CanWest;

Martyrdom celebrations that praised Tamil Tiger soldiers and suicide bombers were held openly in the student centre of the University of Waterloo, where the FBI alleges a ‘’procurement cell’’ for the terrorist organization was located..

Darcey at Dust My Broom has retrieved photos since purged from the WATSA website.;

Waterloo Suresh (aka Suresh Sriskandarajah) who was one of the six Tamil Canadians arrested on terrorism charges last week was involved with WATSA. He had a gallery on their website but it has since been cleaned of files and was also active in their forums. His personal website is located here at www.planetsuresh.com.
Galleries containing photographs of Maaveerar Naal or Hero’s Day have also been removed from the site and the CanWest article suggests that they express deep support and sympathy for the Tamil Tigers.

Check it out.

ABC News transcript via The Corner;

CHARLES GIBSON
Some encouraging news from Baghdad tonight. A few weeks ago, the decision was made to redeploy thousands of US troops to the Baghdad area from other areas of Iraq to secure the city and reduce a number of daily attacks.
Well, the numbers are preliminary, but it seems to be working. After two weeks, Iraqi authorities say the number of violent attacks has gone down by 30%. ABC’s Terry McCarthy got an exclusive chance to travel with a unit through one of Baghdad’s most dangerous areas.
TERRY MCCARTHY
Space-aged vehicles in Baghdad’s side streets. These Stryker armored troop carriers moved in 2 weeks ago with 5,000 extra US troops to patrol the Iraqi capital.
LIEUTENANT PATRICK PATTERSON
It’s new. People don’t know what to expect.
TERRY MCCARTHY
By saturating some of the most dangerous neighborhoods, they have reduced violence across Baghdad by almost a third. US figures, calculated differently, show a 22% drop. Either way, the Americans are fired up.
LIEUTENANT PATRICK PATTERSON
It’s been great. We get a lot of smiles and waves.
TERRY MCCARTHY
One of the most dramatic drops in violence has happened in the Dora neighborhood. In July, up to 20 people here were killed here every day. Then US and Iraqi troops poured in, searching 4,000 buildings in the first 4 days. Their commander, Colonel Michael Beech, was also determined to stop car bombs.
COLONEL MICHAEL BEECH
We established entry control points where we inspect, even now, every single vehicle in and out.
TERRY MCCARTHY
Over 14 days of the stepped-up patrols in Dora, there has been just one killing.
We’re on Mechanic Street in Dora, in Southern Baghdad. A month ago this was one of the most dangerous places in the city. All these stores would have been closed.
But since the extra American troops have moved back in, people feel it’s now safe to do business here. ‘I’m happy because we’re safe,” he says. ‘The stores are open and we can move around freely.” But US commanders told us the additional American fire power can only be a temporary solution.
COLONEL MICHAEL BEECH
It has to be the Iraqi people with the Iraqi security forces that ultimately bring success and security to Baghdad.
TERRY MCCARTHY
Hope has often gone sour in Iraq. If the country’s political leaders cannot make their own peace, America’s later success in Baghdad could quickly be reversed. Terry McCarthy, ABC News, Baghdad.

August 27 Update: After encouraging signs in the past 36 hours or so, the Fox journalists have been freed.

---

Rusty Shackleford is reporting that the group that has claimed responsibility for abducting Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig appears to be at least inspired by Al Qaeda;

More at Michelle Malkin.

RealClearPolitics;

This inability of Europe to get its act together is what suggests 1938. Back then, Churchill was hardly the only one who thought Hitler was intent on war. After all, the German leader was an ideological zealot — and a murderer to boot. Still, England did little.

Similarly, you don’t have to have Churchillian prescience to see that what happened once in Lebanon can happen again. Hezbollah’s avowed aim is to eradicate Israel. Listen to what it says. Pay attention. It will renew its attacks the first chance it gets. This is why it exists.

Or is it 2006?

Story at Toronto Tory.

More on an item mentioned here last week – an arrest has been made in the failed train bombing attempt in Germany;

A LEBANESE student suspected of trying to paralyse the German railway network with a bomb concealed in a suitcase appeared in court yesterday, as a huge police hunt for a second suspect continued.
The 21-year-old man was remanded in custody by an investigating judge in Karlsruhe, southwest Germany, on charges of attempted murder, belonging to a terrorist organisation and attempting to cause an explosion.
The suspect was an engineering student in the north German town of Kiel, where he was held on Saturday morning.
[…]
The suspect, identified only as Youssef Mohammed E, is accused of being at the heart of a plot to blow up two regional trains simultaneously on July 31. Investigators say that only a flaw in the construction of the propane gas bombs prevented a disaster.
There are parallels with the alleged London plot to blow up airliners and the Madrid train bombings. The plan, hatched in Germany, however, lacked the necessary sophistication. The propane gas was supposed to be detonated by an electronic device attached to alarm clocks in two suitcases. A mixture of petrol and oil in the same suitcases was intended to spread fire through the carriages. But the mechanism failed.

I caution readers not to use examples such as this to generalize about the broader engineering community – the vast majority of moderate engineering students are peaceloving people who are as appalled at acts of terrorism as the rest of us.

Military historian Victor Davis Hanson has a sobering review of the current situation in the ME and the questionable sympathies of the world press;

The old Arab agenda of recapturing “stolen” land has been superseded by a new Islamist jihad that is as fanatical as it is inhuman. The Islamists care not a whit for ground, but only for the abject destruction of the Jewish state and to finish the Holocaust that they claim did not take place. Few of the pundits now clamoring for “engagement” care to recall that Syria probably murdered Rafik Hariri, or that Iran promises to wipe Israel off the map.
The near criminal indifference of the international community is cause for greater depression still. No one says a thing about horrific Arab racism and anti-Semitism that brazenly offer the world pictures of our secretary of State as a primate and constant hate speech of Jews as apes and pigs. And here at home, a celebrity actor, the staff of a failed congresswoman in Georgia, and a crazed Muslim with a gun in Seattle all shout about the evils of the “Jews” — a good cross-section of just how insidious is the growing anti-Semitism.
The globalized media is absolutely discredited after the coverage of Lebanon. Reuters has destroyed its reputation, gained from 150 years of world reporting, by releasing doctored pictures and tolerating staged photo-ops. Almost all the Western media outlets failed to distinguish Lebanese civilian from military casualties — as if the Hezbollah terrorists they never filmed and never interviewed never died.
Indeed, thanks to the unprofessional reporters abroad, and their disingenuous chiefs back home, the world never saw the killers who sent the rockets nor many of their civilian victims on the ground in Israel. Nor did the reporters apprise their audience of the different landscapes in which they worked: candor in Israel might win loud disagreement; truth in Lebanon meant death. It would be as if Reuters, AP, or the New York Times embedded its reporters within the Waffen SS, beaming daily reports back home about the great morale and noble suffering of the Wehrmacht as it advanced into the snowy Ardenn.

… and near the end gets something wrong;

In an amorphous war of self-induced Western restraint, like the present one, truth and moral clarity are as important as military force. This past month, the world of the fascist jihadist and those who tolerate him was once again on display for civilization to fathom. Even the most timid and prone to appeasement in the West are beginning to see that it is becoming a question of “the Islamists or us.”
In this eleventh hour, that is a sort of progress after all.

Or rather, is proven wrong. Returning from Lebanon after spending a few days as guests of Hezbollah, two Canadian politicians have established themselves as this year’s leading contenders for the Nobel Prize In Bad Judgement,

It would aid the cause of peace if Canada dropped Hezbollah from a list of banned terrorist organizations, according to two Canadian MPs on a fact-finding mission to Lebanon.
When asked if he were in favour of Hezbollah being taken off the terror list, Etobicoke Liberal Borys Wrzesnewskyj said: “Yes, I would be.”
He likened the situation in the Middle East to Northern Ireland, where “if there wasn’t the possibility for London to negotiate with the IRA, you’d still have bombings.”
“Hezbollah has a political wing, they have members of parliament, they have two cabinet ministers,” Wrzesnewskyj said. “You want to encourage politicians in this military organization so that the centre of gravity shifts to them.”
New Democrat Peggy Nash, who represents the Toronto riding of Parkdale-High Park, said her discussions in Lebanon had led her to believe “that it is just not helpful to label them a terrorist organization.”
“If the political parties in Lebanon who may disagree with Hezbollah, and be opposed to them and their philosophy, can figure out a way to work with Hezbollah and try to get along internally, then perhaps we should take a cue from that.”
This was the message that both MPs said they would bring back to their caucuses, and eventually to the House of Commons, when they return to Canada this week.

Unbelievable.
Related – How Islamic Terrorists Manipulate the Media
Also – lots this morning on this at Blogging Tories.

And a screw loose. The “rest of the story” about the plane that was diverted from Washington-Dulles to Boston last week;

“At about 4:30 a.m. EST, an hour and a half after take-off, a flight attendant saw Mayo pushing against an aircraft bulkhead, the affidavit said. When the attendant told her to return to her seat, Mayo responded that she wanted to speak to an air marshal, saying, “I know you want my bag” or “I know you want to see what’s in my bag.”

For all of the complaints about the “silliness” of airport security these days, I suspect that few people have stopped to consider the vast array of personality types – not to mention, degrees of mental stability – of passengers in those long line-ups we file through before boarding our flights.
I’m not one known for her tolerance for meaningless bureaucracy – but in the case of airport security, the stakes are so high, motivation extreme, and the opportunities nearly infinite. Trapped between the knowledge that any failure can cause the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands, and the pressures to keep the lines moving and flights leaving on time, kneejerk, thoughtless criticisms of airport security is, at the very least, naive and unfair.
At the worst, you look up from your package of sesame snacks to discover the flight attendant is bleeding out in the aisleway.

Medienkritic

According to reports circulating throughout the German media today, two suitcase bombs placed by two unidentified men very nearly went off on regional trains in Dortmund and Koblenz at the end of July. A deadly simultaneous bombing was only averted because the bombs were technically defective. Had they detonated, German authorities believe that a mass casualty event similar to the recent attacks in London could have been the result.

Michael Totten is in the Middle East and advises that no matter what media and apologists would have you believe, this was a this was a terrorist war against civilians. It may also preview a shift in Islamist tactics that signal harder times ahead for Israel.

There is a lot of talk in the media and the blogosphere about Hezbollah’s targets in Israel. Some insist that Hezbollah does too aim its Katyushas at the Israeli military. The “proof” is that 12 soldiers were killed by a rocket just before I arrived on the border.
Here’s the thing, though. Hezbollah hit a little of everything in Northern Israel: houses, trees, streams, grass, apartments, roads, vineyards, and cows. Thousands of rockets crashed and sprayed shrapnel inside their shooting gallery. The odds that none of the rockets would hit a single IDF soldier were microscopic. Hezbollah couldn’t have achieved zero Israeli military casualties no matter how hard they tried unless they didn’t fire those rockets at all.
I was far safer on military bases, in open fields, and on tiny kibbutzes than in cities during Hezbollah’s terror war. Katyushas are nearly useless against an army but are devastatingly effective as terrorist weapons against civilian population centers even as they cause relatively light damage. Shrapnel may not hurt your apartment building too bad, but it will tear you to pieces if you’re in the way.

Times Online reports that Tony Blair’s Labour Government…

… is discussing with airport operators plans to introduce a screening system that allows security staff to focus on those passengers who pose the greatest risk.
The passenger-profiling technique involves selecting people who are behaving suspiciously, have an unusual travel pattern or, most controversially, have a certain ethnic or religious background.
The system would be much more sophisticated than simply picking out young men of Asian appearance. But it would cause outrage in the Muslim community because its members would be far more likely to be selected for extra checks.
Officials at the Department for Transport (DfT) have discussed the practicalities of introducing such a system with airport operators, including BAA. They believe that it would be more effective at identifying potential terrorists than the existing random searches.

It’s encouraging to hear that finally someone has finally screwed up the political courage to even discuss the application of reality-based airport screening. As a relatively frequent flier, I’m ready to accept the heightened risk from blue-haired Texas grandmothers because airport security is waving them through in order to concentrate on 17 – 30 year old males fresh from finishing schools in Islamobad.
As always, YMMV.
Related – comments from John Stevens, former London police chief;

“stop the denial, endless fudging and constant wailing that somehow it is everyone else’s problem and, if Islamic terrorism exists at all, they are somehow the main victims”.

Via Memri –

The following is a brief review and analysis of the position of the Iraqi Shi’a to the events in Lebanon, by the staff in MEMRI’s Baghdad office. Two important messages emerge from the analysis: first, while most of the Iraqi Shi’a are sympathetic to Hizbullah, this attitude is by no means universal. Some elements of the Shi’a community blame Hizbullah Secretary-General Hassan Nassrallah for the provocation that caused the conflagration; and second, and perhaps more significant, the leading Shi’a authority in Iraq, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, has restricted his fatwa [religious edict] to providing financial support to Hizbullah rather than declaring jihad in its favor.

Blogging Tories have launched Terror Watch. Be sure to add it to your blogroll.
(Not to be confused with the Terror Apologist blog aggregator, which has been in operation for some time.)

LGF*;

Conclusive proof that the photographs from Qana were cynically staged, as “Green Helmet” directs cameramen in a video from German TV (with English subtitles). They actually take the body of a child out of the ambulance, transfer it from the light stretcher used in the ambulance to the heavy duty gurney used in the rescue operation (to create the impression that it has just arrived from the bombed area), uncover it, and pose it for photographs.

*Sorry! Having trouble getting the link to work. Scroll down to “Directed By Green Helmet Guy” post of Aug.10
There’s video at Hot Air.

Drudge headlines this morning say it all;

Plan to blow up planes in mid-flight…
‘Mass murder’ bomb plot…
‘Suggestive’ of al-Qaida…
UK police hold 21…
REPORT: Citizens of Pakistani Dissent…
Britain on highest alert…
USA raises air security alert to red for first time…
Statement by Homeland Security…
Airlines ban hand luggage from UK…
Britain facing ‘most sustained threat since WWII’…
2 held on terror charges in Ohio…

Stephen Taylor was up late and live blogged the reports as they came in.
Pajamas Media is also following emerging reports – and good ol’ al-Reuters is at it again;

REUTERS (REMEMBER THEM?) LINKS PLOT TO BLAIR COOPERATING WITH US ON HEZBOLLAH-ISRAEL WAR ALTHOUGH BRITISH INTELLIGENCE INDICATES PLOT IN MAKING FOR MONTHS – LONG BEFORE WAR. 21:35 PDT

And predictably, a member of the Canadian left reacts with all the seriousness we’ve come to expect of them. It’s a plot to improve George Bush’s “(and, in this case, the UK and Israeli governments)” polling numbers, of course. Allow me to ask this directly of “Liberal Catnip” – What’s wrong with you people?
Update – My question has received both a response and an explanation that makes some sense. According to Liberal Catnip, she has the IQ of a shetland sheepdog.

There is another way. And it has a proven track record of success;

Oh, you spineless neo-conservatives may object; “human rights” this and “we fought in vain” that. But if you give Saddam just a few weeks of death squads, rape rooms, human shredders, and secret informants, the insurgent problem will go away. Neocons may flap their gums about solving the problems of the Middle East through such comically unlikely neo-Wilsonian concepts as “democracy” and “liberalism” and “winning hearts and minds,” but Saddam knows what the sniveling neocons dare not admit: that there’s nothing wrong with the Middle East that enough poison gas won’t fix. Restore Saddam to power, give him some strongly-worded suggestions and some well-written oil contracts, and he’ll have Baghdad orderly and humming in a matter of days. Iran? He wrote the book on savage wars of attrition against the Iranian menace. And he’ll create Iraqi jobs by the score! Those mass graves won’t dig themselves.

MIchael Totten;

Tomorrow I’m going to Israel to get as close to this monster as I can without getting myself killed. (To friends and family who worry about me: I promise not to embed with the IDF and ride into Lebanon on a tank.)

If you have some spare change, you can hit his Paypal button to help pay the bills.

Disporportionate? Only if you wish the extermination of Israel.

AT FIRST light they filtered from the undergrowth, camouflaged, laden with captured hunting rifles and crested Lebanese scimitars, and high-fiving with relief at still being alive.
After nearly a week of vicious ditch-to-ditch fighting with Hezbollah fighters in the village of Taibeh, hundreds of exhausted Israeli soldiers slipped back across the border early yesterday after the hardest fighting they had ever experienced.
As they trudged across the brow of a hill in broken single file they were indistinguishable in their battle fatigues and green face paint — some even black out their teeth in Hezbollahland — and all were drunk on adrenalin. “I was hoping to go in and kill Hezbollonim. I killed three,” one shouted as he embraced colleagues from the Nahal Brigade.
As soon as they reached the outskirts of an Israeli hilltop town, which cannot be named for security reasons, they stopped and cleared their M16 automatic rifles in unison — the last task before they could relax. Some then reached inside their huge battlepacks for their mobile phones to call families and girlfriends. Others collapsed with exhaustion, washing away their fear with bottles of cola and lungfuls of cigarette smoke. A few grabbed newspapers to find out how their war was going. “What is happening in other places? What is happening in Gaza?” one asked The Times.

Iran admitted on Friday it has supplied Hezbollah with long-range Zelzal-2 missiles.
“This war is different”;

So if you are saying now that I was wrong when I believed that it would be possible to ensure far fewer casualties and far more quiet after leaving Lebanon, you’re right. I was wrong. I’m afraid of those who are incapable of saying ‘I was wrong’ in the first person. I lived on the border, in Malkiya, and I saw the small tobacco plots of the farmers in southern Lebanon, and I believed that prosperity on both sides of the border would ensure quiet. That Nasrallah would aspire for his people to have a good life. In that I was wrong. I was definitely wrong.

It’s a quote from an Israeli “peace’ activist. The article is fairly long. Do click and read the rest.

Ynet News;

After repeated Israeli efforts to destroy Hizbullah’s al-Manar television station have failed, an IDF intelligence unit succeeded this week in hacking the station’s live broadcasts, planting Israeli PR messages in the transmissions..
The al-Manar channel regularly airs juicy propaganda against Israel, including reports of “heroic” and “successful” operations by Hizbullah fighters against IDF special forces.
However, this weekend the IDF prepared a surprise for the Lebanese and Arab viewers of the channel: The broadcast was interrupted and caricatures of Nasrallah appeared on the screen, accompanied by captions reading: “Your days are numbered” and “Nasrallah, your time is up. Soon you won’t be with us anymore.”

(Via a reader who spotted it in the comments at Tim Blair)

Herald Sun (Australia)

The images, obtained exclusively by the Sunday Herald Sun, show Hezbollah using high-density residential areas as launch pads for rockets and heavy-calibre weapons.
Dressed in civilian clothing so they can quickly disappear, the militants carrying automatic assault rifles and ride in on trucks mounted with cannon.
The photographs, from the Christian area of Wadi Chahrour in the east of Beirut, were taken by a visiting journalist and smuggled out by a friend.

Related;

There is an unexplained gap of about seven hours between the one Israeli air strike that hit the Qana building housing the civilians, which took place around 1 A.M. Sunday, and the first report that the building had collapsed, said the chief of staff of the Israel Air Force, Brigadier General Amir Eshel. Speaking at a press conference at the Kirya military complex in Tel Aviv last night, Eshel said that of three Israeli air strikes on Qana early Sunday, only the first strike hit the building in which the civilians were staying. The other two hit areas at least 400 meters away.
“I can’t say whether the house collapsed at 12 A.M. or at 8 A.M.,” said Eshel. “According to foreign press reports, and this is one of the reports we are relying on, the house collapsed at 8 A.M. We do not have testimony regarding the time of the collapse. If the house collapsed at 12 A.M., it is difficult for me to believe that they waited eight hours to evacuate it.”
Eshel and Major General Gadi Eisencott, who heads the Operations Directorate in the General Staff, said Hezbollah had set up headquarters in Qana and that militants fired about 150 Katyusha rockets at parts of northern Israel, including Haifa and the Galilee panhandle, from Qana. Some of the rockets, the army said, were fired from the built-up areas of the village.
In the second IAF strike on Qana, which took place at around 2:30 A.M. Sunday, IAF planes bombed two targets located about 500 meters from the building that collapsed, and in the third strike, at around 7:30 A.M., three targets were bombed 460 meters away from the building, Eshel said. He told reporters that an analysis of photographs of the strikes, taken by cameras installed in the warplanes, showed that the four bombs dropped during the second and third strikes hit the intended targets, and that an IAF plane sent on a photo sortie in the afternoon confirmed that the intended targets had been hit.
The IDF has not released the aerial photographs, which Eshel said were being processed.
Addressing the possibility that the building may have collapsed because the IAF bombing triggered a delayed explosion of weapons stored inside, Eshel said: “I don’t want to get into conspiracy theories. We will work diligently and collect every detail, so as to understand what happened there. I hope that we will know in the end, but I’m not sure. It’s possible that we will never know what exactly happened there.”
The IDF screened a video yesterday showing rocket launches from Qana, and said it chose the objectives in the village by analyzing the locations from which Hezbollah had fired rockets on Israel. However, the house that was hit had no direct connection to the rocket-launching cells. Nonetheless, IAF officials said that immediately after firing rockets at Israel, some Hezbollah cells hide in civilian houses in built-up areas in southern Lebanon.

Both items via Drudge.

And hand out candy.