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Jonathon Narvey of The Propagandist has written a compelling, if sadly nauseating, series on the effort by Adbusters - a Vancouver-based alternative media network - to associate the State of Israel with the crimes of Nazi Germany through a photo essay comparing Gaza with the Warsaw Ghetto. Sounds like that would win some awards in Tehran, at least. Read Jonathon here, here and then here.
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Crossposted from the IDF’s official blog.
Yesterday, Wednesday, November 3rd, 2010, IDF Chief of the General Staff, Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, sent to every commander in the IDF a letter in which he expressed his personal thoughts on ethics with regards to several recent incidents that had occurred. This letter was to be read to each and every soldier by the commanders of the IDF, as ordered by Lt. Gen. Ashkenazi.
Below, please find a translation of the letter, whereas the letter itself is originally Hebrew form:
“World By Storm” is the pseudonym of one of the principal writers at The Cedar Lounge Revolution, an excellent Irish politics blog. In this entry he distracts himself from Ireland’s catastrophic economic situation by considering the Northern Ireland analogy. Unlike most people so tempted, he can’t be accused of ignorance of Irish politics and history.
As America votes in the midterm elections, Iran’s medieval regime is doing what it does best. Sakineh reportedly faces execution tomorrow, November 3rd. This from the International Committee Against Stoning, via The Propagandist:
The Islamic regime of Iran plans to execute Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani immediately
According to news received by the International Committee against Stoning and International Committee against Execution on 1 November 2010, the authorities in Tehran have given the go ahead to Tabriz prison for the execution of Iran stoning case Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani. It has been reported that she is to be executed this Wednesday 3 November.
We had previously reported that the casefile regarding the murder case of Ms Ashtiani’s husband had been seized from her lawyer’s office, Houtan Kian, and found missing from the prosecutor’s Oskoo branch office so as to stitch Ms Ashtiani up with trumped up murder charges. Ms Ashtiani’s son, Sajjad Ghaderzadeh, and her lawyer, Houtan Kian, have warned of the regime’s plan to do so on many occasions. With the arrest of Ms Ashtiani’s son and lawyer on 10 October and her not having had any visitation rights since 11 August and after fabricating a new case against her, the “Human Rights Commission” of the regime has announced that: ‘according to the existing evidence, her guilt has been confirmed.’ In fact, the regime has created a new scenario in order to expedite her execution.
The International Committees against Stoning and Execution call on international bodies and the people of the world to come out in full force against the state-sponsored murder of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani. Ms Ashtiani, Sajjad Ghaderzadeh, Houtan Kian and the two German journalists must be immediately and unconditionally released.
International Committee against Execution
International Committee against Stoning
Email: minaahadi@aol.com
Tel: 0049 (0) 1775692413
This story is at least a week old, but it doesn’t seem to have had much of an airing, so here goes. At this month’s World Masters Weightlifting Championship in Poland, an Israeli competitor, Sergio Britva, took first place. Britva lifted an astonishing 300kg of weight, beating the second-placed competitor, the Iranian Hossein Khodadadi, by 4 kilos.
The two athletes mounted the podium to receive their medals, together with the third-placed competitor from Germany. Britva and the German shook hands. But when Britva offered his to Khodadadi, the Iranian refused it.
That unsporting gesture didn’t prevent Khodadadi from being rebuked by the Iranian authorities for standing alongside an Israeli. According to Radio Zamaneh, “the Head of Iran’s National Athletic Organization had earlier written a letter to the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, to receive instructions on how to handle situations where Iranian athletes have to confront Israeli athletes.” You don’t need a wild imagination to figure out what those would have been.
And so to the video embedded above. At 1′30″, you can see Britva mount the podium draped in an Israeli flag. He shakes hands with the German to his left. He turns to his right, but the Iranian declines. That doesn’t seem to bother Britva, who is deservedly delighted with his victory. Then, at 2′21″, with Khodadadi and Britva still together on the podium, a stirring rendition of Israel’s national anthem, Hatikvah, strikes up. Britva stands erect and solemn, choking back tears of pride and joy. His image then dissolves into another of the Israeli flag atop the Iranian and the German.
I don’t know whether the Polish producers of the broadcast understood the enormous historical resonance here, but it really has to be seen.
Those of us who have written about Islamism and its connection to the terrorist attacks of the past decade have always gone to great effort to define this tradition as an extremist interpretation of the traditions of Islam. We have distinguished between Islam and Islamism, but we have also insisted that it is naïve to assume that when terrorists say they act in the name of Islam that their actions have nothing at all to do with their interpretation of the religion. To criticize Islamism is not a sublimation of hostility to Islam. It is the result of an interpretation of widely known facts about one extremist interpretation of that religion.Achcar is a man at war with what he has written in his own book. It is Achcar, not us supposed Islamophobes and anti-Arab racists, who documents the tradition of Pan-Islamism and the fusion of Nazism and Islamic fundamentalism that was a key chapter in its history. The same author who traced this tradition from Rida to Husseini now writes as if the terms “Islamism” and “Islamofascism” are the product of anti-Islamic bigotry. Isn’t it possible, and even likely, that those he denounces for criticizing Islamism in recent years have arrived at conclusions similar to his own regarding the Islamists of the 1930s and 1940s because they, like him, concluded that there was good evidence in both cases to do so?
From a fine review by Professor Jeffrey Herf of Gilbert Achcar’s new book, The Arabs and The Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives. Read the whole article at The New Republic.
Landing at Beirut’s international airport, Ahmadinejad’s motorcade passed near the site where Hizbullah murdered 241 American marines and 58 French soldiers in dual suicide truck bombings in September 1982. These peacekeeping forces had been dispatched to monitor the exit of Yasser Arafat and the PLO, following the Israel-Lebanon war, and to assist in restoring peace to this small, battered country.But the void left by the PLO departure, and subsequent withdrawal of American and French forces, was quickly filled by Hizbullah, born during that war. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, emboldened by the shah’s overthrow and eager to export their ideology across the Middle East, seized an opportunity to plant revolutionary seeds. Lebanon, a nation torn by civil war, was particularly vulnerable to outsider machinations, especially any seeking allies intent on Israel’s eradication as part of the larger crusade to spread radical Islam across the region.
From my op-ed in today’s Jerusalem Post, examining the ramifications of Ahmadinejad’s recent visit to Lebanon.
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