Righteous ridicule

Via

The Holmes Plan for Iran

We tell the Ayatollah and Amadanijihad that we will let them walk away with all of the money they have stolen and their lives if they step down and allow for the transfer to a democracy. If not, we lift the prohibition on assassination and every humming noise they hear could be an armed drone with a laser sight trained on their foreheads until the day they are both dead.

Holmes 2012.

God Have Mercy

I can't comprehend this.


Can we intervene now?

Somehow the cheesy 80's music

Doesn't take away from this at all:

"Because you can't respect someone who kisses your ass."

-Ferris Bueller.

29% of Iranians have a positive view of the U.S., down from 34% in February 2008.

via Instapundit.com

God Be With the Iranian People

And let something come of all of this. Anything but the current state. Anything.

Well

So much for making nice nice.

How do you begin a conversation on diplomacy with people who burn you in effigy?
O: Lovely weather you are having here in this beautiful city of Tehran, isn't it?
Iranian diplomat: We will coat the streets with the blood of your people, infidel President.
O: Yes, the climate reminds me a bit of Kenya.

Why there are no homosexuals in Iran

Or damn few of them, anyway. Horrifying pictures and video.

Meanwhile, the Columbia Queer Alliance has some quibbles about language.

We stand in solidarity with our peers in Iran, but we do not presume to speak for them. We cannot possibly claim to understand the multiple and diverse experiences of living with same-sex desires in Iran. Our cultural values and experiences are distinct, but the stakes are one and the same: the essential human right to express our desires freely.

Moreover, we would like to strongly caution media and campus organizations against the use of such words as "gay", "lesbian", or "homosexual" to describe people in Iran who engage in same-sex practices and feel same-sex desire. The construction of sexual orientation as a social and political identity and all of the vocabulary therein is a Western cultural idiom. As such, scholars of sexuality in the Middle East generally use the terms "same-sex practices" and "same-sex desire" in recognition of the inadequacy of Western terminology.

You see, there really are no gays in Iran.

Iran's version of Schindler's list

Surprise , surprise: "Zero Degree Orbit," an Iranian miniseries about the Holocaust that the AP described as sympathetic to the Jews, is anything but.

Allah has the clips, which kept causing my computer to crash. Memri transcript is here. As Memri explains, the Iranians had two motives in making the film.

By means of this series, the Iranians hope to dispel allegations that they deny the persecution of the Jews during World War II and hope to discard their image as Holocaust deniers. The series was presented as an historical drama which aims to depict the suffering of the Jews during World War II, and which is even aimed at educating the Jews about their history. In several newspapers, it is stated that the series sheds light on the way the Jews fled several countries, thus becoming refugees.

At the same time, the series presents the "Zionist lie": The Jewish state is a Zionist invention, the result of collaboration between the Zionists and the Nazis in an effort to coerce Jews to emigrate to Palestine.

It also enables the Iranian regime to stick it to the Pahlavi dynasty.

Iranian police captain Asgari: These are files on students who have passed the exam in order to study overseas.

[...]

There are two problematic files. One is about a young man called Taghi Navadeh, whose brother is in jail, charged with having ties with a Communist group called "the 53 people."

Major: And the other file?

Captain Asgari: It is on a young man called Habib Parsa, the son of a doctor called Ali Parsa. According to the information in the file, the father of this student served as a top Foreign Ministry official in the Iranian consul in Egypt and Syria. Towards the end of 1931, he helped to organize and participated in an Islamic conference in Jerusalem, held at the initiative of Hajj Amin Al-Husseini, the Mufti of the Muslims in Palestine. The conference was intended to denounce the Zionist movement and British policy in Palestine. Because he did not receive the Iranian government's permission to participate in the conference, he was demoted to the position of consul-general in Palestine. A few years later, after Mahmoud Jam was appointed prime minister, and at the recommendation of former Foreign Minister Enayatollah Samii, he was designated to head a special office in the Shah's court, in charge of the policy supporting the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. He resigned in protest, and he has been working for some time now as a doctor.

Ahmadinejad causes a run on banks

By "abruptly" cutting interest rates.

Mr Ahmadinejad's decree forced all state-owned and private banks to slash borrowing rates to 12%. Inflation is officially 15% but is generally believed to be much higher. State banks had been offering rates of 14%, while those in the private sector ranged from 17% to 28%.

The decision caused panic in the Tehran stock exchange, with private banks losing much of their share value overnight. Shareholders in one bank, Karafarin, queued on Wednesday to sell their stock when previously there had been 1.2 million applicants to buy its shares.

Mastectomies for mannequins

Iran's moral police are cutting off the breasts of mannequins wearing revealing clothes. On a related note, yesterday I noticed a mannequin whose hipbones were jutting out. They were seriously sharp--the mannequin's most noticeable feature--and the figure was posed with her pelvis jutting forward. Very odd. Is that supposed to be attractive?

The most democratic country in the Middle East

Is Iran, according to Seymour Hersh, in an interview with an Iranian radio station.

Question: Most international analysts believe that the US ultimate goal is to fight against revolutionary Islam and to dominate of the region's energy and oil. But Mr. Jimmy Carter stated that the overthrow of Saddam did not have anything do with energy and oil. So what is the real goal of the US administration in the Middle East?

Answer: Nobody knows what is in the president mind and Mr. Cheney. We don't know what they think. He attacked Iraq in 2003 in response to the Sunni Al- Qaeda in America. Why he would attack Iraq have never been clear because Saddam Hussein was secular. He was a Sunni but he did not like Jihadists. So it is unclear to me what Bush was doing. You could argue that the neo-cons want to get rid of any threat. They never liked Saddam. He was a threat to the other countries in the Middle East, to Israel. Perhaps what we are doing is for Israel and oil but I don’t think this president believes that he really thinks his mission is to spread democracy in the Middle East, even though, you could argue that Iran is probably the most democratic country. The elections there certainly indicate people vote what the way they believe but he believes to spreading democracy and right now we are working with some of the most undemocratic countries in the Middle East, you know Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia that do so. It is very strange.

See also Sy Hersh's loose relationship with the truth.

Via Pajamas.

Kidnapping as a career move

The 15 British sailors and marines kidnapped last month by Iran have been given special permission to sell their stories.

MoD officials claimed that the move to lift the ban on military personnel selling their stories while in service was justified because of the “exceptional circumstances” of the case. The hostages are expected to earn as much as £250,000 between them.

The story of Faye Turney, 26, the only female among them, is expected to be the most lucrative. She could profit by as much as £150,000 from a joint deal with a newspaper and ITV.

The MoD bracketed the hostages’ 13-day captivity in Iran — including appearances on state television by some to admit straying into Iranian waters — with winners of the Victoria Cross.

The Victoria Cross is Britain's highest honor.

As the VC is awarded for acts of valour "in the face of the enemy", it has been suggested by some that the changing nature of warfare will result in fewer VCs being awarded. Only one in ten VC recipients in the 20th century is said to have survived the action for which they received the VC. Following the death of Captain Umrao Singh, the last surviving Indian holder of the VC, in November 2005 there are currently only twelve surviving holders of the VC – six British, two Australians, and four Gurkhas – eight of them for exploits during the Second World War.

Many Britons are disgusted.

Lasting damage has been done to Britain's reputation, never mind that of the RN and Royal Marines.

And the utterances of the Defence Secretary ("They acted with great dignity throughout."), Chief of Defence Staff ("They did exactly as they should have done...we are proud of them.") and First Sea Lord ("considerable dignity and a lot of courage") are beginning to explain why the 15 acted the way they did and seem somewhat bemused by the justified outcry.

It's one thing to stand by your subordinates but these talking points smack of a whitewash.

Servicemen and women should be held to a higher standard than civilians, though listening to the six of the 15 who spoke on their return it was hard to believe these were military personnel.

I guess Iran did win

The US helped free an Iranian diplomat detained by the Iraqis.

Pentagon and White House spokesmen on Tuesday and Wednesday insisted publicly that the release of Mr. Sharafi was solely an Iraqi decision. Indeed, when Mr. Sharafi was kidnapped in February, Pentagon spokesman said that his abduction was not the work of any members of multi-national forces in Iraq. The Iranians, through diplomatic channels, formally accused America of having ordered the abduction.

The administration official yesterday said that Mr. Sharafi's capture was not ordered by American forces, but he was interrogated in a facility overseen by both Iraqi and American commanders.

"Had this guy been in Iraqi custody, we all know he would have been in Iran weeks ago," an Iraqi diplomat said yesterday on condition of anonymity.

Now that the British sailors will be freed

Can I ask: What was the point of the whole exercise?

Every word is a lie, including the non-existent the

British sailor didn't write "confession." Her captors did.

It's not quite as bad as the spammers' "I need of your assistance" or "within the nearest time", but L/S Faye Turney's most recent letter of "confession", released by the Iranian embassy in London on March 30, really doesn't read like something that a native speaker of English would write. Some of its infelicities might be attributed to stress, lack of practice in writing, or Shropshire vernacular, but it seems much more likely that the text of the letter was largely dictated by Turney's Iranian captors.

Let's take a look at this theory as it applies to the letter's first two out-of-tune phrases -- the salutation and the first sentence.

The first problem is between the first and second words in the salutation, "To British People". This feels wrong -- L/S Turney ought to be addressing herself "To the British People". As a syntactician of slavic origin is said to have explained, "in English, is sometimes necessary to use article". Persian lacks definite articles, and so the subtleties of their use in English are likely to be difficult for native speakers of Persian to master.

Via Noah Schachtman.

Do we overestimate Iran's power?

Fouad Ajami:

Iran is a radical player in the world of states, to be sure, but we should not overstate its power. We should not fall for the Persian bluff. It is important that we do all we can to thwart Iran's nuclear ambitions and to checkmate it in arenas that count, but we should always remember that this is a society swimming against the tide of history and confronting the limits of its capabilities. There is an Iranian role in Iraq, but it should not be exaggerated. It is not true that the Iraqi political class marches to the Iranian drummer. It is well known that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki spent his years of exile in Syria and kept his distance from the Iranians. "Iraq is a cemetery of dreams," a thoughtful Iraqi observed to me of his country. "Iranian dreams, no less than American dreams perhaps." Iraqis are a tough breed, and the notion that they are eager to take their country into a Persian dominion is unconvincing. The Iranians dwell virtually alone in the House of Islam, separated by language and culture, marked by their Shiism.

Read the whole thing.

A feature, not a bug

Iran sees Mutually Assured Destruction as a good thing, says Bernard Lewis.

"Ahmadinejad and his group clearly believe, and I don't doubt the sincerity of their belief, that we are now entering an apocalyptic age, which will result in the triumph of their messianic figure," Lewis said, referring to the twelfth Imam, Mahdi.

"Muslims, like Jews, believe that there are things you can do to hasten the messiah. M.A.D doesn't work with these people."

You mean we weren't before?

Troops authorized to kill Iranian operatives in Iraq.

For more than a year, U.S. forces in Iraq have secretly detained dozens of suspected Iranian agents, holding them for three to four days at a time. The "catch and release" policy was designed to avoid escalating tensions with Iran and yet intimidate its emissaries. U.S. forces collected DNA samples from some of the Iranians without their knowledge, subjected others to retina scans, and fingerprinted and photographed all of them before letting them go.

Here I thought we were bringing the war on terror to the terrorists. Silly me.

Fashion police

Iranian police get into the fashion business in an effort to persuade women to dress more modestly.

Aware that imposing Islamic dress by force hasn't worked, Iran's police decided to hold their own fashion exhibition recently to educate women about what they should be wearing - though there were no live models.

"We want to guide our designers to meet the needs of our society," explained Sardar Ansari of the Iranian police force. "We don't want them to get their ideas about fashion from satellite television."

Good luck with that.