Category Archives: Iran

Britain, censorship, Iran, Media

Mutual Hypocrisy: Britain Bans “Press TV”, Iran Blocks “UK for Iranians” Site ………

    

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“Britain has condemned Iran for blocking a website aimed at explaining the United Kingdom and its policies to Iranians. Foreign Secretary William Hague said Sunday that barring the British government’s “UK for Iranians” site — three days after it was launched — proves “the Iranian authorities fear their own citizens’ interaction and involvement with the outside world.” Britain says Iran blocked the site on Saturday.………”

Blocking websites and radio stations and television networks is a reprehensible form of censorship and thought control. Conventional, but incorrect, wisdom in the West has it that it is expected of the Iranians to block website and other media outlets, and that the British don’t do such things. But they do, as do other Europeans although not nearly on the scale as some Middle East regimes like the Iranians (and others).
Odd for the British foreign minister to complain about the Iranian regime blocking the British website. It was only a two months ago that the British government blocked the Iranian television network Press TV from being seen in the country (it was banned last January).  It is, as William Hague would say, as if the “British authorities fear their own citizens’ interaction……“
In American-ese: what is good for the goose is good for the gander.
It is spelled h-y-p-o-c-r-i-s-y in Britain as well, and both the British and the Iranians have plenty of it.
Cheers
mhg


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AIPAC, Iran, Pakistan, U.S. Politics, US Foreign Policy, War on Iran

Iran and Pakistan and the Vanished Arabists of America………..

    

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“Pakistani officials confirmed Wednesday that Industrial and Commercial Bank of China had withdrawn from plans to head a consortium that would finance the $1.6-billion Pakistani portion of the cross-border pipeline, apparently over concern that the bank could be excluded from the U.S. economy.
The move suggests that even Chinese companies, which have staunchly resisted U.S. and European efforts to punish Iran for its nuclear program, are beginning to bend to the sanctions on Tehran. China’s unwillingness to fully cooperate had been one of the greatest challenges to the international effort to put economic pressure on Iran. China’s decision is a setback for the Pakistani government, which fears that dire energy shortages could lead to civil unrest as well as economic strain. Pakistani officials said they would press ahead with the project, which would deliver more than 750 million cubic feet of natural gas per day from Iran’s South Pars field. They said they would find replacement financing.………….”

The United States administration has been trying to derail this gas pipeline project for some time now. Pressure on the Pakistanis and offers of a more expensive pipeline did not work, and the Chinese for a while seemed impervious to pressure as well. Blocking this pipeline will harm Pakistan much more than Iran, especially beyond the short term. That country is facing a deepening energy crisis and the vast Iranian gas fields are the closest and most efficient source for it. Iran has the largest reserves of natural gas in the world outside Russia, and it has no shortage of clients, especially beyond the short term.
The Obama administration’s State Department is now firmly under the control of the Likud-niks; which means that administration foreign policy itself is under Likudnik control. The old Arabists are long gone from the corridors of power, replaced by Likud-niks. The term “Arabist” itself is now probably a suspect nearly derogatory term at Foggy Bottom and in Washington; in the U.S. Congress “Arabists” can get stoned these days.
Cheers
mhg


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CIA, Drones, GCC, Iran, Israel, U.S. Congress, US Foreign Policy

New International Band: “Barack Obama and the Drones”………….

 

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“Deep inside these burning buildings
Voices die to be heard
Years we spent teaching a lesson
We ourselves had never learned
And if strength is borne from heartbreak
Many mountains I could move
And if walls could speak I’d pray
That they would tell me what to do
The drones will slave away, they’re working overtime,
They serve a faceless queen, they never question why.….” Drones (by Back Against)

“Given these views, experts fear that Holder’s argument in support of the war on terror could also serve as a rationale for possible future military strikes ordered by Obama. Claus Kress, a Cologne-based professor of international law and an internationally renowned expert on the US’s stance on the laws of war, believes that it is “not inconceivable” that, in justifying the drone war, Obama’s top lawyers may have already set their sights on an altogether different target: Iran. Legally speaking, a military strike against the mullahs’ nuclear program — which Obama believes is conceivable should it become verifiably clear that there is no other way to stop Iran from building a bomb — would only be possible with the permission of the United Nations Security Council. But the Russians and the Chinese would probably veto any such consent. As a result, the United States would have to invoke its “inherent” right of self-defense in accordance with Article 51 of the UN Charter. Still, this requires that Iran has essentially raised its weapon against Israel or the United States………”

As the old song says: “birds do it, bees do it….”
Everybody is doing it these days, or soon will be. China is building drones. Israel is using drones. Iran is building and using drones. Before you know it, we’ll have most nations building their own drones. Then we’d have various sects in each country building their own drones: we’d have Shi’a drones, Salafi drones, Ikhwan drones, and Sufi drones. Then there will be Coptic drones and Maronite drones and Orthodox drones. Then we’d have tribal drones around the Gulf: Shemmar drones (more than one type), Ajmi drones, Mutairi drones, Comanche drones, Arapaho drones, etc. Then there will be neighborhood drones…….
In the United States, if things go along the current trajectory, there may be Republican drones and Democrat drones. In fact there already are some primitive prototypes: they call them senators and representatives.
Cheers
mhg


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Arab Politics, Iran, Syria, Terrorism, US Foreign Policy, Weapons deals, Yemen

Iran in Yemen and Syria: Quds Force vs. Qat Force, Plot in DC with Mexicans and Islamic Heritage Revival Society……

 

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““Iran is really trying to play a big role in Yemen now,” the Yemeni official said from his office in Sana, the country’s capital. American officials say the Iranian aid to Yemen — a relatively small but steady stream of automatic rifles, grenade launchers, bomb-making material and several million dollars in cash — mirrors the kind of weapons and training the Quds Force is providing the embattled government of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria. It also reflects a broader campaign that includes what American officials say was a failed plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States in October, and what appears to have been a coordinated effort by Iran to attack Israeli diplomats in India and Georgia earlier this year. Iran has denied any role in the attacks. “They’re fighting basically a shadow war every day,” Gen. James N. Mattis, the head of the military’s Central Command, told a Senate hearing last week. “They are working earnestly to keep Assad in power,” he said, explaining that in addition to arms and scores of Quds Force trainers and Iranian intelligence agents, Iran is providing the Syrian security services with electronic eavesdropping equipment “to try and pick up where the opposition networks are.”………..”

Fine and dandy, the mullahs are probably supplying some arms to a Yemeni faction. Yet I don’t buy the bit about supplying weapons to Syria. Not because they would not be happy to keep Bashar al-Assad in power; no doubt the Iranians are doing their best to keep the Baath regime in control. There is no need for Iranian arms. The Russians have a naval base in Syria, and the Black Sea is nearby, and the Russians make much better weapons than the Iranians, and the Russians have always supplied Syria and still do. So why would Bashar need mediocre Iranian weapons when he has access to better Russian ones? Ditto for the spying and communications equipment. (Unless there is a money/payment angle). The New York Times needs to make a better case for this.
As for the rehash of the so-called plot to blow Adle al-Jubair the Saudi ambassador to smithereens in an overpriced but mediocre Georgetown restaurant: I thought we had gone over that one and refuted the allegation. I recall even refuting any involvement of the Mexican drug cartels, drunk Texan used-car dealers named Jack, Colombian FARC rebels, Hezbollah, Society of Islamic Heritage Revival, the Nabati Poets Diwaniya, and Mitt Romney. This just makes no sense. The Saudi ambassador al-Jubair is not an important person, he makes no decisions or policies except when to have lunch or get a haircut. It is all decided by the princes.
As for the ‘Qat‘, it just popped up…….
Cheers
mhg


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Iran, Middle East Nuclear, United Nations International Organizations, War on Iran

Building the Case for War: One More Questionable Brick………….

 

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“A U.S. non-proliferation expert said on Tuesday he has identified a building at the Parchin military site in Iran suspected of containing, currently or previously, a high-explosive test chamber the U.N. nuclear watchdog wants to visit. David Albright, founder of the Institute for Science and International Security, said he studied commercial satellite imagery and found a building located on a relatively small and isolated compound at Parchin that fit a description in the November 2011 International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report. The building has its own perimeter security wall or fencing and there is a berm between the building and a neighboring building, Albright said in a report. The compound is located more than four kilometers away from high-explosive related facilities at Parchin which the IAEA visited in 2005, Albright’s report said………..”
Cheers
mhg


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GCC, Gulf states, Iran, Middle East Nuclear, Persian Gulf, War on Iran

Nuclear Persian Gulf: Abu Dhabi Mon amour, Bushehr Mon Amour, Fukushima Mon Amour ………..

 

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“The capital is the “gold standard” on which other countries should model their quest for nuclear power, an international nuclear energy industry expert said this week. The oil-rich UAE has been forward-looking in its pursuit of nuclear power and has employed a “logical, well thought-out approach” to building the country’s first four nuclear reactors, said Dr Dale Klein, the former chairman of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the associate director of The Energy Institute at the University of Texas. Central to any new nuclear power programme is transparency, a technique that Dr Klein said the UAE has used to build both international and local trust. “The United Arab Emirates has been very good at explaining to the public what nuclear means, why it’s important for the country, and what steps it’s taking,” Dr Klein said. “It’s very important that people understand how nuclear power plants work and why they’re being built.” Dr Klein’s comments came on Tuesday as part of a lecture delivered at the majlis of Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces.……….”


Cute of Mr. Klein to say that “as part of a lecture delivered at the majlis of Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces.” Neighborly, mighty nuclear neighborly. Yet there are no nuclear reactors in the UAE, not yet.
Besides, didn’t the Gulf GCC ministers raise a concern (well, they raised a stink) about the dangers posed by Iran’s Bushehr plant right on the Persian-American Gulf? That was during one of their powwows just a few months ago, I believe. That was just before they decided that nuclear plants are kosher again, provided they are designed, built, managed, operated, and wtf else by foreign “experts” of the Western faith for our very own potentates.
Sorry about the new name of the Gulf, it should be amended to Persian-American-Nuclear Gulf. The United Nations should revisit its old resolution of some forty years ago asserting “Persian Gulf” as the official name. It should now issue a new resolution renaming the Gulf with this new name. It has a nice ring to it, très moderne, Persian-American-Nuclear Gulf
Cheers
mhg


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Middle East Focus-Arabia Deserta

Culture, GCC, Iran, Middle East Women, Muslims, Saudi Arabia

Sigheh (Mut’ah) and Misyar: Iran’s Hookup Marriage, Gulf’s Hookup Marriage………..

 

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“This week, Iran’s parliament approved a new amendment to a controversial law in the civil code that allows men to have as many sexual partners as they want – all sanctioned by sharia law under the term “temporary marriage”.
Sex outside marriage is a crime in Iran punishable by 100 lashes or, in the case of adultery, potentially a sentence of death by stoning. However, a man and a woman can marry for a fixed period of time after performing specific religious rituals, in a practice called sigheh. The marriage can last for a few minutes up to several years without need to be officially registered. The man can end the sigheh almost at any time, but there is no divorce right for women in temporary marriages.
The new amendment, passed on Monday by 104 MPs who were all male, requires registration in certain circumstances such as those leading to a pregnancy but still largely allows sigheh without formal registration. An opposing MP, Sattar Hedayatkhah, was quoted in the reformist newspaper Etemaad as saying: “From tomorrow, no woman can be sure that her husband is not in a sexual relationship with another woman. Therefore, there is now no difference between here [Iran] and the west. Anyone can have a sexual relationship………………..”


The Shi’as call it Mut’ah in Arabic and Sigheh in Persian. The Sunnis also have their own version in some Arab states, mainly Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, called the Misyar. There are also other variations of the same theme. They are based on some ‘reported’ practices in early Islamic history when men traveled far and for long periods away from their wives. Some senior religious leaders in both sects oppose these so-called marriages. They are basically sexual oriented arrangements, with little commitment between the partners. It is almost equivalent to the Western “hooking up”, but it can last longer and has a veneer of ‘legality’. All these forms of funny marriage should be banned, or called what they really are, sexual “hook-ups”.

Cheers
mhg


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Ali Khamenei, Human Right, Iran

A Massacre of Journalists in Iran, Ayatollah and King at the Watergate……….

 

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“The 39-year-old, the deputy head of Iran’s Defenders of Human Rights Centre (DHRC), was taken seriously ill in 2010 after being kept in solitary confinement in Tehran’s Evin prison for a month. Since her arrest, she has developed an undiagnosed epilepsy-like disease which causes her to lose control over her muscles temporarily during the day. In September 2011, she was sentenced to 11 years after being convicted on three charges: acting against the national security, membership of the DHRC and propaganda against the regime…………. On Sunday, another human rights activist and lawyer, Abdolfattah Soltani, was sentenced to 18 years after being found guilty of anti-government propaganda. Among many of Soltani’s charges is “endangering national security” by accepting a German human rights prize. Kaleme also reported that Iranian journalist Nazanin Khosravani who has been sentenced to 6 six years went to Evin prison on Monday to endure her jail term. According to the opposition website, the Green Voice of Freedom, Khosravani has worked with banned pro-reform newspapers such as Bahar, Norooz, Dorane Emrouz, Kargozaran and Sarmayeh. Another Iranian journalist, Ali Mousavi Khalkhali, was picked up by security officials on Friday, his cousin has confirmed to BBC Persian. He is reported to have been arrested on charges related to propaganda against the regime. …………”



“Propaganda against the regime“: Iran and most of her neighbors have this one thing in common. What they all don’t want is politics, for how can there be politics without some “propaganda” against the regime?  And how can the regime, including Ali Khamenei, know they are screwing up the country without people telling it so?
Ayatollah Khamenei ought to take a sabbatical, come and spend a year or two in the United States, see how Obama gets pummeled by all the “propaganda” ads and statements against him in this election year. May he can study the “Citizens United” case and all the super PACs.
Oh, he should bring the Saudi king along; they can share an apartment at The Watergate. They can talk with Santorum and Gingrich about politics (forget Romney; he’s not interesting enough). They won’t even have to address AIPAC, not yet .

Cheers
mhg


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Arabian Peninsula, Iran, Persian-American Gulf, Saudi Arabia, US Foreign Policy, Wahhabi, Yemen

Of Iranian Mullahs, Saudi Princes, the Old Ikhwan, and Walled Cities on the Gulf…..

“For, since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, US and Saudi foreign policy has been almost single-mindedly dedicated to destabilising Iran. Indeed, there is a way to understand the post-1979 political history of the region stretching from Pakistan to the Red Sea as permutations of an ongoing and devastating battle between Iran and Saudi Arabia. The export of the battle keeps expanding: sectarian violence has become ubiquitous in countries where it had been non-existent. Colonial powers may have engineered sectarian strife into the geography of countries like Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, but what of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and even Bahrain? The expanding battle field tells us something about shifts in Saudi ambitions, and the anxieties that shape them. The Kingdom that exports terrorism is also the Kingdom of the terrified………. Saudi Arabia has never fought a war. In fact, as the embarrassing flight from Al Khafji well ahead of a badly battered Iraqi brigade demonstrated, the Saudi army is not capable of managing even a scrimmage. However, the government has been engaged in proxy wars more or less continuously since 1962……………..”

She says: “US and Saudi foreign policy has been almost single-mindedly dedicated to destabilising Iran….“  Yet that is also what the USA and the Saudi regime accuse Iran of doing around the Middle East. My humble guess: they are both doing it to each other. But the weapon of sectarian divisiveness and hatred is a specialty of the Saudi regime, and they have used it effectively in the Gulf region in the past few years.

Actually the al-Saud clan and their fanatical Ikhwan Wahhabi tribal troops initially waged wars to expand their domain and bite off big chunks of other countries early in the 20th century. They focused on countries that were not part of the British or other European empires. They preferred to attack and invade neighboring countries that were not under any foreign protection. They tried briefly to conquer one country that was part of the British Empire, Kuwait, but were disabused on the notion quickly. (For a long time the Kuwaitis had to build a wall around the old city for protection).
They conquered and annexed big chunks of Yemen, invaded Hashemite-ruled Hijaz (Mecca and Madinah), and occupied and annexed al-Ahsa’a (now part of the Eastern Province). That was early in the 20th century, before the “Kingdom of Saudi Arabia” was announced.


But all that was then. The Ikhwan fanatics are long gone, disbanded long ago when their usefulness to king Ibn Saud ended. If they were around, the Ikhwan would be fighting against the princes whose corruption and opulent lifestyles would be abhorrent to them. The regular Saudi army is not a force capable of fighting wars. It is one of the best-armed, or most expensively armed, military forces in the world, but that is all. Advanced weapons alone do not make a capable military force, otherwise the UAE would be a superpower. Two years ago they were soundly defeated by the Huthi tribal clans of northern Yemen.

Cheers
mhg


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AIPAC, Iran, Israel, U.S. Politics, US Foreign Policy, War on Iran

Brainwashing America: the Eternal Bogeyman under the Bed, of AIPAC and 9/11………..

 

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“The United States has been down this squalid road before, in regard to Iraq, and it doesn’t end well for America. Obama was made to trek to AIPAC (which should have to register as the agent of a foreign state) because it is a very effective lobby and raises money for political campaigns, as well as raising money to punish politicians that do not toe its line on knee jerk support of Israeli policy. We saw this with Iraq, and now it is the same with Iran. A weak, ramshackle, ineffectual bogeyman is set up, like Saddam Hussein or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Americans are kept talking about the “threat” emanating from that country. It isn’t a real threat. It is manufactured by the Israeli intelligence agencies and promoted by their cells in the US. With regard to Iraq, we were told that it had among the more powerful armies in the world, that it possessed frightening weapons of mass destruction, that it was a threat to Europe and the United States. None of these things was true………….”

The Communist bogeyman may have been real, but he wasn’t under every American bed, certainly not under Joe McCarthy’s bed, nor under J. Edgar Hoover’s allegedly mysterious bed.
The Ba’athist Iraqi bogeyman was an ally of the Reagan administration and a bosom buddy of his eventual victims on the Persian-American Gulf. He wouldn’t have survived the war with Iran without GCC money and Western weapons, including the WMD which he used liberally against the Iraqi Kurds and the Iranians. Saddam turned from Western ally into Western bogeyman as soon as his war with Iran was over, as soon as his usefulness expired late in 1988. With the amiable Mr. Gorbachev in the Kremlin, it was time for Saddam to resume his natural role of the favorite bogeyman.
In recent decades America has always ‘needed’ a foreign bogeyman during elections cycles. The problem is that election cycles never end these days. The next American election cycle starts as soon as those elected are sworn in. This election cycle we are seeing now started in January 2009 and continued right through 2010. It will probably pause briefly between next November and January. So there is a perpetual need for a permanent supply of national bogeymen.
It is the turn of the Iranians again, highly and insistently recommended by the unregistered Israeli government lobbyists of AIPAC. They get some help from the neighborhood; the medieval tribal Saudi despots have made a tacit common cause with the Israelis and their allies.
Yesterday on CNN Rep. Peter King of New York (Gauleiter of hearings on local Islamic terrorism last year) kept mentioning that Obama should coordinate with and or talk to the Israelis and the Saudis. Now when was the last time you heard a New York congressman mention the Saudi princes both favorably and in the same breath as Israel?
Now, back to September 11: I wonder when will they finally tie the Iranians to that terrorist act. Miracles do happen when people go stupid: they tied Saddam to it in the minds of millions, didn’t they? Like I said, miracles do happen when people……..
Cheers
mhg


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