Bloodthirsty Liberal

He is threatening the West with an unspecified attack on February 11th.

How coy.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says the nation will deliver a harsh blow to the “global arrogance” on this year’s anniversary of the Islamic Revolution.

“The Islamic Revolution opened a window to liberty for the human race, which was trapped in the dead ends of materialism,” Ahmadinejad said during a cabinet meeting on Sunday.

“If the Islamic Revolution had not occurred, liberalism and Marxism would have crushed all human dignity in their power-seeking and money-grubbing claws. Nothing would have remained of human and spiritual principles,” he added.

Interesting that he equates Liberalism with Marxism in opposition to the liberty conferred by Sha’aria. Shows to go you what a different planet he inhabits.

More ranting here

BBC Monitoring Middle East, Ahmadinejad spoke on official Iranian television, saying that this year’s “Ten Days of Dawn” celebration, marking the anniversary of the country’s Islamic Revolution, would see the “demise” of the American system.

“I believe that 22 Bahman [ February 11 in the Persian calendar] this year marks the demise of the liberal capitalist system.” Ahmadinejad said.

…

Ahmadinejad claimed that Iran was an “inspiring” and “justice-seeking” country, which was just being “introduced to the world.”

“On the other hand, the Iranian nation is being introduced around the world as an inspiring, idealistic, revolutionary, God-seeking, justice-seeking, pure and humane nation.”

Ahmadinejad continued the narrative of America’s impending doom in a speech Saturday, Jan. 30, claiming that the Iranian revolution was the final step in God’s plan for the world.

“God created mankind … to reach a point that it could have control over the world of creation and days and nights,” Ahmadinejad said. “It is clear to all of us that the Islamic Revolution today is a giant stride toward the implementation of this great goal. The Islamic Revolution is in the direction, and of the same nature of, the great prophet’s move. It is guided by God.”

Well, I certainly look forward to the all the excitement on Thursday!

- Aggie

Ralph Peters with some words of encouragement for sub-Saharan Africa:

Whatever planet Earth may find in short supply in 2010, violence and misrule will remain abundant, from the most-recent round of Muslim-vs.-Christian massacres in Nigeria to Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez’s delight in unleashing his thugs on students marching for freedom.

But no region — not even sub-Saharan Africa — competes with the greater Middle East when it comes to wanton savagery, thwarted opportunities and the danger posed to innocent populations around the world. With fanatical terrorists of unprecedented brutality, Islamist extremists pursuing nuclear weapons, rogue regimes, disintegrating states and threats of genocide against Israel, the lands of heat and dust between the Nile and the Indus form a realm of deadly failure that will haunt the civilized world throughout our lifetimes.

A survey of the region’s key countries — and problems — doesn’t offer much good news for the Obama Administration’s naive foreign policy efforts:

Said survey follows.

Oh, okay, you want a few highlights?

LEBANON: This isn’t a country — it’s a temporary stand-off.

…

Hezbollah has been rearming mightily in the wake of its 2006 war with Israel. A new war would devastate much of Lebanon — if internal strife doesn’t do it first.

…

EGYPT: … Egypt faces a potential succession crisis as octogenarian president Hosni Mubarak, who’s ruled the country for almost three decades, grooms his singularly unimpressive son, Gamal, to take over upon his death.

…

SYRIA: The neighborhood’s in such awful shape that this police state’s beginning to look like a success story…. When Damascus looks like a beacon, it’s getting awfully dark in the Middle East.

…

IRAQ: Can’t say we didn’t try. After years of serious progress toward a national compromise… [r]econciliation has come to a screeching halt. The Shia are smug, the Sunnis feel betrayed, and the Kurds are still denied title to the traditionally Kurdish city of Kirkuk. Every faction’s fighting for a greater share of oil revenues. And the Obama administration’s AWOL (this was Bush’s war — we wouldn’t want a positive outcome).

…

SAUDI ARABIA: Its two main exports are oil and fanaticism…. They care only for their repressive version of Islam. The birthplace of Bin Laden, Saudi Arabia’s differences with his terror organization are over strategy and tactics, not over their mutual goal of forcing extremist Islam on all of humanity.

IRAN: Racing to acquire nuclear weapons, delighting in the prospect of a cataclysmic war that would lead to the “return of the hidden imam,” beating the hell out of its own people in the streets, murdering members of the intelligentsia, and explicit in its vows to destroy Israel, the government of Iran continues to be protected by China and Russia.

If you want to know more about that benighted, poxy patch of scrub and swampland… I pity you. You need a date.

An ayatollah can’t-ah get-ah enough-ah this-ah:

Speaking in a Friday prayer sermon, Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati said the wave of street demonstrations sparked by the disputed June presidential election would not have lasted until now if protesters had been executed early on.

“Whatever we suffered was because of our weakness. How many did the judiciary execute on July 9?” he said, referring to one of the particularly large protest days.

“We showed weakness, so then we had Ashoura,” he said, referring to a major protest on December 27. “If you show weakness now, the future will be worse … There is no room for Islamic mercy.”

“Islamic mercy”, that’s a good one.

“Stand up courageously for the sake of God, the same way you executed these two persons very quickly.”

Jannati cited verses from the Quran, Islam’s holy book, that he said show Islam permits rulers to kill their opponents, including “hypocrites, those with evil intentions and those who spread rumors.”

I took some heat here a while back for asking of the Buddhist protesters in Burma what did they expect to happen. They could take to the streets with all the righteous indignation and karmic justification they could muster, but if they weren’t armed, if they didn’t have a Plan B should the government choose not to surrender to their moral superiority, their saffron robes just made them target practice.

In the short term, I was right, of course. Who knows, maybe millennia from now, I’ll look like an ass (don’t say it!).

I was more hopeful of the Iranian protesters. If anything, the government was even more entrenched, more determined to defeat them—but the common Iranian man and woman (we still weep for Neda) had a little more fight in them, I thought.

And, who knows, maybe America was supporting them. (If we ever were, I could see President Obama putting an end to it.)

But now I have to wonder what it was all about. There is certainly no cause more just than liberating yourself from a cruel and repressive totalitarian regime, be it in Iran, or Burma, or wherever. But failure can’t be an option. The picture above was intended to be offensive and cruel to those who didn’t expect it. That’s the nature of failed insurrections. I wouldn’t blame you for not trying, but I can’t celebrate you for trying and losing. It’s not fair to those in the picture.

As the Grand High Exalted Mystic Ruler of Bloodthirstan, I feel I owe you an apology from the core of my heart, from the depths of my soul, for not predicting this:

Following are excerpts from an address delivered by Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami, member of the Iranian Assembly of Experts, which aired on Channel 1, Iranian TV, on January 22, 2010.

What emerges from the catastrophe [in Haiti] is its inhumane exploitation by the US. The US, under the pretext of humanitarian aid to the people of Haiti, deployed 18,000 troops to Haiti and officially occupied it.

Until last night, the US had prevented [the dispatching] of relief planes, which carried dozens of tons of food and medicine, as well as medical personnel, who wanted to provide humanitarian relief. It did not permit the arrival of urgent aid. If the US had allowed the planes to land, so many people under the rubble could have been rescued. Once again, the US is an accomplice to these crimes.

The US realizes that South America – which once was its backyard, and which the US believed was under its thumb… The US realizes that a wave of [South] American nationalism has begun, and its wants, by means of the occupation of Haiti, to uproot this movement.

But the US should know that what’s done is done, and with the grace of God, this century will witness the decline of the [powers of] arrogance.

[…]

There have been news reports that the Zionist regime, in the case of the catastrophe of Haiti, and under the pretext of providing relief to the people of Haiti, is stealing the organs of these wretched people.

Wow…

I mean, wow…

Can’t we bomb them just for that?

First of all, why would Israel fly across the globe for a few mangy Haitian organs (out of disease and malnutrition, I hasten to add, not racial inferiority) when they have a plentiful supply of Palestinian organs close by? Logic, dear boy, logic.

Maybe you don’t buy the he-who-saves-a-life-saves-the-world business, but you can’t just throw this kind of stuff out there and not expect to be challenged on it.

Well, in Iran you can, I guess.

And if the Israelis have no interest in their organs, what possible interest could we Americans have in the rest of the place? This my be news to Ayatollah Khatami-tune, but we’re not dancing in the streets here (as you all did after 9/11), chanting “We got Haiti! We got Haiti!”

It’s more like we’re holding a dripping mess and saying “What do we do with it?” Here, Iran, it’s yours. With our compliments.

But no, you’re just some dusty little anti-Semitic backwater, despised by everyone, especially fellow Muslims (who think you’re debased and deranged), and which hasn’t contributed anything to world culture beyond rugs, cats, and donuts in thousands of years.

Okay, we’ll give you Nazanin Boniadi:

But other than her, you have nothing to say to us. Nothing.

Iran’s got a big scare. And it’s name is Shapiro:

Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei said that the region would soon witness annihilation of the Zionist regime, stressing that Muslim countries can make such a happening even more imminent.

“Certainly, the regional countries will witness the annihilation of the Zionist regime one day and its proximity in terms of time depends on the function of the Islamic countries and Muslim nations,” Ayatollah Khamenei said in a meeting with Mauritanian President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz on Wednesday.

He further stressed that Mauritanian government’s severance of ties with Israel last year served a good model for certain Arab governments.

“The Zionist regime is a big danger to the Muslim world, which hatches plots every day to expand its infiltration and dominance in the region,” Ayatollah Khamenei warned.

It is?

Really?

Can you find Israel in there anywhere? You have to look hard and squint. It’s like “Where’s Waldstein?”

I can see the Zionist regime being a danger to Nepal, maybe, or Ghana—not enough Muslims there to fend off its “plots” and “infiltration” and “dominance”….

I’m sorry, I can’t go on. It’s kind of funny, but not really.

Especially when you think that the wacky ayatollah who thinks like this is about to have a picnic basket full of tactical nuclear weapons. Funny, but funny as a mushroom cloud.

PS: I wonder why the map shows Sudan and Somalia as a neutral color? Aren’t they largely Muslim? And why isn’t Iran ticked of at Uganda and Georgia and Cyprus, and other states that spoil the uninterrupted map of Muslimity? Why is it only Israel that drives them crazier than they already are? I mean, I think I know, but I’m just posing the question.

This one is real

The People’s Mujaheddin is sick and tired of being called a terrorist organization by the U.S. government. So leaders of the terrorist group settled on a uniquely American strategy for handling this problem: They sued.

Yes, the group has done its share of assassinations, bombings, embassy attacks and killings of U.S. troops. But that was long ago, and now the People’s Mujaheddin wants to let bygones be bygones. It says it has devoted itself to democracy and nonviolence, and it would like very much to be taken off the State Department’s list of international terrorist groups.

Friends of the People’s Mujaheddin Organization of Iran — a.k.a. MEK, a.k.a. Mujaheddin-e Khalq, a.k.a. National Liberation Army of Iran, a.k.a. National Council of Resistance, a.k.a. Organization of the People’s Holy Warriors — assembled in a fifth-floor courtroom at the U.S. courthouse in Washington on Tuesday to hear Andrew Frey of the firm Mayer Brown plead their case.

“Today’s PMOI is unique among foreign terrorist organizations,” the lawyer told a three-judge appellate panel. “The organization has foresworn violence. We walk the walk. There have been no terrorist acts by PMOI for eight years.”

But couldn’t the attacks resume? “The fact that terrorist activities are bad if they happen could be said of the Girl Scouts,” Frey reasoned.

The People’s Mujaheddin as Girl Scouts. Only in America.

You see, folks, you need a special mindset to even imagine something like that happening in a court of law. And with the Obama administration, we have achieved that mindset.

- Aggie

Let this be a lesson to our biking enthusiasts out there: motorcycles may be “everywhere” (as the bumper stickers constantly remind us), but that’s not necessarily a good thing:

An Iranian state broadcaster on Tuesday blamed “Zionist and American agents” for a bomb which killed Iranian nuclear physics professor Massoud Ali Mohammadi.

The IRIB report, cited by Reuters, claimed that a bomb-rigged motorcycle parked outside the professor’s Teheran home was “detonated by a remote control.”

IRIB did not give a source for the allegation.

“As a result of the bomb planted by Zionist and American agents two cars and a motorcycle were severely damaged and the windows in the surrounding residential units were shattered,” the report said.

The professor was “martyred this morning in a terrorist act by anti-revolutionary and arrogant powers’ elements,” the broadcaster said.

Why are they blaming us? Was it a Harley or something? Are there Israeli motorcycle companies I’m not aware of? They obviously wouldn’t call them “hogs”.

No windsurfing in the Persian Gulf, for you, Sen. Kerry:

Iranian legislators on Sunday decided to not allow a visit from Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry (D-Mass.), according to Iranian media.

“Members of the Iranian parliament’s Foreign Relations Committee (a subcommittee of the parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Commission) voiced opposition to the request after studying the issue,” Hassan Ebrahimi, head of the committee, told the semi-official Fars News Agency.

Several Iranian news outlets reported last week that Kerry had submitted an official request to visit Tehran in an emissary role.

Kerry spokesman Frederick Jones told the Wall Street Journal before Christmas, though, that no trip had been scheduled. “Is he planning now on going to Iran? The answer is no,” said Jones.

We’re agreed on that, at least.

What greater or lesser Satan lies behind the riots and protests filling the streets and squares all over Iran?

Is it:

a) Britain?

Britain has been told by Iran that it will get ‘a slap in the mouth’ if it does not stop interfering in Iranian affairs. Iran’s foreign minister called in British ambassador Simon Gass to protest at comments by David Miliband.

b) Israel?

“Since the beginning of the riots all evidence shows that there is a connection between the leaders of the struggle to the Zionists….

c) America?

“This is a nauseating masquerade that the Zionists and Americans organized and bought a ticket for, and for which they are the only spectators.

d) All of the above?

With respect, Mr. Ahmadingheihohjsdf, not the only spectators:

Body of Ali Mousavi

What a sick regime. We might as well call this story “Weekend at Ayatollah Bernie’s”:

A number of opposition figures have been arrested in Iran, a day after violent protests in the capital left at least eight people dead.

Those detained include senior aides to opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi.

His nephew Seyed Ali Mousavi was among those killed in Sunday’s violence, the worst since June’s contested elections.

Family members say they are being prevented from holding his funeral because his body has been taken from the hospital where it was being kept.

His brother, Seyed Reza Mousavi, is quoted by the reformist website Parlemannews as saying: “Nobody accepts responsibility for taking away the body… We cannot have a funeral before we find the body.”

Other opposition sources say the body has been taken by government agents in order to prevent his funeral becoming a rallying point for more protests.

It’s understandable. Remember how worked up the crowd got at Khomeini’s funeral?

To paraphrase John Lennon, Khomeini was bigger than Jesus.

I sure hope the protesters get somewhere, but it’s going to cost them a lot of blood. (It already has.) Interesting that what little we know of what’s going on there is not coming from the mainstream media, as they are sometimes honest enough to admit:

BBC Tehran correspondent Jon Leyne, reporting from London…

It hardly matters what he’s reporting. Tottenham is not Tehran. The Dog and Duck in Drury Lane may have a lovely steak and kidney pie and their Old Speckled Hen may be drinking beautifully right now, but if we’re not getting the straight poop on one of the most dangerous and destabilizing regimes since Adolf and Eva retired to the bunker for a shot or two, then we will get the Armageddon we deserve.

Melodramatic? Hope so. Overblown? We’ll see.