Sounds alright by me.

If Air America were a conservative radio network its corrupt funding trail and cynical abuse of a poverty program would be front page news at the NY Times and full-time mega-scandal at CNN.

Ah, yes. A story this juicy hasn't come down the pike in quite a while. The waves of schedenfreude on the right side of the blogosphere are reaching flood levels. Someone call a lifeguard- or sandbaggers or something.

Michelle Malkin is all over it.

The desktop, the other day, greeted me with padlocks and chains around its gates, without so much as two weeks notice. How would this community survive? It wouldn't boot up. All I got was that strobing wait as we access the hard drive screen, which in this particular desktop's case is a really cool x-wing fighter blasting away at an evilly-designed TIE fighter. (The computer is where my inner geek roams free.) Anyway, that screen isn't so cool when it stays up for 15 or 30 minutes.

So I hied myself down to Best Buy, which I don't particularly like but what are you gonna do? I was going for another desktop, but this laptop (or are we supposed to say "notebook" now?) caught my eye. Screen very shiny. The (slightly) more rational part of my brain was also impressed by the price, which was quite competitive with your standard tower. So what the hell. I bought the thing.

Soon after ripping it out of the box and getting it signed up on the home wireless network, which I acquired earlier solely for the purpose of allowing Tivo to communicate with its mothership without a landline, I noticed that the desktop concern had ended its lockout and was now open for business. What the hell? I guess it was a contract renegotiation gambit which failed. The town's future is assured! But for how long? Actually I suspect that there are some sort of bugs in there- literal ones- messing around with things about which they have no understanding, much like Walter Pidgeon and Leslie Nielsen wandering around the Krell super-computer in Forbidden Planet.

Diversification is the key to any community's future, so the laptop is staying. That'll make the desktop think twice before it tries that trick again. All power to the workers!

This event also made me realize the woefully inadequate job I've been doing backing up all my various and precious data. Pictures, gone! Passwords to every site I've ever visited, gone! Back-up for this blog, gone! Since I've been granted a reprieve I better get started backing up all that data. I'll start sometime next week. I don't feel like doing it right now.

Jane Fonda is returning to anti-war activism and embarking on a cross-country tour to call for an end to US military operations in Iraq.

Across which country? The US or Iraq?

The actress, 67, said the protest trip would begin next March and she would travel on a bus powered by vegetable oil.

I know it's trite, but you really can't make this stuff up.

Fonda has not commented on any war since her controversial anti-Vietnam efforts, which involved posing on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun that fired at American aircraft. The resulting photograph triggered national outrage and led to the actress being dubbed Hanoi Jane.

Earlier this year, Fonda told CBS the picture amounted to the "largest lapse of judgment that I can even imagine".

Oh yeah?

Presumably she now has judgment enough not to be photographed with Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi. Not at her age.

I think it's clear that this is a move by Karl Rove to discredit the anti-war "movement".

Update: From normblog:

Good to know she'll be excited, and running on vegetable oil, while campaigning for the people of Iraq to be left to the benign attentions of the 'insurgents'.

Well, she was sufficiently excited campaigning for the South Vietnamese to be left to the benign attentions of the totalitarians to the North. If she succeeds again maybe we'll get more boat people out of it.

Blair's Bombs

The bombs of 7 July were Blair's bombs.

Blair brought home to this country his and George W Bush's illegal, unprovoked and blood-soaked adventure in the Middle East. Were it not for his epic irresponsibility, the Londoners who died in the Tube and on the No 30 bus almost certainly would be alive today.

Pilger goes to some length describing the many grievances of the terrorists: Israel of course, the disputed Lancet figure of 100,000 dead Iraqis, and even the number of dead in Afghanistan:

In 2001, in revenge for the killing of 3,000 people in the twin towers, more than 20,000 Muslims died in the Anglo-American invasion of Afghanistan. This was revealed by Jonathan Steele in the Guardian but never became news, to my knowledge. The attack on Iraq was the Rubicon, making the reprisal against Madrid and the bombing of London entirely predictable....

Note that the US takes "revenge", while from the terrorists, there are "reprisals". Pilger can assess the moral character of the West's actions, but not of the Islamic world's actions. This is typical of the Left. When the terrorists act, it is as a force of nature, like animals responding to stimuli. Blame or responsibility for their actions cannot be assigned to them. It is proper, in this view, to trace back the terrorist response to the most recent Western stimulus, because it is only to the Westerner that responsibility can be assigned or in whom the status of moral actor can be invested.

When the West acts it is responsible, morally and otherwise, for the consequences of its actions, and for others' responses to those actions. This is a one-way street. Non-Westerners are never blamed for Western actions.

That Pilger believes that the fault, dear Brutus, is in ourselves, and not in the terrorists is clear throughout:

The hand-wringing over "whither Islam's soul" is another distraction. As an industrial killer, Christianity leaves Islam for dead. The cause of the current terrorism is neither religion nor hatred for "our way of life": it is political, requiring a political solution. It is injustice and double standards, which plant the deepest grievances.

Most egregiously, he writes that the consequences of the first Iraq war are the fault of the West:

In the 1991 Gulf "war", American and British forces left more than 200,000 Iraqis dead and injured, and the infrastructure of their country in "an apocalyptic state", according to the United Nations. The subsequent embargo, designed and promoted by zealots in Washington and Whitehall, was not unlike a medieval siege. Denis Halliday, the United Nations official assigned to administer the near-starvation food allowance, called it "genocidal".

I witnessed its consequences: tracts of southern Iraq contaminated with depleted uranium, and cluster bomblets waiting to explode. I watched dying children, some of the half a million infants whose deaths Unicef attributed to the embargo - deaths which the US secretary of state Madeleine Albright said were "worth it". In the west, this was hardly reported. Throughout the Muslim world, the bitterness was like a presence, its contagion reaching many young British-born Muslims.

Pilger doesn't mention Saddam's invasion of Kuwait as the event that precipitated the war. Why bother? There can be no moral responsibility there. And one can easily imagine that if Saddam's action was mentioned, there would still be no blame in it. Pilger would of course push the blame back on the West by arguing that the US "supported" him and sold him weapons. We've all heard this a hundred times.

It's not merely a tactic of the anti-Western left, it's part of their belief system by now. The only people capable of wrong-doing, in any meaningful way, are Western.

So naturally, the bombs of 7/7 are Blair's. The Islamist terrorists who actually built and deployed them were acting in a blameless way, with the inevitability of falling rain and lions pursuing prey. You don't blame the rain for falling. You don't blame lions for killing gazelle. And you don't blame Islamist terrorists for bombing London.

In this view, the terrorists aren't "wrong" per se. They're just reacting. The only way to get them to stop is for us to change.

To the degree that getting us to change policies is a goal of the terrorists, then John Pilger's way of thinking is necessary for terrorism to work.

The Left is the fulcrum about which the lever of terrorism might turn. Terrorism, without the Left's helpful pronouncements about why there is terrorism and what we need to do to satisfy the terrorists and how it really is all our fault, is just senseless, directionless violence. Without a fulcrum, a lever is just a stick. The Left uses terrorism to push us in the direction of least resistance in the face of terrorist pressure- a direction the terrorists can anticipate and take advantage of. It takes the Left's approval of the terrorist program to achieve the terrorists' aims. The Left provides the terrorists with a mechanism that allows them to do so.

If, as John Pilger believes, the goal of the 7/7 terrorists was to get the UK out of Iraq, how is his call for the UK to get out of Iraq, in part because of the 7/7 bombings, nothing less than an impromptu, after-the-fact partnership with the terrorists? If John Pilger had had a conversation with the terrorists beforehand in which they agreed that the London tube would be bombed and that John Pilger would then trumpet their cause, thus amplifying the terrorists' pressure on the UK to get out of Iraq, his article today would be little different than it actually is.

Pilger is using the terrorist attack as a weapon against Tony Blair in a way that is complementary to the terrorists, according to Pilger himself: they're both using terrorism to get the UK to disengage from Iraq. That's a low place to argue from, and why John Pilger is, in effect, a partner in terrorism. John Pilger needs the terrorists in order for his views to have any relationship to force at all and the terrorists need people like John Pilger to translate their application of force into real movement. Lever and fulcrum. Partners for change.

Update: More commentary on the Pilger piece at Brainster's Blog, Western Standard, Ari on the Web, Stephen Pollard, Bloggledygook, and Oliver Kamm, who asks "Have you left no sense of decency?"

Update: Jeff Goldstein has a post up exploring a related angle.

Update: Episode III: Some commenters on LGF mention that one of Pilger's factoids from the New Statesman piece, "There were no suicide bombers in Palestine until Ariel Sharon, an accredited war criminal sponsored by Bush and Blair, came to power," is in fact wrong. Gene at Harry's Place also blogs about it in Pilger's lie.

Trainee journalist Dilpazier Aslam had his contract with the Guardian terminated today.

The move followed an internal inquiry into Aslam's membership of the political organisation Hizb ut-Tahrir.

A statement said: "The Guardian now believes continuing membership of the organisation to be incompatible with his continued employment by the company."

"Mr Aslam was asked to resign his membership but has chosen not to. The Guardian respects his right to make that decision but has regretfully concluded that it had no option but to terminate Mr Aslam's contract with the company."

The inquiry followed a piece written by Aslam for the Guardian's comment pages entitled "We rock the boat".

The statement added: "The Guardian accepts that it should have explicitly mentioned Mr Aslam's membership of Hizb ut-Tahrir at the end of his comment piece."

A correction will appear in the paper's Corrections and Clarifications column.

See previous posts here and here. I have to say that I think the Guardian handled that well, overall. Though releasing this news at 6:15 pm on a Friday is a bit cute. The Guardian article concludes with this cliffhanger:

Aslam said: "I am shocked by the manner inn which this whole affair has been handled. My treatment throws up issues which will be of grave concern to all journalists. I am currently taking legal advice."

Dun-dun-DUNNNN!

Hey, Dilpazier, was it a concern to you as a journalist when you interviewed Hizb ut-Tahrir client and provocateur Shabina Begum for an article yet failed to disclose your own membership in Hizb in that article? You'd better get a particularly good lawyer. Hey, how about a shariah lawyer?

Scott Burgess at The Daily Ablution, who started this whole thing, has this story too.

Update: The Guardian has also posted a lengthy background piece on the controversy. Follow-up also at Harry's Place.

The Guardian newspaper is refusing to sack one of its staff reporters despite confirming that he is a member of one of Britain's most extreme Islamist groups.

Dilpazier Aslam, who has been allowed to report on the London bombings from Leeds and was also given space to write a column in last Wednesday's edition of The Guardian, is a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir, a radical world organisation which seeks to form a global Islamic state regulated by sharia law.

Well all views should get a good airing, right?

It is understood that staff at The Guardian were unaware that Mr Aslam was a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir until allegations surfaced on "The Daily Ablution", a blog run by Scott Burgess. Speculation is mounting that it may have been a sting by Hizb ut-Tahrir to infiltrate the mainstream media.

Hmm. Aslam's participation in Hizb activities was no secret. His byline is in several editions of Khilafah, Hizb ut-Tahrir's online "magazine". You Google his name, you find this out. Is it likely that the Guardian didn't Google his name? No.

As I noted in my previous post, the Guardian was knowingly the subject of a Hizb media offensive: "In a sign that the group is changing direction, it has given the Guardian unprecedented access to its leadership." Nobody mentioned at that time, hey, one of our writers wants to write for the Guardian? Or hey, Dilpazier, didn't I just interview you for that Hizb piece we did last month? Or how about, Dilpazier, what writing experience do you have?

Late on Friday The Guardian released a statement to The Independent on Sunday saying: "Dilpazier Aslam is a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir, an organisation which is legal in this country. We are keeping the matter under review." The paper refused to comment further.

Heh, so that's the standard? Legal in this country. I don't know what the British equivalent might be, but should a paper in the US have no problem employing a reporter who's a member of the KKK? After all, they're legal in this country. (Maybe Hizb is the equivalent.)

I don't see how the Guardian can do nothing. Can you imagine the attention that's going to be paid to every future Aslam piece? It's time to play Let's Search the Guardian for Islamist Propaganda! Probably there's going to be a meeting tomorrow morning after which Aslam will be sacked.

Follow-up also from The Daily Ablution and Harry's Place. Great post at Chrenkoff too.

Update: The Daily Ablution and Harry's Place each have additional posts, in whose comments I've added even more of my own scintillating remarks.

Update: Mark Steyn.

Update the Third: Here's a take from a media angle. They're missing the conflict of interest aspect of Aslam covering the Shabina Begum story. Meanwhile, Special Sauce suspects a certain political advisor to the president was involved.

Update: The Guardian and Aslam have now parted company.

Khilafah.com and the magazine Khilafah aren't just supporters of the Islamist organization Hizb ut-Tahrir, they're the organization's propaganda arms. See this interview with one of the group's leaders, Nazreen Nawaz, for example:

We also publish many leaflets and booklets that include discussions on how to maintain the Islamic identity while living in the West as well as fulfilling our responsibility of aiding the work for the re-establishment of the Khilafah in the Muslim world. We also have a monthly magazine - "Khilafah magazine" and a number of websites -"1924.org" and "khilafah.com".

As noted, Dilpazier Aslam wrote several articles for the Hizb ut-Tahrir organ. Here's a pdf of Khilafah from June 2004 featuring an article by Aslam, and his nifty 1924.org email address.

The Guardian was the beneficiary (along with others) in late 2004 of a Hizb ut-Tahrir outreach program. From a November 11, 2004 Guardian article:

In a sign that the group is changing direction, it has given the Guardian unprecedented access to its leadership. The newspaper has spoken to current and former Hizb members and supporters in London, Derby, Leicester, Birmingham, Nottingham and Manchester in an attempt to piece together the group's motivation and ideology.

Aslam's earliest Guardian byline (that I could find) was this January 19, 2005 article.

The connection is circumstancial, but the timing is interesting, assuming I have it right that is. Did the Guardian deliberately recruit a reporter from an Islamist house organ? If so, what is it they hope to gain from this?

One troubling aspect is that Aslam's "sassy" article is of a piece with Hizb ut-Tahrir's aims of discrediting the old-line Muslim leadership. But the Guardian represents Aslam merely as a trainee reporter, and not as someone with organized Islamist connections.

Here's a snappy quote from the Hizb ut-Tahrir website itself:

It also aims to bring back the Islamic guidance for mankind and to lead the Ummah into a struggle with Kufr, its systems and its thoughts so that Islam encapsulates the world.

Resistance is futile I guess.

Here is some additonal material on the group: one, two, three.

Update: Scott Burgess at The Daily Ablution has written the Guardian asking them about Aslam. Let's see what happens.

Later Update: More from The Daily Ablution here.

Even Bigger Update: Tim Worstall notes that the very same Hizb ut-Tahrir backed Shabina Begum in the jilbab controversy in the UK. Tim quotes Vicki Woods in The Telegraph:

The girl who insisted on wearing a jilbab instead of perfectly acceptable Muslim-type school uniform should not have been allowed to. Full stop.

Especially when Hizb ut Tahrir, who seem to have spread out a bit from Uzbekhistan and gone to live among our friends in the north, targeted her school, and backed her. And even though that brisk barrister Cherie Booth won her case for her.

The Guardian used its Hizb ut-Tahrir writer (and presumably, member) to write an article on the Hizb ut-Tahrir-backed jilbab fight. From Dilpazier Aslam's Guardian article on the jilbab story:

In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, Shabina Begum, 16, described the court of appeal verdict against Denbigh high school in Luton as a victory for all Muslims "who wish to preserve their identity and values despite prejudice and bigotry".

The Guardian would be well-placed to land that exclusive wouldn't it? Aslam's connection to the Islamist Hizb ut-Tahrir is nowhere disclosed. This relationship between the Guardian and Hizb seems pretty cozy. Aslam quotes the girl quoting Islamist propaganda (unchallenged of course):

Our belief in our faith is the one thing that makes sense of a world gone mad, a world where Muslim women, from Uzbekistan to Turkey, are feeling the brunt of policies guided by western governments. I feel I've made people question the jilbab issue again.

Note the girl's odd reference to Uzbekistan. Hizb ut-Tahrir is very active in Uzbekistan in particular, and is one of the main groups that the Uzbek government is actively (and overzealously, using torture) fighting.

It seems that the Guardian has been a Hizb ut-Tahrir propaganda outlet for some time.

See also this Ace of Spades post and Tim Blair.

Yet Another Update: Michelle Malkin has now picked up the story, with a gracious link to this blog, among others. This story of the Guardian's apparent collusion with Islamist enemies of the West might go mainstream now. Props to Scott Burgess of The Daily Ablution for starting this whole thing.

More in the Update Vein: Patterico's got it, and brings the distressing news that the LA Times has reprinted Aslam's Islamist apologia. Don't they check this crap out first?

Final Update: The Guardian confims Aslam's Hizb ut-Tahrir membership. See this follow-up post.

[S]ince 9/11 [New York] has commodified boastfulness into an entire industry, tirelessly dedicated to I Love [the paper version has the heart symbol] New York merchandise. The only alternative on sale in many parts of Manhattan is merchandise branded with I Love NYPD instead.

I Love New York was a clever response to 9/11, capturing both the city's need to win back fearful tourists, and the affection inspired by its trauma. All the same, had London been al-Qaida's target that day, I doubt they'd now be selling I Love The Met T-shirts on Oxford Street - and I wouldn't want them to be, either.

Emphasis mine, because as all New Yorkers, and a decent percentage of the rest of Americans and other Westerners know, the I [Heart] N Y campaign was not a response to 9/11, clever or otherwise. It was designed in the 1970's, as this site details.

History: the I Love NY design made its debute in 1977 with ads featuring Frank Sinatra, Morgan Fairchild and Yul Brenner. The campaign is considered, by many, the most successful in history. The campaign was designed to revitalize the New York economy. The ad agency Wells, Rich and Greene conceived of the slogan to refer not only to New York City, but New York state as well. To this day, the I Love NY logo is seen around the world.

This reminds me of the previous (and not quite as successful) NY tourism campaign: "You've got to be crazy to live in New York. Crazy about..." followed by something like museums, or sodomy, as Saturday Night Live once had it.

Anyway, the rest of Ms. Aitkenhead's piece is similarly misguided, as Norman ably points out.

What's the deal with that logo? Anyway, I shan't write about the Olympics again for some years. They're dead to me. Heh, "movement".