Author: Mick Hartley

The six-nation talks on North Korea have resumed in Beijing:

North Korea defiantly declared itself a nuclear power Monday at the start of the first full international arms talks since its atomic test and threatened to increase its arsenal if its demands were not met.

Reiterating those demands in its opening speech, the North said the United Nations must lift the sanctions imposed on the communist nation for its Oct. 9 nuclear test. It also said the United States must remove the financial restrictions that led the North to break off the six-nation negotiations 13 months ago.

The North also said it wants a reactor built for it and help covering its energy needs in the meantime, according to a summary of the speech released by one of the delegations involved. Five nations are trying to persuade the North to abandon nuclear weapons – the United States, China, South Korea, Japan and Russia.

The North said that now that it is a nuclear power, it should be treated on equal footing with the U.S. It warned that if its demands were not met, it would increase its arsenal, according to the summary.

Well, that sounds hopeful.

Islamophobia in action (via Tim Blair):

Jewish people are four times more likely to be attacked because of their religion than Muslims, according to figures compiled by the police.

One in 400 Jews compared to one in 1,700 Muslims are likely to be victims of “faith hate” attacks every year. The figure is based on data collected over three months in police areas accounting for half the Muslim and Jewish populations of England and Wales. The crimes range from assault and verbal abuse to criminal damage at places of worship.

Police forces started recording the religion of faith-hate crime victims only this year. They did so on the instruction of the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), which wanted a clear picture of alleged community tensions around the country, following reports of Muslims being attacked after September 11 and the July 7 London bombings last year.

However, the first findings, for July to September, obtained by The Sunday Telegraph under freedom of information legislation, show that it is Jews who are much more likely to be targeted because of their religion. […]

The CPS report revealed that not a single person accused of an anti-Semitic crime had been prosecuted on a charge of religiously aggravated offending. It said: “The police statistics include incidents where no defendant has been identified or where there is insufficient evidence for a prosecution.” […]

The Sunday Telegraph has obtained information on faith-hate crimes from the Metropolitan Police, Greater Manchester, South Wales and West Mercia forces. In London and Manchester, where Muslims outnumber Jews by four to one, anti-Semitic offences exceeded anti-Muslim offences…. The figures do not record the faith of the offenders.

Rabbi Alex Chapper, 33, was the victim of a “faith-hate” crime in July last year. He was returning from a synagogue in Ilford, Essex, with three Jewish friends after conducting a service. All were wearing skull caps. Seven Asian teenagers followed them down the road shouting “Yehudi”, which means Jew in Arabic. One of them shouted, “We are Pakistani, you are Jewish. We are going to kill you”, before punching Rabbi Chapper in the face and hitting one of his friends over the head with a bottle.

“It was very frightening, we were all very shaken,” said the rabbi. “I thought we were going to get seriously hurt but someone threatened to call the police and they ran off.

“We identified the youths and told the police but they were never prosecuted. They just did not seem interested. I feel very let down.”

ims, working themselves up to a pitch of excitement.

In one collective punishment last summer, four women denounced for gambling were given between six and 10 lashes. One passed out as she was dragged off the stage.

the deaths of babies and for epidemics such as AIDS, and they were believed to be the cause of wars. They were greedy and would do absolutely anything to kill us Muslims. If we ever wanted to know peace and stability, and if we didn’t want to be wiped out, we would have to destroy the Jews. For those of us who were not in a position to take up arms against them, it was enough for us to cup our hands, raise our eyes heavenward and pray to Allah to destroy them.

d all the simplicity of a mathematical proof – refuting the worst genocide in living memory and absolving one of the most evil and wicked regimes in history of its crimes against humanity.

So this was the aim of the conference for Iran – to undermine the very argument for the existence of Israel.

And also to score a few points over the West on the issue of freedom of speech. Every delegate I interviewed congratulated Iran on its commitment to freedom of speech which they said was absent in the West where their comrades were in jail for denying the Holocaust.

They all paid tribute to their new hero, President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. I asked them if they knew about the journalists and students who have been jailed in Iran for pushing the limits of freedom of speech in this country.

They were vague – happy to whitewash Iran without knowing the facts. As a journalist living and working in Iran I found it particularly galling to be told that I had freedom of speech by these people.

Eventually I found one of the movers and shakers behind the conference – a friend of President Ahmedinejad and asked him why there was freedom of speech to deny the Holocaust but not to criticise the Iranian government.

He told me there was complete freedom but the Western media was in the pocket of the Zionists and sent spies to undermine Iran’s national security.

Presumably he meant all the students, bloggers, journalists and human rights lawyers who’ve been jailed here are Zionist spies.

ives/791″>RightWingBob of course.

Danny Quinn doesn’t look much like a mix of Dylan, Jim Morrison and Mick Jagger to me.

As I predicted back in January 2004 when the enquiry was originally announced (don’t know what’s happened with the formating there, but you have to scroll down a bit), the whole thing has been a whitewash.

Jews and Israel, which, as I mentioned earlier, is vital for their elimination. However, it is not possible to demonize a people as long as it is viewed as a victim of the Holocaust. Therefore, as long as the Jews are perceived as victims of the Holocaust, this demonization cannot take root. Holocaust denial is thus vital, in order to wipe out the image of the Jews as victims.

This is the reason why these three elements – Holocaust denial, the elimination of the State of Israel, and demonization of the Jews – are constantly present in statements by Ahmadinejad and other senior Iranian officials.

erp.

As my (Flemish) brother-in-law says, Belgium might well split – if it wasn’t for Brussels. Historically Flemish, but now majority Francophone, there’s no way they could carve that up.

From the Scotsman:

The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court plans to issue arrest warrants for suspects in connection with atrocities in Darfur by February – nearly two years after the United Nations Security Council asked him to investigate.

In a report ahead of his address today to the council, Luis Moreno-Ocampo said his office was preparing submissions for arrest warrants to judges at the ICC, the world’s first permanent criminal court, based in The Hague, in the Netherlands.

Mr Moreno-Ocampo’s team has carried out more than 70 missions to 17 countries and conducted over 100 interviews, many of which were with victims of crimes in Darfur.

Senior government figures in Sudan deemed to be part of the command structure for ethnic cleansing in the region may be issued with warrants based on allegations that government warplanes support operations by the Janjaweed militia, whose name means “evil spirits on horseback”….

Sudan’s close ally, China, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, has made it clear that it will use its veto to protect Sudan against outside intervention. China is developing Sudan’s new oil fields and has built a 950-mile pipeline from the interior to the Red Sea port of Port Sudan.

Beijing also arms the Sudanese armed forces and has built three weapons factories in Khartoum. Some 70 per cent of all Sudan’s exports go to China. However, ICC arrest warrants might persuade China to exert pressure on Khartoum to compromise on Darfur.