"We Need a False Flag to Start War with Iran"

Breaking!!
NeoCon Lobbyist - We Need a False Flag to Start War with Iran
http://www.forbiddenknowledgetv.com/videos/endless-war/breaking-neocon-lobbyist---we-need-a-false-flag-to-start-war-with-iran.html

YouTube Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVEYk98xsSQ

"NeoCon At Globalist Think-Tank Says Use False Flag to Start War With Iran"
Susanne Posel
September 26, 2012
Occupy Corporatism
OccupyCorporatism.com

Patrick Clawson, member of the globalist-controlled think-tank and neo-con influenced Washington Institute for Near East Studies (WINES); recently spoke about the use of false flags as a necessary way for instigating a war with Iran. Clawson remarked that Obama has had a difficult time “getting the US into a war with Iran” and advocating the use of conventional means (i.e. using a false flag to provoke a military strike).

Clawson said: “If in fact Iran is not going to compromise, then it would be best if someone else started the war. . . One can combine other means of pressure with sanctions. We could step up the pressure. I mean, look people – Iranian submarines go down all the time. What if one of them did not come back up? Who would know why?”

The WINES was founded by Martin Indyk, an academic and deputy of research for the Zionist lobby the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

Through AIPAC, the US government supplies Israel with:

• Defense intelligence and military security
• Counterterrorism
• Technologies that facilitate defense and military equipment
• Science and agricultural products

The WINES attempts to coerce the US Congress into following their “recommendations” with conferences, the Military Fellows Program (which has ties to the Council on Foreign Relations and the RAND Corporation), the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress , and secret meetings; as well as a multitude of publications and research reports. WINES instill Zionist propaganda and demonize Arabs and Muslims. However, they are hand-in-hand with one of the largest Zionist-controlled and pro-Israeli lobby in the US.

The neocon phenomenon consists of Zionists and sympathizers that dictate and coerce US foreign policy to reflect the agendas of the Zionist regime. According to neocon Irving Kristol, founder of the movement and the Commentary Magazine , the neoconservative agenda is explained as: “The historical task and political purpose of neo-conservatism is to convert the Republican Party and American conservatism in general, against their prospective wills, into a new kind of conservative politics suitable to governing a modern democracy.”

Kristol believes that the US can be compared to the Soviet Union in ideology and interests. “The US will then always feel obliged to defend a democratic nation under attack from non-democratic forces, external or internal. That is why we feel it is necessary to defend Israel when its survival is threatened. No complicated geopolitical calculations of national interest are necessary.”

Prominent neocons have purveyed the Zionist agenda such as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Jeanne Kilpatrick, Norman Podheretz, Joshua Goldberg, and many others.

Evidence of the power of WINES was manifest in the bill HR 4133 which allocates US resources to Israel at the expense of the taxpayer. This legislation marks Obama’s unwavering commitment to Israel as a puppet of the global Elite. Israel may siphon money from the Federal Reserve, use the US military at their whim and expect the backing of the US government during provoked attacks of other Middle Eastern sovereign nations.

Mainstream media is following the Zionist script to the letter in regard to the false claims of Iranian endeavors to build nuclear weapons. Now there are reports that Iran is capable of launching a pre-emptive strike should Israel attack, as they are threatening to do.

According to Amir Ali Hajizadeh, brigadier general for the CIA-sponsored Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps states that: “Iran will not start any war but it could launch a pre-emptive attack if it was sure that the enemies are putting the final touches to attack it.”

Hajizadeh explains that the Zionist-controlled Israeli government will not start “a war without America’s support. Therefore, in case of a war, we will get into a war with both of them and we will certainly get into a conflict with American bases.”

Other propaganda purveyed by an anonymous expert claims that Iran “will attack the forces of the US or any country that tries to take out its nuclear program are not mere boasts, experts say, but any such strike could be met with devastating counterattacks.”

The Zionist regime are continuously decrying that Iran has a nuclear weapon. However, this is an old game they are playing and the American public’s memory may be too short to recall how many times this lie has been perpetrated. In the past, there have been several claims by Israeli Prime Minister and globalist puppet Benjamin Netanyahu and other supporters of the lie that Iran was on the precipice of having a nuclear weapon.

In 1992, Netanyahu predicts that Iran was “3 to 5 years” from having a nuclear weapon.
In 1992, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres predicts an Iranian nuclear warhead by 1999 to French TV.
In 1995, New York Times reports US and Israel claim Iran would have the bomb by 2000.
In 1998, speaking before Congress Donald Rumsfeld proclaims Iran could have an intercontinental ballistic missile that could hit the US by 2003.

The reality is that between 1985 and 2002 the Israeli Ministry of Defense used shell corporations to smuggle nuclear triggers from the US. One of the operatives, Richard Kelly Smith, met with Netanyahu who worked for one of the shell corporations called Heli Trading Company and was an integral part of the smuggling ring.

In the 1950’s the US assisted Iranian nuclear endeavors with the aid of Atoms for Peace program that united the US and other European governments to contribute to Iran’s nuclear program until the state-sponsored removal of the Shah of Iran. When the US-friendly Ayatollah Khomeini was installed, he disbanded the nuclear program citing conflictions of nuclear weapons with the Qur’an.

Still, mainstream media continues to sound the alarm that Iran not only has nuclear weapons, but will strike US bases if attacked by Israel. While Iran maintains that their nuclear program is to develop power for their nation, Israeli officials, including Netanyahu say: “Those in the international community who refuse to put red lines before Iran don’t have a moral right to place a red light before Israel.”

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad explains that Iran does not take the Zionist regime’s threats of military strike seriously. Ahmadinejad asserts that Iran is quite capable of defending itself against an attack with Israeli armed forces. He also said that Iran views the Zionists at a “dead end” and scrambling to gain ground and maintain power.

Iranian media deny slain man was connected to nuclear program

Thomas Erdbrink
July 23
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle-east/iranian-scientist-killed-local-media-report/2011/07/23/gIQAdsSNVI_story.html

TEHRAN — Iran’s semi-official state media denied reports that a man killed Saturday by unknown assailants was a physicist connected to the country’s nuclear program.

Several local Web sites had reported that the man, who was gunned down by assailants on a motorcycle, was connected to Iran’s nuclear program. But the semi-official Fars news agency said the slain man was actually a student of physics.

“During the last hours, some media had mistakenly thought Dariush Rezaienejad was one of Iran’s nuclear scientists while confirmed reports show that he is not a nuclear scientist and is a student at Khajeh Nasir University,” the agency reported.

In November, two scientists were targeted by men on motorcycles who attached explosives to their cars during Tehran’s morning rush hour. One of the scientists, Majid Shahriari, died, while the other, Fereydoun Abbasi, survived the attack and now heads the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran.

At the time, Iranian authorities blamed agents of Israel and the United States for those killings, accusing them of wanting to cause chaos in the country. But leading figures in Iran’s opposition accused the government of plotting the attacks in order to spread fear in the capital, where many oppose the government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

In January 2010, another physicist, Massoud Ali-Mohammadi, was killed when explosives attached to a motorcycle detonated in front of his house.

Iran Has ‘Positive’ View on Geneva Talks as Nuclear Issues Loom

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-12-07/iran-has-positive-view-on-geneva-talks-as-nuclear-issues-loom.html

Iran Has ‘Positive’ View on Geneva Talks as Nuclear Issues Loom
December 07, 2010
Jonathan Tirone and Ladane Nasseri

Preventing the spread of nuclear weapons and a proposal to transfer atomic-reactor fuel to Iran top the agenda as U.S. and European diplomats meet for a second day in Geneva with their Iranian counterparts.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said in a speech today in the city of Arak that talks will be “fruitful” if sanctions against Iran are canceled. Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast said at a press conference in Tehran that Iran is going into the talks with a “positive attitude.” Nuclear non-proliferation, disarmament and atomic-technology transfer will be the points of discussion, he said.

“What matters most to the Americans is Iran’s uranium enrichment and their alleged studies” into nuclear weapons, Ivan Oelrich, senior fellow at the Washington-based Federation of American Scientists, said in a telephone interview from New Orleans. “If both sides agree to talk on those issues, then that would be a step forward.”

Iran’s nuclear program, which has drawn four sets of United Nations sanctions, is at the center of the European Union-led talks in Geneva. Iran says it’s producing uranium to fuel atomic reactors. The U.S. and Europe accuse Iran of trying to build nuclear weapons.

Iran used yesterday’s meeting in Geneva with the so-called P5+1 -- China, France, Russia, the U.S., the U.K. and Germany -- to talk about a Nov. 29 bombing in Tehran that killed an Iranian nuclear scientist. Iran has blamed foreign agents for the bombing.

Killing Condemned

Iran’s envoy to the Geneva talks, Saeed Jalili, opened the session by condemning the killing of physicist Majid Shahriari, state-run Mehr news agency reported, citing an unidentified Iranian official in Geneva.

“We believe some of the secret foreign services have been involved,” Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki told reporters in Athens yesterday. “Those who think murders and military violence can destroy nuclear technology have made a big mistake.”

The U.S. has said it wasn’t involved, while Israel and the U.K. have declined to comment.

“Trust is going to take a long time to develop, and they’re not going to come out of this meeting with an agreement,” Paul Ingram, executive director of the British American Security Information Council, a London-based policy advisory group, said yesterday by telephone. “There is an increased willingness now to discuss real issues.”

IAEA Blocked

International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors have been stymied by Iranian officials, who have so far refused to discuss documents that show Iran may have researched the construction of nuclear weapons. The IAEA has been investigating Iran’s nuclear work since 2003, when it was revealed that Tehran’s government had hidden atomic research for two decades.

Tensions may mount further after Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of Iran’s atomic energy agency, said Dec. 5 that the country had achieved self-sufficiency in producing yellowcake -- uranium in its raw form -- as part of its nuclear program.

The goal of the talks is to find a way for the P5+1 -- the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany -- to build momentum for further negotiations, say past and present diplomats from countries participating. An immediate breakthrough isn’t likely, they say.

--With assistance from Natalie Weeks in Athens and Flavia Krause-Jackson in Washington; Editors: Leon Mangasarian, James Hertling.

To contact the reporters on this story: Jonathan Tirone in Geneva at jtirone@bloomberg.net; Ladane Nasseri in Tehran at lnasseri@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: James Hertling at jhertling@bloomberg.net

Ancient Israeli Myths Deter Peace

http://consortiumnews.com/2009/070809.html

Ancient Israeli Myths Deter Peace
By Robert Parry (A Special Report)
July 9, 2009

The rationale for formally designating Israel a Jewish state – as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu now demands – rests on three religious-political pillars: God’s purported covenant with Moses instructing the ancient Israelites to conquer the land, the injustice of the Roman-era Diaspora that supposedly removed them centuries later, and the brutal persecution of European Jews in the Holocaust.

Yet, two of these pillars – Moses conveying God’s covenant to the Israelites and the Roman Diaspora – appear based on almost no historical reality, the stuff of legend and possibly even lies that crumble under any serious scrutiny.

Normally, such ancient stories might be regarded as harmless tales that some people treasure as part of their Judeo-Christian faiths, except that Netanyahu’s new demand means that these myths now threaten peace in the Middle East and conceivably could push the modern world into more bloody warfare. Therefore, they must be given fresh examination.

Ironically, it was the Nazis’ drive to exterminate European Jews during World War II that is the one pillar founded on historical reality, although some extreme enemies of Israel insist on making Holocaust denial a central feature of their attacks.

Also, some adversaries, like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have argued that it is unfair to make the Palestinians pay for a crime against humanity committed by the Germans.

Yet, the Holocaust is not in historical dispute. That horrible reality – an industrial-style extermination campaign that also targeted Gypsies, homosexuals and Communists – was proven after the World War II from a multitude of Nazi records, photographs and eyewitness accounts.

It is the tales of Moses from the Torah (or the first five books of the Old Testament) and the legend of the Roman Diaspora that lack serious historical underpinnings.

The Diaspora myth has been addressed in a new book by Israeli historian Shlomo Sand, When and How Was the Jewish People Invented? It debunks the notion that Rome removed the Jewish people en masse from the Holy Land in the First and Second Centuries A.D. and scattered them across Europe.

Instead, most East European Jews appear to be descendents of converts, principally from the Kingdom of the Khazars in eastern Russia, who embraced Judaism in the Eighth Century, A.D. The descendants of the Khazars then were driven from their native lands by invasions and – through migration – created the Jewish populations of Eastern Europe.

Thus, Sand argues, many of today’s Israelis who emigrated from Europe after World War II have little or no genealogical connection to the land. According to Sand, a bitter irony of Israel’s founding may be that it displaced Palestinians who could be the actual descendants of the ancient Israelites, who stayed on the land and eventually converted to Islam.

Other descendants of those ancient Israelites maintained Judaism as a strong presence in the Middle East, both in Palestine and in successful communities from Egypt to Iraq and Iran. These Jews faced few religious pressures until after Israel was founded in 1948, when this new European intrusion into Islamic lands was viewed in the context of the Crusades a millennium ago. [More on Sand’s book below.]

The Moses Myth

Yet, while questioning the Diaspora myth is a sensitive topic for many Israelis and their supporters around the world, it is even touchier to challenge the Biblical claim that God, through Moses, struck a covenant with the Israelites to conquer the land and possess it for all time.

Because the Torah is sacred to Jews – and to many Christians as the revealed word of God in the Old Testament – it has been dangerous to examine the factual history behind these texts in an objective manner.

For centuries, the Catholic Church and some Protestant faiths persecuted anyone who questioned Moses’s supposed authorship of the chapters even though their internal contradictions and the description of Moses’s death at the end of Deuteronomy made that long-held belief untenable.

As Richard Elliott Friedman recounts in his 1987 book, Who Wrote the Bible?, “Religious opposition to the new investigation (into the traditional belief about Moses’s authorship) persisted during the 19th Century” and didn’t collapse until 1943 when Pope Pius XII “encouraged scholars to pursue knowledge about the biblical writers.”

Modern Biblical scholars now agree that Moses was not the author of the Torah, that the stories were passed down orally from the 14th Century B.C. and were put into writing centuries later. But the legendary figure of Moses has remained almost beyond criticism, not only for many Jews but for people of the Christian and Islamic faiths. (He is treated as a holy messenger in the Koran.)

Many Americans think of Moses as the angry but righteous leader as portrayed by Charlton Heston in the 1956 epic “The Ten Commandments,” or they think of their feel-good Bible studies as children. Yet, many archaeologists believe that the Moses stories were largely made up.

“This is what archaeologists have learned from their excavations in the Land of Israel: the Isrealites were never in Egypt, did not wander in the desert, did not conquer the land in a military campaign and did not pass it on to the 12 tribes of Israel,” summed up Professor Ze’ev Herzog, director of the Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University.

“The many Egyptian documents that we have make no mention of the Israelites’ presence in Egypt and are also silent about the events of the Exodus.”

However, other scholars believe that some Israelites did emigrate to Egypt, suffered in servitude there, and may have been led back to Canaan by Moses or a Moses-like leader.

Nevertheless, because of the powerful influence of the Torah (and the Old Testament), the biblical Moses carries extraordinary religious and historical weight, inspiring Israeli settlers to claim Palestinian lands as rightfully theirs and rallying fundamentalist Christians across the American heartland to embrace whatever actions the Israelis take.

A Tyrannical Leader

But who was Moses?

According to biblical lore, Moses was a Hebrew child raised in the royal Egyptian court before breaking with his protectors and remaking himself into a leader of Hebrew slaves. He guided them out of Egypt and transformed them, as they wandered for decades in the Sinai desert, into an Israelite nation, giving them specific laws and detailed rules of behavior.

During that time, Moses announced a covenant with God that granted the Israelites permanent dominion over the lands across the Jordan River, and he instructed them to destroy other peoples inhabiting those territories. Moses, however, never returned to the Promised Land, dying near the Jordan, before the conquest began.

Though Moses is regarded by many as a great law giver (the Ten Commandants) and as a major force in the formation of monotheism (the belief in one God), the text of the Torah present him as a cruel and tyrannical leader.

From a modern perspective, Moses might be viewed as a “dictator who killed his own people” when they disobeyed him and an advocate of genocide against outsiders. His claims that he spoke with the Lord sound more like a megalomaniac who believed he could scare a primitive people into following his orders by claiming they were edicts from God.

Indeed, over the centuries, many tyrants have used religion (especially monotheism) to justify repression and to eliminate enemies and rivals. The religious wars in Europe during the Middle Ages are a classic example of how kings and popes wrapped their personal power in the bloody cloak of religion, torturing and burning alive “heretics” who wouldn’t submit.

The biblical Moses appears to have been such a tyrant, though the Sunday school version often played down this extreme side of his personality.

In Exodus, for instance, there is the famous story of the Israelites creating a visible idol of their God in the form of a golden calf while Moses is absent on Mount Sinai. When Moses returns with stone tablets conveying laws of behavior, he is furious and smashes the tablets.

According to the Torah, Moses then grinds up the golden calf, mixes it with water and makes the Israelites drink it. Then, Moses recruits what we would today call a “death squad.”

The Torah reads: “Moses stood at the gate of the camp and said, ‘Whoever is for the Lord, to me!’ And the Levites gathered round him. And he said to them, ‘Thus said the Lord God of Israel, “Put every man his sword on his thigh, and cross over and back from gate to gate in the camp, and each man kill his brother and each man his fellow and each man his kin”’ And the Levites did according to the word of Moses, and about three thousand men of the people fell on that day.”

In other words, Moses ordered a massacre of Israelites whom he regarded as his enemies, people who had challenged his authority in the form of dancing around the golden calf.

Robert Alter in his 2004 book, The Five Books of Moses, comments on Moses’s instruction: “each man kill his brother,” etc.

“This chilling command enjoins the sword-wielding Levites to show no mercy to friend or kin,” Alter wrote. “The figure of three thousand dead in the next verse indicates that this is not an indiscriminate massacre but an assault on the ringleaders – or perhaps, those guilty of the most egregious excesses – among the orgiasts.”

Higher Authority

It also seemed that whenever Moses was setting some rule, whether as grand as the Ten Commandants or as minor as personal hygiene, he always invoked the Almighty.

In Leviticus, for instance, God supposedly takes a direct interest in dictating how women should be treated after childbirth, with one set of rules for giving birth to sons and another for daughters.

According to this account, the Lord tell Moses, “Speak to the Israelites, saying ‘Should a woman quicken with seed and bear a male, she shall be unclean seven days, as in the days of her menstrual unwellness she shall be unclean. And on the eighth day, the flesh of his foreskin shall be circumcised. And thirty days and three she shall stay in her blood purity. She shall touch no consecrated thing nor shall she come into the sanctuary till the days of her purity are completed.

“And if she bears a female, she shall be unclean two weeks, as in her menstruation, and sixty days and six she shall stay over her blood purity. And when the days of her purity are completed, whether for a son or for a daughter, she shall bring a yearling lamb for a burnt offering and a young pigeon or a turtledove for an offense offering to the entrance of the Tent of Meeting, to the priest. And he shall bring it forward before the Lord and atone for her, and she shall be clean from the flowing of her blood.”

If you think that’s a lot of unnecessary detail, you should read the Lord’s instructions via Moses for how to assess whether a boil is leprosy or not.

In Deuteronomy, Moses explains to the Israelites about their right to reclaim the land of their forefathers, again speaking for God:

“And the Lord your God shall bring you to the land that your fathers took hold of, and you shall take hold of it, and He shall do well with you and make you more multitudinous than your fathers.”

Moses also makes clear that God expected the conquest to include massacres and genocide. Again speaking for the Lord, Moses said:

“I will bring back vengeance on My foes and My enemies I will requite. I will make My shafts drunk with blood, and My sword will eat up flesh from the blood of the fallen and captive, from the flesh of the long-haired foe.”

In his final blessing to the Israelites, Moses makes the genocide message even more explicit, painfully so. He called on them to “smash the loins of [the Lord’s] foes, that His enemies rise no more. … Your enemies cower before you and you on their backs will tread.”

So, more than 3,000 years later, should a modern state like Israel be demanding that Palestinians recognize Israel as an explicitly Jewish state, as Netanyahu now says?

The Diaspora Myth

The second pillar – the Roman Diaspora – also comes from ancient times though not as far back as the stories of Moses. If anything, however, the Diaspora has less of a historical basis.

In When and How Was the Jewish People Invented?, Dr. Sand, an expert on European history at the University of Tel Aviv, says the Jews were never exiled en masse from the Holy Land and that the myth of the Diaspora was used by Zionists over the past century to buttress their argument for creating Israel.

Sand, a European Jew born in 1946 to Holocaust survivors in Austria, argues that until the Zionist movement arose, Jews thought of themselves as Jews because they shared a common religion, not because they possessed a direct lineage to the ancient tribes of Israel.

However, at the turn of the 20th Century, Sand asserts, Zionist Jews began assembling a national history to justify creation of a Jewish state by inventing the idea that Jews existed as a people separate from their religion and that they had primogeniture over the territory that had become known as Palestine.

The Zionists also invented the idea that Jews living in exile were obligated to return to the Promised Land, a concept that had been foreign to Judaism, Sand states.

If Sand’s thesis is correct – and it has faced no substantive rebuttal – it would suggest that many of the Palestinian Arabs have a far more substantial claim to the lands of Israel than do many European Jews who arrived there asserting a God-given claim.

Indeed, Sand theorizes that many Jews, who remained in Judea after Roman legions crushed the last uprising in 136 A.D., eventually converted to Christianity or Islam, meaning that the Palestinians who have been crowded into Gaza or concentrated in the West Bank might be direct descendants of Jews from the Roman era.

In his book – and in an interview with Haaretz about his book – Sand challenged the myth that the Romans relocated the Jews by force to Europe. In the interview, he said:

"I started looking in research studies about the exile from the land - a constitutive event in Jewish history, almost like the Holocaust. But to my astonishment I discovered that it has no literature. The reason is that no one exiled the people of the country.

“The Romans did not exile peoples and they could not have done so even if they had wanted to. They did not have trains and trucks to deport entire populations. That kind of logistics did not exist until the 20th Century. From this, in effect, the whole book was born: in the realization that Judaic society was not dispersed and was not exiled."

The True Descendants

Asked if he was saying that the true descendants of the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Judah are the Palestinians, Sand responded:

"No population remains pure over a period of thousands of years. But the chances that the Palestinians are descendants of the ancient Judaic people are much greater than the chances that you or I are its descendents.

“The first Zionists, up until the Arab Revolt [1936-1939], knew that there had been no exiling, and that the Palestinians were descended from the inhabitants of the land. They knew that farmers don't leave until they are expelled.

“Even Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, the second president of the State of Israel, wrote in 1929 that, 'the vast majority of the peasant farmers do not have their origins in the Arab conquerors, but rather, before then, in the Jewish farmers who were numerous and a majority in the building of the land.'"

Criticism of Sand’s book has focused mostly on his credentials as an expert on European history, not ancient Middle Eastern history, a point that Sand readily acknowledges.

One critic, Israel Bartal, dean of humanities at the Hebrew University, attacked Sand’s credentials, but disagreed mostly over Sand’s assertion that the Diaspora story was created as an intentional myth by Zionists seeking to fabricate a direct genealogical connection between many of the world’s Jews and Israel.

“Although the myth of an exile from the Jewish homeland (Palestine) does exist in popular Israeli culture, it is negligible in serious Jewish historical discussions,” Bartal wrote in the newspaper Haaretz. “Important groups in the Jewish national movement expressed reservations regarding this myth or denied it completely.”

In other words, Bartal is not so much disputing Sand’s historical claims about the Diaspora or the origins of Eastern European Jews, as he is contesting Sand’s notion that Zionists concocted a false history for a cynical political purpose.

But there can be no doubt that the story of the Diaspora has played a key role in the founding of Israel and that the appeal of this powerful narrative has helped generate sympathy around the world, especially in the United States.

"After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people remained faithful to it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom," reads the preamble to the Israeli Declaration of Independence.

As recently as Israeli’s bombardment of Gaza in January 2009, the myth of the Diaspora was used to justify the slaughter of some 1,400 Palestinians dead, including many children and other non-combatants. When the Israeli government investigated alleged war crimes by its army, Israeli troops testified that extremist Rabbis had proclaimed the invasion a holy war.

The troops said the Rabbis brought them booklets and articles declaring: “We are the Jewish people. We came to this land by a miracle. God brought us back to this land, and now we need to fight to expel the non-Jews who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land.”

Today, with the emergence of a new Likud-led government in Israel, the Diaspora myth and Moses legends are intruding again on the prospects for finally achieving peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

Prime Minister Netanyahu has insisted on a new precondition for talks – that the Palestinians must agree to a “public, binding and unequivocal” recognition that Israel is “the nation state of the Jewish people,” not simply the nation state of the people of Israel. Netanyahu is making this demand although Arabs make up about 20 percent of Israel’s population.

This appears to be another case of ancient bloody myths contributing to a modern bloody reality.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com.

Iran: fraud claims and counter-claims analyzed

http://www.iranaffairs.com/iran_affairs/2009/06/iran-elections-claims-and-counterclaims-analyzed.html

June 19, 2009
Iran elections: fraud claims and counter-claims analyzed

Out of boredom, I thought it would be fun to keep track of the various claims about how the elections in Iran were supposedly stolen or fraudulent, versus their counter-arguments - please add to the list if you can, since I haven't been keeping track of all the claims and counter-claims.

[As a side note: Before you automatically and unthinkingly assume that there was election fraud in Iran, ask yourself: WHY? was Mousavi, the opposition leader -- and a former Prime Minister and very much a supporter of the revolution -- such a threat to the system that they had to resort to election fraud? No, sorry, he isn't.]

CLAIM 1: MOUSAVI LOST IN HIS HOME DISTRICT - SUSPICIOUSLY.

"It is claimed that Ahmadinejad won the city of Tabriz with 57%. His main opponent, Mir Hossein Mousavi, is an Azeri from Azerbaijan province, of which Tabriz is the capital. Mousavi, according to such polls as exist in Iran and widespread anecdotal evidence, did better in cities and is popular in Azerbaijan. Certainly, his rallies there were very well attended. So for an Azeri urban center to go so heavily for Ahmadinejad just makes no sense." (Juan Cole)

COUNTER-CLAIM:

"But Ahmadinejad himself speaks Azeri quite fluently as a consequence of his eight years serving as a popular and successful official in two Azeri-majority provinces; during the campaign, he artfully quoted Azeri and Turkish poetry — in the original — in messages designed to appeal to Iran’s Azeri community. (And we should not forget that the supreme leader is Azeri.) The notion that Mousavi was somehow assured of victory in Azeri-majority provinces is simply not grounded in reality." (Leveretts)

CLAIM 2: AHMADINEJAD WON IN TEHRAN - SUSPICIOUSLY.

"Ahmadinejad is claimed to have taken Tehran by over 50%. Again, he is not popular in the cities, even, as he claims, in the poor neighborhoods, in part because his policies have produced high inflation and high unemployment." (Juan Cole)

COUNTER-CLAIM:

Ahmadinejad won the province of Tehran, not the city of Tehran. Anyway, he was the mayor of Tehran and won there in 2005 too.

CLAIM 3: THE STRAIGHT-LINE GRAPH

"Ahmadinejad's numbers were fairly standard across Iran's provinces. In past elections there have been substantial ethnic and provincial variations." (Juan Cole)

"Statistically and mathematically, it is impossible to maintain such perfect linear relations between the votes of any two candidates in any election — and at all stages of vote counting. This is particularly true about Iran, a large country with a variety of ethnic groups who usually vote for a candidate who is ethnically one of their own." (Tehran Bureau)

"They didn't even attempt to disguise the fraud. Which, to me, tells me they panicked. This graph is a red flag to Iran and the world." (Andrew SUllivan)

COUNTER-CLAIM

The apparently extremely strong relationship is mostly an artifact of the exceptionally simple fact that as you count more votes, both candidates' totals will tend to increase. (Fivethirtyeight.com)

[T]hese figures, though they may seem eerily consistent at first glance, are actually just what we would expect. That's the nature of large batches of data, governed by what's called the Law of Large Numbers: Averages of widely varying quantities can, and usually do, yield results that look almost perfectly uniform. Given enough data, the outliers tend to cancel one another out. (Jordan Ellenberg)

CLAIM 4: SECURITY CRACK-DOWN

"If Ahmadinejad had really won, then why the crack down on dissidents, cutting off international communications and filtering Facebook? "

COUNTER-CLAIM:

This is more of a rhetorical question than an argument. Perfectly valid reasons exist for security measures following a hotly-disputed election especially when you add in the tense international situation, what with talk of "regime change" and all. Add rioting to the mix too.

CLAIM 5: AHMADINEJAD's BAD ECONOMIC POLICIES

Ahmadinejad is responsible for bad economic policies that have driven up inflation, increased unemployment, increased poverty, and so people could not have possibly voted for him.

COUNTER-CLAIM:

"The belief that Iran suffers from dire economic conditions is one of four myths circulating about Iran's macroeconomic performance. Iran's economy has actually performed well in aggregate terms, with a moderate rate of growth in the last ten to fifteen years, including healthy GDP and per capita growth in investment. In the last three years, Iran's actual growth rate has averaged 5.8 percent." (Kelly Campbell, U.S. Institute of Peace)

"Lucky for Mr. Ahmadinejad, there are good reasons to doubt that poverty has been on the rise...Another comparison, based on the absolute poverty lines defined on the basis of the $2 per day standard, shows the opposite: that poverty rates have declined slightly during 2005-06." (Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, Brookings Institute)

"There is no shortages of complaints one can have about Iran’s economy (high youth unemployment, high inflation, and stagnant productivity, to name a few) , but a low standard of living is not one of them. "(Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, Brookings Institute)

"The International Monetary Fund projects that Iran’s economy will actually grow modestly this year (when the economies of most Gulf Arab states are in recession). A significant number of Iranians — including the religiously pious, lower-income groups, civil servants and pensioners — appear to believe that Ahmadinejad’s policies have benefited them. And, while many Iranians complain about inflation, the TFT poll found that most Iranian voters do not hold Ahmadinejad responsible." (Leveretts)

(I would add to this: I'm no economist but I think inflation rates go up because of increased government spending under Ahmadinejad in part as a result of benefits and subsidies that went mostly to the poor -- something for which he was widely criticized by economists in Iran.)

CLAIM 6: COUNTING VOTES IMPOSSIBLE IN SHORT TIME

It is impossible to have counted all the votes in the short time between the closing of the polls and the announcement of Ahmadinejad's victory.

COUNTER-CLAIM:

"During the election, there were about 47,000 polling stations for voting. For each station, every candidate was allowed to have a representative present to oversee the process... When the voting ended at 11 pm, they immediately started counting. Once they had the final tallies at each station, the representatives were made to sign off on them, and the numbers were fed into a centrally computerized system where the tallies were collected.

Now, if you divide 39 million votes by 47,000 stations, it comes to 893 votes per station on average. This is a very small number of ballots that can easily be counted in a short period of time." (Huffington Post interview with Iranian cleric)

"The counting mechanism is simple: Iran has 47,000 voting stations, plus 14,000 roaming stations that travel from tiny village to tiny village, staying there for a short time before moving on. That creates 61,000 ballot boxes designed to receive roughly the same number of votes. That would mean that each station would have been counting about 500 ballots, or about 70 votes per hour. With counting beginning at 10 p.m., concluding seven hours later does not necessarily indicate fraud or anything else." (Stratfor)

CLAIM 7: EXCESS VOTERS

A spokesman for Iran's authoritative Guardian Council has admitted that voter turnout in the country's July 12 presidential election exceed 100 percent in as many as 50 cities

COUNTER-CLAIM:

"Voter turnout of above 100% in some cities is a normal phenomenon because there is no legal limitation for people to vote for the presidential elections in another city or province to which people often travel or commute." (Press TV)

"In an interview with the special news section of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting's [state broadcaster] Channel II on Thursday night, [Iranian Interior Minister] Sadeq Mahsuli said that the increase in the votes in some of the country's cities against the limit of the eligible voters is quite natural and it has also happened in the past. He added: In 48 cities, the number of voters was higher than the number of those eligible to vote and this was due to employment or education related emigration and holiday trips.

He pointed out that in some of these cities where there were surplus votes, the votes for the rival candidate was higher than the elected candidate and added: The number of voters in Shemiranat [area in north Tehran] were thirteen times higher than the eligible voters in this region and one of the candidates achieved votes twice of the elected candidate and the figure of thirteen times higher participation by the people on holiday in this region appears quite normal. The interior minister stated that the number of eligible voters was announced based on the places in the country where birth certificates were issued and added: This is in spite of the fact that a great percentage of people have left their place of residence because of employment, education and holidays and even in the previous elections, we had up to 800 times the number of eligible voters in some cities. Mahsuli explained that on the whole, 184,734 people out of 100 per cent of the eligible voters have voted over the limit in 48 cities and specified: In a province such as Yazd, at least 30 per cent of the population, meaning more than 37,000 students and military garrison personnel, consists of non-native individuals whereas the surplus voters in this region only totalled 515." (Resalat, Tehran, in Persian, 27 Jun 09, p. 2, BBC Monitoring Service Jun 30 2009)

CLAIM 8: STATISTICAL EVIDENCE

A statistical analysis of province-by-province voting in Iran’s June 12 presidential election makes a compelling case for wide-spread fraud in the vote that returned conservative President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power and touched off days of bloody protests in Iran. (Christian Science Monitor)

COUNTER-CLAIM:

"Recently, spot analyses by scholars from the University of Michigan and the Royal Institute of International Affairs suggested that this year’s election results are out of line with previous presidential elections. These analyses compare this year’s results with the first round of the 2005 presidential election, when Ahmadinejad and former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani outpolled other candidates to move into a runoff. Viewed through that prism, Ahmadinejad’s 2009 tally seems inflated.

But the comparison is structurally flawed. It is tantamount to arguing that, because Barack Obama won 38 percent of the vote in a competitive, multicandidate caucus in Iowa in January 2008, it is implausible that he could have won 54 percent of that state’s vote in the two-person general election in November. A more appropriate comparison for this year’s results in Iran would be the second round of the 2005 presidential election, when Ahmadinejad trounced Rafsanjani." (Leveretts)

The University of Michigan study relies on Benford's Law but according to the Carter Center which has monitored more than 70 elections around the world:

In short, Benford's Law does not generally apply to electoral data and even in cases where we suspect that it might apply, we find that it does not. All in all, Benford's Law seems like a very weak instrument for detecting voting fraud. There are many reasons to believe that it does not apply to electoral data, and empirical tests suggest that deviations from the law are not necessarily indicative of fraud.

CLAIM 9: KARROUBI's LOW VOTES

Karroubi, one of the candidates, scored very low in the polls -- lower than expected.

COUNTER-CLAIM:

He also admitted on TV during his debates with Ahmadinejad to accepting $300,000 payment from Shahram Jazayeri, a shadowy figure involved in a number of recent financial scandals in Iran. (PressTV)

CLAIM 9: BALLOT BOXES WERE CLOSED, NOT ENOUGH BALLOT PAPERS PRINTED, ETC.

"In his letter released on Saturday [20 June], Musavi had cited seven accounts of abnormalities in the election process and asked the Guardian Council, the body tasked with overseeing the election, to "cancel the election nationwide."

Musavi said the "sealing of ballot boxes before the voting in most polling stations, shortage of ballot papers and limited voting time" were among the reasons he objected to the results of the election." (Press TV website, Tehran, in English 1807 23 Jun 09)

COUNTER-CLAIM:

"The Interior Ministry however rejected the claims, saying that his letter 'contains apparent contradictions' and includes general cases which 'lack concrete and legal evidence.'

The ministry added that according to the election law, the ballot boxes have to be sealed in the presence of the representatives of the supervisory board before the voting officially starts.

It added that the ministry, however, invited Mr Musavi's representatives to be present and almost all of them were present when the ballot boxes were sealed.

On the shortage of the ballot papers, the ministry argued that it was 'impossible to estimate the exact and correct number of voters in a town or a polling station.' " (Press TV website, Tehran, in English 1807 23 Jun 09)

The New York Times and Iran

“Underdeveloped countries with rich resources now have an object lesson in the heavy cost that must be paid by one of their number which goes berserk with fanatical nationalism. It is perhaps too much to hope that Iran’s experience will prevent the rest of Mossadeqs in other countries, but that experience may at least strengthen the hands of more reasonable and far-seeing leaders.”
New York Times, August 1954

This quote should be remembered whenever mainstream pundits claim those in the Middle East aren't ready for democracy. In fact, Iran had a vibrant democracy over 50 years ago, and it was squashed by the CIA and US oil companies because Mossadeq was demanding a fair cut for the Iranian people on the oil business.

Likewise any talk in the mainstream press claiming outrage over election fraud in Iran shouldn't be taken seriously after the Bush swindles of 2000 and 2004. At this point, the US establishment has less credibility defending democracy than it does condemning torture and war crimes.

Ahmadinejad's reelection may be a con, but I've yet to see any evidence of it, even if the dude is a creep. At this point, this just looks like another attempted electoral coup funded by the Orwellian named National Endowment for Democracy to put another guy who will shove the IMF agenda down his country's throat while feigning to be a paragon of democracy...

http://wsws.org/articles/2009/jun2009/pers-j19.shtml

The New York Times and Iran: Journalism as state provocation
19 June 2009
Bill Van Auken

In an editorial published Thursday entitled “Iran’s Nonrepublic,” the New York Times once again denounced the country’s presidential elections, declaring that “government authorities bulldozed the results” and that the victory of the incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was “bogus.”

At the same time, echoing a statement made by President Barack Obama the day before, the newspaper warned, “Given its history with Iran, the United States must take special care not to be seen as interfering.”

The Times editorial board does not believe that this stricture applies to itself. Since the results of the June 12 election were announced, the newspaper has pursued a journalistic policy of out-and-out provocation in service of the imperialist interests that official Washington insists it must not be seen as pursuing.

The Times observes no standard of journalistic objectivity, reporting as fact that the Iranian election was stolen, without providing a scintilla of proof to back it up. Instead, it uncritically repeats the insistence of the Mousavi camp that it is so.

The newspaper has not even bothered to report, much less analyze, the vote totals, which are readily available by both city and province and refute the claims made that the ballots were rigged to give Ahmadinejad a 60 percent margin across the board.

On the contrary, they show that Mousavi won—in some cases by a two-to-one margin—precisely in the areas that are now the center of the election protests—the wealthier suburbs of Tehran, Shiraz and elsewhere.

The US has intense interests in Iran, with the Obama administration fighting wars on its eastern and western borders. There is, moreover, the long history of hostility between the two countries, stemming from Washington’s previous domination of Iran and its oil wealth through its dictatorial client regime under the Shah, and the revolution that brought that regime to an end. Given these interests and this history, conscientious coverage of Iranian politics, particularly by US journalists, calls for not only objectivity, but also sensitivity to Washington’s intervention in Iran’s affairs and attempts to influence its politics.

The Times coverage, however, exhibits no such objectivity whatsoever. The newspaper has simply ignored commentary from prominent analysts of the region who have suggested that the claims of a rigged election are not supported by the evidence. These include Anthony Cordesman, the chief military strategy and Middle East analyst for the Center for Strategic and International Studies; Hillary Mann Leverett, the former chief Iran analyst on George W. Bush’s National Security Council, and her husband Flynt Leverett, a long time CIA analyst and NSC staffer, who together wrote a column entitled “Ahmadinejad won. Get over it;” and George Friedman, the head of the Stratfor private intelligence service.

All of them said that the right-wing populist Ahmadinejad retained substantial popular support in Iran, particularly among the rural poor and more oppressed social layers, and warned against “Iran experts” who based their analyses on wishful thinking and contact with a more affluent, English-speaking minority in Iran.

The fact that the Times employs its claims of fraud to demand a new election—calling the Guardian Council’s call for recounting ballots a “cynical gesture”—is highly significant. The newspaper is not interested in correcting vote fraud, but rather in bringing pressure to bear within the Iranian state to effect a political coup.

This was spelled out explicitly Thursday by Times foreign affairs columnist Roger Cohen, who speculated that Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, “will come to view Ahmadinejad as a liability.” He continued, “In Mousavi he has a credible vehicle for a reform of the regime that serves to preserve it... The supreme leader can find the means to reverse course.”

This succinctly sums up Washington’s aims—to exert pressure on the Iranian state to carry out a change at the top that will render the regime more amenable to US interests in the region and more open to American capital within Iran. The concern for democracy, while sincerely held by millions of Iranians, is for the Times, as for the US government, merely a pretext.

No doubt there were instances of vote-rigging in Iran, but this is the rule, not the exception, in elections around the globe. And not infrequently, particularly in the so-called lesser developed countries, elections end in charges of fraud by the losing party that trigger mass demonstrations and even armed clashes.

Just last April, elections in Moldova ended in violent protests, with the losing party claiming fraud and the winning one saying it was the victim of an attempted coup. In November of last year in Nicaragua, nationwide local elections in which the opposition claimed irregularities led to confrontations involving thousands of people armed with bats, rocks, machetes and guns. Last July, charges of election fraud led to mass rioting in the capital of Mongolia. There is no record of the Times becoming particularly exercised about any of these events.

Particularly instructive is the attitude taken by the newspaper toward the disputed 2006 presidential election in Mexico, when the conservative candidate Felipe Calderon—with just 36 percent of the vote and amid substantiated charges of gross electoral fraud—claimed victory over his left-nationalist opponent, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.

The Times called for no new election then, and was largely indifferent to the evidence that the election had been rigged. While the massive crowds that took to the streets of Mexico City were comparable to those seen in Tehran, the newspaper showed only disdain for the protesters.

On July 7, just five days after the contested vote totals were announced, the Times haughtily editorialized: “Mr. Lopez Obrador has occasionally furthered his political career by inviting supporters to take to the streets... but he should resist inciting mass protests, which would harm Mexico’s stability and add to his image as a less-than-committed democrat.”

In Mexico, the victim of vote fraud was told to stand down in the interests of “stability,” while mass protests by his supporters were portrayed as a threat to democracy—the exact inverse of the newspaper’s approach to the Iranian events. Why the difference? In Mexico, the candidate favored by Washington won, and in Iran, the White House seeks not stability, but destabilization.

Even closer to home, the approach of the newspaper to the claims of a stolen Iranian election stands in stark contrast to the open theft of the 2000 election by the Republican Party, which only two years before had sought to carry out an extra-constitutional coup against an elected president by means of a bogus impeachment—an operation that the Times had helped legitimize.

In that election, it was not a matter of the government offering a partial recount of disputed ballots in Florida, but a direct intervention by the US Supreme Court to stop a statewide recount that had been ordered by the Florida Supreme Court to insure that all votes were properly counted. Did the Times advocate mass protests or demand a new election? Far from it. The newspaper made itself an accomplice to this unprecedented assault on democratic rights—the suppression of the vote to install the candidate who had lost the popular vote nationally.

In the course of the bitter battle over the Florida vote, a Times editorial demanded an end to “wild talk of vote-stealing and coups d’état”—precisely what was happening. And after the US Supreme Court selected Bush, negating the will of the majority of voters, the newspaper demanded that the decision be accepted in order to “unify the nation.” It praised Democratic candidate Al Gore for capitulating, calling it “a patriotic duty.”

Neither the Times nor the US government are in a position to give lessons to Iran or anyone else on the subject of democracy. The American electoral system, rife with fraud, is controlled lock, stock and barrel by two parties of big business whose national candidates are vetted for their loyalty to a financial oligarchy.

Leading US politicians—including John Kerry in an op-ed piece published by the Times Thursday—have insisted that the US must keep a low profile in Iran because of its role in organizing the 1953 coup that overthrew the nationalist prime minister, Mohammad Mossadeq, and ushered in the 26-year torture regime of the Shah. By the same token, the editors of the Times should keep their mouths shut.

In 1953, their correspondent in Tehran, Kennett Love, was not only a willing conduit for CIA disinformation, but acknowledged participating directly in the coup. He subsequently wrote of giving an Iranian army tank column instructions to attack Mossadeq’s house. Afterwards, the Times celebrated the coup and demanded unconditional support for the Shah’s regime.

Little has changed since. It is not difficult to find evidence that the Times acts—both in its news coverage and its editorial line—as a major instrument of US foreign policy. Its main function is to provide justifications for the policies pursued by American imperialism around the globe, while manipulating public opinion at home and abroad to support them. As the “newspaper of record,” it sets the agenda for much of the US media, which echoes its line.

There was, of course, the well-known and criminal role played by the newspaper in promoting—and through its senior correspondent Judith Miller helping to fabricate—the lies of the Bush administration about “weapons of mass destruction” that were used as the pretext for the war against Iraq.

Then there was the newspaper’s endorsement of the abortive April 2002 coup against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. The Times praised the sections of the Venezuelan military that had “intervened and handed power to a respected business leader.” It argued that, as a result of the armed overthrow of an elected president, “Venezuelan democracy is no longer threatened.” It likewise helped Washington cover its tracks, claiming—incredibly—that the coup was “a purely Venezuelan affair.”

More recently, there was the newspaper’s response—both its reporting and editorials—to the August 2008 Russian-Georgian war. Using the same methods as in Iran—contempt for journalistic objectivity, the retailing of claims made by Washington and its allies as fact and disregarding of all evidence to the contrary—the Times presented the war as an unprovoked act of Russian aggression. It willfully ignored undeniable evidence that the fighting began as an unprovoked and brutal attack by Georgian forces on Tskhinvali, the capital of Georgia’s breakaway province of South Ossetia.

The Times cast the conflict as “Russia’s war of ambition,” an attempt by Vladimir Putin “to re-impose by force and intimidation as much of the old Soviet sphere of influence as he can get away with.” Facts on the ground, reported by monitors in Georgia from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) among others, belied this account and pointed to the US using Georgia as its proxy in an act of aggression against Russia itself.

In the case of the present crisis in Iran, the Times has employed all of these methods of distortion and deceit on a grand scale, in an effort that was prepared well before the elections were held.

Leading this effort is Executive Editor Bill Keller, who is arguably the most morally compromised editor in the US today—and that’s saying something! It was Keller who, at the request of the Bush administration, withheld a story on the National Security Agency’s illegal domestic spying operation until after the 2004 election, playing what may have been a decisive role in delivering Bush a second term.

He was recently dispatched to Tehran to write “Memos from Iran.” The extraordinary character of this assignment is shown in the fact that between taking over as the newspaper’s senior editor in July 2003 and his trip to Iran, Keller—the newspaper’s man in Moscow during the collapse of the Soviet Union—is credited by the Times web site with writing precisely six articles, none of them news stories.

Keller’s presence is evidence that the Times is involved in a major operation. He was accompanied to Tehran by a number of others, including the vicious anti-socialist foreign affairs columnist Roger Cohen. A veteran propagandist for US imperialist interests, Cohen has churned out justifications for the US intervention in the Balkans, the war against Iraq, the US policy in Georgia, and now the destabilization effort in Iran.

In the days of Kennett Love, the CIA put journalists on its payroll to secure their collaboration. With the likes of Keller and Cohen, this is no longer necessary. The lavishly-paid senior columnists and editors at the Times don’t need to be bribed. Their social interests are naturally in sync with the aims of US imperialist policy.

The seamless intersection of the news and views published in America’s leading newspaper with the interests of US imperialism and its ruling elite is both a symptom and contributing factor in the advanced decay of democratic processes in the United States.

It poses the urgent necessity of building a new independent socialist media of the working class, the task being carried forward by the World Socialist Web Site.

Khatami to run in Iran's presidential election

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-iran-khatami9-2009feb09,0,6230697.story

Mohammad Khatami to run in Iran's presidential election
After weeks of rumors, the former president, considered a moderate, made the formal announcement that he will run against incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
By Borzou Daragahi and Ramin Mostaghim
February 9, 2009

Reporting from Tehran -- Iran's former president, Mohammad Khatami, a moderate, announced Sunday that he would run against incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a critical election in June that is shaping up as a referendum on the performance of the current conservative government.

After months of whispers about a possible run, Khatami's move is sure to bolster turnout in a contest that most analysts see as coming at a crucial juncture for the Islamic Republic and its relations with the outside world.

"I strongly announce my candidacy in the election," the cleric, 65, told reporters at the launch of a website for his political group, the Combatant Clergy Assn. "I had no hesitation from the very beginning,"

Iran's political system combines elements of a theocracy and democratic republic. The country holds regular elections for parliament and the presidency, but all candidates are vetted for loyalty by a powerful committee of jurists and clerics, and ultimate power over military and security matters rests with a cleric, Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

But it is the president who appoints ministers of interior, intelligence and foreign affairs and can heavily influence Iran's domestic and international policies.

Ahmadinejad's anti-Israeli rhetoric has made him toxic to the West. The Obama administration has indicated that it is willing to hold discussions with Iran, on issues that include suspicions about the nation's nuclear program. But the administration might prefer to negotiate with a less polarizing figure after the Jun. 12 elections.

Khatami's calls for a "Dialogue Among Civilizations" and attempts to normalize Tehran's relations with the West have won accolades abroad. He was twice elected president on platforms of increased social freedoms and moderate policies that attracted young and female voters. He was constitutionally barred from seeking a third consecutive term.

Economic stagnation and political infighting overshadowed his presidency, which lasted from 1997 to 2005. Critics also viewed Khatami as either too weak or beholden to the political status quo to bring about meaningful change.

Still, on bread-and-butter issues Iran has fared even worse under his successor, Ahmadinejad, despite record international oil prices through much of his tenure. Unemployment and inflation are worse now than under Khatami.

"If it's a totally free and fair election, Khatami stands a very good chance," said Karim Sadjadpour, Iran analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "When Iranian voters go to the polls, economics is on their mind," he said.

Many Khatami supporters became disillusioned after he failed to make good on his promises for concrete change and buckled under pressure from religious hard-liners, who held up his proposals in legal limbo and used courts to jail his most effective allies.

Khatami on Sunday downplayed his candidacy. Instead of making an inspirational speech or announcing new political initiatives, he said he thought his candidacy would encourage voters to participate in the election, regardless of who wins.

"I hope my presence and the presence of others can contribute to high turnout and the result, whatever it is, will be a blessing," he said.

Other than his own political weaknesses, Khatami faces several possible stumbling blocks in his path to regain the presidency. The Council of Guardians must approve his candidacy. In 2004 parliamentary elections, the council barred dozens of reformist candidates who had run successfully for office four years earlier.

Khatami also faces the prospect of competing against another reformist candidate, Mehdi Karroubi, a former speaker of parliament who has also entered the race. Khatami and Karroubi could split the moderate vote, though most analysts say that the two probably will join forces.

Khatami and his supporters have expressed concern that electoral shenanigans could stack the deck against him. The Interior Ministry, which oversees elections, is firmly under the control of Ahmadinejad, whose supporters in 2005 rallied military officials and hard-line militiamen to vote en masse in what was criticized by some as a misuse of official power.

Persuading supporters to turn out for the vote will also be a major challenge. In 1997 and 2001, Khatami's calls for dramatic change brought more highly educated urban voters out in droves.

"The dynamic is that the Tehran voters aren't going to the polls and the voters in the provinces are voting in much higher numbers," Sadjadpour said. "Those voters Ahmadinejad considers his constituency."

daragahi@latimes.com

Gaza Conflict Could Lead To U.S. Attack On Iran

http://www.prisonplanet.com/bolton-gaza-conflict-could-lead-to-us-attack-on-iran.html

Bolton: Gaza Conflict Could Lead To U.S. Attack On Iran
Top Neo-Con exploits crisis to push for new war
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Top Neo-Con John Bolton told Fox News yesterday that the conflict in Gaza could lead to a U.S. attack on Iran as the former U.S. ambassador to the UN exploited the crisis to propagandize for a new war.

“So while our focus obviously is on Gaza right now, this could turn out to be a much larger conflict,” said Bolton, adding that “we’re looking at potentially a multi-front war here.”

“I don’t think there’s anything at this point standing between Iran and nuclear weapons other than the possibility of the use of military force possibly by the United States, possibly by Israel,” added the former ambassador, suggesting that a strike on Iran’s facilities by Israel alone would be risky but could push Iran back by three or four years.

Bolton’s ceaseless fearmongering about Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon contradicts the U.S. intelligence community’s own National Intelligence Estimate, which concluded that Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and was highly unlikely to develop a nuclear weapon this decade.

Bolton’s implication that other Arab states would support an attack on Iran to prevent them from obtaining nuclear weapons, and in his own words “pop champagne corks,” is a ludicrous claim. Bolton is actually trying to suggest that Arabs celebrate when the U.S. attacks the Middle East. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan alone have stoked anti-US sentiment across the Middle East and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, far from being viewed as a dangerous tyrant, is seen as more of a “hero” across the Middle East, according to a 2007 L.A. Times investigative report.

Iran's Greatest Roller Coaster Ever

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/irans_nuclear_operation_revealed

Iran's Nuclear Operation Revealed To Be Cover For Greatest Roller Coaster Ever
December 15, 2008 Issue 44•51
Ali Baba and the 40 Loops

TEHRAN, IRAN — Nearly 30 years of tense relations between the U.S. and Iran came to a dramatic end this March when Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad revealed that his country's suspected nuclear program was in fact a covert operation to build "Ali Baba and the 40 Loops"—the largest, most thrilling roller coaster in the Middle East.

In a globally televised address before the United Nations, Ahmadinejad unveiled the 500-foot-tall steel coaster, which he called a "very real threat" to anyone not interested in having a blast. The Iranian leader then challenged all thrill-seekers—young and old, Christian, Muslim, or Jew—to ride the mighty coaster, which can reportedly reach speeds of 165 mph by using a newly developed electromagnetic propulsion system previously seen only in blurry satellite images.

All U.N. inspectors were given complimentary season passes for being so patient.

"I regret having kept you in the dark for this long, but doesn't the surprise make it so much better?" a smiling Ahmadinejad said while gesturing to the massive coaster's interlocking quadruple vertical corkscrews. "And to think, you were all afraid we would use this technology for evil. Well, the only thing the world should fear now is Ali Baba's heart-stopping 400-foot drop!"

Members of a special U.N. envoy were immediately granted access to the new ride, and spent the next six hours conducting more than 30 separate critical examinations of the roller coaster. By late evening, however, inspectors said their findings were still inconclusive and determined that the fact-finding mission would require further test rides, corn dogs for everyone, and photographic documentation of their efforts.

Despite years of economic sanctions and the constant threat of military action, Iran reportedly continued working on the clandestine project by stockpiling metal tubes for the tracks, enriching uranium to provide glow-in-the dark lighting for the subterranean portion of the ride, and purchasing hundreds of gallons of neon green paint from Pakistan.

"We have moved wisely and decisively to establish Iran as a regional power in the amusement park field," said Ahmadinejad, adding defiantly that the nation would not succumb to Western standards for height requirements. "Wheeeee!"

In response to rumors that the new Iranian amusement park will include a ride dedicated to bridging the foreign relations gap with Israel, Ahmedinejad flatly denied the existence of the so-called "Holocoaster."
-------------
For more in-depth analysis of world affairs, read special commentary by Department Head Rawlings. This piece is part of The Onion's complete Our Annual Year: 2008 A.D. coverage.

"Don't Tase Me, Bro" tops '07 memorable quote list

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071219/us_nm/usa_quotes_dc

"Don't Tase Me, Bro" tops '07 memorable quote list
By Arthur Spiegelman
Wed Dec 19, 2007

"Don't Tase Me, Bro," a phrase that swept the nation after a U.S. college student used it seeking to stop campus police from throwing him out of a speech by Sen. John Kerry, was named on Wednesday as the most memorable quote of 2007.

Fred R. Shapiro, the editor of the Yale Book of Quotations, said the plea made by University of Florida student Andrew Meyer on September 17, accompanied by Meyer's screams as he was tased, beat out the racial slur that cost shock jock Don Imus his job and the Iranian president's declaration that his country does not have homosexuals.

Shapiro said Meyer's quote was a symbol of pop culture success. Within two days it was one of the most popular phrases on Google and one of the most viewed videos. It also showed up on ringtones and T-shirts.

Second on Shapiro's list was this tortuous answer by Lauren Upton, the South Carolina contestant in the Miss Teen America contest in August:

"I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because some people out there in our nation don't have maps and I believe that our education like such as in South Africa and Iraq and everywhere like such as and I believe that they should our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S. or should help South Africa and should help Iraq and the Asian countries so we will be able to build up our future for us."

Upton had been asked why one-fifth of Americans are unable to locate the United States on a map and later apologized for her answer not making a lot of sense.

Third was Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's October comment at Columbia University in New York, "In Iran we don't have homosexuals like in your country."

Shock jock Don Imus comments about the Rutgers University women's basketball team: "That's some nappy-headed hos there," was fourth.

Imus created a national outcry and lost his job at CBS radio in April, but returned to the airwaves in December with Citadel Broadcasting.

Other phrases on the list:

5. "I don't recall." -- Former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' repeated response to questioning at a congressional hearing about the firing of U.S. attorneys.

6. "There's only three things he (Republican presidential candidate and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani) mentions in a sentence: a noun and a verb and 9/11." -- Sen. Joseph Biden, speaking at a Democratic presidential debate.

7. "I'm not going to get into a name-calling match with somebody (Vice President Dick Cheney) who has a 9 percent approval rating." -- Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat.

8. "(I have) a wide stance when going to the bathroom." -- Idaho Republican Sen. Larry Craig's explanation of why his foot touched that of an undercover policeman in a men's room.

9. "I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that's a storybook, man." -- Biden describing rival Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

10. "I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history." -- Former President Jimmy Carter in an interview in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette newspaper.

(Editing by Jill Serjeant and Eric Beech)

Opec urged to end use of dollar

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/0D71066E-B8DE-4360-9F5C-816B8EA604D8.htm

Opec urged to end use of dollar

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, has called on Opec members to stop pricing oil in "worthless" US dollars.

"They get our oil and give us a worthless piece of paper," he told reporters at the close of a two day meeting of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries in Saudi Arabia.

The fall in the value of the dollar has weakened the purchasing power of Opec members and helped push oil prices to nearly $100 a barrel.

Ahmadinejad is to meet Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president, later on Monday to discuss the issue.

Chavez echoed Ahmadinejad's sentiment, saying "the empire of the dollar has to end".

Opec's summit in Riyadh ended on Sunday with leaders divided over whether to dump the dollar as a currency to price and sell oil.

Both Iran and Venezuela have proposed trading oil in a basket of currencies to replace the falling dollar, but a final statement from Opec after the meeting did not include any reference to the weakening dollar.

Instead Opec vowed to keep providing Western consumers with an "adequate" supply of oil.

Saudi Arabia, a staunch ally of the US, had opposed the move to include concerns over the falling dollar included in the summit's closing statement and tried to direct the focus of the summit towards studying the effect of the oil industry on the environment.

Falling dollar

But both Iran and Venezuela made it clear that they would press for action on the dollar, which could include pricing oil in a basket of currencies.

"There was a proposal from Iran and Venezuela to have a basket of currencies for the pricing of OPEC oil," Bayan Jabor, the Iraqi finance minister, said.

"But a consensus could not be reached," he said, adding that backed by Ecuador, the two had won agreement that finance ministers would discuss the issue before a scheduled oil ministers meeting in Abu Dhabi on December 5.

"Because the final communique was already drafted, there was an agreement that Opec finance ministers hold a meeting before the oil meeting in the UAE in December to discuss economic issues including the dollar's exchange rate."

The Venezuelan leader had opened the summit urging Opec, which accounts for 40 per cent of world oil supplies, to be a "geopolitical agent".

Chavez lauded Opec's ability to ensure high oil prices for developing producer nations, saying Opec "must stand up and act as a vanguard against poverty in the world".

He threatened that if Washington follows through on military threats against Iran, oil could double to $200 a barrel.

The summit, only the third in the group's history, also acknowledged the oil industry's role in global warming, with pledges of cash for research into climate change.

Time's Person of the Year: Them?

http://www.radaronline.com/exclusives/2007/11/times-person-of-the-year-them.php

MAGLOMANIA!
Time's Person of the Year: Them?

It's almost time for that august publication to select its Person of the Year, a meaningless accolade that is usually bestowed upon the person or thing that will create the most buzz for itself.

FRONT-RUNNER Gore, "You" cover

If your grandma is still alive and her eyesight hasn't failed yet, you've probably seen a copy of Time magazine sitting next to the bowl of sour candy on her coffee table. It's almost time for that august publication to select its Person of the Year, a meaningless accolade that is usually bestowed upon the person or thing that will create the most buzz for Time, a magazine so attuned to the level of sophistication possessed by its readers that it correctly assumes they are the kind of people who find Joel Stein to be a laugh riot. (They do; he is not.)

Who will win the coveted non-award this year? Our experts handicap the race.

Al Gore: Won an Oscar. Won a Nobel. Did a guest spot on 30 Rock. Plus, choosing the almost-president is sure to enrage right-wingers who feel secretly guilty about how badly George W. Bush has fucked up pretty much everything this country used to be about. Almost a no-brainer. (Like George W. Bush.) Odds: 2 to 1.

Stephen Colbert: Because Colbert has not received enough publicity this year. Also, magazine editors are inexplicably compelled to put him on the cover. Okay, we get it, he's funny. Stop shoving him down our throats. Odds: 5 to 1.

Rupert Murdoch: Snatched up one of America's most prestigious newspapers. Remained undaunted in his unfettered pursuit of evil. Will apparently never die. Plus, was the subject of a big Time feature story this year, so they've already got the art. Odds: 10 to 1.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: The Iranian president would be a controversial choice, but given the instability in the Middle East, his dogged pursuit of nuclear weapons, and the furor he caused when he addressed the United Nations, there is a strong case to make that he was one of the year's most influential figures. Sadly, there are way too many letters in his name, so it's not gonna happen. Odds: 50 to 1.

The iPhone: Not, technically, a person, but then again neither are the hordes of easily influenced trendwhores who lined up to purchase it and now cannot get through a simple ATM transaction without whipping it out and caressing it while letting you know that they own an iPhone. Turning an entire segment of the population into brainless zombies? Pretty notable. Odds: 100 to 1.

Amy Winehouse: Sure, she hasn't really done anything, and that whole "I sound like I came straight out of 1965" shtick is getting a little tired, but the woman has dedicated her career to drinking herself to death for the amusement of the general public. And once her husband goes off to prison there's no telling how much self-degradation she'll be capable of. It's like watching the creation of a gay icon in real time. That's got to count for something, right? No? Okay. Odds: 250 to 1.

Angelina Jolie: All right, the Marianne Pearl movie was kind of a drag, and she hasn't adopted anyone else this year, but teen boys everywhere are going to flock to theaters to see her digitized boobies in Beowulf. Plus, she's really hot and is all about refugees and Darfur and stuff, which is good. Unfortunately, as a contributor to the Economist, she represents the competition, so don't expect to see it. Odds: 500 to 1.

George W. Bush: Did we mention he has fucked up pretty much everything this country used to be about? Should be worth a nod. Still, would you buy a magazine with this schmuck on the cover? Of course not. Odds: 750 to 1.
You: Forget about it. You already won last year! What have you done since then except sit around eating Skittles and watching your ass expand? Exactly. Odds: 1000 to 1.

11/13/07
File Under: Person of the Year, Pop, Time

Putin visits Iran, sends warnings to US

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071016/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iran_russia

Putin visits Iran, sends warnings to US
By VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV, Associated Press Writer
10-16-7

Russian leader Vladimir Putin met his Iranian counterpart Tuesday and implicitly warned the U.S. not to use a former Soviet republic to stage an attack on Iran. He also said nations shouldn't pursue oil pipeline projects in the area if they weren't backed by regional powers.

At a summit of the five nations that border the inland Caspian Sea, Putin said none of the nations' territory should be used by any outside countries for use of military force against any nation in the region. It was a clear reference to long-standing rumors that the U.S. was planning to use Azerbaijan, a former Soviet republic, as a staging ground for any possible military action against Iran.

"We are saying that no Caspian nation should offer its territory to third powers for use of force or military aggression against any Caspian state," Putin said.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad also underlined the need to keep outsiders away from the Caspian.

"All Caspian nations agree on the main issue — that all aspects related to this sea must be settled exclusively by littoral nations," he said. "The Caspian Sea is an inland sea and it only belongs to the Caspian states, therefore only they are entitled to have their ships and military forces here."

Putin, whose trip to Tehran is the first by a Kremlin leader since World War II, warned that energy pipeline projects crossing the Caspian could only be implemented if all five nations that border the Caspian support them.

Putin did not name any specific country, but his statement underlined Moscow's strong opposition to U.S.-backed efforts to build pipelines to deliver hydrocarbons to the West bypassing Russia.

"Projects that may inflict serious environmental damage to the region cannot be implemented without prior discussion by all five Caspian nations," he said.

Other nations bordering the Caspian Sea and in attendance at the summit are: Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan.

The legal status of the Caspian — believed to contain the world's third-largest energy reserves — has been in limbo since the 1991 Soviet collapse, leading to tension and conflicting claims to seabed oil deposits.

Iran, which shared the Caspian's resources equally with the Soviet Union, insists that each coastal nation receive an equal portion of the seabed. Russia, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan want the division based on the length of each nation's shoreline, which would give Iran a smaller share.

Putin's visit took place despite warnings of a possible assassination plot and amid hopes that a round of personal diplomacy could help offer a solution to an international standoff on Iran's nuclear program.

Putin's trip was thrown into doubt when the Kremlin said Sunday that he had been informed by Russian intelligence services that suicide attackers might try to kill him in Tehran, but he shrugged off the warning.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini dismissed reports about the purported assassination plot as disinformation spread by adversaries hoping to spoil good relations between Russia and Iran.

Putin has warned the U.S. and other nations against trying to coerce Iran into reining in its nuclear program and insists peaceful dialogue is the only way to deal with Tehran's defiance of a U.N. Security Council demand that it suspend uranium enrichment.

"Threatening someone, in this case the Iranian leadership and Iranian people, will lead nowhere," Putin said Monday during his trip to Germany. "They are not afraid, believe me."

Iran's rejection of the council's demand and its previous clandestine atomic work has fed suspicions in the U.S. and other countries that Tehran is working to enrich uranium to a purity usable in nuclear weapons. Iran insists it is only wants lesser-enriched uranium to fuel nuclear reactors that would generate electricity.

Putin's visit to Tehran is being closely watched for any possible shifts in Russia's carefully hedged stance in the nuclear standoff.

The Russian president underlined his disagreements with Washington last week, saying he saw no "objective data" to prove Western claims that Iran is trying to construct nuclear weapons.

Putin emphasized Monday that he would negotiate in Tehran on behalf of the five permanent U.N. Security Council members — United States, Russia, China, Britain and France — and Germany, a group that has led efforts to resolve the stalemate with Tehran.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Tom Casey said the U.S. government expected Putin to "convey the concerns shared by all of us about the failure of Iran to comply with the international community's requirements concerning its nuclear program."

Putin's schedule also called for meetings with Ahmadinejad and the Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

While the Kremlin has shielded Tehran from a U.S. push for a third round of U.N. sanctions, Iran has voiced annoyance about Moscow's foot-dragging in building a nuclear power plant in the southern port of Bushehr under a $1 billion contract.

Russia warned early this year that the plant would not be launched this fall as planned because Iran was slow in making payments. Iranian officials have angrily denied any payment arrears and accused the Kremlin of caving in to Western pressure.

Moscow also has ignored Iranian demands to ship fuel for the plant, saying it would be delivered only six months before the Bushehr plant goes on line. The launch date has been delayed indefinitely amid the payment dispute.

Any sign by Putin that Russia could quickly complete the power plant would embolden Iran and further cloud Russia's relations with the West. But analysts said Putin's trip would be important for Iran even if it yielded no agreements.
___
Associated Press writers Ali Akbar Dareini and Nasser Karimi contributed to this report.

U.S. Government Gave Airtime to Terrorists

http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2007/05/us_government_g.html

U.S. Government Gave Airtime to Terrorists, Official Admits
May 22, 2007

Justin Rood Reports:

Al Hurra television, the U.S. government's $63 million-a-year effort at public diplomacy broadcasting in the Middle East, is run by executives and officials who cannot speak Arabic, according to a senior official who oversees the program.

That might explain why critics say the service has recently been caught broadcasting terrorist messages, including an hour-long tirade on the importance of anti-Jewish violence, among other questionable pieces.

Facing tough questions before a congressional panel last week, Broadcasting Board of Governors member Joaquin Blaya admitted none of the senior news managers at the network spoke Arabic when the terrorist messages made it onto the air courtesy of U.S. taxpayer funds. Nor did Blaya himself or any of the other officials at the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees the network.

"How does it happen that the terrorists take over?" asked Rep. Gary L. Ackerman, D-N.Y., at a hearing last Wednesday of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee he chairs. "Is there no adult supervision?"

Blaya conceded that the top officials in the network's chain of command could not understand what was being said on al Hurra broadcasts.

Also, the network's news division also had no assignment desk, he said. That left decisions over al Hurra's content in the hands of its reporters and producers, who are, according to Blaya, hastily-hired Arabic-speaking journalists with insufficient understanding of Western journalistic practices or the network's pro-Western mission.

Blaya's comments were first reported by Congressional Quarterly.

It has never been al Hurra's policy to "provide an open, live microphone to terrorists," Blaya assured lawmakers. "It should not have happened."

The station's gaffes have included broadcasting in December 2006 a 68-minute call to arms against Israelis by a senior figure of the terrorist group Hezbollah; deferential coverage of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Holocaust denial conference; and a factually flawed piece on a splinter group of Orthodox Jews who oppose the state of Israel, according to the Wall Street Journal, which has reported the network's travails for months.

At the hearing, Blaya and other officials assured lawmakers that some of the staffers involved in the controversial broadcasts had been fired. They also said the network now has an assignment desk, staffed by Arabic-speaking editors. And the network's vice president of news has hired an Arabic speaker to help monitor its broadcasts and ensure the material is consistent with al Hurra's mission.