What Fresh Hell Is This: Protesters At German and British Embassies in Sudan

Embassy-Storming Week has now gone viral.  The German embassy is reportedly on fire while the UK Foreign Office says protesters gathered in front of the British embassy there.  You know, it doesn't need to be said, does it, that by making a dangerous world more dangerous you imperil not only Americans but everybody else who shares the same values.  (Including, of course, the native liberal reformers in those troubled nations.)

Apparently It's "Embassy-Storming Week" In the Annals of "Smart Diplomacy"

Egypt. Libya. Now Yemen.   The news story mentions Tunisia too.  This is insane. And deeply troubling.

UPDATE: It's spreading beyond US embassies to the German and British embassies in Sudan. This means the gentle reader Eric's comment below was right on the money, since he made it before the attacks in Sudan.

The 2012 Failed States Index

Mondays suck anyway, so I figured we might as well do this annually depressing survey now instead of later this week. The 2012 Failed States Index is online.  The top 5 are all in Africa.

Quote of the Day: Obama on Syria and Sudan

Here's a piece of an interesting op-ed:

... his policies toward both Syria and Sudan increasingly seem lame, ineffective and contrary to American interests and values. Obama has shown himself comfortable projecting power — as in his tripling of American troops in Afghanistan. Yet now we have the spectacle of a Nobel Peace Prize winner in effect helping to protect two of the most odious regimes in the world.

What might be even more interesting is the fact that this op-ed was in yesterday's New York Times.  Well, well, well.  The worm turns?  Hopechange!  Of course, that Nobel Peace Prize was a joke as far as I'm concerned.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali on the Persecution of Christians

Oppression all too readily forgotten.  As I have said before, you don't have to be a Christian yourself to be horrified.

The Forgotten: The Persecuted Christians of the Middle East

Read this.

Human Rights Spotlight: the Geneva Summit

Maggie's Farm offers a reminder that the Geneva Summit is beginning today.

Here is the WSJ blurb about the meeting:

The Geneva Summit -- organized by groups such as U.N. Watch and Freedom House, and chaired by Poland’s Lech Walesa and the Czech Republic’s Vaclav Havel -- will bring together political dissidents from China, Iran and Burma, rights activists for the Tibetan and Uighur peoples, a survivor of the North Korean gulag, plus a former Sudanese slave named Simon Deng who plans to speak about “the gross human-rights abuses by radical jihadists and the Islamic government in Khartoum . . .

I should clarify that the full name of the meeting is the "Geneva Summit for Human Rights, Tolerance, and Democracy." (Yes. Democracy.)

Contrast, my darlings, with the rogues' gallery that is the UN's Human Rights Council.

The HopeChange Chronicles: Obama's Foreign Policy and Human Rights

That sound you hear, gentle reader, is me banging my head against the wall in frustration at the current administration's fundamentally, totally, and risibly un-serious "foreign policy." Read this. Previous rants here and here.

Oh, and while we're at it, let's frivolously, gratuitously, and needlessly cold-shoulder our German allies on an anniversary that brought freedom to millions. Pffffft.