You think you’ve seen French appeasement at its worst. Then they go and do something like this.

Last year’s French riots were triggered by the deaths of two “youths,” who fled a police ID check, broke into an electrical substation to hide, and were electrocuted when they touched something they shouldn’t have.

Last Friday officials and residents of Clichy-sous-Bois, scene of some of the worst rioting, dedicated a monument to these two disenchanted fleeing criminals.

What would Godfrey of Bouillon have done?

Israel bombed the power plant as a not-so-subtle hint that the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority should instruct its militiamen to release the kidnapped Israeli soldier, Corporal Gilad Shalit.

US taxpayers may reflect ruefully that we probably paid for the bombs and the Israeli Air Force planes too. You’ve got to think that there must be a some way to settle all this where we only pay one time.

In Vancouver, seven Canadian women have decided to go for the next logical step: they plan to marry themselves.

Makes sense to me. That’s the kind of relationship that really is likely to make it all the way to “’til death us do part.”

Here’s something we don’t see every day. Photographs of North Korea taken by visiting Russian web-designer Artemii Lebedev.

The original version (in Russian) is here. Use CONTROL + arrow keys to move forward and back through the photo pages here.

Ethnic tension marked by massive protests by members of the Azeri Turkish minority have broken out in Iran over the publication of a cartoon. The BBC reports:

Azeris said the cartoon, which was published earlier this month, compared them to cockroaches.

Reports from the cities of Ardebil, Naqadeh and Meshkin Shahr say Iranian security forces fired on demonstrators, killing at least five people.

Dozens of others were injured and hundreds arrested.

The cartoon was published in a state-owned newspaper.

It showed a succession of people attempting to talk to a cockroach in Persian.

Each time, the insect responded by saying, in Azeri: “What do you mean?”

Azeris are the largest ethnic minority in Iran, and the cartoon caused outrage among those who believed it suggested that all Azeris were stupid.

Thousands of people took to the streets in protest and, shortly afterwards, the newspaper was shut down and its editor arrested.

But that did not quell the anger. In the latest protests on Saturday, government buildings were targeted, and a number of banks and television stations burnt down.

Chuck at YARGB is providing coverage, and has posted a very helpful ethnic map of Iran.

Gateway Pundit is collecting coverage of the rioting.

Washington Times:

Mark Inglis, an amputee who conquered Mount Everest on artificial legs last week, yesterday defended his party’s decision to carry on to the summit despite coming across a dying climber.

As his team climbed through the “death zone,” the area above 26,000 feet where the body begins to shut down, they passed David Sharp, 34, a stricken British climber who later died. His body remained on the mountain. Mr. Inglis, 47, a New Zealander, said: “At 28,000 feet it’s hard to stay alive yourself. He was in a very poor condition, near death. We talked about [what to do for him] for quite a lot at the time and it was a very hard decision. “About 40 people passed him that day, and no one else helped him apart from our expedition. Our Sherpas (guides) gave him oxygen. He wasn’t a member of our expedition, he was a member of another, far less professional one.”.. About 200 people have died on Everest since the first expeditions in the 1920s. The corpses are stepped over by climbers traveling the most popular routes.

Sir Edmund Hillary, the first climber to summit Everest and a representative of a different era, condemned their action.

The New Zealand Press Association reports that Edmund Hillary has questioned the actions of Mark Inglis and others on the night British David Sharp, 34, died. “In our expedition there was never any likelihood whatsoever if one member of the party was incapacitated that we would just leave him to die,’’ Hillary, told the Otago Daily Times today.

Hillary said people have completely lost sight of what’s important and that the difficulties posed by operating at high altitude is no excuse. “I think the whole attitude towards climbing Mt Everest has become rather horrifying…people just want to get to the top, they don’t give a damn for anybody else who may be in distress and it doesn’t impress me at all that they leave someone lying under a rock to die.”

Yesterday’s Times reports Airbus has been trying to persuade Asian carriers that stand-up flying is the next solution to enhanced profitability.

Fausta denounces the idea.

And Airbus tells CNN, no, we wouldn’t think of such a thing, not us.

Perfidious, aren’t they?
———————-

Hat tip to Franco Alemán.

The struggle of real New England Yankees against the cultural influence of lily-livered flatlanders continues. Put that motto on those signs!

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Rumors are also circulating that Sharon has indeed died, but that the Israeli government has chosen to follow the example of the PLO regarding Yassir Arafat, and is concealing his death in order to conduct succession negotiations in private prior to the announcement.

There was outrage Wednesday when a Vermont judge handed out a 60-day jail sentence to a man who raped a little girl many,many times over a four-year span starting when she was seven.

The judge said he no longer believes in punishment and is more concerned about rehabilitation.

Prosecutors argued that confessed child-rapist Mark Hulett, 34, of Williston deserved at least eight years behind bars for repeatedly raping a little girl countless times starting when she was seven.

But Judge Edward Cashman disagreed explaining that he no longer believes that punishment works.

“The one message I want to get through is that anger doesn’t solve anything. It just corrodes your soul,” said Judge Edward Cashman speaking to a packed Burlington courtroom. Most of the on-lookers were related to a young girl who was repeatedly raped by Mark Hulett who was in court to be sentenced.

The sex abuse started when the girl was seven and ended when she was ten. Prosecutors were seeking a sentence of eight to twenty years in prison, in part, as punishment.

The prosecutorial proposal was far too lenient as well. He should have been hanged, and left hanging for 60 days for the crows.

Hat tip to Michelle Malkin.

• A market trader in Derby was banned from selling candles – unless they carried a notice warning that they can burn.

• A constable who saved the life of a man who was high on drugs by stopping him jumping from a window was reprimanded. PC Amerjit Singh, who had been summoned to a house in Cambridgeshire to prevent the potential suicide, had used “undue force” in holding the man back from killing himself. The man’s father complained.

• Labour’s election slogan – Forwards Not Backwards – sounded ironic to most Germans. The words were the East German government’s standard election cliché and slogan, just before the Berlin wall came down and Communism collapsed in 1989. Germans still use the term as a bad joke…

And so on.

Schoolfellows who know John Kerry from the old days in the Political Union will find awfully recognizable the spotlight-grabbing behavior featured in the incident of today described by Dean Barnett on Soxblog, who writes:

I know we’re never going to see the day where we all agree on the quality of George W. Bush as both a president and a man. But can we not at least agree that this country is fortunate to not have John Kerry as its president?

Whatever Randy Cunningham did in later life, it remains true that on the tenth of May, 1972 ShowTime 100 would shoot down two MIGs, then a third. ...

We turn to France, whose decision to stay out of the Iraq war is starting to make more sense. After all, why go all the way to the Mideast when you can fight Muslims in your very own suburbs?

— JON STEWART

The situation is really bad — today Chirac announced that the French are pulling out of France.

— JAY LENO

With characteristic hypocrisy, Americans complain about illegal immigration, while relying in countless cases upon off-the-books workers from Mexico and Central America to clean their houses, mow their lawns, move their furniture, or build their new home. Illegal aliens bus our tables, serve our fast food, and in general do all the dirty work and heavy lifting. The French, and other Europeans, resorted to a similar expedient earlier, in a more above-board fashion opening their doors to a major influx of residents of former colonies, or guest workers, to fill the same kinds of roles.

In America, we naturally get, as part of our enormous new wave of immigration, a small number of criminals and hormone-intoxicated male adolescents. All large waves of immigration are bound to contain a portion of the same. But we are primarily receiving people who are hard-working, family-oriented, and Roman Catholic. Our illegal Hispanic immigrants of today have both the natural inclinations, and a natural trajectory, to become tomorrow’s Republican voters. Europe was less fortunate. Its unskilled laboring classes are primarily drawn from Islamic countries.

From a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant perspective, Mexicans and Salvadorans seem downright exotic, but Spain was also part of European civilization, and Roman Catholics are also Christians sharing a common European culture and its values. Europe’s equivalent laboring caste is far more fundamentally alien.

America also has a tradition of assimilating foreign immigrant laborers, and can point to a demonstrable record of delivering in the past to the descendants of lowliest of its laborers a real path upward with respect to education, career opportunity, and prosperity. France has frozen its Islamic immigrants out of opportunities for upward mobility by a low-growth economy produced by its regime of Social Welfare. France even effectively curtails their physical mobility, trapping its Islamic laboring classes in battery-cage banlieus, functioning as Theodore Dalrymple observed in 2002, as the practical and moral equivalent of the South African system of apartheid.

The second European generation of foreign unskilled labor remains unassimilated, and without a path to opportunity. World-wide Islamic revolution is in the air, and we are seeing the thirteenth night of violence in Paris.

Rioting and the burning of automobiles by gangs of Islamic youths have spread from the housing projects in the suburbs of Paris to cities all over the county.

Despite the so-called poverty and destitution of which they are victims (at least according to the media), the Islamic “youths” of Clichy are the spoiled brats of the West European welfare state. Despite the media talk of “discrimination” (if there is any discrimination of immigrants in Western Europe, it is “positive” discrimination), they get the same generous welfare benefits as other Frenchmen. The West European government handouts are so high that none of the allegedly “frustrated and angry unemployed” are willing to do the kind of jobs that the Poles gladly take. The moral perversion which accompanies socialism has affected Muslims to a larger extent than it has affected people raised in the traditional Christian culture of the West with its stronger sense of individual responsibility — and even among the latter social welfarism has had devastating effects on traditional morality, which has almost disappeared.

The Poles on the other hand have lived under almost half a century of communist dictatorship, but socialism did not affect them to the same extent as it has affected the peoples of Western Europe. They remained faithful to their Catholic religion.

Saturday night’s rioting was the most destructive so far as 1,300 vehicles were set alight and 349 people arrested, despite an enhanced police presence.

So far more than 800 people have been arrested and 3,500 vehicles torched, mainly in the working-class, high-immigration outer suburbs of Paris where unemployment is as high as 20 percent.

Cars were burned out in the historic centre of Paris for the first time on Saturday night. In the normally quiet Normandy town of Evreux, a shopping mall, 50 vehicles, a post office and two schools went up in flames.

November 2, 2005 Paris – - French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy today accepted terms of surrender from Mohammad Al Jabooti, the leader of a pack of Muslim rioters after just seven days of civil unrest north of that nation’s capitol. Following a brief signing ceremony at the Palais de Justice, the French Republic surrendered to the suburb of Chichy-sous-Bois.

“The terms offered by our Muslim overlords in exchange for our immediate capitulation was most generous” said Minister Nicolas Sarkozy. “We are grateful we have been allowed to live.” “…and what greater gift is there than life itself?”

The terms that the French Republic agreed to was the immediate conversion of all 22,000 Catholic churches into Mosques and the summary beheading of the approximately 30,000 remaining priests and 60,000 Jews in that country.

“It is important for us to understand and respect their culture” said Laurent Fabius, a former Socialist prime minister. “There is no higher sign of disrespect in Islam than the practicing of another religion and we now need to recognize that fact”. “For us to choose any other path than submission would only make us responsible for prolonging the violence and betray the French people’s rich history of capitulation.” When asked about the inherent violence associated with the planned ritualistic slaughter of almost 100,000 of the former-republic’s citizens, Fabius bristled that any condemnation of that policy is in itself as a sign of racist thinking and grotesquely insensitive to the needs of the Muslim community.

“That is the problem with you Americans!” “You always want to play the cowboy and you never consider the subtle nuances of surrender. This is something we know well and that emotion beats in the chest of every real Frenchman. Surrender is as instinctive to us as breathing.”

‘Vermont still provides a communitarian alternative to the dehumanized mass production, mass consumption, narcissistic lifestyle which pervades most of the United States,” said Thomas Naylor, a former Duke University economics professor who retired to Vermont and has written a book called ‘’The Vermont Manifesto—The Second Vermont Republic.”

‘’Vermont is smaller, more rural, more democratic, less violent, less commercial, more egalitarian, and more independent than most states,” Naylor said. ‘’It offers itself as a kinder, gentler metaphor for a nation obsessed with money, power, size, speed, greed, and fear of terrorism.”

Todd Zywicki at the Volokh Conspiracy remarks on the appearance of ethnic Catholics like Judge Alito as Republican nominees as indicative of the watershed changes in American politics in recent years in which the children of working class Catholic immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe have moved up and out of the working class, and up and out of former ties to the democrat party.

He writes:

I think that the demographic fact of the make-up of the conservative Justices (Thomas, Scalia, and Alito) is a remarkable statement on the nature of modern conservatism… I don’t know Alito, but I feel like my background growing up is similar enough to his that I will hazard a few speculations on what this says about the nature of modern conservativism. For those like myself (and I hazard to guess Scalia, Alito, and Thomas) conservatism is attractive because it now seems to be the party of meritocracy where one is judged on your character and ability, and not on your connections or demographics. As the doors of schools such as Princeton and Yale Law School (in Alito’s case), and the professions themselves have been thrown open to Italians, Poles, Irish, etc., individuals such as Scalia and Alito have had the opportunity to prove themselves.

Among other things, I think this cultural upbringing reflects itself in a skepticism about racial preferences in college admissions and hiring. It is difficult to say, from what I can tell, that Sam Alito’s ascent to the Supreme Court came about through some sort of unfair advantage, money, or family connections. In the legal arena, I think this cultural temperament may reflect itself in a anti-elitist streak rebelling against the arrogance of the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary and a humility in the face of the common-sense of citizens as reflected through democratically-elected legislatures.

Professor Zywicki got lots of flack (from derisive liberals who will not abide references to meritocratic advancement) in comments on his posting, and evidently decided that his use of the term “ethnic Catholic” could be taken as a euphemism for someone Italian, or produced some other kind of offense to politically correct sensibilities, and removed a portion of his remarks. Pity! I’d like to have seen the unedited version.

This nomination was marred by absolutely outrageous behavior at the White House Press briefing by CBS Chief Correspondent John Roberts. Roberts subsequently proffered a patently insincere disclaimer of obscene intent and a bogus apology. If this administration were operating properly, the White House Press Secretary would have responded to a hostile interrogative couched in terms of obscene allusion by immediately calling security, and having Marine guards escort that reporter from the premises, while recessing the proceedings long enough to order his secretary to fire off a facsimile notifying that reporter’s employer of the permanent loss of the credentials admitting him to White House briefings.