Wars and Rumors of Wars

There is no doubt that the Middle East is becoming more and more complex in the interaction of the nations and their agendas in the region.

Who is aligned with whom? Does Israel have any friendly Arab nations that will fight on its side? Since the Palestinian-Arab people are apparently divided between Hamas and the Palestine Authority, will the PA become an ally of Israel to squash Hamastan? Will Israel attack Syria? Will Syria attack Israel? Will Hezbollah attack Israel at the bequest of Iran? Will Shi’ite Hezbollah team up with Sunni Hamas (add a smidgeon of the Syrian military into the mix) in a two front assault on Israel with Iran waiting in the background to decide whether or not to become personally involved in such a fracas? Will Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Israel team up to confront Iranian aspirations to be the hegemon of the Middle East? Will America abandon the Middle East (and its Western Democratic ally Israel) to allow the nations to duke it out and enter a weakened battle weary area to indulge on perceived (depending who runs the White House) National Interests? OR will the dang Middle Eastern erupt into global war because of outside National Interests such as Russia, China, Japan, India, America and the EU? AND if a global war erupts who will side with whom?

Yeah man this is what I am talking about: Wars and Rumors of Wars. I did not even mention transnational Islamist multiple terrorist organizations which are more numerous than just al Qaeda.

Here is what got me thinking on this geopolitical lava dome ever growing until some kind of pressurized explosion occurs: Guy Bechor writing for the YnetNews.com Opinion section speculates that all these juicy arms deals to Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Israel is a message that America will eventually pull out of the Middle Eastern region to allow those nations to deal with the nuke WMD aspirations of hegemonic hungry Iran.

Now think about that speculation! Saudi Arabia (Wahhabi Sunnis), Egypt (Muslim Brotherhood Sunnis) and Israel (secular and religious Jewish Zionists) as a Middle East team against radical Shi’ites managed by Iran (including a remarkable smattering Sunnis). Could the Saudi’s and Egypt cooperate militarily with Israel for a common goal of neutralizing an Iran ramping up to become armed with nuclear WMD?

The only thing I see is chaos!

Multiculturalism's War on Education

Elan Journo of the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI) discusses multiculturalism is not an objectively legitimate form of education. Multiculturalism today tends to teach the “Politically Correct” therefore subjecting curriculum to half truths rather than real truth.

Journo’s article was written originally in 2004; however someone at ARI rightly felt it relevant to this time of BACK TO SCHOOL. I am on the ARI E-list and thus received on August 20, 2007.

JRH 8/20/07
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Multiculturalism's War on Education

By Elan Journo

August 20, 2007 E-newsletter

Ayn Rand Institute

Back to school nowadays means back to classrooms, lessons and textbooks permeated by multiculturalism and its championing of "diversity." Many parents and teachers regard multiculturalism as an indispensable educational supplement, a salutary influence that "enriches" the curriculum. But is it?

With the world's continents bridged by the Internet and global commerce, multiculturalism claims to offer a real value: a cosmopolitan, rather than provincial, understanding of the world beyond the student's immediate surroundings. But it is a peculiar kind of "broadening." Multiculturalists would rather have students admire the primitive patterns of Navajo blankets, say, than learn why Islam's medieval golden age of scientific progress was replaced by fervent piety and centuries of stagnation.

Leaf through a school textbook and you'll find that there is a definite pattern behind multiculturalism's reshaping of the curriculum. What multiculturalists seek is not the goal they advertise, but something else entirely. Consider, for instance, the teaching of history.

One text acclaims the inhabitants of West Africa in pre-Columbian times for having prosperous economies and for establishing a university in Timbuktu; but it ignores their brutal trade in slaves and the proliferation of far more consequential institutions of learning in Paris, Oxford and elsewhere in Europe. Some books routinely lionize the architecture of the Aztecs, but purposely overlook or underplay the fact that they practiced human sacrifices. A few textbooks seek to portray Islam as peaceful in part by presenting the concept of "jihad" ("sacred war") to mean an internal struggle to surmount temptation and evil, while playing down Islam's actual wars of religious conquest.

What these textbooks reveal is a concerted effort to portray the most backward, impoverished and murderous cultures as advanced, prosperous and life-enhancing. Multiculturalism's goal is not to teach about other cultures, but to promote--by means of distortions and half-truths--the notion that non-Western cultures are as good as, if not better than, Western culture. Far from "broadening" the curriculum, what multiculturalism seeks is to diminish the value of Western culture in the minds of students. But, given all the facts, the objective superiority of Western culture is apparent, so multiculturalists must artificially elevate other cultures and depreciate the West.

If students were to learn the truth of the hardscrabble life of primitive farming in, say, India, they would recognize that subsistence living is far inferior to life on any mechanized farm in Kansas, which demands so little manpower, yet yields so much. An informed, rational student would not swallow the "politically correct" conclusions he is fed by multiculturalism. If he were given the actual facts, he could recognize that where men are politically free, as in the West, they can prosper economically; that science and technology are superior to superstition; that man's life is far longer, happier and safer in the West today than in any other culture in history.

The ideals, achievements and history of Western culture in general--and of America in particular--are therefore purposely given short-shrift by multiculturalism. That the Industrial Revolution and the Information Age were born and flourished in Western nations; that the preponderance of Nobel prizes in science have been awarded to people in the West--such facts, if they are noted, are passed over with little elaboration.

The "history" that students do learn is rewritten to fit multiculturalism's agenda. Consider the birth of the United States. Some texts would have children believe the baseless claim that America's Founders modeled the Constitution on a confederation of Indian tribes. This is part of a wider drive to portray the United States as a product of the "convergence" of three traditions--native Indian, African and European. But the American republic, with an elected government limited by individual rights, was born not of stone-age peoples, but primarily of the European Enlightenment. It is a product of the ideas of thinkers like John Locke, a British philosopher, and his intellectual heirs in colonial America, such as Thomas Jefferson.

It is a gross misconception to view multiculturalism as an effort to enrich education. By reshaping the curriculum, the purveyors of "diversity" in the classroom calculatedly seek to prevent students from grasping the objective value to human life of Western culture--a culture whose magnificent achievements have brought man from mud huts to moon landings.

Multiculturalism is no boon to education, but an agent of anti-Western ideology.
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Elan Journo is a junior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute (http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer) in Irvine, Calif. The Institute promotes Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand--author of "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead." Contact the writer at media@aynrand.org.

Copyright © 2007 Ayn Rand® Institute. All rights reserved.

Iran's Revolutionary Guards: We Will 'Punch' U.S.

General Yāhoo Yahya Rahim Safavi is the leader of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Yahya’s response to Bush moving forward to placing the Revolutionary Guards on America’s Terrorist List is that the RG will “punch” America for doing so.

JRH 8/19/07

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Iran's Revolutionary Guards: We Will 'Punch' U.S.

Associated Press

Fox News

Saturday, August 18, 2007

TEHRAN, Iran — Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards said they would not bow to pressure and threatened to "punch" the U.S., in their first response to Washington's plan to list them as a terrorist organization, newspapers reported Saturday.

Local press in the Iranian capital of Tehran quoted Revolutionary Guards leader Gen. Yahya Rahim Safavi saying that he could understand Washington's ire toward the group because of their "leverage" against the U.S.

"America will receive a heavier punch from the guards in the future," he was quoted as saying in the conservative daily Kayhan. "We will never remain silent in the face of U.S. pressure and we will use our leverage against them."

There was no elaboration on what Safavi meant by the punch or the organization's "leverage."
Washington has accused the Guards of supporting militias and insurgent groups attacking U.S. forces in Iraq—charges Iran denies.

The fact that the remarks, made on Thursday in the central Iranian city of Isfahan, appeared in local newspapers rather than the official state news outlets suggest the comments are for domestic consumption.

Meanwhile, other Iranian officials continued to speak out against Washington's move to register the group as a terrorist organization, with a government spokesman calling the claims "baseless," on the Web site of the state broadcasting company.

"The claims of the U.S. are baseless and have no takers around the world," he said Saturday, noting that "the U.S. has endangered the world many times under the excuse of fighting against terrorism."

On Tuesday, an unnamed official in the Bush administration said the U.S. planned to list the Guards as terrorist group in order to squeeze Iran.

The move was seen as an effort to pressure businesses the corps is thought to control, from construction to oil sectors. It would be the first time the U.S. would put a foreign government's military agency on the list, which includes the Al Qaeda network and the militant groups Hamas and Hezbollah.

Iranian armed forces spokesman Gen. Ali Reza Afshar hit out precisely against this attempt to declare a state body terrorist in an editorial Saturday in the country's largest circulation newspaper, calling it illegal.

"America's long time hostility against the Guard is clear and understandable, but this move against organization that is part of Iran's armed forces is illegal," he wrote in the daily Hamshahri.

The estimated 200,000-strong Revolutionary Guards is an elite force separate from Iran's regular military and has its own ground, naval and air units.

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Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Copyright 2007 FOX News Network, LLC. All rights reserved.

Diplomats Ignore the Folly of Negotiating with Iran

I have read from pundits and experts alike that it is pure delusion to think the Western Democracies can negotiate anything positive with Iran. The simple truth is the Mullah ruled Islamofascist Shi’ite radical regime will in no way negotiate in good faith about anything that may contradict radical Shi’ite religious convictions about the spread of Mohammedanism and the global enforcement of Sharia Law.

In case you were unaware, Sharia Law is bad news and a contradiction of Western Democratic principles (premised on a Leftist or Conservative vision is irrelevant) to the radical Shi’ites.

And yet there are diplomats in the American State Department from both sides of the political spectrum that believe Western style diplomacy will convince Iran that the art of negotiation (give and take) can reach a beneficial solution to the current chasm that exists between Iran and America.

Michael Ledeen is one of many that delineates the reasons that talking to Iran under the current conditions will turn up zero conciliation between America and Iran. Iran’s pattern of Foreign Policy and internal affairs are set in stone under the current regime.

JRH
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Talking to Iran


By MICHAEL A. LEDEEN
Wall Street Journal (Subscription Required)
August 18, 2007; Page A7
Blind Conservative E-List
Posted By Don M.


For some time now, the chattering classes have debated whether the United States should negotiate with the Islamic Republic of Iran. Both sides have endowed the very act of negotiating with near-mythic power.


The advocates suggest that "good relations" may emerge, while opponents warn it is somehow playing into the mullahs' hands. Both seem to believe that the three recent talks in Baghdad are historically significant, since they are said to be a departure from past practice.


That claim is false. Every administration since Ayatollah Khomeini's seizure of power in 1979 has negotiated with the Iranians. Nothing positive has ever come of it, but most every president has come to believe that a "grand bargain" with Tehran can somehow be reached, if only we negotiate well enough.


Washington diplomats have steadfastly refused to see the Iranian regime for what it is: a relentless enemy that seeks to dominate or destroy us. This blindness afflicted the first American negotiators shortly after the 1979 revolution, and has been chronic ever since, even though Iran declared war on us in that year and has waged it ever since.


During the first negotiations in early 1979, shortly after the Revolution, the Iranians denounced American meddling, and the Americans lamented Iran's dreadful human-rights practices. The Iranian negotiator, Deputy Prime Minister for Revolutionary Affairs Ibrahim Yazdi, said that Iran had just undergone "the cleanest revolution in world history," even though mass executions were underway throughout the country.


Yet American diplomats were optimistic that a grand bargain could be struck. The Iranians wanted arms, and American military men sat down to work out the details of new sales. On the diplomatic front, Assistant Secretary of State Harold Newsom reported that: "the Iranian suspicions of us were only natural in the post-revolutionary situation but that after a transition period common interests could provide a basis for future cooperation-not on the scale of before but sufficient to demonstrate that Iran has not been 'lost' to us and to the West."


This was written almost precisely a month before the American Embassy in Tehran was seized in November, 1979. For the next 444 days, diplomats talked and talked, until, minutes before Ronald Reagan's inauguration, the hostages were ransomed out.


Five years (and a new set of hostages) later, the Reagan administration commenced secret negotiations with the mullahs, using American, Israeli and Iranian back channels. Reagan's deep personal concerns about the fate of the hostages drove the policy, and inverted the logical strategic order.


Iran was a major problem for the U.S. -- hundreds of American marines and diplomats had been massacred in Beirut by Tehran's favorite terrorist instrument, Hezbollah -- and should have been dealt with on that basis. But some American officials convinced themselves that a deal could be made with Iranian "moderates," and a group led by former National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane flew secretly to Tehran, met with a few mid-level Iranian officials, and returned empty handed. As in the Jimmy Carter years, the mullahs killed Americans, but America did not respond effectively.


The George H.W. Bush administration, with the Iran-Contra scandal fresh in their minds, avoided direct negotiations with Iran, but in recent years two of its leading officials -- National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft and Secretary of State James Baker -- have been outspoken advocates for talking to the mullahs.


The Clinton administration passionately sought rapprochement. Believing that the Iranian "moderates" had grown more powerful with the election of President Mohammed Khatami, the president and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright made public amends for real and imagined American sins against the Islamic Republic, and made a series of public and secret gestures calculated to show that the U.S. bore no ill will toward the mullahs.


Iran was secretly authorized to ship weapons into Bosnia in defiance of a United Nations embargo that was formally endorsed by the Clinton administration. Russia was secretly permitted to sell weapons and supply Iran's budding nuclear program, in violation of a law coauthored by Vice President Al Gore in his Senate years. Visas were issued to Iranian wrestlers and scholars, and some Iranian funds were unblocked.


This was all evidence of the American belief that an agreement could be reached. The Iranians exploited the opportunity, provided by our invitation to ship arms to the Muslims in the Balkans, by supporting a terror network in Bosnia. Mohammed Atta trained in Bosnia, from there he went to Hamburg, and thence to the U.S. Two other 9/11 terrorists -- Ramzi Binalshibh, and Said Bahaji -- were recruited into al Qaeda in Bosnian camps. We ignored the Iranian actions.


In 1996, the Iranians were up to their necks in the terror attack against Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia. Still, we pursued the mirage of a deal with our enemies. In the final months of the Clinton administration, former Spanish President Felipe Gonzales traveled secretly to Tehran to explore the possibilities of a new relationship. Like all the others, he made no progress.


The current administration has maintained the pattern. Despite a considerable volume of criticism of the mullahs, and open warnings of undefined consequences if Iran did not become more cooperative, various American officials and the usual private emissaries have explored the possibilities of better relations.


In 2001 and early 2002 we negotiated the future of Afghanistan after the war against al Qaeda and the Taliban, and although some diplomats praised Iranian "cooperation," military intelligence had hard evidence that the mullahs had sent killers into Afghanistan to attack our troops. Meetings were subsequently held with Iranian representatives in Geneva and Cyprus, and just last September, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice asked Mr. Gonzales to try again. He returned to Tehran, and emerged empty-handed.


The current negotiations are thus part of a well-established pattern. If anything, there is far less reason for optimism than in the past, since our knowledge of Tehran's war against us -- notably in Iraq and Afghanistan -- is broader and deeper than before. The Europeans' failure to make any progress at all in their diplomatic efforts to convince Tehran to abandon its nuclear weapons program should further convince an honest observer that the mullahs intend to build an atomic arsenal and use it against us and our allies.


As Jonathan Swift put it, you cannot reason a man out of something that he did not reason his way into. The Iranian war against the U.S. rests upon fanatical convictions, and Tehran has no interest in resolving it at a conference table.

Terrorists Teach how to Kidnap on American Web Hosted Sites

MEMRI reports that an American based web host service provided hosting for an Islamist terrorist website entitled, “alhesbah.org.” And the worst of hosting the terror site is that one of the posts was of a document dated 2003 entitled, “The Excellent Summary of the Rules of the Art of Kidnapping Americans.”

Just to make sure your brain is clicking, you did read that correctly: THE ART OF KIDNAPPING AMERICANS!

In America! In America! The terrorists are among us and for a buck they can get a website hosted IN AMERICA!

Brigitte Gabriel of the American Congress for Truth in recent E-newsletter wrote about such websites in America:

The jihadist website linked to in the article below (Al-Hesbah) is one of the most frequented jihadist forums on the Internet. A generic message was posted earlier this week indicating that the account had been "suspended." Websites such as these have a history of being "suspended" only to reappear after they are no longer under the spotlight. This is why the work we do is so important and your partnership is so essential. By drawing attention to these websites and increasing the pressure on their hosting companies, you can help us in the fight against Islamo-fascism.

Brigitte Gabriel (E-Newsletter dated August 17, 2007 referring to the MEMRI report)

So the jihadi websites are shut down but apparently not until they get busted. American companies must put patriotism above the buck in the War on Terrorism. They should not only prevent the web hosting of Jihadists, but report the attempt to have a site hosted to Homeland Security.

This is not a Free Speech matter it is a National Security matter in the midst enemy combatants representing no governments warring with acts of terrorism against the sovereign nation of the United States of America. I don’t even recommend criminal charges during a state of war; I recommend a government response conducive to the war.

Is Olmert Selling Out Jews?

There is the clandestine appearance that Prime Minister Olmert is preparing to sellout Judaism by giving up the holiest jewel to Mohammedan sovereignty – Temple Mount.

You will read that Israel currently has sovereignty over the Temple Mount but has allowed a Mohammedan entity known as the Waqf to control the Temple Mount. Israel regained the entirety of Jerusalem including the Temple Mount after defeating a combined Mohammedan attack in 1967. Israel’s victory over foreign aggression meant the spoils of war were the West Bank from Jordan (which included all of Jerusalem), the Gaza Strip from Egypt and the Golan Heights from Syria. Victory meant the regaining of the Holiest of Holies – the location of the Jewish Temple.

For some reason which I will never understand, Israel failed to secure control of the Temple Mount and agreed to have the Waqf manage the area. The Waqf manages two Mosques built on the ruins of the Temple Mount: Al Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. Both are declared the third holiest site due the Mohammedan traditional faith that the maniac Mohammed ascended to Heaven on a white winged horse from the location.

I say tradition because the event is not recorded in the Mohammedan's holy book known as the Quran. It was a myth fabricated later as part of the Dar al-Islam concept of Mohammedanism; viz. that all land acquired by Mohammedan conquest and forced to accept Mohammedanism as their religion, then the land is considered Mohammedan forever. A Caliph in the 700’s AD reinforced Dar al-Islam by building a Mosque perpetuating the myth that Mohammed took off to Heaven there.

The Israeli government mistake was not taking total control of the Temple Mount after the victory before World opinion took hold favoring the Mohammedans. I am convinced it would take some kind of military victory over Mohammedan aggression to regain control to the Temple Mount to overcome Appeasement minded world opinion in the West. Naturally global Mohammedan opinion would never be changed.

I am going through all this because it is rumored that Prime Minister Olmert is preparing to deliver sovereignty to the Temple Mount and half of Jerusalem to Palestinian-Arabs presuming the Mohammedans will keep promises to allow Jewish access to the Temple Mount.

If the rumors pan out, Olmert is insane. Mohammedans in the Middle East have not kept ONE PROMISE, especially the PALESTINIAN Terrorist organizations that have governed autonomously the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The Land for Peace concept will end up either in the destruction of Israel and another Jewish holocaust or the USA will be forced to militarily deliver Israel from the dementia of Mohammedan lies.

Jury finds Padilla guilty on terror charges

The “Dirty Bomber” was not a dirty bomber; nonetheless Jose Padilla was convicted with two others for plotting acts of terrorism relating to Islamofascism.