The keys to a surprising military campaign.
by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross for Pajamas Media
Edited by Richard Miniter

The startlingly rapid retreat of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), a Taliban-like group linked to Osama bin Laden, surprised military intelligence officers who less than a week ago were predicting a total route of Somalia’s secular transitional federal government.

by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross
A Pajamas Media Exclusive

Al Qaeda’s allies in Somalia are on the verge of seizing the secular government’s last stronghold - opening the possibility of a “new Afghanistan” to shelter America’s enemies.

In Paris, just getting to the airport is the adventure. “Two policemen in glass cages, and two lines: one for Muslims, one for infidels. You think I’m kidding? Two lines. One, slow line for miscellaneous others. One fast track for a party of about twenty escorted by a high ranking border police officer and a female underling, both speaking Arabic, who usher them through the checkpoint with VIP attention.”

— Or — How political expediency has replaced political correctness in the Netherlands

Pieter Dorsman reports on the issue of Sharia law replacing the constitution in the Netherlands: “If a situation could arise where a majority could agree to shred a constitution in favor of religious law – and one from the Middle Ages at that - than doesn’t a democracy have an obligation to devise mechanism whereby such choices could be neutralized?”

When Ayaan Hirsi Ali published her autobiography, entitled “My Freedom”, last week she commented that immigration and integration issues in The Netherlands were far from being solved; that more confrontations by opposing sides in the debate were likely. It is therefore remarkable that the key players in the Dutch election campaign so far have stayed away from this particular hot button and focused on more mundane issues such as universal childcare and retirement benefits.

Nidra Poller

BY Nidra Poller, PJM Paris Editor
Paris 12 September 2006

[first of a weekly column - ed..]

You’ve got complaints against the mainstream media? Even Fox News is somewhat of a disappointment sometimes? Maybe you live in the shadow of the BBC? You’re traveling and there’s nothing but CNN International to get on your nerves? Hold on, and take a look at the French media. You won’t believe my eyes and ears. When I tell you what the French media are telling the citoyennes and citoyens, you’ll wonder why no one ever thought to use it to put the French to shame. It’s so easy!

Over the coming months, I’ll give you insights, résumés, excerpts, transcripts…and for now, here’s a hot item.

September 12, 2006
Ellen W. Horowitz

We wander over to place de la République, perhaps the most schizophrenic of all of Paris’s major places.
-The Paris Free Voice Magazine, June 1999
——

If Place de la Republique was schizophrenic back in the summer of 1999, then by the autumn of 2000 it was overtly psychopathic.

You would think that the bronze lady of of the republic would have felt a bit violated by the keffiyahs, swastikas, and hatred gracing her foundation - but she didn’t protest too much.

Berlusconi

[When Mario Sechi, Deputy Managing Edtior of Italy’s Il Giornale thinks of Italy today, he thinks “of a farmer milking a cow. What does the farmer do when the cow has no more milk? In Italy’s case, the State is the cow and the farmer are the Italians. And the cow is dry.”—- Editor ]

After five years of Berlusconism, Italy switched channels last April. Italian politics is no longer the visionary adventure of the media mogul Silvio Berlusconi: now the bobble-headed Romano Prodi plays a major part too.

[Native Netherlander Pieter Dorsman of Peaktalk looks at the recent traffic patterns of Dutch politics and finds jams, backups, wrecks and no real right turn in the offing. —- Editor ]

It was in the beginning of this year that The New Republic jumped on the bandwagon of classifying everything that happened in The Netherlands since the Fortuyn and Van Gogh murders as solid evidence of the small nation abandoning its left-liberal tolerance and ‘turning right’.

Aleksander Boyd, a London-based Venezuelan citizen and editor of Vcrisis.com, watches a dark horse candidate emerge into the light in Caracas.

London 24.08.06 | The conventional wisdom of the international community regarding Venezuela is this: Hugo Chavez is a highly destabilizing figure but his opposition is so atomized, so utterly divided, so lacking in unity of purpose that the man may as well stay in power until 2031, as he has pledged many times. The take-away from this conclusions is a shrug. Since little can be done from within Venezuela, less can be done from a foreign perspective.