 Ali Hassan al-Majid, also known as "Chemical Ali", has been sentenced to death for ordering the gassing of Kurds in the Iraqi village of Halabja, state television has reported. Al-Majid, who was a senior aide to Saddam Hussein, the executed Iraqi leader, was sentenced to be hanged for the 1988 attack, in which 5,000 Kurds are thought to have died. Families of some victims cheered in court when the guilty verdict was handed down on Sunday. "The decision has been issued today, January 17, to sentence Ali Hassan al-Majid, to death by hanging ... for crimes against humanity," Aref Abdul-Razzaq al-Shahin, the head of the court, said. The Iraqi High Tribunal also sentenced three other Saddam aides, including the former defence minister, to 10 to 15 years in prison for the Halabja attack. In March 1988, Iraqi jets swooped over the village and sprayed it with a deadly mix of mustard gas and the nerve agents Tabun, Sarin and VX. Three-quarters of the victims in the five-hour assault were women and children. It is thought to have been the deadliest gas attack ever carried out against civilians. Al-Majid, a cousin of Saddam, was nicknamed "Chemical Ali" for overseeing the gassing of Iraqi Kurds during the so-called Operation Anfal campaign, which culminated in 1988. About 182,000 Kurds were estimated to have been killed in gas and bomb attacks during the Anfal operation, while 4,000 villages were destroyed. The latest sentence comes 10 months after the same court handed down a death sentence to al-Majid for his involvement in the killing and displacement of Shia Muslims in 1999. He had already received death sentences for crushing a Shia revolt soon after the 1991 Gulf War and for his role in the Anfal campaign. His execution has been delayed by legal disputes over his conviction. Al-Majid was captured in August 2003, five months after US-led forces invaded Iraq and ousted Saddam. Al Jazeera
 Analyst Gal Luft explains in a report by Harvard that Saudi Arabia has spent millions of dollars to convert American soldiers to Islam (and obviously, their version of Salafi Islam) since the Gulf War. Nearly two decades have passed since the Saudi conversion campaign, and most of the converts may no longer be in uniforms,” the analyst, Gal Luft, said.
“But the seeds sown during the Gulf War have germinated, creating scores of radicalized Americans who are a threat to their comrades in uniforms as well as to their civilian communities.” …At one point, Saudi commander and now deputy defense minister, Prince Khaled Bin Sultan, bragged that more than 2,000 U.S. troops converted to Islam in 1991. Some of the U.S. officers were said to have been given as much as $30,000 to convert. This doesn’t mean that the Saudis directly converting Hasan necessarily, but we should look into the circumstances of whether he was radicalized to a more strict form of Islam due to Saudi-funded networks or mosques, or perhaps one of these soldiers who has been converted in this campaign. Source: World Threats
 If you listen to the outraged wails of leftists and Muslims, you might reasonably be under the impression that the United States is in the business of persecuting Muslims. The reality is radically different. If anything American policies should have made us the Muslims' best friends.
Before 9/11, the United States had fought two wars on behalf of Muslims, the Gulf War under George Bush Sr. and the Kosovo War under Bill Clinton.
In fact during the second half of the 20th century, the only wars that the United States fought that were not against Communism or Nazism-- were fought on behalf of Muslims.
That is not a fact that you will glean from any of the usual media portrayals of the United States foreign policy as hostile to Muslims. In fact US foreign policy was about as helpful to Muslims as you can imagine.
Until 9/11, the United States had never invaded and occupied a single sovereign Muslim country. The closest it came was the First Barbary War in 1801, in response to piracy against American vessels and the liberation of North Africa from Hitler's Vichy allies in WW2. And of course the misguided attempt at participating in a peacekeeping force in Beirut.
Not only that, America had developed much of the oil wealth that would keep the Gulf States in gold, skyscrapers and slave labor. And when the leaders of the Gulf States seized American oil companies, the United States government did not fight a war, as England did when Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, instead the US government paid oil companies to take the loss... out of taxpayer money.
The fear of a Communist takeover helped turn America into one of the biggest patrons of Muslim countries, from the Middle East to Turkey, Indonesia and Pakistan. America willingly closed its eyes to Indonesia's genocide in East Timor, and even supplied them with weapons. America provided the weapons and funding that Pakistan would channel into the Taliban. And naturally we ignored Turkey's pesky little genocide of the Armenians and avoided ever discussing the issue.
So by 9/11, not only had America repeatedly sent soldiers to fight and die for Muslims in two wars... but it had robbed its own taxpayers rather than challenge them over the nationalization of the assets of American companies, and had proved willing to aid and even overlook the genocides of Muslim regimes. So naturally by the warped logic of leftists and Muslims... American foreign policy was "oppressive" to Muslims.
The root of the leftist critique of American foreign policy typically rests on two planks. The first blames America for supporting dictators in Muslim countries. This would be a more legitimate critique if there were any free and democratic Muslim countries around. As it was, America simply supported whoever was in power and wasn't allied with the USSR. This might have been an immoral policy, but during the Cold War it was a continuation of the same kind of thinking that caused the US to ally with the USSR against Nazi Germany.
The left's implication was always that by supporting dictators in Muslim countries, the United States was preventing the rise of more legitimate governments. It is not clear where these legitimate governments were or how they were ever supposed to arise. Syria is a dictatorship without us ever supporting Assad. Egypt was a dictatorship when it was allied with the USSR under Nasser. It is still a dictatorship now that it is allied with us under Mubarak. When the Shah of Iran was overthrown, the left wing appeasement corps working for Jimmy Carter decided not to interfere. The result was not a democratic government or even a leftist one, but a radical Islamist one under the Ayatollahs.
The second plank is of course Israel. The United States did decide to finally cultivate Israel as an ally back under JFK in the 60's. This was in sharp contrast to far longer US ties with the House of Saud or the Eisenhower Administration's willingness to destroy England's economy in order to protect Egypt's nationalization of the Suez Canal.
And the United States has provided Israel with billions in aid. As well as providing billions in aid to Egypt and Jordan. Not to mention the aid given to Turkey and Pakistan. Or the cost of the first Gulf War undertaken to liberate Kuwait and protect Saudi Arabia from Saddam Hussein.
H/T: gramfan
 The Washington Post shows the slides shown by the Fort Hood jihadist before he acted on his beliefs: Maj. Nidal M. Hasan, the Army psychiatrist believed to have killed 13 people at Fort Hood, was supposed to discuss a medical topic during a presentation to senior Army doctors in June 2007.
Instead, he lectured on Islam, suicide bombers and threats the military could encounter from Muslims conflicted about fighting wars in Muslim countries. Go through those slides here. Mark Durie, a priest and scholar, describes what Hasan said: He is saying that Muslims can experience problems in the military for two reasons. One reason is the prohibition against Muslims killing other Muslims (’whoever kills a believer intentionally, his punishment is hell’ – slide 12). The other is the requirement that Muslims wage war against non-believers in both defensive jihad (slides 37-41) and aggressive jihad (slides 42-48).
This command, he is saying, can be expected to be followed by devout, God-fearing Muslims (’Allah expects full loyalty’ – slide 49), especially if they are persuaded that in so-doing they would be ‘fighting against the injustices of the “infidels,”’ (slide 48).
His point is that if US Muslim soldiers can be persuaded that fighting against fellow-Muslims is an injustice, this could trigger a deadly attack against fellow US soldiers instead, e.g. by means of ‘suicide bombing, etc’ (’We love death more than you love life!’ – slide 48). The Major was explaining that when Muslims in the military are ordered to fight against other Muslims (such as in Iraq or Afghanistan) this can trigger their religious convictions to such effect that they will seek to be discharged from their combat duties.
Otherwise they could feel compelled to attempt to kill fellow US soldiers in a personal jihad. Major Hasan refers to this possibility as ‘adverse events’.
He cites the case of convert to Islam and US soldier Hasan Akbar (slide 13), who killed two US officers in a grenade attack during the Gulf War, and had written prior to the attack: ‘I may not have killed any Muslims, but being in the Army is the same thing. I may have to make a choice very soon on who to kill.’ Hasan warned that Muslims soldiers could not be trusted to fight a Muslim enemy, and could turn their guns on their countrymen instead. He then did just that himself.
Question: why did the army not remove this man from his post? And how can anyone still doubt the role of Islam in this massacre? Source: Andrew Bolt H/T: gramfan 
 A special report by Judith Miller and David Samuels You might think Palestinian refugees would be welcomed by their Arab neighbours, yet they are denied basic rights and citizenship It is a cynical but time-honoured practice in Middle Eastern politics: the statesmen who decry the political and humanitarian crisis of the approximately 3.9 million Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and in Gaza ignore the plight of an estimated 4.6 million Palestinians who live in Arab countries. For decades, Arab governments have justified their decision to maintain millions of stateless Palestinians as refugees in squalid camps as a means of applying pressure to Israel.
The refugee problem will be solved, they say, when Israel agrees to let the Palestinians have their own state. Yet in the two decades since the end of the Cold War, after two Gulf wars, and the rise and fall of the Oslo peace process, not a single Palestinian refugee has returned to Israel – and only a handful of ageing political functionaries have returned from neighbouring Arab countries to the West Bank and Gaza. Instead, failed peace plans and shifting political priorities have resulted in a second Palestinian "Nakba", or catastrophe – this one at hands of the Arab governments.
"Marginalised, deprived of basic political and economic rights, trapped in the camps, bereft of realistic prospects, heavily armed and standing atop multiple fault lines," a report by the International Crisis Group (ICG) in Lebanon recently observed, "the refugee population constitutes a time bomb." The fact that the divided Palestinian political leadership is silent about the mistreatment of the refugees by Arab states does not make such behaviour any less reprehensible – or less dangerous.
Some 250,000 Palestinians were chased out of Kuwait and other Gulf States to punish the Palestinian political leadership for supporting Saddam Hussein. Tens of thousands of Palestinian residents of Iraq were similarly dispossessed after the second Gulf war. In 2001, Palestinians in Lebanon were stripped of the right to own property, or to pass on the property that they already owned to their children – and banned from working as doctors, lawyers, pharmacists or in 20 other professions.
Even the Palestinian refugee community in Jordan, historically the most welcoming Arab state, has reason to feel insecure in the face of official threats to revoke their citizenship. Read more here,,,, Source: The Independent
 THE widow of the Shah of Iran, Empress Farah Pahlavi, is still around to remind us how bad Jimmy Carter was as president -- long before his recent Israel-bashing and his calling Obama detractors racist.
If Carter hadn't let the Shah be overthrown in 1979, "there wouldn't be this problem in Afghanistan, nor would there have been the Iran-Iraq war," Pahlavi tells Avenue magazine.
"Iraq would never have dared to even send a plane over our country. The Gulf War wouldn't have happened, nor would any of the problems of the past 30 years, including the exporting of religious fanaticism."
In the intro to the interview, Bob Colacello talks about his and Andy Warhol's 1976 visit to Iran: "The fact that the empress would invite Andy Warhol, fresh from Studio 54, to the Imperial Palace . . . showed just how open-minded, not to say hip, Her Imperial Highness was." Unlike, say, the Ayatollah Khomeini.
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Ali Hassan al-Majid, also known as "Chemical Ali", has been sentenced to death for ordering the gassing of Kurds in the Iraqi village of Halabja, state television has reported. 
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