-Christian heritage down the toilet we’ll turn into the UK.

(Fox News Radio) — A Texas pastor who was told he could not pray in the name of Jesus during a Memorial Day ceremony at Houston National Cemetery has been granted a temporary restraining order.

U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes issued the order preventing the Dept. of Veterans Affairs and the Houston National Cemetery from ordering Pastor Scott Rainey to remove the name of Jesus from his prayer. The judge ruled that such censorship violated the First Amendment.

“It is very clear that a pastor has a right as a private citizen to speak his mind freely and not have the government censor or edit the content of his speech, said Jeff Mateer, general counsel of the Liberty Institute and the attorney representing Rainey. “Our veterans fought and many died for our religious freedom and to have it stripped away under the façade of inclusiveness is the height of offense to those who have served our country.”

Rainey, the pastor of Living Word Church of the Nazarene, has delivered prayers at the Memorial Day service for the past two years. But this year the cemetery’s director asked him to submit his prayer in writing.

The prayer concluded with the words, “in the name of Jesus Christ, the risen Lord.”

“People should be very alarmed that the government was attempting to censor someone’s private religious prayer,” Liberty Institute attorney Erin Leu told Fox News Radio. “That violates the First Amendemnt and it’s clearly unconstitutional.”

Keep reading…

And yet Obama singles out Israel.

Via PMW:

The Palestinian Authority’s ideology is to refuse to recognize Israel’s right to exist. The media it owns and controls regularly publish articles that demonize the modern State of Israel and its establishment as a “colonialist plan”.

Recently, the official PA daily went even further, not just maligning the modern State of Israel but also labeling the Jewish/Israelite presence in the land of Judea/Israel 2000 years ago as a “crude form of colonialism”.

The following is the PA daily’s defining ancient Judea/Israel as “colonialism”:

“The Zionists must acknowledge publicly, in front of the world, that the Jews have no connection to the Palestinian Arab land, upon whose ruins arose the colonialist settler Zionist plan that settles and expels, represented by the Israeli apartheid state. That which occurred two thousand years ago (i.e., the Jewish/Israeli presence in the land), assuming that it is true, represents in the book of history nothing more than invention and falsification and a coarse and crude form of colonialism.”

At times, the PA’s denial of Israel’s right to exist serves as the justification for its claim that Israelis should all leave their homes in Israel.

PA TV narrator addresses the Jews of Israel, asking them to leave, because Israel has no right to exist:

“Where are you [Israelis] from? Where are you from? Where are you from? Of course, you’re from Ukraine; of course, you’re from Germany, from Poland, from Russia, from Ethiopia, the Falasha (pejorative for Ethiopian Jews). Why have you stolen my homeland and taken my place? Please, I ask of you, return to your original homeland, so that I can return to my original homeland. This is my homeland; go back to your homeland!”

Keep reading…

Yay, looks at us, we’re useful idiots!

Via The Blaze

Really, this is his defense?

ROMNEY: I understand there are a lot of people who would like me to get up and say it was a terrible, boneheaded idea, it was a terrible mistake and we are all entitled to mistakes. The only problem is it wouldn’t be honest. we solved a serious need that existed in our state.

Q: President Obama can’t wrap his arms around you tightly enough. He said RomneyCare inspired ObamaCare.

ROMNEY: If I become president, I will repeal ObamaCare. My bill was 70 pages. His is over 2,000. He’s doing a lot of stuff that’s devastating to the health care system in this country. He’s wrong.

Here’s how different they are:

Thanks Barack.

(INN) — It is now apparent that the reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah is also a wedge for the accreditation of organizations such as Islamic Jihad.

Mahmoud Abbas, the  Palestinian Authority head, met in Cairo on Monday with Ramadan Shallah, secretary- general of Islamic Jihad, and his deputy, Ziad Nakhleh.

Egypt’s official Middle East News Agency (MENA) said the Palestinians confirmed their readiness to restart peace negotiations with Israel. They want them  based on U.S. President Barack Obama’s May 19 speech stating Israel’s pre-1967 lines as a starting point for new borders. This is an indication of the negative impact of the Obama address, as this is now the starting point in the Arab mind for any negotiations, and further concessions are expected.

No dipshit, it is the finest, name one that even comes close to the American military?

From yesterday’s Memorial Day speech:

“It’s one of my highest honors. It is my most solemn responsibility as president to serve as commander-in-chief of one of the finest fighting forces the world has ever known.”  Huh,  can you name one that is even close? Who else are you talking about,  Mr. President?

HT: Big Peace

I know fact-checking takes a back seat when doing a global warming hysteria piece but the majority of scientists blame this year’s tornadoes on La Nina.

In a world of climate change, freak storms are the new normal. Newsweek’s Sharon Begley on why we’re unprepared for the harrowing future, and how adapting to the inevitable might be our only option.

Joplin, Missouri, was prepared. The tornado warning system gave residents 24 minutes’ notice that a twister was bearing down on them. Doctors and nurses at St. John’s Regional Medical Center, who had practiced tornado drills for years, moved fast, getting patients away from windows, closing blinds, and activating emergency generators. And yet more than 130 people died in Joplin, including four people at St. John’s, where the tornado sucked up the roof and left the building in ruins, like much of the shattered city.

Even those who deny the existence of global climate change are having trouble dismissing the evidence of the last year. In the U.S. alone, nearly 1,000 tornadoes have ripped across the heartland, killing more than 500 people and inflicting $9 billion in damage. The Midwest suffered the wettest April in 116 years, forcing the Mississippi to flood thousands of square miles, even as drought-plagued Texas suffered the driest month in a century. Worldwide, the litany of weather’s extremes has reached biblical proportions. The 2010 heat wave in Russia killed an estimated 15,000 people. Floods in Australia and Pakistan killed 2,000 and left large swaths of each country under water. A months-long drought in China has devastated millions of acres of farmland. And the temperature keeps rising: 2010 was the hottest year on earth since weather records began.

Picture California a few decades from now, a place so hot and arid the state’s trademark orange and lemon trees have been replaced with olive trees that can handle the new climate. Alternating floods and droughts have made it impossible for the reservoirs to capture enough drinking water. The picturesque Highway 1, sections of which are already periodically being washed out by storm surges and mudslides, will have to be rerouted inland, possibly through a mountain. These aren’t scenes from another deadly weather thriller like The Day After Tomorrow. They’re all changes that California officials believe they need to brace for within the next decade or two. And they aren’t alone.

Keep reading…

Fear-monger.

(CBS News) — Newly-elected DNC chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (D-Fla.) said Sunday that the recen tDemocratic victory in a special election in a conservative upstate New York district was evidence that voters across the country disapproved of the Republican proposal for Medicare which, she argued, would end the program “as we know it.”

In an appearance on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” Wasserman-Schultz said that the GOP plan, outlined in Wis. Rep. Paul Ryan’s proposed 2012 budget, would unfairly target young Americans.

“[Republicans] would take the people who are younger than 55 years old today and tell them, ‘You know what? You’re on your own. Go and find private health insurance in the health care insurance market. We’re going to throw you to the wolves, and allow insurance companies to deny you coverage and drop you for pre-existing conditions,’ ” Wasserman-Schultz told CBS’ Harry Smith. ” ‘We’re going to give you X amount of dollars and you figure it out.’

He’s in denial, the conservative base will be sitting this one out if Romney is the nominee.

(The Hill) — Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) sees his chances of beating President Obama as “better than 50-50.”

The Republican presidential candidate said Tuesday that his chances of beating Obama are “very good,” something he attributes to the economy.

“I probably do give myself better than 50-50 odds, but it’s up to the American people. And I’ll tell them what I believe, and if that works, great,” he said on NBC’s “Today” show.

“There’s no sure thing in politics, but this is a time when the American people are really concerned about the scale of government — they want to cut it back — and they’re concerned about the economy, long-term and short-term. And that’s in my wheelhouse,” he explained.

Sued for stating the blatantly obvious?

(Ahlul Bayt News Agency) – The Vigilance Musulmane (Muslim Vigilance) think-tank lodged a complaint with the Centre for Equal Opportunities and the Fight Against Racism (CGKR) against VUB professor of sociology Mark Elchardus, for statements about Islam and antisemitism he made in the De Morgen newspaper.

On May 12 the newspaper published the results of a study ‘Jong in Brussel’ by the Youth Research Platform. In the article Mark Elchardus said that antisemitism among Muslim students was theologically inspired and that there is a direct link between being Muslim and harboring antisemitic feelings.

Vigilance musulmane say that this goes back to the idea that every Muslim is antisemitic. His statements incite the public opinion to hate all Muslim citizens on the basis of their religious convictions. The think-tank say Elchardus’ claim violates the anti-discrimination law of 2007 , which forbids discrimination on the basis of ‘religious convictions’. They say his statements also violate article 444 of the penal code, since they were repeated extensively in print.

If that did happen (and it could considering the infestation of Islamists in the Pakistani military’s ranks) would we have any other choice but to send in the B-52s?

The Taliban has said they have no plans to attack Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, asserting that it is the only Muslim state possessing such weapons and the terror group aims to take over the country as well as its nukes.

Taliban has stepped up a violent campaign to avenge Osama bin Laden’s death that has renewed fears that the country’s warheads could be vulnerable.

Declaring that “Pakistan is the only Muslim nuclear power state,” Taliban spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan said that his group had no intention of changing the fact, Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported. The Taliban, after all, aim to take over Pakistan and its weapons, he said.

A well-coordinated Taliban attack on Pakistan’s key naval airbase at Karachi had triggered fresh global alarm that radical militant groups operating from the country’s restive tribal areas bordering Afghanistan might be out to snatch nuclear weapons.

Seeking to dismiss these concerns, Ehsan claimed that the US was using this as an excuse to pressurise the Pakistani government and military into fighting Taliban, whom he portrayed as the country’s true protectors.

“Isn’t it a shame for us to have the Islamic bomb, and even then we are bowing down to the pressures of America?” the Taliban spokesman mocked.

WSJ said Ehsan’s remarks appeared tailored to appeal to the increasingly nationalist mainstream, where conspiracy theories flourish about American, Indian and Israeli plots to deprive Pakistan of its atomic arsenal.

Keep reading…