Y-Net News reportsthat former International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei, who had previously announced his intentions to run for the presidency of Egypt, said Monday that “if Israel attacked Gaza we would declare war against the Zionist regime.” They continue:
In an interview with the Al-Watan newspaper he said: “In case of any future Israeli attack on Gaza – as the next president of Egypt – I will open the Rafah border crossing and will consider different ways to implement the joint Arab defense agreement.”
He also stated that “Israel controls Palestinian soil” adding that that “there has been no tangible breakthrough in reconciliation process because of the imbalance of power in the region – a situation that creates a kind of one way peace.”
Discussing his agenda for Egypt, ElBaradei said that distribution of income between the different classes in Egypt would be his most important priority if he were to win the upcoming elections.
Senior Libyan rebel “officers” sold Hizballah and Hamas thousands of chemical shells from the stocks of mustard and nerve gas that fell into rebel hands when they overran Muammar Qaddafi’s military facilities in and around Benghazi, debkafile’s exclusive sources report. The rebels offloaded an estimated 2,000 artillery shells carrying mustard gas and 1,200 nerve gas shells for cash payment amounting to several million dollars negotiated by Iran. The consignments may still be in Sudan en route for Lebanon and Gaza.
Here is also some commentary from Creeping Shariaon those many killed in the Ivory Coast:
Take note, Obama and the Ummah United Nations are behind Ouattara even though the winner of the election is in dispute. When it’s time to choose his poison, Obama always sides with the Muslim.
Patrick Nicholson, of the Roman Catholic charity Caritas, said workers visited Duekoue last Wednesday and found hundreds of bodies of civilians killed by bullets from small-arms fire and hacked to death with machetes. He said they estimated that more than 1,000 civilians had been killed.
Nicholson, the Caritas spokesman, said the killings occurred over three days in a neighbourhood controlled by fighters loyal to internationally recognised president Alassane Ouattara, though it was not clear who the perpetrators were.
[This is]…the second source claiming no clue on who killed 1,000 people even though fighters loyal to the Muslim leader captured the town.
To catch the reader up on the issues in that part of Africa,one article explains why we find this tension growing:
Background
A civil war began on September 19, 2002 due to several unresolved social, political, and military issues the government of the Ivory Coast had not proactively dealt with. One of the largest of these issues remains the increasingly grim “ethnic problem” that has led to violence around attempted pre-election periods. It is estimated that over 20% of the national population is of foreign descent, which has led to a national disunity concerning voting rights. The underlying problem of the voting rights issue is the indecision surrounding if foreigners, many from Burkina Faso, have the right to vote.
During the 30-year reign of Félix Houphouët-Boigny, ethnic tensions had been suppressed under the strong leadership of the government despite a growing influx of foreigners from other African nations. After Houphouët-Boigny, the nation struggled to integrate democracy into the fragmenting society largely due to a growing dislike of the “non-Ivoirity” population. Over the past several years, this term has been used as increasingly racist and is often used in the rampant nationalist, xenophobic politics to represent the population of the southeastern portion of the country, particularly in the capital of Abidjan.
As last century drew to a close, ethnic violence began to increase as the economy of the Ivory Coast continued to sink, forcing many urban workers to return to the growing fields that had originally made Ivory Coast a regional powerhouse. However, many of the farmers were immigrants from other African nations who had been drawn to the wealth of the Ivory Coast. This further exacerbated heightening tensions between ethnic groups, leading to frequent riots on plantation farms.
The final straw came before the 2000 elections, which required that both parents of any presidential candidate be born within sovereign territory of the Ivory Coast. This excluded northern presidential candidate Alassane Ouattara, a serious contender for the presidency from the race, who represented much of the immigrant community.
On September 19, 2002, northern troops mutinied and launched multiple attacks across Abidjan. By that night, much of the north was under their control despite a failure to take over Abidjan. French troops soon moved in to separate the two sides and evacuate expatriates. Despite a ceasefire soon afterwords, additional rebel groups appeared in the west of the country and fears of a nationwide security meltdown led to UN troops being deployed throughout the country. Sporadic violence has kept the Ivory Coast in a state of tension into 2010.
Currently, the international community is enforcing an arms and diamond embargo on the Ivory Coast, as well as freezing the assets of anyone standing in the way of peace.
Current Crisis Due to Multiple Unresolved National Issues
The failure of the shaky coalition government to deal with security issues, voting rights, and demobilization of the rebel group New Forces has created an environment that is not safe for free and fair elections to take place.
According to a judicial official, last week Ivory Coast investigators discovered evidence of “fraud” in a voters’ roll, triggering additional protests in the western town of Man, where the local court was ransacked by hundreds of angry civilians. The Independent Electoral Commission denied the allegations despite previous acknowledgements of major problems in providing fair elections.[see video near bottom]
“Rioters in western Ivory Coast burned down a local government building on Tuesday during a demonstration against the government’s handling of voter registration in a much delayed election. Witnesses said more than a thousand demonstrators marched through the city of Vavoua as local security forces tried unsuccessfully to disperse them by firing shots in the air…
Political tensions are rising as West Africa’s former economic giant looks set to miss another deadline for holding presidential elections needed to end years of political crisis…
President Laurent Gbagbo is locked in a row with electoral commissioner Robert Mambe, whom he accuses of trying to add around 430,000 names to the final voter list that were not properly vetted to check their Ivorian nationality.”
As violence and riots continue to mount, the spokesman for the ex-rebel group New Forces Sidiki Konate stated that the Ivory Coast is at a renewed risk for civil war:
“We have today in places a real danger to the peaceful coexistence of our communities. The communities are looking daggers at each other, ready to attack. The seeds of civil war are there, each one is already preparing its munitions.”
Such rhetoric, along with the ever-growing ethnic, political, and social issues such as:
a government failure to deal with security issues
voting rights
demobilization of the New Forces
raises sincere concerns that not only will a national election be delayed yet again, but also that this time civil war could be resumed by it.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, quoted this morning by Fox News:
President Laurent Gbagbo to step down immediately,” she said. “His continuing refusal to cede power to the rightful winner of the November 2010 elections, Alassane Ouattara, has led to open violence in the streets, chaos in Abidjan and throughout the country… Gbagbo is pushing Cote d’Ivoire into lawlessness. The path forward is clear. He must leave now so the conflict may end.
When I first read about this (thanks to Drudge) the very first thing I did was follow the rabbit trail. I typed in “Alassane Ouattara Muslim” in Google search… guess what? These followers of Ouattara and Ouattara himself are Muslims. I thought to myself that most likely the people murdered were Christians. Guess what, Libertarian Republican has this story.
….From the UK Telegraph “Ivory Coast: aid workers find 1,000 bodies in Duekoue”:
The single biggest atrocity in the long battle for control of Ivory Coast has emerged after aid workers discovered the bodies of up to 1,000 people in the town of Duekoue.
Patrick Nicholson, a spokesman for the Catholic charity Caritas, said his team had counted 1,000 bodies, adding that some had been hacked with machetes.
‘The secretary general expressed particular concern and alarm about reports that pro-Ouattara forces may have killed many civilians in the town of Duekoue in the west of the country,’ the UN said.
The Catholic charity Caritas has said that up to 1,000 people had been massacred in Duekoue, which forces loyal to Ouattara seized earlier this week.
A massacre in a Roman Catholic mission compound in the heart of the Ivory Coast’s cocoa-producing region could come to be seen as a crucial moment in the West African state’s escalating civil war.
Early reports suggested that more than 800 people, largely from the Gbagbo-supporting Gueré tribe, were killed in a single day at the sprawling Salesian Saint Teresa of the Child Jesus mission in Duekoue, 300 miles west of Abidjan towards the Liberian border. The attackers seem to have been largely soldiers descended from Burkina Faso immigrant Muslim families loyal to Ouattara…
“A former NHS director died after waiting for nine months for an operation–at her own hospital,” London’s Daily Mail reports:
Margaret Hutchon, a former mayor, had been waiting since last June for a follow-up stomach operation at Broomfield Hospital in Chelmsford, Essex.
But her appointments to go under the knife were cancelled four times and she barely regained consciousness after finally having surgery.
Her devastated husband, Jim, is now demanding answers from Mid Essex Hospital Services NHS Trust–the organisation where his wife had served as a non-executive member of the board of directors.
He said: “I don’t really know why she died. I did not get a reason from the hospital. We all want to know for closure. She got weaker and weaker as she waited and operations were put off.”
It would be cruel to put this down to karma, so instead we’ll just note that it can’t possibly be true. After all, as New York Times star columnist Paul Krugman has observed, “In Britain, the government itself runs the hospitals and employs the doctors. We’ve all heard scare stories about how that works in practice; these stories are false.”
Another sad story of defeat in regards to the Obamacare “health” law that our great Democratic Congress has graced us with. You will hear little about this topic in the mainstream media as it refutes an icon of the Left [by the Left I might add]. One of the laws staunchest defenders, Anthony Weiner, also asked for a waiver from the health law for NY:
The Obama Administration has now granted over 1,000 health care waivers. Of the 129 latest waivers more than half went to unions. Jamie Durpree at the AJC reported:
The Obama Administration has rolled out another 129 waivers to one provision of the new health reform law, with almost half of those new exemptions going to various union groups.
The extra waivers bring the total to 1,168, giving businesses, health plans, unions and others an exemption from a portion of the law that in 2011 requires an annual benefit limit of no less than $750,000.
In other words, these 1,168 waivers allow companies to limit health insurance payouts to less than $750,000 – those annual benefit limits will be phased out by 2014.
The waivers now cover almost three million Americans, but the feds argue that is “less than 2 percent of all Americans who have private health insurance.
Almost half of the new round of waivers were given to union health benefit programs, a fact that is sure spur new complaints from health law critics in the Congress, who see these waivers as evidence that the Obama health plan is flawed.
Among the unions that were recently approved for waivers:
# Teamsters Local 237 in New York, covering over 51,000 workers # Carpenters District Council of Kansas City Welfare Plan, for 20,898 workers # Southeastern Iron Workers, for 5,143 policies # Minneapolis Retail Meat Cutters and Food Handlers for 10,720 # the Fulton Fish Market Welfare Fund for 1,211
Karl Rove previously reported that a disproportionate number of waivers, nearly one-third, were being granted to union workers even though unionized workers make up only 7% of the private work force.
First of all, the liberal mainstream media has hardly been chomping at the bit to report any story regarding Islamic violence towards women. For example, when Time magazine featured a cover with a picture of a woman whose face had been disfigured by the Taliban, The New York Times called it “war porn” (see the image below).
Second of all, liberals seem to have an overwhelming tendency to downplay Islamic abuses towards women (as well as towards gays) under the guise of multiculturalism. Don’t believe me? Well, then I suggest that you read the column by liberal Boston Globe columnist Susan Jacoby where she asks the question, “Why are liberals excusing religious abuses on grounds of cultural relativism?” To be specific, Jacoby makes some great points when she writes the following:
What did this very innocent looking teacher write to have her picture — sweet isn’t it — on my blog? She wrote in an email to Republicans the following:
“Atten: Death Threat!!!! Bomb!!!”, “Please put your things in order because you will be killed and your families will also be killed due to your actions in the last 8 weeks.”
She is a teacher! Shouldn’t she have known it is “Attn:”???
