Begging Your Pardon

Daniel Greenfield

You can tell which Republican the media thinks is a threat by seeing whom they go after. Besides Sarah Palin, the current target seems to be Haley Barbour. The outrage de jour is over Barbour's pardon for Gladys and Jamie Scott, two sisters who served as insiders in an armed robbery. Defenders of the Scott sisters routinely emphasize that they got a life sentence for only an 11 dollar robbery. But it was only an 11 dollar robbery because that was all they had. It was still however an armed robbery executed at gunpoint. The second line of argument is the usual "racism of the criminal justice system". But the victims who testified against them were also black. With all that in mind, Haley Barbour's pardon of the Gladys sisters after 16 years and under the current medical context is not unreasonable. His attachment of a condition in which one sister must donate her kidney to the other is more problematic, because it all opens all kinds of doors that should probably stay closed. What happens when inmates are told that a parole board will view them more favorably if they provide an organ donation? It's not quite China's gleeful carving up of prisoners for spare parts, but it's not a million miles away from it either.

But Governor Barbour's actions were reasonably practical and well-intentioned. Compare Barbour's pardon of Gladys and Jamie Scott, with Governor Patterson's pardon of John White for his murder of Daniel Cicciaro Jr. John White barely served half a year in prison for murder. Patterson didn't even bother talking to the victim's family about it. The NAACP and Al Sharpton did their dirty lobbying and they got what they wanted... with minimal media criticism.

The few media complaints mainly centered on Governor Patterson not speaking to the Ciccciaro family first. As if pardoning a murderer after less than half a year in prison would be somehow okay, if the governor had just taken time off from stealing all the furniture, to tell the victim's family what he was going to do, and tell them that there was nothing they could say that would change his mind.

Plaxico Burress shot himself with his own handgun and got a three-year prison sentence, and Michael Vick received a 21-month prison sentence for cruelty to animals.

White shot an unarmed juvenile and only had to serve a five-month jail sentence for manslaughter before being released by Paterson.

Where's the mercy for this poor child's family?


As usual there's only mercy for the killers, never their victims. The Democrats have never reformed or repented of their shameless pandering to criminals a generation ago. They've just learned to be more subtle about it.

The Rosenbaum family had to spend nearly a decade fighting to try Lemrick Nelson on civil rights charges, after a jury and a mayor who were sympathetic to his murder of Yankel Rosenbaum gave him a free pass. The Ciccciaro family clearly does not have those kinds of resources of energy to keep pushing this year after year, until it becomes a federal issue. And so the Ciccciaro family will mourn, while a murderer walks smirking out of jail and back to his church and the NAACP to talk about "healing".

The White pardon has yet to become a national story. But then Governor Patterson is not a Republican tipped to run for national service. And that also tells you everything about what the media's goal really is. Kneecap everyone who might pose a threat to Obama.

Then there's Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle's Pardon-a-Thon. If you're a criminal, then Wisconsin is the place to go.

Following a dustup at the Capitol this fall after the state Pardon Advisory Board waived interviews for applicants seeking pardons for misdemeanor crimes,


Even better...

Outgoing Governor Jim Doyle has pardoned 74 convicted criminals in the last two weeks, bringing the total for the year to 177. That’s much more than in any of his previous seven years in office.

And Doyle’s pardons since December 15th were more than the 51 he granted in all of 2009. None of the latest pardons appear to involve prominent or politically-connected people. Their crimes ranged from fleeing police to second-degree sexual assault.


And in still more pardon related controversies, Tim Pawlenty is under fire for participating in a panel that pardoned Jeremy Giefer for having sex with an underage girl whom he later married. Now Giefer is back on trial for molesting his own daughter. But if Pawlenty is under fire for agreeing to pardon Giefer, based on the fact that Jeremy Giefer had married his victim, then Jim Doyle should be similarly under fire, because his second-degree sexual assault pardon deals with the same exact situation. It's a pardon for a man who married his underage victim. So if Pawlenty is under fire, why not Doyle?

Again the answer is that Doyle is a Democratic and Pawlenty is a Republican with presidential aspirations. Had Giefer not been pardoned, the same outlets blasting Pawlenty for pardoning him, would be blasting him for being an uptight religious fanatic who ruined his life by refusing to pardon him. It's part of the media's damn you if you do, damn you if you don't game. Which is the only game you can expect opposition researchers to play.

But at least Bill Richardson has agreed not to pardon Billy the Kid. Oddly enough Obama is being criticized for offering fewer pardons than Bush did. But why offer pardons when you don't bother prosecuting the offenders?

Not when Attorney General Holder can only openly dismiss reams of evidence in the New Black Panther Case to argue that he did nothing wrong.

South of the border, Brazil's President Lula demonstrated the same sympathy for leftist thugs as Holder when he refused to extradite leftist terrorist Cesare Battisti to Italy. Battisti who had been a member of Armed Proletarians for Communism was shielded first by France's Mitterand and now by Brazil's Lula. Two of Battisti's targets were non-political. Their only crime had been to use armed force to defend themselves against attempted robberies. An act that offended the Armed Proletarians for Communism, who like so many other Communist terrorist groups were armed robbers themselves.

Pierluigi Torregiani, a jeweler was opening the store along with his adopted son and daughter, when Battisti and other ARC terrorists murdered him in cold blood. Now his son Albert Torregiani, who was there during the murder has accused Brazil's exiting President Lula of being an accessory to his father's murder. And there's really no denying it. Unlike the Scottish government in regard to the Lockerbie bomber, this isn't about money but the sympathy of one leftist thug for another. It's the same motivation behind Brazil's recognition of a Palestinian state.

The justification that Armed Proletarians for Communism used for their murder of Pierluigi Torregiani was this, "to teach people to "allow the deeds of the Proletarians forced to steal to survive". The best message to send is to not allow the likes of Battisti or Mahmoud Abbas to survive.

And speaking of Abbas and the terrorist state that the media's opinionators insist Israel must create-- is also holding a major event. No not a New Year's Party. A terrorism anniversary party.

Mahmoud Abbas, that so-called moderate leader of the Palestinian Arabs, is set to make a major televised speech tonight to commemorate the 46th anniversary of the start of the "revolution."

What happened 46 years ago?

On January 1, 1965, Fatah attempted its first terror attack, trying to blow up part of Israel's water infrastructure.

Note that this is not the anniversary of the founding of Fatah - which happened in 1957. No, Abbas chooses to commemorate the anniversary of the first Fatah terror attack. That, to him, was the start of the "revolution."

Which indicates exactly how much Abbas values peace as a goal.


Fatah has never stopped being a terrorist organization. Now it's just a terrorist organization that's no longer funded by the USSR, but by the US and Europe, recognized by Brazil and Argentina.

On a similar note, Elder of Ziyon has a story on an Arab journalist who wrote positively about the State of Israel and negatively about the level of freedom in his own country, and is now afraid of being murdered.

But there is good news. Finally a Muslim religious leader had stepped forward to condemn terrorism.

Riyadh - Sheikh Salman al-Awda warned against severe terrorist acts, bombings, and bloodshed, as well as against the groups that carry out these actions and hide behind Islam, carrying the banner of jihad. He said: "These are tools in the hands of the Zionists, Israelis, Europeans, and Orientals, with the goal of damaging Islam."


The Muslim world is so insanely racist, that it's not possible to condemn terrorism, without blaming it on the Jews and the Orientals.

Sheikh Al-Awda can't say that terrorism is wrong. No, he has to claim that the terrorists are not really Muslim terrorists, but pawns of the Jew and the Oriental against Islam. In this convoluted universe of Islam, the only way to condemn Islamic terrorism is by redefining it as Jewish and Oriental terrorism first.

Oh and don't get the idea that he's actually opposed to terrorist groups.

I believe all of the components of the Palestinian people should be respected, and there can be no stability in any region of the world without respect for all of its components. Hamas, Fatah, Islamic Jihad, and other groups are equally fundamental parts of the Palestinian people.


So whatever kind of terrorists he's condemning, it's not Hamas or Islamic Jihad which are just great. No it's those "other" terrorists who answer to the Japanese-Jewish conspiracy. And people wonder why outreach to the Muslim world is useless.

But luckily Mensa member Katie Couric has the answer.

Of course, a lot of noise was made about the Islamic Center, mosque, down near the World Trade Center, but I think there wasn’t enough sort of careful analysis and evaluation of where this bigotry toward 1.5 billion Muslims worldwide, and how this seething hatred many people feel for all Muslims, which I think is so misdirected, and so wrong — and so disappointing. Maybe we need a Muslim version of The Cosby Show.


They already have that. It's called Little Mosque on the Prairie. But this is the answer of the liberal elite to terrorism. Ignore the terrorism and create your own fictional reality on television in which Islam is just great.

I for one can't wait for the Mohammed Atta Show. Featuring Mohammed Atta and his three wives and his eighteen children. Life lessons include honor killings, female genital mutilation, and the vast Japanese-Jewish worldwide conspiracy against Islam. It's Must See TV, in that anyone who doesn't watch it gets beheaded.

Blazing Cat Fur via Square Mile Wife has more examples of the typical kind of tolerance in another Little Mosque of Calgary that should provide great material for the Mohammed Atta Show.

Back when I was researching a New York City mosque whose prayer rugs had been pissed on by a drunk, and for whom radical leftist Rachel Barenblat of Velveteen Rabbi fundraised, I found the same obsession with Jews and AIDS. The Oriental-Jewish conspiracy has so far decline to respond to these charges.

Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs has written a follow up piece in a number of outlets on the Islamic attempt to hijack the internet via ICANN.

In practice, the new arrangement makes it much easier for Muslim countries to dictate what stays on the internet and what doesn't. The removal of the material about "terrorism" was just muscle-flexing; there is much more of that kind of censorship coming. If this stands, anti-jihad sites like my own site AtlasShrugs.com and the JihadWatch.org site run by my colleague Robert Spencer will likely lose their domain names. It will become harder and harder to find the truth about jihad activity, or any resistance to it, on the internet or anywhere else.

Why is this necessary at all? Why should the U.S. relinquish control of its own invention? The internet was our extraordinary gift to the world. We kept it free. And now, like some depraved drunk, we are tossing it away and relinquishing control to the vultures and destroyers.


There's also worry over a growing push by the UN for global internet governance.

"We have to be careful about what institutions take the lead," said Ron Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab and the Canada Centre for Global Security Studies at the University of Toronto. "The Chinas, the Irans, the Saudi Arabias of the world want to impose a territorial vision of control over cyberspace -- and if the ITU got its wishes, that's essentially what would happen."

In future, the debate over who should govern the Internet would do well to bear in mind its success stories like Google and Facebook, said Olaf Kolkman, director of NLnet Labs and chair of the Internet Architecture Board.


But to Iran, China and Saudi Arabia... Facebook and Google are not success stories, but serious threat. It's the case for most dictatorships. Particularly Islamic ones.

And the UN takeover of the internet can be done using the typical class warfare rhetoric of the left.

Among the little-noticed debates at the United Nations this week was one that focuses on a potentially explosive issue: the future of the Internet. On one side are those countries favoring more governmental controls. On the other are the advocates of Internet freedom.

The debate has its roots in the 2005 World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), a U.N.-organized conference that addressed the "digital divide" between countries over their relative access to the Internet. One result of the conference was a mandate that the U.N. should explore ways to internationalize the governance of the Internet.


And by explore ways, we mean seize control. And by internationalize, we mean turn over into the hands of dictatorships who want to censor it.

At issue is the extent to which private industry, civil society groups, and other nongovernmental actors should continue to play significant roles in the management of the Internet. At this week's hearing, organized by U.N. Department of Social and Economic Affairs, some countries, including China, favored limiting the oversight role to governmental and intergovernmental bodies.

"The governments are located in the center of this process," argued Tang Zicai, representing the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology in Beijing. "This process cannot be accomplished without the meaningful participation of the governments."


That would be the same process which just led China to just ban Skype. That process.

But support for increased government regulation of the Internet is growing, especially among the developing countries who constitute a majority in the United Nations General Assembly. Several were outspoken in presentations this week at the U.N. hearing.

"Developments have not been supportive of increasing the leverage of developing countries in policy issues pertaining to the Internet," said Mohammed Hussain Nejad, representing the government of Iran. "The few developed countries are either monopolizing policymaking on such issues or entering into exclusive treaties among themselves, while further marginalizing other countries, mainly developing ones," he said.


Kind of like the way Iran's regime marginalized its people by shooting them in the street. But we can't be accused of marginalizing developing dictatorships. Let's turn over control of the internet to China, Russia and Iran. Who needs freedom anyway.

"The worst case scenario would be the imposition of U.N. types of governance over the Internet," says Philip Verveer, the Coordinator of International Communication and Information Policy at the US State Department. "[It would] inevitably bring with it tremendous slowness in terms of reaching critical decisions, because you can't have decisions taken among nations on anything that won't take a very long time. It would potentially [slow] changes in the architecture of the Internet, the adoption of technology, or the commercial arrangements that surround interconnection."


Oh I wouldn't worry about that. Infrastructure decisions would be made very slowly, but some other decisions would be made very quickly. Like one scrubbing all political dissent and cartoons of Mohammed.

The government of Mauritania, in its contribution to the U.N. debate, proposed that "international policy in the field of Internet should urge each country to ensure control of Internet content" in order to block the dissemination of any information "not authorized by law and morality" in some other country.


Guess what the religion of Mauritania is?

A. Buddhism

B. Christianity

C. Judaism

D. Islam

If you guessed D., congratulations you're an Islamophobe. And you will be forced to watch 60 straight hours of the Mohammed Atta Show to purge your mind of these hateful thoughts. But also you're correct. Mauritania is a Muslim country.

The Constitutional Charter of 1985 declares Islam the state religion and sharia the law of the land.


It's "odd" how Muslim countries are so obsessed with forcing every country to monitor internet content so that no information "not authorized by law and morality" in some other country can pass.

I bet that means Muslim countries will be obligated to scrub their insane rants about the Oriental-Jewish conspiracy spreading AIDS around the world. Nah. That can't happen. But scrubbing any criticism of Islam, that's number one on the agenda.

And how is that Sharia working out for Mauritania? Just fine.

Mahjouba was raped in March on the nighttime streets of Mauritania's capital, but she will not bring charges against the man she says did it since she may be the one who ends up in prison. The 25-year-old says the legal advice she received was to not go to court, leaving her to suffer in silence.

There is no law in Mauritania that defines rape.

According to a local U.N.-funded group working with the victims, the law criminalizes the women instead of their rapists -- and society ostracizes the women.

...

She added: "I consulted a lawyer secretly, and he advised me sincerely not to seek justice because that would throw me in jail. I know what happened to other girls who decided to go to court and face the community. Their lives were destroyed completely forever. So I already know what would happen to me if I had to follow that path.

"This Islamic republic has no place for rape victims like me."

Mauritanian laws are based on Sharia law and the penal code forbids relationships between both sexes outside marriage. That includes a consensual relationship between a boyfriend and girlfriend but can also criminalize a woman who is forced to have sex.

Sidi Athman Ould Sidi Salem, a law specialist and legal adviser to the government, said: "If raped women don't bring strong evidence, which is not easy, they would be accused of Zina -- an Arabic word meaning sex out of marriage -- and end up in jail. It's because the victims of rape are always accused of a Zina which make a lot of problems."


The above information comes from the website of Women Against Sharia. One of those sites whose existence no doubt offends the Mauritanian regime's ideas of "law and morality". And another reminder of why it's so important not to let the likes of Mauritania dictate the content of speech on the internet.