Turkey refuses to help Syrian opposition

The Turks may say that they want Assad out, but they have turned down a request for help from the Syrian opposition

Learning From the Murder of a Pedophile

(policelink.monster.com(broken link)) Security video footage of officers attempting to breach a cell door while a pedophile is being murdered by another inmate.

Father John Geoghan, a Roman Catholic priest. Geoghan had a 30 year career as a priest at six different parishes. He was accused of molesting more than 130 children during that time. The Catholic Church seemed to transfer Geoghan from parish to parish in spite of allegations. The Boston archdiocese initially agreed to a $30 million settlement with 86 of Geoghan’s victims, and then reached an ultimate settlement with a total of 542 victims (from the entire diocese) for $65 million including Geoghan’s 86 victims.
In January 2002 John Geoghan was found guilty of indecent assault and grabbing the buttocks of a 10-year-old boy at a boys and girls club swimming pool. His sentence, 9-10 years in prison: many other victims from prior allegations came forward to testify even though the statute of limitations (on their respective cases) had run out years earlier. John Geoghan, a career pedophile and part-time priest was going to prison.
Fast forward to August 23, 2003; John Geoghan a prisoner at the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center in Shirley, Massachusetts was trapped in his cell, strangled and stomped to death by Joseph Druce, a self-described white supremacist. Druce was serving a sentence of life without the possibility of parole for killing a man that allegedly made a pass at him.
According to the New York Times (Aug. 23, 2003) Druce was a self-proclaimed homophobe and had been planning the killing for more than a month. As officials started to examine the case it was revealed that another prisoner had tried to warn guards prior to the attack. John J. Conte, the District Attorney was quoted as saying “This seems like something that shouldn’t happen.”

"Palestinian Queer Parties" held in Tel Aviv!

(EOZ) received a lot of feedback about an essay on the sheer hate that Sarah Schulman exhibited in the New York Times this week, where she downplayed Israel's gay rights achievements as mere "pinkwashing" of Israeli crimes, which she believes is the real reason Israelis are more accepting of gays than their neighbors.
One correspondent, Scott Piro, wrote another excellent response to her essay on Ray Cook's blog. He points out that one of the Palestinian Arab gay groups that Schulman extols, AlQaws, has held its parties in Tel Aviv.
Sure enough, a Google search of "AlQaws Palestinian Queer Party" finds that this is a bi-monthly event, and has been held for the past year at the Comfort 13 club in Tel Aviv. The next event is on December 2:

And they had the same party, at the same venue, in April,  June , July and October. 

In fact, alQaws' headquarters is in Jerusalem, on the western side of the Green Line. 

Even so, they also argue against so-called "pinkwashing" and support Sarah Schulman's organization, "Queers Against Israeli Apartheid. "

The hypocrisy is stunning. They are against events such as "Out in Israel," a celebration of Israeli LGBT culture in San Francisco last year, because they dislike the politicization of their cause in ways that make Israel look good. But QuAIA's entire reason for existing is as a politicization of their cause to demonize Israel! Their hate trumps any desire they have for gays to be treated equally worldwide. 

Even their arguments are silly. This is the pinnacle of their logic, used by Schulman as well as at the alQaws site:

It doesn’t matter what the sexual orientation of the Soldier at a checkpoint is, whether he can serve openly or not....The apartheid wall was not created to keep Palestinian homophobes out of Gay Israel, and there is no magic door for gay Palestinians to pass through.

In other words, Israelis, as opposed to Palestinian Arabs, have a concept of equal rights. Terrorists are treated the same whether they are straight or gay, and so are soldiers.
Would Al Qaws prefer that such a discriminatory magic door exists? Are they saying that they should be treated better by Israel than their straight neighbors?
Apparently, they want to be treated as special, to use their cause specifically to demonize Israel. (Al Qaws at least tries to work to fix Palestinian Arab society, QuAIA has no interest in that.)
In a perfectly equal society, gays would not be considered more or less special than any group of people, like stamp collectors or fans of Twilight. If people created an organization called, for example, Quilters Against Israeli Apartheid, it would be blatantly obvious that the group is not pro-quilter but simply haters of Israel. And that is what QuAIA is, as they hijack the very real issues that gays face and try (very unconvincingly) to shoehorn them into their own loathing of the Jewish State.
(By the way, the Goldstone Report used the exact same bizarre logic in accusing Israel of violating the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women during Cast Lead - as if Israel was specifically targeting and discriminating against Gaza's women! When one wants to attack Israel, apparently no argument is too crazy.)

fabulous

The medical NGO's war on Israel

Giulio Meotti summarizes the extreme bias that the medical NGO's display toward Israel.

A case in point is how the Red Cross allocates personnel and budgets worldwide. For North Africa, the Red Cross has one office in Tunis. For “Israel/Occupied Territories/Autonomous Territories,” the Red Cross has offices in Jenin, Tulkarm, Nablus, Kalkilya, Ramallah, Jericho, Bethlehem, Hebron, Gaza, Khan Yunis, Majdel Shams, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv.
Western newspapers, imbued with the ideological reports of medical NGOs, establish a comparison between the Palestinians and South Africa's blacks, who were critically injured and left to bleed to death if there was no “black” ambulance to rush them to a “black” hospital. Jewish altruism never finds its legitimate space in the global media because it doesn’t fit in with the stereotype propagated by the medical NGOs.
...
It would be enough to stroll through the corridors of Israeli hospitals to understand how false the “apartheid” charge by medical NGOs is. Large Arab families stand with Israelis in the corridors of the maternity wards where one is born and in the oncology clinics where one dies. Through the private program “Save the heart of a child,” the Wolfson Medical Center in Holon cures congenital cardiologic defects in Arab children from all over the world. About half the children it treats are from the nearby Palestinian areas and there have also been some from Iraq and Iran, both technically at war with Israel.
...
Medical organizations never blamed the Palestinians for attacks on Israeli hospitals. Hadassah University Medical Center on Jerusalem’s Mount Scopus recently released a report, noting that it suffered 43 attacks by east Jerusalem Arabs in 2011. During the last “Nakba Day” events alone, 11 firebombs were thrown into the Mount Scopus campus.
The medical groups also didn’t report that 10 Gaza hospitals were used by Hamas during Operation Cast Lead to shelter weapons and terrorists.
Today Magen David Adom vehicles do not enter the Arab neighborhoods of east Jerusalem without police authorization and military escort. It’s not because of the “apartheid,” but rather, because terrorists tried to hit the doctors. During the Intifada, MDA had to replace the windows of its ambulances in the Jerusalem region with glass that does not shatter if hit by rocks. Read the whole thing.

The picture at the top of this post comes from a post on in 2006 which documented the International Red Cross assisting Hezbullah terrorists to escape from the Second Lebanon War. That story is here.

All hell breaking loose? Iran threatens Dimona Nuclear Reactor

On Saturday, Iran threatened to hit Israel's nuclear plant in Dimona if Israel attacked Iran.

Former head of the Guards' Political Bureau Brigadier Yadollah Javani said, "If Israel fires [a] rocket at one of our nuclear facilities or vital centers, it should know that any point of Israel, such as its nuclear facilities, would be a target for our rockets and we have [that] capability," Iranian news agency ISNA reported.
"Today, our enemies have been locked in a quagmire and they see no way out, so they make contradictory comments," he contended. "They raise military threats against Iran whereas they do not possess such a capability."

Curiously, Iran also threatened Turkey (Hat Tip: Joshua I).

A senior commander of Iran's powerful Revolutionary Guard says the country will target NATO's missile defense shield in Turkey if the US or Israel attacks the Islamic Republic.
Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the head of the Guards' aerospace division, is quoted by the semiofficial Mehr news agency as saying the warning is part of a new defense strategy to counter what it sees as an increase in threats from the US and Israel.
...
"Should we be threatened, we will target NATO's missile defense shield in Turkey and then hit the next targets," the semiofficial Mehr news agency quoted Hajizadeh as saying.
Tehran says NATO's early warning radar station in Turkey is meant to protect Israel against Iranian missile attacks if a war breaks out with the Jewish state. Ankara agreed to host the radar in September as part of NATO's missile defense system aimed at countering ballistic missile threats from neighboring Iran.

Is Iran starting to realize that the sky is falling?
By the way, Israel quietly took delivery on a shipment of Patriot missiles in the past few weeks.

via israelmatzav.blogspot.com

What is that you are eating Obama?

	(Obama Eating Frog legs) ...Bibi killed Abbas and tried to cook his body parts. This story is kind of gross and it includes video for those who really can't get enough of it ( (Israel Matzav Hat Tip: David H).

Britain's Queen Elizabeth II formally welcomed Turkish President Abdullah Gül and his wife, Hayrünnisa, to London Monday at a ceremony that took place near Buckingham Palace

Elizabeth Windsor says: Starting the day with an epic bacon sandwich of almost biblical proportions. One never reigns on an empty stomach.

 
(hudson-ny.org) Before Gül and his wife arrived at the ceremony field near the palace, the Kingdom Squadron entered, accompanied by a band. The queen and her husband, Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, arrived at the field followed by a car carrying Gül and his wife, who arrived from White Hall Gate.
The two heads of state shook hands warmly as the hosts laid on the traditional ceremony pomp, which included a 41-gun royal salute and Gül's inspection of the lines of Coldstream Guards in their grey greatcoats.
During the ceremony, British Prime Minister David Cameron, Foreign Secretary William Hague and Home Secretary Theresa May accompanied the queen. The United Kingdom hopes the visit will forge stronger ties with Turkey, a growing economic power and an increasingly important trade partner straddling Europe and the Middle East.
Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Ali Babacan and Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu are accompanying Gül during his visit. It marks the first official visit by a Turkish president to Britain in 23 years. The UK accepts a maximum of two state visits in one year; the year's first visit was paid by United States President Barack Obama. Queen Elizabeth paid a visit to Turkey in 2008.
Gül was scheduled to meet Cameron and receive Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg on Monday, and was also slated to attend a dinner hosted by the queen at Buckingham Palace later in the day.
On Tuesday, Gül delivered a foreign policy speech expected to broach the topic of Syria. Gül will also attend a state banquet and meet political leaders during his visit. Gül also met former British Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs Jack Straw on Nov. 21.
http://haber.gazetevatan.com/23-yil-sonra/412724/1/Gundem

So Michael Gove has written a forewood to the Bible.  Ironic. As Defender of the Faith, one can assure you that God cannot stand Mr Gove.

Court Refuses to Free Scribes: And more from the Turkish Press

(hudson-ny.org) An Istanbul court refused to release arrested journalists Ahmet Şık and Nedim Şener, as well as 12 other suspects, in the first hearing of an alleged coup plot case Monday.

Fourteen suspects, including journalists Şık, Şener and Soner Yalçın, the owner of the dissident online news portal Oda TV, are accused of ties to Ergenekon, an alleged ultranationalist gang accused of plotting to overthrow the government. The 14 appeared before Istanbul's 16th High Criminal Court on their 265th day of arrest, prompting anger from colleagues and representatives from local and international journalistic organizations at the slow pace of the legal process.

Philippe Leruth from the European Federation of Journalists, or EFJ, highlighted the importance of support during a protest in front of the courthouse.

"Everybody has to understand that if there are concerns about press freedom, it means democracy is in danger," he said. "I hope this will make [the government] think more about this case, especially during a time when many 'Arab Spring' countries are taking Turkey as a model for democracy."

Ümit Gürtuna, the spokesman of the Platform of Freedom for Journalists, said there were nearly 10,000 cases in Turkey involving journalists and that the number of arrested journalists had now reached 76. Gürtuna also said Turkey was at the top of the list in terms of the number of journalists that have been arrested.

"This is a shame for a country that is trying to improve its democracy," he said.

Suspect Kaşif Kozinoğlu, a former intelligence operative, was scheduled to appear in court Monday as well, but he died of a heart attack Nov. 12 in prison.

The court decided to postpone the trial until Dec. 26.

During the trial, the defense lawyers also demanded that the judges be recused from the case; a higher court is expected to rule on the demand some time next week.

A row broke out between members of the press and security guards in front of the hearing room at Istanbul's Çağlayan Courthouse just prior to the beginning of the trial.

Due to the intense attention the case has attracted, the trial was held in the larger hall of the First Court of Serious Crimes. A quota of three persons was allocated to the families and acquaintances of the suspects, 20 for the Turkish press and 10 for the international press. Despite the quotas, however, many local journalists were turned away from the trial room as members of the international press were given priority for entry into the courtroom.

There was a separate row between the security guards themselves as the guards standing in front of the hearing room argued with security personnel in charge of registering the names of journalists during the morning.
http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/n.php?n=court-refuses-to-free-scribes-2011-11-22

The Ergenekon investigations have divided the Turkish population. To some they represent the “cleansing of the century”.[21] To its detractors the Ergenekon investigation is politically motivated; the alleged organization itself a deliberate fabrication by government sympathizers.[21] Criticism grew stronger after the arrest of journalists in February and March 2011.[75] Even the biggest fans of the government worry that the legitimacy of the Ergenekon case is being dented by heavy-handed tactics such as the arrests of Ahmet Şık and Nedim Şener.[76] The real goal of the Ergenekon investigation was not to go after the deep state but to intimidate and silence opponents of Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), particularly critics of the vast network of Gülen’s supporters known as the Gülen Movement.[10]
Ergenekon (organization) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)