Segacs's World I Know

Posts Tagged ‘iran’

Another day at the U.N., another toothless move to try to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions:

The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously on Saturday to impose new sanctions on Iran for its nuclear ambitions by targeting Tehran’s arms exports, state-owned bank and elite Revolutionary Guards.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki immediately rejected the council’s demand to suspend uranium enrichment, which can be used for making bombs and to general electricity. He maintained Iran’s program was for peaceful purposes.

It’s almost like watching paint dry, seeing the predictable moves play out. This is a game the U.N. has no desire to play, and Ahmadinejad knows it full well. He’s already concluded that there is nothing the world can do to stop him from going nuclear, and that by pressing the U.N.’s buttons like this, he’s only exposing its weaknesses further.

And with the United States tied up in Iraq, Israel facing an existential threat if it attempts to thwart Iran, and the rest of the world casually indifferent, the outcome of this game has been determined months ago. And even the best-case endgame scenario here is pretty damn frightening.

The Eurovision song competition is the latest to jump on the anti-Israel bandwagon, threatening to ban this year’s Israeli entry for having an “inappropriate political message”:

Eurovision Song Contest organizers said Thursday they might ban this year’s Israeli entry, “Push the Button,” because they say it has an inappropriate political message.

The song, to be performed at the contest in Helsinki in May, overwhelmingly won Israel’s competition Wednesday. It’s sung in English, French and Hebrew by the group Teapacks and seemingly refers indirectly to Iran’s nuclear ambitions and its hard-line leader, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

“It’s absolutely clear that this kind of message is not appropriate for the competition,” said Kjell Ekholm, an organizer of the contest. “We’ll have all the delegation leaders here in Helsinki next week, and I’m sure we’ll talk about this case within the EBU (European Broadcasting Union) group.”

The song warns about the dangers of nuclear war, but in an interview with the Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot, band members denied that the song is about Iran, calling that “absurd.”

The lyrics of the song refer to “demonic” and “crazy rulers,” and say that “he’s gonna blow us up to … kingdom come.”

Ahmadinejad’s recent anti-Jewish statements have added to fears in Israel that Iran’s nuclear program is intended to produce weapons that could be used against that country.

And apparently the contest organizers support Iran’s ambitions to wipe Israel off the map enough to believe that any song that protests against it – or against nuclear war in general – is “not appropriate”.

Hear that? It’s Israel Double Standard Time, still ticking away.

Ehud Olmert found out the hard way that Prime Ministers aren’t allowed to have slips of the tongue. . . especially when the subject in question is nuclear weaponry:

Israel’s prime minister spent Tuesday trying to put the nuclear genie back into the bottle after a remark in an interview was interpreted as confirming that Israel has nuclear weapons – widely assumed to be true, but never officially admitted by Israel.

Meanwhile, ambiguity has never been the strong suit of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad today told delegates at an international conference questioning the Holocaust that Israel’s days were numbered.

Ahmadinejad, who has sparked international outcry by referring to the killing of six million Jews in World War 2 as a “myth” and calling for Israel to be “wiped off the map”, launched another verbal attack on the Jewish state.

“Thanks to people’s wishes and God’s will the trend for the existence of the Zionist regime is downwards and this is what God has promised and what all nations want,” he said.

“Just as the Soviet Union was wiped out and today does not exist, so will the Zionist regime soon be wiped out,” he added.

Was Olmert’s statement a deliberate warning in response to Ahmadinejad’s blustering? Or was it an honest mistake? If the latter, then just chalk it up to Olmert’s long list of gaffes. But if the former, it seems nobody has ever bothered to explain Israel Double-Standard Time to Olmert. Either way, he’s likely going to pay the price for this one.

(Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust-denial conference, by the way? It’s amazingly sparking protests among Iranian students. This is bound to be deeply embarrassing to the Iranian dictator, and he will probably take some sort of steps to quell the dissent. Keep an eye on this one – it could be a big story.)

These women stood up to speak out against radical fundamenatalism in the middle east and in the world:

“We must speak out now, because we’ve got nothing to lose,” said Dr. Wafa Sultan, one of four Middle Eastern women taking part in a panel discussion in Montreal yesterday to argue their position on the West’s response to Islam.

The four were keynote speakers at an Institute of Public Affairs of Montreal conference. They talked before the event about the place of women under the yoke of an increasingly fundamentalist Middle East.

[ . . . ]

Iranian-born Nazanin Afshin-Jam, a former Miss Canada, has been leading an international effort to publicize the plight of an 18-year-old Tehran rape victim sentenced to death under sharia law. Afshin-Jam recalled a peaceful rally held in Iran in which the protesting women were dispersed by extremist, heavily veiled women.

“They feel more powerful,” she said of the veiled women.

Sultan said many Muslim women are not freely choosing to wear the veil, but do so because it’s in their best interest.

Islam has other ways of enforcing a bias against women, Afshin-Jam said: “In Iran, 65 per cent of university students are women but the laws say women are not allowed to be judges.”

And under sharia law, it’s very difficult for a woman’s word to be taken seriously, she said.

In the West, “we cannot afford to lose our cherished freedoms to radicalism,” Brigitte Gabriel, a Lebanese Christian, told the conference audience later in a Delta Hotel meeting room.

We often wonder where the voices are, speaking out against oppression and injustice. They exist; there are too few of them so far, they tend to get drowned out, and those who speak sadly – in this country where freedom of speech is cherished – often fear legitimately for their personal safety. But more and more, they exist. And we owe it to them to listen to what they have to say. Because the more people speak out, the more courageous the next people will feel… and the next… and the next.

Dissidents or secularist bloggers are still being gagged in Iran… but the clerics are blogging up a storm.

This started off as merely an amusing tidbit but I wonder what’s in store. The blogosphere is one of the last arenas of freedom of speech, and it seems that Iran’s hardline religious leaders have chosen it as their next battleground. So far they’ve only been concentrating on Iran, but the global nature of the Internet makes me wonder how far off we are from seeing attempts by Islamists to control worldwide blogging content. It’s something every blogger ought to be keeping a close watch on.

Believe it or not, other newsworthy things happened in the world yesterday and today. You’d never know it from watching the local news, of course, which has been covering Dawson nonstop since yesterday afternoon. But here are a few things that happened in the world outside our little corner:

• Sadaam’s judge doesn’t think he was a dictator. So what was he, then? A democratically-elected leader? A royal monarch? The winner of the first season of Iraqi Idol?
• The new Palestinian “unity” government appears likely to get its funding back from Europe, though the U.S. isn’t on board.
• Amnesty said Hezbollah committed war crimes, in what Charles Johnson over at LGF dubbed a flying pig moment. I’m shocked too. Amnesty gets so much more money and support when it’s directing its wrath at Israel.
• In a big sign of normalcy returning to the country, Israel’s getting its international soccer games back.
• Germany ordained its first rabbis since 1942. See that big middle finger in the air, you neo-Nazi assholes?
• Speaking of Jews and Europe, Pajamas Media is all over this under-reported story about the defamation trial that just begun in France against three Jewish citizens who questioned the French Channel 2 network for its coverage of the Mohammed Al-Dura affair.
• The Pope has pissed off Muslims, it seems, by making some statements that, regardless of their intent, will surely be taken way out of context. This could be a thing.
• Bibi said that Ahmadinejad is “more dangerous than Hitler”. You’d think such a normally-competent debater would’ve heard of Godwin’s Law, no?
• And in other news, Stephen Colbert’s bridge in Hungary looks like it isn’t going to happen, despite his large margin of victory in the online naming poll, due to the tiny problem of his failing to meet one of the qualifications – being dead. Whoops! (By the way, Budapest rocks!)

Okay, I think that about does it for the ten-second catch-up. Or, as the BUZZ puts it, some “temporary relief from ignorance”.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is taking more steps to stamp out dissent and reform in Iran:

Iran’s hard-line president urged students Tuesday to push for a purge of liberal and secular university teachers, another sign of his determination to strengthen Islamic fundamentalism in the country.

With his call echoing the rhetoric of the nation’s 1979 Islamic revolution, Ahmadinejad appears determined to remake Iran by reviving the fundamentalist goals pursued under the republic’s late founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Iran still has strong moderate factions, and since taking office a year ago Ahmadinejad has moved to replace pragmatic veterans in the government and diplomatic corps with former military commanders and inexperienced religious hard-liners. His administration also has launched crackdowns on independent journalists, Web sites and bloggers.

Hey Mahmoud, what’s wrong? Can’t stand the blogging competition?

Seems that in addition to calling for Israel’s destruction, denying the Holocaust, and developing nuclear weapons, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s list of hobbies has expanded to include blogging.

I wonder if this will be any more interesting than Paul Martin’s foray into the blogosphere. By the looks of it, not so far.

• The London Times reports that Iran is trying to mine Uranium in Africa, with the goal of importing it to make, well, I’ll give you three guesses. (Via IrisBlog).
• Related to the above, Mark C. at Daimnation links to this excellent editorial in the New York Times by a French writer explaining the existential threat to Israel that made the Lebanon war necessary. (Link requires registration).
• The big story making the rounds online, of course, is about the doctored Qana photos, a story that LGF has been all over for a couple of days now. Allison links to Reuters’ (belated) response to this fiasco. (My personal opinion? While I’m sure Reuters will end up with some egg on their face over this one, it won’t be nearly enough, and in fifty years people will still be quoting some of the exaggerations from Qana as fact, just as they’re still quoting the exaggerations from Deir Yassin today. And you know what else? I can’t even bring myself to get worked up about it, because symbols last longer than facts in any case, and innocent civilians were killed in Qana, and even though Hezbollah is deliberately doing much, much worse on a daily basis, the focusing on the conspiracies and exaggerations is going to ring hollow no matter what. But I’ve ranted about this already, so I’ll leave it at that for now.)
• And while the attention of the world is focused on Israel and Lebanon, things in Sri Lanka are getting worse. But is anyone noticing? When will 15,000 people will turn up in downtown Montreal to protest this war? (Oh, right, that’s just reserved for wars they can blame on the J-E-W-S).

On that note, time for bed.

Montreal’s hosting the first-ever OutGames. And Pauline has the scoop on the only people who seem to be offended, and on why:

Quebec agency offended by “Outgames”

Not by the existence of the event, a sort of gay and lesbian Olympics, but by the fact that organizers didn’t bother to give the name “Outgames” a French translation.

People unfamiliar with Quebec society might think I am making this up.

I am not.

Nope, not surprised at all. Pauline continues with a rant about the OLF that is pretty much what I would say about them. (Oh wait, I think I did. Yep.)

But what really gets me is this tidbit, linked to by Pauline at the end of her post:

But what IS news, and what brought this to my attention today, was this report:

Iranian Leader Bans Usage of Foreign Words

Way to go, Ahmadinejad, your repressive tactics have finally caught up with those of the Province of Quebec.

It’s refreshing to see that this language nonsense is the only controversy that the OutGames seem to be generating. Just another reason why I love Montreal so much. When I consider the very real problems of the rest of the world, I love how petty ours are in comparison.

By the way, I haven’t actually attended any of the OutGames events just yet, but it will be going on for a couple of weeks so I hope to make it to something-or-other. Downtown has been a lot of fun, though, in the leadup to the event. This is big from a tourism point of view, and it’s nice to see so many businesses getting into the spirit of things and flying rainbow flags or otherwise rolling out the welcome mat.

It’s also nice to see the influx of extremely fit, good-looking men, in town for the event… in particular, the three guys in Finland shirts walking down St-Denis this afternoon. (No, the point of the OutGames isn’t lost on me. But hey, a girl can look, right? No harm in a little eye candy.)