Slashdot Mirror
Iran's President Launches Blog
02bunced writes "The BBC is reporting that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has started his own blog, the launch of which was announced on Iranian State TV. This is perhaps slightly ironic, given that the Iranian Government actively censors blogs on the Internet."
Hmm. In the original post I made of this story, I had linked to the blog. Must just have been removed in the editing process :(
Oh, and I'm a Brit!
"The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word 'crisis.' One stands for danger; the other for opportunity
Mel Gibson is a great man indeed:
http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Mel_Gibson
I appreciate intelligence as much as the next guy, but doesn't the list of things you "kinda have to get past" render anything he says on those topics completely illogical and biased?
Cynical Idealist
I've seen a similar view. I've been to IOI'96 -- a guy from the Iranian team actually defended the censorship, claiming they have only a single 56k link (as of 1996) for the whole country on purpose! For them, faulty software/network has its benefits as it pulls people away from the "American way of life".
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
I wouldn't call it censorship and Iran President new blog ironic. Iran is authoritarian society and I call it par for the course. In Iran, you expect the president to talk and the people to listen, not the other way around. The true irony is that it is not much different in the US. Unlike in Iran, we can talk our mouths dry. Yet, our President (or our Congress, for that matter) just choose not to listen.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
While you can easily argue on either side of the palestinian question when discussing Israel, there is no doubt that this Lebanon-Israel war was waged by Hizbulah. Israel was at peace with Lebanon until Hizbulah crossed the border and killed 8 soldier and kidnapped 2.
Yes, it's amazing how effective American media spin is, isn't it? Um, no, the situation isn't that simple. Your comment reminds me of what you see all the time about the various middle east conflicts on American TV -- things to the effect of "A suicide bombing ripped through SomeIsraeliCity today, breaking a period of relative calm in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict" when several dozen Palestinians, mostly children, had been killed in the "period of relative calm" (just no Israelis). It's enough to drive one batty.
Anyways, aside from the generalized rant...
Leading up to this point: Regular exchanges of fire occur across the border in both directions, sometimes with ground incursions and/or Israeli bombing raids. Much of it centers over the Sheeba Farms region, which is occupied by Israel and which they've been settling (it's important because of its water resources). Attacks occur weekly.
May 23rd: Bush meets with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Several participants at the meeting later report that Bush encouraged Olmert to attack Lebanon and Syria. Israeli officials reportedly balked at the latter part, but considered the former part.
May 26th: A car bomb in Sidon kills two high-ranking officials of Lebanese Jihad.
May 28th: Lebanese guerellas fire rockets across the border in retaliation. Israel counterattacks and kills one Hezbollah soldier.
June 10th: Mahmoud Rafeh is arrested by the Lebanese police for the car bombing. He confesses to the crime and states that he was part of a Mossad-sponsored cell in Lebanon. Throughout the next month, members of the cell are arrested one by one. This is widely accepted in Lebanon, as the Mossad has a history of such attacks (the most famous of which was probably when they formed a fake Egyptian terror cell in Egypt that bombed US interests in the country, leading to a diplomatic row between the US and Egypt -- the Lavon Affair (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavon_Affair))
June 23rd: Tensions on the northern border escalate when violence expands in Gaza when the Israeli army invades and siezes two sons of Palestinian activist Ali Muamar to put pressure on him.
June 24th: In retaliation, Hamas sneaks into Israel via a tunnel, kills two Israeli soldiers, and captures a corporal. They seek a prisoner exchange (Israel holds about 10,000 Palestinian prisoners, including many women and children)
June 27th: Abbas convinces Hamas to agree to a document endorsing a separate Palestinian state alongside Israel, a major concession.
June 28th: Israel returns to Gaza in force to find their soldier. Numerous Hamas legislators are arrested, which creates an outrage coming the day after they agreed to accept Israel.
Early July: Sporadic fire and counterfire picks up in the north, partially triggered by tensions in the south.
Jul 12th: The trigger occurs. Hezbollah rockets are fired and the Israeli army attacks; both agree on this much. Hezbollah and the Lebanese army say that the Israelis were ambushed in a town on Lebanese territory; the Israelis say that the attack occured on a border outpost in Israeli territory. Either way, three Israeli soldiers are killed and one is captured.
Israel invades en masse. Open warfare begins on the northern border.
My hand to God. Baby geese. Goslings. They were juggled.
Link on the left of the new blog pops a "HTTP MS IE File DragDrop Embed Code" in Norton. Is this intentional or not? You decide.
e jad-trying-to-infect.html
Check out http://olehgirl.blogspot.com/2006/08/pres-ahmadin
You'll find that the real Jew-haters will have other tell-tales of their agenda (and its a mistake to call it a political motivation, it's way more serious than that). For example, there's a large/infamous site out there saying at top "this is not a hate site" where they talk about numbers in Holocaust, but they also for example have pictures of famous present day Jewish folk next to some of history's criminals who supposedly had some Jewish ancestry to "demonstrate" some imagined genetic predisposition to evil, as well as "proofs" that everything and anything wrong with the world is due to Jewish people, and plenty of other spiteful hateful garbage like that.
But anyone ought to be free to question or investigate the number of deaths, and it's wrong to automatically assume they are jew-haters (which by the way is much more serious problem than a mere political motivation) or label them as such. And just because a Jew-hating scumbag should use someone's reestimation (sure, call it a revision) shouldn't mean others with a rational brain can't engage in legitimate historical research. It does not make the Nazis somewhat less monsters if 900,000 rather than 1,500,000 Jews were murdered at a particular camp, or if 4,300,000 rather than 6,000,000 were victims of the Holocaust.
This is very similar to the problem of anyone criticising an action of Israel as being labelled anti-semite by some of our well-meaning but overzealous famous national reporters who are so afraid of a repeat of the evil and horror of Nazi 1930's and 40's. Well, any good person doesn't want to see a repeat either, but no country/government should be above criticism of their actions
"Jews and other non-Muslims are denied equal participation in society. They remain 2nd class citizens unless they convert to Islam. "
THis is the same as muslims in israel. They don't enjoy full rights as jews do. For example they can be denied housing. They are treated differently in the courts.
evil is as evil does
It's simple. Yes, you are entirely right. It is important to get the numbers right, and it is wrong to treat every question about those numbers or events as if it were a Holocaust denial.
But whether it was 100000, 1 million, or 10 million doesn't change the gross horror of slaughtering innocent people -- not as unintended civilian casualties during war activities, not under the euphemism "collateral damage", but as a simple matter of political choice. It was Jews and many other ethnic groups and people of various religious and political views. It was genocide of innocent people on an industrial scale. Though for different reasons and with different targets, it has happened other places: Cambodia, the Soviet Union under Stalin. It is important to get the facts right about these horrible events, to try to foresee and stop it happening in the future.
Accurate numbers matter to history, but they don't actually change the horror of the political decisions made, and the industry set up to perform a mass extermination.
Just like I don't care *exactly* how many people of the Bahai Faith, Zoroastrianism, or political opposition have been imprisoned, tortured, or executed by the current Iranian regime. It would be historically important to have a precise accounting, but it is still a violation of human rights for which the Iranian regime is responsible, and for which it should be ashamed.
The greatest irony in all this is that Ahmadinejad rightly makes a big deal of how the Iranian revolution justly overthrew the brutally oppressive regime of the Shah, yet the regime of which he is now a part turned right around and started oppressing its own people again in new ways -- exactly contrary to the point he was trying to make about past injustices in the Holocaust not automatically justifying the actions of the state of Israel today. The Shah was a brutal despot. That doesn't excuse what the current Iranian government is doing.
He was a hypocritical idiot. Now he's a hypocritical idiot with his own blog. So what? They're a dime a dozen these days.