According to The Pogues:
Someone better tell Faleh Hassan Almaleki he’s not in Iraq anymore. In this country, we don’t do honor killings. And we sure as hell don’t try to kill our own daughters.
But that’s exactly what Almaleki intended to do when ran over his daughter, 20-year-old Noor Faleh Almaleki, in a state government parking lot in suburban Phoenix. Relatives say dad fought with his daughter over becoming too westernized and not living up to traditional Iraqi standards — which, we might add, are not very fun if you’re a 20-year-old woman in America…
So Almaleki allegedly ran over his daughter in Peoria, Arizona, also hitting her friend Amal Edan Khalaf. Noor Almaleki was found
unconscious and bleeding; her condition is life-threatening. Amal is on good condition. Noor lives in Sunrise, Arizona with her boyfriend and the 43-year-old Amal.Faleh Almaleki was last seen driving a grey or silver 2000 Jeep grand Cherokee.
The following doesn’t even need to be true to enrage Iranians; but if the Regime is importing Arabs to fight off protesters in Iran, then this will only ignite the movement further, from Independent.co.uk:
The Iranian opposition leader Mirhossein Mousavi is under 24-hour guard by secret police and no longer able to speak freely to supporters, according to the film director Mohsen Makhmalbaf.
Mr Makhmalbaf, 52, an informal spokesman abroad for the protest in Iran, said that Mr Mousavi was not under arrest but “he has security agents, secret police with him all the time. He has to be careful what he says.”
In a telephone interview, Mr Makhmalbaf, the director of the 2001 film Kandaha, denied suggestions that the protests against the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad were losing steam.
“The regime, arguably, is losing ground, not the protests,” he said. “Ordinary Iranians are openly rejecting the legitimacy and power of Ayatollah Khamanei. That is entirely new, unheard of.”
Mr Makhmalbaf, a friend of Mr Mousavi for 20 years, said that there were reports from Iran that some of the militia deployed to suppress protest were “speaking Arabic”. “That is unconfirmed but it suggests that the regime is unable to trust its own security forces to repress the Iranian people,” he said. “It suggests that people are being used from abroad.”
Iranians have an affinity with Arabs because of their shared religion. But beneath that veneer, lies two major rifts with Arabs:
- even within the religious affinity, Iranians are (like Iraqis, who are Arab) largely Shiite,
- nationalistically speaking, Iranias are Persians, ie. non-Arabs, and many still resent how the Muslims came to their country and imposed Islam onto them.
Any suggestion that the Regime is bringing in Arabs to fight off the Iranians taking to the street will backfire.
None of this is PC per se, but it is real: while an Iranian and an Arab will exchange pleasantries, an uneasy tension will exist between them, as well.
Bear in mind over 100 Canadians have died in Afghanistan, because Bush took the American army into Iraq… and the American army needed help in Afghanistan.
“The Sadrists were saying, ‘We are talking about having immunity for foreign troops here while at the same time an Iraqi is in prison for insulting a foreigner,’” says Mahmoud Othman, an independent Kurdish lawmaker who attended the session. “They’re trying to embarrass Maliki in an election year, to portray him as an American puppet.”
The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg offers an interesting excerpt from “A World Of Trouble,” a forthcoming book by Patrick Tyler on the White House and the Middle East:
A servant appeared with a bottle. Tenet knocked back some of the scotch. Then some more. They watched with concern. He drained half the bottle in a few minutes.
“They’re setting me up. The bastards are setting me up,” Tenet said, but “I am not going to take the hit.”…
“According to one witness, he mocked the neoconservatives in the Bush administration and their alignment with the right wing of Israel’s political establishment, referring to them with exasperation as, “the Jews.”
Vice President Cheney has come out and said that the Iraq would have happened, regardless of the threat of weapons of mass destruction. Now on MSNBC’s show Hardball, right-wing commentator Frank Gaffney has defended Cheney and the Bush administration’s choice to invade Iraq, and Cheney’s remarks, by saying Saddam Hussein posed a “mortal threat” to America.
Host of the show, Chris Matthews, was appalled by Gaffney’s lack of remorse over the deaths of 4000 Americans in that war. Deaths Matthews attributes to the mistakes of the right-wing. To which Gaffney basically replied, paraphrased of course, well, it’s a shame, but I think they had to die. Read more…
Check it out:
NEW Yorkers were left a little confused overnight as more than a million copies of a fake newspaper were handed out by a team of pranksters rallied through the web.
“Iraq War Ends” read the headline of a fake “special edition” of The New York Times, dated July 4, 2009, which was handed out to commuters as they rushed for work.
Update: the source of the leak is a hoax, but the fact remains: for the GOP to send up John McCain and Sarah Palin to the batter’s box after George Bush’s disastrous tenure shows how reckless the POW (Party of War) is. I do not see how America’s shifting demographics will allow for the GOP to remain a viable party…
Original post:
Remember: the GOP is the Party of War… so if their second in command does not know the basics, that is a dangerous thing. From Martin Eisenstadt, the leak who told FOX that Palin was clueless on geography, let alone geo-politics:
So yes, to be clear, last week I was the one who leaked those things to a producer at Fox News who works with Cameron. Carl and his producers are good guys, and I don’t want them to have to worry about protecting their sources (and going through the wringer ala Judith Miller or Matt Cooper) on something like this.
As you know, I was one of the foreign policy advisers on the McCain campaign who worked with Randy Scheunemann to help prep Sarah on her debate with Joe Biden. Did we outright give her a geography quiz when we started the prep? No, of course not. But yes, in the context of the prep, it slowly became apparent that her grasp of basic geo-political knowledge had major gaps. Could she have passed a multiple choice test about South Africa or NAFTA. Probably. But it was clear that she simply didn’t have the ease of knowledge that we come to expect from a major party political candidate. Other slights came up, too: Not knowing the difference between Hezbollah and Hamas. Or the difference between the Shiites and Suni. Or when it came to international terrorist organizations, knowing that the IRA was in Northern Ireland, and ETA in Spain.
Read more. The point is, we saw that happens when someone runs the country without knowing that Iraq has Sunnis and Shia and they don’t get along. I don’t think we can afford to have more of these types of people in charge… yet both John McCain and Sarah Palin did not seem to know this very basic fact.
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