Wednesday, July 27, 2011


Iran: ‘We Have No Option but to Destroy Israel’

In reaction to the recent assassination of Iranian scientist Dariush Rezaiinejad, chief commander of the Basij Brigadier General Mohammad-Reza Naghdi stated:
The main plot for this criminal act was conceived by the American government, and since it is scared of the reaction by the Muslim world due to the uprisings in the region, it had the Zionist regime commit the heinous act....

In order to protect the security of our country, we have no option but to have the Zionist regime wiped off the map.

Naghdi, who was born in Iraq, was a member of the Iranian Quds Force involved in international terrorism before he was appointed by Ayatollah Khamenei to the post of commander of the Basij in 2009. He has previously threatened to assassinate American generals in retaliation for the killings of the Iranian nuclear scientists.

Last Saturday, the Iranian scientist was gunned down outside his home in Tehran by assailants on a motorcycle. Since then, the state-owned Iranian media has sent out conflicting reports: first, that the scientist was a physicist involved in Iran’s nuclear program; later, that he was just a student studying for a master’s degree in electricity.

Iran’s Fars News Agency, operated by the Revolutionary Guards, claimed that the scientist was one of the researchers working on electric detonators which can be used on missiles or nuclear bombs. They stated that it was because of this activity that he was assassinated by the enemy.

The reaction by Iranian officials indicates that the slain scientist was an integral and important part of the Iranian nuclear bomb program. Said Tehran Governor General Morteza Tamadon to reporters during Dariush Rezaiinejad’s funeral procession in Tehran:
Undoubtedly, this was an American-Israeli project against our intellectuals and thinkers, with the aim of discouraging the Iranian nation from continuing the path it has taken.

Iranian Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani also said the assassination was planned by the U.S. and Israel:
The days of adventurous U.S. policies in the region are numbered, so the U.S. has turned to terrorist groups to cover up its failures.

MP Kazem Jalali of the Majlis National Security and Foreign Policy Committee also alleged that the assassination was a terrorist operation:
The Zionist regime and the U.S. are behind these terrorist actions. … The Zionist regime and the U.S. are the axis of terrorism in the world.

Radicals ruling Iran are determined to make the bomb, and reports from Iran indicate that Iranian officials are now considering a measure to move all of their nuclear scientists, along with their immediate families, to a secure site such as the Parchin military complex.

SOURCE




Britain looks likely to adopt a version of a "workfare" program set up some years ago in Australia by a conserrvative administration

THE MINISTER charged with tackling Britain's welfare dependency crisis has drawn on Australia for inspiration by copying policies introduced by the Howard government and continued under Labor.

The former British Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith, now secretary of State for Work and Pensions in the the Cameron government, said he was openly plagiarising Howard government polices which sought to lure people off welfare rather than further entrench dependence.

The policy approach, once controversial in Australia, is now accepted and pursued by both major political parties whereas it is stirring controversy now in Britain.

Mr Duncan Smith will copy the 1998 Jobs Network initiative which involved outsourcing job placement services away from the now-defunct Commonwealth Employment Service and paying private providers.

"As a country, Britain has taken too long to understand the basic message that we shouldn't be so concerned with who delivers support or how they do it, but whether what they do works," he said.

Mr Duncan Smith is proposing a harsher version of welfare-to-work reforms that have been implemented by the Coalition and Labor and which involve incentives for moving into work and penalties for refusing to do so.

At the heart of his reform agenda is his Universal Credit scheme, which involves rolling Britain's seven unemployment benefits into a single benefit.

The rate at which the benefit will be withdrawn when a person does some work will be lessened to increase the incentive to work. But the penalties for refusing work will be harsher.

The first refusal will involve a three-month suspension of benefits, a nine-month suspension for the second breach and three years for the third.

He said he was not necessarily advocating Australia matches his scheme, but said conservatives around the world "need to capture the idea of poverty rather than leaving it to the left".

"They are conservative reforms to improve the quality of life of people rather than just an issue about money.

"For too long Conservatives had left this area to the left, only occasionally making forays to attack spending on welfare and everything was viewed through the lens of saving money or catching scroungers," he said

Both Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard are advocates of welfare-to-work measures. This year's federal budget contained measures to break the cycle of dependency, end long-term unemployment and ease the blowout in the disability support pension.

Mr Duncan Smith was being hosted by the conservative think-tank, the Menzies Research Centre.

Also in Australia yesterday was the former British Labour prime minister, Tony Blair. He and Ms Gillard met in Melbourne. At a press conference, Mr Blair declined to comment on domestic policy matters but did agree pricing carbon was the best way to reduce emissions.

SOURCE







Is Islam Misrepresented?

Decades ago Marshall McLuhan observed, “The medium is the message.” As the print and electronic media penetrate more and more every aspect of life, their influence increases greatly in shaping views and behavior of the public. The power of the media is a mixed blessing. On one hand, it can serve to expose injustices, wrongdoings, and flaws. On the other, it is able to propagate misinformation and outright disinformation.

Manipulation and control of the media is of critical importance to the rule of totalitarian states. Free societies, although less subject to laundered information, are still at considerable risk of being selectively informed or misinformed outright. The public can be deceived more easily by the overlords of the media when political correctness is used as subterfuge for promotion of certain ideas.

A case in point is the media’s portrayal of Islam, articulated by politicians and pundits—the talking heads on television and radio, as well as the analysts who write for newspapers and magazines in the West. Time and again we hear and read that Islam is a religion of peace, in spite of the fact that Islam has been a religion of violence from its inception to the present. This mantra, “Islam is a religion of peace” is repeated so often that it has become an indisputable statement of fact in the minds of many.

While radical Muslims kill, behead and rape, the MSM remains silent and repeats the same mantra of Islam’s peacefulness in the name of multiculturalism. They insist that the civilized world accept Islamic culture, under the rubric of multiculturalism. Muslims and their frequently well-paid apologists use the multiculturalism umbrella only in non-Islamic lands to shield themselves from the torrent of legitimate criticisms that those who know Islam better shower on this cult of violence peddled as the religion of peace.

Don’t listen to me and don’t listen to these conniving dissimulators. Find out for yourself. See if the euphemism of multiculturalism is ever printed in the Islamic press, or ever appears in any form anywhere in Muslim countries. This multiculturalism gambit is Islam manufactured to pull the wool over the eyes of non-Muslims while Muslims carry on with their unrelenting campaign of eradicating anything or anyone non-Islamic everywhere in the world.

Those of us, through reason and tremendous act of will, who have freed ourselves from the enslaving yoke of Islam placed around our necks from birth, know about all the heinous inside dirt of this plague of humanity. We have experienced Islam first-hand and up close from the inside. We have studied the Quran, the Hadith, and the Sunna. We have seen Islam in action where it holds sway. Some of us even tried desperately to cling to this security blanket that was wrapped around us from birth. Yet, the more we studied and the more we experienced Islam, the more our efforts to remain in the fold became untenable.

We broke away from Islamic slavery and found it to be our solemn duty to expose this fraud of a religion, help other Muslims to free themselves from it, and warn the good-hearted and gullible non-Muslims against falling prey to it.

Recall former President George W. Bush on several occasions repeated the mantra and attributed the horrific violence committed under the banner of Islam to a small band of extremists? The former President’s assertion was either based on ignorance of the facts about Islam or his attempt at political correctness. Perhaps the President’s reticence to speak on the true nature of Islam was due to his desire to avoid inflaming the already charged feelings of many about Islam. In any event, truth is sacrificed and the public continues to cling to the false notion that Islam is a peaceful religion. People who dare to disclose the true nature of Islam run the risk of being castigated as a bigot or a hatemonger.

Even a cursory examination of Islam’s history and Islamic texts conclusively proves the exact opposite of peacefulness. Islam was, and continues to be, a movement of unbridled violence.

The Arabs who sallied out of the Arabian deserts did not fan out to the outside world with the Quran in one hand and flowers in the other, preaching love and peace from street corner to street corner, thereby capturing the hearts and minds of the people. Islam was forced upon every people at the point of the sword and the imposition of backbreaking jazyyeh (special taxes) levied on those who were spared death and allowed to retain their religious beliefs. In spite of paying heavy Jazyyeh, the non-Muslims were treated, at best, as second-class citizens in their own homelands.

The abominable persecution of non-Muslims in Islamic countries is a standard operating procedure. In many Islamic countries non-Muslim marriages are not recognized as legal unions and the children of the couples are stigmatized as bastards. Never mind Saudi Arabia, the cradle of barbarism, and even Egypt, the more civilized Islamic country and recipient of billions of dollars in U.S. aid, treat non-Muslims as second-class citizens and deprive them of their legitimate human rights.

The pundits, the analysts and the politicians are doing a great disservice to the public, each segment for its own expedient reasons, by parroting the mantra regarding the peaceful nature of Islam. As a matter of fact, the so-called small band of Islamic extremists is the true face of Islam. Admittedly, from time to time and place to place, Muslims have shown a degree of tolerance for non-Muslims. This tolerance dates back to the very early years of Muhammad himself. Early on, Muhammad was meek and proclaimed, “For you, your religion, and for me, my religion.” This assertion lasted but a few years until Muhammad’s movement gathered strength and Islam became the only alternative to death or heavy taxation. The imposition of Jazyyeh was a clever ploy for filling the Islamic coffers to support its armies and to finance its further conquests.

A longstanding Islamic practice is to be meek while weak and assume despotic intolerant power as it gains strength. Recent migration of Muslims to non-Islamic lands began as a seemingly harmless, even a useful, trickle of cheap needed labor. Before long, greater and greater numbers of Muslims deluged the new territories and as they gained in numbers—by high birth rate as well as new arrivals—Muslims began reverting to their intolerant ways by, for instance, demanding legal status for Shariah (Islamic laws), the type of draconian laws that for the most part resemble those of humanity’s barbaric past.

Islam is indeed misrepresented. Islam is not misrepresented by its “detractors.” It is misrepresented by Islamic mercenaries: organizations and individuals generously funded by states as well as wealthy believers who are making billions of dollars pumping and selling oil at astronomical prices. Prestigious universities in the West, always looking for handouts, are tripping over one another to establish Islamic studies programs staffed by professors who sing the praise of Islam. Islamic associations routinely intimidate newspapers if they dare to print the truth about Islam. Legions of lawyers, both Muslims as well as hired guns, are on the lookout to intimidate and silence any voice speaking the truth about Islam. The media that fall in line may receive generous advertising and other incentives from Islamic lobbyists.

Hence, it is a fact that Islam is misrepresented. It is misrepresented very effectively by non-Muslim individuals and institutions who are generously rewarded by the modern day Islamic conquerors. This time around the Muslims are using the immense petrodollar they extract from the addicted non-Muslims.

The sword is temporarily replaced by just as deadly a weapon—the petrodollar. Before long, the Muslims aim to add a more deadly modern version of the sword—the Islamic bomb. With the bomb on one hand and the other hand on the oil spigot, the non-Muslim world will be brought to its knees by the religion of peace and brotherhood.

SOURCE





Lawsuits no way to defend privacy or free speech

Comment from Australia

JULIA Gillard's retribution over her perceived enemies in the press has latched on to an extremist rights agenda that would reregulate free speech and encourage a more litigious society.

Her Justice Minister Brendan O'Connor has been directed to respond to the News of the World phone hacking scandal by making it easier for Australians to sue media companies for invasions of privacy. Such journalistic practice already is illegal in Britain and Australia. And there is no evidence of such Fleet Street "red top" outrages here.

But O'Connor claims that "mass breaches" here highlight that Australia has "no general right to privacy" and thus "no certainty for anyone wanting to sue for a breach of privacy".

So the left-wing junior minister from Victoria has dusted off a 2008 Australian Law Reform Commission privacy report which, from page 2535 of its third volume, argues for an extremist "tort of invasion of privacy".

Yet, as the ALRC has argued previously, the concept of a general tort of privacy is vague and nebulous, a concern repeated a decade ago by then High Court chief justice Murray Gleeson. The Law Council of Australia more recently has backed the existing "appropriate and adequate recourse to individuals who consider that a media organisation has interfered with their privacy".

But to understand the issue, it first has to be removed from the grip of the lawyers, particularly those with a rights agenda or a political grudge. For the economic issue is that digital technology has slashed the cost of gathering, analysing and distributing information, including about people.

This has raised a host of issues from ensuring that banks and hospitals keep personal financial and health records confidential, to closed circuit cameras following people's every move, to alarm that sex partners could post explicit video clips on YouTube.

But it still has been an overwhelmingly good thing, providing cheaper access to services and allowing people to bypass traditional media to communicate directly among themselves.

The new digital technology also reduces the gatekeeper role of the traditional media: anything seems to go in social media. Yet, exploiting the NOTW scandal, Labor's privacy tort is aimed at traditional media companies because they are a political target and because they still have deeper pockets than some random blogger or hacker.

The legal trick is to conflate the various digital concerns into a new form of property right: a general tort against invasion of personal privacy akin to someone breaking into your property or a home invasion. Conventional private property rights are a foundation of a democratic market economy. But a property right over individual privacy necessarily intrudes into a more basic foundation of an open society: free speech.

O'Connor fudges around this. And sensible people, such as my old mate Barrie Cassidy on the ABC's Insiders on Sunday, find it hard to understand why anyone could caution against protecting people's privacy.

The objection is that elevating privacy to a fundamental human right is designed to get around the problem that protecting it is not costless. It aims to avoid having to measure the extent of the actual problem and to figure out the most effective ways to deal with it.

Hence, the Victorian lawyers' guild argues against "any selective analysis of the costs and benefits" of the state's charter of human rights now being reviewed by the Baillieu government.

Yet getting a handle on who actually benefits, by how much and at what cost to others is central to good regulation.

There is ample evidence of the costs of allowing such open-ended rights to take root in the legal system. Before being reined in over the past decade, allowing people to sue for injury to their reputation or even honour became an Australian legal absurdity that transferred money from deep-pocketed media companies to politicians and defamation lawyers.

Even judicial officers began to exploit this legal protection racket. Without any proof of actual injury to reputation, damages for mere slights ballooned to way beyond payouts for serious workplace accidents or for common assault.

Like privacy, people's reputations are more than their own business. People rely on the reputations of those from whom they buy food, trust with their savings, take medical advice or leave their children to care for. Protecting both reputations and privacy restricts others from being properly informed by the marketplace of free speech.

Again like protecting privacy, it similarly sounds only just that those whose negligence causes injury to others should be made to pay. But not when the lawyer-controlled courts stretch the concept so far that the public liability premiums for a local fete, a surf club sausage sizzle or a local playground become prohibitive or if insurance companies refuse to cover the risks of medical surgery.

Just as defamation and negligence torts have been reformed, however, the privacy tort push has gathered momentum with the European human rights agenda, been transmitted to Britain (where it mostly has enriched celebrities) and then transported to Australia via a few activist lower court judges. This has created such uncertainty, argues the ALRC, that a whole new privacy tort needs to be legislated.

The absurdities already extend to defining as private what happens in public spaces. On the weekend, my 77-year-old father went back to the historic North Sydney pool underneath Sydney Harbour Bridge where he swam in schoolboy competitions. He was told he could not photograph the public pool because of privacy concerns of those swimming in it.

Languishing in the polls, the Prime Minister demands that News Corporation's Australian arm answer unspecified "hard questions" over the NOTW phone hacking scandal. The Greens leader who props up her government, Bob Brown, calls The Australian the "hate media" and pushes for an inquiry into breaking up News Limited.

Communications Minister and Labor factional warlord Stephen Conroy complains that another Murdoch paper, Sydney's The Daily Telegraph, is inciting "regime change", inviting the probity concern that media regulation could be influenced by politics.

Yet Gillard's privacy tort threatens all the media, not just those Labor seeks to intimidate. Putting the whole media offside is a bizarre strategy for a Prime Minister languishing in the polls and trying to sell a tax she promised never to introduce.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine). My Home Pages are here or here or here or Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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