Good Luck In Iran

Hidden somewhere in the news lately is the fact that Iran announced that they had detained 3 people on their border.  The Iranians call them CIA spies of course, while the news reports have been about ‘hikers’.  Well, it turns out that they are died-in-the-wool kooks from Bezerkley:

Three Americans whose disappearance in Iran has prompted concern from U.S. officials are idealistic UC Berkeley graduates whose interest in Middle Eastern culture and human rights led them abroad to study and do freelance journalism, friends and colleagues said Monday.

Shane Bauer and Joshua Fattal, who are 27, once lived in the same Oakland co-op and taught a student-led class at Berkeley that envisioned a harmonious, postcapitalist society. Sarah Shourd, Bauer’s 30-year-old girlfriend, describes herself on one Web site as a lover of “fresh broccoli, Zapatistas and anyone who can change her mind.

Perhaps its just me, but how stupid can you be to decide to go ‘hiking’ on the Iranian border?

Bauer graduated with honors from UC Berkeley in 2007, earning a bachelor’s degree with a major in peace and conflict studies and a minor in Arabic. He went to Sudan’s Darfur region to research a thesis on the crisis there.

Shourd is described by those who know her as passionate about teaching, traveling and politics. After receiving a bachelor’s degree in English in May 2003, she worked as a tutor with Americorps, a tutoring service in Berkeley and a charter elementary school in Oakland.

Fattal, who earned his bachelor’s degree in environmental economics and policy, is a Pennsylvania native who recently worked and lived at a sustainable living research center in Oregon.

Good luck in that Iranian prison you twits.

Iran To Obama – Raspberries

We were just absolutely sure that Iran would be real happy to talk to The Messiah, weren’t we?

Reacting to President Obama’s call for the Iranians to “unclench their fist”, Mr Ahmadinejad called for the United States to apologise to the Iranian people “and try to repair their past bad acts and the crimes they committed against Iran”.

He added: “If someone wants to talk with us in the language that (President) Bush used … even if he uses new words, our response will be the same that we gave to Bush during the past years.”

So Ahmadinacrazy has completely absolved the Bush Derangement Syndrome verbiage.  And he has a simple starting point for the lovely new sparkly diplomacy:

As proof of the desire for change, Mr Ahmadinejad said that the US should withdraw its troops from conflict zones around the world and “stop supporting the Zionists, outlaws and criminals.”

Dump Iran, Afganistan, Israel – I assume this means to provide active support as Iran make sure to kill anybody who opposes it anywhere in the world.  See – diplomacy is soooooo easy.

The Hitler Comparison Is Out – For Now

Gotta love the way Ann Coulter can skewer the self-important:

After decades of comparing Nixon to Hitler, Reagan to Hitler and Bush to Hitler, liberals have finally decided it is wrong to make comparisons to Hitler. But the only leader to whom they have applied their newfound rule of thumb is: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

While Ahmadinejad has not done anything as starkly evil as cut the capital gains tax, he does deny the Holocaust, call for the destruction of Israel, deny the existence of gays in Iran and refuses to abandon his nuclear program despite protests from the United Nations. That’s the only world leader we’re not allowed to compare to Hitler.

And the ditz who wants to be President and thinks talking to a kook like this with no pre-conditions is just fine?

Liberals view talk as an end in itself. They never think through how these talks will proceed, which is why Chamberlain ended up giving away Czechoslovakia. He didn’t leave for Munich planning to do that. It is simply the inevitable result of talking with madmen without a clear and obtainable goal. Without a stick, there’s only a carrot.

The only explanation for liberals’ hysterical zealotry in favor of Obama’s proposed open-ended talks with Ahmadinejad is that they seriously imagine crazy foreign dictators will be as charmed by Obama as cable TV hosts whose legs tingle when they listen to Obama (a condition that used to be known as “sciatica”).

Because, really, who better to face down a Holocaust denier with a messianic complex than the guy who is afraid of a debate moderated by Brit Hume?

You go girl!

Iranian Students Put Bounty on Israeli Leaders

And want people to donate their kidneys to raise money for the payoff:

Iranian hardline students have offered rewards totalling a million dollars for the “execution” of three Israeli military leaders over the deadly strikes on Gaza, the student news agency ISNA reported on Monday.

The group is even encouraging Iranians to donate their kidneys to increase the bounties on the heads of Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak, Mossad spy agency director Meir Dagan and military intelligence chief Amos Yadlin.

Iran Nukes in 3 Years

Living next to thugs that want to murder you and your children makes you pay more attention. Of course, the yawn that will greet this news in the US and the media will be apparent as a “dog that didn’t bark”.

clipped from www.breitbart.com Israel’s Mossad spy agency estimates Iran will develop a nuclear weapon within three years and continue to provide rockets to regional armed groups, a newspaper reported on Tuesday. Dagan’s estimate of Iran’s nuclear ambitions differs sharply from an assessment by the US intelligence community late last year that said Iran had mothballed its nuclear weapons programme in 2003. In Monday’s report, Dagan also predicted that Tehran would continue to supply more and better rockets and training to Palestinian militant groups in the Gaza Strip. “Syria is improving its surface-to-surface missile system and today the quantity of missiles and rockets is twice as large as two years ago,” Dagan said, according to Maariv. Israel has long perceived Iran as its greatest threat, especially after Iran’s President Mahmud Ahmadinejad relaunched its nuclear enrichment programme and repeatedly predicted the demise of the Jewish state.

Dhimmi of the Year – 2008 Nomination

It is early for the nominations to come in, but this just has to be noted.And why in the world would a member of the delegation request anonymity? Aren’t these people proud to go over to this state of supporter of terrorism and murder and prostrate themselves in front of this little thug?

clipped from www.mehrnews.ir NEW YORK (MNA) – An academic delegation of Columbia University professors and deans of faculties plans to visit Tehran to officially apologize to Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad. The delegation plans to express regret for the insulting remarks Columbia University President Lee Bollinger directed at Ahmadinejad on September 24 in his introductory speech, the Mehr News Agency correspondent in New York reported. Since the incident, the deans and professors from the faculties of history, anthropology, Middle Eastern studies, philosophy, and Islamic studies have criticized Bollinger’s behavior toward Ahmadinejad. A member of the delegation, who requested anonymity, said the main goal of the visit is to meet the Iranian president and officially apologize to him.

12 Myths of 21st Century War

From Ralph Peters at the American Legion website:

We’re in trouble. We’re in danger of losing more wars. Our troops haven’t forgotten how to fight. We’ve never had better men and women in uniform. But our leaders and many of our fellow Americans no longer grasp what war means or what it takes to win.

Myth No. 1: War doesn’t change anything.

This campus slogan contradicts all of human history.  We need not agree in our politics or on the manner in which a given war is prosecuted, but we can’t pretend that if only we laid down our arms all others would do the same.

Wars, in fact, often change everything. Who would argue that the American Revolution, our Civil War or World War II changed nothing? Would the world be better today if we had been pacifists in the face of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan?
Myth No. 2: Victory is impossible today.

Victory is always possible, if our nation is willing to do what it takes to win. But victory is, indeed, impossible if U.S. troops are placed under impossible restrictions, if their leaders refuse to act boldly, if every target must be approved by lawyers, and if the American people are disheartened by a constant barrage of negativity from the media.

Myth No. 3: Insurgencies can never be defeated.

Historically, fewer than one in 20 major insurgencies succeeded. Virtually no minor ones survived. In the mid-20th century, insurgencies scored more wins than previously had been the case, but that was because the European colonial powers against which they rebelled had already decided to rid themselves of their imperial possessions.

In the entire 18th century, our war of independence was the only insurgency that defeated a major foreign power and drove it out for good.

Myth No. 4: There’s no military solution; only negotiations can solve our problems.

In most cases, the reverse is true. Negotiations solve nothing until a military decision has been reached and one side recognizes a peace agreement as its only hope of survival.  The only negotiations that produce lasting results are those conducted from positions of indisputable strength.

Myth No. 5: When we fight back, we only provoke our enemies.

When dealing with bullies, either in the schoolyard or in a global war, the opposite is true: if you don’t fight back, you encourage your enemy to behave more viciously.

Passive resistance only works when directed against rule-of-law states, such as the core English-speaking nations. It doesn’t work where silent protest is answered with a bayonet in the belly or a one-way trip to a political prison.

Myth No. 6: Killing terrorists only turns them into martyrs.

The harsh truth is that when faced with true fanatics, killing them is the only way to end their influence. Imprisoned, they galvanize protests, kidnappings, bombings and attacks that seek to free them.  Dead terrorists don’t kill.

Myth No. 7: If we fight as fiercely as our enemies, we’re no better than them.

Did the bombing campaign against Germany turn us into Nazis? Did dropping atomic bombs on Japan to end the war and save hundreds of thousands of American lives, as well as millions of Japanese lives, turn us into the beasts who conducted the Bataan Death March?

The greatest immorality is for the United States to lose a war.

Myth No. 8: The United States is more hated today than ever before. 

The fashionable anti-Americanism of the chattering classes hasn’t stopped the world from seeking one big green card. As I’ve traveled around the globe since 9/11, I’ve found that below the government-spokesman/professional-radical level, the United States remains the great dream for university graduates from Berlin to Bangalore to Bogota.

Myth No. 9: Our invasion of Iraq created our terrorist problems.

This claim rearranges the order of events, as if the attacks of 9/11 happened after Baghdad fell. Our terrorist problems have been created by the catastrophic failure of Middle Eastern civilization to compete on any front and were exacerbated by the determination of successive U.S. administrations, Democrat and Republican, to pretend that Islamist terrorism was a brief aberration.

Myth No. 10: If we just leave, the Iraqis will patch up their differences on their own.

We must be open-minded about practical measures, from changes in strategy to troop reductions, if that’s what the developing situation warrants. But it’s grossly irresponsible to claim that our presence is the primary cause of the violence in Iraq – an allegation that ignores history.

Myth No. 11: It’s all Israel’s fault. Or the popular Washington corollary: “The Saudis are our friends.”

Israel is the Muslim world’s excuse for failure, not a reason for it.  All men and women of conscience must recognize the core difference between Israel and its neighbors: Israel genuinely wants to live in peace, while its genocidal neighbors want Israel erased from the map.

As for the mad belief that the Saudis are our friends, it endures only because the Saudis have spent so much money on both sides of the aisle in Washington. Saudi money continues to subsidize anti-Western extremism, to divide fragile societies, and encourage hatred between Muslims and all others. Saudi extremism has done far more damage to the Middle East than Israel ever did. The Saudis are our enemies.

Myth No. 12: The Middle East’s problems are all America’s fault.

The collapse of once great Middle Eastern civilizations has been under way for more than five centuries, and the region became a backwater before the United States became a country.  Its social and economic structures, its values, its neglect of education, its lack of scientific curiosity, the indolence of its ruling classes and its inability to produce a single modern state that served its people all guaranteed that, as the West’s progress accelerated, the Middle East would fall ever farther behind. The Middle East has itself to blame for its problems.

If Ahmadinacrazy Drove a VW

U.S. Sinks North Korean Ship w/ Nuclear Cargo for Iran

There’s more in this link. Iran has offered N.Korea $1.5 billion for discarded N.Korean nuclear items, and France helped sink another N.Korean freighter bound for Iran. Didn’t Bush hit it right about the “Axis of Evil”?

clipped from www.conservativeunderground.com In the past month, American naval and air forces have intercepted two North Korean vessels clandestinely en route for Iran with cargoes of enriched uranium and nuclear equipment. The shutdown of Pongyong’s nuclear facilities has made these items surplus to North Korea’s requirements and worth a good price to the Islamic Republic. On July 12, the second intercepted North Korean freighter was sunk in the Arabian Sea by torpedoes fired from a US submarine 100 miles southeast of the Iranian naval base-port of Chah Bahar. Delivery of its freight of enriched weapons-grade uranium and equipment and engines for manufacturing more fissile material including plutonium in its hold could have jumped-forwarded Iran’s nuclear bomb and warhead project, lopping off at least a year of work. For this Iran’s rulers were ready to fork out $500 million. US airplanes had been tracking the freighter and picked up signs of radioactivity, indicating the presence of nuclear materials aboard.

Marriage in Iran

temporary wives, multiple permanent wives, this is why Islamic societies are so angry. Most young men are excluded from women.

clipped from kamangir.net As Ahmadinejad’s government has set the only condition for re-marriage to affording it, based on the court’s decision, the Judiciary has just issued a table. Men should know that if the number of their wives does not comply with this table, they will have to divorce the excessive wives and pay a fine. Monthly Income Number of Wives More than $5,000 Four Permanent, Infinite Temporary Between $2,000 and $5,000 Four Permanent, Two Hundred Temporary Between $1,000 and $2,000 Two Permanent, Fifty Temporary Between $500 and $1,000 One Permanent, Five Temporary Less than $500 Do it Yourself