Suspicions regarding Israel’s September 6 attack on a facility in northeastern Syria were confirmed last Thursday, when U.S. intelligence officials released details to Congress proving the target was a nuclear reactor—capable of producing plutonium—that had been constructed with assistance from North Korea.

For some, last week’s revelations provided a measure of closure to some of the mysteries shrouding last September’s attack. For others, such as the Telegraph’s Con Coughlin, it only created more questions: “While the Americans have explained the reason for Israel’s attack,” he wrote, “they have been less forthcoming about why the Syrians were trying to acquire nuclear technology in the first place.”

Indeed, that’s the most central question of this issue, and the one we should all be asking. Given Syria’s “geographical proximity to Israel,” Coughlin writes, any attempt to nuke the Jewish state would be counter-productive as “fallout would inevitably affect larger tracts of Syria.”

So if Syria’s not planning on nuking Israel, why would it risk building a nuclear reactor? Coughlin explains (emphasis ours throughout):

Syria’s experimentation with nuclear proliferation has more to do with its strategic alliance with Tehran than any pretensions the Assad regime might entertain about becoming a nuclear superpower. In response to the West’s increasing pressure on Iran over its uranium enrichment program, Tehran has stepped up its military co-operation with Damascus, and has signed a mutual defence pact. That has resulted in the Iranians promising to provide the Syrians with their Shahab-3 ballistic missile system. Last summer, dozens of Iranian and Syrian missile technicians were reported to have been killed while attempting to mount a chemical warhead on a Scud missile at a Syrian military facility.

Iran’s fingerprints were all over the Syrian-North Korean nuclear project. According to Western security experts, many of the North Korean nuclear experts filmed working on the Syrian reactor were also frequent visitors to Iran’s top-secret atomic facilities!

Yet despite evidence suggesting significant Iranian involvement in the joint Syrian-North Korean nuclear project, it seems very few are considering Syria’s nuclear reactor in this context. There’s absolutely no excuse for such negligence; years of evidence prove that Iranian fingerprints cover nearly every major anti-Western event in the Middle East, including terrorist attacks, anti-Israel, anti-American strategies and failed peace agreements.

The first thought any astute analyst should have when considering the Syrian nuclear project is: What’s Iran up to now? That’s exactly how Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry perceived the September 6 attack immediately after it occurred, despite the fact that very little evidence had been released pointing toward Iranian involvement. “This problem goes much deeper than Syria and Israel,” he wrote. “Syria is a surrogate of Iran. The king of the Muslim world is Iran.” To learn more about Iran’s role as the king of the Muslim world, read The King of the South.

Pakistan Approaches Deal With Taliban

In a recent column, Trumpet managing editor Joel Hilliker explained that the marginalization of Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf doesn’t bode well for Pakistan, and comes with even worse consequences for the United States. “As of right now,” he wrote, “the [Pakistan-U.S.] alliance is effectively over,” which is “bad, bad news for the U.S.—and any other nation not interested in the Taliban taking back control of Afghanistan.”

It now appears that a peace deal between Pakistan and the Taliban is close to being finalized. On Friday, Reuters, citing Pakistani authorities, reported that a deal was being clinched that would include the cessation of hostilities by Pashtun fighters in exchange for prisoners and the withdrawal of Pakistan forces from the area.

By negotiating with terrorists, Pakistan’s new government is playing a dangerous game, say analysts at Stratfor, that will very likely result in disastrous consequences for America, the international community and Pakistan itself. Stratfor reported April 25:

Islamabad is trying to strike a balance between its international commitments and the need to maintain security at home. Unless it can come up with a comprehensive strategy for containing terrorism—one that addresses the jihadists’ tendency to take advantage of cease-fires—it will risk failing in its commitments to the United States and to international security, and might not even forestall violence at home.

A truce might temporarily halt hostilities, but it will not unseat the numerous Taliban and al Qaeda training camps already established in the area. In effect, all this deal does is give the Taliban a period of stability which it will exploit to further entrench itself in the region and beef up its ties with al Qaeda.

Mugabe: Still Strangling Zimbabwe

The Times published two articles this weekend highlighting the desperate measures Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe is using to retain power. First, after some investigative reporting into the arms company that tried to ship weapons to Mugabe last week, the Times reported that the weapons were shipped by Poly Technologies, a weapons manufacturer “controlled by a clique from China’s preeminent military clans with close ties to the Communist party leadership and army.”

The Timesreports:

On paper, Poly Technologies is a subsidiary of the China International Trust and Investment Corporation. Analysts of Chinese financial affairs say, however, that Poly is actually a front for an elite [sic] within the country’s military-industrial complex and that it reports to the general staff department of the People’s Liberation Army.”People call it the supreme headquarters of the China party,” commented one analyst. “It’s a power centre beyond civilian control.” Although Poly discloses almost no financial details, its customers for small arms and ammunition include Sudan and Burma. Chinese AK-47 assault rifles made by Poly have turned up in the war-torn eastern Congo, among other African battlefields. Its other sales include short-range and medium-range ballistic missiles to Iran and Pakistan.

That the Chinese government is bolstering Africa’s most notorious dictator with a consistent flow of weapons is hardly surprising. The most diabolical revelation was the means by which Mugabe is paying for his weapons:

Diplomatic sources say Mugabe forged links with the Poly Technologies management on state visits to China. Since Zimbabwe is all but bankrupt, the arms are paid for by barters of agricultural products and raw materials.

With his nation on the threshold of death—its political, economic and societal infrastructure gutted, tens of thousands starving and inflation beyond what most of us can even imagine—Mugabe’s weapons purchases will ultimately prove redundant. Why? Because what’s the point in ruling over a dead state?

But despite Zimbabwe’s spiral toward non-existence, Mugabe remains ruthless in his efforts to defeat the opposition and retain control over the dying state, as the second Times piece showed:

Scores of children and babies have been locked up in filthy prison cells in Harare as Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s president, sinks to new depths in his campaign to force the opposition into exile before an expected run-off in presidential elections.Twenty-four babies and 40 children under the age of six were among the 250 people rounded up in a raid on Friday, according to Nelson Chamisa, spokesman for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (mdc). …”This is ruthlessness of the worst kind. How can you incarcerate children whose mothers have fled their homes hoping to give their children refuge?” asked an emotional Chamisa yesterday. “In Mugabe’s Zimbabwe even children are not spared the terror that befalls their parents.” …

To learn more about Zimbabwe and its transformation from being one of Africa’s wealthiest countries to one of the continent’s most miserable, read “Winds of Change.”

Obama a Politician, Not a Pastor

In his first major interview since last month’s spectacular brouhaha, Barack Obama’s pastor, the outspoken and highly combustible Jeremiah Wright, explained to veteran journalist Bill Moyer why the democratic presidential candidate, rather than excommunicate himself from Wright, chose merely to excommunicate himself from the preacher’s vitriolic diatribes.

You can read excerpts of the interview, which aired on pbs on Friday night, here.

Bill Moyers:

Here is a man who came to see you 20 years ago. … Barack Obama was a skeptic when it came to religion. He sought you out because he knew you knew about the community. You led him to the faith.You performed his wedding ceremony. You baptized his two children. You were, for 20 years, his spiritual counsel. He has said that. And, yet, he, in that speech at Philadelphia, had to say some hard things about you. How did those words…how did it go down with you when you heard Barack Obama say those things?

Reverend Wright:

It went down very simply. He’s a politician, I’m a pastor. We speak to two different audiences. And he says what he has to say as a politician. I say what I have to say as a pastor. But they’re two different worlds.I do what I do. He does what politicians do. So that what happened in Philadelphia where he had to respond to the sound bytes, he responded as a politician.

Bill Moyers:

In the 20 years that you’ve been his pastor, have you ever heard him repeat any of your controversial statements as his opinion?

Reverend Wright:

No. No. No. Absolutely not. I don’t talk to him about politics. And so he had a political event, he goes out as a politician and says what he has to say as a politician. I continue to be a pastor who speaks to the people of God about the things of God.

There it is, direct from the mouth of Obama’s spiritual mentor and father figure: Barack Obama is a politician and therefore, by implication, a liar.

When the Pastor Wright controversy erupted last month—especially after Barack Obama’s nationally televised speech on race—the news media went wild as political pundits, journalists and social scientists saturated print and electronic news outlets with a multitude of repetitive analysis on the event. For a truly unique perspective of Obama’s political campaign, read “The Barack Obama Tragedy—It’s Much Bigger Than Race.”

Abstinence Linked to stds

In the right is wrong and wrong is right world of liberal social engineers, Planned Parenthood is blaming abstinence-only sex education for the shockingly high std rates among teenagers. Yes—those who are trying to put the brakes on the rampant sexual immorality that is causing the problem—those supporting abstinence-only education in schools—are being framed as the problem themselves.

The BBC reports:

U.S. lawmakers are investigating whether to cut government funding for health education programs that promote sexual abstinence until marriage. The move follows a report earlier this year from America’s leading health agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which revealed one in four teenage girls has a sexually transmitted disease. …Planned Parenthood estimates that two thirds of teenagers will have experienced sexual intercourse by the time they leave school. And with some 750,000 teenage pregnancies a year, America has one of the highest teen birth rates in the developed world.”This national programme which has wasted $1.5bn (£750m) of tax money is a failure and our teens are paying the price,” says Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood. “We’ve been wasting money on programmes that don’t work and we’re seeing the consequences every single day.”

Liberals conveniently ignore the fact that it is comprehensive sex education—not abstinence-based sex education—that is taught at the vast majority of American schools. Perhaps they should admit that it is their approach—you’re going to do it anyway, so here’s how—that is the problem. At its core, this is just one battleground in the broader war on marriage and family.

In his column last Thursday, Brad Macdonald covered another critical battleground in the war against family. To learn why such a battle against family rages, request your free copy of The Missing Dimension in Sex.

World War ii a Picnic for Parisians

A photo exhibition in Paris is getting a lot of attention. The exhibit, Parisians Under the Occupation, showcases 270 never-seen-before color photographs of daily life in the French capital during World War ii, and supposedly provides visitors with a rare glimpse into life in Paris during the 1940-44 Nazi occupation.

Problem is, the photos—taken by André Zucca, a photographer employed by Nazi propaganda magazine Signal at the time—portray life in Nazi-occupied Paris as a picnic. The fact that thousands of Jews and anti-Nazi forces were rounded up and sent to extermination camps, or slave labor facilities where they were slowly starved to death, was conveniently missing in the photos of Parisians enjoying afternoons in the park and walks down leafy promenades.

The International Herald Tribunereports:

The images on display are indeed striking: Three smiling young women in white-rimmed sunglasses pose in the Luxembourg Gardens in May 1942; well-dressed couples relax at outdoor café tables at Fouquets, on the Champs-Elysées, as two uniformed German officers stroll by; an elegant woman in fur and jewels shares luscious-looking cherries with a well-heeled man on a park bench, their baby beside them in a pram.

Although this may have been the lifestyle of a select few during World War ii, it most certainly wasn’t the norm. What this exhibition fails to show—as many have angrily pointed out—is that life for most Parisians, especially Jews, was a ghastly tapestry of unprecedented suffering and depression that more often than not ended in death.

The fact that this side of the story is being ignored in this photo exhibition is further evidence of a larger trend unfolding in some parts of Europe that seeks to dilute the scale and depth of the atrocities conducted by the Nazis during the Second World War.

Elsewhere on the Web

In Britain, the Timesreported today that girls as young as 12 years old are having abortions. Most alarming was how some health “experts” casually dealt with the news, telling people that they need to “stop being shocked” by such news, and saying it’s a fact of life that society needs to “come to terms with.”

In Israel, more evidence of the mounting dissatisfaction with the Olmert government surfaced today, when Aryeh Stav, the right-wing editor of Nativ,said that “Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni, who are leading open negotiations over the handing over of Jerusalem, the capital of Israel, must according to international law and guidelines on treason be sentenced to death.”

American youth are still gorging themselves on heinous video games, including the latest release of “Grand Theft Auto,” which hits stores Tuesday and includes intense violence, blood, partial nudity, strong language, strong sexual content and use of drugs and alcohol. All this, in addition to the basic premise that you are a street thug trying to make a career in crime for yourself. The Rockstar-developed game is rated “M” for “Mature,” and retailers can only sell it to customers 17 and older. It’s no surprise then, that Grand Theft Auto is one of the most-played games for boys 12 to 14—and for girls of the same age!

And Finally …

On the heels of Earth Day, atheists are promoting celebrations of the summer solstice and World Humanist Day, reports the Washington Times. The Institute for Humanist Studies is calling attention to athiest holidays celebrating free-thinkers, nature and other themes, for the benefit of nonbelievers. Other “secular holidays” highlighted by the Institute for Humanist Studies include Festivus, April Fool’s Day, [Russian] Cosmonautics Day, National Day of Reason (the anti-National Day of Prayer), and Darwin Day.

It’s impossible to read these and not concoct a few celebrations of our own: Let’s start with an “International Day of Sanity.”