From an interview with Larry Elder, for WorldNetDaily:

Larry Elder: You are of Christian Lebanese descent. When you heard what Rosie O’Donnell said, that Christian extremism is as bad as Islamic extremism, how did you react?

Brigitte Gabriel: Well, I do not know what land she is living in, but I do not recall when the last time I saw a Christian behead anybody on television, or behead somebody and advertise it on the Internet. I do not recall hearing a Christian preach that Muslims are apes and pigs because they are cursed by Jesus, the way that Muslims are teaching that we are apes and pigs. I do not recall the last time a Christian went into an elementary school, hijacked children and started shooting them in the back like the Muslims did in Beslan in Russia when they went into a schoolyard and took over the children and started butchering them and killing them. [Rosie] better be thankful that she is living in America, because if she were living in Iran and spoke against her country – or any Arabic country – she would be beheaded or actually buried halfway in the ground, to be stoned to death.
[..].

Elder: You were raised in Lebanon. You were 10 years old and living in southern Lebanon when militant Muslims … poured into your country and declared jihad against Lebanese Christians such as yourself.

Gabriel: Yes, my 9-11 happened to me in 1975 when I was a 10-year-old child, living and minding my own business [in] a small town in south Lebanon. I was an only child to a businessman and his wife. I was blessed with a wonderful childhood. … They showered me with love and everything life had blessed them with. However, our lives were turned upside down because in 1975, the Muslims declared holy war on the Christians of Lebanon. My home exploded around me, buried in the rubble, wounded as the perpetrators shouted, “Allahu Akbar” [God is great]. My only crime was that I was a Christian living in a Christian town. I learned at 10 years old the meaning of the word “infidel.” I had a crash course in survival not in the Girl Scouts, but in the bomb shelter that I lived for seven years of my life in freezing cold, pitch darkness, drinking stale water and eating grass to live. I remember at the age of 13, I dressed in my burial clothes going to bed at night, waiting to be slaughtered. By the age of 20, I had buried most of my friends, who were slaughtered by Muslims.
[..]

The rest on WorldNetDaily.

This Spanish news site is running a poll on the most influencial person on history. (english translation)

It appears the poll has been hijacked for a cause. Currently 175934 votes have supposedly already been cast. 85% have been for Muhammad. 14% has gone to Jesus Christ, with 1% divided amongst the rest. Other choices include Aristotle, Hitler, Darwin and Einstein. The bottom of the poll says “Pending provisional result of revision of fraudulent votes” and undoubtably the poll has been rigged, but Muslims are circulating a link to the site via email and on Muslim forums. Apparently a special program will then be televised about the personality that wins the poll.

So jump in and have a vote!

Here’s an excellent documentary that aired on the Cutting Edge program on SBS on Tuesday night. It has already been shown on British television in December 2006 and was made by Journeyman Pictures.

(be patient, it may take a few seconds to load when you press Play)

The Journeyman website has a transcript of the program.

About the documentary:

Videos of smiling suicide bombers and insurgent attacks have become as important a weapon as explosives in Al Qaeda’s global jihad against the West. The jihadis have seized on the power of the internet and their message cannot be silenced. But who actually watches these videos and what effect are they having on young people in the Muslim world? And - for that matter - on their enemies in West?

Abu Muawiya smiles and blows a kiss to the camera. He’s about to ram his car, packed with explosives, into an Iraqi checkpoint. Hours later, a slick and sophisticated video of his death is available to download. This is the jihadi propaganda machine, designed to inspire its supporters and terrify its enemies. The video is emotional, powerful and – thanks to the internet – you can get it anywhere in the world.

“We use the programme ‘Windows Movie Maker’ to make the films”, explains one jihadi producer. The whole process is taken very seriously. Only when the video has been checked and approved by the group’s chain of command will it be taken to an innocuous internet café to be uploaded. “The CIA can search for ages. Even if they find the café where it was uploaded, they can never find the person”, explains journalist Faris bin Hizam.

Al Qaeda have always recognised the importance of propaganda. When planning September 11th, they filmed the wills of the hijackers against an easily replaceable background. This enabled them to edit in shots of the World Trade Centre in flames later. For them, 9/11 was as much about creating iconic images as killing their enemies. But it was the war in Iraq and spread of broadband internet that turned the trickle of propaganda into a torrent.
[..]

Still on the Balkans, Albanian blackmail shows no sign of abating either. When you’re on a good thing, stick with it, I guess.

Cautioned? Sounds more like a threat to me:

ROME — Any attempt by the international community to deny Kosovo independence will set off “a new Balkan war,” a senior Kosovar negotiator cautioned yesterday.

[..]

Some international diplomats have speculated that a watered-down version of [U.N. envoy Martti Ahtisaari’s] proposals may be adopted by the U.N. Security Council, which would lessen the degree of Kosovo’s de facto independence.

“If you want to see a new Balkan war, that is the perfect scenario,” said [negotiator Ylber] Hasa, who wrangled for years with Serbian delegates over the future of Serbian cultural sites and monuments in Kosovo.

And just to show they are serious:

In the latest incident, an explosion damaged three U.N. vehicles in Kosovo’s capital yesterday, causing no injuries but raising tensions in the disputed province.

And here’s another one for the Reuter’s Oddly Section - some odd reporting from The Times Online:

It is eight years since Nato halted Slobodan Milosevic’s persecution of Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians, in an onslaught that emptied and torched villages, killed about 100,000 and forced almost a million to flee. Returning Albanians turned on their persecutors, killing 1,000 Kosovan Serbs; 200,000 left the province, never to return.

Don’t be shy with the rounding now!

100,000 Albanians where killed? Is that from a Lancet study, perhaps? Nope:

A study by The Lancet (PDF), Vol 355, 24 June 2000, estimated “12,000 (95% CI 5500 18 300) deaths in the total population.”

Out by a factor of 10, which ever source you use (and four days later still no correction).

And then?

The most immediate problem — the refugees — was largely resolved very quickly: within three weeks, over 500,000 Albanian refugees had returned home. By November 1999, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, 808,913 out of 848,100 had returned.

However, much of the remaining Serb population of Kosovo fled fearing revenge attacks. Gypsies, Turks and Bosniaks were also driven out after being brutalized by Albanians. The Yugoslav Red Cross had registered 247,391 mostly Serbian refugees by November. The new exodus was a severe embarrassment to NATO, which had established a peacekeeping force of 45,000 under the auspices of the United Nations Mission In Kosovo (UNMIK). According to Amnesty International, the presence of peacekeepers in Kosovo led to an increase in the trafficking of women for sexual exploitation. [27] [28]

Most seriously, as many as 1,000 Serbs and Roma have been murdered or have gone missing since June 12, 1999. Criminal gangs or vengeful individuals may have been involved in some incidents since the war, but elements of the KLA are clearly responsible for many of these crimes. [29]

The Croats’ sweet love affair with Hitler just keeps on keeping on:

ZAGREB (Reuters) - Small packets of sugar bearing the likeness of Adolf Hitler and carrying Holocaust jokes have been found in some cafes in Croatia, prompting an investigation, the office of the state prosecutor said Monday.

“The local district attorney in (the eastern town of) Pozega has opened an investigation and is currently looking at the matter,” said Martina Mihordin.

The Novi List daily newspaper reported that officials at a small factory in Pozega have confirmed the sugar packs were produced on their premises.

Croatia’s Ustasha regime sided with the Nazis in World War Two and enforced ethnic laws under which thousands of Serbs, Jews and Gypsies, as well as anti-fascist Croats, were killed in local concentration camps in 1941-45.

[..]

Note that Reuters placed this article in the Oddly Enough section. Not real news, apparently. Just an anomaly. Can’t get our head around it, so we’ll just chuck it in with the salacious sex trivia and chuckle-worthy animal deformities.

See this previous post for the background on Croatia’s nostalgia for Nazism, containing the following (and much more along similar lines) from an article by Julia Gorin:

In 1998, NY Times columnist A.M. Rosenthal wrote: “In World War II, Hitler had no executioners more willing, no ally more passionate, than the fascists of Croatia. They are returning, 50 years later, from what should have been their eternal grave, the defeat of Nazi Germany. The Western Allies who dug that grave with the bodies of their servicemen have the power to stop them, but do not.”

[..]

In an article titled “Pro-Nazi extremism lingers in Croatia,” the Washington Times in 1997 reported: “A German tank rolls through a small village, and the peasants rush out, lining the road with their right arms raised in a Nazi salute as they chant ‘Heil Hitler.’ Mobs chase minorities from their homes, kicking them and pelting them with eggs as they flee into the woods. Europe in the 1940s? No. Croatia in the 1990s.”

In 1995, the London Evening Standard’s Edward Pearce wrote that “you can understand Croatia best by saying flatly that if there is one place in the world where a statue of Adolph Hitler would be revered, it would be in Zagreb.”

UPDATE (22/2): Julia Gorin has this photograph of one of the packets of sugar and a translated joke, via Mickey from serbianna.com:

Hitler comes to the Jews and says, “I’ll play you a record!”
Jews: “Which one?”
Hitler: “Concrete!!!”

The joke for Croats here is supposed to be with the word ‘record’, because the word “PLOCA” in Croatian has a double meaning: one a record (as in LP), which is what is SAID in the saying, and the other, a TABLET, something you put on a grave, which is what is MEANT by the saying.

Well worth watching, if you haven’t already.