Ah, the land of my birth, which has not been my country since I became an American nearly 40 years ago and the liberal media seem to have the sort of relationship only a Chamberlain could love.

If you listen to “progressives”, Cuba is a true paradise under the Castro regime, with great health care, fair governance, great health care, a benign leader, great health care, liberty beyond belief and, of course, great health care.

They embrace Che as the noble revolutionary while ignoring his status as engineer of the Cuban death camps and view Fidel and Raoul with the reverence they once reserved for Ho Chi Minh.

They overlook the regime’s suffocation of human rights as a mere “detail” that holds little significance in the face of all that Fidelian benevolence they perceive on that island made miserable by what amounts to an oppressive tinpot dictator.

Can you imagine what the New York Times would say if we quarantined all of America’s HIV victims, as they began doing in the late 1980s in Cuba?

From the L.A. Times, 1988

A member of the first U.S. delegation to visit Cuba’s quarantine center for people infected with the AIDS-causing human immunodeficiency virus Thursday described the detention facility as “pleasant” but “frightening in its implications.”

The first detailed picture of what the Cuban government calls its “sanitarium” for all identified HIV carriers was painted by Ronald Bayer, associate professor at Columbia University’s School of Public Health, in an interview with The Times.

Cuba is the only nation in the world that has mandated universal HIV testing and enforced isolation of all virus carriers. Bayer said he was told by Cuban health officials that one-third of the nation’s 10.2 million people have been tested so far and that 240 Cubans–171 men and 69 women–have been placed in the camp, where they are required to spend the rest of their lives. They are removed from their jobs but continue to be paid.

“We were shown groups of nondescript apartments that looked like typical Cuban suburban housing,” Bayer said. “It was neither barracks-like nor dungeon-like, although I have to assume we were shown the best. It was impossible to tell whether the complex was surrounded by a wall or a fence.

“But even if it all looked as good as what we saw, it does not resolve the moral justification of incarceration based on supposed future behavior,” said Bayer, a medical ethicist who has long specialized in AIDS, or acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

My emphasis above.

Well, that sentiment came from an L.A. Times journalist 24 years ago. That paper is a member, in good standing, of the liberal media.

How times have changed since then.

From Times Watch:

So Much for Civil Liberties: Communist Cuba’s Mandatory AIDS Quarantine Defended in New York Times, Dictator Castro Praised

New York Times “global health correspondent” Donald McNeil Jr. made a rare trip to Cuba and filed a report praising the Communist island’s handling of the AIDS epidemic for Tuesday’s “A Regime’s Tight Grip on AIDS – In Cuba, rigorous testing, education, and free condoms help keep the epidemic in check.” Conspiciously absent from that headline, especially for a newspaper that prides itself on defending civil liberties, were the involuntary quarantines of AIDS patients that took place in Cuba until 1993.

McNeil also downplayed concerns about the sanitarium prisons for AIDS patients (”life inside was not brutal”), a policy the Times would no doubt find dangerous and repellent if done in America. He also praised Cuba’s “universal health care” and free condoms and credited “socialism” for Cuba’s success.

(The same edition of the Science Times was much harder on American health policy, featuring medical writer Tara Parker-Pope talking to a doctor angry about the medical tests selfish Americans demand, a theme well-suited to the Times’ call for cost-cutting via universal health care: “Plenty of Blame in a Health System ‘Designed to Fail.’”)

McNeil opened with the case of Yudelsy García O’Connor, the first Cuban baby known to have been born with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, and downplayed the quaranatine policy.

Ms. García is alive thanks partly to lucky genes, and partly to the intensity with which Cuba has attacked its AIDS epidemic. Whatever debate may linger about the government’s harsh early tactics — until 1993, everyone who tested positive for H.I.V. was forced into quarantine — there is no question that they succeeded.

Cuba now has one of the world’s smallest epidemics, a mere 14,038 cases. Its infection rate is 0.1 percent, on par with Finland, Singapore and Kazakhstan. That is one-sixth the rate of the United States, one-twentieth of nearby Haiti.

The population of Cuba is only slightly larger than that of New York City. In the three decades of the global AIDS epidemic, 78,763 New Yorkers have died of AIDS. Only 2,364 Cubans have.

Other elements have contributed to Cuba’s success: It has free universal basic health care; it has stunningly high rates of H.I.V. testing; it saturates its population with free condoms, concentrating on high-risk groups like prostitutes; it gives its teenagers graphic safe-sex education; it rigorously traces the sexual contacts of each person who tests positive.

{rigorously traces the sexual contacts of each person who tests positive — I’ll just bet Cuba’s “healthcare” system does}

You’ll notice how the Times writer justifies (because it worked) the quarantine system.

Now, again imagine if the U.S. Government did the quarantine number on Americans with HIV. What are the odds the same journalist and, in fact, the entire body of N.Y. Times writers wouldn’t begin immediately pummeling Washington with a massive editorial crusade condemning such offensive violations of human rights.

Apparently what would constitute “dastardliness” here in the U.S. of A. is perfectly acceptible in a nation governed, as our media seems to believe, in a more enlightened way.

What stupidos these liberals are… Ooops, sorry; It’s just all those things they know that aren’t so.

From Wesley Pruden today,

Celebrating Easter and the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, the most important holy day for Christians of all denominations, can be deadly in the Middle East. Reciting a Scripture or humming a hymn could cost your head in Saudi Arabia, and you could risk other highly valued body parts in the similarly benighted ninth-century neighborhoods abounding in the lands of caliphs, imams and ayatollahs.

Beheading is something of the national sport of Saudi Arabia, where the government has scheduled for Friday the gruesome ritual for a man, the father of five, accused of sorcery for “making predictions” in his native Lebanon. (Punditry can be risky there, too.)

Better to take your celebration to Israel, where the government will assist your visit. It’s the difference between Middle East and the cultural West, between the 8th and 21st centuries, between civilized and not-so-civilized. The Israeli guarantee of religious freedom, taken for granted in the nations of the West, is part of what invites hostility and belligerence from Israel’s neighbors.

Ah, yes. The sweet, sweet freedoms found in the Muslim world versus the liberty smothering, murderous, despotic aparthied of Israel. Right, Barack, Joe & Hillary?

Pilgrims proceed under protection today along the Via Dolorosa, believed to be the path that Christ took with His cross to the crucifixion at Calvary, and on to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.

Many Christians, particularly Roman Catholics, believe Christ was buried on the site three days before the Resurrection. Christians and everyone else are welcome to join the procession. Unless a suicide bomber or other evil-doer slips through security, no one will be harmed. The Israeli government guarantees it.

The Israeli Declaration of Independence, adopted in 1948, declares Israel to be a Jewish state, but further declares that the nation “will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants, irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions.” It’s a promise bereft of Jeffersonian eloquence, but it’s plain and to the point.

My emphasis there. Try and find anything like that on the “Arab street.”

Moshe Dayan, the defense minister who led the Israelis to victory in the Six-Day War, was clear about religious tolerance and protection in a radio broadcast the morning Jerusalem was captured. “This morning,” he said, “the Israel Defense Force liberated Jerusalem. We have united Jerusalem, the divided capital of Israel. We have returned the holiest of our holy places, never to part from it again. To our Arab neighbors we extend, also at this hour - and with added emphasis ‘at this hour’ - our hand in peace. And to our Christian and Muslim fellow citizens, we solemnly promise full religious freedom and rights.”

And in a column today from Carolyn Glick that is, as always, right to the point:

There is an element of irony in the current crisis of relations between the Obama administration and Israel. On the one hand, although US President Barack Obama and his advisors deny there is anything wrong with US-Israel relations today, it is easy to understand why no one believes them.

On the other hand on most issues, there is substantive continuity between Obama’s Middle East policies and those his immediate predecessor George W. Bush adopted during his second term in office.

Yet, whereas Israelis viewed Bush as Israel’s greatest friend in the White House, they view Obama as the most anti-Israel US president ever. This contradiction requires us to consider two issues. First, why are relations with the US now steeped in crisis? And second, taking a page out of Obama’s White House chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel’s playbook, how can Israel make sure not to let this crisis go to waste?

The reason relations are so bad of course is because Obama has opted to attack Israel and its supporters. In the space of the past ten days alone, Israel has been subject to three malicious blows courtesy of Obama and his advisors. First, during his visit to the White House last Tuesday, Obama treated Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu like a two-bit potentate. Rather than respectfully disagree with the elected leader of a key US ally, Obama walked out in the middle of their meeting to dine with his family and left the unfed Netanyahu to meditate on his grave offense of not agreeing to give up Israel’s capital city as a precondition for indirect, US-orchestrated negotiations with an unelected, unpopular Palestinian leadership that supports terrorism and denies Israel’s right to exist. Next, there was the somewhat anodyne — if substantively incorrect — written testimony by US Army General David Petreaus to the Senate about the impact of the Arab world’s refusal to accept Israel’s right to exist on US-Arab relations. In the event, the administration deliberately distorted Petreaus’s testimony to lend the impression that the most respected serving US military commander blames Israel for the deaths of US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. After Petreaus rejected that impression, his boss Defense Secretary Robert Gates repeated the false and insulting allegation against Israel in his own name.

Finally there is was the report this week in Politico in which nameless administration sources accused National Security Council member Denis Ross of “dual loyalties.” Ross of course has won fame for his career of pressuring successive Israeli governments into giving unreciprocated concessions to Palestinian terrorists. Still, in the view of his indignant opponents in the Obama White House, due to his insufficient hostility to the Israeli government, Ross is a traitor. If Ross wants to be treated like a real American, he needs to join Obama in his open bid to overthrow the elected government of Israel.

Read the rest here.

The differences between Islam’s definition of “civilized” and the western interpretation of same are 180 degrees apart, and when you examine these differences from the point of view of even one iota of decency, the Muslims come out looking pretty evil while the rest of us emerge looking good.

Despite the glaring obviousness of this concept, Barack Hussein and his White House junta choose to attack Israel while all but worshipping the terrorist spawning fascism of Islam. No matter how they attempt to justify it, Obama, Biden and Clinton are profoundly transparent where the reality of their positions are concerned: They are wrongly supporting our enemies against our only true ally in the Middle East because they perceive Arab dictatorships and terrorism as being more in line with their own mindsets.

After all, the submission without quarter expected of a good Muslim is the same attitude they secretly wish they could provoke towards themselves among the American people, good facists that they are.

…seems to be underway.

An international humanist organization has warned that Islamic governments are trying to use the United Nations to shut down free speech. The warning comes as a bloc of Islamic states is holding a summit with “Islamophobia” high on the agenda.

The Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) on Thursday began a meeting in Senegal, with the shadow of Danish cartoons satirizing Mohammed and a Dutch lawmaker’s film criticizing the Koran hanging heavily over the gathering.

The 57-member bloc is considering a report by a new body set up to monitor instances of what many Muslims view as growing prejudice against them and their religion, particularly in the years since 9/11.

Warning that Islamophobia poses a threat to global peace and security, the 58-page report by the “Islamophobia Observatory” examines the reasons for the perceived trend — exemplified by stereotyping, hostility, discriminatory treatment and the denigration of “the most sacred symbols of Islam” — and suggests ways to combat it.

The recommended steps include a range of responses, including monitoring of and responding to incidents, and a campaign to show Islam to be a “moderate, peaceful and tolerant” religion.

But the report also says that legal measures are required.

Legal measures, huh?

“There is a need for a binding legal instrument to fight the menace of Islamophobia in the context of freedom of religion and elimination of religious intolerance,” it says.

“The Islamophobes remain free to carry on their assaults due to absence of legal measures necessary for misusing or abusing the right to freedom of expression.”

Islamic states must therefore keep “the pressure on the international community at the multilateral forums and bilateral agendas,” the OIC report recommends.

Since the uproar over the Mohammed cartoons in 2006, the OIC has stepped up its attempts in international forums to protect Islam against criticism. Late last year it succeeded in getting the U.N. General Assembly to pass a first-ever resolution on the “defamation of religions.” Islam was the only religion mentioned by name in the text.

The OIC has 56 votes at the 192-member General Assembly, but it managed to win sufficient support from non-Muslim nations, mostly in the developing world, to see the resolution pass by 108 votes to 51, with 25 abstentions.

Repeat after me: The U.N. is our friend. The U.N. is our friend. The U.N…. ah, forget it, even after I repeated it 1000 times, I still wouldn’t be able to convince myself of its veracity.

As the U.N. prepares later this year to mark the 60th anniversary of the landmark Universal Declaration of Human Rights, some observers worry about the growing clout of the Islamic bloc, and its agenda.

In a statement delivered to the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva on Wednesday, the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU), a non-governmental organization with consultative status at the U.N., voiced concerns about the OIC push.

“The implications of this [defamation of religions] resolution for freedom to criticize religious laws and practices are obvious,” the IHEU said.

“Armed with U.N. approval for their actions, states may now legislate against any show of disrespect for religion however they may choose to define ‘disrespect.’”

As I understand it, the U.N. is supposed to deal between governments, not supplant them.

“The Islamic states see human rights exclusively in Islamic terms, and by sheer weight of numbers this view is becoming dominant within the U.N. system,” the organization added. “The implications for the universality of human rights are ominous.”

And this,

The charter would be in accordance with the provisions of the 1990 Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam - the last major OIC human rights document - which says that all human rights and freedom must be subject to Islamic law (shari’a).

“Everyone shall have the right to express his opinion freely in such manner as would not be contrary to the principles of the shari’a,” it says.

Emphasis mine.

Of course, the U.N. will do the usual — perform the kiss of shame on the Islamofacists of the OIC and in so doing, attempt to hammer yet another nail in the coffin of the free world.

These people are truly amazing in the scope of their stupidity: Anyone with an IQ of 6 who has their access to information should be able to see what the leaders of the Islamic nations are trying to do, yet they simply suck it up and go with the program, not seeming to grasp the very real fact that their own personal freedoms are as much on the line as everybody else’s, that once Sharia has been successfully foisted on the western world, they’ll be the first to go.

I’d like to see our government and those of other free countries fight the OIC charter tooth and nail at the U.N., but with their collective recent track record of sucking up to Islam as any kind of indicator, I won’t hold my breath.

The question of free speech and its effect on religious sentiment has been on the Human Rights Council’s agenda this week.

On Wednesday, the council considered a report by a U.N. “special rapporteur” on freedom of expression and opinion, Kenyan lawyer Ambeyi Ligabo.

Ligabo said he was concerned about attempts to expand the scope of defamation laws beyond the protection of individuals, to include the protection of “abstract values or institutions” such as religions.

Where international human rights documents placed limitations on freedom of expression, he told the council, they were designed to protect individuals — not religions — from criticism.

Ligabo also said he “strongly rejected” the view that the use of freedom of expression has undermined people’s ability to enjoy other rights, such as the freedom of religion.

His stance drew criticism from some Islamic states in the council.

Iranian representative Asadollah Eshragh Jahromi said Ligabo should address the issue of freedom of expression and religion “in a more balanced and comprehensive manner.”

“Insulting religions is incompatible with the right to freedom of expression and cannot be justified or interpreted under such a pretext,” he said.

“When someone defames a religion or religious personalities or symbols, he hurts the believers of that faith and impinges on his exercise of right to religion and belief,” said the representative of Bangladesh, Mustafizur Rahman.

The OIC and its allies effectively dominate the Human Rights Council, where 26 of the 47 seats are earmarked for African and Asian countries.

Emphasis again mine.

I fully understand that the oil lying underneath so much Islamic soil is a major factor behind Islam’s international “influence”, so perhaps we need to rethink certain policies in that regard.

Here in the United States, the rights we take for granted are but a distant dream to our counterparts in a large part of the world. The idiots who abuse their freedom of speech rights, for example, using them to attack and otherwise demean the selfsame system of government that allows us these freedoms, have absolutely no clue as to what it would be like for them if our form of government were not one whose Constitution guarantees us these rights.

In Egypt, for example, whose government attempted to demonstrate not long ago how democratic they are, human rights oriented bloggers and activists are being snatched up Gestapo style and tossed into the hoosegow without so much as due process, held for a 15 day investigation period that can be extended without a whole lot of pomp and circumstance and, if the powers-that-be decide to do so, be indefinitely extended so as to become what may be a permanent disappearance.

We’re not talking about criminals being arrested for murder, larceny or battery, simply non-violent dissenters, yet they do not have a fraction of the same rights as the murderers, larcens or batterers whose wrists liberal doctrine has forced us to slap here in America.

Right now, as we speak, an Egyptian blogger and others who fight for the same human rights we conservatives do here in the United States are in serious danger from their own government.

We all need to address this together, in many ways it’s like running across the street to stop a rape or a mugging.

To get down to brass tacks, let’s go visit my blog brother and friend Kender and get this sorted out.

After all the concerts raising money for African aid and the G8 summits gaining governments’ pledges to send money to African countries, the fact remains that most of them are dictatorships run by corrupt, despotic pricks ala Robert Mugabe, a typically fucked-up African dictator, who do not represent the people, just themselves.

These are the folks who will receive the bucks we send, and these are the people who will keep the money for their own use(can anybody say, Numbered Account?).

African countries are so badly mismanaged by self-motivated, self styled monarchs who have no problem with letting their people starve as long as they live in luxury, and these leaders control dissent through imprisonment, torture and execution.

In my opinion, sending all this money to African countries at this time is no different from flushing it down the nearest commode and, since some of it comes out of my taxes, I feel completely justified in taking umbrage with it. These African countries need to be repaired from within before they are ready to be helped from without.  

Pamela of Atlas Shrugs has a post that tells it like it is.    

“Guantanamogate” has reaaallllly gotten out of hand.

We get a Newsweek story based on misinformation and quickly retracted as such, then Amnesty International, admitting that they don’t know what’s happening at Camp Delta, the Gitmo detention facility, but going ahead and calling it a gulag anyway, so,

Based on no factual evidence whatsoever(to Bush hating liberals that’s plenty of proof), the left has begun to crow with their usual glee beneath their patented false veneer of concern and hurl accusations of torture and inhumanity, creating yet another wave of anti-Bush hysteria, demands pouring in from liberal politicians and pundits that the detention center be shut down. What a bunch of reactionary obstructionist buffoons!

Let’s read how Oliver North weighs in on the subject.

An exerpt,

Here’s Amnesty’s “gulag:” Upon arrival, detainees are issued a blanket, a sheet, two orange “jump suits,” flip flops, a foam sleeping pad, two bath towels, a washcloth, toothpaste, soap, shampoo, a prayer rug, and a Koran. They are allowed two 15-minute showers per week; They get recreation time and three culturally sensitive meals per day. Schedules are respectful of Islamic traditions, prayer calls are broadcast five times a day and arrows painted on the floors point to Mecca. Their regular quarters include a flushing toilet, running water, and an off-the-floor bed. Detainees who ask for them are provided with soccer balls, playing cards, chessboards and paperback books. All of this, courtesy of the American taxpayers the detainees have sworn to kill.

Now compare that to a Soviet gulag as described by gulag survivor Alexander Solzhenitsyn. If you haven’t yet read his  (1962) novel, One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovitch, I highly recommend adding it to your reading list.

Another of Solzhenitsyn’s books on the subject (in nonfiction mode) is The Gulag Archipelago. A link to a preview at Amazon.com that includes the opening segment follows in the next post.

I’m sure finding a lot of stuff to comment about from the “all the left that fits to print” newspaper these days. In todays New York Times there’s an article by Andrea Elliott entitled You Can’t Talk to an F.B.I. Agent that Way, or Can You?

Dressed in a navy suit and red tie, his hair parted neatly on the side, Special Agent Charles E. Frahm sat with practiced calm as Muslims rose, one after another, to hurl raw complaints at him. Mr. Frahm, who heads the counterterrorism division of the F.B.I. in New York, was at a banquet hall in the Midwood section of Brooklyn on Thursday night to listen, he had told hundreds of residents gathered there.

And they responded. They were tired of being held for hours at airports when their names resembled those of suspected terrorists, they said. They were tired of seeing Muslims arrested on immigration charges. They were tired of having their mosques watched, their businesses scrutinized.

….Since Mr. Frahm took over New York’s counterterrorism division in July 2004, he has impressed some skeptical Muslim leaders with his eagerness to make public appearances. “I think it helps the community to air their feelings,” he said during a break on Thursday night. “”This provides folks a forum for pent-up frustration. The emotion is real.”

….”I hear you, and I will continue to hear you,” he said. “I can also say we make no apologies for actions we must take to protect Americans.” 

And that last quote sums things up pretty well. “…. we make no apologies for actions we must take to protect Americans.”

What do these people expect? The overwhelming majority of today’s terrorists look just like them, have names like theirs and to go further, several mosques and places of business have been caught out as places for storing weapons and explosives, harboring wanted terrorists, indoctrinating and training terrorists and also in the case of the mosques, many are places where “holy men” preach hate against Jews and Christians with the intention of inciting lethal violence against innocent people in the name of Islam.

So we’re supposed to assume that all of these people are clean until something blows up and a lot of people are killed or maimed? Is that it? 

I have a much better idea: Stop whining, and police your own damn community! Your inaction sends out a message of approval to these murderous fanatics, and coupled with the adulation they receive from Arab media and millions of fellow Muslims this accellerates terrorism. If a Muslim community, here or elsewhere does not openly oppose terrorists and actively help local and federal law enforcement in taking them down(that includes fingering relatives who are involved in terrorism) then as far as I’m concerned that community is proterror and undeserving of U.S. citizenship or even a green card.

Terrorism travels with Islam; Wherever the Religion of Peace goes, so does violence. It’s your baggage, Muslims, so you need to deal with it. Until you do, don’t bitch about your “rights.” My right to live is more important to me than your right not to be inconvenienced.

So, in the article.…