Breeding Terrorists

After the complaints that Farfour, the giant mouse character on Pioneers of Tomorrow, the Hamas children’s show on Al Aqsa TV was a clone of Mickey Mouse, he has been replaced with Nahoul the Bee.

Little Green Footballs has a clip of the show where Nahoul is introduced. They post the dialogue from the clip underneath. It was so shocking, I thought it must be a spoof. Then I watch the clip and saw that it was also subtitled.

Nahoul: I want to be in every episode with you on the Pioneers of Tomorrow show, just like Farfour. I want to continue in the path of Farfour – the path of Islam, of heroism, of martyrdom, and of the mujahideen. Me and my friends will follow in the footsteps of Farfour. We will take revenge upon the enemies of Allah, the killer of the prophets and of the innocent children, until we liberate Al-Aqsa from their impurity. We place our trust in Allah.

Nahoul the bee claims to be the cousin of Farfour the mouse.  I’m not sure exactly how that works. The Palestinians have clearly made remarkable advances in the area of genetics.

The Good Guys are the Bad Guys

or is it the other way around?

You know things are bad when Hamas are the good guys.

This is an organisation that says every Jew should be killed wherever they are found. With a record of suicide bombing, they have tried to put their words into action. They are recognised as a terrorist organisation by both the US and EU. Nonetheless, they engineered the freedom of BBC reported Alan Johnston from the even more extreme self-styled Army of Islam.

I have no doubt they did not act altruistically. They need the good publicity.

Predictably, senior Hamas leader, Mahmoud Zahar, said, “We didn’t work to receive favours from the British government. We did this because of humanitarian concern.” Somehow, when you blow up people as a matter of policy, no one in the civilised world really takes you seriously when you speak of humanitarian concern.

Having taken over the Palestinian government form the more moderate Fatah, but diplomatically isolated from the US and UK, they need to show they have some semblance of civilised behaviour. Since they won’t back down from their policies, they had to come up with something else.

After Johnston was freed, Foreign Secretary David Miliband was cautiously appreciative of the role of Hamas in securing the release. However, he also made clear that there would be no change in UK policy toward Hamas until Hamas changes its policy toward Israel.

“And that is that. The end.”

So ended Tony Blair’s political career. Those were the last words he said in public as Prime Minister, at the close of Question Time.

Thanks to the ingenuity of the technical wizard at school, I was able to see the end of PMQs and the Blair’s trip to Buckingham Palace during lunch time. With a TV possibly built by John Logie Baird himself and a spoon as an antenna stuck into the back of the VCR, he tuned in BBC2.

With all my excoriating of TB, I have to say that I still almost teared up as tributes were paid to him from other parties, especially from normally very dour Ian Paisley. There is something about the high moments in the drama of politics that is emotive.

I think Tony is going to a job for which he is well suited. All sides have praised him for his work in pulling together the agreements in Northern Ireland. Anyone who could bring Ian Paisley to the same table with Sinn Fein has to be commended for it. He may be able to make significant progress in the Middle East.

Blood Money for Nothing

Five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor were tortured into confessing that they infected 426 Libyan children with the HIV virus. They have been sentenced to death.

Why would the Libyans try to put the blame on foreign nurses? HIV principally transmitted through homosexual or non-marital heterosexual acts. This is not the sort of thing a fundamentalist Islamic country like Libyan would want to admit. That being said, the scientific evidence indicated that much of the infection was transmitted throughout the hospital by unsanitary practice.

The death penalty isn’t absolute. There is a way out. The Bulgarian government can pay $13.48 million in blood money for each for each family. That’s only a bit over $7.42 billion. But since the entire Bulgarian government’s annual budget expenditure is $12.16 billion (with revenues of only $13.28 billion) it might be just a little hard to scrape the cash together. The Libyans originally offer to trade them for Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the Pan Am 103 (Lockerbie) bomber, but they withdrew this offer.

It’s not surprising that folks in Bulgaria have turned to prayer. Thousands attended a prayer service led by Patriarch Maxim at the Alexander Nevski Cathedral in Sofia. They’ve even brought in the big guns with three miracle working icons of the Theotokos brought in from monasteries in Troyan, Rila and Bachkovo with the cathedral open throughout the night.

I don’t know if there is a traditional patron for nurses, but if you do, please add a comment.

Pray for Ashraf Ahmad Djum’a al-Hadjud, Kristiyana Vulcheva, Nasya Nenova, Valya Chervenyashka, Snezhana Dimitrova and Valentina Siropulo.

Scandal in Iran

The shame. The horror. The outrage.

The most outspoken advocate of Sharia has fallen from grace – not that Islam actually incorporates a doctrine of grace, but you know what I mean. President Ahmadinejad of Iran has been caught with a woman not his wife. On television.

The newspaper Hezbollah expressed outrage. “This type of indecency has grave consequences, like violating religious and sacred values.”  Surely a fatwa must be issued. Surely he must die the violent death of those who reject Islam.

Surely it won’t be long before the salacious footage is shown in the West, if it hasn’t already. This will bring further shame on Islam, Iran, Ahmadinejad.

Apparently the President and model for Shi’ites everywhere just couldn’t control his passions. The only mitigation I can think of is that it didn’t happen during Ramadan.

The object of his illicit affection is Najmeh Gholi Pour. She is a teacher. Okay, she was a teacher. I’m guessing she’s retired. She was Ahmadinejad’s primary school teacher. The elderly woman was attending a Teacher’s Day ceremony. When Ahmadinejad saw her, he was overcome with emotion and without thinking he enbraced her and kissed her hand.

This raises one important question. Why don’t we have Teacher’s Day in this country?

For England, Palestine, and St George

Today is the Feast of St George, patron of England and pictured at the top of the right column on this blog.

It is very true that St George fought against a Dragon. St John calls him “the dragon, that serpent of old, who is the Devil and Satan”. He received the martyr’s crown on this date in 303, having suffered various tortures before being decapitated.

St George is also the patron of Palestinian Christians, who must stuggle every day, pressed upon all sides – hated by the Jews for being Palestinian and hated by most Palestinians for not being Muslim.

May his example encourage us to fight the good fight.

St George, pray to God for us and for all who seek your intercession!

O Little Town of Bethlehem

Rowan Williams (the Archbishop of Canterbury), Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor (Archbishop of Westminster and RC Primate of Britain), Bishop Nathan Hovhannisian (the Armenian Primate of Britain) and David Coffey (head of the Baptist World Alliance) have just returned from Bethlehem. They are hoping to raise the profile of the situation faced by Arab Christians in the Middle East.

Bethlehem used to be a town with a slight majority of Christians. Now less than a quarter of the population are followers of the God who spent his first few human days in a local cave laying in a feed trough. At any point where the Muslims haven’t made life difficult, the Israelis have.

But it is not just in Palestine where Christians are facing trouble. It is even worse in Iraq since the overthrown of Saddam. That was my one qualm about the invasion. Like many people, I foresaw that Christians would not have the same protection they had experienced under the secular Ba’athist regime. Were the democractically elected new government in Iraq powerful enough, Christians would probably still be safe.

However, the insurgency of those who wish to impose either a Sunni or Shi’a sharia state has led to a difference result. Each side may hate and kill the other, but Christians are still easy prey.
The vicar of St George’s Church in Baghdad told The Times:

All my staff at the church have been killed. They disappeared about a year ago and we never saw them again. Of the rest of my congregation, most say they have been targeted in some way or have had letters delivered with bullets in them. People forget, or the Islamic groups don’t realise, that Christianity was in the Middle East before them and therefore they see Christians as being part of the Western coalition military presence. Things have got considerably worse since the Iraq war.

As we open our presents and sit down to big Christmas dinners with not the slightest chance that Muslim gunmen will kick open our door and kill us, let us remember those who live in harms way – where just being a Christian is a dangerous thing.