Globe Trot: Argentina's murder scandal is a movie in the making

ARGENTINA: Argentine journalist Damian Pachter saw his Twitter followers go from 420 to more than 10,000 as he broke on the tweetstream a scoop on the murder of prosecutor Albert Nisman, whose death has been declared a suicide by President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. Prachter is now in Israel, forced to leave Argentina amid the ongoing high-stakes drama involving the currently wheelchair-bound Kirchner, her Jewish foreign minister, and two pro-Iran “social activists,” plus more. The Economist has a good roundup of the scandal that could bring down the government (and should definitely be made into a movie).

IRAQ: Kurdish Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani yesterday criticized U.S. efforts to push back the Islamic State in Iraq as currently inadequate. He said it would be fall before a serious effort to take back Mosul could be mounted.

THOSE CHRISTIANS AND MUSLIMS: Self-proclaimed atheist commentator Robert Tracinski writes perhaps the most lucid defense of “why Islam is more violent than Christianity.”

In today’s context, it’s absurd to equate Islam and Christianity. Pointing to the Spanish Inquisition tends to undermine the point rather than confirm it: If you have to look back three hundred years to find atrocities, it’s because there are so few of them today. The mass crimes committed under the name of Islam, by contrast, are fresh and openly boasted about.

And includes this important doctrinal point (for Christians also to remember):

The life of the founder of a religion is held up to his followers as a model for how they should live their own lives. The life of Mohammed tells the Muslim that he should expect to rule, whereas the life of Christ tells the Christian he should expect to sacrifice and serve.

Christians are indeed the most persecuted religious group in the world today, says narrator and author Raymond Ibrahim in this succinct five-minute video presentation of a significant global issue. But reporting it would violate the media’s narrative of Christians as persecutors and Muslims as victims.

ARMENIA: “I’m wearing Ede & Ravenscroft,” attorney Amal Alamuddin Clooney told reporters apparently more interested in her designer wear than the conviction she and a team representing Armenia won at the European Court of Human Rights on Jan. 28. The court turned down an appeal from Dogu Perincek, a Turkish activist who has sought court venues across Europe in which to deny the Armenian holocaust took place. Ede & Ravenscroft, by the way, is London’s oldest maker of judiciary robes.