Archive for the ‘Iran’ Category
The annual Muslim debate in Italy
Puglia, south Italy, where Muslims are under the impression that land without people is up for grabs by people without land. (Photo: Belén Fernández)
I cannot recall a visit to my friend’s home in Puglia, southern Italy, in which the Muslim invasion of Europe has not surfaced as a discussion topic. It often initiates when one or more of my friend’s relatives discovers that I have just been to Turkey or Lebanon, for example, and remarks on my good fortune as a female to have avoided being stoned to death.
This year’s discussion started out as an innocent rant by my friend’s cousin against the concomitant invasion of Italy by Romanian criminals, who were said to make Albanian immigrants look well-behaved and who along with the euro constituted proof of the heinous nature of the European Union. A comment on the need to backtrack on a Europe without borders then led to the cousin’s observation that fortified Italian frontiers would additionally prevent Muslims from faking qualifications for asylum in order to continue the quest to absorb Italy into an Islamic caliphate. As for faked qualifications, it was now decided that stoning was not overly oppressive.
On Vaïsse’s ‘Neoconservatism’ and Taboo
Review of Justin Vaïsse, Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 366 p.
by Stephen J. Sniegoski
The mainstream media acclaim Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement as the best book on neoconservatism—the definitive account—and portray its author, Justin Vaïsse, a French specialist on American foreign policy and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, as a veritable Alexis de Tocqueville for his masterly insights. The mainstream’s high praise of this book, however, would seem to be due in large part to its minimization of two taboo issues—neoconservatism’s Jewish nature and its focus on Israel. Where the book breaks through what was heretofore largely blacked-out in the mainstream media is its discussion of the major role played by the neoconservatives in bringing about the war on Iraq.
The black-out had essentially placed the entire idea that the neoconservatives played a central role in bringing about the US attack on Iraq in 2003 beyond the pale of public discussion. In its most extreme form, this approach denied the very existence of neoconservatives. More moderate variants accepted the neocons’ existence but denied their influence on US policy. Instead the war on Iraq was alleged to have been essentially planned by President George W. Bush and/or Dick Cheney; or, for the anti-war Left, the war was brought on by the greedy oil interests or by unnamed nebulous corporatists (presumably gentile). Even to dwell on the neoconservatives could be taken as a sign of being “anti-Semitic.”
Israel lobby pushes US to attack Iran
Secret files declassified in America have revealed covert public relations and lobbying activities by Israel. The documents were obtained by Pulse contributor and IRMep director Grant F. Smith. Alison Weir, the new president of the Council for National Interest, comments on the release of the documents, on the influence of the lobby on the media, and its role in pushing the US toward war with Iran.
What Israel and the lobby really fear about Iran
by M.J. Rosenberg
The internet has been burning up with responses to Jeffrey Goldberg‘s Atlantic cover story on the likelihood that either Israel or the United States will preempt development of an Iranian nuclear bomb by attacking its atomic sites.
Goldberg does not flat-out endorse bombing Iran. Rather, after numerous conversations and briefings with US and Israeli officials, he concludes that there is at least a 50-50 chance that bombs will fly in a year or so.
Goldberg himself does not take a position on whether bombing is warranted or justified. But, given the way he frames the article and his personal closeness, to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu – who speaks in apocalyptic terms of the existential danger a nuclear Iran poses to Israel – it is clear that Goldberg sees no alternative to preventing an Iranian nuke, by whatever means necessary. And that includes war.
“O, God! Have mercy on me! Distracted, I whirl” — Rumi’s Gift
by Maulana Rumi
Singing: Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Qawwaals
Translated by Huma Dar
Naa Man Behooda Gird-e Koocha-o-Baazaar Mi Gardam (Huma Dar 2005)
نه من بيهوده گرد کوچه و بازار می گردم
مذاق عاشقی دارم پئ ديدار ميگردمخدايا رحم کن بر من پريشان وار می گردم
خطا کارم گناھگارم به حال زار می گردمشراب شوق می نوشم به گرد يار می گردم
سخن مستانه می گويم ولے هوشيار می گردمگھےخندم گھے گريم گھے افتم گھے خيزم
مسيحا در دلم پيدا و من بيمار می گردمبیا جانا عنایت کن تو مولانای رومی را
غلام شمس تبریزم قلندروار می گردم
One More War, Please
by David Bromwich
Will the summer of 2010 be remembered as the time when we turned into a nation of sleepwalkers? We have heard reports of the intrusion of the state into everyday life, and of miscarriages of American power abroad. The reports made a stir, but as suddenly as they came they were gone. The last two weeks of July saw two such stories on almost successive days.
First there was “Top Secret America,” the three-part Washington Post report by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin on the hyperextension of private contracts, government buildings, and tax-funded expenditures in the secret surveillance economy. Since 2001, the new industries of data mining and analysis have yielded close to a million top secret clearances for Americans to spy on other Americans. Then at the end of July came the release of 90,000 documents by Wikileaks, as reported and linked by the New York Times, which revealed among other facts the futility of American “building” efforts in Afghanistan. We are making no headway there, in the face of the unending American killing of civilians; meanwhile, American taxes go to support a Pakistani intelligence service that channels the money to terrorists who kill American soldiers: a treadmill of violence. Both findings the mainstream media brought forward as legitimate stories, or advanced as raw materials of a story yet to be told more fully. This was an improvement on the practice of reporting stories spoon-fed to reporters by the government and “checked” by unnamed sources also in government. Yet, as has happened in many cases in the mass media after 2001 — one thinks of David Barstow’s story on the “war experts” coached by the Pentagon and hired by the networks — the stories on secret surveillance and the Afghanistan documents were printed and let go: no follow-up either in the media or in Congress.
We seem to have entered a moral limbo where political judgment is suspended and public opinion cannot catch its breath.
Obama Must Bring Back that Magic to the Middle East
Mosaic Intelligence Report: 2010 is far from over, yet the Middle East has witnessed a series of close encounters with major wars. What are Arabs afraid of? And why is Barack Obama’s popularity sinking fast?
Also see Jim Lobe’s analysis of the Brookings/Zogby ‘Arab Public Opinion Poll’.
Not another war for Israel, intelligence professionals warn
Col. (ret.) Ann Wright warns against the United States waging another war for Israel. Reproduced below is a memo Wright co-signed with Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) warning Obama against such a war.
by Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
We write to alert you to the likelihood that Israel will attack Iran as early as this month. This would likely lead to a wider war.
Israel’s leaders would calculate that once the battle is joined, it will be politically untenable for you to give anything less than unstinting support to Israel, no matter how the war started, and that U.S. troops and weaponry would flow freely. Wider war could eventually result in destruction of the state of Israel.
This can be stopped, but only if you move quickly to pre-empt an Israeli attack by publicly condemning such a move before it happens.
We believe that comments by senior American officials, you included, reflect misplaced trust in Israeli Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu.
Jonathan Cook on Israel
A recent appearance on RT by author and independent journalist, Jonathan Cook. Based out of Nazareth, Cook is among the best investigative reporters focusing on Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. In this interview he points out the strategic importance of instability in the Middle East for Israel — i.e. justification for its policies both domestic and foreign, and the real reason Israel is opposed to Iran obtaining nuclear weapons, or even worse, building good relations with the US — because such an event would present a challenge to Israel’s currently monopoly over the balance of power in the region.
On Iran, Liberals Are Enabling Another Disastrous War
by Tony Karon
Beinart chats with friends in high places: Liberal “hawks” like him played a major role in enabling the Iraq debacle
In 2003, the United States launched an unprovoked invasion of Iraq, a country that had neither attacked nor threatened it — and we, and the Iraqis, are still living with the consequences. Going to war in Iraq was made possible — easy, even — for the Bush Administration not only by Republican hawks and neocon extremists (the wannabe Army Corps of Social Engineers) baying for blood, but even more importantly, by supposedly sober and moderate liberal voices — the Peter Beinarts, Ken Pollacks, George Packers and the editors of the New York Times — not only failing to challenge the basic logic of the case for war, but providing their own more elegant (although equally brutal when stripped of their high-minded rhetoric) rationalizations for invading Iraq.
It was the liberal “hawks” and the New York Times, by failing to ask the right questions of the case for war, that did more to make the war a “thinkable” option for America than any neocon. They allowed the question to be posed simply as one of whether Saddam had weapons of mass destruction or not. And because nobody could give an absolute assurance in the negative, the argument became “better safe than sorry”. The liberals and the New York Times offered no challenge, and asked no questions, of the basic assumption that if Saddam had, in fact, had a couple of warehouses full of VX gas and refrigerator full of anthrax, that necessitated launching a war that has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of upward of half a million Iraqis (and thousands of Americans) and left America weaker and more vulnerable.
And the bad news is that they’re doing it again on Iran.
