Dems promise they’ll “restore America’s image abroad” once Bush is gone. In one rather important corner of the world, their message is not going over so well.

From Time:

The arrival of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who came to Baghdad on Saturday with a congressional delegation, set off a now-familiar cycle of reaction in the Iraqi capital. First there was buzz around the city about flight delays from Baghdad International Airport, which goes into lockdown when VIPs land or takeoff. Since no dust storms were grounding flights, anyone traveling could have assumed some American bigwig was heading in. But when local TV reported the visitor was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, there was a collective shrug of the kind you might expect from Republicans catching a glimpse of her somewhere in McCain country.

Pelosi is something of a nonentity to average Iraqis. If they know who she is at all, she is generally seen as an antiwar caricature figure, someone whose views on U.S. troop withdrawals are widely considered unrealistic. Pelosi has said she wants to see most U.S. troops withdrawn from Iraq by the end of the 2008, a time frame virtually no Iraqi political leader sees as feasible. Not even Mahdi Army militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr, the fiercest advocate of a U.S. withdrawal on the scene, has called for such a rapid withdrawal of U.S. forces. Rather, Sadr contends that the Americans should simply announce a reasonable timetable for the departure of U.S. forces.

The lack of popularity of Pelosi’s views was evident in the fact that her first day on the ground Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki did not make an effort to see her. Maliki is currently in the northern city of Mosul overseeing a crackdown on insurgent networks there. But the city has been largely quiet in recent days, and there was no obvious pressing reason for the prime minister to skip Pelosi’s arrival.

Pelosi may not get much more warmth from the American military leaders she plans to meet either. Pelosi argued against sending additional surge forces to Iraq, a plan overseen by Gen. David Petraeus that is now widely credited with reducing the levels of violence in Iraq. Moreover, Pelosi made waves on Capitol Hill in November by saying U.S. troops were torturing detainees - an accusation generally not taken well by men and women in uniform of any rank….

Dem foreign policy ideas go over well in Pelosi’s home district of San Francisco and among the Mandarin eunichs in DC. But our allies and service personnel in Iraq see right through it. Too bad for Obama that Hamas doesn’t have a vote.

Lifted from Powerline:

It’s no surprise that the media are in the tank for Barack Obama, but the willingness of the New York Times to simply misrepresent the facts–while pretending to act as a fact-checker!–is pretty breathtaking. You may think the Times is an outlier, if not a joke, but I suspect that many more news outlets are prepared to follow the Times’s lead in flat-out misreporting the facts, if that’s what it takes to get Obama elected.

The Times story is “On McCain, Obama and a Hamas Link.” It takes John McCain to task for pointing out that Hamas has endorsed Obama. The Times reporter, Larry Rohter, says that John McCain has “again portrayed the Democratic contender as being the favorite of Hamas, the militant Palestinian group.” Of course, this is not McCain’s “portrayal;” it is an indisputable fact that Hamas has endorsed Obama and has said that it hopes he will be elected. But the paper’s most egregious error, in its campaign “fact check” column, is yet to come.

Rohter notes that charges and counter-charges have gone back and forth between the McCain and Obama campaigns, but Rohter judges that McCain is mostly at fault:

But important nuances appear to have been lost in the partisan salvos, particularly on Mr. McCain’s side.

McCain, Rohter writes, is guilty because he says that Obama has advocated “unconditional” meetings with Iran’s President:

[I]n a fund-raising letter sent out in April, a spokesman for Mr. McCain wrote: “We need change in America, but not the kind of change that wins kind words from Hamas, surrenders in Iraq and will hold unconditional talks with Iranian President Ahmadinejad.”

That, the Times says, is wrong. It quotes Obama adviser Susan Rice denying that Obama has advocated “unconditional” talks with Ahmadinejad:

Susan E. Rice, a former State Department and National Security Council official who is a foreign policy adviser to the Democratic candidate, said that “for political purposes, Senator Obama’s opponents on the right have distorted and reframed” his views. Mr. McCain and his surrogates have repeatedly stated that Mr. Obama would be willing to meet “unconditionally” with Mr. Ahmadinejad. But Dr. Rice said that this was not the case for Iran or any other so-called “rogue” state.

That’s good enough for the New York Times’s “fact checkers.” The problem is that, contrary to his campaign’s current revisionist effort, Obama plainly has advocated unconditional talks with Iran on several occasions. He was caught on YouTube doing exactly that during one of the Democratic debates. Not only that, Obama’s web site contains this statement:

Diplomacy: Obama is the only major candidate who supports tough, direct presidential diplomacy with Iran without preconditions.

Now that it is convenient for Obama to retreat from his conciliatory attitude toward Iran and other bitterly anti-American states, the Times is happy to help him cover his tracks, even though Obama’s own web site confirms that, exactly as the McCain campaign said, Obama has advocated talks with Iran “without preconditions.”

It will be interesting to see whether the Times corrects this column. Personally, I’m not holding my breath. I think we are about to witness a level of partisanship in the “mainstream” media that has not been seen since the era of professional news media began a little over a century ago. In the past, when newspapers like the Times have misreported facts, people have generally assumed it was, even if the result of bias, inadvertent. No longer. We have entered an era in which leading news organs will intentionally and persistently misinform their readers in order to achieve a political objective–the election of Barack Obama.

Whoa:

The next UN investigator into Israeli conduct in the occupied territories has stood by comments comparing Israeli actions in Gaza to those of the Nazis.

Speaking to the BBC, Professor Richard Falk said he believed that up to now Israel had been successful in avoiding the criticism that it was due.

Professor Falk is scheduled to take up his post for the UN Human Rights Council later in the year.

But Israel wants his mandate changed to probe Palestinian actions as well.

Professor Falk said he drew the comparison between the treatment of Palestinians with the Nazi record of collective atrocity, because of what he described as the massive Israeli punishment directed at the entire population of Gaza.

He said he understood that it was a provocative thing to say, but at the time, last summer, he had wanted to shake the American public from its torpor.

I really don’t care what this idiot thinks of the “torpor” of my fellow citizens, but do we really have to fund 39% of his salary?

From today’s WSJ:

…During the fighting in 1947-1948, about three-fourths of a million Arabs fled or were driven (both are true in different places) from Israel and found refuge in the neighboring Arab countries. In the same period and after, a slightly greater number of Jews fled or were driven from Arab countries, first from the Arab-controlled part of mandatory Palestine (where not a single Jew was permitted to remain), then from the Arab countries where they and their ancestors had lived for centuries, or in some places for millennia. Most Jewish refugees found their way to Israel.

What happened was thus, in effect, an exchange of populations not unlike that which took place in the Indian subcontinent in the previous year, when British India was split into India and Pakistan. Millions of refugees fled or were driven both ways — Hindus and others from Pakistan to India, Muslims from India to Pakistan. Another example was Eastern Europe at the end of World War II, when the Soviets annexed a large piece of eastern Poland and compensated the Poles with a slice of eastern Germany. This too led to a massive refugee movement — Poles fled or were driven from the Soviet Union into Poland, Germans fled or were driven from Poland into Germany.

The Poles and the Germans, the Hindus and the Muslims, the Jewish refugees from Arab lands, all were resettled in their new homes and accorded the normal rights of citizenship. More remarkably, this was done without international aid. The one exception was the Palestinian Arabs in neighboring Arab countries.

The government of Jordan granted Palestinian Arabs a form of citizenship, but kept them in refugee camps. In the other Arab countries, they were and remained stateless aliens without rights or opportunities, maintained by U.N. funding. Paradoxically, if a Palestinian fled to Britain or America, he was eligible for naturalization after five years, and his locally-born children were citizens by birth. If he went to Syria, Lebanon or Iraq, he and his descendants remained stateless, now entering the fourth or fifth generation…

Alas, how different the world would be if more people accepted these simple facts.

UN Watch addresses the UN Human Rights Council

Thank goodness for anti-Semitism. It’s a perfect mechanism for identifying authoritarian idiots. However populist or scientific or warm-and-fuzzy their rhetoric is, these people cannot help but reverting to blaming the Jews for the problems of the world.

From today’s WSJ:

There was Clare Short, a member of the British Parliament and Secretary for International Development under Prime Minister Tony Blair until she resigned in 2003 over the Iraq war. Claiming that Israel is actually “much worse than the original apartheid state” and accusing it of “killing (Palestinian) political leaders,” Ms. Short charged the Jewish state with the ultimate crime: Israel “undermines the international community’s reaction to global warming.” According to Ms. Short, the Middle East conflict distracts the world from the real problem: man-made climate change. If extreme weather will lead to the “end of the human race,” as Ms. Short warned it could, add this to the list of the crimes of Israel.

When Clare Short (cousin of Canadian comedian Martin Short) resigned from her cabinet position she claimed it was because the UN was not given a more central role in Iraq. Shortly thereafter accused the British Government of eavesdropping on Kofi Annan’s phone calls in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq - an accusation she later withdrew. She also attacked the US for its efforts to provide relief in the Indian Ocean after the December 2004 Tsunami, saying the US efforts were “yet another attempt to undermine the UN.”

Fetishizing international bureaucracies, silly US bashing, climate alarmism, anti-Semitism - she’s got it all.

LGF Headline:

Drunken Anti-Israel Climate Change Hooligans Who Love Hamas

From AP:

Police were confident of being able to contain the expected climax of the climate camp at Heathrow Airport.

Protesters, buoyed by an influx of new arrivals, promised 24 hours of direct action, starting from midday on Sunday.

The move came after 20 anarchists from the camp broke into a warehouse in Hayes, owned by Carmel Agrexco, an Israeli fruit and vegetable importer. Up to six were arrested on suspicion of burglary, police said.

Amos Orr, general manager of Agrexco UK, said: “They broke in. A lot of them were drunk, they broke doors, spread papers everywhere and they were very aggressive. They were singing about Hamas.”

We wrote previously about a children’s show on a government-operated TV channel in Gaza (government = Hamas). The show starred a Mickey Mouse look alike, subsequently killed on air (by a Jew, of course).

The mouse has been replaced by a big bee. Here the Nahoul the Bee teaches a lesson on cruelty to animals.

Via LGF

The UN is predicting a “Summer of Peace” in South Lebanon. From AFP:

“I think that for the people of the south, this summer will be a summer of peace. And we will be taking care of the problem of terrorist attacks,” Graziano told An-Nahar.

“I am sure we are strong enough and that we are in control of the Blue Line,” the UN-demarcated border between Israel and Lebanon, he said. “At the moment, I don’t see any intention” between the two sides for renewed fighting.

Meanwhile, the WSJ reports that the Syrian invasion of Lebanon is already underway:

As of this minute, Syria occupies at least 177 square miles of Lebanese soil. That you are now reading about it for the first time is as much a scandal as the occupation itself…

…It would, of course, be nice to see the Arab world protest this case of illegal occupation, given its passions about the subject. It would also be nice to see the media report this story as sedulously as it has the controversy of the Shebaa Farms. Don’t hold your breath on either score. In the meantime, the only countries in a position to help Lebanon are France and the U.S. They could strike a useful blow by closing their embassies in Damascus until such time as Damascus opens an embassy–with all that it implies–in Beirut.

And last week the president of Iran was in Syria promising Israel a “hot summer”:

…Following a surprise meeting with Hizbullah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah in Damascus, Ahmadinejad said that it was going to be a “hot” summer in the Middle East.

“We hope that the hot weather of this summer will coincide with similar victories for the region’s peoples, and with consequent defeat for the region’s enemies,” Ahmadinejad added, in an apparent reference to Israel.

And an effective civil war is brewing in Palestinian refugee camps across Lebanon:

Lebanese troops have pounded the few remaining compounds of militants inside a Palestinian refugee camp in northern Lebanon, as fighting entered its eighth week.

From UN Watch:

Dictators Fidel Castro of Cuba and Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus will be celebrating the UN Human Rights Council’s likely adoption tomorrow of a reform package that will see both regimes dropped from a blacklist, while Israel is placed under permanent indictment.
 
Contrary to all the promises of reform issued last year, the proposal released today by Council President Luis Alfonso de Alba targets Israel for permanent indictment under a special agenda item: “Human rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories,” which includes “Human rights violations and implications of the Israeli occupation of Palestine and other occupied Arab territories”; and “Right to self-determination of the Palestinian people.” No other situation in the world is singled out — not genocide in Sudan, not child slavery in China, nor the persecution of democracy dissidents in Egypt and elsewhere. Moreover, the council will entrench its one-sided investigative mandate of “Israeli violations of international law”—the only one not subject to regular review after a set term—by renewing it “until the end of the occupation.”