Informed Comment

Ahmadinejad Promises to Protect Qana in South Lebanon

Posted on October 16, 2010 by Juan

The USG Open Source Center translates from Persian the speech of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at Qana in South Lebanon on Friday (See below). Qana is significant as the site of several Israeli attacks and atrocities, most recently in summer 2006, in which Israeli bombing killed innocent non-combatants. Lead 9/11 hijacker Mohammad Atta was incensed by the 1996 Israeli bombing of Qana.

Ahmadinejad’s speeches in Lebanon have centered on defense, not offense, and he has several times suggested that the situation will improve when the 12th Imam, a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, returns, alongside Jesus Christ. That is, he is speaking a mystical language of spiritual saviors at the end-time rather than talking about tanks.

Aljazeera English reports:

Here is the speech:

Ahmadinezhad Says Iran Will Stand By Lebanon to ‘Last Breath’
Address by President Mahmud Ahmadinezhad to people of Qana, southern Lebanon — live
Islamic Republic of Iran News Network Television (IRINN)
Friday, October 15, 2010
Document Type: OSC Translated Text …

In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate. (Introductory prayers in
Arabic).

I thank God Almighty for granting me the opportunity to visit you pious, brave and revolutionary people.

I have come to bring the greetings of the great Iranian nation and its leadership to you. God bless you, brave and committed offspring of Lebanon. Greetings to your faith and revolutionary zeal. Greetings to the proud youth of Qana, the hopes of Lebanon and the hopes of the resistance of the nations of the region. Greetings to martyrs and self-sacrificers of Qana. Greetings to the war disabled and families of martyrs. Greetings to innocent widows and small children of Qana’s martyrs.

I have come to thank you for your patience, resistance and honor. I have come to offer greetings to you and to Qana, the land of patience and resistance. Qana is living proof of resistance, patience and faith of the people of Lebanon. The innocent and defenseless martyrs of Qana are proof of the innocence and resistance of the people of Lebanon. Qana is living proof of the crimes of the criminal Zionists.

My dear ones, you are victorious and your enemies are defeated. You will stay and your enemies, who are the enemies of humanity, are on the slippery slope to destruction.

You are honorable and respected and your Zionist enemies are shamed, wretched and pitiful. On behalf of the Iranian nation, I would like to congratulate you on your faith, resistance and love for justice.

I have come to tell you that the Iranian nation and leadership will stand by the people of Lebanon and Qana to their last breath. The martyrs of Qana are alive and the enemies of Qana are dead. The path of martyrs, the path of justice, purity and resistance against oppressors is everlasting.

I have come to thank you. I thank my dear brother, the honorable Mr Michel Sulayman, the dear president of Lebanon. I have come to thank my combatant and honorable brother, the speaker of parliament Mr Nabih Birri.

I have come to thank my dear brother, the prime minister, the esteemed Mr Sa’d Hariri. I have come to thank the dear combatant and the hero of Lebanon, the honorable Seyyed Hasan Nasrallah. I have come to thank all the Lebanese tribes, from Christian to Muslim, from Shi’i to Sunni and Druze, and all the heads of tribes, senior officials, political officials, and religious leaders of Christians and Muslims. I have come to thank the dear Lebanese Army, which has been standing proud against the criminal Zionists. I have come to thank the Lebanese security and police forces, who maintain the security of this land. I have come to pray for the victory of all nations at the grave of martyrs. God Almighty, the people of Qana and Lebanon are dear, take them to the peak of human dignity and honor.

God Almighty, destroy the enemies of the Lebanese nation and the innocent nations. God Almighty, our hearts and the hearts of the Lebanese nation are saddened by the grief of Scholar Seyyed Musa Sadr. God Almighty, bring happiness to the hearts of all pious people with some good news from that dear one.

(Sentence in Arabic meaning: Dear Lebanese people, Dear honorables, we are proud of you and we will be with you always.)

(Description of Source: Tehran Islamic Republic of Iran News Network Television (IRINN) in Persian — 24-hour news channel of state-run television, officially controlled by the office of the supreme leader)

Posted in Iran, Lebanon | Leave a comment

Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar Walk out on O’Reilly’s Muslim-Baiting

Posted on October 15, 2010 by Juan

The View stars Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar walked out on Bill O’Reilly Thursday when the right wing pundit insisted on blaming all Muslims for the September 11 attacks. They pointed out that a small group of extremists carried them out, not “Muslims” as O’Reilly was insisting. When he kept repeating his smear of the whole religion (1.5 billion people), the two of them stood up and walked out.

Here is the blow-up:

Barbara Walters criticized her co-hosts for having departed but then took up their point and insisted to O’Reilly that he is wrong. She finally got him to back down and say he did not mean to blame all Muslims and to say that he had spoken ‘inartfully.’

Elizabeth Hasselback then intervened and blamed President Obama for the confusion, saying he had forbidden people to use the word “terrorst,” and and started talking about ‘Muslim extremists’ instead, and that it would have been better just to keep talking about terrorists because terrorists exist across all faiths.

Hasselback is right in the second part of her assertion, but is mistaken if she thinks that President Obama ever ‘forbade’ the use of the term “terrorism” or “terrorist” with reference to Muslim extremists.

See for instance his diction when he spoke about the attempted crotch-bombing over Detroit by a recruit from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

Some of the confusion was deliberately sowed by O’Reilly, who used the phrase “Muslims attacked us.” If he had said “the Muslims attacked us,” it would have been clear that he meant all of them. By leaving off the definite article, he was able to imply that all Muslims attacked the US on September 11 but provided himself with plausible deniability.

I have have pointed out that the September 11 attacks contravened Islamic law in several important respects. So there was nothing ‘Muslim’ about it and indeed Usama Bin Laden appears to have admitted as much when he said that those young men had no ‘fiqh’ or Muslim law.

I am filled with admiration for Goldberg and Behar, who responded exactly as all decent human beings should when face to face with what is essentially a blood libel. Here I disagree with Barbara Walters. There is some discourse that is inappropriate for reasoned discussion on the mass media.

If Walters had had a guest on who insisted that “Jews attacked us” in the USS Liberty incident of 1967, instead of specifying that it was only some Israeli military personnel, would she really have sat there and listened to it and broadcast it to millions of viewers.

Television is a hot medium, and given the passions running high in the election season, O’Reilly was shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theater.

Moreover, O’Reilly is an artificial pundit who is where he is because media billionaire Rupert Murdoch put him on the air. He is nobody on his own and has never had an interesting or original thought. He is moreover, a prominent stalker of a female staff member, and it is shocking that Walters should have him on The View to talk to an audience of women.

It should not be lost sight of that O’Reilly’s true target was not “Muslims” but President Obama, and what O’Reilly was attempting to imply was that Obama was insufficiently sensitive to the need to act in bigoted ways toward Muslims (e.g. denying them their constitutional rights on grounds of non-Muslim ‘sensitivities.’) White people’s feelings were hurt in the South for decades at the attempt of African-Americans to exercise their constitutional right to vote.

There is still a gender gap, with women more favorable to Democrats and the president, and O’Reilly’s effort was to address that constituency with his Islamophobic message, which in turn was a Republican message.

Goldberg and Behar have restored some decency to the US mass media when it comes to Muslim-baiting. Bravo!

Joy Behar discussed the matter further with former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura on her own show, in which she said she walked out because what O’Reilly said was in her view hate speech. Ventura is a mixed bag. On the one hand he made the correct point that if people have a constitutional right, that is the end of the story. You can’t take it away from them. On the other, he unfortunately brought up a ‘truther’ perspective that exonerated even radical Muslims. The evidence that al-Qaeda carried out 9/11 is overwhelming and it is disturbing to me when people try to let them off the hook. Here is the Behar video:

Posted in Islamophobia, US Politics | 13 Comments

Ahmadinejad Pledges to Protect Lebanon

Posted on October 14, 2010 by Juan

On Wednesday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad addressed large and adoring crowds in the southern Shiite suburbs of Beirut, which had been intensively bombed by Israeli fighter jets in summer 2006, and then subsequently rebuilt, in part with Iranian aid. Ahmadinejad pledged that Iran will support Lebanon in any future case of aggression against the small Levantine state of 4 million persons.

Americans who are surprised at Lebanese appreciation of Iran should remember that when the Israel-Hizbullah war broke out in summer 2006, the Bush administration initially actively opposed a ceasefire that could have saved hundreds of Lebanese civilian lives and could have spared billions of dollars in infrastructure. When someone is being intensively bombarded from the air and you attempt to put off a ceasefire, you are not a friend of the country being bombed.

Reuters has video on Ahmadinejad in Beirut:

Member of the Israeli parliament or Knesset, Aryeh Eldad, called Wednesday for Ahmadinejad to be assassinated, likening such an act to killing Hitler in 1928.

Eldad said, “If the Iranian President were in the Israeli army’s line of fire the day he chooses to throw rocks against Israel then he should not be allowed to return home alive.”

Israel’s vice premier, Silvan Shalom, distanced himself from Eldad’s remarks, saying that Israel does not kill heads of state.

The USG Open Source Center translates or transcribes other reactions from Israel:

Israeli Sources Comment on Lebanon Visit; MK: IDF Should Kill Ahmadinezhad
Israel — OSC Summary
Wednesday, October 13, 2010 …

PM Bureau Source: Ahmadinezhad Visit Completes Lebanon’s Transformation Into Iran Protectorate. Nir Yahav reports in Tel Aviv Walla! in Hebrew, website of leading news service, at 1515 GMT: “‘Ahmadinezhad’s visit to Lebanon completes the process of Lebanon’s transformation into an Iranian protectorate,’ a senior prime minister’s bureau source said today in reaction to the Iranian president’s visit to Lebanon. The source added that ‘Lebanon has thereby joined the axis of radical states that oppose the peace process and support terrorism. The Iranian president is there in the capacity of a supreme commander reviewing his troops, the Hizballah terrorists, who are Iran’s military arm in the region.

“Netanyahu’s bureau sources further said that ‘anyone concerned about peace and freedom should be worried about Iran’s brazen display of power. Lebanon, which has the right to peace and prosperity, has become the Iranian aggressor’s lackey.’” …

Deputy Minister, Mayors Fly Balloons on Border, Protest Ahmadinezhad’s ‘Warmongering’ the Jerusalem Channel 1 Television Online in English reports at 1126 GMT: “Several dozen people demonstrated near the northern border in Metula to protest Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit in Lebanon. Ynet reports that Knesset member Ayoub Kara (Likud) was among the demonstrators. He called on the Lebanese people to prevent an Iranian takeover of their country.”

Walla! further reports at 1138 GMT: “In anticipation of the Iranian president’s arrival in Lebanon, Israeli mayors came to the Fatma Gate (near the Lebanese border) to fly blue and white balloons in the air. Deputy Minister Ayyub Qara, who participated in the event, said: ‘The world should remember that the state was established following 2,000 years the Jews spent in the diasporah.’

Posted in Iran, Lebanon | 10 Comments

Palin Fear-Mongers on Iran, Sharia

Posted on October 13, 2010 by Juan

Republican gadfly Sarah Palin said in an interview with Newsmax Tuesday that Russia should be warned against helping Iran because if Iran got a nuclear weapon it would bring about Armageddon.

She also warned against the imposition of what she called Muslim sharia law on Americans and said they would never put up with it.

Give me a break. No one is working harder to impose a religious law code on Americans than Palin herself. Palin is one of those people who says she would like to forbid abortion even in cases of rape or danger to the mother’s life. Palin’s hostility to pro-choice positions derives from her belief in the supremacy of Christian law, which she wants to impose on all Americans. For more see my classic Salon essay on how many of Palin’s stances track with sharia or actually are more rigid.

Iran does not have a nuclear weapon, and says it does not want one and would not accept one. There is no evidence that Iran has a nuclear weapons program, and the International Atomic Energy Agency has repeatedly certified that no nuclear material is being diverted to military purposes from Iran’s civilian nuclear enrichment facilities in Natanz near Isfahan.

In contrast, the United States and Russia each has thousands of nuclear warheads, and smaller nuclear arsenals are possessed by Britain, France, China, and Israel.

It is difficult to see how Iran, a poor weak state with virtually no air force to speak of, and which is defenseless against a nuclear-armed superpower, could possibly cause an ‘Armageddon’ or show-down battle ushering in the Last Days

As for sharia, this allegation that Muslims are conspiring to impose their religious law on the United States is just propaganda from an American right wing that has destroyed the US economy and weakened the constitution, and has no one to blame for it but themselves. So they have nothing to run on but fear. They tried making Americans afraid of Latinos, but there are so many Latino voters that the tactic caused them to crash and burn. They needed a small group to position as threatening to middle America. They really miss the Communists. You could always run against the Communists, and there were hardly any in the US, so there was no down side.

So now they are coming after the some 6 million American Muslims.

Sharia does not have a fixed meaning. It is the living tradition of Muslim religious law. It is analogous to Roman Catholic canon law. What Palin is doing is similar to raising an alarm that the country’s 80 million Catholics have a secret plan to make canon law the law of the land and impose it on clueless Protestant Americans.

Ooops. The one place where attempts are being made to make the US conform to canon law is law around abortion, which is forbidden in Roman Catholic law but allowed in American law.

And guess what. Sarah Palin agrees with the imposition of canon law in that area of forbidding abortions.

US law already overlaps with Muslim sharia in the essentials. Sharia law forbids murder. It forbids theft. Etc.

Most of the elements of sharia to which Americans might object are traditional and are being reformed by Muslims themselves. Thus, sharia traditionally allowed a man to take up to four wives. But in many Muslim countries that practice has been curtailed. Or people think about harsh punishments such as stoning for adultery. But the Qur’an does not mention stoning anyone, and stoning adulterers is actually a feature of Jewish law or halakha that was probably brought into Islam by rabbi converts in the 8th or 9th century. Egypt has made the age of marriage 18, even though Muslim legal tradition allowed marriage at a much earlier age. But then Roman Catholic canon law in the medieval era set the marriage age at 12, as did Jewish religious law. All religious systems of law in the medieval period tended to allow marriage with the onset of puberty. Americans who get all high and mighty about sharia should remember that 18th century British law prescribed hanging for minor theft.

There is no mechanism whereby Muslim religious law could be imposed on Americans (it would have to be legislated by Congress, which is much more likely to make us live by Leviticus). The US Supreme Court has ruled that a law may not be passed if it does not have a secular purpose (that is why we can work on Sundays now; blue laws don’t have a secular purpose.

But since the United States has an Anglo-Saxon, common law legal system that privileges custom as a source of law, it is inevitable that judges will occasionally have to take sharia into account when adjudicating disputes among American Muslims. US judges can take precedents from anywhere, and have occasionally cited rulings of, e.g., the Indian Supreme Court. The only way to avoid this situation would be to adopt the Napoleonic code and give up on custom and precedent as contributors to law. That would be a much bigger break with American legal traditions than merely occasionally citing Muslim legal practice in settling disputes among Muslims.

Nevada politician Sharon Angle attracted a sharp rebuke from the mayor of Dearborn, which has a large Arab-American community, when she made a similar charge about the imposition of sharia.

WXYZ in Detroit reports:

Posted in Islamophobia, US Politics, Uncategorized | 20 Comments

Ahmadinejad Greeted by Cheering Throngs in Beirut

Posted on October 13, 2010 by Juan

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad arrived in Beirut on Wednesday, being greeted enthusiastically by large crowds (probably mostly Shiites) who lined the streets as his retinue came into the city from the airport.

The Iranian president said before he left Tehran that “Lebanon is the focus point of resistance and standing against those who demand too much …”

Some 250 Lebanese notables signed a letter to Ahmadinejad condemning his visit and what they saw as an attempt to position Lebanon as an Iranian military base abutting Israel. The signatories favor the Future movement of PM Saad Hariri or one of his political allies, often called “March 14″ after the date of the large demonstrations they mounted in 2005 in favor of a Syrian military withdrawal from Lebanon (a wish they got.) Although Lebanon at the moment has a national unity government, since 2005 the Shiite fundamentalist, pro-Syrian and pro-Iranian Hizbullah Party has often been in the political opposition to Hariri. Rumors are swirling that a tribunal may implicate persons with Hizbullah ties in the 2005 assassination of Rafiq Hariri, the father of the current prime minister, and many fear Sunni-Shiite strife were such a conclusion to be publicized.

Ahmadinejad called Saudi King Abdallah, Syrian president Bashar al-Asad and Jordanian king Abdallah II before coming. The Saudis consider Lebanon a part of their sphere of influence and Sunni prime minister Saad Hariri is widely seen as a Saudi surrogate in the country. (The late Rafiq Hariri had made his money in Saudi Arabia and became close to King Fahd before becoming prime minister in the 1990s). Ahmadinejad may have been attempting to calm Saudi nerves about the visit and to assure Riyadh that Iran had no intention of taking over Beirut all together (the Hizbullah and Amal Parties that organize Lebanon’s Shiites are as favorable toward Iran as Hariri is toward Saudi Arabia.)

I gave the background for Ahmadinejad’s visit at my Truthdig column yesterday..

Aljazeera English reports on Ahmadinejad’s arrival in Beirut:

Posted in Iran, Lebanon | 1 Comment

Google imagines an Atlantic Wind Grid

Posted on October 12, 2010 by Juan

One of the problems with new green energy installations is the need to funnel the power, facility by facility, into the existing electricity grid. Google is trying to resolve that problem on the Atlantic seaboard by starting with an “Atlantic Wind Connection” that “will be able to connect 6,000MW of offshore wind turbines.”

Networking the turbines this way is far more efficient, both physically and administratively.

Now lets see if it goes through.

Posted in Energy, Environment | 4 Comments

Cole on Ahmadinejad at Truthdig

Posted on October 12, 2010 by Juan

My column on Iran’s Ahmadinejad and Lebanon is up at Truthdig:

Excerpt:

‘ Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Middle East’s populist answer to the American tea party, has stirred controversy with his trip to Lebanon, which will begin Wednesday. He is planning to visit villages in southern Lebanon on the border with Israel that have been rebuilt with Iranian aid after Israeli incursions and wars, the last in 2006. Ahmadinejad’s theatrical politics often make him a laughingstock, but his trip is intended to make the serious point that Tehran can stand up to Western sanctions and thwart attempts to box the Islamic Republic in.’

Read the whole thing.

Posted in Iran | Leave a comment

Ahmadinejad Promises to Protect Qana in South Lebanon

Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar Walk out on O’Reilly’s Muslim-Baiting

Top Ten Questions about Chile Mine Collapse: Was it Nixon-Kissinger’s Fault?

Ahmadinejad Pledges to Protect Lebanon

Palin Fear-Mongers on Iran, Sharia

Ahmadinejad Greeted by Cheering Throngs in Beirut

Google imagines an Atlantic Wind Grid

Cole on Ahmadinejad at Truthdig

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