The Corner let Michael Rubin out of time out again

Michael Rubin just drives me up a wall. There are plenty of biased people in American journalism, but he is among the worst. At least we can laugh at hacks like Glen Beck or Keith Olbermann. But with Rubin, I imagine him sitting in front of a computer somewhere, laughing in a cold and measured way as he plays with language to select the words and phrases with the most negative connotations. Today, he was taking issue with the Woodrow Wilson Center giving an award to the Turkish foreign minister. And what sort of measured language did he use?

Josh Rogin details the back-and-forth relating to the congressionally funded Woodrow Wilson Center’s award to Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, including the ire of congressmen unsure about why the Wilson Center’s head would choose to honor Davutoglu, given Turkey’s recent support for the Iranian nuclear program and Hamas.

So apparently working with Brazil to iron out a major diplomatic compromise constitutes supporting their nuclear program, whilst allowing Turkish-flagged vessels to sail to Gaza with humanitarian relief items counts as supporting Hamas. Hmm, that sounds entirely reasonable.

He has also played a role in Turkey’s embrace of blood libel.

Evidence? Nope, nowhere to be found. But if I’ve learned anything from Norman and John Podhoretz, it’s that when your rhetorical point is in jeopardy, just accuse your opponent of anti-Semitism.

As the Turkish daily Cumhuriyet has pointed out, the AKP and the Islamist cult leader Fethulleh Gulen have both become more prolific in funding overseas think-tanks (Cumhuriyet singled out Brookings). If the Islamist money is flowing, does the Wilson Center hope that, by showering praise on a controversial supporter of Hamas, it can get a cut of that as well?

The Country Estate happens to have already covered Gulen. I am still not an expert on the guy and he’s probably not someone I would have much to do with politically, but Rubin seems to be painting him with unfairly broad brushstrokes here. There’s also the problematic “connection” between the Turkish FM and Hamas that he expects us to assume along with him at this point and, beyond that, an unfair speculation about the motives of the Wilson Center.

Look, I don’t relish defending the decision of any center that would willingly associate itself with the legacy of Woodrow Wilson, but Michael Rubin is just a rhetorically lazy partisan crank. After every Rubin sentence you read, you should peel back the negative connotations and bias and ask yourself what he was saying at the origination of the idea, before he tacked all of that junk onto it.

Read Full Post »

Still more on “honor” crimes in Canada

The Country Estate covered the guilty plea bargain reached in the stupefyingly cruel murder of 16-year-old Aqsa Parvez earlier this week. In case you missed it and you are too lazy to click through, Aqsa Parvez was strangled to death by her father and brother for refusing to wear a hijab, wanting to get a part-time job and generally refusing to become an unthinking drone in the island of Islamopatriarchy that was their family household.

It was with great satisfaction that I noticed the Globe and Mail addressed the case three times over today. Full coverage after the jump.

Read Full Post »

Warning: “dumb” news story

I tend to hate “dumb” news stories in the vein of “Man weds gerbil.” But today I saw a “dumb” news story on ESPN.com that I feel compelled to link to–a South African man was killed for switching his family’s tv over to the World Cup match. Take it away, AP:

JOHANNESBURG — Police say a South African man who wanted to watch a World Cup match instead of a religious program was beaten to death by his family in the northeastern part of the country.

David Makoeya, a 61-year-old man from the small village of Makweya, Limpopo province, fought with his wife and two children for the remote control on Sunday because he wanted to watch Germany play Australia in the World Cup. The others, however, wanted to watch a gospel show.

“He said, ‘No, I want to watch soccer,'” police spokesman Mothemane Malefo said Thursday. “That is when the argument came about.

“In that argument, they started assaulting him.”

No one should ever have to die for the right to watch a 4-0 blowout!

But seriously, beating a man’s head against a wall because he turned off The 700 Club? Seriously? I would love to have seen a normal conversation between this family. The people who killed him were all adults. Did they have no capacity for reasoning? Were they just bad with words? It’s incredibly messed up and I hope they are all plagued until death by thoughts of the relative they killed over a tv program.

Read Full Post »

Oh, America…

you litigious little country, you! The NYT has a report today about the city of Newport, RI being found liable for an accident that occurred along its public Cliff Walk.

Read Full Post »

More on “honor” crimes in Canada

Following up our earlier coverage of the Afghan refugee mother in Montreal who stabbed her daughter in the head for coming home too late at night, the Globe and Mail today had coverage of another “honor” crime committed in Canada, this one far more serious.

Read Full Post »

“Honor” crime in Canada

I was tempted to link to a piece in the Globe and Mail yesterday about an “honor” crime in Montreal, but it was light on detail–namely, just what sort of Islamic “honor” was at stake. Well, luckily for us, they fleshed it out today and it turns out–avert your eyes!–that an Afghan refugee mom stabbed her 19-year-old daughter for returning home too late! Worth mentioning is that this might be the 13th such “honor” crime in Canada since 2002.

I loved the courtroom scene:

Dressed in a grey T-shirt and track pants, Ms. Kaleki began sobbing quietly as her husband pleaded with the judge from his seat in the public gallery.

“Please, sir, my wife is innocent,” Ebrahim Ebrahimi told the judge as courthouse security tried to quiet him.

Unless someone else stabbed this poor girl, which is indicated by nothing discovered so far, how can this guy claim his wife is innocent? It’s an insulting claim for human rights, the victim and even the court.

It seems to me that “honor” crimes are among the most vile things imaginable. If, as a parent, you would rather kill your kid than have them date freely or even just come home late, the most repugnant thing about you is not your kid’s freely-chosen behavior but the fact that nature gave a bloodthirsty halfwit such as yourself the ability to reproduce at all.

Thankfully, the victim will apparently be ok. Let’s hope she isn’t scarred and never has to see her parents again.

Read Full Post »

Two vile persons for the price of one

NYT has coverage of AZ Gov. Jan Brewer’s refusal to release a likely-to-be-innocent man.

So who are the vile people in this story?

1. Jan Brewer.

Last year, the five members of the Arizona Board of Executive Clemency unanimously recommended to Ms. Brewer that Mr. Macumber be released after 35 years in prison “to correct a miscarriage of justice.”

But Ms. Brewer rejected the board’s recommendation without explanation in November. It is possible that politics played a role in her decision; Ms. Brewer, a Republican who became governor last year, is running for a full term in November.

AND

P. S. Ruckman Jr., a political science professor at Rock Valley College in Rockford, Ill., has been fuming about Ms. Brewer’s handling of the Macumber case. “I have been following state clemency for 30 years, and this is easily, easily the most disturbing,” he said. “It’s borderline despicable.”

Hey, keeping an innocent man in jail is wrong UNLESS it will help your tough-on-crime reelection campaign! How do you go to bed at night knowing that your own political ambitions are worth keeping another human being locked in a cage?

2. Carol Kempfert:

The jury did hear about two kinds of physical evidence — a partial palm print and bullet casings — that prosecutors said connected Mr. Macumber to the killings.

Mr. Kempfert said he believed that his mother had done more than lie.

“I can fully see how my mother could have set him up and framed him,” Mr. Kempfert said. “She had access to the evidence. She was doing fingerprint courses at the time.”

Granted, these claims have not been substantiated, but if they end up being true and you fabricated evidence that cost a guy 35+ years of freedom, I hope he spent the whole time reading “Count of Monte Cristo” and comes out prepared to go Edmond Dantes on your life.

Read Full Post »

Why North Koreans probably won’t take the Cuban route in South Africa

The Cornerites came up with a pretty good post today, addressing the question of why North Korean soccer players at the World Cup in South Africa are unlikely to defect. Defections by athletes and artists abroad were once common in the USSR and still are common in Cuba, so why not North Korea? Jesse Naiman quotes Prof. Jae Ku from Johns Hopkins with a pretty compelling answer:

Ku said that whenever an elite North Korean citizen defects, Kim Jong Il’s National Security Bureau (NSB) will round up the defector’s immediate family and subject them to interrogation, followed by months if not years spent in labor reeducation camps. He described what happened when a former high-ranking official named Hwang Jang-yop defected. Hwang was the chairman of the Supreme People’s Assembly (North Korea’s rubber stamp parliament) and a prominent philosopher of the Juche Idea, the socialist ideology of North Korea.

When Hwang defected, over 3,000 of his family members, friends, and associates were arrested. Many of his distant relatives who faced arrest had no idea they were even related to Hwang.

3000? Consider how widely they would have needed to cast that net to rope in so many people. It’s bad enough that North Korea is an open-air prison, but for them to punish the people unlucky enough to have been left behind, many of them with an only-tenuous connection to the “guilty” in the first place, is even more upsetting. If there is a hell, the people running North Korea will be roasting in it one day.

Read Full Post »

Kneejerk reaction alert

I’m excited to make the first post in the “Vile People” category I’ve created. I considered just calling the category “Chuck Schumer” since he is one of the few anti-freedom scumbags capable of really getting my blood up, but that wouldn’t be very inclusive. Luckily, the honorable senior senator from NY gets to be part of the first post. Take it away, worst Libertarian Party nominee ever Bob Barr:

Democratic New York Sen. Chuck Schumer now has teamed with his Republican colleague from Texas, John Cornyn, and introduced a bill that would employ the heavy hand of federal law to prohibit anonymous cell phones.  Leaving aside the question of where the Congress finds authority in the Constitution to do this, it is certain that many of their colleagues will jump at this latest chance to prove they are as tough on terrorists as the next guy, whatever the cost to the rest of the citizenry.

While Sens. Schumer and Cornyn may believe that the only people who purchase prepaid cell phones are terrorists, the fact is, many average, law-abiding citizens use such devices regularly.  Some people do so because they may not have the funds or the creditworthiness to buy a cell phone with a network plan.  Others may do so precisely because of the anonymity such phones offer; something especially important for journalists to be able to protect communications with their sources from being revealed.

No matter to Schumer or Cornyn.  To prevent one possible bad guy from purchasing a single prepaid cell phone, they’ll use their power as senators to prevent anyone from having one.

This is such a slam dunk not even Bob Barr can mess it up. The question remains, though: is Chuck Schumer really this much of an ignorant, policy-illiterate, kneejerk reaction-loving fool OR is he a patsy for the security bureaucrats who see an opening to take away another freedom in exchange for what may be a minor advance against terrorism?

I hope this bill fails…hard. The overwhelming majority of people who buy prepaid phones are people who can’t afford to get a plan, don’t have the credit for it or, yeah, maybe like the anonymity. Let them be.

[Hat tip: Radley Balko at Reason]

Read Full Post »