What? YOU again? Do you enjoy having these conversations with your own self?

Why, yes, I do! If no one else is interested in the most significant and most potentially catastrophic build-up to disaster of the young 21st century, I will chat among myself.

Death to America Death to America Death to America.

Oh, where was I? Here's the latest from the Boy Wonder, Ahmadinejad.

Susan

Iranian president ridicules European nuclear offer

by Farhad PouladiWed May 17, 8:03 AM ET

Iran's hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ridiculed a European Union plan to offer trade and technology incentives in exchange for his country agreeing to halt sensitive nuclear work. "They say they want to give us incentives. They think they can take away our gold and give us some nuts and chocolate in exchange," Ahmadinejad told a rally in the town of Arak.

In a confident speech carried live on state-run television, he also vowed the Islamic regime would not bow to demands it freeze uranium enrichment work -- at the centre of fears the country could acquire atomic weapons.

The president also again warned that Iran could quit the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and halt inspections by the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

"We accepted a suspension for two years," Ahmadinejad said, referring to a now-moribund deal with leading EU members Britain, France and Germany.

"This was a bitter experience for the Iranian people. The Iranians won't be bitten twice on the same spot," he told a crowd of thousands, drawing chants of "Death to America!" and "Ahmadinejad, we love you!"

Enrichment is a process that makes fuel for nuclear power reactors but can also produce the core of a nuclear weapon. Iran insists that it only wants to make reactor fuel and that this is a right enshrined by the NPT.

"We don't need incentives. There is no need to give us incentives, (You heard him. They don't need any stinkin' incentives!) just don't try to wrong us," said the president during the rock festival-style rally.

The European powers are currently drawing up a package of trade and technological incentives they hope will coax Iran into voluntarily curbing its atomic ambitions. (This could take a while as the European POWERS weigh the relative harshness of each word in their proposed mean, threatening letter to Tehran. "Or else what, Hans Brix?" as Kim Jong Il asked the weapons inspector in 'Team America.' "Or else we'll write an angry letter and tell you how upset we are.")

Under the draft deal, Russia would enrich uranium on Iran's behalf, diplomats say.

The offer -- which could include helping Iran acquire a light-water nuclear reactor -- was to have been reviewed Friday in London by the five permanent UN Security Council members plus Germany, but this meeting has been postponed.

"The reason is to allow more detailed preparations on the EU-3 proposals to Iran," a British Foreign Office spokesman told AFP in London. He added that a meeting would likely take place in the next 10 days or so.

A similar offer was made last year but also spurned by Tehran.

The Foreign Office spokesman declined to comment on Ahmadinejad's latest tough talk, saying: "He's been saying these things continuously ... and everyone knows our position."

Security Council members remain divided over how to crack down on Iran if the new offer is rejected.

Washington, along with the so-called EU-3, wants a Security Council resolution that would make a suspension legally-binding -- but Russia and China fear this would worsen tensions and open the door to military action.

In his speech, Ahmadinejad confidently asserted that the "Western powers were doomed to fail. These bullying powers are nothing and are bound to go away because they stand in the way of truth. They will be defeated and they won't last. This is the divine tradition," he said in his speech in Arak, situated 250 kilometres (160 miles) southwest of Tehran.

Arak is also the site of a planned heavy-water reactor, another source of concern in the West.

"As long as the nation is pious, it will overcome all problems and will humiliate the enemies," said Ahmadinejad, who managed to give a rousing speech despite an apparent soar throat.

The firebrand president also repeated a warning that Iran could follow the path of North Korea.

"Don't act in a way so that countries and other people stop being a member of the NPT and finish with the agency," he warned.

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin

O K Susan, since this thread is for talking to one's self, how about a repetition?

Aman has missiles and may fairly soon have nukes and his missiles range includes Europe, not the USA, therefor I think the Euros ( not the currency) should be very alert on this. They have the most to lose.

When is Russia and China, and other friends of Iran, going to open up their eyes to the true dangers that Iran represents.

http://www.canada.com/components/print.aspx?id=11fbf4a8-282a-4d18-954f-546709b1240f&k=32073 

Human rights groups are raising alarms over a new law passed by the Iranian parliament that would require the country's Jews and Christians to wear coloured badges to identify them and other religious minorities as non-Muslims.

"This is reminiscent of the Holocaust," said Rabbi Marvin Hier, the dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. "Iran is moving closer and closer to the ideology of the Nazis."

Jordan .

It always gets a little confusing, doesn't it? Ahmadinejad says the Holocaust is a myth but then, coincidentally, chooses the yellow swatch to designate Jews. I know he's a "teacher" so maybe somewhere we'll get a decent translation of just why he may want to have clear indications of who's who in Iran. There must be a logical explanation that has nothing to do with designating targets.

This article from last week seems to fit nicely here.

Susan

Never Again?
Washington Post
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, May 5, 2006; A19

When something happens for the first time in 1,871 years, it is worth noting. In A.D. 70, and again in 135, the Roman Empire brutally put down Jewish revolts in Judea, destroying Jerusalem, killing hundreds of thousands of Jews and sending hundreds of thousands more into slavery and exile. For nearly two millennia, the Jews wandered the world. And now, in 2006, for the first time since then, there are once again more Jews living in Israel -- the successor state to Judea -- than in any other place on Earth.

Israel's Jewish population has just passed 5.6 million. America's Jewish population was about 5.5 million in 1990, dropped to about 5.2 million 10 years later (2000) and is in a precipitous decline that, because of low fertility rates and high levels of assimilation, will cut that number in half by mid-century. (2.6 million)

When 6 million European Jews were killed in the Holocaust, only two main centers of Jewish life remained: America and Israel. That binary star system remains today, but a tipping point has just been reached. With every year, as the Jewish population continues to rise in Israel and decline in America (and in the rest of the Diaspora), Israel increasingly becomes, as it was at the time of Jesus, the center of the Jewish world.

An epic restoration, and one of the most improbable. To take just one of the remarkable achievements of the return: Hebrew is the only "dead" language in recorded history to have been brought back to daily use as the living language of a nation. But there is a price and a danger to this transformation. It radically alters the prospects for Jewish survival.

For 2,000 years, Jews found protection in dispersion -- protection not for individual communities, which were routinely persecuted and massacred, but protection for the Jewish people as a whole. Decimated here, they could survive there. They could be persecuted in Spain and find refuge in Constantinople. They could be massacred in the Rhineland during the Crusades or in the Ukraine during the Khmelnytsky Insurrection of 1648-49 and yet survive in the rest of Europe.

Hitler put an end to that illusion. He demonstrated that modern anti-Semitism married to modern technology -- railroads, disciplined bureaucracies, gas chambers that kill with industrial efficiency -- could take a scattered people and "concentrate" them for annihilation.

The establishment of Israel was a Jewish declaration to a world that had allowed the Holocaust to happen -- after Hitler had made his intentions perfectly clear -- that the Jews would henceforth resort to self-protection and self-reliance. And so they have, building a Jewish army, the first in 2,000 years, that prevailed in three great wars of survival (1948-49, 1967 and 1973).

But in a cruel historical irony, doing so required concentration -- putting all the eggs back in one basket, a tiny territory hard by the Mediterranean, eight miles wide at its waist. A tempting target for those who would finish Hitler's work.

His successors now reside in Tehran. The world has paid ample attention to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's declaration that Israel must be destroyed. Less attention has been paid to Iranian leaders' pronouncements on exactly how Israel would be "eliminated by one storm," as Ahmadinejad has promised.

Former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the presumed moderate of this gang, has explained that "the use of a nuclear bomb in Israel will leave nothing on the ground, whereas it will only damage the world of Islam." The logic is impeccable, the intention clear: A nuclear attack would effectively destroy tiny Israel, while any retaliation launched by a dying Israel would have no major effect on an Islamic civilization of a billion people stretching from Mauritania to Indonesia.

As it races to acquire nuclear weapons, Iran makes clear that if there is any trouble, the Jews will be the first to suffer. "We have announced that wherever [in Iran] America does make any mischief, the first place we target will be Israel," said Gen. Mohammad Ebrahim Dehghani, a top Revolutionary Guards commander. Hitler was only slightly more direct when he announced seven months before invading Poland that, if there was another war, "the result will be . . . the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe."

Last week Bernard Lewis, America's dean of Islamic studies, who just turned 90 and remembers the 20th century well, confessed that for the first time he feels it is 1938 again. He did not need to add that in 1938, in the face of the gathering storm -- a fanatical, aggressive, openly declared enemy of the West, and most determinedly of the Jews -- the world did nothing.

When Iran's mullahs acquire their coveted nukes in the next few years, the number of Jews in Israel will just be reaching 6 million. Never again?

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin

Germans should stop feeling Holocaust guilt: Ahmadinejad
Sun May 28, 2006 11:20 AM ET

By Erik Kirschbaum

BERLIN (Reuters) - Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told Germans they should no longer allow themselves to be held prisoner by a sense of guilt over the Holocaust and reiterated doubts that the Holocaust even happened.

In an interview with Germany's Der Spiegel magazine, Ahmadinejad said he doubted Germans were allowed to write "the truth" about the Holocaust and said he was still considering traveling to Germany for the World Cup soccer tournament.

"I believe the German people are prisoners of the Holocaust. More than 60 million were killed in World War Two ... The question is: Why is it that only Jews are at the center of attention?," he said in the interview published on Sunday.

"How long is this going to go on?" he added. "How long will the German people be held hostage to the Zionists?... Why should you feel obligated to the Zionists? You've paid reparations for 60 years and will have to pay for another 100 years."

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other leaders have said his previous remarks questioning whether the Holocaust happened were unacceptable. Denying the Holocaust is a serious crime in Germany punishable with a prison term of up to five years.

Six million Jews were killed by the Nazis and their allies in concentration camps.

In the rare interview with Western media, Ahmadinejad said if the Holocaust really happened Jews should be moved from Israel back to Europe.

"We say if the Holocaust happened, then the Europeans must accept the consequences and the price should not be paid by Palestine. If it did not happen, then the Jews must return to where they came from."

WORLD CUP

He said he was still considering going to Germany to support Iran in the World Cup despite protest stirred by a "worldwide network of Zionists".

Iran's first World Cup match is against Mexico in Nuremberg on June 11 two days after the tournament starts and German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble says he would be welcome to come because Germany wants to be a good host.

The invitation sparked protests from other political leaders and groups who said his anti-Israeli comments were unacceptable.

"My decision (on whether to go) depends on a lot of different things," said Ahmadinejad, a soccer fan. "Whether I have time, whether I want to and some other things."

He said he could not understand why his possible visit had caused such debate but was not surprised by the row.

"I was not at all surprised because there is a very active worldwide network of Zionists, also in Europe," he said in the rare interview with Western media that was published on Sunday.

Ahmadinejad's latest comments were condemned by the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. Rabbi Marvin Hier, a founder and dean, called on Merkel to keep him out of Germany.

"On a day when the Pope is in Auschwitz to remind the world of the horrors of the Holocaust, Ahmadinejad questions it again," Hier said. "For him to be at the World Cup and sit in a VIP seat would be a desecration of the memory of the Holocaust."

Asked by Der Spiegel, in its cover story entitled "The man the world is afraid of", whether he stood by his earlier view the Holocaust was a myth, Ahmadinejad said: "I only accept something as the truth if I am truly convinced of it.

"In Europe there are two opinions on it. One group of researchers who are by and large politically motivated say the Holocaust happened. There is another group of researchers who have the opposite view and are by and large in prison for that."

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin

Hey, Nuart, are you posting here again?

Yup, Susan, tis I!

Whadja got today?

This one from the WaPo. Who knew Karzai was visiting our good buddy Ahmadinejad in Iran last week?

This cannot be a good development.

All I can say is hmmmmmmm...

Keep me posted!

You know I will!

Nuart/Susan

Iran, Afghanistan Pledge Drug Crackdown

The Associated Press
Monday, May 29, 2006; 1:05 AM

 

 

 
TEHRAN, Iran -- Iran and Afghanistan pledged to crack down on drugs passing over their shared border as Afghan President Hamid Karzai visited Tehran, Iranian state television reported.

Officials also signed seven agreements dealing with the reconstruction of wartorn Afghanistan, investment in the country, and cultural and scientific cooperation, state television said Sunday.

"Progress and security in Afghanistan is highly important for Iran," the broadcast quoted Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as saying.

Karzai, a staunch ally of the United States, held talks with Ahmadinejad; Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei; the speaker of parliament and the foreign minister _ all of whom regularly criticize U.S. policy toward Iran.

The U.S. and its allies accuse Tehran of using its civilian nuclear program as a cover to produce nuclear weapons. Tehran denies this, saying its nuclear program is merely to generate electricity.

Iranian state television did not say whether Iran's standoff with the international community over its nuclear program figured in the talks.

Afghanistan is the world's biggest producer of opium, the raw material of heroin. Last year, more than 4,500 tons of opium were harvested, about 90 percent of the global supply.

Iran and Afghanistan share a more than 600-mile border. Iran is a stopover on the drug route between Afghanistan and Europe.

The visit is the third by a foreign leader to Tehran since Ahmadinejad came to office in August. Syrian President Bashar Assad and Sudanese President Omar Hassan Al-Bashir have each visited Iran.

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin

*sympathy post* 

Hi Susan!

My decision (on whether to go) depends on a lot of different things," said Ahmadinejad, a soccer fan. "Whether I have time, whether I want to and some other things."

 

This was the line that made me realise what a jerk he was.  Holocaust denial is one thing, but imitating Rummy is uncalled for under any circumstances.

Actually, not to be too controversial here, but I don't like this guy very much.  At all.

N Korea all over again....

http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/06/06/D8I2PI2O0.html

Let's give nuclear technology in hopes that a rogue state will stop developing nuclear weapons, only to discover a decade later they were secretly building weapons while saying publicly they were not. Oh brother.  

When are we gonna learn?  

Jordan .

I seriously doubt the US will give anything without adequate safeguards.  Moreover I don't think this road will even be travelled. I hope I am wrong though, and these are the first steps to a peaceful resolotion to this issue.

As for the World Cup, Iran have no chance of reaching the knockout stages with Mexico & Portugal in their group!!

Moreover I don't think this road will even be travelled. I hope I am wrong though, and these are the first steps to a peaceful resolotion to this issue.

Because it worked so well with N Korea?  

Jordan .

I get your point, why share nuclear technology with an adversary? But at the end of the day, the best the US is gonna get is a short-term resolution to the current crisis. They won't be able to keep Iranian nuclear amibition at bay for ever. They can only use the old carrot-and-stick approach whilst keeping a close eye on developments (initially by improving virtually non-existant diplomatic relations). Stronger means of containment simply aren't available to the US at the moment. Military action against Iran is inconceivable due to three important factors:

- Lack of domestic support for many agendas, not least another messy war in the middle east

- Lack of international international support for another war, or even sanctions for that matter

- The costs of continued antagonism with an OPEC member to US business and the global economy

My guess is that since Iran as well as the US knows these things all too well, they (Iran) will play hard-ball at the negotiating table and push the US to the max if proper negotiations happen.

I'm hoping for one of those last minute Cuban Missile Crisis moments here.  Only the outcome may be a necessary living with a nuclear Iran as we do with a nuclear Pakistan, India and North Korea.  Stalemate?  But maybe it all dies down with a happy compromise of Boeing parts and some nuclear doo hickeys that are mostly benign in exchange for constant monitoring by that scary IAEA. 

"Oh Hans Brix, you're blaking my barrs!" 

It is more dangerous now than during the cold War.  No doubt.  But maybe as years go by and (hopefully) the Iranian Mullahcracy crashes of its own oppressive weight, these nuclear facilities collect dust with new generations. Maybe a 22nd century new nuclear disarmament treaty comes to pass?

Hey, I'm just trying to be optimistic today.  The negatives are too horrifying to ponder for too long a spell.

Susan 

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin

I believe that the 21st century will see many autocratic states make significant moves towards democracy. In China, economic maturity will certainly bring about political restructuring. Communist regimes have a shelf life of about 70/80 years and I'm hoping the 2008 beijing olympics, with the eyes of the world on china, will prove a further catalyst for change.

 Similarly, I'm hoping for a gradual change in Iran from mullahcracy (nice word susan) to democracy. This can be supported in many ways by the western world. Instead of isolationism, economic and diplomatic relations with Iran should be strengthened and deepened. Interdependence makes states less likely to come into conflict. That would be the most stable process rather than imposition of change from above. Having said that however, the nuclear issue is unique in that it unites both Iranian Islamists and reformists so I don't believe entirely that the issue will dissipate with the mullahs.