Harry's Place

There’s some damaging news out for the Catholic church and the UK state:
The police, the Catholic Church and the government conspired to cover up a priest’s role in one of the worst atrocities of the Northern Ireland Troubles, an investigation has found.
Nine people died in bombings in Claudy, County Londonderry on 31 July 1972.
The NI [...]

The Daily Mail reports on ‘The moment an angry crowd protesting against Ground Zero mosque turns on man in a skullcap… because they think he is a Muslim’.

I hope Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller are suitably ashamed. The so-called ‘anti-jihad’ movement spearheaded by these two characters has spawned this kind of mindless bigotry and thuggery [...]

This is a guest post by Jacob S
During the heightened tensions between Iran and the West, it is important that the Iranian people know that they are not the target of the opprobrium. Earlier in the year, U.S. President Barack Obama and Israel’s President Shimon Peres sent direct messages to the Iranian people on the [...]

Regular readers of this blog will be very familiar with the so-called Socialist Workers Party and their antics with the Stop the War Coalition. What they might not realise is that the SWP’s cheering on of Saddam Hussein dates back much further. Below I copy an extract from a news report that appeared in The [...]

THIS IS A CROSS-POST FROM A RABBIT’S EYE-VIEW OF THE HYPERBOREAN NORTH.
Friends of Kim eagerly have adopted Facebook, Twitter and YouTube (although it is not recommended that Koreans under the yoke of American occupation befriend them), but as of yet none of Shwe’s friends have follow suit.
Maybe the astrologists for the aspic-addled State Peace and [...]

Simon Romero of The New York Times reports on Venezuela’s out-of-control homicide rate, and the Chavez government’s minimal efforts to deal with it.
CARACAS, Venezuela — Some here joke that they might be safer if they lived in Baghdad. The numbers bear them out.
In Iraq, a country with about the same population as Venezuela, there were [...]

While I don’t agree with them, I can understand why some people (including Muslims) believe it would be insensitive to build an Islamic center two blocks from Ground Zero in Manhattan, and that it would be more respectful to the victims of 9/11 to build it somewhat farther away.
So I hope these people will raise [...]

The nuttersphere was in high dudgeon last week over a BBC Panorama  documentary which:

indicated that the Turkish “charity” behind the Gaza flotilla had links to Hamas;
showed “peace campaigners” dreaming of martyrdom, and then stabbing and beating the crap out of Israeli soldiers;
concluded that the medical “aid” that was brought to Gaza was out of date and [...]

This is a cross post by Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi
With the official end of U.S. combat operations in Iraq, what bodes for Iraq’s future in terms of its relations to other nations in the Middle East? One useful way to examine this question is through the lens of what Daniel Pipes describes as the present “Middle [...]

This is a cross post by Meredith Tax
Two weeks ago, the Center for Constitutional Rights and ACLU announced that they were suing the government to get permission to represent Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen who appears from all evidence to be a leader in Al Qaeda and is on the CIA assassination list. They are working [...]