I mean, I have never ever heard of a longer voting count than that of the Iraqi election. If takes a day longer, I am going to start thinking that maybe there is political and financial corruption in Iraq. But there are US troops there and the US is a guarantee against corruption, no?
What? No direct invitation? … and, Netanyahu insults the US, AGAIN: “Netanyahu says his government will make no concessions about construction in East Jerusalem….” Netanyahu made the comment to his Cabinet Sunday as the U.S. envoy on Middle East peace arrived in Israel(VOA) and Israel continues its slaughter of Palestinians!
Jerusalem/AFP: “President Barack Obama has invited Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to meet him in Washington on Tuesday to discuss Middle East peace efforts, Netanyahu’s office said. … The invitation was handed to Netanyahu by visiting US Middle East envoy George Mitchell at the start of a meeting in Jerusalem on Sunday, the office said. Netanyahu, who has angered the US administration by continuing to expand settlements in east Jerusalem, was due to leave for Washington later Sunday to meet US officials and Jewish leaders.
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei uses his new year message to accuse the US of plotting against his country.
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Proponents of unregulated capitalism, or if you will, the ‘free market,’ maintain that it provides a better life for all than do other systems. This allegation is demonstrably untrue if the question is public health across the board. In Iran, under the hyper-capitalist Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlevi, infant mortality was 122 per 1,000 in 1970. Today, in the Islamic Republic of Iran, it is 28.6 per 1,000, an incredible decrease. Some 94% of the population has access to health services, and around the same percentage have access to affordable medicine. The state is authoritarian and controlling, but it cares about the welfare of even the poor among its citizens in a way that the US-backed, capitalist Pahlevis clearly did not. In the last year of George W. Bush’s presidency, at a time when he had drastically limited Federal support for stem cell research, Iran committed $2.8 billion to such high-powered medical research.
It is to the point where Mississippi, which has among the worst health statistics in the US, and where 20% of the population lacks health insurance, is looking to Iran for a model of how techniques pioneered in a third-world society could improve health care for Americans living in third-world conditions.
So maybe the urgency of Americans resorting to Iranian help will decline today if the US Congress does the right thing and enacts health care reform. It won’t be perfect, but it will extend coverage to some 30 million who now have none, and will stop outrageous abuses like the dropping of sick patients and exclusions for pre-existing conditions.
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Philip Jenkins studied violence in the Bible and in the Qur’an, and found that the Bible is ‘far more violent.’
This conclusion is obvious to anyone who seriously studies the two scriptures. The NPR article quotes someone named Bostom who claims that violence in the Bible has a context but in Qur’an is commanded to be ongoing. This is an extremely ignorant comment and completely untrue.
The passages in the Qur’an that command fighting pertain to the early Muslims’ struggle with the militant pagans (kafirun, kuffar) of ancient Mecca. The mercantile Meccan elite dominate lower Red Sea trade and worshipped star goddesses; they determined to wipe out the new religion of Islam as it gathered converts through the 610s and set up as a city-state in Yathrib/ Medina in the 620s CE. As I have pointed out before, a careful study of the word kafir or infidel in the Qur’an will show that it never is used in an unadorned way to refer to non-Muslims in general. It implies paganism, or alliance with paganism, and often has overtones of militant hostility to Muslims and Islam. In contrast, the Christians are called ‘closest in love’ to the Muslims, and the Children of Israel are repeatedly praised. There is a passage referring to those who commit kufr or infidelity from among the people of the book (i.e. Jews and Christians) [2:105]. But this diction demonstrates that the word for infidel does not ordinarily extend to those groups. The ones condemned probably had allied with the pagans who were trying to destroy Islam and kill all Muslims, against whom the Qur’an advises believers to wage defensive war (“kill them wherever you find them” [2:191]– i.e. defend yourself against the fanatic pagans trying to kill you).
There are fundamentalist Muslims who use the word ‘kafir’ to refer to all non-Muslims, but the Qur’an does not support this usage. Anti-Muslim bigots in the US use these simplistic ideas of fundamentalists to condemn Islam and all Muslims.
All you have to do is look at the fate of the conquered Canaanites under Joshua (who were to be wiped out in a biblical genocide) and the fate of the Meccans when the Muslims overcame them (almost none were killed and they went on to flourish in the Islamic empire despite their earlier attempt at mass murder aimed at the prophet and his followers), to see the difference between the two.
Jenkins goes on to caution that Jews and Christians are not more violent than Muslims, despite the differences in scripture.
Actually I figure Europeans polished off a good 70 million people in the 20th century, whereas Muslims probably killed no more than 2 million (mainly in the Iran-Iraq War and Afghanistan, the latter of which a European power provoked). But this vast difference is not because Christian-heritage Europeans are such worse human beings than Muslim Middle Easterners. Rather, Europe industrialized warfare first, and also had the political independence to launch wars.
My experience is, people are people. They’re all equally capable of the same good and evil, across religions and cultures, and how much of each they commit has to do with both their opportunities and their character at any point in history.
The amazing thing is that the West has managed to convince itself that all its wars and killing were someone else’s fault (even though it was mainly elements of the West fighting other elements of the West that produced the charnel houses of the twentieth century).
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“Fred Hiatt, editor of the Washington Post’s editorial page, is particularly shameless about promoting both an imperial foreign policy and the Israeli connection. In today’s edition on page A6, billed as analysis, appears a Glenn Kessler piece called “Experts question whether US has a real Israel strategy.” The article is illustrated by a color photo of Palestinian youths throwing stones. Glenn’s Kessler’s assembled experts turn out to beDaniel Kurtzer, Aaron David Miller, Elliot Abrams, and Martin Indyk. That the Post believes that only Jews can rightfully comment on the US relationship with Israel should be disturbing to the 98% of the population that is not Jewish but which is nevertheless called on to financially support Tel Aviv, but what really caught my attention was a small bit towards the beginning of the piece. Kessler reports that “…Yitzhak Molcho, a low key private lawyer in Israel who negotiated the settlement freeze with Mitchell, worked closely behind the scenes on the Israeli response with Dennis Ross, a senior official on the National Security Council.”
First of all, the “settlement freeze” should rightly be called the “unsuccessful settlement freeze” as the Israelis never complied with the US demands. And second, there is the disturbing reemergence of Ross. At Camp David in 2000 when Bill Clinton brought together Yassir Arafat and Ehud Barak, Ross was a chief negotiator. He reportedly briefed the Israelis in advance on all US negotiating positions to obtain their approval, giving Israel a de facto veto over anything it objected to. For that yeoman’s work Ross was dubbed “Israel’s lawyer” by his colleagues. Now it would appear that Ross is doing the same thing for Obama. If Kessler is correct, the description of Ross’s role suggests that he is concerned with an acceptable Israeli response, not in convincing Israel that it mustchange its behavior to support US interests in the region. Which raises the question “Who is he working for and to what end?”
A few days ago I predicted that the crisis with Netanyahu would quickly be patched over with Obama conceding on every point and we would be back to business as usual withIsrael controlling the lopsided bilateral relationship. While it is possible that the tone of the narrative has somewhat shifted, the return to the status quo ante has largely come to pass and just in time for the annual AIPAC Conference where Hillary Clinton will no doubt speak soothingly, followed by a long conga line of congressmen who will deliver their own obeisances. I would like to think that international frustration with Israeli intransigence will finally reach a boiling point, possibly dragging Washington along kicking and screaming to actually pressure Israel in some real way to change course. We shall see, but I wouldn’t be optimistic. And before that happens American soldiers might well be drawn willy-nilly into a war with Iran, a war not of our choosing and one that can only have bad consequences.” PG
Today Iranians mark Now Ruz, their ancient New Year’s day, celebrated on the vernal equinox (which most often falls on March 21 but sometimes, as today, on the 20th). Now Ruz literally means “New Day.” Persian is an Indo-European language ultimately related to English, and “now” (pronounced “no”) and “new” are cognates.
As he did last year, President Barack Obama addressed Iran in a Now Ruz message. He renewed his offer of comprehensive diplomatic contacts with Tehran, decrying what he called the Iranian government’s determination to isolate itself.
Obama pledged to allow more Iranian students to study in the United States, and noted the recent decision to lift obstacles to US internet firms supplying the Iranian market, including Facebook.
Obama’s Iran outreach was stymied by the outbreak of massive protests in Iran after last June’s presidential elections, which the opposition maintains were stolen by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It also ran into difficulties when the apparent deal struck at Geneva on October 1, and tentatively agreed to by the representative of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, was rejected on his return to Iran by hardliners, presumably in the Revolutionary Guards.
Obama’s dogged determination to engage Iran and his decisions on exchange students and internet openness are far more likely to bear fruit than his predecessor’s dismissive and belligerent policies. The resistance of the White House to a campaign by the Israel lobbies for crippling sanctions and even military action against Iran is one element in the tense relations between Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.
Iranian opposition leader Mir Hosain Mousavi praised the Green protest movement in the past year and pledged to continue to work for a more open press and the right to assemble and protest (pro forma already in the Iranian constitution).
Human rights and internet activists called upon the regime to release Iran’s “blogfather,” Hosain Derakhshan, from prison. Derakhshan, then living in Canada, pioneered techniques for blogging in Persian and sparked a communications revolution in Iran.
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Israel's Prime Minister has responded with a 'no' to demands made by the US, as well as Russia, the EU and the UN, to cancel the construction of settler homes in East Jerusalem.
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President Obama says the US offer of dialogue with Iran still stands, in a New Year message to the Iranian people.
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BBC News, Cyber crime losses in US almost ‘double’ during 2009, 19 Mar 2010 "One scam that proved popular in 2009 involved people receiving an e-mail from the "Ishmael Ghost Islamic Group". The sender claims he has been told to assassinate the recipient and their family. Only by giving a donation to a UK group that helps Islamic expatriates will the death threat be lifted.""
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Learn To Read And Write Arabic
Find out all about the revolutionary secret technique for learning to read and write Arabic. Read the article here.
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