The Violent Oppression Of Women In Islam

Last week, YouTube made headlines and agitated many when it banned the short film: The Violent Oppression of Women in Islam, which is produced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 

The film, rated “X” for such extreme graphic content, gives an accurate and eye-opening account of how women are treated under Islam. This film shows actual beheadings, hangings, and and other ways in which women are beaten, mutilated, and otherwise tortured under Islam. If there was ever a doubt in your mind that severe (understatement) oppression occurs, watch this film:

Film: The Violent Oppression of Women In Islam

Plame Continues To Flame

Yawn. Nobody cares anymore… 

SOUTH BURLINGTON, Vt. –Outed spy Valerie Plame says she isn’t going away, no matter what the folks at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue want.

Touring in support of a new memoir, the former CIA operative said in a speech Sunday that she and husband Joseph Wilson have left Washington behind but have no intention of keeping quiet about the way they say they were retaliated against by the White House and others.

“They would like nothing more for us to than be silent and go away. We are not going to give them the satisfaction,” said Plame.

But she also said that neither she nor her husband — whose 2003 op-ed column in the New York Times questioned the Bush administration’s rationale for the war with Iraq — want their lives defined by it.

Plame, 44, went from an undercover CIA operative to household name after syndicated columnist Robert Novak revealed her identity in a column in a 2003 story about Wilson’s CIA-sponsored trip to Niger to investigate claims that Iraq was trying to buy uranium.

The disclosure triggered an investigation that led to the conviction of former White House aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the only person charged in the case. He was not convicted of leaking but of lying and obstructing the probe, and President Bush commuted his 2 1/2-year prison sentence.

On Sunday, about 900 people turned out for Plame’s $28-a-ticket appearance at a Vermont Woman newspaper lecture series at a Sheraton hotel ballroom, six days after the release of “Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House.”

Plame got a $1 million advance for the book. Her speaking fee Sunday wasn’t disclosed; neither Plame nor Vermont Woman publisher Suzanne Gillis would say what it was.

In a 52-minute speech and a question-and-answer session that followed, Plame recounted some details about her CIA training, her marriage to Wilson — a veteran diplomat — and the “wild and woolly” fallout they endured after her name was published.

“I felt like someone sucker punched me in the gut,” she said.

The revelation compromised some of her former CIA contacts, put her family at the center of a “media maelstrom” and effectively ended her career as a spy, she said.

The book, which had to be cleared for publication by the CIA as part of a secrecy agreement she signed when she joined, was dramatically redacted for what she said were reasons more related to the White House’s political agenda than to national security.

Publisher Simon & Schuster — which lost a court fight over the deletions — opted to print the book using gray blackout over the parts the CIA objected to, for effect. Most of the deletions had to do with the dates of her CIA service, according to Plame.

“The vast majority of what’s underneath those black lines has nothing to do with national security information,” she said.

“Although this is only a piece of the story, I think it’s an important piece, because it shows a much broader pattern of activity and behavior by this administration to silence its critics and to use national security and fear as a bludgeon so that they can perpetuate their own political agenda,” Plame said.

Plame, who is also suing Vice President Cheney, former White House political strategist Karl Rove, Libby and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, said she hopes the civil suit will lead to more revelations about her case.

Until the book’s publication, Plame and her husband had faded from the limelight in recent months. Six months ago, they moved to Santa Fe, N.M.

“We have every desire to move beyond this,” she said. “We do not want to be defined by this. This is an important story, it has to be told. But I want to be able to move on.”

Source: Boston.com – Outed Spy: I’m not going away

Michael Mooreon

Michael Moore’s latest doucheumentary Sicko was released in United Kingdom cinemas last week. As Minette Marrin reports in this Times Online article, the NHS socialized healthcare system which Michael Moore has evangelized has serious shortcomings and has been inaccuratedly portrayed in his latest film:

Unfortunately Sicko is a dishonest film. That is not only my opinion. It is the opinion of Professor Lord Robert Winston, the consultant and advocate of the NHS. When asked on BBC Radio 4 whether he recognised the NHS as portrayed in this film, Winston replied: “No, I didn’t. Most of it was filmed at my hospital [the Hammersmith in west London], which is a very good hospital but doesn’t represent what the NHS is like.”

I didn’t recognise it either, from years of visiting NHS hospitals. Moore painted a rose-tinted vision of spotless wards, impeccable treatment, happy patients who laugh away any suggestion of waiting in casualty, and a glamorous young GP who combines his devotion to his patients with a salary of £100,000, a house worth £1m and two cars. All this, and for free.

This, along with an even rosier portrait of the French welfare system, is what Moore says the state can and should provide. You would never guess from Sicko that the NHS is in deep trouble, mired in scandal and incompetence, despite the injection of billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money.

Interestingly enough, Sicko’s release in the United Kingdom has raised the same questions that were raised when the film was released stateside. It seems also that our neighbors to the east have arrived at the same conclusions that so many of us have reached:

One can only wonder why Sicko is so dishonestly biased. It must be partly down to Moore’s personal vainglory; he has cast himself as a high priest of righteous indignation, the people’s prophet, and he has an almost religious following. He’s a sort of docu-evangelist, dressed like a parody of the American man of the people, with jutting jaw, infantile questions and aggressively aligned baseball cap.

However, behind the pleasures of righteous indignation for him and his audience, there is something more sinister. There’s money in indignation, big money. It is just one of the many extreme sensations that are lucrative for journalists to whip up, along with prurience, disgust and envy. Michael Moore is not Mr Valiant-for-truth. He is Mr Worldly-wiseman, laughing behind his hand at all the gawping suckers in Vanity Fair. Don’t go to his show.