The right-wing blogosphere is having a field day with this one. The Daily Call started it all with a Sept. 13 piece on comments offered by the Palestinian Authority's ambassador Maen Rashid Areikat at a breakfast briefing hosted by the Christian Science Monitor. The Call entitled its write-up "Palestinian ambassador reiterates call for a Jew-free Palestinian state." Here's the offending quote:

Taking a tip from the "indignados" who occupied downtown Madrid for several weeks over the summer, hundreds of protesters on Sept. 17 established an encampment in Lower Manhattan's Zuccotti Park—now renamed "Liberty Square"—just three blocks north of Wall Street, where they have remained since, despite rain and an intimidating round-the clock police presence. Wall Street itself, of course, is inaccessible behind police barricades. When protesters marched down to Wall on the morning of Monday the 19th to greet the arriving traders and office workers, police quickly moved in, arresting six and dispersing the rest. (NYT, Sept. 19)

It is nonetheless sickening for being de rigueur to hear Barack Obama mourning the death of the war criminal Burhanuddin Rabbani as a "tragic loss." Rabbani had recently been appointed to lead a "High Peace Council" to start negotiations with the Taliban. He was killed at his home in Kabul by a visitor with explosives hidden in his turban. President Hamid Karzai, at the start of talks with Obama on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, said Rabbani's death "will not deter us" from continuing the quest for peace. (Reuters, LAT, Sept. 20) Rabbani ruled Afghanistan from 1992 until the Taliban take-over of '96, and then led the Northern Alliance insurgency. He has been perceived as the real power behind President Karzai. The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) decried Rabbani as leader of the "Northern Alliance mafia" made up of "millionaire rapists busy in the opium trade under the very nose of the US troops."

We recently noted China's aggressive embrace of the pathological, dystopian car culture first pioneered by the West. Now comes another sign of this cultural retrogression. From RTTNews, Sept. 16:

China Detains General's Teenage Son Over Road Rage Incident
The teenage son of a famous Chinese army general has been detained and sent to a government correctional facility for one year in connection with a road rage incident which sparked outrage across the country, state media reported Friday.

As fighting continues in Sirte, David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy toured Tripoli to cheering crowds and triumphalist headlines ("David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy given heroes' welcomes in Libya"—UK Metro). They pledged to continue NATO bombardment, even as Cameron assured: "This was your revolution, not our revolution." (Read: "This is our revolution." We're reminded of similar British assurances not quite 10 years ago when Afghanistan was invaded—which remains NATO-occupied today.) The New York Times acknowledged some "awkward" contradictions in the junket:

Partisans of either side in the Libyan conflict are touting various claims that foreign fighters were on the other side. The pretty clear political agendas behind these claims makes it difficult to arrive at an objective reading of the situation. A sensationalist but rather confused Sept. 7 account in the DC-area Afro features quotes from former congressman Walter Fauntroy, recently returned from a "self-sanctioned peace mission" to Libya, during which his month-long disappearance sparked rumors of his death. Fauntroy claims much of the fighting attributed to the rebels was actually carried out by NATO special forces troops—who also brutalized the populace:

Ten years after 9-11, there are many hopeful signs that the world is finally moving on from the dystopian dynamic unleashed by the attacks. As we pointed out after the killing of Osama bin Laden: Al-Qaeda has been utterly left behind by the Arab Spring, which has already overturned two authoritarian regimes (Tunisia and Egypt), with more almost certainly on the way. While there have been few and small Islamist protests over Osama's killing, basically secular and progressive protests against dictators are mounting throughout the Arab world, the greater Middle East and beyond. Al-Qaeda has been relegated to playing catch-up, hoping that continued terror attacks can transform the struggles in Yemen and Morocco from popular civil revolutions to jihadist civil wars. It hasn't been working. Alas, a brief review of the streets of downtown Manhattan on this day indicates how little these changes have extended to popular consciousness in New York CIty and the United States...

Returning to a prospect first raised after last year's flotilla affair, Israel's Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has broached supporting recognition by the US Senate of the Armenian genocide as part of a diplomatic offensive against Turkey, the Hebrew-language daily Yedioth Ahronoth reported Sept. 9. The report came ahead of a meeting of a meeting of Foreign Ministry officials to discuss Israel’s response to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s decision to downgrade Ankara’s diplomatic ties with the Jewish state. Amazingly, the report also claimed Lieberman had suggested that Israel back the PKK Kurdish guerillas (which will doubtless fuel the endless conspiracy theories in Turkish nationalist circles that the Kurds are the pawns of a Zionist conspiracy against the Muslim world). (AFP, Sept. 10; YNet, Sept. 9)