The fact the Muslim inmates had already desecrated the Korans by defacing them with writing didn’t stop the usual “outraged,” rent-a-religious mob from furiously and hysterically shouting “Death To America.” It also didn’t prevent the subsequent murder of several US soldiers and President Obama from rushing to make an apology.

But that was not the least of the hypocrisy surrounding this staged, anti-American and anti-Western disturbance. Largely passed over by the mainstream media, about the same time the “religious” riots were happening Afghan police freed 41 Afghan children who were being taken to Pakistan to be indoctrinated for use as suicide bombers. The police also were able to arrest four handlers transporting this condemned cargo of innocents.

The ages of the children are shocking. The youngest child destined for a jihadist’s death was six-years-old while the oldest was eleven. They all came from poor Afghan families whose parents, in allowing them to leave, believed they were going to madrassas in Pakistan to receive a free education. Authorities returned the children to their families.

Earlier last month, Afghan police arrested a further two child suicide bombers, both aged 10, before they could attack NATO and Afghan military personnel and civilians. The children were reportedly released when the president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, pardoned them along with 18 other children. The problem of child suicide bombers is so severe in Afghanistan that one of Karzai’s ministers warned that people should watch out for their children aged seven to 13 years old.

But this destruction of innocent lives in the name of their religion did not appear to upset in the least the Afghan demonstrators who were so rabidly furious about a few holy books that had been destroyed. They remained curiously uninterested and unmoved about the published fact that men of darkness are recruiting Afghan Muslim children, now by the dozens, to blow themselves up in the name of that very same holy book, causing death and destruction and spreading horror. This is all the more curious when one considers that the Koran, which the “enraged” Muslim mob regards as sacred, forbids murder. All this only heightens the already high level of hypocrisy and phoniness that lay behind the recent Koran-burning demonstrations.

But the fact these “devout” Afghan Muslims would become hysterical over the burning of a few Korans but show a lack of any kind of societal instinctive, protective reaction or moral outrage on behalf of the rescued children and about the fact that an ever increasing number of Afghan children are being recruited for the barbarism of suicide bombings represents something much more sinister. This absence of such shocked and angry indignation regarding the sacredness of the lives of this Muslim country’s most vulnerable members who were going to be killed in such a horrific manner, and kill others, in the name of Islam strongly indicates Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan, where children are also used as suicide bombers, are slipping more and more into the grips of the Islamist death cult where the killing of children is welcomed.

In her remarkable and fascinating book Death Orders: The Vanguard of Modern Terrorism in Revolutionary Russia, Boston College history professor Anna Geifman analysed the Islamist death cult and explained the underlying desire to claim, first and foremost, children as victims. Islamic terrorists, she explains, are thanatophiles, or death worshippers, just like the Communists and Nazis were. Geifman traces the roots of modern-day Islamic terrorism to socialist and anarchist terrorist groups of pre-revolutionary Russia, primarily after 1901, and sees no difference in the mindset between the followers of Lenin and those of Osama bin Laden, Hezbollah and Hamas.

The new Egypt of the Arab Spring is looking more and more like the Egypt of old – at least as far as freedom of expression goes.

In what appears to be a settling of scores, an Egyptian court sentenced earlier this month 72-year-old Adel Imam, one of the Arab world’s most famous comedian-actors, for allegedly “defaming” Islam in productions he took part in years ago. The lawsuit against Imam, a stage and film performer for 40 years, had been brought before the court by a lawyer described as having “ties to Islamist groups.” And since the verdict came only a few weeks after the Muslim Brotherhood won the final round of Egypt’s elections, Imam’s supporters are questioning its timing.

“I will appeal the ruling,” said Imam, who did not attend the proceedings. “Some people seeking fame have filed a suit against me over works I have done which they consider insulting to Islam, and this of course is not true.”

Imam’s renown is not just restricted to Egypt. For his work on stage and screen, he was internationally recognized in 2000 with an appointment as a United Nations goodwill ambassador for refugees along with such luminaries as Angelina Jolie and Italian fashion designer Giorgio Armani. But Imam’s international profile and his recognized life-long battle on behalf of human rights could not save the Egyptian thespian from the Islamists’ vindictiveness. Imam says his past works the religious hardliners dislike the most are a comedy called “The Leader” and “The Terrorist.”

“All the works in which I have starred went through the censors,” said Imam after the verdict. “Had they been found to be defamatory, the censors would have banned them.”

Like Charlie Chaplin in “The Great Dictator,” in “The Leader” Imam made fun of the Middle East’s authoritarian military rulers, while in “The Terrorist” he portrayed an Islamic extremist. The fact that Muammar Gaddafi banned ”The Leader” in Libya attests both to the effectiveness of the production’s theme and Imam’s starring performance. (Apparently not one to hold a grudge, Imam said in his typically irreverent fashion that has gained him millions of fans in the Arab world that one of his “life-long dreams” was to have Gaddafi play a role in one of his comedies since the Libyan dictator was  “a nutcase,” who would be a great draw.)

People possessing totalitarian mindsets, like Gaddafi and Egypt’s Islamists, have always taken a particular dislike to comedy, especially when it is directed at them. Besides the fact they don’t like laughter in the first place, no self-respecting military dictator could ever allow himself to be made fun of by talented comedians like Chaplin and Imam whose comical uniforms, clownish chest swellings and amusing speech would puncture their vanity balloons and get people laughing at them.

The ludicrous actions of Germany’s Nazi dictatorship indicate how seriously totalitarians regard the power of comedy as a weapon of subversion. In the early days of the Nazi regime, when German Vaudeville comedians had their trained chimpanzees perform the newly instituted Hitler salute on stage, authorities bizarrely ordered the primates enacting the ritualistic greeting to be destroyed. German professor Tilman Allert writes in his book The Hitler Salute: On The Meaning Of Gesture that “the animals were obviously guilty of profanation, and only through their sacrifice could the sin be expiated.” And when all is said and done, the Nazis were probably eliminating their most dangerous intellectual competition as well.

A disobedient woman, who allegedly brings shame to her family, especially when it concerns her sexual behaviour, has to be eliminated. That is what the multicultural West is discovering to its horror as the body count continues to mount of young women, primarily from Muslim families, who run afoul of this foreign and twisted sense of restoring family “honor.” Rather than “honor,” however, Western societies now recognize this alien way of thinking for what it really is: a revolting concept, behind which the most brutal, anti-women crimes are being committed.

The latest North American case involving this “honor” masquerade ended last Sunday in the eastern Ontario city of Kingston where a jury returned a guilty verdict after only 15 hours of deliberation for the mass honor slayings of Rona Amir Mohammed, 50, Zainab Shafia, 19, and her two sisters, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13. The four females were found dead, apparently by drowning, in a vehicle submerged in a canal just outside of Kingston on June 30, 2009.

“This verdict sends a very clear message about our Canadian values and the core principles in a free and democratic society that all Canadians enjoy, and even visitors to Canada enjoy,” prosecutor Gerard Laarhuis said after the trial.

Their killers were, as in most honor murders, close family members: father Mohammed Shafia, 58, mother Tooba Mohammed Yahya, 42, and brother Hamed, 21. Rona Amir Mohammed was Mohammed Shafia’s unwanted first wife. She was in Canada on a visitor’s visa, since polygamy is prohibited in that country. The Shafia family, originally from Afghanistan, had been in Canada for two years by the time of the murders.

Unlike some honor killers, however, who openly and happily admit their crime to the world, so as to leave no doubt their “honor” has been restored, the Shafias continued after the verdict to profess their innocence.

“Sir, I did not drown my sisters anywhere,” Hamed protested in the courtroom.

But the facts of the case are this. Zainab, Sahar and Geeti were three girls who lived in an emotionally and physically abusive home, dominated by a strict father who adhered to the archaic, patriarchal customs of his land of origin. The girls wanted to enjoy the freedoms Canadian girls have, which included determining their own lives. This meant, among other things, having boyfriends, choosing the clothes they wore and hanging out with friends after school.

In the Afghan tribal and clan culture the Shafia parents come from, however, such freedoms are strictly forbidden to females, since women are regarded as possessions of male family members. The men are obligated to ensure their daughters and sisters are virgins when married. This is not only a question of family honor but also a financial one. A non-virgin brings in no bride money on the marriage market. She is valueless. Moreover, a girl who has had pre-marital sex is almost always killed by her male relatives, who believe only blood can wash away this supposed shame and restore the family’s honor. Since it is such a societal obsession, virginity is therefore, literally, a major and vital, life-or-death factor in a girl’s life.

Influenced by the freedom of their Canadian environment, the Shafia girls rebelled against their stifling home situation. Zainab once ran away to a women’s shelter. The father, a Canadian newspaper reported, was “desperate” to get her back, since her absence inflamed his greatest fear: She may be having sex. (European social workers say even just one night away from home is enough for a family to pass a death sentence on the offending female member.) Hamed also caught Sahar sneaking a boyfriend into the house when their parents were away in Dubai, while 13-year-old Geeti, apparently the most strong-willed of the three, was asking teachers and social workers to put her in a foster home. The fact Zainab and Sahar had boyfriends would also have condemned them as “whores” in their family’s eyes.

Photos on Zainab’s and Zahar’s cellphones also helped seal the girls’ fate. They showed the girls with boyfriends and by themselves but scantily clad. Some photos were found in Hamed’s briefcase, and the prosecution believed he showed them to his father. These had a devastating effect on Mohammed Shafia. On a police wiretap only weeks after his daughters’ deaths, he raged to his wife:

What excess had we committed, that they …undressed themselves in front of boys? God curse their graduation! Curse of God on both of them! God’s curse on them for generations! May the devil shit on their graves! Is that what a daughter should be? Would (a daughter) be such a whore?

The reason Rona Amir Mohammed was killed is more obscure. She was barren, which caused Mohammed Shafia to take a second wife, who treated the first wife cruelly. Rona Mohammed was also very close to the dead girls, whom she helped raised, and may have been seen as a bad influence, or she may simply have been regarded as superfluous. Rona Mohammed had, however, expressed fears for her safety to her own relatives.

“She was afraid,” her brother later said. “She had threats that if she went to the police, we will kill you.”

It is by now a familiar scenario for German police. The lifeless body of a teenaged Middle Eastern girl, missing since November. Discovered in a hidden spot with signs of a violent death. A suspected honor murder at the hand’s of the family, some of whose members were already in custody.

But this time the script is slightly different.

While most honor murders in Germany originate within the country’s four million strong Muslim community, the latest victim, Arzu O. from Remminghausen (German law does not allow for the release of the last name), 18, whose corpse was found last week, belonged to a little known Middle Eastern religious sect called Yazidism. And it is this sect’s adherents who are becoming better known recently for their part in the nightmarish phenomenon of honor killings in Germany. Already in 2003, the German news magazine, Der Spiegel, wrote:

More and more often, police must protect young women from the Yasidi faith community from their own relatives – and help them flee.

The Yazidis are Kurds who inhabit primarily northern Iraq but are also found in Syria and Turkey. Many Yazidis have immigrated to Germany where they form the second largest Yazidi community in the world, numbering an estimated 30,000 to 80,000, outside their home countries. Over the centuries, their religious beliefs have often put them at odds with their Muslim neighbours, who have at times cruelly discriminated against them, forcing them to convert on pain of death or sometimes just outright massacring them. Since Yazidis are not ‘People of the Book’ in the Koran, like the Jews and Christians, they were afforded no protection in Islamic lands.

Yazidi religious beliefs, like those of other religions, are complex. The Yazidis believe in one God, who created the world and left it under the care of seven angels. They don’t believe in the devil, since that would limit God’s power. Nevertheless, they have often mistakenly been called devil worshipers. Yazidism is described as being “syncretic,” influenced by Sufism and Iran’s pre-Islamic religion, Zoroastrianism. One also cannot convert to Yazidism; one is born into it.

But the problem Yazidism poses for young Yazidi women (and a few men) living in a modern Western state like Germany where freedom of choice and development of the individual are regarded as virtues is that they are not allowed to marry outside their religion. They are also not supposed to marry outside the three castes that make up their culture and usually wind up taking a cousin as a spouse. And like their Muslim neighbors, women are expected to be virgins when they marry.

“When a girl tries to marry outside the community, that is perceived not only as a dirtying of the family honor, but a break with the religion and the community,” wrote one German reporter.

Another reason Yazidis probably do not want their daughters to marry outside their religion is money. According to one report, the bride price for a Yazidi girl can cost a prospective groom and his family up to $ 80,000, “although the highest Yazidi spiritual leader…wants to limit the bride money to $5,000.” A woman marrying a non-Yazidi would probably add nothing to the family’s coffers.

Police believe Arzu’s breaking of these age-old religious restrictions is probably behind their gruesome discovery last week. Arzu, a high school student, had developed a forbidden love last summer with a 23-year-old apprentice baker, a non-Yazidi, at a bakery where she worked weekends. Her mother and older sister had also once worked there. But for wanting to determine her own life path, which includes selecting her own boyfriends like most normal teenagers do, this vibrant, young woman had to pay with her life.

Although the family, which originally came from Turkey, was described as “a shining example” of successful integration, they still acted out their archaic religious and cultural customs behind closed doors. Last August, Arzu’s family members tried to put a halt to her blossoming romance by giving her a beating, which got police attention. The assault only resulted, though, in Arzu’s fleeing the home for a women’s shelter, which alone is often reason enough for an honor killing. Once away from family control and observation, even for one night, it is suspected the girl may have lost her virginity.

“Every woman who flees the home is the object of an honor murder,” noted one German social worker. The Federal Crime Office (Germany’s FBI) registered 48 such homicides between 1996 and 2006 with a further 22 people surviving attempted honor killings.

Other reasons for honor killings, besides a loss of virginity, range from the female victim living too Western (re: independent) a lifestyle, to wanting a divorce, to fleeing either an abusive or an upcoming forced marriage. Conversion to another religion is sometimes punished by death as well as marrying or having a boyfriend outside one’s religion, race or ethnic group. Only with the blood sacrifice of a fellow human being do the murderers believe their family honor can be cleansed and restored.

It’s official, now. The Obama administration’s admiration for Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood (MB) is indisputably mutual.

The Egyptian English-language newspaper, Daily News Egypt, reported on Wednesday that the MB “hails” its new ties with the United States after a meeting between the head of the MB’s political arm, Mohamed Morsi, and Deputy Secretary of State William Burns at the MB’s Cairo headquarters. After the Wednesday meeting, Morsi said relations between their two countries “must be balanced” and, in apparent reference to Israel, stated past US behavior has been “biased and not in its interest.” The MB, Morsi maintained, wants Washington to adopt “a positive position concerning Arab and Muslim causes.”

“It [the meeting] was an opportunity to hear from and to reinforce our expectations that all major parties will support human rights, tolerance, rights of women and will also uphold Egypt’s existing international obligations,” said State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland.

This top-level diplomatic meeting occurred almost simultaneously with the news that the MB has swept approximately 25 of the 50 individual seats up for grabs in the third round of voting for Egypt’s parliament, which the MB is expected to dominate. In this final round, the MB received 35.2 percent of the votes, while the hard-line Salafist Al-Nour Party got 27.5 percent and seven seats. Between them, the two Islamist parties captured 70 percent of the vote in the election’s first two rounds.

The results of the Burns-Morsi get-together actually contained no great surprises for those who believe the Democratic Party’s support of the Arab Spring is opening doors for the Islamists to seize power and establish sharia law in countries across the Middle East and North Africa. The Obama White House has been “reaching out” for several months now to the MB (Some believe his outreach started in the earliest days of his presidency when he invited MB members to his Cairo speech). Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has admitted the White House has been in contact with the MB since last June.

Last November, Clinton, in an address to the National Democratic Institute, stated the US would be willing to work with any party in the Middle East that supports fundamental values such as “freedoms of speech, religion, association and assembly.”

“In other words, what parties call themselves is less important than us than what they actually do,” Clinton stated.

Clinton also said it was “insulting, dangerous and wrong” to suggest that Muslims would not thrive in a democracy. And, in what was truly a classic example of leftist relativism, she said all religious and secular parties “must reject violence.” In case Clinton hadn’t noticed, one would be hard-pressed to find in the Middle East secular or Christian terrorist groups endangering Muslims, governments and the region’s general stability.

Only days before the Clinton speech, Obama’s newly appointed special coordinator for Middle East transitions, William Taylor, was even more explicit. When speaking at a Washington think-tank, he said the Obama administration would be “satisfied” with a MB victory in the Egyptian elections as long as it is the result of “a free and fair election.” Taylor also echoed Clinton when he said: “We need to judge people and parties on what they do, not what they’re called.”

If that is the case, as Clinton and Taylor maintain, that it is actions and not names that matter, then one must ask: why US officials have also met with the Salafist al-Nour party? Nuland was almost apologetic when she said Burns did not have time on this trip to meet with al-Nour members, but said US embassy personnel does meet with party officials.

“It’s not a matter of excluding them. He [Burns] was not able to meet with all of the parties,” Nuland said.

Finally, a piece of good news from the Middle East after almost a year of mostly bad.

The Middle Eastern energy picture took a turn for the better when Cyprus announced on December 28 that natural gas had been discovered off its southern coast where exploration had been taking place since last September. American-based Noble Energy of Houston, the company conducting the drilling operation for the joint Israeli-Greek Cypriot venture, said the field, named Aphrodite, may contain as much as 5 to 8 million cubic feet. The discovery is said to be large enough to meet Cyprus’s natural gas needs for the next 240 years and, even more encouraging, comes after only the first of 11 offshore areas marked out by the Cypriot government has been explored.

“The gas discovery in the exclusive economic zone of our country creates great prospects for Cyprus and its people, which we shall seriously and effectively exploit to serve public interest,” said Greek Cypriot President Demetrius Christofias, whose foreign minister last month on a visit to the United States received support for its natural gas research project from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

This exciting discovery will definitely provide a boost for an envisaged Israel-Cyprus-Greece pipeline to supply Europe with gas. A 185-km pipeline to bring gas from Israeli and Greek Cypriot fields to a planned liquidation plant in Cyprus is already in the works. Such joint projects are bringing the three countries closer together, as they seek to exploit the suspected massive energy deposits lying under the Mediterranean. Noble says a pipeline to Greece could be ready as early as 2014 or 2015. Before Greek Cyprus, Israel had also discovered huge amounts of offshore gas, described as the biggest finds worldwide in the last decade, which it wants to export.

Israel had earlier explored building a 460 km pipeline from Haifa to Ceyhan in Turkey; but growing hostility towards Israel from Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan and his government ended the proposed project. The week the Cyprus gas discovery was announced, his foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, said before his parliament’s Foreign Relations Committee that Turkish policy was to “bring Israel to its knees.” And since Erdogan’s Islamist leanings are turning Turkey into an adversarial power after decades of being an ally, Israel has sought new alliances with countries such as Greece and Greek Cyprus, which also feel threatened by Turkey.

It also wasn’t long before Turkey’s anti-Israeli stance manifested itself in the Greek Cypriot-Israeli gas exploration venture. Last September, Turkey had threatened to stop the joint operation, saying the Greek Cypriot government had no right to sign deals with Israel, even though drilling was to take place within Greek Cyprus’s United Nations-designated Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). Erdogan had even called the exploration venture “madness.”

Turkish hostility is based on the belief no exploration should take place until a political settlement is reached with the Ankara-controlled government in the partitioned island’s northern part. Cyprus has been divided since 1974, when a brief Greek Cypriot coup sought to unite the island with Greece. Turkey responded by invading and occupying Cyprus’s northern one-third, after which it sent thousands of colonists to settle there.

The new government Turkey established in northern Cyprus, called The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, is not recognized in any world capital except Ankara. The southern Greek Cypriot government holds Cyprus’s UN seat under the name Republic of Cyprus and is internationally recognized as representing the island nation.

After threatening only days ago to close the Strait of Hormuz, through which twenty percent of the world’s oil supplies moves, the Iranian government has once again engaged in ominous sabre-rattling.

The mullah regime’s latest threat involves a warning to the United States on Tuesday not to send its naval task force group, headed by the aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis, back to the Persian Gulf. The Stennis had already left Gulf waters last week en route to the Afghan war theater and is now “somewhere between Oman and Pakistan.”

“I advise, recommend and warn them [the Americans] over the return of this carrier to the Persian Gulf because we are not in the habit of warning more than once,” Iranian Army Chief Ataollah Salehi reportedly stated.

The reason for Iran’s latest bellicose outburst is that the Obama administration is implementing a strict set of sanctions that could seriously damage, even topple, the Iranian government. The latest punitive measures are being imposed because Iran is still refusing, despite worldwide condemnation, to give up its nuclear weapons program. The fact Iran may be as little as a year away from developing its first nuclear weapon accounts for the sanctions’ severity. The International Atomic Energy Commission also reported recently that Iranian scientists are “working to design a nuclear warhead.”

Iran’s rulers have survived previous sanction attempts to halt their nuclear program because Iran is the fourth-largest energy exporter in the world. Its sales of oil and gas, which comprise the country’s largest exports, have allowed the Iranian government to maintain the enormous state subsidy system that has, more or less, maintained social peace in the country. There have been anti-government demonstrations in Iran, but they have failed to develop into “Arab Spring”-like movements that have brought about regime change in countries like Egypt and Tunisia.

But the latest restrictions were constructed to target those all-important oil revenues, the mullah regime’s life blood. In the future, countries that buy Iranian oil will not be allowed to “conduct financial transactions in the United States.” Governments who continue to do so would thus be excluded from a major part of the world’s financial system. In essence, what these new sanctions amount to is an embargo on Iranian oil.

It is obviously believed a US-induced boycott of Iranian oil will cause such economic havoc in Iran that the mullahs will give up their nuclear ambitions and “come back into compliance with its international obligations.” What is left unspoken, however, is that it is most likely hoped the ensuing economic disruption after the sanctions begin to bite will lead to the mullahs’ undoing. It was in response to this embargoing of its oil that the Iranian government issued its first threat to close the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s vice president stated “even one drop of oil” will not pass through the strait if Iran’s oil exports were affected.

But as with all plans, there are also setbacks. A major concern regarding the latest sanctions is that it is “unclear” whether there will be enough alternative sources of oil to make up for the expected reduction in Iranian exports. A second problem is that oil prices would also certainly rise at a time when many countries are in recession. And while Western nations are expected to co-operate with the boycott, China, which imports a lot of its oil from Iran, will definitely be more problematic.

“The only strategy that is going to work here is one where you get the cooperation of oil buyers,” said one analyst in the New York Times. “You could imagine the Europeans, the Japanese, and the South Koreans cooperating, and then China would suck up all of the oil that was initially going to everyone else.”

It is perhaps the most pernicious of evils. The words “child slavery” would cause most people nowadays to recoil in horror, but in the oil-rich countries of the Saudi Arabian Peninsula, it apparently still doesn’t.

The most recent and revolting incident shedding light on the continued existence of this murky and most heinous of crimes involves a thirty-five-year-old Pakistani mother who bravely refused to sell her two boys to a slaver in Dubai, one of the United Arab Emirates. But this heroine, whose name, Azim Mai, deserves to be mentioned, paid a high price for her courageous stand. Her husband, angry at her refusal to condemn her sons to such a cruel fate, threw acid in Mai’s face, seriously disfiguring her.

But there are still many other parents among Pakistan’s large, poverty-stricken population willing to sell their male offspring into the Persian Gulf. Boys as young as three are bought from poor parents, and sometimes simply kidnapped from the street, principally in Pakistan and Bangladesh, and sent as slaves to these oil-rich states for one purpose only: to win camel races for their new Arab masters. The boys are expected to do this after being trained as riders under very brutal conditions for what is a very popular sport in that region.

“As many as 6,000 camel jockeys …languished in hidden slavery on ouzbah farms where their masters beat them and starved them to keep their weight down,” wrote E. Benjamin Skinner in his book, A Crime So Monstrous, before the use of boy camel jockeys was officially banned due to international pressure in 2005. A 2004 documentary about the boys’ plight, shown on HBO, was chiefly responsible for making Americans aware of this modern-day barbarism.

Great fanfare was made at the time about replacing the child jockeys with robots. But humanitarian organizations, like the Ansar Burney Trust, never believed all racing camel owners stopped using slave boy jockeys after abolition. Such a law, they say, would never affect the rich and powerful in the Emirates, especially members of the different Gulf royal families. The races, in which children are still made to ride, simply went underground.

As evidence, the Ansar Burney Trust cites the fact that of the estimated 6,000 camel jockeys at the time of the so-called abolition, one thousand are still missing. And even then, some of the ones repatriated back to their countries were resold and resent to the Persian Gulf to race camels again, while still others wound up in the madrassas of Islamic extremist organizations in their home countries.

The unfortunate boys kept on an “ousbah,” an isolated camel farm, are caught up in a nightmare of hellish proportions. After experiencing the trauma of suddenly being separated from their families, they are made to work 18-hour days. A camel jockey-in-training is also starved, beaten and sometimes sexually abused. Serious injury, even death, is a fate that also awaits many of the child riders, some as young as five, when training or racing over distances between four and 10 kilometres atop of 800-900 pound animals that can run as fast as 40 miles per hour. Even if the rider does not fall, damaged genitals is one of the serious wounds the slave boys often suffer.

“They used to wake us at two or three in the morning. If we didn’t get up or thought we were lazy, they would beat us with sticks,” one former child camel jockey told a British newspaper. “We had to clean up the camel dung with our hands.”

Another boy, Zufiqar, 10, said that race day represented the worst time due to the injuries and deaths he saw the camel jockeys suffer when thrown from their fast-moving mounts. And if the camel was also injured, Zufiqar stated “They always look after the camel first.” The reason for this is that the camel may have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars while the slave boy may only have cost a few hundred. Also for this reason, there are camel hospitals, and a Dubai prince was reported by an American paper to even have a swimming pool for his racing camels.

Along with the boys, young girls from South Asia and other impoverished countries are also trafficked to the Arabian Peninsula but for the sinister purpose of sexual exploitation. In the book Princess Sultana’s Circle, a sensitive and modern-thinking princess of the Saudi royal family gave American authoress Jean Sasson damning testimony concerning this evil.

The Canadian government of Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper showed new immigrants that Canadian and Western values are paramount in Canada on Monday when it banned face coverings for Muslim women at citizenship swearing-in ceremonies. The prohibition occurred after the country’s immigration minister, Jason Kenney, had received complaints from citizenship judges and other ceremony participants that it is “hard to tell whether veiled individuals are actually reciting the oath.

“Allowing a group to hide their faces while they are becoming members of our community is counter to Canada’s commitment to openness, equality and social cohesion,” Kenney stated.

The wearing of the Muslim face-veil was becoming a growing problem at citizenship ceremonies. Government officials across the country were being confronted “every week” with veil-wearing women. This went against the grain of the government’s belief that taking the citizenship oath, according to Kenney, was “a public declaration that you are joining the Canadian family and it must be taken freely and openly.” In fact, Kenney called it “frankly bizarre” that regulations had allowed for face coverings at the ceremonies in the first place.

“We cannot have two classes of citizenship ceremonies,” the immigration minister maintained. “Canadian citizenship is not just about the right to carry a passport and to vote.”

Canada is already wrestling with the veil-wearing issue in its Supreme Court, the country’s highest judicial body. An unidentified Muslim woman, a sexual assault victim, is currently seeking the right to wear a veil when she testifies at the trial of her two accused. The outcome of this trial has far-reaching implications for the Canadian legal system as a finding in her favour could introduce a special status or two-tier system that Keeny feared for trial participants: Muslim women who would be allowed conceal their faces and non-Muslim women who wouldn’t.

But as Barbara Kay, a columnist for the National Post, a Canadian national newspaper, points out, this case is not really about religion. The woman, for example, had not worn a veil when she had her photo taken for her driver’s license. Which indicates the case really concerns the unfortunate victim’s “unwillingness to face her abusers without the psychological protection of the veil.”

Besides, as Kay states, the veil is not a religious “demand” in Islam. She cites the grand Shiekh of al-Azhar University in Egypt, Islam’s most prestigious university, who, in 2009, “scolded a Cairo high school girl for wearing a face-veil: ‘The niqab is tradition,” he said, ‘It has no connection to religion.’ ”

After Monday’s announcement, Muslim women who show up with a covered face at citizenship ceremonies will be warned twice to uncover. If they refuse to do so, they will not be allowed to take the oath and their status in Canada will remain as “permanent resident,” which does not give them the right to vote or hold certain jobs. That, however, may be a good thing from Canadian society’s point of view. Veil-wearing women are usually associated with radical Islamic religious beliefs that include the destruction of liberal democracies and their replacement with theocracies based on sharia law.

This is the view in France, which treats veiled Muslim women much more strictly than Canada. A French judicial body, for example, denied citizenship outright in 2008 to a burqa-wearing Moroccan woman for “insufficient integration.” In 2010, France’s legislative bodies passed a law against covering one’s face in public spaces, which included the Muslim veil and burqa. The law went into effect last April, and the first two Muslim women were fined by a French police court for non-compliance in September.

Germany’s leftist school teachers are breathing a tremendous sigh of relief – at least for the moment – due to a court ruling last week that forbids a Muslim student from praying in his Berlin school. German leftists, who used multiculturalism to get Christianity out of the public schools, were relieved Leipzig’s federal administrative court prevented Islam from filling the vacuum they created when it decreed the school had a right to prevent students from performing the Muslim mid-day prayer ritual, since it could disturb school peace.

“This is not a verdict against Islam,” stated Der Spiegel, Germany’s largest news publication, in hailing the decision. “It is a verdict for the sensible separation of state and religion.”

The ruling’s only drawback, however, was that the court stressed its decision applied only to this one school and not to the whole country.

The events leading to the anti-prayer legal ruling actually began in November, 2007, when a Muslim student, Yunus Mitschele, who was then 14, knelt down in a school corridor during a school break along with seven other Muslim students and began to pray towards Mecca, while several other “astonished” students looked on. A teacher fetched the school’s principal, Brigitte Burchardt, who waited until the prayer was finished to speak to the students, telling them, as one German newspaper reported, that “it is perhaps not a good idea what they are doing there…that church and state are largely separate…and about how it would affect other students.” Burchardt also forbid a repetition.

Afterwards, the principal spoke with the students’ parents, since she feared such a demonstrative prayer display could endanger the peace in the multicultural school. The school in question, the Diesterweg Gymnasium, an academic high school for students going on to post-secondary studies, contains students representing 29 different nationalities and five major world religions, including different strains of Islam. The German newspaper Die Welt reports that in the past this religious diversity “has lead to conflicts, and therefore the school administration had to intervene” in this case.

Burchardt came to an understanding with seven of the Muslim students and their parents; but Mitschele’s father, a German convert to Islam, would not accept her prayer prohibition and took the matter to court. In 2008, he obtained a temporary order from a lower Berlin court that would allow his son to perform his prayers once a day at school but only during a break.

“He (Yunus) was the first student in Germany to demand the right to conduct his prayers at school,” Spiegel stated.

Mitschele returned to court in 2009 to have his right to pray in school confirmed, basing his claim on the fact religious freedom is guaranteed in the German constitution. Since observant Muslims pray five times a day, he would have to pray during school hours, it was argued. In September of that year, the court agreed Mitschele did have this constitutional right and therefore should be allowed to pray in school. After the ruling, the Diesterweg Gymnasium allotted Mitschele a prayer room, although the court “did not demand it.”

But one German journalist, writing in May, 2010, wondered how important praying really was to Mitschele, since, in the eight months after the ruling, he had used this prayer room a grand total of only 14 times. In his defense, Mitschele says he couldn’t always find a teacher with a key to the room, which appears rather odd. After all, why would the school take the trouble to provide him with a prayer room, especially after this case had received so much media attention, and then not ensure access? It also appears neither the court nor the German media received a complaint from him or his father regarding his inablity to perform this supposedly all-important mid-day prayer, especially after they had gone to so much trouble to obtain this right.

This leads one to wonder whether the whole Diesterweg Gymnasium affair was simply a provocation, taking after the movement in Europe to bring Islam out of the mosques and into the public sphere. Public spaces, including whole streets, have been taken over in European cities for prayer by kneeling Muslims. These public demonstrations are not so much about piety, but rather more about establishing a dominant position for Islam in European societies by visibly occupying their public areas.

Public schools would be a tempting, and important, target in this drive, since in schools it would also be about the hearts and minds of children. But in Mitschele’s case, once the value gained by the visibility of his praying in the school’s public space, the hallway, was lost by the assignment of a prayer room, his interest in the mid-day prayer may have waned correspondingly.

When it involves the horror of honor crimes, even a high profile, professional world boxing champion was not able to escape the incomprehensible and savage violence of this barbaric custom.

A trial nearing its conclusion in Berlin, Germany, has outlined how a family drama in that country ended in the non-fatal shooting tragedy of Rola El-Halabi, a 26-year-old Muslim woman originally from Lebanon. Like hundreds of other mostly female victims of honor crimes in the West, the reason for the shooting was that El-Halabi had wanted to establish her independence from her culture’s restrictive and archaic customs and be with the man she chose to love.

But unlike most other honor crime victims, El-Halabi was unique in that she enjoyed the unusual distinction of being a well-known sports figure who once held two world championship belts in women’s boxing in the lightweight division. In 2010, the talented El-Halabi defeated American Mia St. John for the WIBF and WIBA titles in Ulm, her hometown in Germany, giving her a perfect 11-0 record. El-Halabi even had one of her matches televised by Al-Jazeera television to the Middle East where it was seen by 22 million people.

El-Halabi’s fame, however, provided no protection from her attacker who was also her step-father, Hicham El-Halabi, 44. The older El-Halabi, a German citizen and goldsmith originally from Kuwait, stormed into her dressing room minutes before she was to enter the ring in a Berlin sports arena to try to regain one of her belts and coldly and calculatingly shot her four times. Rola El-Halabi related the horror of that night to the German newspaper, Bild, and how she had tried to calm her attacker during the shooting:

I was with my trainer and manager, a doctor and physiotherapist in the dressing room, when Papa stormed into the room. He was threatening with the weapon in his hand and screamed “Everybody out!” And then he shot me in the hand from three meters distance. I cried and screamed. Then he shot me in the left foot. I fell and implored him: “Papa, you have everything, what do you want? Please, put the weapon down, then everything is over.” He threatened to kill himself, but he was too cowardly for that. He took his time, aimed, shot me in my kneecap and then in my right foot.

Just moments before the potentially deadly assault on his step-daughter, Hachim El-Halabi had shot two security guards in the legs. The guards were trying to block him from gaining entrance to the dressing room when hit.

This extra expenditure of bullets, however, forced El-Halabi to pause and change his gun’s magazine after he had knocked his step-daughter to the floor with the first shots. The German prosecutor said this was done in “ice-cold” fashion before he continued to shoot her. El-Halabi had also been sure to barricade the dressing room door, so no one could interfere with his brutal assault.

The reason for Hachim El-Halabi’s barbaric behavior was his step-daughter’s falling in love with a non-Muslim man who had reportedly left his wife for her. Hachim had actually been his step-daughter’s manager until the discord between the two over the relationship caused Rola to hand back her two belts, separate her career from her step-father and take a year-long pause from the sport. Her title fight last April, which a German sports channel was to televise, marked her return to the ring under a new manager.

During that year’s respite, however, Hachim had spread insulting messages on the Internet about his step-daughter and had told people, the court learned, he intended to shoot her in the legs and put her in a wheelchair. He had also assaulted his daughter’s new boyfriend and threatened Rola that he had better not see them together.

No one at France’s national satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, was laughing this week after the publication’s Paris offices were destroyed by a firebomb overnight late Tuesday or early Wednesday morning. It is believed Islamists, angry that the editors had named the Prophet Mohammad as guest “editor-in-chief” for this week’s edition, were responsible for the attack. The edition was dedicated to a satire of sharia law, but the firebomb assault took place before it had even hit the newsstands on Wednesday.

“We received threats, but no one had seen this edition,” said Stephane Charbonnier, the magazine’s designer and director. “People reacted violently to the paper yet they were completely ignorant of the edition’s contents; that is the most aberrant and idiotic.”

The leftist weekly publication, founded in 1960, came up with the idea to satirise sharia law and to honour Mohammad with the editor title after the victory of the Islamist Ennahda party in Tunisia’s election last week and the announcement sharia law would be introduced in Libya. The editors proclaimed the upcoming sharia theme in a humorous statement they released in advance that elicited “quite a few letters of protest, threats, insults,” on Twitter and Facebook.

“To fittingly celebrate the victory of the Islamist Ennhada party in Tunisia…Charlie Hebdo has asked Mohammad to be the special editor-in-chief of its next issue,” the statement read. “The prophet of Islam didn’t have to be asked twice and we thank him for it.”

When it appeared on Wednesday, the controversial edition’s front page showed a caricature of a “visibly happy” Mohammad and had him saying “100 lashes if you don’t die laughing.” The edition had also had its title changed to ‘Sharia Hebdo’ and contained a women’s section called “Madame Sharia” as well as an editorial by Mohammad titled the ‘Happy Halal Hour.’ There are also two pages of cartoons with sharia law as their subject, and Mohammad appears again on the last page, wearing a clown’s nose, with, ironically, the caption: “Yes, Islam is compatible with humour.”

As it turns out, the magazine was wrong. Its headquarters were also not the only target singled out for attack. In what may have been a co-ordinated move with the firebombing, Charlie Hebdo’s website was simultaneously hacked. On Wednesday morning, its home page showed the words “no god but Allah” accompanied by a picture of the grand Mosque in Mecca with a message in English and Turkish.

“You keep abusing Islam’s almighty Prophet with disgusting and disgraceful cartoons using excuses of freedom of speech,” the message read. “Be God’s curse upon you!”

French politicians and France’s newspaper association were all quick to condemn the assault on the Charlie Hebdo offices and express solidarity with its staff. French Prime Minister Francois Fillon said the “…every attack against the freedom of the press must be condemned with the greatest firmness,” while the French minister of culture, Frederic Mitterand, called the assault “intolerable.

It is not a cause the leftist ‘Occupy Wall Street’ crowd would ever espouse, since its life-or-death issues would shame theirs and show where true evil and oppression resides.

Largely ignored by the Western media, nine Tibetan Buddhist monks and one nun have attempted suicide by self-immolation since last March in China’s eastern Sichuan province, a hotbed of unrest against perceived Chinese government oppression. Eastern Sichuan is largely inhabited by ethnic Tibetans and was once historically part of Tibet.

It is unknown how many of the ten perished in their suicide attempts, since Chinese authorities never say whether a monk survived. But it is believed five have died from their injuries, the nun, Tengzin Wangmo, 20, being one of them. The latest attempted self-immolation, reported by the Free Tibet group, occurred only last week outside a monastery in Ganzi in Sichuan, when a monk set himself alight after dousing himself with an accelerant. It is also not known whether he survived.

“The unrest in Tibet is escalating and widening,” said Stephanie Brigden of Free Tibet. “The number and frequency of self-immolations is unprecedented.”

The latest fatality, whose name is unknown, is the eighth Buddhist monk to attempt suicide by fire in the past two months. This increase in self-immolation numbers indicates the Tibetans’ level of desperation and despair concerning the survival of their people, culture and religion, which they see threatened by Han Chinese immigration and repressive government measures. Beijing gained control of Tibet, which is now labelled an autonomous region, after it successfully invaded its neighbour in 1950.

Self-immolations, like those occurring in Tibet, are a sign of a people reaching the end of its tether. It is the only weapon the powerless and brutalised Tibetans feel they have left that could make a difference against a monstrous dictatorship that has already murdered 70 million people. The employment of this ultimate measure is also an indication that Tibetans believe their situation and conditions are becoming so hopeless, they would rather perish than continue living in their present state.

Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, self-immolations also occurred in European communist countries to protest the unbearable and horrific results of decades of socialism. A self-immolation also triggered the ‘Arab Spring’ when a man set himself alight in Tunisia to protest bureaucratic corruption. While it is doubtful whether the recent self-immolations of Buddhist spirituals will lead to such regime-changing events, especially in the face of continued, massive Chinese police oppression, Brigden believes they are sparking discontent.

“The acts of self-immolation are not taking place in isolation, protests have been reported in the surrounding region and calls for wider protests are growing,” she said.

The center of the recent Tibetan suicide protests, and of anti-Beijing sentiment in general, is the Kirti monastery in eastern Sichuan. The majority of monks involved in the fiery suicide attempts this year were from Kirti, the first one taking place last March. The monk was 16-years-old. Two other Kirti monks, accused of assisting with the March attempt, were both given long jail terms.

Before the self-immolations, the Kirti monastery had a population of 2,500 monks; that has now dwindled to 600 due to arrests, police persecution and “brutal” security raids.” With police now stationed inside the monastery itself, the religious institution is reported to have been turned into “a virtual prison.” Several hundred monks may also have been sent away for “patriotic re-education.”

“May the devil s**t on their graves.”
- Mohammad Shafia

These charming words, picked up by a police wiretap, were Mohammad Shafia’s ghoulish reaction almost three weeks after the murder of his three daughters and first wife, whose deaths he is accused of orchestrating. Daughters Zanaib, 19, Sahar, 17, Geeti, 13, by all appearances beautiful and vibrant teenagers, filled with life, and first wife Rona Mohammad, were found dead in a family vehicle in a canal near Kingston, Ontario, in June 2009. Authorities gave drowning as the cause of death.

An unrepentant Shafia, an immigrant from Afghanistan, appeared in court last week in Kingston to answer for this barbaric loss of human life. He is facing four charges of first degree murder along with his second wife, Tooba, the mother of all the family’s seven children, and oldest son Hamid, who was 18 at the time of the killings. The three have pleaded not guilty to the charges, setting the stage for the most sensational honor murder trial Canada has ever witnessed, particularly because of the number of victims involved.

Canadians woke up to the horror of the honor murder phenomenon, in which some immigrant families, particularly those from Islamic countries, kill primarily female members “to restore family honor,” when teenager Aqsa Parvez, 16, was murdered in a city near Toronto in 2007. Parvez’s Pakistani father and older brother were responsible for her death, her brother having strangled her.

Unlike Mohammad Shafia, however, Parvez’s father called the police right after her execution and said he had just killed his daughter. He and his son eventually pleaded guilty to second degree murder.

It is believed Mohammad Shafia, a prosperous businessman who owns a shopping mall, killed his daughters for the same reason that Aqsa Parvez’s father murdered her: They were living too Western a lifestyle. Shafia’s daughters would wear Western-style clothing, have boyfriends, disrespect traditions such as the hijab, and be defiant of his authority. They also apparently suffered the same mistreatment at their father’s hands that Aqsa Parvez did for behaving so. One daughter was even kept out of school for a whole year when it was discovered she had a boyfriend. Shafia, however, was apparently particularly hostile to the friendship and alliance the three had formed with the childless Rona, which was probably the reason she was also killed in this mass honor murder.

“They committed treason on themselves. They betrayed humankind. They betrayed Islam. They betrayed our religion…they betrayed everything,” Shafia told Tooba, the murdered children’s mother.

To show perhaps he isn’t completely unfeeling, Shafia also told his second wife he becomes “consoled” over his daughters’ deaths whenever he views the cell phone photos Zainab and Sahar took of themselves, posing in their underwear or with boyfriends.

“I say to myself, ‘You did well.’ Were they come to life, I would do it again,” the wiretap recorded him saying.

Shafia arrived with his family in Canada in 2007 and settled in Montreal after leaving Afghanistan in 1992 and spending several years in other countries. He married second wife Tooba after his first wife didn’t bear him any children. Rona Mohammad was brought to Canada on a visa six months later; the girls presented her as their aunt. After her death, police found Rona’s diary, in which she described her husband’s beatings and the cruelty and mistreatment she suffered at the hands of his child-bearing, second wife.

“You’re not his wife. You’re my servant. Your family got rid of you. Who would want a dead weight around its neck? Your life is in my hands,” Tooba had prophetically told her predecessor. Tooba is known to Canadians for the photos that appeared in the media, showing her weeping copious tears over her daughters’ deaths after the discovery of their bodies. Police, however, believe she was involved in their murders all along.

The Shafia family is typical of some immigrant families from Third World countries with strict religious cultures. They arrive in the West but never actually live here. They want to take economically from their new environment but still want to live their lives by the laws, rules, customs and values of their country of origin. They want to adopt nothing in this respect from their new society, believing in some cases their new country’s culture inferior to their own and that it even poses a threat. For them, integration is simply out of the question and no attempt is ever made, choosing self-segregation from the host society instead.

But problems often arise when their children attend school and encounter values that contradict those of the family’s, especially if a strict religious, patriarchal culture reigns at home. Girls face heavy restrictions in such homes, particularly in Muslim ones, and therefore can be especially affected by a school environment where equality between the genders is stressed, and they notice female classmates from other cultures enjoying unheard of freedoms. Wanting to fit in with the others and enjoy life, these girls then rebel against their restrictive home environments, but sometimes with deadly consequences.

Such was the case of the Shafia sisters. But the surprising thing about this tragedy, as was pointed out in one Canadian newspaper, was that the evidence the prosecutor presented in court last week showed how open the girls’ rebellion was. It was no secret. Child welfare authorities had twice been called by Sahar’s schools. The social worker found one of her complaints true, “…but closed the file when Sahar wouldn’t talk to her once she learned that the worker would be obliged to tell her parents what she’d told her.” Another time the girls were too afraid to go home and had a stranger call 9/11. The youngest Shafia sister, Geeti, had asked to be placed in a foster home, and Zainab had even once run away to a women’s shelter.

Part of the failure of the police and social workers to prevent this tragedy was simply ignorance of the misogynistic, religious-based culture in which the Shafia girls lived. In this culture, men believe they have the right to control women, especially their chastity, which, to them, is of the highest importance. If a young woman wishes to determine her own life, which includes sexual behavior, and satisfy her freedom drive, she often must cut off all connections with her family or risk an honor murder. There is no concept of the Western precept of individuality, and a person, especially a woman, is not allowed to establish an identity outside the family, or clan. In such cultures, there are also usually no rights or laws for women, only custom.

And the men who commit these heinous acts have no fear of the host country’s laws. Before killing his daughters, Shafia was researching on the Internet about whether prisoners can have control of their real estate assets.

It was not revealed how the police believe the Shafia sisters and their father’s first wife died that day. The murder victims were reported to have had marks on their heads. Their brother may have pushed their vehicle into the canal with his car. The family was returning in the two vehicles to Montreal from a surprise trip to Niagara Falls that may have been a ruse to get the sisters to the possibly pre-planned murder location. The vehicle used as the women’s coffin was also purchased only six days before the trip.

Further details from the murder trial of the Shafia sisters and Rona Mohammad will only reinforce the belief there is an anti-civilization growing in the West, in which humanistic Western values are coming under siege. Honor murders have now occurred in nearly every Western state. This barbaric “New World” is a threat to liberal societies and democracies, of which honor murders are one of its more horrifying manifestations. The tragedy of the Shafia sisters and Rona Mohammad attest to that.

Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle. Click here.

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To get the whole story on the Left’s deafening silence about Islamic honor killings, read Jamie Glazov’s book, United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror.

American soldiers have launched a major operation this week that has seen hundreds of US and Afghan troops mass near Afghanistan’s eastern border with Pakistan, raising suspicions over a possible unilateral military strike in North Waziristan. If undertaken, the assault would end years of frustration with Pakistani military inaction concerning Islamic terrorists who take refuge there after staging hit-and-run attacks against American and coalition forces in Afghanistan.

Called “Operation Knife Edge,“ the allied forces are deploying right up to the Pakistani border with helicopter gunships and heavy artillery, blocking the main road between the two countries and conducting house-to-house searches. An Afghan Defense Ministry official said the operation was “largely against the Haqqani network,” the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) and the Afghan security forces’ chief threat in eastern Afghanistan. Last month, Haqqani fighters carried out an assault in Kabul itself that saw the US embassy attacked. They also wounded 21 US troops in a bombing in Wardak province.

“These networks are directly responsible for recent attacks against the people of Afghanistan and coalition forces,” said US captain Justin Brockhoff.

After US Navy Seals flew deep into Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden last May at his luxury compound in Abbottabad where he was living undisturbed, the Pakistani government warned the United States not to violate Pakistani sovereignty again. But Pakistan’s army chief, General Ashfaq Kiyani, admits American forces may cross the border during this current operation, but this time to confront the Haqqani organization.

“They [USA] may do it, but they will have to think ten times because Pakistan is not Iraq or Afghanistan,” General Kiyani told the Pakistani politicians on Tuesday.

A story in the Washington Post last month further indicates Operation Knife Edge may extend into Pakistani territory. It states that American government officials warned their Pakistani counterparts a week after September’s US embassy attack that the United States would take unilateral action against the Haqqani network if they did not do so. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told reporters the United States is going “to take whatever steps are necessary to protect our forces,” which could be interpreted as an ultimatum.

The American government has long been aware of the ties between the Haqqani network and Pakistan’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) and wants these bonds cut. In a speech to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace last month, Admiral Mike Mullen, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, even accused the Pakistanis of waging a “proxy war” in Afghanistan through the Haqqani organization. Mullen told his audience he had had a four hour conversation with Pakistan’s army chief that included discussing “the need for the ISI to disconnect from Haqqani.”

Pakistani officials, naturally, deny any such ties exist. Which is not unexpected from a government that says it did not know bin Laden was living comfortably in its midst for so many years.

North Waziristan is a rugged, mountainous tribal area in north-western Pakistan that borders Afghanistan’s Khost province. The Haqqani network, headed by Jalaluddin Haqqani, made its name fighting Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s, for which he received American and Pakistani help. Pakistan’s tribal territories also served as his base during that conflict.

Haqqani took part in the civil war in Afghanistan after the Soviets were driven out and later sided with the Taliban, becoming a minister in the Taliban government. He fled back to the Pakistani tribal area after the 2001 US-led invasion and resumed guerrilla warfare there, but this time against NATO and Afghan government troops. He also became closely allied with al-Qaeda and may now be sheltering some of its members in North Waziristan.

They wanted to change the world, but first they had to change the location of their demonstration.

Billed as “Occupy Toronto,” the Canadian version of America’s “Occupy Wall Street” ran into a problem not long after their protest began in cold, rainy weather last Saturday on Bay Street in downtown Toronto, Canada’s largest city. Bay Street was the natural location for such an event that would include a large number of anti-capitalist participants. Like Wall Street in America, the corner of Bay and King Streets is Canada’s financial heart where the Toronto Stock Exchange and the country’s largest banks are located.

But because the annual Toronto Marathon, scheduled for Sunday, was to have its finish line at this intersection, workers were there setting up barriers, causing the protesters to move to a cathedral park about a ten-minute walk away. They did, however, considerately leave one lone individual behind, holding a hastily-manufactured cardboard sign with an arrow on it, indicating to any perplexed late arrivals that the demonstration went thataway. Maybe this person’s lonely vigil and sign will eventually serve as the metaphor for the whole “Occupy Toronto” movement when all is said and done.

Arriving in the park, the first thing one noticed among the several hundred people present were the signs the demonstrators were holding and the rather unusual things written on them. One of the more memorable ones read: “Quit buying stuff.” Which makes one wonder: how does this person suggest people feed and clothe themselves? And wouldn’t a lot of workers, who anti-capitalists say they support, be unemployed if people didn’t?

Other signs were more explicitly anti-capitalist, such as: “This Revolution Will Not Be Privatized,” “Separation of Corporations and Politics,” and “Capitalists: You’re Fired.” These messages create a lot of confusion, since they leave one wondering how these presumably well thought-out statements are to be carried out in practice.

But the confusion dissipated somewhat for this writer when a sign was spotted that read: “1984 was an instruction manual.” So, everything was now clear – at least momentarily. All a person had to do to understand how all these weighty thoughts were going to be implemented was to read George Orwell’s classic novel. But, then, upon further reflection, it could occur to one that perhaps this sign was directed at the capitalists and their evil machinations.

My confusion continued despite talking to some of the individuals involved in the protest. Darren (he would not give his last name), who was selling a socialist newspaper, said he belonged to the Canadian Peace Alliance and was affiliated with several socialist groups. Darren accounted for his presence in the park by saying he was against government austerity measures and the war in Afghanistan.

“I don’t like the way our government is prioritizing its expenditures on the military,” Darren said. “We’re going to Afghanistan and killing innocent civilians when we have problems at home.”

Darren summed up the Canadian government’s bad behavior with his own, rather catchy, homemade slogan: “Peace and prosperity out; war and austerity in,” of which he appeared to be quite proud. But as to how he and the other people involved in the “Occupy Toronto” movement were going to reverse this and what was to happen after Saturday, he was unable to say.

“That’s the big question,” he said. “It’s totally up in the air at the moment.”

Zack Morgenstern, a student and member of the Canadian Communist Party, was more optimistic as well as good enough to educate me about the fact that “capitalism is a doomed movement.” He believes that if these demonstrations, like the Wall Street ones, last long enough, the movement can get “broad support.”

“We want to rally people around a revolutionary movement, around mass consent, and bring down ultimately the capitalist state,” said Morgenstern of his and his party’s goals, apparently having missed the history of world events between 1917 and 1991.

Religious violence against Christians and complaints against the ruling military council make up most headlines one reads about Egypt today. But the Nile state’s biggest, and largely unknown, problem concerns how it is going to feed its millions of desperately poor and hungry people in a time of economic downturn and political turmoil. It is estimated that about 40 million Egyptians among an 82 million population now live below the poverty line.

Egypt is the biggest wheat importer in the world, but, frighteningly, may soon run out of funds to buy on international markets the necessary food to feed its impoverished masses. A story in the Financial Times last week states that the Central Bank of Egypt’s foreign currency reserves have dropped $10 billion, from $29.8 to $19.4, since last February.

“The current reserves are estimated to cover 4.8 months of imports, down from 6.9 in April, 2011,” the story goes on to say.

Which translates into only five months until catastrophe strikes. Egypt consumes 14 million tonnes of wheat annually, half of which it imports. The amount of wheat Egypt currently has in storage combined with planned purchases, primarily from Russia, is expected to last only until March.

While the recent massacre of Christians by the Egyptian army demonstrates that Egypt is disintegrating, the inability of the country’s rulers to feed their country’s millions of poor would lead to a collapse into chaos of monumental and cataclysmic proportions. The Asia Times columnist Spengler (a literary pseudonym), who has written about Egypt’s impending food crisis, believes it will not matter what form of government eventually takes charge in Egypt because the starvation issue will override all other concerns. As Spengler succinctly puts it: “Even Islamists have to eat.”

“It [Egypt] will look like the Latin America banana republics, but without the bananas,” Spengler states. “That is not meant in jest: few people actually starved to death in Latin inflations. Egypt, which imports half its wheat and a great deal of the rest of its food, will actually starve.”

Egypt’s food problem has been strongly affected by the continuing steep rise in world food prices. Corn and wheat, for example, have nearly doubled in price in the past year. Overall, food prices rose by 25 percent in 2010. Already last spring, the World Bank estimated that food costs for the world’s poor were reaching a “breaking point.” To make matters worse, prices have increased most dramatically on key commodities, such as rice, bread and cooking oil, the basic staples of people like those who make up Egypt’s huge underclass, rather than on processed foods.

“Food price increases will correspondingly roughly triple the inflationary impact in Egypt compared to Qatar,” reported the Arab paper, the Gulf Times. “In Egypt, the Consumer Price Index increased by 17.2 % in 2010 compared to 3.8 % in Qatar.”

The Arab street in Egypt has exploded twice in the past over food prices. The first time occurred in 1977 when the government of Anwar Sadat ended subsidies on basic commodities. Known as the “Bread Riots,” tens of thousands of people took to the streets in several Egyptian cities in what was called the greatest threat ever to military rule until Hosni Mubarak was deposed earlier this year. Eight hundred people perished in the 1977 disturbances until the subsidies were restored days later.

It is just another sign that the Arab Spring is turning into an autumn of Muslim religious persecution. While the world media is currently focused on the latest Christian murders at a demonstration in Cairo, a much smaller, but equally telling, incident of religious intolerance played itself out in Libya today.

David Gerbi, a Libyan Jew who fled his country for Italy in 1967 to escape the recently deposed Muammar Gaddafi’s persecution, was forced to leave Libya again Tuesday after unsuccessfully attempting to reopen the Dar Bishi Synagogue in Tripoli. Dar Bishi, closed 41 years ago, was to be Libya’s first functioning synagogue in decades. In an indication of the devastation visited on Libya’s Jewish community, in 1941 there were 44 synagogues in Tripoli alone and Jews formed 25 percent of the city’s population.

Gerbi’s desire to re-establish the more than 2,000-year-old Jewish presence in his native land ended in failure when several hundred angry protesters showed up last Thursday to oppose his initial efforts to clean out the abandoned building for prayer. Granted official permission, he broke down the synagogue’s bricked-up entrance.

But a peaceful protest wasn’t sufficient for the citizens of the “new” Libya. Holding signs that read, “There is no place for Jews in Libya” and “We don’t have a place for Zionism,” the demonstrators also demanded Gerbi’s expulsion from the country and tried to storm his Tripoli hotel. After speaking with Libyan and Italian authorities, Gerbi agreed to leave the country “to ease the tensions.”

“This incident has served to expose the dangerous reality simmering beneath the surface,” Gerbi noted. “I want to contribute to, not obstruct, the building of a new, democratic and pluralistic Libya. It is sad and absurd that my mere presence in Libya should set off so much hostility and I regret this.”

The fact some of the protesters’ signs were in Hebrew, and a demonstration against the synagogue re-opening also took place in Benghazi indicates the hostility Gerbi “set off” was not necessarily spontaneous or entirely local. Most likely the product of Islamist forces with international connections, the anti-Semitic protesters may also have wanted Gerbi expelled from the country because he is seeking the position as the rebel National Transition Council’s (NTC) representative for Libyan Jewry.

There had been a thriving Jewish presence in Libya for 2,300 years. When Libya became an Italian colony in 1911, Jews lived mostly in Tripoli and Benghazi. Italian occupation was a fairly positive experience for Libya’s Jews until Italy’s fascist regime grew more anti-Semitic in the 1930s. And as the anti-Semitism intensified, “anti-Jewish incidents increased in Libya” and Rome “privileged Libya’s Arabs over its Jews.” Worse, however, was yet to come.

“As the Axis solidified in the late 1930s, Rome imposed anti-Semitic race laws on both Italy and Libya,” writes Michael Rubin in a review of Maurice Roumani’s book, The Jews of Libya. “Libyan Jews were interned in local labor camps, deported, and, in some cases, transferred to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.”

During the war, German troops also plundered the Jewish quarter in Benghazi and deported more than 2,000 Jews, including women and children, across the desert to an Italian work camp in western Libya that Gerbi visited. Gerbi “sat shiva” for the 600 prisoners who died there during a typhoid epidemic and visited the cemetery where they are now buried.

As if any further proof was necessary, Canada stepped forward once again and showed the world that it is Israel’s best friend. In taking the field on behalf of the Jewish people this time around, the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper became the first country last week to sign the Ottawa Protocol on Combating Anti-Semitism. (For the full text of the protocol click here.)

“The fact that this important document was crafted in Ottawa is further testimony to Canada’s leadership role in this vital global battle,” said Shimon Fogel of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, adding that the protocol is “groundbreaking” and “will serve as the basis of the renewed international effort against anti-Semitism.”

The protocol, drawn up by international parliamentarians in a series of conferences that began in Ottawa last November, is intended to combat the ongoing, worldwide threat of anti-Semitism. It is a reaffirmation of the “commitment to institute tangible measures” to counter the scourge of anti-Jewish hatred that is often disguised as criticism of Israel. The Ottawa document is meant to plainly distinguish between the two and does so in exemplary fashion.

“The criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any other country cannot be anti-Semitic,” the protocol states. “But singling Israel out for selective condemnation and opprobrium – let alone denying its right to exist or seeking its destruction – is discriminatory and hateful, and not saying so is dishonest.”

The Canadian government co-hosted last year’s initial conference along with the Inter-Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Anti-Semitism. The meeting “reaffirmed the London Declaration on Combating Anti-Semitism as a template for fighting anti-Jewish prejudice.” In this spirit, Prime Minister Harper addressed the November gathering and, in plain language not often heard from a politician, especially on this subject, showed his great respect and support for the Jewish state as well as a high level of morality and insight lacking in most other world leaders.

“When Israel, the only country in the world whose very existence is under attack, is consistently singled out for condemnation, I believe we are morally obligated to take a stand,” said Harper. “…Not just because it is the right thing to do, but because history shows us, and the ideology of the anti-Israel mob tell us all too well, that those who threaten the existence of the Jewish people are in the longer term a threat to us all.”

Without directly naming the guilty party, Harper also added “a hateful ideology with global ambitions” is the “one which targets the Jewish homeland as a scapegoat” and is responsible for Jews being “savagely attacked around the world.” Hopefully, someone from the Obama administration was present and taking notes.

The Ottawa Protocol on Combating Anti-Semitism is just the latest manifestation of Harper’s siding with Israel on the international stage. Since coming to power in Ottawa in 2006, the Canadian prime minister and his government have garnered nothing but praise from Jewish organizations and advocates for Israel around the world. His government’s pro-Israeli policies have earned his country the unofficial title of being the Jewish state’s “greatest friend in the world” at a time when Israel is under constant attack internationally and sometimes inside Canada itself.

Former Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi is currently not the only object of intense search in Libya. Large amounts of weapons are missing from his many abandoned, well-stocked arsenals, and no one knows where they have gone. But causing Western intelligence services nightmares, though, are the thousands of unaccounted for shoulder-held surface-to-air missiles (SAMS) that, in capable terrorist hands, could bring down civilian airliners.

Peter Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch has travelled around Libya, visiting former Gaddafi armouries. He describes what he found as “shocking.” At one storage facility alone he found 100,000 anti-tank and anti-personnel mines. To make matters worse, the site was unguarded.

“Qaddafi’s weapons stocks far exceeded what we saw in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein; some of the weapons such as surface-to-air missiles now floating around eastern Libya are giving security officials sleepless nights,” said Bouckaert, who adds he is now getting “anxious” phone calls from these officials.

Documents discovered at one abandoned armoury show that 482 shoulder-held SAMS made up one Russian shipment alone to Libya in 2004 and are now nowhere to be found. These SAMs are a sophisticated Russian model, the SA-24, which have a range of 11,000 feet. This model was apparently the Soviet Union’s answer to the portable American Stinger missile that brought down so many Soviet helicopters and aircraft during the 1980s Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

The threat that these SA-24s pose to civilian air traffic is real. In 2002, two other Russian-made SAMS, albeit a different model, were fired at an Israeli passenger plane leaving Mombasa, Kenya; but both missiles fortunately missed their target. A Lebanese-based terrorist group, called the Army of Palestine, took responsibility for that attack. There are reports that some SA-24s have already been smuggled out of Libya by Iranian agents, based in Sudan, belonging to the Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force.

“The SA-24 is on the top wish list of Iran; the US tried to block its transfer from Russia to [Venezuelan President Hugo] Chavez because they were afraid it was going to get into Iranian hands a few years ago,” said Bouckaert.

It is estimated that Gaddafi spent more than $100 billion on arms during his 42-year rule. This accounts for why his forces seemed to have an unlimited supply of weapons and munitions despite the United Nations (UN) arms embargo placed on Libya. And it would also account for why his fighters are still able to continue resisting the rebel forces in their last strongholds of Sirte and Bani Walid. In contrast, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) warplanes were running out of bombs within weeks of NATO’s decision to intervene, a deficiency that America had to make good.

As for Libya’s future, the greatest danger is that the country is awash in guns. Gaddafi had arms issued to the general population, and even to criminals, in order to fight the insurgency. It is also going to be difficult for the country’s provisional ruling body, the National Transition Council (NTC), to disarm them and the numerous militias that fought Gaddafi’s forces, since they regard themselves as independent or semi-independent entities. The NTC has often been described as united in only one thing: deposing Gaddafi.