Arthur,
This is an embarrassing piece on the part of the Globe and Mail. Far
more statements made by Ahmadinejad on his invitational visit rang true,
and nailed Bush and his administration squarely on the head, without
being rude. Even the conservative Victoria Times Colonist printed
several of his sobering quotes that represent a far more rational leader
than Bush 43. Posting this just contributes to the ignorance;
hi-lighting such phrases as: *Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's talk at Columbia
University on Monday was so funny it could lead to war.* is inexcusable.
No, manipulators like this guy and journalists of his ilk are who sway
public opinion, and it is their words which reflect war mongering
propaganda that pave the ugly road to more Iraq-like invasions.
How can anyone fail to remember what similar propaganda occurred to
manipulate Americans to invade Iraq? How can anyone fail to observe what
that war was really about, and how can anyone fail to remember that
hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians have died because of Bush's
power tripping and greed? There are over two million internally
displaced civilians in Iraq because of this war and the recent "surge",
and about 2.5 million other Iraqi refugees who were forced to leave
their homeland because of lies on the part of the Bush administration.
I think that the Columbia University speech was either a set up to try
to make the guy look bad, and thereby help prepare the US nation
psychologically for war they don't want with Iran, or that the
university president took some serious heat (for having invited the guy
to campus) or serious bribes to have so rudely discredited their guest.
One thing for sure: Bush would never have had the guts to visit a
university in Iran under similar circumstances. Apart from the fact that
some might try to kill him, Bush has way, way more to hide than Iran's
leader. Bush is one stinkin' coward and mass murderer.
To accept the official version of 9/11 is one thing, but to not
understand the preambles to warmongering is a whole other serious
problem. Not to stop and think how the $billions spent on Iraq could
have been spent to enrich lives instead of ruin them is beyond my
comprehension. I understand that most people of Jewish descent are going
to have problems with Ahmadinejad, but as has been pointed out, even
Castro and Khrushchev got more respectful treatment on their visits to
the US., the latter a parade. No doubt the Russian leader deserved it
for the fact he began selling South West Russian crude secretly to the
US amidst a cold war, but the Iranians aren't sharing.
Arab nations' leaders enjoy respect and even protection from 9/11
prosecution because they cooperate with the US for the mutual benefits
of oil, despite atrocious human rights records towards all, including
women and homosexuals. The U.S. can't take on Russia, and it can't take
on China, so their leaders get respect, too. Human rights aside, they're
just too big. Iran's leader is being targeted because the US leaders
want their oil, they want to further fatten their war-related portfolios
by continuing with another war, they want control of Iran's strategic
waterways and connecting oil spigots from and to other nations, and they
want the dollar to remain the oil trade currency. Oh, and I almost
forgot--they need a scapegoat for failing to win the hearts and minds of
the Iraqis.
I won't take up people's time by listing the ways in which corporate
America, the US government and military have stolen from Iraqi people
and ensured future rights to their resources.
I couldn't help but notice your postings about Swiss racial profiling.
They seemed to follow Swiss Chris's postings about the other point of
view around the Iranian leader's US visit. (Are you bearing in mind that
the US only allowed some 500 Iraqis into the country 2001-2006, and no
more than that many since the Surge?)
I hope you're aware that it is you who first brought up a topic that is
currently but barely directly related to the future of work. I recall
that once the USS Liberty topic got too hot, you took sharp reins to
steer us away from what quickly festered into a war of words. Now /you
/have initiated another such topic.
Arthur, politics is an inevitable ingredient within the future of work,
and people's attitudes and beliefs are those which shape economies. Your
beliefs have fueled this posting of my beliefs, and I shall conclude by
saying that there won't be much of a future for work, in the US, Canada,
Iraq or possibly Iran, if people continue to allow themselves to be
manipulated by the few who profit by war.
Natalia Kuzmyn
From the Undernews yesterday at:
http://prorev.com/indexa.htm
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
AHMADINEJAD: THE MISSED OPPORTUNITY
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Sam Smith
The childish, petulant, hypocritically self-righteous and jingoistic
attacks on Iran's president by politicians and members of the media
provides a useful insight into why America is such a hated place in the
world these days.
The reality of the world is that there are places where the Holocaust is
denied, women are badly mistreated and gays abused and then there are
other places that have been responsible for the deaths of over a million
Iraqi civilians and have caused much of the global ecological damage
that threaten the lives of millions of other humans.
The rational approach to ameliorating the damage done by both such
places does not rest on the unilateral assessment of blame, unilateral
admission of guilt or on military action that increases the number of
victims. It depends rather on incremental acceptance of new ways agreed
upon because they work well for all parties. As Benjamin Franklin said
of happiness, peace does not depend on great strokes of good fortune but
on the little felicities of every day.
Because the American elite, from the president of Columbia University to
the Columbia Broadcasting System commentator, is so absorbed in a
fantasy of its own perfection, it is constitutionally unable - save in
rare moments - to step down from a self constructed altar and make the
successive small adjustments necessary for peace, progress and cooperation.
Thus, if they had not been so obsessively narcissistic, those attacking
Ahmadinejad might have noticed that the Iranian president was opening a
door for discussion, negotiation and perhaps even resolution. Would it
work? We don't know, but we know for certain that not taking the
opportunity will not do a single thing for women or gays in Iraq nor
bring Ahmadinejad any closer to understanding the history of Nazism.
Instead we could easily find ourselves in an even more disastrous war in
part because we don't talk to people who don't understand the Holocaust.
In fact, if one examines Ahmadinejad's statements, he has shifted his
position on some of these issues. Not that words are inherently
important. We have wasted years as American and Israeli officials
insisted they would not talk to country X until it "recognizes the right
of Israel to exist." In fact, the miscreants long recognized that right;
they just don't want to do with their lips.
WHAT ARE WE AFRAID OF?
PATRICK J. BUCHANAN - What is it about this tiny man that induces such
irrationality?
Answer: He is president of a nation that is a "state sponsor of terror,"
is seeking nuclear weapons, and is moving munitions to the Taliban and
insurgents in Iraq.
But Libya was a "state sponsor of terror," and Col. Ghadafi was
responsible for Pan Am 103, the Lockerbie massacre of school kids coming
home for Christmas. And President Bush secretly negotiated a renewal of
relations in return for Ghadafi giving up his nuclear program and
compensating the families of the victims of that atrocity. Has
Ahmadinejad ever committed an act of terror like this?
Richard Nixon went to Moscow and concluded strategic arms agreements
while Moscow was the arms supplier of the enemy we were fighting in
Vietnam that used, at Hue, mass murder as a war tactic.
Nixon went to Beijing to toast Mao Zedong, the greatest mass murderer in
history, responsible for the deaths of 37,000 Americans in Korea, who
was, in 1972, persecuting and murdering dissidents in the Great
Proletarian Cultural Revolution run by his crazed wife, and
transshipping Russian weapons into Vietnam.
And Nixon is today hailed as a statesman for having gone there.
In 1959, President Eisenhower rode up Pennsylvania Avenue in an open
convertible with Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin's gauleiter in Ukraine, who,
three years before his tour of the United States, had sent tanks into
Budapest to butcher the patriots of the Hungarian Revolution.
What has Ahmadinejad done to rival these monsters?. . .
True, as the Washington Times charges, Ahmadinejad invited David Duke to
Tehran to a conference of Holocaust deniers, and his minions chant
"Death to America" and "Death to Israel."
But every mob in the Middle East shouts such slogans. And Duke was the
Republican candidate for governor of Louisiana in 1991 and got a
majority of the white vote. And Holocaust deniers meet regularly in the
United States. Yet we seem to survive.
http://www.antiwar.com/pat/?articleid=11667
***********************************************
Cordell, Arthur: ECOM wrote:
AMERICA
Comment Column
*The consequences of that wild and crazy Ahmadinejad*
JOHN IBBITSON
26 September 2007The Globe and Mail
*Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's talk at Columbia University on Monday was so
funny it could lead to war.*
The Iranian President, who was in New York to attend the United
Nations General Assembly, accepted an invitation to speak and to take
questions at Columbia. The invitation afforded a valuable opportunity
to assess the political leader directly rather than through the filter
of press reports.
*Mr. Ahmadinejad, it turns out, is a laugh riot*. When asked why his
regime executed homosexuals, he replied: "In Iran, we don't have
homosexuals, like in your country. I don't know who's told you that we
have it."
As one wag in this office observed, there'd be no homosexuals in
Canada, either, if it were a hanging offence.
When asked why women in Iran are deprived of fundamental human rights,
Mr. Ahmadinejad insisted the very opposite was the case. Iranian women
are so highly valued, he said, that "they are exempt from many
responsibilities. Many of the legal responsibilities rest on the
shoulders of men in our society because of the respect, culturally
given, to women."
There's more, folks. After exalting the importance of scientific
inquiry, Mr. Ahmadinejad went on to warn that "one of the main harms
inflicted against science is to limit it to experimental and physical
sciences." Scientific research, he insisted, must be guided by purity
of spirit and submission to divine will -- which explains why the
Islamic world took a pass on the Enlightenment and the Industrial
Revolution.
And he castigated those "bullying powers" who "violate individual and
social freedoms in their own nations," who "do not respect the privacy
of their own people," and who "create an insecure psychological
atmosphere in order to justify their warmongering acts." This, from
the President of Iran? Stop, you're killing me.
Anyone who watched that presentation with an open mind, or who
listened to Mr. Ahmadinejad's arrogant diatribe against "impious
powers" at the General Assembly yesterday, must have shared Columbia
president Lee Bollinger's "revulsion at what you stand for." And
that's a problem.
We are entering very dangerous days with Iran. Despite Mr.
Ahmadinejad's insistence that his country has neither homosexuals nor
a covert nuclear weapons program, it's pretty certain that both exist.
The United States and Britain want the UN to tighten economic
sanctions against Iran, and France has gone from cringing
accommodation under Jacques Chirac to blunt confrontation under
Nicolas Sarkozy.
"There will be no peace in the world if the international community
falters in the face of nuclear arms proliferation," the French
President told the General Assembly yesterday. "Weakness and
renunciation do not lead to peace. They lead to war." Welcome back,
France.
But Russia and China continue to block tougher sanctions. One solution
might be a joint European-North American agreement on stricter trade
and financial embargoes. If Iran persists in its nuclear weapons
program, however, it will become increasingly difficult to stay the
hands of the hawks. The West mustn't, and Israel won't, ever allow
people such as Mr. Ahmadinejad to acquire nuclear capability.
And yet, it's more complicated than that. Iran's President is only one
of several actors in the country's power structure, and not
necessarily the most powerful. There is internal opposition to the
current regime; Mr. Ahmadinejad could be removed by the voters before
he is removed by any coalition.
If the sanctions are too oppressive, or if Israel or the West strikes
prematurely, then moderate voices in Tehran could be silenced. How do
we know the current regime isn't actually trying to incite an attack,
as an excuse to suppress domestic opposition?
If Mr. Ahmadinejad sought, through his talks at Columbia and the UN,
to soften his personal image and to present his regime as moderate and
humane, he failed miserably. His endless evasions, circumlocutions and
occasional accidental flashes of brutality could only harden
opposition among people of goodwill to him and to his regime.
It would be good to see the end of Mr. Ahmadinejad. It was good to see
the end of Saddam Hussein. There were consequences in that instance,
however, and there would be consequences this time, too.
It will take wisdom in Washington and London and Paris and Berlin to
navigate between the evils of appeasement and imperialism, to contain
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad without turning Iran into Iraq.
Still, I don't know about you, but I could do without having to listen
to that man again.
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