Author: Mick Hartley

an officials told the Sun they are “100% sure” Iranian Revolutionary Guard soldiers have fired rockets into Israel. They also said the Syrian army has provided Hezbollah with intelligence information on the locations of strategic Israeli targets to aid in Hezbollah rocket fire.

‘s one thing one can conclude about the Spanish: they certainly love to feed their faces. Then it turned out he wasn’t Spanish at all, but a fellow American, from Montana! I guess I learned a valuable lesson about generalising: people from Montana are lazy and love to feed their faces.

Yes, it’s another American wanting us to know that he’s aware of what we think about Americans, but he’s not like that at all….

Still, the Metafilter comments amused me. After a few remarks about how lame the piece was, the poster chimes in with:

I find it utterly, utterly hilarious that some people just don’t get this at all. Brilliant!

And later:

The piece is written the way it is written quite deliberately.

Notice the ‘ironic’ tag. It’s a bit of a clue.

That’s the last I’ll say, and I’ll silently chuckle to myself in the corner.

Don’t you just love it when people do that? – make out that people who disagree with them are just too stupid to, you know, get it.

Amir Taheri on Hezbollah:

Hezbollah is a state within the Lebanese state. It controls some 25% of the national territory. Almost 400,000 of Lebanon’s estimated 4m inhabitants live under its control. It collects its own taxes with a 20% levy, known as “khoms”, on all incomes. It runs its own schools, where a syllabus produced in Iran is taught at all levels. It also runs clinics, hospitals, social welfare networks and centres for orphans and widows.

The party controls the elected municipal councils and appoints local officials, who in theory should be selected by the central government in Beirut. To complete its status as a virtual state, the party maintains a number of unofficial “embassies”: the one in Tehran is bigger and has a larger number of staff than that of Lebanon itself.

Hezbollah also has its own media including a satellite television channel, Al-Manar (the lighthouse), which is watched all over the Arab world, four radio stations, newspapers and magazines plus a book publishing venture. The party has its own system of justice based on sharia and operates its own police force, courts and prisons. Hezbollah runs youth clubs, several football teams and a number of matrimonial agencies.

Its relationship with the rest of Lebanon is complex; it occupies 14 seats in the 128-seat national assembly and holds two portfolios in the council of ministers. But it still describes itself as “a people-based movement fighting on behalf of the Muslim world”.

The backbone of all that is Hezbollah’s militia, a fighting force of about 8,000 men, trained and armed with the latest weapons by Iran and Syria. Of these about 2,000 men represent an elite force under the direct command of the party’s secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah, a former pupil of the late Ayatollah Khomeini, the man who founded Iran’s Islamic republic. But the party also claims more than 30,000 reservists. […]

Why has Tehran decided to play its Lebanese card now? Part of the answer lies in Washington’s decision last May to reverse its policy towards Iran by offering large concessions on its nuclear programme. Tehran interpreted that as a sign of weakness. Ahmadinejad believes that his strategy to drive the “infidel” out of the Islamic heartland cannot succeed unless Arabs accept Iran’s leadership.
The problem is that since the Iranian regime is Shi’ite it would not be easy to sell it to most Arabs, who are Sunni. To overcome that hurdle, it is necessary to persuade the Arabs that only Iran is sincere in its desire and capacity to wipe Israel off the map. Once that claim is sold to the Arabs, so Ahmadinejad hopes, they would rally behind his vision of the Middle East instead of the “American vision”. […]

The mini war that is taking place between Israel and Hezbollah is, in fact, a proxy war in which Iran’s vision for the Middle East clashes with the administration in Washington. What is at stake is not the exchange of kidnapped Israeli soldiers with Arab prisoners in Israel. Such exchanges have happened routinely over five decades. The real issue is who will set the agenda for the Middle East: Iran or America?

Update: James Wolcott has a typically unpleasant piece citing this Taheri article, which then gets some Metafilter commenters going: it’s all about selling an Iran-is-evil line to bolster the war on terror.

forget“:

… the head of a murdered child, laid out in a field in a North Korean village, with residents brought down to see if anyone knew whose child this had been. Like twelve other wandering, homeless children before him, he had been lured into one of the last remaining restaurants in the starving district. Once the owner lured the children in, she would bathe them, and then strangle them. And butcher them. And then, she would sell their flesh to her customers as pork.

The man who told us the story, one of the first six refugees…to be resettled in the United States, claimed to have unwittingly eaten some of the meat.

We’ve heard stories like this for years, but the roomful of reporters at the Capitol Hill press conference recoiled.

Meanwhile reports of heavy flooding and the return of famine suggest that things aren’t about to improve in the Democratic People’s Republic.

‘s choice should be easy to see.

The Lebanese, though, are not masters of their own domain. They will need protection and political support; they will need to see the will and the designs of the radical axis contested by resolute American power, and by an Arab constellation of states that can convince the Shiites of Lebanon that there is a place for them in the Arab scheme of things. For a long time, the Arab states have worked through and favored the Sunni middle classes of Beirut, Sidon and Tripoli. This has made it easy for Iran–overcoming barriers of language and distance–to make its inroads into a large Shiite community awakening to a sense of power and violation. To truly turn Iran back from the Mediterranean, to check its reach into Beirut, the Arab world needs to rethink the basic compact of its communities, and those Shiite stepchildren of the Arab world will have to be brought into the fold.

o sophisticated forensic analysis could the bills be confirmed as imitations.

Counterfeits of this superior sort — known as supernotes — had been detected by law-enforcement officials before, elsewhere in the world, but the Newark shipment marked their first known appearance in the United States, at least in such large quantities. Federal agents soon seized more shipments. Three million dollars’ worth arrived on another ship in Newark two months later; and supernotes began showing up on the West Coast too, starting with a shipment of $700,000 that arrived by boat in Long Beach, Calif., in May 2005, sealed in plastic packages and wrapped mummy-style in bolts of cloth.

In the weeks and months that followed, federal investigators rounded up a handful of counterfeiting suspects in a series of operations code-named Royal Charm and Smoking Dragon. This past August, in the wake of the arrests, Justice Department officials unsealed indictments in New Jersey and California that revealed that the counterfeits were purchased and then seized as part of an operation that ensnared several individuals accused of being smugglers and arms traffickers, some of whom were suspected of having connections to international crime rings based in Southeast Asia.

The arrests also prompted a more momentous accusation. After the indictments were released, U.S. government and law-enforcement officials began to say in public something that they had long said in private: the counterfeits were being manufactured not by small-time crooks or even sophisticated criminal cartels but by the government of North Korea. “The North Koreans have denied that they are engaged in the distribution and manufacture of counterfeits, but the evidence is overwhelming that they are,” Daniel Glaser, deputy assistant secretary for terrorist financing and financial crimes in the Treasury Department, told me recently. “There’s no question of North Korea’s involvement.” […]

From all accounts, superb quality is a feature of much North Korean contraband: methamphetamine of extraordinarily high purity; counterfeit Viagra rumored to exceed the bona fide product in its potency; supernotes. It’s an impressive product line for a regime that can barely feed its people. When I discussed this with Asher [David Asher, a former senior adviser for East Asian and Pacific affairs in the State Department], he let out a sigh. “I always say that if North Korea only produced conventional goods for export to the degree of quality and precision that they produce counterfeit United States currency, they would be a powerhouse like South Korea, not an industrial basket case.” […]

Even if the counterfeiting is not worthy of being a diplomatic issue unto itself, the fact that North Korea is counterfeiting may still serve as a grim reminder of the difficulty of good-faith negotiations with North Korea. Just consider that the supernotes that were seized by law-enforcement officials in New Jersey and California arrived in the United States while the six-party talks were going on. Asher, for one, was stunned by the audacity of the regime. “If they’re going to counterfeit our currency the entire time they’re engaged in diplomatic negotiations, what does that say about their sincerity?” he asked me. “How can they want normalization with a country whose currency they’re counterfeiting? How can they expect it?”

From MEMRI: a whiff of Nuremberg as Iranian Parliament Speaker Gholam-Ali Haddad addresses the Iranian people:

“England, and then America, wished to have control over the Islamic world, to prevent Muslim unity, and to have control of the oil resources in the Middle East. Therefore, following World War II, they established an artificial, false, and fictitious state called Israel in this region.

“They established a political party, and supported the Zionists, claiming this was support for the Jews of the world. They mobilized the racist Zionists, who are not accepted even by many Jews. They came to Palestine, and under the pretext of wrongs supposedly done to them during World War II, they carried out terrorism, conspiracies, massacres, and bloodshed in this region.

“Today, the peoples have awakened. The Muslims have awakened and are facing you. As you have seen, they are facing you in Lebanon, and so far you have not dared to set foot on Lebanese soil.” […]

“Today, nobody in the Islamic countries is rolling out the red carpet for you. Today, the land of Palestine is painted red with your contemptible blood.” […]

“Today, the confrontation is not only within the borders of Lebanon. It is taking place deep within your land. Today, your flourishing cities in the north of Israel… of occupied Palestine are within the range of fire of the fighters and lion cubs of Hizbullah. Today, Haifa and Tiberias are within Hizbullah’s range of fire. No place in Israel will be safe.” […]

“Today is the day of the liberation of Palestine, and the day of resistance. As said by Hassan Nasrallah, this courageous, vigilant, and informed religious scholar, the war has just begun.” […]

“We say to America, England, and the supporters of Israel in the West: You will not benefit from supporting Israel. You are earning the hostility of 1.5 billion Muslims worldwide, under the pretext of supporting a handful of Zionists, whom you brought and stuck, like a dagger, in the hearts of the Muslims in the Middle East.” […]

“The Americans should know that as long as this festering growth remains in the body of the Islamic world, with their support, the Muslims will never, under any circumstances, cease to hate and to oppose America.”

to the Palestinians.” I’m not even going to start unpacking that. At least as great an injustice…

So what’s the solution?

Israel’s best and perhaps only security for the future would be to rest upon a settlement that everyone the whole world over — everyone but the anti-Zionist fanatics — could see was reasonable. There would need to be no room left for argument. Then Israel would be able to feel confident of the full-hearted support not just of governments but of their peoples.

That settlement has to be a return to her pre-1967 boundaries. Precisely because Israel is by no means forced to make so generous a move, the international support (even love) this would generate would secure her future permanently. It would bring her back within the pale.

Perhaps Parris was unaware, but Israel had already pulled out of Gaza, and out of Lebanon. The outpouring of love from Hamas and Hezbollah has been wonderful to behold.

Neither Hamas or Hezbollah, by the way, are deemed worthy of mention in Parris’s piece. It’s Israel – full of pushy Jews – which has brought this problem on itself. If only they’d realise that fact and behave appropriately….

I was really looking forward to the Tour this year. I thought, with Lance Armstrong out, it’d really open up.

Well there’s no denying that it’s opened up – especially with all the pre-Tour favourites like Ullrich and Basso being thrown out just before the start – but there’s such a thing as opening up too much. Somehow the magic’s gone. It’s not even as if I was a great Armstrong fan, but without a focus – a dominant personality – the whole thing’s beginning to seem like a pointless exercise in extreme suffering. One day it’s 250 kilometres in scorching heat across the centre of France, then it’s up the Pyrenees, then more long gruelling stages, then yesterday up the Alpe D’Huez, now today up – how many? four? – mountains. Not just any mountains: these are big mountains. Tomorrow more mountains. And the main excitement of today’s stage was seeing the yellow jersey and favourite, mild-mannered charisma-free Mennonite Floyd Landis, crack on the last climb. “Landis looks like a broken man there Phil…”, and the thought inevitably occurs – well, the other guys are being a bit smarter with their drugs than poor old Floyd. I mean, how else is anyone meant to get through all that shit? If they insist on making it so tough that you’re doing serious damage to your body (didn’t I read somewhere that Tour cyclists tend to die younger than average?), then of course they’ll take drugs if they can get away with it.

Still, I’d been looking forward to another US winner, just to annoy the French. After Lance, Floyd: good all-American names. It doesn’t seem likely now though. Levi Leipheimer’s the highest-placed American in ninth. And what happened to the strange-looking George Hincapie? I’ve been waiting all Tour for someone to say, “Hey George, why the long face?”

Good news for us Brits though: Bradley Wiggins is still in there in his first Tour, even if he is somewhere round 150th. Did Chris Boardman ever make it so far? All he needs to do next year is shorten his name: Brad Wiggins sounds like a serious contender.

Dennis Prager sums it up pretty well:

The Middle East conflict is difficult to solve, but it is among the simplest conflicts in history to understand.

The Arab and other Muslim enemies of Israel (for the easily confused, this does not mean every Arab or every Muslim) want Israel destroyed. That is why there is a Middle East conflict. Everything else is commentary.

Those who deny this and ascribe the conflict to other reasons, such as “Israeli occupation,” “Jewish settlements,” a “cycle of violence,” “the Zionist lobby” and the like, do so despite the fact that Israel’s enemies regularly announce the reason for the conflict. The Iranian regime, Hizbollah, Hamas and the Palestinians — in their public opinion polls, in their anti-Semitic school curricula and media, in their election of Hamas, in their support for terror against Israeli civilians in pre-1967 borders — as well as their Muslim supporters around the world, all want the Jewish state annihilated.