Greg Palast risks jeopardizing his wild popularity among the leftoid legions by raining on their increasingly beloved "Jewish Conspiracy" theory. Bashing this bosh is long overdue, but we sure wish Palast had done a better job of it. His arguments here are so weak and garbled that they can be easily shot down by the Judeophobes. They constitute a strawman which actually renders a disservice to the cause of opposing Jewish scapegoating.

More sacrifices for the American way of life. From Newsday, June 27:

Brooklyn bike rider killed on Houston Street

For the third time in 13 months, a bike rider was killed yesterday on Houston Street, leading one advocate to label it Manhattan's "boulevard of death."

While federal authorities tilt at windmills in Miami, it seems the real al-Qaeda is still very much alive. From AP, June 24, via the UAE's Khajeel Times:

Al Qaeda number two Ayman al-Zawahiri vowed in a videotape on Al Jazeera television Friday to avenge the death of the terror network’s Iraq frontman Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, killed in a US air raid June 7.

Voice of America reports June 26 that the US will be deploying Patriot missile batteries in Japan under an agreement reached May 1 in response to the supposed threat from North Korea. AFP adds that the US Missile Defence Agency has confirmed that a Forward Based X-band Transportable (FBX-T) radar station is to built at an air base near the village of Shariki, opposite North Korea in northeastern Japan.

Remember how the firefighters, cops and rescue workers who answered the call of duty at New York's Ground Zero were exploited shamelessly for war propaganda—as if saving lives in New York was somehow the same as taking lives in Iraq? Well now look what's happening to them. It seems all that talk about honoring the heroes was a mile wide and an inch thick. From the New York Times, June 23:

From Newsday, June 23:

In a Brooklyn neighborhood known for its patriotic fervor, residents were shocked Thursday to discover that seven American flags displayed outside homes had been set ablaze overnight, including one on a block named for a firefighter who died on Sept. 11.

The standards for what constitutes a terrorist conspiracy continue to get radically dumbed down. Most Americans don't seem to care, as those targeted invariably belong to some fringe and seemingly extremist sect. In this case, it appears to be an offshoot of Moorish Science, an indigenous American tradition held to be utterly heretical by ultra-orthodox Sunnis of the al-Qaeda variety. However, this has not stopped the mainstream media from (inaccurately) portraying the suspects as linked to al-Qaeda. The June 22 arrest of seven men in Miami's Liberty City district came in a raid by some 20 FBI agents in full-on paramilitary gear. Yet authorities immediately admitted the so-called "conspiracy" seems to be little more than a bunch of bad-ass braggadocio. OK, maybe these guys wanted to blow up Chicago's Sears Tower. But, as we have asked before, is wanting to a crime? As in recent "terrorism" busts in the United Kingdom, federal authorities are rushing to embrace the Orwellian concept of thoughtcrime. Some relevant excerpts from the June 24 Miami Herald coverage (emphasis and interjected comments added):

A Somali cleric who is on the US list of terror suspects was elected as head of the Islamist militia that controls the capital, Mogadishu, and much of the country's south. Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys was elected in absentia June 24 as the head of the Supreme Council of Islamic Courts (SCIC), succeeding the more moderate Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed. Sheikh Aweys, regarded as the architect of the Islamic court system, led the al-Itihad al-Islami militia, currently listed by the State Department as a terrorist organisation with links to al-Qaeda.