The Afghan Treasure Surviving the Dark Ages

Art Daily: "Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul at National Gallery of Art" (Washington)

Extraordinary artifacts uncovered in modern-day Afghanistan — once the heart of the Silk Road linking cultures from Asia to the Mediterranean — long thought stolen or destroyed during some 25 years of conflict until the dramatic announcement of their existence in 2003, begin their United States tour at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, May 25 through September 7, 2008.

- Caption: Unfired-clay sculpture (second century B.C.)
excavated at the site of Greek city of Aï Khanum -

The exhibition, co-organized by the National Geographic Society (recommended reading) and the National Gallery of Art, will travel to the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, October 24, 2008 through January 25, 2009; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, February 22 through May 17, 2009; and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, June 23 through September 20, 2009. After its tour through Paris, Turin, and Amsterdam, the show was reorganized for the United States and accompanied by a new catalogue and a video documentary produced by National Geographic and narrated by the celebrated author, Khaled Hosseini.

Revealing Afghanistan’s multicultural heritage are some 228 objects ranging in date from 2200 BC to the second century AD. Drawn from four archaeological sites, they belong to the National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul and include fragmentary gold bowls with artistic links to Mesopotamia and Indus valley cultures (modern-day Pakistan) from the Bronze Age site of Tepe Fullol; bronze and stone sculptures and a gilded silver plaque from the former Greek colony at Aï Khanum (“Lady Moon”); bronzes, ivories, and painted glassware that had been imported from Roman Egypt, China, and India, and excavated from ancient storerooms discovered in the 1930s and 1940s in Begram; and more than 100 gold ornaments from the “Bactrian Hoard,” found in 1978 in Tillya Tepe, the site of six nomad graves, and revealing a synthesis of Greek, Roman, Persian, Indian, Chinese, and Siberian styles. (...) >>>

Pricked by CassandraTroy with Nomao

Of the Saddam Connection and Al Qaeda's Unraveling

The Press from Hell has really done it this time, or so it seems. Things are moving on the counter terrorism front you wouldn't believe! Or perhaps you do ... judge for yourself:

- American Thinker: "A Quiet Triumph May be Brewing" by Ray Robison - "There are signs that the global Islamic jihad movement is splitting apart, in what would be a tremendous achievement for American strategy. The center of the action is in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the very territory which is thought to harbor Usama, and from which Al Qaeda was able to launch 9/11. Capitalizing on existing splits, a trap was set and closed, and the benefits have only begun to be evident."

"This cannot be overstated: it is the most crucial development since the capture of Khalid Sheik Mohammed. Cutting al Qaeda's support in Pakistan has been a massive coup, of which our media has no clue of right now. It is the exact sort of thing that the Democrats and their media accomplices always complain that we are not doing and then completely ignore when we do it."

"By way of correlation, you may remember that the German government recently arrested Islamic terrorists planning an attack on US targets. It turns out that those men were trained and controlled by Uzbek terror camps in Pakistan -- this time meaning actual Uzbeks. The stated purpose of the attack was to force the German military to cease operations at an Uzbekistan base which is supporting operations in Afghanistan. The German terrorists were part of the Islamic Jihad Union (IJU) which is an offshoot of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU). Other recent reports have noted that the order to the terrorists to start the attacks stated it was crucial for them to "go now" and attack within days during early September."

"To cause the German public to demand an end to operations in Afghanistan just as the Madrid train bombings caused the Spaniards to demand an end to that government's involvement in the war on terror. Since the Germans are the only western forces allowed to operate in Uzbekistan this would help al Qaeda forces trapped in Tora Bora."

"The Bush Administration, most likely through the CIA and DIA, has pulled off a fantastic maneuver to split the global Islamic jihad movement at its base. This is the kind of stuff we may not hear about in detail for another fifty years. Congratulations to our President and our brave soldiers and intelligence assets for making this happen. Al Qaeda is losing in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The fact is now inescapable that they have lost the ability to impose their political will on the West, athough this does not mean ...."

Here's a link to a 3D map of Tora Bora, Afghanistan which ran in Time Magazine in 2001.

Here's the entire article! It reads like a spy novel ...! >>>

Wait, there's more by the same author. We already touched the subject in yesterday's digest. The Saddam-Al Qaeda connection!


- American Thinker: "Al Qaeda's Man in Saddam's Iraq" - "As is widely known, Zarqawi was indeed moving between Iraq and Iran at this time but his links to al Qaeda and reasons for being in Iraq have been contested."

"As I explained in a previous American Thinker article, he was indeed al Qaeda and he was in Iraq to fight Americans instead of Saddam. In that article I detailed how the Jordanian population had become more radicalized by a “jihad stream” of Palestinian refugees who were kicked out of Kuwait by that government for collaborating with Saddam when Iraq invaded in 1990. Those Jordanians, like Zarqawi, were directed by an al Qaeda associate named al Barqawi."

"Zarqawi’s mentor Barqawi was a Saddam sympathizer and al Qaeda affiliate who sent these Jordanian-Palestinians to Iraq to fight the Americans. Clearly these Jordanian-Palestinians were not in Iraq to impose their own brand of regime change on Saddam; they were there to kill US forces."

"Now a man named Hamid Mir, who is an Executive Editor for Geo TV in Islamabad, Pakistan, writing for the popular India news website rediff.com, reveals his inside knowledge ... >>>

Iran Update

Received following update dated 19th September from the Committee on the Present Danger:

Iran's Other Proxy War Against the West
Tehran's Troublemaking in Afghanistan

America’s leaders have focused much more intensely in recent weeks on Iran’s deepening role in Iraq, where U.S. officials say the Islamic Republic is helping expand the scope and lethality of the insurgency against the U.S.-led coalition. In their testimonies before Congress last week, General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker both delineated Iran’s malignant political and strategic role in the former Ba’athist state.

Increasingly, however, Iran is working its destabilizing magic on another front in the War on Terror as well. Quietly, and away from the public eye, Iran’s ayatollahs are attempting to subvert the fragile, pro-Western government of President Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan. Evidence of an Iranian hand in the former Taliban stronghold is mounting. >>>

- The Washington Times: "Ground Zero is not for crashing" - "Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the well-armed fruitcake who is more or less in charge of the government in Iran, knows how to pull the chains of certain wimps in the West. The Iranian president will arrive in New York City on Sunday for a two-day visit to the United Nations, where he will deliver one of his entertaining rants against the United States, Israel and the West." >>>

- The Washington Post: "Columbia Won't Cancel Ahmadinejad Speech" - "Columbia University said it does not plan to call off a speech by Iran's president despite pressure from critics including the City Council speaker, who said the Ivy League school was providing a forum for "hate-mongering vitriol." >>>

Now this is a typical example of Pomo's redistributions of speech rights: whereas infidels are constricted by 'hate speech' handicaps, fiddles ... fidels' freedom of speech is exerted unrestraint by similar considerations!

- Monsters & Critics: "Thousands mourn slain member of parliament, Ghanem, in Beirut"- "Thousands belonging to the anti-Syrian camp Friday mourned slain MP, Antoine Ghanem, who was killed two days ago in a bomb blast in the Christian eastern sector of the capital. ... He was the eighth anti-Syrian figure to be slain since the 2005 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri. ... Ghanem's death has now reduced the number of the majority to 68 in the 128-member parliament against a Shi'ite-Christian opposition bloc that includes Hezbollah, which is backed by Syria and Iran. >>>

Trouble being in the opposition? Just kill the government! Where's the useless U.N. and their tribunal? Perhaps too busy fighting off the latest evidence of moral bankruptcy?

- The Wall Street Journal: "Yet Another UN Scandal" - "This might look like progress toward prosecuting one of the 20th century's most heinous genocides: the extinction of over one million Cambodians between 1975 and 1979. Unfortunately, this optimism masks another U.N. corruption scandal in the making -- one so serious that it threatens the legitimacy of the entire process." >>> Here's more >>> The kickbacks payable to the Cambodian judges come out of U.N. funds.

Update: PJM: "Return to the Killing Fields" - "A monument to the victims of Pol Pot’s Regime, the Tuol Sleng Prison bore witness to the horrors and the unspeakable brutality of the Khmer Rouge. LDT Regent reports ... about one of the Asian Rousseau inspired returns to the simplicity and serenity of Agrarian Collectivist life ... >>>

Of Farce, Oscuridad and Re-Re-Conquista

Yesterday I promised a regular participant in these pages (hi, High) to produce an 'obscure' post. An entire post goes against the grain, but here's an obscure statement if there ever was one. Brussels Journal yesterday published an article, authored by Soeren Kern, Senior Analyst for Transatlantic Relations at the Madrid based Strategic Studies Group.

"Spain’s Policy of Appeasing Terrorists Backfires" deals with the Iberian version of Atilla the Hun and his destructive policies. In a statement of utter obscurity it reads: "Confirming the growing suspicion that José Zapatero’s post-modern approach to fighting terrorism lacks a basis in reality, he told TIME Magazine in September 2004 that ‘sexual equality is a lot more effective against terrorism than military strength’. Digest that for obscurity, for a moment.

That is, on the part of 'the epitome of a postmodern appeaser', not the author Soeren Kern evidently, whose description of Zapatero's "multicultural group therapy" shines a brilliant light over otherwise disastrous political recklessness for the sake of it, that can only facilitate to further the Re-Re-Conquista of Al Andalus and beyond, the Maghreb, the West.

- In Afghanistan this week, the kidnapping of Italian reporter for La Repubblica newspaper Daniele Mastrogiacomo, his driver, and his interpreter ended with the freeing of the first of these and the killing of the other two, both of them Muslims. Chiesa.com on Friday reproduced an article written by Islam expert Khaled Fouad Allam, which La Repubblica published on 11th April.

In "A totalitarian Islam" he explains the finer points of the fault lines within Islam, which are not just the more well-known Sunni versus Shia divide, but also a totalitarian versus mystic one. There's our answer towards the Religion of Peace: we should be supporting the Sufis!

- And while we are on the subject: the enemy is herewith on notice that any attack between today and two years hence will not be subject to any significant counter activity. This is the delivery time required to get fresh ammo and canteen supplies to the Dutch N.A.T.O. mission in Uruzgan, Afghanistan (ISAF III). Since this hazardous situation will not stand - and I'm sure the unions won't have it either - Dutch Command has let it be known they'll throw in the towel in 2008, totalitarian Islam or a mystical one. A sense of farce never was a Dutch forte.

- And as we find Canadian confirmation that multiculturalism indeed leads to ghettos, sectarianism and insularity, the most multicultural city on earth is moving on to 'metaculturalism' - and here they loose me - to syncretism. The term alludes me in the cultural context, but what could be meant, is what's called 'Truthiness', a religious smorgasbord of whatever suits your Individual Personality. The good news is that this particular piece of nasty social engineering might at last be fazing out once our governments get the message. Some cultures may after all survive the onslaught, more or less. And here's for the aficionados amongst us: metaculturalism does go towards Choice! This is promising a lot of fun, culture hopping. It may come in the nick of time to pick up a few pieces, of what's left of Britain.

- As Turkish National Islamists do their utmost to give God a bad name and murder their way out of future E.U. membership (not to worry, it'll blow over), the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas confirms Radical Liberals and The Pink Inverse Triangle in their conviction, that believers in the transcendental are indeed all deranged fundamentalists.

Clean Monday News Items

Although I'm preparing a major piece with astonishing revelations on the favorite subject, today Ash Monday (in Greek Clean Monday, Kathara Devtera) some noteworthy news items. First, what happened to Geert Wilders, the Freedom Party's M.P. in the Dutch Parliament? Well, never a dull moment, as they say.

For starters he's doubting if he should go on a Parliamentary 'fact-finding mission' to Pakistan and Afghanistan shortly. He's already on 24/7 police protection and he just hurled a major insult at the Prophet, hypothetically advocating deportation accompanied by tar and feathers treatment. Since this is punishable by death in Pakistan it is perhaps to be recommended to either stay at home or consider a trip to the sea-side instead.

Before he does so, it is to be decided if he should perhaps retract the whole blasphemous thing, including his words regarding the Koran, of which he said that half should be trashed before it becomes a respectable book. The Saudi government is 'unofficially' demanding a retraction and an apology to the ummah. I wouldn't go to Pakistan, if I were Geert. Doing so would be wreckless.

Equal rights for all ... except for Dutch municipal registry officials, if the Amsterdam 'gay community' gets their way. Not content with getting the preposterous concept of same sex marriage generally accepted, the Amsterdam Pink Action Group (or whatever the name of this little pressure society is) is insisting that present freedom of conscience of marriage officials - having the right to refuse marrying gay couples should they wish so - should be abolished. Mind you, they're still able to marry, only the proceedings will be done by an official who has no scruples in that regard. The 'gay community' however is as persistent as ever and is of the opinion, if there are officials with uncalled for discriminatory pangs of the conscience, they should go find themselves another job.

Expatica is reporting that "in the first nine months of last year almost 100,000 people left the Netherlands to settle elsewhere, 12,000 more than the same period in 2005... About half of the emigrants were Dutch natives ... if the trend continues, more than 130,000 people will have left the country by the end of this year.

Lebanon's Daily Star is reporting that British Anti-Terror Law also protects tyrants and dictators. Seems to me lawmakers are increasingly less able to do so. Loopholes and unintended effects abound!

The same paper also assures us that spring is in the air: The Taliban have deployed 10,000 fighters for a spring offensive of "bloody attacks" against foreign troops in Afghanistan, a rebel commander said on Friday.

Ending with some good news for the day! There are signs the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe is starting to show cracks as last! But it isn't a painless process ... Inflation has hit 1600 percent and "discontent is very high up to mid-level officers. They do not earn enough to buy basic groceries. They are suffering the hardships all of us suffer now, yet they are the ones Mugabe depends upon to be ruthless in putting down any opposition. It adds up to trouble for Mugabe."

More Persons of the Year named

On the day a high-ranking Taliban military commander, Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Osmani, a close associate of Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Omar, is reported to have been killed in an airstrike this week close to the border with Pakistan, Dutch leading Elsevier's Magazine named its person of the year, the 1.600 men and women strong Dutch troops contingent in the Afghan province of Uruzgan. The honour was awarded "for forging a mission of war into one of reconstruction".

This goes against the grain of the national parliament which just concluded the opposite earlier this week. A (former Maoist) Socialist Party M.P. went so far as to term the mission a "dirty war". The erstwhile fringe party picked up as many as 26 seats in the election of last November and even became a serious player in the formation of the new government, albeit for a moment.

The troops in Uruzgan meanwhile, after having suffered a great many violent incidents initially, due to their tenacious attitude improved the situation to a large extent. A reconstruction shows that by the end of October things started changing for the better. Nevertheless, in two months' time they had nine near-fatal escapes and suffered two severely wounded, whom were rescued in a show of bravery, writes Elsevier.The pessimistic view in parliament in The Hague is countered by a number of positive developments on the ground in the Afghan province. There is less violence and U.N. relief workers have returned. The head of the reconstruction team has said there are even talks going on with Taliban leaders through intermediaries. General Berlijn states the troops are regularly confronted with the limits of their command instructions. Orders from regional NATO command in Kandahar are analyzed and tested at least once every two weeks.

Last year's Elsevier Person of the Year was maverick politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali, former Dutch M.P. for the center-right liberal party VVD and an associate of film director Theo van Gogh, who was brutally assassinated last year by a Muslim extremist. Somali born Ms Hirsi Ali is presently a Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

~ This post was originally written for and syndicated to Blogger News Network BNN ~

The war in Iraq must be going a lot better than we think! The insurgents are offering a 30-day truce. Ostensibly for our troops to pull out, but it's a fair guess they need a break themselves.

I'm on a roller-coaster and apologize to the Armed Forces

I know I promised interesting stuff from the Town Hall and I also owe an instalment of life at the base after crisis point, but first things first.

- A public apologies on my part: yesterday in a misplaced attempt at being funny, I unawares insulted the blokes of the NATO Task Force in Uruzgan with my remark about them rabbit-holing over there, which is a bit demeaning for them when in actual fact they get shot at on an almost daily basis! Nobody knows that better than I do, what with them having all the muscles and the big guns on their side! As proof in point I've been forwarded a link with video material: here it is. A word of caution though: as things do tend to get a bit rough you are advised to watch it either from under a table, or at least don a protective saucepan over the head (hope that's not too flippant). Merry Christmas, laddies and keep it clean! I'm sincerely proud of you!

To which I'd like to add and stress at 23.50 L.T., having just seen a video of last night's Nova TV program, that my arrows are firmly pointed at those Dutch M.P.s who're having trouble fighting terrorists, indeed are shocked that our boys are actually fighting in Afghanistan, while they were sent (indeed marines!) to do reconstruction work. It's the hypocracy there I'm having trouble with. Socialist Party M.P. Van Bommel yesterday issued a press release calling the war on terrorism in Afganistan "a dirty war", no less! I rest my case ...

- The Middle East Forum published an article by Rachel Silverman in respect of a speech by Robert Satloff held in Philadelphia on Monday, about his new book Among the Righteous, which took him four years of study. He sees it as "a potential antidote to the trend of Holocaust denial and trivialization in the Muslim world". His search for an Arab Oskar Schindler resulted in two heroes. A former mayor of Tunis, who sheltered sixty Jewish workers, and the rector of the Great Mosque in Paris who saved Jews by supplying them with false identity papers. These are wonderful stories of course, were it not for the reasons they remained hidden for so long: Arabs don't want them to be known and Jews tend to see the Holocaust in an Ashkenazi context.

- On a another note, Ayaan's is in trouble again. It was not enough to get her career as an M.P. ruined and her identity stripped. Now some envious gutter journalist is trying to nib her career at the American Enterprise Institute in the but as well by suggesting her work is not her own, but done by people in her circle of friends and sympathisers. Leon de Winter in no uncertain terms (which I personally feel do him no justice) describes the attempt with feeling. Although it is exemplary of how people, one size too big are treated in Holland and stories like that regretfully tend to stick, it is a bit silly as well. Has the entire Society for the Promotion of Ayaan been moved with her to the U.S. to hold her hand, or was Ayaan's latest article a joint online effort? According to Leon de Winter, besides appearing in the International Herald Tribune the article was also syndicated to the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Die Welt, Corriere della Sera, El Pais, Expressen, Aftenposten and Le Temps. Good for you, gal!

- On today's calender:

The extent to which citizens trust each
other is equal to their sense of happiness.

A very active blogosphere indeed!

I have a daily alert with Google . Every morning I find in my email a link list with all hits on "relativism". I get to know friend and foe alike. My foes I won't mention but to state that there is the occasional religion basher and/or quasi intellectual post-modern philosopher with a "weak" head who thinks he has something worthwhile to add to this already quite sufficiently deconstructed world. Sometimes I am even stupid enough to study their cerebral products seriously, thereby committing an offense against time management.
Friends sometimes make it very fast indeed to the list of Friends and Foes, in the column on your left hand side. The pickings were today of a special nature. So outstanding in fact that I feel the urge to mention them here specifically.

On #3., as Blog of Special Interest: Pope Benedict XVI Fan Club, no less! Sign up and make it official now!

Number 2, a post on a matter which remained under the radar I'm ashamed to admit. But some scouts in the spiky field of relativism are on the alert for P.C. bomb shells, multi-culti snipers and deconstructionist contraptions: Colby Willen of Birmingham, Alabama's Vocabuli Blogspot spotted it sure enough: Time's choice of Person of the Year is Relativism Personified!

Top of the pops, the uncontested number 1 is ..... Archbishop Cranmer's Blog on the Examination of Religio-Political Agendas with Religio-Politican Objectives. You'd be excused for thinking the archbishop is long history, but some clever foot-soldier has reincarnated him in the fight against halal meat for all faiths and denominations alike, and other such abominations! A well deserved laurel for a job well done!

I've also been active, posing rhetorical questions on the Uruzgan Blog (Que? ... Uruzgan Blog ...!). That's the Afghan province where the Aussie-Dutch NATO Task Force is rabbit-holing. On my question why it is that some European countries are having trouble fighting terrorists (honest, the Dutch parliament only wanted to send troops if they would be doing the job any government sponsored NGO could do better, namely building schools and hospitals - as if that is where we train our marines for!). I got a long and very diplomatic answer, which ducked the political implication with great agility. Bravo, boys ... athletic in more ways than one. I expressed the hope that attitudes as the Dutch parliament's, wouldn't unduly demoralize them. But after being left holding the politically red hot potato of Srebrenica the Dutch boys and girls are up to anything ghastly the U.N., NATO or the E.U. may throw at them.

This is not a post on Robert Mugabe and his African hell-hole of Zimbabwe.

And the Dutch are perfectly normal, middle of the road Europeans when it comes to fighting crime. In many other respects they're really a bit subnormal, but shshut .. don't tell them ... they think everybody is as they are.

In the next posting some goodies from the Town Hall of the U.S. conservative heartland which has something very intelligent to contribute on tolerance.

I am closing This Daily Cause in the words of G.K. Chesterton, copied from the papal fan club site:

"The Catholic Church is the only thing which saves a man
from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age".

Jan Pronk is at it, again ...

Our national Charles Chaplin of high diplomacy has put his foot in it again.

http://www.janpronk.nl/index120.html

Kofi Annan's special envoy to Sudan has 72 hours to get packing. The government lot in Sudan, being under heavy pressure internationally to accept a real U.N. peacekeeping force for Darfur instead of the toothless ragtag A.U. army which is presently in place (7.000 men for an area the size of France, more the government won't tolerate), has for some time now been looking for an excuse to suspend negotiations. Well, thanks Jan, you have just given it to them on a gold platter! Still cannot keep you emotions in check, eh? Still too much in touch with your Dolle Miena* side?

* Dolle Miena, lit. Insane Ida, the name of the activist group of women who in the sixties (and seventies? anyway the time of the Socio-Cultural Revolution of blessed memory) were on the barricades pro choice, pro pre-school for three year olds, pro D.D.R. (very good pre-schools for three year olds!), against 'Nam, nukes and cruise missiles even if they might have saved civilization as we know it; anti anyting American in general and any U.S. president in particular - and above all, against common decency (most still shudder with the very thought of it; some have even supernatural, extrasensorial experiences accompanying these terrible reminisces (for instance a sudden inexplicable smell of brussels sprouts! Yak ...).

Now that Osama and his entourage have been kicked out of Afghanistan they are apparently looking for another country to turn into a hell-hole and he'll be jumping up and down with joy that this one is once again becoming vacant. Hey, perhaps we can even open up a new front there in the war on terror!

Jan, Jan, in the past I've said so more than once when you'd yet again were given ministerial opportunity to unleash Keynesian economics on our poor country, but I bet right now even at the U.N. in New York City they'd wish you remained in Scheveningen, and had followed a blissful vocation aboard herring kotter m/s "Cornelia II", on the high seas, instead....