An Afghan National Army soldier opened fire and murdered three and wounded seven members of an Australian military training team in southern Afghanistan.yesterday. The ANA soldier attacked his own Mentoring Task Force 3 just as they ended a regular weekly parade at a forward operating base at Shah Wali Kot in Kandahar province.

To my best knowledge, that brings the grim toll of Afghan murders of their Western allies to 42 45 in the last 23 months.

The Sydney Morning Herald pointed out that the loss of three Australians made this incident "the single deadliest attack on Australian forces during the entire Afghanistan campaign."

The Herald report continues:

Another Australian sustained life-threatening injuries and is likely to be airlifted to a military medical centre in Germany.

Another four Australians were seriously wounded while two suffered minor injuries. An Afghan interpreter was also killed.

Australian forces - including some of those who were wounded...

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Khaled bin Talal, brother to Alwaleed bin Talal, Fox News' top non-Murdoch shareholder

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The ethical and legal failings of the Murdoch clan have made headlines for months with James Murdoch kicking up the most dirt in the British phone hacking scandals, much to the discomfort of the News Corp. board and shareeholders.

But what are even unconsionable, unlawful  breaches of privacy next to putting bounties on the heads of Israeli soldiers to encourage their kidnappings? A close family member of another major New Corp. player has done exactly that.

From Haaretz:

"Saudi royal offers $900,000 for capture of Israeli soldiers"

A Saudi royal offered a $900,000 reward to anyone who captures an Israeli soldier, on Saturday. Prince Khaled bin Talal, the brother of business tycoon Walid bin Talal, told the Saudi-based broadcaster...

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Yesterday's post netted some valuable and vivid addenda.

1) From Andrew Bostom came the canonical hadith that suports Shafiq Mubarak's teachings to US Marines not to -- how to put it? -- excrete in the direction of Mecca. This, Andy explains, is more formally known as "facing the Qiblah," which means turning toward the Kabaa structure in Mecca.

From "The Book of Purification", Sunan An-Nasai (one of the 6 canonical hadith collections), vol. 1, chapter 19, p. 35, "The Prohibition of Facing the Qiblah When Relieving Oneself"   It was narrated from Rafi bin Ishaq that when he heard Abu Ayyub Al-Ansari say when he was in Egypt, "By Allah, I do not know what I should do with these toilets. The Messenger of Allah said: "When any one of you goes to defecate or urinate, let him not face toward the Qiblah, nor turn his back towards it."

And thus, Islamic Twister was born...?

...

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Gen. David Petraeus, Col. David Furness, and Shafiq Mubarak (far right). Mubarak served as Furness's "right hand" during a recent deployment. "I can't do anything without him," Furness said.

And who is Shafiq Mubarak? All I can find out is that he is a Pro Sol contractor (?) hired by the Marine Corps Center for Advanced Operational Culture Learning to help implement "the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, the winning of hearts and minds." At least that's how Col. Furness puts it. According to the North County Times, Mubarak didn't come to the US until 2008 -- from where the story doesn't say -- but has been working with US troops in A-stan "for much of the past decade."

How is that? Why is that? Dunno. What the story does report is that Mubarak teaches the do's and don't's of sharia -- kind of, Islam for Leathernecks.

Mubarak teaches US Marines:

Don't spit toward...

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From Politico:

The Obama administration on Monday treaded carefully around the announcement that Sharia law will be enforced in post-Muammar Qadhafi Libya, refraining from expressing disapproval of Islamic law as the foundation of the country’s new legal system.

“We’ve seen various Islamic-based democracies wrestle with the issue of establishing rule of law within an appropriate cultural context,” State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters on Monday when quizzed about Libya’s National Transitional Council leader Mustafa Abdul-Jalil’s declaration on Sunday that Sharia law will shape the country’s legal system.

Nuland added that the “number one” priority for the U.S. was that universal human rights, as well as rights for women, minorities, due process and transparency, be fully respected in Libya.

Then, the "number one" priority for the U.S. is a dead duck. Islamic human rights, derived from sharia, and what we know as "universal" human rights are totally and mutually exclusive.  

...

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Iraq won't give us permanent bases, let alone immunity for our troops in Iraq to train demonstrably untrainable Iraqis. (I mean, come on; eight years and they're still not "trained"?) Score: Iran.

Now, Karzai says he would back Pakistan in a war with the USA:

"God forbid, If ever there is a war between Pakistan and America, Afghanistan will side with Pakistan," he [Karzai] said in the interview to Geo television.

"If Pakistan is attacked and if the people of Pakistan needs Afghanistan's help, Afghanistan will be there with you."

Anything wrong with this picture?

Sahar Aziz  just knows the clever Obama Justice Department's civil rights attorneys can come up with a way to redefine criticism of Islam as racial discrimination. Assistant Attorney General for civil rights Thomas Perez has "some very concrete thoughts" on the matter, whatever that means. 

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More on this story. Will any GOP candidate address this proposed gutting of the Constitution the Obama Justice Department is so enthusiastically "taking notes" on?

From the Daily Caller:

Top Justice Department officials convened a meeting Wednesday where invited Islamist advocates lobbied them for cutbacks in anti-terror funding, changes in agents’ training manuals, additional curbs on investigators and a legal declaration that U.S. citizens’...

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Readers know I often cite the excellent reporting of John Rosenthal, an American journalist based in Europe, on the events of the noxiously branded "Arab Spring," particularly regarding Egypt and Libya. Today, in response to my post on the killing of Qaddafi, John writes:

Thanks, Diana, also for the Lawrence Auster link. To be honest, Qaddafi’s death doesn’t just leave me cold. It leaves me feeling sick to my stomach. And I think I will be feeling sick for many days to come.

As Lawrence Auster correctly says, we killed him. There is no way that the erstwhile “rebels” would have ever defeated him or captured him without our hellfire missiles and the French Mirages. Actually, they probably could...

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Timing is everything. Qaddafi was not killed in retaliation for his attacks on American servicemen in Berlin in 1986, or the downing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie in 1989. He was not killed for his central role in the USSR's terror networks going back to the 1960s and 1970s. He was killed after coming over to our side of George Bush's "war on terror" in the final phase of a civil war in Libya in which his regime fought al Qaeda affiliates.

Horrific as it sounds, Qaddafi was killed because we and our NATO allies joined the other side -- the al Qaeda affiliates.

Lawrence Auster elaborates on why the event rankles:

Kaddafi never violated his agreements with us and never became a threat to us or our allies. He spoke in the warmest terms of the United States and of Obama. Yet the instant that people whom we chose to call democrats rose up in rebellion against him, our ideology and what we perceived as our political...

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John Quincy Adams doesn't need to meet Abu Qatada

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The Justice Department's war on the facts about Islam, currently  playing out in a purge of fact-armed trainers such as FBI analyst William Gawthrop,  has taken a publicly aggressive turn as former US Attorney Dwight C. Holton declared AG Holder's "firm committment" to, as TPM reported, "nixing anti-Muslim material from law enforcement training."

“I want to be perfectly clear about this: training materials that portray Islam as a religion of violence or with a tendency towards violence are wrong, they are offensive, and they are contrary to everything that this president, this attorney general and Department of Justice stands for,” Holton said. “They will not be tolerated.”

As obliquely noted yesterday, such a diktat would ban the Koran...

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Dwight C. Holton, meet Abu Qatada

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From TPM:

Attorney General Eric Holder is “firmly committed” to nixing anti-Muslim material from law enforcement training, former U.S. Attorney for the District of Oregon, Dwight C. Holton said Wednesday.

Holton, who was U.S. Attorney when the FBI arrested the so-called Christmas tree bomber, said that he spoke specifically with Holder about the “egregiously false” training that took place at the FBI’s training headquarters at Quantico and at a U.S. Attorney’s office in Pennsylvania, which was first reported on by Wired.

“I want to be perfectly clear about...

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Just FYI:

In order to meet a preliminary deadline for The Hollow Center (St Martin's Press, October 2012), I will not be writing my column this week or next week.

This week's syndicated column:

I am looking at a reproduction of an old engraving of Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulcher. It is in Bat Ye'or's book "The Dhimmi," which collects primary documents from history to chronicle the impact of Islamic law on non-Muslims through the centuries.

What is notable about the image, which is based on an 1856 photograph, is that the church, said to be at the site of Jesus Christ's crucifixion and burial, has no cross and no belfry. Stripped of its Christian symbols, the church stood in compliance with the Islamic law and traditions of the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire, which ruled Jerusalem at the time.

I went back to the book to find this image for a reason. It had to do with last weekend's massacre of two dozen Coptic Christians in Cairo by Egyptian military and street mobs, which also left hundreds wounded. The unarmed Copts were protesting the destruction of yet another church in Egypt, St. George's, which on Sept. 30 was set upon by thousands...

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Lauchlin Currie of the US Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve, the White House -- and the Kremlin

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This past week's syndicated column (posted a little late): 

The most amazing aspects of the accelerating American submission to the state are: 1) how matter-of-fact we are in contemplating massive government interventions, such as President Barack Obama's latest stimulus "jobs" plan, and 2) how virtually no one notices the blatant Marxist overtones. When someone does, a la "Joe the Plumber" at the end of the 2008 campaign season, he or she is mocked off the stage.

President Obama demonstrated how this is done in January 2010 when, during an unusual White House meeting with congressional Republicans about his pending health-care legislation – another massive government

intervention into the private sector – he declared: "If you were to listen to the debate, and,...

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On September 8, 2011, I joined Peter Brookes, Senior Fellow for National Security Affairs at the Heritage Foundation and John David Lewis, Visiting Associate Professor at Duke University at the National Press Club to discuss the tenth anniversary of 9/11 on a panel titled "The Islamist Threat: From Af-Pak to Jyllands-Posten and Times Square." The event was moderated by Elan Journo, Fellow and Director of Policy Research at Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights. My segment begins around the 27 minute mark.

Charbaran, 2008 (photo by Paul Avallone)

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Whaddya know but I'm not alone in having Yogi Berra's sense of deja-vu-all-over-again on reading this week's  NYT report on Charbaran, Afghanistan. Me,  I just had a funny feeling about the place, about the repetitive motions US forces are going through, about the tired fruitlessness of it all -- about those "ruins of a government center that the United States built earlier," which was the tip-off to earlier, failed COIN efforts in Charbarn, as stitched together in my initial post.

But writer-photog-veteran Paul Avallone was there in 2008. He writes:

Gee, we coulda saved the Times (already heavily mortgaged) a ton of money just using my stuff from...

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The NYT reports:

Iraq's political leaders announced late Tuesday that they had agreed on the need to keep American military trainers in Iraq next year, but they declared that any remaining troops should not be granted immunity from Iraqi law, a point the United States has said would be a deal breaker.

The statement, issued as the political leaders emerged from a meeting in the presidential compound, sent mixed signals as United States officials and the Iraqi cabinet negotiate whether any troops will remain after the first of the year, when the forces are scheduled to depart. American officials were scrambling on Tuesday night to decipher the announcement.

Less than three months before the last troops are scheduled to leave — close to 40,000 members of the military are in the country — Americans are increasingly frustrated at the slow pace of the discussions. The United States has called for a prompt decision, noting the logistical hurdles of moving ahead on a withdrawal while...

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NYT photo: In what way is our constitutional republic better protected by deploying US forces (in Afghanistan at a baseline cost of $350 million per day) to search for munitions in the hovels of Charbaran along the Af-Pak border?

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The NYT this week carried yet another  report on yet another US  mission to "disrupt" yet another A-stan network with yet another first lieutenant sitting down with yet another tribal elder (only this one was named Mohammad --) while  troops searched yet another village, where Afghan troops had yet again probably tipped off local fighters.

The reporter, too, recognized this re-run of a re-run as he describes the meeting between the US officer and the Afghan "elder":

There was a ritual familiarity to their exchange, a product of a war entering its second decade. 

That ritual is also a product of the...

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