Unholy Alliance – The Left & Fundamentalist Islam

Pro-Palestinian protestors stage die-in in London. No such protest against ISIS.

A strange thing has happened in Left protest circles since the first Iraq war. An unholy alliance has formed between Leftist activists protesting Western wars in the Middle East, including Israel’s ongoing conflict with the Palestinians, and far-right Islamists. Somehow groups such as Australia’s Socialist Alternative and others see the threat of radical Islam as less harmful than that of Western imperialism, colonialism, Zionism and other ism’s of the 20th Century.

I consider myself a progressive. A leftist. A peacenik. And a pragmatist. But for the life of me, I cannot understand why the (radical?) Left is holding onto outdated philosophies and definitions of conflict that are no longer relevant. Though I do recognise the historic impact of Western influence on the region, make no mistake the biggest threat to the Middle East today is radical Islam. It threatens all progress that marked the Arab Spring, and is now plunging the region again into a deep darkness.

From Libya to Gaza, Syria to Iraq, radical Islam threatens all those that do not ascribe to its values. The ISIS threat of creating a fundamentalist Islamic state across most of the Middle East and a large swathe of Europe is very real. This isn’t the fundamentalism of groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, themselves abhorrent on their record against human rights, progress and peace. No, this is a whole new level of horror and hate.

Hear, hear Roman – You got away with it

Smug

What a fantastic step forward in justice. Roman Polanski, famed art-house film director and creative genius will not be extradited to the United States from Switzerland to face the 30-year old sex offense charges that he skipped out on all that time ago never to return.

How wonderful, he will go back to making films that will be shown in film festivals throughout the world. He will shake hands with dignitaries, celebrities and the common folk who line red carpets hoping for a glimpse of fame. He will be acclaimed as a ground-breaking and visionary director who changed the face of cinema.

How truly great it is that Roman Polanksi will never have to serve his sentence for the rape and sodomy of a 13-year-old girl whom he plied with alcohol and forced his pedophile self onto, violating a child against her will in the worst possible way.

Turkish Delight: Turkey-Israel playground spat continues

Friends?

Things are going from bad to worse in Turkish-Israel relations, since the flotilla fiasco last month, in which 9-Turkish protestors were killed after an Israeli commando raid on a group of Gaza-bound protest ships attempting to break Israel’s three-year embargo on the Strip. In the international outcry that followed, and the rounds of heinous propaganda from both sides professing utmost innocence, one thing is clear.

We now have two world leaders playing a game in the Eastern sandpit of ‘he started it’. Yesterday, Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan had a tantrum and decided to pull out on joint US-Israel military maneuvers, with ties on hold until Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu apologizes for the botched raid. Never one to admit failure, though there have been many and varied in his illustrious career, Bibi will do no such thing and says Erdogan pulled his receding hair first, leaving two half-friends nearly bitter enemies.

So convenient is their playground tiff, that it has managed to deflect from both leaders inability to deal with their internal troubles and failures to make peace with their respective nationalist minority time-bombs, making one think that maybe they planned this episode?! Small dicks with big guns – Part XXIIV – stay tuned, next installment coming soon.

iSpy ‘a Russian’ with my little eye…

A spy? A lesson on why you shouldn't post your pics on Facebook...

Good news folks, spies are back. Not since the cold war have intelligence agencies seemed so, um, intelligent? First, we had the Israeli Dubai assassination caper, which lets face it, if not for the dead man was quite entertaining, in a Steven Spielberg Munich kind of way. All we needed were bell-bottoms and cheesy 70’s music. No wait, I think we had that.

Now we have suburban spies. On Monday, 11-people were accused of spying on the US from deeply embedded households in suburban America. From their well-to-do homes in a variety of pretty neighborhoods, the defendants are charged with attempting to gather information regarding US-foreign policy and recruit additional agents, at the bequest of the Russian Intelligence Agency, S.V.R, formally known as the cloak-and-dagger K.G.B.

After gathering useful information, the accused would meet at clandestine locations such as parks, train stations and…Starbucks, where they would use encrypting software or the good old-fashioned identical bag swap to exchange data, which they would then send off to the motherland. The FBI, which had been investigating the case for a number of years, and waited until the Russian President Dmitri Medvedev had left the country after eating a hamburger with Obama to make their move. The Russians have denied any involvement in the saga. As they would, for it would be impolite to steal the President’s chips.