InstaHack posts pictures of a smoldering cathedral and desecrated Jewish graves in New Zealand and insinuates Helen Clark instigated the vandalism:
Did Helen Clark establish the climate that makes this sort of thing more likely?
And this story suggests that Helen Clark’s behavior may have encouraged this sort of thing.
Above links are Reynolds’. How, you may wonder, did Helen Clark instigate the desecration of Kiwi Jewish graves? Let’s look at Insty’s links.
The first article blasts Clark:
IT makes you wonder about Helen Clark’s priorities. In two separate sting operations in March and April, Thai police seized 23 bogus New Zealand passports that were being sold on the Bangkok black market. And, if that isn’t bad enough, security officials in Thailand expressed the belief al-Qa’ida terrorists have been using the products of these forgery rings for quite some time.
But the prospect of Osama bin Laden flashing a visa-free Kiwi passport as he sauntered through customs at Heathrow didn’t seem to bother the New Zealand Prime Minister. In fact, her Government’s reaction to these passport forgeries was exceedingly low key. Thus, a Foreign Affairs spokesman responded dismissively to this story, declaring that he “had absolutely no confirmation” of “claims by Thai police that New Zealand passports may have been used by al-Qa’ida-linked terrorists in Europe”.
The writer goes on to try to show that Helen Clark is meaner to the Israelis caught red-handed in a sting operation than to whoever is behind the Thai passport frauds. Interestingly, Justin Raimondo’s most recent article on AntiWar.com includes this information:
It turns out that the ringleader, Ze’ev William Barkan, who fled before New Zealand security could nab him, was and presumably still is a member of the Israeli diplomatic corps, having served at embassies in Vienna and Brussels. He was last seen in North Korea, traveling with a Canadian passport as “Kevin Hunter,” where he turned up in Pyongyang as a “consultant” brought on to help the North Korean government build a “security fence” in order to keep their people in. Now that the East Germans have wound up in history’s dustbin, the Israelis are the current experts in the field.
Barkan is a man of many skills, and one of them, according to an aid worker cited by the Sydney Morning Herald, is this:
“‘He goes to Laos, Cambodia, Burma and Thailand and deals with gangs who rob tourists of their valuables and passports,’ the aid worker said. ‘Barkan is mostly interested in passports and there have been a number of Australian passports.’ Intelligence analysts in New Zealand believe Barkan, a former navy diver in the Israeli Defence Force, was trying to secure a ‘clean’ passport for use in a sensitive Israeli undercover operation in the region, less risky than a forged passport.”
So, from where did those bogus passports in Bangkok come? Maybe we’ll find out that information after Barkan is found and questioned. Meanwhile, all the fulminating against Helen Clark’s severing of diplomatic ties with Israel and jailing of the Mossad operatives running the NZ passport farm and efforts to paint her as an instigator of antisemitic vandalism are just predictable MOs for neocons, armageddonists, Likudniks and others for whom Israelis can do no wrong.
As Justin points out:
As the U.S. seeks to plug up the holes in its security, the recent activity in New Zealand ought to be of immediate concern. The Israeli government has refused to either disavow or claim “credit” for the activities of its agents in Kiwi-land, let alone apologize. In this age of terror, however, an Israeli covert operation that systematically and illegally collects Western passports is bound to raise all sorts of suspicions – and rightly so.
If they did it to the Kiwis, and the Canadians, then why not screw us, too? A similar scam aimed at procuring U.S. passports on American soil can’t be dismissed altogether.
The danger of that, alone, ought to motivate U.S. government officials to do everything possible to assist New Zealand and Canada in tracking down Barkan and bringing him to justice, and yet, so far, we have heard not a peep out of them about this matter. The possibility that Barkan is indeed an American may eventually force the Washington spin team into performing the requisite verbal gymnastics, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Stymied by tighter U.S. security procedures, Al Qaeda is apparently seeking to outflank us on our porous southern border. But surely such a strategy is a bit risky. Ms. Ahmed was caught without a visa, and the pages torn out of her South African passport aroused suspicion. Maybe next time, the terror masters should seek out Ze’ev Barkan: I’m sure he can give them a real deal on a New Zealand passport – or perhaps even a Canadian one, in which case they’ll have no trouble coming in from our equally porous northern border. (See Justin’s article for relevant links.)
Of course, Justin’s take is that of a person who elevates the interests of his own country above a foreign country, while InstaHack and his fellow travelers are busy calling the New Zealand embassy and whining about the arrest of Israeli Mossad operatives engaged in fraud in another country. Quite a difference.