Ethnic Groups
Persian 51%, Azeri 24%, Gilaki and Mazandarani 8%, Kurd 7%, Arab 3%, Lur 2%, Baloch 2%, Turkmen 2%, other 1%
Farsi majority. Hmmmm
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Who Deserves a State?
Modern Palestinian demand for state stems from anti-Semitic desire to harass Jews
Hagai Segal Ynetnews.com
Yeshayahu Leibowitz once ruled that even a kitchen table is allowed to present itself as a people, and the Palestinians jumped on the bandwagon of this simplistic criterion. However, even Leibowitz refrained from arguing that every fresh nation immediately deserves a state. After all, earth is too small to contain all the different desires for sovereignty of the people who live here.
The Kurds, for example, a people boasting a rich history and numbering 25 million souls, are forced to get by without a state of their own. The Basques, Catalonians, Corsicans, and Scots also have no state. Even the Native Americans, Flemish, the Copts and the Maronites have no state. Therefore, it is quite odd that it is precisely the absence of a Palestinian state that preoccupies the international community and the Israeli consciousness.
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Hagai Segal Ynetnews.com
Yeshayahu Leibowitz once ruled that even a kitchen table is allowed to present itself as a people, and the Palestinians jumped on the bandwagon of this simplistic criterion. However, even Leibowitz refrained from arguing that every fresh nation immediately deserves a state. After all, earth is too small to contain all the different desires for sovereignty of the people who live here.
The Kurds, for example, a people boasting a rich history and numbering 25 million souls, are forced to get by without a state of their own. The Basques, Catalonians, Corsicans, and Scots also have no state. Even the Native Americans, Flemish, the Copts and the Maronites have no state. Therefore, it is quite odd that it is precisely the absence of a Palestinian state that preoccupies the international community and the Israeli consciousness.
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No Upgrade
No, You Can’t Get an Upgrade
We are not going anywhere.
That is what we learned from a report last week by the Census Bureau which found that fewer Americans are changing residences than at any time since 1962, back when there were 120 million fewer Americans than today.
The numbers are yet another worrying beep from the array of gizmos that monitor our economic coma. But the report also signals a profound, if barely noticed, change to our national psyche, one that goes far beyond the way we think about housing.
For decades, Americans have been known as epic consumers, but it would be more accurate to call us epic upgraders. During all those years of packing up and moving, we were headed to a bigger house, at a better address, perhaps for a higher-paying job. We were trading up, and that urge — to acquire something bigger or better, preferably something bigger.<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/26/weekinreview/26segal.html?_r=1&ref=weekinreview&pagewanted=print">read more </a>
Jacob Zuma
Where is the World Going?
Survivor Zuma Takes Helm as Poor Push Him on Pledges (Udpate1)
<a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20670001&sid=araZcvbH6egY"> read more </a>
Survivor Zuma Takes Helm as Poor Push Him on Pledges (Udpate1)
By Mike Cohen and Karl Maier
April 24 (Bloomberg) -- South Africa’s about-to-be president Jacob Zuma “has survival skills like we can hardly imagine,” says Susan Booysen, a professor at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
He’ll need them.
Zuma, who survived being fired as the nation’s deputy president and beat charges of rape and graft, is about to take control of Africa’s largest economy with promises to create jobs and improve health and education for the millions of poor South Africans who voted for him, as well as to woo foreign investment. With about nine-tenths of the ballots counted, his African National Congress was leading with about two-thirds of the vote.
<a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20670001&sid=araZcvbH6egY"> read more </a>
Israel Struggles
No one summed up the irony of our present situation better than Amos Oz. "in the 1930s our enemies said: Jews to Palestine. Now they say: Jews out of Palestine. They don't want us to be here. They don't want us to be there. They don't want us to be." Why?
Israel Struggles
| http://www.aish.com/jewishissues/jewishsociety/Israel_Struggles.asp | |
This is the text of the speech given by the British Chief Rabbi Jonathan Saks at the Finchley Road Synagogue on Yom Haatzmaut 5765/2005
Not lightly does the Torah give the name Israel to our people, for it means "you have struggled with God and with men, and have prevailed." To be a Jew, to be a member of the people Israel, has always been a struggle, sometimes with God, sometimes with our fellow human beings. But that is our destiny, our call, our task...
The American writer Milton Himmelfarb once said that we are a tiny people, but great things happen around us and to us. Already before the 20th century Jewish history was recognized as unique: by Pascal, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Tolstoy. Little could they have known that some of its most dramatic chapters were yet to be written:
The Shoah, the attempt once and for all to silence the Jewish voice and eliminate the Jewish presence. Yom Hazikaron, when we remember those who fell in Israel's defense as they discovered that the Jewish people still has to fight for the right to be, to exist, to have one place on earth where we can defend ourselves. Yet out of the depths of those very tragedies came two of the greatest moments in 2000 years of history, Yom Ha'atzmaut -- the restoration of Jewish sovereignty after 1900 years, and Yom Yerushalayim, the return to the ancient and holy city, home of the Jewish heart, focus of all our prayers, embodiment of all our hopes.
Yet once again Israel is under attack, after four years of a savage, ceaseless, brutal onslaught of terror. At the very moment that terror is being contained, Israel is facing a new attack -- a systematic campaign of delegitimization and demonization among the media, non-governmental organizations, university teachers, and perhaps even among the churches -- as if the cause of peace, or justice, or reconciliation, or coexistence were served by listening to only one voice in the conversation, one side in the conflict. <a href="
Obama Apologizes
Please Excuse me for Apologizing
By Laurent Murawiec in Washington © Metula News Agency
Translated from the French by Llewellyn Brown
I spent 2008 harping on the prediction that Obama would be a complete disaster for the United States and the world. Good Lord! I never dreamt to what extent. We cannot all be Cassandras.
Obama is apologizing for America’s deeds, its past, its present and the rest; he is apologizing for everything. For deteriorating relations with Russia, lack of respect for Islam, bad relations with Iran, squabbles with Europe, lack of adulation for Fidel Castro, every occasion is a pretext to declare America’s repentance.
What is more, he is celebrating the (totally fictitious) contribution of Islam to America’s ascension, and does his utmost to bow down before the bloody and sectarian king of Arabia, Abdullah The Hateful. He cancels the anti-missile belt installed in Alaska and proposes a useless nuclear disarmament.
The fact that the dictator Putin has, over the last ten years, revived Russian hatred and aggressiveness towards the West, attacked neighboring states by military means, and the United States by all other means, do not even mention it! It is, it must be, it can only be Uncle Sam’s fault.
America’s fault over the last thirty years if relations with Islam have deteriorated, through lack of American respect. Nasser, the Syrian and Iraqi dictators, Soviet influence, do not even mention them…
Guilty by definition. The bellicose folly and the hatred of the West that characterized Ayatollah Khomeini since the forties? The general conversion of the Iranian intelligentsia to anti-imperialist extreme-left thinking? The rescue of millions of Muslims by America in the four corners of the earth from the barbarity that is Islam? The rhetorical genuflections of Bush before “Islam, a religion of peace”?
Europe, frightened by its own shadow, hesitant to arm itself even with a pen-knife (a dangerous arm of aggression), Europe that demonstrates by the millions against the “Euromissiles” and Ronald Reagan, and even against Clinton? Once again it is ever and always America’s fault. “We do not speak Russian! It is your fault”.
But where did Obama learn this nonsense! Where does this accumulation of all the world’s disappointments, these false and deformed ideas, come from? Where does this knee-jerk “I apologize” come from? We are used to Jimmy-Carterism, falling down on all fours before Khomeini (“a saint”), the USSR, Cuba, the third world, Muslim terrorism. How is it that Obama — governing a republic — bowed his head before the king of Arabia?
ssssssThat is where we need to remember the man who was his pastor for twenty years, which is a very long time when you are under fifty: pastor Jeremiah Wright, of the Chicago Trinity United Church of Christ, from whom Obama only separated under constraint, because of his unbearably anti-American and anti-Western, delirious and declarations inspired by conspiracy theories, and which “went over badly” in the electoral campaign.
For twenty years, Wright was his mentor and his Nestor, the one who introduced him into the circles of Chicago’s Black Theology, who initiated him to the ideas of this black version of “liberation theology”.
And what does it say, what does Wright say? “Not ‘God Bless America,’ but ‘God damn America’”. That America is slavery, that AIDS was “invented” by the American government to exterminate blacks, etc.
Wright hates America with all his being, even if he pockets all imaginable dividends… Black “liberation” theology is the American equivalent of all the worst perversions spawned by Castro, Guevara and Fanon: America is satanic, and all the others — who are victims of America — are angelic.
Twenty years is enough time to become steeped in sermons. It was Wright who made the Harvard graduate — who was a “community organizer” — a noted politician in Chicago. Let us not forget that Obama’s local political career was launched by fanatics who hate America, the extreme left-wing Weatherman terrorists, in Chicago, who repeat and confirm the same ideological refrain. All the aquariums where the tadpole swam are filled with the same water.
Obama is the manicured version of Wright: he went to Harvard. He does not eructate, he does not slobber, he does not show his fist. He does not continuously spout obscenities like his guru does. He is elegant, syrupy, but even when they are sugar-coated, the pills are still full of hot pepper. The heart is the same. Wright insults America, Obama apologizes: in both cases, America is guilty. Wright is a pastor, Obama is president.
Even worse, this deplorable America has spread disorder and evil all over the world. Instead of collaborating multilaterally with all, working for the common good with Putin, Chavez, Ahmadinejad, Saddam Hussein, Bachir al-Assad and Co., horrible Bush made enemies of them.
How shameful! We have to repair the damage. America will only find its redemption in withdrawal, penitence, contrition, and a form of disappearance. Submerged in multilateral and international organizations, smothered by the UN’s unanimities, harmonized with Europe, abandoning its own sovereignty in favor of “international law”, whose judges no longer bother with democracy and are accountable to none, like the European Union, that has repealed democracy and replaced it by the government of jurists and commissioners. Jeremiah Wright wants apocalypses; Obama wants to change everything gently, through attorneys.
That is why his administration is crammed with these jurists who look down on and scorn the American constitution, electors, congressmen: their peers are the international jet-set of multinational jurists, juridical NGOs, judges of international courts.
They do not so much want a state of law and international law as they want the reign of jurists. They want to place a jurist behind each soldier and put war — which is ultima ratio regis, the king’s ultimate argument, as was engraved in the cannons of Frederick the Great of Prussia — outside the pale of the law.
They are the only ones to do so, while the gangs of assassins roam the streets and alleys of the megalopolis. They scrutinize the least actions of soldiers, intelligence agents, the government, and subject them not only to censorship but also to sanction, self-disarmament by means of utopia, while the other sides, who could not care less, continue with their depredations.
That is what is taught at Harvard Law School, of which Obama is a graduate. All action must be regulated by the dictatorship of subsections, of the bearers and interpreters of clauses: lawyers.
We must at all costs find common grounds with all. We must go a long way with concessions: the other side will end up understanding. Kim Jong II, Hugo Chavez, ayatollah Khamenei, Assad, Hamas, we will find the compromises necessary for a deal with the other side’s lawyers.
Without an agreement, we fall back into the errors of shameful America. America, how awful, goes so far as to defend its allies against its enemies. We fight in Vietnam and Korea against the aggressions of communism. We fight against Soviet communism. What do you think Obama stated in Berlin, during his electoral campaign, not without a degree of delirium, that the world won the Cold War “by uniting”, as if there were only one side in this war!
America must be reduced in its aspirations and in its power. The world must be reduced to a single camp, that of the peacemakers, with which an agreement is always possible. There are no enemies, there are only misunderstandings. There can be not confrontations, only clarifications.
You do not agree? Shut-up! It is you who are the menace, the trouble-maker, the public enemy. You intend to defend yourself? Who are you to defy the “international community”? The chorus of liars who promote the official pseudo-reality will condemn your voice and your action.
The chorus of sycophants is deafening. Just yesterday, for example, after the operation of commandos that liberated the American captain, a hostage of Somali pirates, The Washington Post titled, on its first page “An Early Military Victory for Obama”: it was the battle of Lepanto, the battle of Jutland, Midway; we were plunged in an Epic saga.
Blowing up a minute police operation and turning it into a military victory is, obviously, to deceive oneself as to what war is and what military means are. Obamaism has created for itself such a deformed image of war that it no longer distinguishes reality from delirious rambling. By confusing a police raid with war, they mix them up. It is not serious in the case of a road accident, but it is in the event of a real conflict.
If it is not just three miserable good-for-nothings on the Somali coast that you have to neutralize, but North Korea you have to free from Kim Jong II, three marine commandos will not suffice.
And the Iranian mega-rogue? And Putin? When you can no longer distinguish black from white, you can no longer see anything. You bow down before a despot, you reassure Islam that you will never be at war with it (even if Islam is at war with us). You promise a “new start” to the Russian tyrants who are determined to make America an enemy.
Disorder and confusion are at their peak. Obamaland is a land of chaos. We should note, in this respect, that the fray of foreign policy “realists”, who advise getting rid of one’s allies in order to find an agreement with the bad guys, are in bliss and participate in setting up Obama’s con game. At last! we are no longer bothered by anything else other that short term “stability”.
Obama makes no distinction between black and white, between friend and foe. He gratuitously offended the English by scorning their “special relationship”. He offended the Japanese by paying no attention either to them or to the North-Korean missile that flew over their territory. He had not a word to say to the Taiwanese ally. He is relentlessly preparing a crisis with Israel. He has showed the Czechs and the Poles, with the anti-missile defense issue, that they cannot count on Washington and that they will be sacrificed on the altar of the “new start” with Moscow.
For everyone the lesson is brutal: in the Obama era it is better to be an enemy than a friend: if you are a friend, you will be cast aside. If you are an enemy, Washington will bend over backwards to please you.
In geopolitics the Chinese strategist Sun Tzu had words of wisdom: it is best to avoid the strong points and attack the weak ones. The “full” should be avoided, the “empty” should be invaded. Obama creates the empty and avoids the full.
In the coming years we can predict a rush toward the bad guys, and the sacrifice of the good ones. Carter sacrificed the Shah of Iran, who was no saint, in favor of the satanic ayatollah. It is the model Obama follows. In a Western I saw and English duke who said to a thug from the Far West: “Well sir, we shall fight”. By the time he took off his coat, the other guy had already kicked him several times where he should not have.
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