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This Year In Islamophobia

Nine years after Sept. 11, 2001, America saw perhaps its worst outbreak of Islamophobia since the attacks.

Experts wagered it came from the aimless fear and the anger people feel in times of economic crisis, exploited by certain politicians looking to give their party an advantage in the midterms and turned toward American Muslims.

Such an outbreak was possible in the days and months after Sept. 11's attacks. It never really materialized, experts say, in part because President George W. Bush stood up and told the nervous country that Islam is a religion of peace, and that American was not at war with Muslims.

He made no such appeal this year, and President Obama's pleas fell on deaf ears or, more accurately, ears that believe Obama himself is secretly, and sinisterly, Muslim.

Without further ado, then, is This Year in Islamophobia:

The 'Ground Zero Mosque'

When an imam — a known moderate imam who'd been sent by the U.S. government around the world on goodwill missions to Muslim nations — and a group of developers decided to turn the old Burlington Coat Factory building in downtown Manhattan into a community center and mosque, almost no one noticed. No one noticed for months, in fact, until all of a sudden, this summer, it exploded.

People like Pamela Gellar and Robert Spencer, who for years had been screaming about the dangers of Islam from the fringe, were suddenly front and center. Their assertions — that American Muslims are inherently dangerous, that the majority of imams are radical, that Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf is a terrorist sympathizer — were suddenly being repeated by the mainstream, by Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin and the like.

People said vicious things, calling the community center a shrine to terrorists and salt in an American wound.

The furor came to a head on Sept. 11, the ninth anniversary of the attacks, when protesters from both sides converged on the site, just a few blocks from Ground Zero itself and the memorial services being held. They screamed and chanted, and at least one man tore pages out of the Koran and scattered them throughout the street.

Then, as suddenly as it came, the furor died down to a few embers at the extremes. But the community center is still years and millions of dollars away from being a reality, and we can all expect more outrage to come.

The Koran Burner

When cultish Florida church leader Terry Jones announced that he would burn a pile of Korans in his front yard on Sept. 11, the media dug in and didn't let go. It became the biggest story of the week, with dozens of reporters and news crews camped out in front of Jones' church, while reporting that footage and even stories about such a bonfire could set off violent riots in the Muslim world and give recruiting fodder to terrorists.

So worried was the Obama administration that Defense Secretary Robert Gates called Jones personally to ask him not to burn any Korans. He eventually agreed to call off the event after a local imam told him that Rauf, the New York imam, had promised to move his community center, even though he hadn't. Jones never did go through with it.

The spectacle angered the "God hates fags" funeral protesters at the Westboro Baptist Church, who'd been burning Korans for years.

It also prompted copycats, like the man in Texas who tried to burn one of the holy books but was thwarted by a skateboarder, who described the incident thusly:

I snuck up behind him and took his Koran, he said something about burning the Koran, I said, "Dude you have no Koran," and ran off.

Sharia in Middle Tennessee

The opposition to a mosque near Murfreesboro, Tenn., started out scary — first with vandalism and then with an arson that claimed some of the mosque's construction equipment. But it quickly turned to farce, as opponents to the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro — which has been in town for 30 years and is now trying to expand — filed a lawsuit to try and stop it.

The lawyers for the opponents, partially funded by a Christian Zionist group, argued in county court that the mosque's permit for religious use should never have been approved because Islam, they claimed, isn't a religion. When the Justice Department filed a brief noting that the U.S. has recognized Islam since Thomas Jefferson's time, the lawyers claimed that the federal government couldn't be trusted because it had once condoned slavery.

The judge ruled that the mosque's construction could continue.

The Future

Violence has, fortunately, not spread past isolated incidents like the young man who slashed a Muslim cab driver in New York City.

But the story of Islamophobia in America is not over. Tensions between the Muslim community and federal law enforcement are growing, as the FBI continues to conduct undercover terror stings that some critics say amounts to entrapment. The new chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Rep. Peter King (R-NY) has claimed that Muslim leaders are insufficiently cooperative with terror investigations and therefore is holding hearings on the "radicalization" of Muslim Americans. Other congressmen have promised to try to keep the hearings from targeting Muslims.

And so what happens next year, and the year after that — whether cooler heads continue to prevail in the end — remains to be seen.

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Can You Guess Which Street Is Mayor Bloomberg's?

Take a look at these two post-blizzard New York City streets, courtesy Brooklyn blog Sheepshead Bites—one impeccably plowed, the other, well, not so much. Can you guess which one Mayor Mike Bloomberg lives on? Bloomberg has been his usual lovable self ever since the storm hit New York on Sunday. "The world has not come to an end," he told people."The city is going fine." Sheepshead Bites blogger Ned Berke, who lives on the unplowed street pictured above, does not agree, at all: It must be pretty easy to urge patience when you're well taken care of. It must be pretty easy when every agency caters to your needs, paid for by our greenbacks. It must be pretty easy to shrug off our complaints, as if our contribution—in both taxes and the workforce—amount to nothing. As of now we have no roads, no buses, no trains. Businesses remain shuttered. The sick don't make it to the hospital. To his credit, Bloomberg later apologized for acting so callous, but not without a little lashing out: Mr. Bloomberg said he shared the anger emanating from snowbound neighborhoods. But he also showed some irritation of his own, saying people's perceptions were based largely on whether their own streets were clear. Yep. I'll bet they are. Original photos: [Sheepshead Bay] Send an email to Max Read, the author of this post, at max@gawker.com. Read more at gawker.com

 

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WikiLeaks and our obligations: Is it wrong to bear true witness?

Amplify’d from www.guardian.co.uk

WikiLeaks and our obligations to the web of tellings

The principles of free speech, discretion and bearing witness come into conflict when considering a case such as WikiLeaks

Nicholas Shackel

'WikiLeaks has been defended as legally free speech, but for it to be ethical requires the legal freedom to be justified by the moral freedom.' Photograph: Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images

The question: Is it wrong to bear true witness?

Most of what we know, we know because someone told us. So we are all aware of the vital support given to us by the great web of tellings that surrounds us and we care a lot about the strength of that web. The ninth commandment (thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour) sounds right to most of us.

To give witness is to contribute a thread to the web of tellings on which we depend, a thread on which we will place weight. False witness is spinning a thread that will give way: an untruth, a half truth, an insincerity, a prejudice, a deception, an utterance born of malice.

Is it only neighbours we shouldn't bear false witness against? To me it seems wrong against others as well, but I can imagine circumstances in which lying about one enemy to another might be right. Anyway, it seems right to include as my neighbour anyone to whom loyalty is owed, and allowing the strength of the duty to vary with the strength of loyalty owed.

We might reasonably regard many of the governments involved in the WikiLeaks cables as distant neighbours and, given the extent of the cables involved, selective publication could be used to bear false witness, which on this principle would be wrong.

Careless gossip about our friends and family is obviously wrong, and it is no excuse – indeed, it makes it worse – if the gossip is true. Some things between us are for us, not for others: to give them away is to harm our relationship. Loyalty therefore requires discretion: confidences are to be kept, not told. Perhaps there is here a principle analogous to the ninth commandment: thou shalt not bear true witness against thy neighbour.

This doesn't sound quite right to me. What makes the telling wrong is not so much that the truth tells against (or for) your neighbour, but that they do not want it known, or that enemies can use it against them. On the other hand, some truths that tell against your neighbour ought to be told, and told by you, whether they want it told or not.

So the duty of discretion isn't simply not telling the truth against your neighbour. Rather, it must weigh with you that they do not wish it known or that enemies may misuse it, and this must be outweighed by other considerations before you tell. Remembering my earlier point about distant neighbours, WikiLeaks owes some degree of discretion. Discretion would count against the publication of cables more for their value as gossip than anything else, and also against indiscriminate publication.

WikiLeaks has been defended as legally free speech, but for it to be ethical requires the legal freedom to be justified by the moral freedom. Defence of the moral freedom can be based on the benefit to the audience, on free thought requiring free exchange of ideas and on autonomy and self-possession requiring free expression. When we defend free speech on these grounds we don't just mean that it's OK if people don't like what you say provided you are speaking rightly without error. We mean you should be free to speak wrongly and in error. But that means to defend a moral right to free speech is to defend the permissibility of saying what is morally objectionable and false.

So now we can see the problem: if these three principles (no false witness, discretion and free speech) are right, bearing false witness and indiscretion are both forbidden and permitted, which is a contradiction.

The Scottish philosopher William David Ross offered a way round this problem when he proposed that ethical principles of the kind discussed here are not absolute but, as he put it, prima facie. What he meant by this is that there is no general precedence among the principles but that what is ethical is determined by the balance of the prima facie principles as they apply in each specific circumstance.

If Ross is right (a question still hotly contested by philosophers), in arguing the rights and wrongs of WikiLeaks we are trying to balance prima facie principles of (among others) free speech, bearing witness and discretion. The principles conflict. There is no precedence between them and in this case how they balance is heavily influenced by questions over who is our neighbour and how close they are. Whose side are you on? How much discretion do you owe? How much indiscretion must we tolerate? The answers to these questions matter a lot and are hard to agree on. Granted our conflicting loyalties, we might still think we all owe something to civilisation and to that extent, while we should tell some truths about civilisation's failures, we also should be circumspect in indiscretions that give aid to barbarity. Read more at www.guardian.co.uk

 

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Who's my brother's keeper, Barack? Hint: it's not the government

Amplify’d from www.renewamerica.com

Who's my brother's keeper, Barack? Hint: it's not the government

By Bryan Fischer

Politico ran a long piece today about President Obama's increased references to his "Christian faith." It's difficult not to think that this is raw political pandering on the president's part, given his ardent and quite public support of everything Muslim and the virtual invisibility of Christianity in his administration heretofore. He can read poll numbers like anyone else. He likely knows that 32% of all the votes cast on November 2 were cast by evangelical Christians, and that he'd better suck up to them right quick if he wants to have a prayer of getting reelected in 2012. The Democrats suffered a bloodbath at the hands of evangelical Tea Partiers this fall, and he's running scared. His handlers likely are urging him to at least pretend to be a devout Christian. Of course, they add, just be sure to ignore all those pesky verses about the sanctity of life in the womb, the sanctity of marriage between one man and one woman, and the evils of homosexual behavior. We don't want you to be devout enough to take any of that stuff seriously. Hence his very public attendance at a worship service while on vacation in Hawai'i this week and his newfound fondness for quoting the Bible. Unfortunately for Mr. Obama, his favorite verse does not mean what he thinks it means, and if properly understood, would be more likely to make you a conservative than a socialist. The president is fond of reminding us all that we "our brother's keeper, our sister's keeper," a politically correct, gender neutral paraphrase of Gen. 4:9. This verse, the president says, is why he's a Democrat. In its original setting, the phrase is used by Cain just after he'd murdered his brother Abel. God speaks to Cain, and asks him where his brother is. Cain responds essentially by saying, "I have no idea, it's not my day to watch him." Literally, he says, "I do not know; am I my brother's keeper?" So these words are originally found on the lips of history's first cold-blooded killer and were part of a bald-faced lie to the Creator of the universe, spoken by a guy trying to dodge a homicide beef. If you're going to pick a Bible verse to be your mantra, I'd frankly recommend you start somewhere else. Be that as it may, the phrase has come down in modern parlance as a sort of variation on "Love your neighbor as yourself," or "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Okay, fine, let's go with that and accept for the sake of argument that this utterance represents one of the moral high water marks on the pages of Scripture. The question then becomes, "Who is my brother's keeper?" Answer: it's not government. The answer to the question, "Who is my brother's keeper?" is obvious. It's me. The brother is the keeper of the brother, not the government. Nowhere in the Bible will you find an admonition that government is to be anyone's keeper. I am to take care of myself, with God's constant help, and if I need outside assistance, it is to come from my family, my friends, and my faith community. Or to switch it around, if my brother needs help, he's supposed to get that help from me. Keeping my brother, even using the president's own favorite Bible verse, is not government's responsibility. It's mine. Democrats, including the president, are fond of trying abysmally to turn the Scriptures into a Marxist screed. It can't be done without prostituting the word of God. Regressives (my term for liberals, who want to take us back to the dark days of socialism) believe that compassion is giving away other people's money, and they believe in the involuntary transfer of wealth to get it done. But the involuntary transfer of wealth is just stealing. Conservatives, on the other hand, imbued with a biblical worldview, believe that generosity is giving away your own money, out of a heart of compassion inspired by the example and Spirit of Christ. Taking money from the pocket of one citizen at gunpoint and transferring it to the wallet of another citizen is theft, whether a thug does it or the government does it under color of law. And so the president's worldview is predicated on a gross violation of both the eighth and 10th commandments. The eighth commandment is blessedly straightforward and unambiguous: "You shall not steal." Just because government does it doesn't make it right. That just makes it legalized plunder, to use Frederic Bastiat's deft turn of phrase. The president's entire approach to the redistribution of wealth comes from Marx, not from the Bible. In fact, the 10th commandment prohibits class warfare of all kinds. "You shall not covet ... anything that is your neighbor's." But the entire mindset of regressives, including Mr. Obama, is based on a covetous, slavering, slobbering, trembling, itching greed for the possessions of others. It is accompanied by a dark, angry and thoroughly unchristian jealousy that some have more than others. That kind of greed comes from the pit of hell, not from the Father of lights. So Mr. President, you can have your favorite hacked-up Bible verse, just as long as you take it seriously. Let's get brothers back into the business of caring for brothers, and let's bind Big Brother down with the chains of the Constitution and the word of God and keep him out of our wallets and our families. (Unless otherwise noted, the opinions expressed are the author's and do not necessarily reflect the views of the American Family Association or American Family Radio.) © Bryan Fischer Read more at www.renewamerica.com

 

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It’s cold, so it can’t be Global Warming

To the editor:  A massive snowstorm hit the Midwest over the weekend, followed by the coldest weather in decades. While in England residents are facing a winter reminiscent of the Little Ice Age. And, in Paris they had to close the airport because of heavy snow and cold weather.  All of this was happening while the UN Global Warming Group (I’m sorry, it is now called Climate Change) and environmentalists around the world thought they would be basking in an example of global warmth — Cancun, Mexico. Unfortunately, an uninvited guest, Mother Nature, sent them a message that she, not they, was in charge of weather on earth. She blew a cold wind that plunged Cancun temperature to 54 degrees, a 100-year low. Not to be dissuaded those in attendance said that this was proof that the world is headed for disaster because of man made Co2 gas emissions.  Like a bunch of vultures looking for their next meal, the environmentalists dismiss the roller coaster nature of historic climate change while seeking a redistribution of wealth to those countries that have lacked the initiative to build their own economies. They dismiss that in just the past 100 years Earth has entered four periods of warmth and cooling. And, if it hadn’t been for some global warming we would still be living in igloos on a sheet of ice. Marion Eggleton Medford Read more at www.southjerseylocalnews.com

 

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Cancun: Global Hysteria, Wealth Redistribution

Amplify’d from www.thenewamerican.com

Cancun: Global Hysteria, Wealth Redistribution

Written by Alex Newman

Thousands of climate dignitaries representing almost every national government on Earth flew to Cancun, Mexico, for the great event. Security precautions were extensive: Battleships could be seen from the beach while thousands of soldiers and police lined the jam-packed roads. It was time for the 16th “Conference of the Parties,” or COP16 for short. The annual summit, which was held this year from November 29 through December 10, is an extravaganza of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC. The previous year’s COP15 in Copenhagen was massive — over 50,000 attendees in all, not counting protesters. It was well publicized, too. But after the spectacular failure of COP15 to deliver a binding climate treaty, and with little hope of securing one this time, expectations for COP16 were purposefully set low.

Unlike Copenhagen, which was deluged with Presidents, Prime Ministers, and high-level Cabinet officials, heads of state and top officials mostly stayed away from Cancun. UN bigwigs even downplayed the significance of the talks, dampening hopes of any major deal being reached. In comparison to the 2009 confab, where more than 5,000 journalists instantly reported every little detail to the world as it happened, large swaths of the world press basically ignored, or even ridiculed, the Cancun conference. The UNFCCC did not even fill the smaller quota of 2,000 slots it had allotted for the world press corps at COP16. Apropos for UN events, COP16 began with a lavish climate “Fiesta” on the beach, paid for by taxpayers around the world. While preaching austerity for the rest of humanity, the self-anointed Earth saviors lived it up: gourmet food; fancy drinks; excellent service; expensive entertainment, including a live mariachi band; and, of course, carbon emissions aplenty. Americans for Prosperity got in the party and filmed the giant gala; their video, entitled “Bureaucrats Gone Wild,” is posted online for your edification. But it wasn’t all party time; eventually the global “civil servants” had to get down to business.   The serious work of the summit began with a particularly bizarre start. The UN’s new climate boss, Christiana Figueres of Costa Rica, kicked off the climate festivities with a prayer to the ancient Mayan jaguar goddess known as Ixchel. Describing the mythic entity as a goddess associated with the moon, reason, creativity, and weaving — while carefully omitting Ixchel’s association with war, human sacrifice, and cannibalism — Figueres called on Ixchel to “inspire” the climate delegates. “May she inspire you, because today, you are gathered in Cancun to weave together the elements of a solid response to climate change, using both reason and creativity as your tools,” Figueres said in the opening speech, conveniently glossing over the massive sums of taxpayer money also being used as tools. “Excellencies, the goddess Ixchel would probably tell you that a tapestry is the result of the skillful interlacing of many threads.... I am convinced that 20 years from now, we will admire the policy tapestry that you have woven together and think back fondly to Cancun and the inspiration of Ixchel.” Fear Mongering & “Solutions” The doom and gloom started right away. Another introductory speech, this one by host-country President Felipe Calderon, painted an approaching dire apocalypse. “If we don’t act to prevent climate change, the cost will be much higher to reverse its effects,” claimed “His Excellency” Calderon (the UN really refers to distinguished delegates like that). “Approximately five to 10 percent of world GDP would have to be dedicated to alleviate the devastating changes.” Even worse: “The disasters caused by climate change are threatening the survival of human beings,” Calderon opined. He cited a hurricane, a fire, and a drought — phenomena that have plagued mankind for thousands of years prior to the invention of SUVs — as evidence of his claims and the need for massive wealth redistribution and a global carbon regime. It’s for “the children,” of course, he concluded. Meanwhile, a coalition of more than 40 island nations was claiming that, without big money and drastic regulations, it would soon be “the end” for them. “We are facing at this moment the end of history for some of us,” claimed Antonio Lima, vice-chair of the Alliance of Small Island States. “All these countries are struggling to survive. They are going to drown.” The solution, according to another alliance representative: “dramatically increase funds for the smallest and poorest of us.” Socialist Bolivian President Evo Morales said delegates needed to fight a “battle between capitalism and life.” Without a strong agreement, global warming “will keep getting worse,” he warned. Some of his proposed solutions: a “Climate Tribunal” for “climate criminals,” implementation of his “Declaration of Rights” for “Mother Earth,” and, of course, lots of capitalist money transfers. His sentiments were echoed by representatives of tin-pot dictators around the world — most of whom love to blame the problems they have created in their own countries on global warming and “evil capitalist” countries. Morales’ counterpart in Venezuela, socialist strongman Hugo Chavez, blamed a downpour that washed away some shanty towns in his utopia on “capitalism,” too. Their supposed solution: world socialism. This, naturally, was music to the ears of the Socialist International (SI), the worldwide organization of socialist and communist parties, which plays an important role at all UN conferences. The Socialist International — which counted Obama’s “Climate Czar” Carol Browner among its leaders until she left SI to join the new U.S. administration — joined the call for committing at least $100 billion per year into a United Nations “Green Fund,” ostensibly to save the poor. A proposal by Professor Kevin Anderson, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in the U.K., made a splash at Cancun. Anderson authored a paper for the Royal Society urging the adoption of a draconian World War II-style rationing system — for carbon emissions. “The Second World War and the concept of rationing is something we need to seriously consider if we are to address the scale of the problem we face,” he explained in the article, urging world rulers to limit electricity and prohibit food imports, among other things. His suggestion would involve a total freeze on economic growth in developed countries and “carbon rations” for every person on the planet. Unbelievably, at least one of his “Royal Society” colleagues said even that would not be enough. Another remarkable proposal came from media baron Ted Turner. Like the climate delegation from China, Turner urged planetary overlords at a luncheon in Cancun to adopt a global one-child policy modeled after the brutal communist Chinese system. “If we’re going to be here [as a species] 5,000 years from now, we’re not going to do it with seven billion people,” claimed Turner, who has five children of his own. Skeptics Enlighten With Reason — and Pranks Despite the avalanche of alarmism coming out of the summit, a few cooler heads did show up to offer their opinion. The Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), a market-oriented non-profit organization that deals with development and environmental issues, put on several events. They appeared to be the only well-represented group at the whole conference that could be classified in the “skeptic” category, which is to say they don’t buy into the false “consensus” that human activities are significantly causing a heating of the planet and therefore must be curtailed. Not surprisingly, their message was generally not very well received by conference participants.    Among the CFACT activities was a press conference promoted as “an opportunity for journalists to balance their coverage of COP16 by listening to all points of view.” Very few reporters, however, bothered to show up — let alone balance their coverage. The event included talks from several “skeptical” experts including Lord Christopher Monckton, the chief policy advisor to the Science and Public Policy Institute and science-policy advisor for Margaret Thatcher when she was British Prime Minister. “I think the world is in danger of throwing away its democracy, prosperity and freedom if it carelessly accepts what seems to me unresolved science and economics,” he told the press conference. “To try to stop this problem by cutting carbon is like King Canute [a King of England] trying to stop the tide [by commanding it to stop].”   University of Alabama research scientist, best-selling author, and former senior scientist in climate studies with NASA, Dr. Roy Spencer, was easily among the most qualified experts at the entire COP16 summit. He also spoke at the CFACT press conference. Among other things, Spencer told the assembled journalists that it would be irresponsible to force poor people to stop burning fossil fuels in favor of expensive and inefficient alternatives. He also attacked a paper published in the journal Science about clouds and their effect on climate change, calling the paper “a step backward for climate research.” Some youth CFACT activists — their group is called Collegians for a Constructive Tomorrow — also showed up. And they exhibited a sense of humor in battling the alarmism, getting delegates, activists, and other conference “experts” to sign a petition for banning “Di-Hydrogen Monoxide,” otherwise known as water. Nearly every delegate they asked readily signed on to banning the evil substance, often while drinking water from a nearby watercooler. “There’s kind of this aura about the conference that these are experts meeting,” CFACT executive director Craig Rucker told The New American from Cancun. “But they are not people endowed with some sort of special scientific understanding of the natural world. They’re very ordinary folks who, in our opinion, have much more of a political agenda than they do a scientific one. That’s what the video on di-hydrogen monoxide revealed.” CFACT also obtained the signatures of climate delegates on a bogus petition to reduce the U.S. GDP by six percent via trade restrictions if the U.S. does not cooperate with the international community on carbon reduction. The CFACT video of the Cancun attendees signing these farcical petitions has been posted all over the Internet, powerfully demonstrating the mindset of the green true believers who are demanding to control the planet. Process, Protests, Progress In the press, the hottest topic throughout the summit was the Kyoto Protocol. The 1997 agreement expires in 2012. Currently, it is the main mechanism used by the warmists internationally to limit emissions and raise money. It basically forces developed countries, accounting for less than one-fourth of total global emissions, to cut back on releasing carbon dioxide through the Clean Development Mechanism. The money raised by selling “carbon credits” is used to finance “green” projects in poorer countries. But in Cancun, there was a problem. Japan’s climate delegation steadfastly refused to renew its commitments, complaining that China, India, and the United States — some of the world’s largest “emitters” — were not participating. “It does not make sense to set a second commitment period,” Japanese Environment Vice-Minister Hideki Minamikawa told reporters. “[Signatories] to Kyoto only represent 15 per cent of global emissions, but the countries who have signed up to the Copenhagen accord cause 80 per cent of emissions. We want a single binding treaty.... We should jump ship to a more effective framework.” Canada, Russia, and some other governments were also opposed to renewal. But Third World governments on the climate dole, including the communist Chinese regime and other, smaller ones, demanded the renewal of Kyoto as a precondition for “progress.” Climate delegations had reached an impasse — or so it seemed.   Final Agreements The summit in Cancun failed to produce a binding deal or even a concrete renewal of the Kyoto Protocol. However, the UN climate dignitaries did finally reach an “agreement” of sorts, citing the accord as evidence of progress and vowing to expand the climate regime later. Almost every government in the world signed on to what the global body is calling the “Cancun Agreements.” And similar to the process used to create the COP15 Copenhagen Accord last year, wealthier regimes simply bribed rulers of poor nations with continued promises of free technology and at least $100 billion per year by 2020 to fight “climate change.” Exactly where the money will come from has still not been determined, however. “Cancun has done its job,” claimed UN climate boss Christiana Figueres in a statement at the summit’s conclusion. “The beacon of hope has been reignited and faith in the multilateral climate change process to deliver results has been restored.” She said the Cancun Agreements represented a “new beginning,” not the end. “It is not what is ultimately required, but it is the essential foundation on which to build greater, collective ambition,” she said. Predictably, the agreements were attacked by far-Left greens for not going far enough fast enough, many of whom were out in force at Cancun, serving as a foil to make the delegates appear as “capitalist” stooges by comparison. However, critics on the Right noted that even though the summit did not accomplish what the protestors and even the summit’s most ambitious advocates had hoped, the agreements are far from being the harmless documents described in most media accounts. “Notwithstanding the carefully orchestrated propaganda to the effect that nothing much will be decided at the UN climate conference here in Cancun, the decisions to be made here this week signal nothing less than the abdication of the West,” declared science-policy expert Lord Monckton after reading one of the draft documents. “The governing class in what was once proudly known as the Free World is silently, casually letting go of liberty, prosperity, and even democracy itself,” he added. “No one in the mainstream media will tell you this, not so much because they do not see as because they do not bloody care.” Cathie Adams, Sovereignty & Security chair for Eagle Forum and a correspondent at COP16 for IRN/USA Radio Network, has been attending UN summits since 1995. “The United Nations knows what they want and they put facilitators in place to accomplish their end goal,” she told The New American. “It really has never been a process of nations joining together. It’s a process of nations submitting to an international authority.” She said the finalized Cancun Agreements were “huge” for the UN. “What they came up with in the final draft was a process to begin the scheme where they’re going to be able to have a global tax,” she said, referring to a plan to have a UN body collect taxes on shipping and aviation to supposedly fund “climate” action. “It is incredulous for the UN to demand that a sovereign nation pass laws to fit the UN’s political agenda, but that is essentially what they did,” Adams noted. She also said 2012 — the 20-year anniversary of the climate hysteria — will probably be the big date for a final, binding treaty. The next COP climate summit is scheduled for early December 2011 in Durban, South Africa. And while some observers are already predicting the imminent collapse of the alarmist movement and ridiculing the scam in the world press, other analysts claim that the UN climate “monster” is still far from dead — especially with the tens of billions of dollars already invested in it. Photo of Socialist Bolivian President Evo Morales at Cancun: AP Images Read more at www.thenewamerican.com

 

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Pope's Bank Accused Of Fiddling The Books

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Pope's Bank Accused Of Fiddling The Books

Locked in the vaults and protected by the Vatican walls is God's designated bank, the l'Istituto per le Opere di Religione.  Since 1942 money from Catholic churches around the world have used the Pope's bank to transfer funds.

This week The Independent published documents alleging that the bank had failed to account for 20 million Euros destined in part for Germany and the rest to another Italian Bank.

It's not the only instance which has come before the courts.  In October the Sicily Police uncovered what is believed to have been a transaction involving a Catholic priest who's Uncle has been convicted of crimes associated with the Mafia.  Police have asked for a legal explanation for 250 000 euro, allegedly illegally obtained from a regional government.

In both cases the Vatican, while considered a separate state has agreed to comply with financial regulations established the European Union.  This includes disclosing the source of funds which in both cases the Vatican is alleged to have failed to comply with.

The wealth of the Catholic bank is hard to establish, but some put the figure as high as 2 billion Euros.  With such significant resources and guided by the ethical concerns of the church most would consider the institution would be above reproach.

Yet, historically the bank has been in hot water on a number of occasions.   Formed in 1942 the bank is alleged by Holocaust survivors, Russians, Croatian citizens and Roma to have profited from their being detained as well as containing and concealing assets obtained by the Nazi's during the war.

In 1982, no less than the head of the Vatican Bank, Archbishop Paul C. Marcinkus, was indited as an accessory for the 3.5 billion collapse of the Italian Bank Banco Ambrosiano.

The investigation could not overcome the stumbling block when the Italian courts ruled that employees of the Vatican could not be prosecuted, given the special status of being an independent State within Italy.

In the current scandal to hit the Vatican prosecution documents obtained by the Independent state that the actions of the Bank were "with the aim of hiding the ownership, destination and origin of the capital".

Where the case will end up, God knows!

If you have any comments on this article please email Mary Banfield: info@cultureclashdaily.com

References:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/vatican-bank-hit-by-financial-scandal-again-2164321.html

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,922953,00.html

http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/09/21/awaitng-art-vatican-bank-probe-threatens-new-scandal-for-bele/

http://www.apfn.org/skolnicksreport/vaticanbank.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4737372.stm Read more at www.cultureclashdaily.com

 

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US to Vatican: Genetically Modified Food Is a "Moral Imperative"

Amplify’d from www.truth-out.org

US to Vatican: Genetically Modified Food Is a "Moral Imperative"

Vatican City. (Photo: Argenberg)

Secret United States diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks detail efforts to promote genetically modified (GM) crops and biotechnology across the globe, including the Vatican, where US diplomats pushed the Roman Catholic Church to support biotech food in developing nations.

Cables from embassies in Spain, Austria and even Pakistan reveal the US diplomats have clearly sided with the biotech industry, even as court cases  and public debates over GM food raged in the US and abroad.

In 2005, a US diplomat and a USAID official met with Catholic leaders in Rome to discuss biotech foods, according to a leaked cable.  The diplomats reported that Catholic leaders said the science and safety of GM food would soon be a "non-issue" in the Vatican and signaled a cautious acceptance of biotech products despite active opposition among the faithful:

Preoccupation at the Vatican, they said, was tied more to economic arguments, as some fear that widespread use of GMO food in the developing world would subjugate its farmer population and become a form of economic imperialism simply serving to enrich multi-national corporations.

US diplomats pledged to continue pushing GM foods as a "moral imperative" to feed growing populations in order to counter opposition to the biotech food industry among Catholic activists and clergy.

A document drafted by scientists linked to the Vatican and leaked to the press in 2010 suggested the Catholic Church could have a moral obligation to promote GM food crops to combat world hunger, according to the British newspaper The Independent.

Other cables reveal plans to counter anti-GM initiatives across Europe, and in 2008, US diplomats declared the Monsanto MON-810 corn crop in the biotech stronghold of Spain as "under threat" from a campaign to ban GM crops in Europe.

Spain was the first European country to approve the MON-810 corn variety, and by 2009, Spanish farmers were responsible for 75 percent of the MON-810 crop in Europe, according to the leaked cable.

Top Spanish officials warned US diplomats that Spain was under pressure from other European Union (EU) countries to ban MON-810, and Monsanto officials told the diplomats that acceptance of the product was threatened by an agreement between the French government and environmental groups.

Truthout recently reported that, in 2007, the former US ambassador to France wanted to "retaliate" against the French for creating anti-GM momentum in Europe and questioning the safety of MON-810 when the product was up for re-evaluation in the EU.

France suspended cultivation of MON-810 in 2008 despite a EU report that found no new risks associated with the crop. French and independent scientists initiated a rigorous debate with EU scientists over MON-810, and by 2009, bans were in place in France, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Greece and Luxembourg.

Additional cables from the Spanish embassy tracked the country's approval  of GM corn varieties and identified Spain as a "country worth continuing to target" in efforts to promote acceptance of biotechnology.

MON-810 is engineered to excrete the Bt toxin, which is poisonous to some insect pests. A stacked version of MON-810 is also engineered to be resistant to glyphosate, an herbicide first popularized by Monsanto under the brand name Roundup. Read more at www.truth-out.org

 

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From New Vatican Rules To Malaysia’s Alcatel Probe

Amplify’d from blogs.wsj.com

High Tide: From New Vatican Rules To Malaysia’s Alcatel Probe

By Samuel Rubenfeld

A roundup of corruption-related news from Dow Jones and other sources.

Bribery:

Malaysian anti-corruption authorities launched their own investigation into U.S. claims of bribery by Alcatel to obtain contracts. (Reuters)

U.S. pharmaceutical companies are worried about how the U.K. Bribery Act will be enforced. (Fairwarning)

Just as he did with enforcement actions, Tom Fox details his top ten FCPA investigations of 2010 in two parts.

FCPA Blog releases its 2011 watch list.

Thebriberyact.com warns about facilitation payments under the U.K. Bribery Act.

Money Laundering:

The Vatican said the Pope will issue new rules that have the force of law to increase transparency at its bank after a money laundering investigation led to the seizure of $30 million. More here. (AP, Antimoneylaundering.us)

Colombian football seeks to escape the grip of drug cartels, which allegedly launder profits through the teams. (Guardian)

The Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission said it has recovered Sh50 million (or about $600,000) stashed abroad in the last two months. (Daily Nation)

Sanctions:

Standard Chartered has launched a review of its compliance with U.S. sanctions, after revealing it is in discussions with American authorities about its “past business” with Iran. (Daily Telegraph)

The United States dismissed claims that it had sent mercenaries to Ivory Coast to oust president Laurent Gbagbo. The West African delegation delivering the ultimatum to Gbagbo said more meetings were needed. (Guardian, Al Jazeera)

General Anti-Corruption:

The U.S. has had trouble penetrating the web of corruption that envelops Afghanistan, and the case of banker Haji Muhammad Rafi Azimi illustrates the problem. Azimi, who U.S. and Afghan officials say bribed senior officials, moved money for drug traffickers and kept the Taliban flush with cash, denied wrongdoing in an interview. (Wall Street Journal) Read more at blogs.wsj.com

 

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Robot Turns Spinal Surgery Into a Flight Simulator Game

Amplify’d from www.fastcompany.com

SpineAssist is a small robotic arm coupled with a workstation unit that allows surgeons to map out a patient's spinal anatomy in advance (pictured). The package also includes a clamping fixation device and special software to control the robot. These are currently the only robots specifically created for spinal surgery.

So far, spinal implants have been inserted in 2,000 different surgeries using SpineAssist. There have been no cases of nerve damage, Mazor says. A newly released study in the medical journal Spine indicates a 98% success rate in implant accuracy via SpineAssist. And a presentation at a 2010 spinal surgery conference says use of the robots reduced patients' hospital stay by a third and led to a 70% reduction in misplaced implants.

Mazor's robotics system are primarily used in cases of scoliosis and severe spinal deformities. The Dallas Morning News recently wrote on the use of SpineAssist on scoliosis patients in Texas:

"Like a pilot in a flight simulator, I can map out the patient's spinal anatomy and perform the entire procedure before the patient even arrives for surgery," [SpineAssist co-creator Dr. Isadore] Lieberman said. "I contribute the basic carpentry, just putting the screws in the right spot."

In addition to increasing precision, Lieberman said SpineAssist reduces a patient's radiation exposure during surgery. Lieberman said that with SpineAssist there's less chance of an infection, less pain after surgery, fewer complications, shorter hospital stays and quicker recovery.

"We envision this technology as ushering in a new era in spine surgeries, the same way laparoscopies transformed general surgery in the 1990s," said Sara Misuraca, program director of the Scoliosis & Spine Tumor Center at Texas Health Plano.”

The use of robotics for spinal surgery is, naturally, a new field. Hospitals will need to be sold on purchasing SpineAssist systems and on arranging training sessions for surgeons. Mazor is currently selling SpineAssist to hospitals for $660,000, along with an annual $66,000 service fee. Spinal implants marketed by the firm are also proprietary. Given the inflated costs of just about everything in healthcare, that seems a small price to pay for empirically faster and easier surgery. Read more at www.fastcompany.com

 

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Amplify’d from www.guardian.co.uk

National Archives: Britain lobbied pope to intervene in IRA hunger strike

Exchanges between Margaret Thatcher and the Vatican disclosed along with embassies' guidance on prison uniforms

Owen Bowcott

Margaret Thatcher in 1980. She told the then pope his 'wisdom and experience are of inestimable value to us all'. Photograph: PA

British diplomats lobbied Pope John Paul II repeatedly to secure his assistance in ending the IRA's 1980 hunger strike, exchanges between Margaret Thatcher and the Vatican reveal.

Documents available at the National Archives from today also demonstrate how, as part of the propaganda war against the republican protest, UK embassies were instructed to discover whether prisoners around the world had to wear uniforms. Even the releaxed dress code of Liechtenstein's inmates was recorded.

The Provisional IRA and Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) members had launched a hunger strike in the Maze prison with five demands for their political status to be recognised, including the right not to wear a uniform or do prison work.

In the run-up to the confrontation, the Foreign Office asked diplomats to report on the use of uniforms in other countries. "The practice of wearing prison uniforms in Spanish goals was discontinued," a diplomat in Madrid wrote.

In Italy, prisoners dressed in "khaki-coloured suits". In Austria, convicts had uniforms "of quite good quality and by no means blatantly distinctive". In Portugal, the suits, it was said, "would not attract attention since [they were] the sort worn by the average labourer".

Swiss criminals, the embassy in Berne noted, were not required to wear uniforms and "the foregoing also applies to Liechtenstein". Convicted prisoners in Turkey were not obliged to wear prison uniforms, a diplomat in Ankara added, "if only because the government does not provide any".

Humphrey Atkins, the Northern Ireland secretary, cannot have been reassured. Secret cabinet minutes on 23 October record him proposing to issue a statement making clear "that the government [was] in no circumstances prepared to grant special status to the PIRA prisoners but that as part of the continuing process of penal reform they were prepared to allow all prisoners to wear approved civilian clothing.

"[Atkins] considered that a statement on those lines would deprive the protesters of a great deal of public sympathy … and would be better made now than at a later stage when it could be presented as a surrender to the prisoners' action."

The prime minister agreed but insisted that "once the government's position had been made clear, no further concessions should be offered." Similar comments – such as "We cannot make any concessions" – appear in the margins of other cabinet documents on the hunger strike in Thatcher's charcteristic blue felt pen.

The government's slight shift in position did not deter the hunger strikers. Seven republican volunteers in the H-Blocks refused food on 27 October 1980. A report sent to the cabinet in early November warned that republican families "are very willing for their kin to die for the cause".

There was also disappointment in the cabinet that while "individual priests (such as Fr Faul) are undoubtedly doing their best, the church is not being particularly helpful. Cardinal O'Fiaich and Bishop Daly have not as yet taken a very constructive line."

But there were plans to stiffen the resolve of the Catholic church. Sir Mark Heath, the British ambassador to the Vatican, had been summoned to convey a personal message from the pope to the prime minister.

"I would ask you to consider personally possible solution in order to avoid irreversible consequences that could perhaps prove irreparable," the pope's letter to Thatcher pleaded.

The ambassador added a covering note: "When I asked what further practical steps he thought we could take in addition to the concession on clothing, he was silent. [The pope] said that the clergy would continue to urge the prisoners to give up their strike and [that] the message was a personal one from the pope himself."

On 24 November the prime minister flew to Rome and met John Paul II. On her return she penned a grateful letter. "I derive encouragement, instructions and inspiration from our discussion," she told him. "Your wisdom and experience are of inestimable value to us all. I will continue to reflect for a long time on what you said."

She continued: "I and my colleagues in the government are firmly resolved that it would be utterly wrong … to take any steps which could be regarded as conceding that political motives can excuse murder or serious crimes.

"In view of the sensitivy of the issue involved, I have asked HM minister to the Holy See to seek an early opportuinity to explain matters more fully to the cardinal secretary of state; and for that purpose I am arranging for a senior official … in the Northern ireland Office to go to Rome to assist Sir Mark Heath."

The prime minister also told the pope: "You may be sure we very much welcome the efforts of the clergy in Northern Ireland to persuade the prisoners both to give up the strike and to end their protest; and I hope you will be able to give full support to this objective."

In mid-December, after a plea from Cardinal O'Fiaich as one of the hunger strikers approached death, the protest was called off. The recriminations soon began; a second – and more deadly – hunger strike was launched the following year. Read more at www.guardian.co.uk

 

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VIA UT ROMA (Road To Rome)***

The Ark of Noah

The Search for Sodom And Gomorrah

'Don't ask' survey really didn't ask

URL:  http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=244653

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Hawaii guv suddenly 'mum' on Obama birth 'certificate'

URL:  http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=244797

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NY's Dumbest; NYC sanitation workers destroy a Ford Explorer

SODOM AND GOMOROW FILM