Blogs

I'm in Beirut and will have some fresh material shortly, but in the meantime Al Qaeda leader Mokhtar Belmokhtar was reportedly whacked in Mali by Chad.

Good for Chad. Chad needed a win. When was the last time Chad had a win?

And the rest of the world had to be rid of Mokhtar Belmokhtar. He was the Al Qaeda-linked gangster terrorist behind the recent hostage drama at a gas plant in Algeria that ended with dozens of innocents dead.

Thanks, Chad.

Here’s more evidence busting the myth of Ukrainian passivity and indifference.

The residents of Kremenchuk, a city of 230,000 southeast of Kyiv on the Dnipro River, and its environs are up in arms over oligarch Kostyantyn Zhevago’s plans to build the Bilaniv Mining and Enrichment Combine (HZK) on the Psol River in Kremenchuk District. According to Zhevago’s plans (pdf), about 12 villages comprising one fifth of the district’s territory would have to go to make room for the combine.

Claims that the Russian pro-democracy opposition is working for the West to undermine Russia’s national interests—and is therefore nothing but a bunch of traitors—are a favorite tune of Kremlin supporters. The absence of any facts to substantiate such claims has never stopped them. In October 2011, the news website Infox.ru published a story with a truly sensational headline: “Kasparov Urges War Against Russia.” Those who read it learned that one of the leaders of Russia’s opposition, while speaking at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC, urged the West to “act against Russia … from the position of strength” and “reminded [the audience] of the ‘successful’ experience of democracy-building by military intervention in countries of the Middle East and Africa.” “Judging by this experience,” the story continued, “the most effective way to install democratic procedures is by ‘humanitarian’ bombing.”

By Courtney Brooks
Guest Blogger

North Korean refugee Dong-hyuk Shin was born a prisoner. He lived in the notoriously brutal gulag Camp 14 for more than 20 years, and is the only known escapee of what’s known as one of the regime’s “total control zones.” He told the United Nations’ Geneva Summit For Human Rights and Democracy on Tuesday that he was so brainwashed he even informed authorities of his family members’ escape plans, leading to their death—and then was forced to watch their executions.

Read full article here.

You can now pre-order autographed copies of my new book, Taken, which is my first novel. The book will be published in April. If you order from me directly, you'll receive a signed copy in March before it's available anywhere else.

Here are the front and back covers:

Here's the book description: Prize-winning author and journalist Michael J. Totten’s debut novel features a fictional version of author and journalist Michael J. Totten who is taken from his home in the night by terrorists and hauled bound and gagged to a remote house in the wilderness. So begins a harrowing journey across three states with a ruthless band of killers and sadists, and after all escape attempts fail, Totten faces a terrible question: what if the only way out is to join them?

Most of you don't know this, but I was a fiction writer long before I became a journalist. I'm a product of the English Department, not Journalism School, and I spent my entire early adulthood developing and honing skills as a short story writer and novelist. I expect that a few years from now I'll have more novels than non-fiction books published, but for now, this is my first.

UPDATE: Orders are now closed. The book will be released in April, so you can buy a trade paperback or electronic version at that time from Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, Powell's, Kobo, iTunes, etc.

What’s better than offering your compatriots a chicken in every pot?

Silvio Berlusconi’s most recent promises. There’s almost nothing Berlusconi won’t offer the electorate this time around. For example: If elected as Italy’s prime minister (yet again…), Silvio, who happens to be very rich and tax-averse, said, “I will take four billion euros of my own fortune and give it to Italians.” That’s the amount Berlusconi believes his countrymen had to pay in stiff new property taxes last year.

Berlusconi uttered his personal tax refund declaration on television, and since he rose long ago from shipboard crooner to media magnate and now owns almost all Italian networks, you can bet word got around. Especially since Berlusconi also promised (surprise!!) a pardon for all tax evaders. There were many, many reasons for this assurance to the electorate, the prime one being that Berlusconi himself makes a habit of cheating the taxman. In fact he was convicted of it. So if he gets elected, he can pardon himself, among many, many others.

Is there is a “rice revolution” in India’s poorest state, Bihar? Sumant Kumar claims to have shattered the world’s record for output of the staple.

Kumar, from the village of Darveshpura in the district of Nalanda, usually harvested four to five tons per hectare. In 2011, each stalk was heavier and each grain bigger. The result? The shy young man had grown 22.4 tons on a hectare. That topped the record of 19.4 tons held by China’s Yuan Longping, the elderly agronomist known as the “father of rice.”

And Kumar was not alone in attaining agricultural glory. Nitish Kumar, a friend of the rice king, broke the world’s record for potatoes by harvesting 72.9 tons per hectare last March. His mark, however, was surpassed a few months later when Rakesh Kumar, from another Nalanda village, grew 108.8 tons. Ravindra Kumar, from a nearby field, took India’s record for wheat. 

Yes, it’s that time of year again—time for the annual UN report on Afghan civilian casualties. Since the compilations were first released in 2007, they’ve been the occasion for ridiculous mea culpas from peaceniks horrified that any civilians actually get killed by accident in a war, for jeremiads from hard lefties charging that our troops go around whacking Afghans civilians willy nilly, and for ridiculous bombast from conservatives arguing that if we just increased the number of troops in Afghanistan we would be better able to “protect” civilians.

On Wednesday morning, Vladimir Pekhtin, one of the most senior and longest-serving members of Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party in the State Duma, took to the floor to announce his resignation because of “controversial documents published on the Internet.” He did not mention Alexei Navalny by name, but it was indeed Russia’s leading anticorruption blogger who forced the Putin loyalist out of politics. Last week, Navalny published documents showing Pekhtin’s (undeclared) ownership of more than $2 million worth of luxury real estate in Miami Beach, Florida.

If you’ve ever been to Ukraine’s countryside, you may have noticed that many villages look like holdouts from the late nineteenth century. Dirt roads are the norm, water frequently has to be hauled from wells, and outhouses abound.

Don’t blame the villagers for that. Put the blame squarely on Joseph Stalin and the Communist Party. Collectivization destroyed Soviet agriculture, while the forced starvation of 1932–1933, known as the Holodomor, destroyed the Ukrainian peasantry. Nazi occupation policies during World War II only made things worse, while continued Soviet neglect of agriculture condemned the peasants to a nether existence up to the end of the Soviet Union. Collective farmers had a third-class status that some analysts even compared to modern-day serfdom.

The British parliament’s national embarrasment George Galloway (MP-Gaza) belatedly discovered in front of a live audience at Oxford that his debate opponent is an Israeli citizen, so he stormed out in a bigoted huff. Watch the video. It’s really something.

I suppose he’ll get “resistance” points in some circles for his theatrics, but Mahmood Naji, who organized the debate, condemned Galloway for his boorish behavior. I should also add that I learned of this video from a Muslim friend of mine who sent me the link with the words "George Galloway -- massive racist" in the subject line.

Like many men in predominantly Muslim Egypt, Mohamed Abdelfattah was named after Islam’s most famous prophet. But he thinks the faith represented by his namesake is being challenged like never before in modern Egyptian society. While the world warily watches the country’s new Muslim Brotherhood president, also named Mohamed, this young journalist thinks everyone’s missing the real story: Egypt’s seismic search for meaning.

Abdelfattah makes his case by way of a recent debate headlined “Atheism and how atheists think” that was held—of all places—at an old Cairo mosque.

During the event, one 18-year-old Egyptian high school student proclaimed: “As an atheist, I believe that faith is against our very humanity and the source of warfare and bloodshed.” That’s a bold statement in Egypt, and certainly a bold thing to say to a mostly Muslim audience. Indeed, Abdelfattah said it was the first time he’d seen a public meeting on the subject of atheism, which had been considered, he said, “sensitive and taboo” before the opening up of society heralded by the ousting of longtime authoritarian leader Hosni Mubarak two years ago.

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea launches three-stage ballistic missiles, tests nuclear weapons, and sells just about everything in its increasingly destructive arsenal to other dangerous regimes.

Who is to blame for Pyongyang’s behavior? Recent pieces in Chinese state media, in an apparent attempt to deflect criticism from Beijing, contain a surprising answer.

“At a superficial level, it was Pyongyang that has repeatedly breached UN resolutions and used its nuclear program as a weapon to challenge the world community, which was considered to be unwise and regrettable,” states a Xinhua News Agency commentary titled “Time to Address Root Causes of Nuclear Crisis on Korean Peninsula.” “In reality, the DPRK’s defiance was deeply rooted in its strong sense of insecurity after years of confrontation with South Korea, Japan, and a militarily more superior United States.”

Syrian rebels are (again) threatening to attack Hezbollah targets in Lebanon to retaliate for Hezbollah’s involvement in Syria’s civil war.

They’ve said this before and it was just talk. I assume it’s still only talk. I don’t expect this will actually happen. But who knows? Lebanon is the kind of place where just about anything you can imagine eventually happens at some point.

If the Free Syrian Army does go after Hezbollah, things will get…interesting. Hezbollah is formidable when it fights a guerrilla war against a conventional army, but counterinsurgency is extraordinarily difficult, even for the American and Israeli armies, two of the best in the world.

Hezbollah is scary good at insurgency, but counterinsurgency is emphatically not a skill in its toolbox. That’s one of the many reasons the organization has never tried to conquer the rest of the country. It can’t. It can only push people around from its own corner.

I’ll have a much better sense of what to expect in the Levant soon enough because I’m heading to Lebanon myself later this week. Stay tuned.

The Israel Defense Forces plans to put up a military field hospital on the Syrian border to help refugees seeking assistance.

I would not expect Syrians to approach the Israeli border and ask for help, not after having their minds poisoned for so long by the violent propaganda of the Assad regime, but apparently some wounded refugees did just that a couple of days ago.

Hardly anyone knows it, but the Israelis do this sort of thing as a matter of course.