spinbadz own

If I hadn't seen so many things like it I would be pinching myself that the following, posted on MEMRI is not fictitious:

On November 13, 2005, Saudi Al-Majd TV aired an interview with Jordanian lecturer on religious law Sheikh Dr. Ahmad Nawfal. Sheikh Dr. Nawfal is a lecturer at the Shari'a Faculty of the University of Jordan, and was associated with Sheikh 'Abdallah 'Azzam, the spiritual leader of the movement of Arab and Muslim volunteers for jihad in Afghanistan and the spiritual mentor of Osama bin Laden.[1] Nawfal has acknowledged collaborating with 'Azzam in launching jihad operations against Israel from Jordanian territory.

TO VIEW THIS CLIP GO TO: http://www.memritv.org/search.asp?ACT=S9&P1=925 .

The following are excerpts from the interview:

Nawfal: "The Jews dug 40 meters into the ground, and found nothing. There is no indication that a temple existed there. Brothers, they are making fun of you. Unfortunately, we are unwittingly legitimizing this nonsense of theirs. This is nonsense. This is heresy and blasphemy against God, history, human beings, and common sense. We, unfortunately, are being swept along with the tide. And then we write books that give them legitimacy. This is strange.
"Sir, if David and Solomon were to return to life, these [Zionist] criminals would fight them and they would fight back. David and Solomon were among our ranks. If Solomon had a temple, we would be worshipping Allah in it. We would not be worshipping idols and polytheism in it, like they do.
[...]
"Armageddon is a word in English, and it has become a film of global proportions. They have inflated it to the point that it has become an actual belief. There are now dozens of millions of pro-Zionist Americans who believe that the temple should be founded on the ruins of Al-Aqsa, in order to hasten the coming of the Messiah - as if Allah accelerates his timetable on the basis of human deeds. Thus, they want to hasten the coming of the Messiah by accelerating the destruction of Al-Aqsa and the building of the temple on its ruins."
Television host: "How many people in the West are motivated by this belief?"
Nawfal: "Hundreds of millions."
Television host: "Hundreds of millions."
Nawfal: "Worse still, [they include] decision-makers. Reagan is one of those who believe in this, and now Bush has passed Reagan by light years in his belief in this. His campaign against us is not a transient, political issue. This issue is stuck in his head. It is their faith. Many pro-Zionist Christians are more extreme than Sharon, much more extreme.
[...]
"They believe that the decisive global war will take place on the Megiddo Plain. The film gave it all different dimensions - different metaphors and symbols... They are too sophisticated to say it straightforwardly. No, they hint at it. But ultimately, they have managed to plant in people's minds the belief in Armageddon."
[...]
Nawfal: "Roger Garoudy said: 'If we take the number of gas chambers and the maximal daily capacity of an oven, and multiply them by the period you Zionists, claim the Holocaust lasted - even if we multiply the number of ovens by the maximal [capacity], the figure is grossly exaggerated. The number of those burned [sic] was 600,000. You added another zero, and turned it into six million.'"

With newspaper circulations spiralling ever downward, and international source information available at the fingertip, one wonders why a localised leftist tabloid like Australia's Sydney Morning Herald bothers footing the cost of stationing reporters overseas.

Herald reports in any case, much more often than not, echo Britain's Guardian, or Reuters, or the BBC.

The paper's reporters, similarly, seem to progress up the food chain as they echo relativist and Amerika-loathing flora and fauna like Chomsky, Fisk and Our Johnny Pilger.

Why pay for an echo? In the Internet era one can, of course, access the devil direct.

Surely noone wants to pay to read pimple-faced Bradley somebody piously puporting to give the US President a failing "report card" (sic) on one page, and some rugby boofhead with journalistic pretensions drooling over a speaking tour to Perth by hyperbolist Maureen "I hate W" Dowd on the next.

Let alone smarmy Washington-based tortoises like M. Gawonka (I think that's his name) giving an "inside" account of something that was described in infinitely more colour and detail - and with identical bias - in the Times or the Post a week ago.

Not that the Herald does not have a few quality columnists. But Miranda Devine, Paul Sheehan and Gerard Henderson can be bookmarked and read without swimming through crud.

That the Herald tolerates rightists and centrists on the payroll at all might simply be to do the minimum necessary to bring an expanded readership.

More likely it's so that management may pretend the kind of "balance" and bogus moral high ground that George Orwell famously torched so long ago, mutatis mutandis:

"…(T)here is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writing of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States …"

Yet the Herald, decades after Orwell, plods along under the boneheaded misapprehensions that such (mutatised and mutandised) relativism:

a) is not completely transparent;
b) stimulates readership; and
c) earns credibility.

Hence west-critical relativist gems continue to fall out of the Herald like mangoes from Queensland trees.

Lovechild reporters like Paul McGeogh and Peter Hartcher continue to get star billing, the former with endless, credibility-challenged and no doubt costly doom and gloom reports from Iraq.

Hartcher, on the other hand, delivers a stream of op-ed pearlers like today's, the crux of which was that public opinion was with US President Bush when he invaded Afghanistan, but against him in Iraq; therefore Iraq is/was a mistake and Bush a failure.

He describes the 9/11 atrocity as a military "strike", just like the US "strike" on Iraq (in the same sentence).

Then there was the dissembling mumble filed yesterday by Ed O'Loughlin, the Herald's man in Israel/Palestine. According to Ed, and the headline, it wasn't clear whether Hezbollah or Israel initiated the recent conflagration along the Israel-Lebanon border.

Even though:

d) the blow-ups were coordinated by Hezbollah - at different points on the border;
e) a United Nations representative condemned Hezbollah for initiating the attacks;
f) the entire UN Security Council, except for the one Arab representative thereon, chided Hezbollah for initiating the attacks; and
g) the conflagration started in the Shebaah Farms part of the border, which Hezbollah has aggressively claimed is Lebanon's ever since the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon some years ago.

Perhaps it's just an innocuous report, a typical Herald offering, but nevertheless: what a sad day for the paper when a much more balanced, clear and factual account of the incident can be found - in simultaneous real time - by simply clicking on the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs web site!

There you will also find useful, relevant, pertinent background. Like the fact that even the UN condemns Hezbollah's contesting the Shebaah Farms territory, recognising the border as legitimate.

O'Loughlin, the Herald's sponsored expatriate, merely describes the zone as "disputed" territory that Israel "occupies".

Azahiri Bin Husin, now dead, is the murdering superbigot said to have "masterminded" the Bali atrocities. Today's papers described him as a former mathematician with two university degrees.

He is thus revealed as an educated fellow. His pedigree is not dissimilar to a number of the Aum Shin Rikyu cult lunatics who perpetrated the '90s sarin gas attack on a Tokyo subway station.

Members of that milieu were famously revealed as university-educated computer geeks and technofiles. That prompted energetic discussion in the Japanese press at the time about the correlation, or otherwise, between powers of logical deduction and emotional stability.

When the saga of chess super grand master Bobby Fischer re-ignited some months back, with that American exile being forced to flee Japan to Iceland, such discussions were similarly re-ignited.

Fischer, you may recall, began vomiting (in the most unrestrained and obscene terms) anti-American and anti-Jewish conspiracy theories like they were going out of style. This stupefyingly brilliant former world champion is himself Jewish and American, and appeared at one level to be a few beads short of a full abacus.

We might rest easy with a similar take on Azahiri, though he clearly wasn't in the same academic league as the extraordinary Fischer.

Yet other explanations for Azari's behaviour are deductible from early reports following his capture by Indonesian police: resentment towards Australia and Australians after failing a mechanical engineering degree at the University of Adelaide; a warped sense of Islamic duty following deep inculcation into the faith after the death threatened his child, and even, perhaps: sadism, pure and simple - if it's true that he "enjoyed" watching innocent child and adult victims explode into gory, nail-ridden pieces.

Maybe the motivator(s) was(/were) something else altogether. Ultimately the whys and wherefores matter not. Azari's were acts of a hateful and warped mind, howsoever they were arrived at, and timely reminders of that old chestnut about prayer being the last resort of the wicked.

The significance of dreams has been much on the writer's mind in recent days. for several reasons:

a) One early morning a concerned Mrs S prompted a spousal scurry to the Internet in search of dream interpretations, of which there are plenty and varied. In course of which activity the searcher was fascinated to discover that one Sigmund Freud postulated that the four most common dreams are/were (in 1900):

- falling,
- teeth falling out,
- nakedness in public,
- and I can't remember the fourth;

b) I cut my nails after awakening from a bad dream the other morning to discover a real-life itchy spot aggravated.

But the clinching prompter of this post was last night's dream, which we'll call

c), in which the writer dreamt he was telling a particularly poor joke he had thought up laying in bed the previous night, to wit: (n.b. joke was concocted after reading newspaper articles regarding arrests of suspected would-be Salafist mass murderers):

Guy behind bar (in dream): One of the guys arrested was a converted Christian, an Anglo-Australian.
Moi: Yeah, I heard. Those guys are often even more fanatical than the others. I heard they call them "Ken Oliver"s.
Guy: Why's that?
Moi: Well, the pronounciation's not quite Aussie, more like "Ken Olover". These Ken Olivers become leaders, or "sheikhs" and give fiery speeches, in which case they're (cue drumroll, Elvis jingle):

sheikh-ken-ol-o-ver.

I would get my coat and cane, but I kid thee not: I dreamed I was telling that joke.

Could have been worse. Like something to do with Sheikh Dat, Sheikh Doun, Ima(n) Drughz etc., all of which crossed the diseased mind before dropping off to jackalalaland.

But whatever one makes of present company's dreaming, hain't nuthin' next to the hallucinations evidently experienced by one Sheikh Omran of Melbourne, as quoted in The Australian this morning.

My group, he said in a prepared statement (apparently delivered to the press),

"considers the security of our nation with high priority".

This quickly followed up with an expression of "alarm and uneasiness" over the arrests of 13 of his Islamic congregants in connection with confiscation of bundles of the same chemicals used in the July 7 London mass murders.

Now Sheikh Omran's track record includes:-

- proclaiming Osama a good man;
- accusing the US of 9/11;
- supervising a guy named by the French secret service as "the (sic) recruiter in Australia ... for jihad";
- Ooozing inflammation and hate at popular "prayer" sessions every Friday night.

Wake up, Sheikh. You're dreaming, son. We do not want you even thinking about, let alone considering "with high priority" Australia's security. Not your business, friend. Nor does it require a Freud to elucidate a range of possible interpretations of your statement.

The thing about doing a Clinton is that you have to, as old man Capone said, do it good.

With little flame icons dotting maps of France and fire engulfing screens in media reports the world over, the flames having been sparked by what might have been a relatively innocuous incident were it not for the race-meets-poverty tinderbox in which it took place, it's hard not to be reminded of the Tom Wolfe novel, isn't it.

Since the first night of riots 21st century "new journalism" has cashed in, as have the real-life equivalents of the civil rights leaders portrayed in the book.

With the French riots running ever hotter, Australian TV today coincidentally showed a willing fist fight between suspected terror sympathisers (arrested by Australian police) and journalists outside a Melbourne court.

Reminded me of the scene in "Bonfire" where a cameraman mercilessly baits Sherman McCoy outside a court and then snaps a pic of his angry face, same being plastered all over the next day's front pages without reference to the actual context.

Except that in this case,

a) the fight with media itself being the story; and
b) cameras being on hand to show a wide angle of the incident,

Viewers were treated to a rare view of just how invasively close television cameras come to their targets. A swarm of them invaded the personal space of the Muslim youths as they walked away from the court, coming within inches of their faces and trailing them in that position.

Not that that excused the extremity and violence of the youths' reaction. Same can be said of what's going on in France.

In 1998 a World Cup conquering French football team composed largely of the offspring of North African immigrants, the envy of the sporting planet, prompted warm toasts and loud boasts Gaul-wide.

How could the events of last night have occured in the very same country(?) :

The unrest spread to at least nine Paris-region towns overnight Tuesday, exposing the despair, anger and criminality in France's poor suburbs - fertile terrain for Islamic extremists, drug dealers and racketeers.

The violence, concentrated in neighborhoods with large African and Muslim (search) populations, has highlighted the difficulties many European nations face with immigrant communities feeling marginalized and restive, cut off from the continent's prosperity and, for some extremists, its values, too.

"They have no work. They have nothing to do. Put yourself in their place," said Abderrahmane Bouhout, president of the Clichy-sous-Bois mosque, where a tear gas grenade exploded Sunday evening. Local youths suspected a police attack, and authorities are investigating.

The violence cast doubt on the success of France's model of seeking to integrate its large immigrant community - its Muslim population, at an estimated 5 million, is Western Europe's largest - by playing down differences between ethnic groups. But rather than be embraced as full and equal citizens, immigrants and their French-born children often complain of police harassment and of being refused jobs, housing and opportunities.

"If French society accepts these tinderboxes in its society, it cannot be surprised when they explode," said Claude Dilain, the Socialist mayor of the Clichy-sous-Bois suburb.

Eric, a 22-year-old in Clichy-sous-Bois who was born in France to Moroccan parents, said police target those with dark skin. He said he has been unable to find full-time work for two years and that the riots were a demonstration of suburban solidarity.

"People are joining together to say we've had enough," he said. He refused to give his surname because talking to reporters was poorly regarded in his neighborhood.

"We live in ghettos," he added. "Everyone lives in fear."

Many immigrant families are trapped in housing projects that were built to accommodate foreign laborers welcomed by post-World War II France but have since succumbed to despair, chronic unemployment and lawlessness. In some neighborhoods, drug dealers and racketeers hold sway and experts say Islamic radicals seek to recruit disenchanted youths by telling them that France has abandoned them.

Le bonfire of les vanities. Without any nuance or restraint.