SMCCDI (Information Service)
April 8, 2006

In the name of Iran, the land of noble thoughts!/Be nam e Iran, Zadguah e zibatarin andishe ha!

1) Cyrus the Great & Thomas Jefferson
(English Documentary from You Tube):
http://youtube.com/watch?v=wJW6VexP73A&search=Cyrus

2) Persepolis:
http://www.persepolis3d.com

3) Save Pasargad:
http://www.savepasargad.com/european_languages.htm

Please spread this e-mail/Lotfan in e-mail ra pakhsh namaid.

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By Andrew L. Jaffee

More great news on the American job market:

The unemployment rate slipped to 4.7 percent from 4.8 percent, the Labor Department said, matching the low hit in January, which had been the lowest rate since July 2001.

Employer payrolls grew by 211,000 last month, down slightly from a revised gain of 225,000 in February, the department said. But that was above the average forecast of 190,000, according to a survey of economists by Briefing.com.

The U.S. economy has created 5 million new jobs since August 2003; gross domestic product grew 3.5 percent in 2005; worker productivity has increased at a 3.4% annual rate since 2001; manufacturing activity has increased for 33 consecutive months; inflation has remained at a tame 2.1% over the last year; personal income has grown 8.2% since 2001; and, the U.S. is at or near full employment (those looking for work are finding work).

American orders for durable goods jumped 2.6% in February, the fourth increase over the last five months. Durable goods are defined as products with a normal life expectancy of three years or more, like furniture, aircraft, computers, and automobiles.

Let’s hope all the good economic news doesn’t panic the Fed into raising interest rates too high and too fast. We seem to be in a sweat spot of sustainable growth with mild inflation. Perhaps Alan Greenspan’s successor Ben Bernanke will keep a cooler head.

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Donnel Jones

Still stinging from the failure of the neo-con vision to instill democracy in backward peoples, the Bush Administration will stop directly funding the Palestinian Authority as its elected governance, the terrorist organization Hamas, refuses to abide the values of the Quartet: namely, to recognize Israel and cease all terrorist activity.

Even Europe is catching on:

Earlier on Friday, the EU Commission said it had halted payments to the government because the new cabinet had not recognized Israel’s right to exist or renounced violence. Hamas’ charter officially calls for Israel’s destruction.

Although I’ve virtually lost all respect for the current administration, it does stick by its guns, right or wrong. Here, the Bush dynasty is correct. We cannot fund a cabal of ruffians and degenerates who, unfortunately, reflect the non-values of a very backward people.

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by Daniel Pipes
danielpipes.org*
March 30, 2006
http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/580
* Cross-posted with permission

The recent case of Abdul Rahman, an Afghan who converted to Christianity and was sentenced to death for doing so, has made Islamists in the West squirm. The Shari‘a is perfectly clear and unanimous about the need to execute Muslims who leave their faith, whether becoming atheists or converts to another religion. If a tutorial in the matter were needed, the Rushdie affair of 1989 provided an ample one. But it’s not possible to acknowledge this fact to Westerners who, as one, condemn such intolerance.

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By Andrew L. Jaffee

Fareed Zakaria is a man I respect — his ideas are always worth considering. But in a recent Newsweek column, he argues for President Bush’s guest worker/amnesty program, legislation that I believe would undermine America’s prosperity and democracy.

First, Zakaria draws an analogy between: a) the positive influence that Indian immigrants have had on American society; and, b) the unrelenting flow of Latinos into the U.S. This analogy is flawed. Indian immigrants are generally highly-skilled and come from a nation with a long tradition of democracy. Latino immigrants are mostly unskilled, and come from societies dominated above all by corruption (e.g., Mexico; remember that the PRI ruled Mexico rather undemocratically until only a few years ago).

Parenthetically, have you ever heard of East Indian gangs terrorizing America’s streets? On the other hand, Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) is considered the “most dangerous gang in America.”

Second, Zakaria frames our immigration problem mostly in terms of economic supply and demand — supply being a pool of cheap Latin labor, and demand being America’s insatiable appetite for services. While not scientific, I can travel to my hometown’s inner city neighborhoods and easily point out scads of Americans out of work — or unwilling to work. This city’s unemployment rate was 6.7 and 6.1 for the first 2 months of 2006, respectively. That’s about 2 percent above the national average, and the city’s demography is not by any means predominantly Latino. Why can’t these people be employed? This is a societal problem not to be solved by importing Mexico’s unemployed, but by tackling faults in our education system, and requiring citizens to assume personal responsibility for their actions.

Here’s Zakaria’s thesis:

The United States has a real problem with illegal-immigrant flows, largely from Mexico (70 percent of illegal immigrants are from that one country). But let us understand the forces at work here. “The income gap between the United States and Mexico is the largest between any two contiguous countries in the world,” writes Stanford historian David Kennedy. That huge disparity is producing massive demand in the United States and massive supply from Mexico and Central America. Whenever governments try to come between these two forces-think of drugs-simply increasing enforcement does not work. Tighter border control is an excellent idea, but to work it will have to be coupled with some recognition of the laws of supply and demand-that is, it will have to include expansion of the legal-immigrant pool.

We’re way past the point of granting amnesty to illegals — about 12 million (illegal immigrants) past that point. Assimilation takes time. When does the U.S. become unmanageable? When the population reaches 400, 500, 600 million? How do we educate and assimilate unskilled immigrants at the current, rapid pace of influx?

Take action. Support LEGAL immigration.

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by Dan Diker and Pinchas Inbari
Middle East Quarterly*
Spring 2006
http://www.meforum.org/article/923
* Cross-posted with permission

Hamas’s landslide victory in the recent Palestinian parliamentary elections is the latest sign of the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) failure. The collapse of the West Bank into civil chaos and jihadist control would pose a security dilemma not only for Israel but also for Jordan. It is a scenario that increasingly occupies the Jordanian government’s strategic thinking.

Jordan’s interest in the West Bank is long-standing. The Jordanian army occupied the West Bank and Jerusalem in 1948 but was ousted by the Israeli Defense Forces in the 1967 Six-Day war. King Hussein continued to claim sovereignty until July 31, 1988,[1] when, in the midst of the first Palestinian intifada, he renounced Jordan’s official administrative and legal roles in the territory. His motives were not entirely altruistic or sparked by commitment to Palestinian nationalism; rather, he feared the spread of Palestinian unrest to the East Bank.[2]

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By Andrew L. Jaffee

Maybe the cacophony of anti-Semitic sentiments in our universities has awakened people of good conscience — or the bigots have been exposed so much that they’re backing down. From USA Today:

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, responding to allegations that an anti-Israel bias is rampant on college campuses, approved recommendations Monday aimed at ensuring that Jewish college students are protected from anti-Semitic harassment.

The recommendations grew out of a November hearing at which speakers cited examples of anti-Semitic incidents. One frequently cited involved a 2004 documentary that said Middle East Studies faculty at Columbia University were intimidating Jewish students who defended Israel. (A faculty committee investigated and found no evidence of anti-Semitism.) Last September, a non-profit group called “StandWithUs” showed a 45-minute documentary depicting examples of anti-Israel speakers on campuses.

The commission, an independent, bipartisan federal agency that does not have enforcement powers, also urged university leaders to “set a moral example by denouncing anti-Semitic and other hate speech,” and to ensure that Middle East studies departments protect the rights of all students. It recommended Monday that the Department of Education “vigorously” enforce the federal law that bars discrimination based on “race, color or national origin,” and that Congress clarify that “national origin” can refer to Jewish heritage.

Hat-tip to Jerry Gordon, who provides more info at Israpundit.

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By Donnel Jones

Eliot A. Cohen, professor at Johns Hopkins University’s Advanced International Studies has written a direct and clear editorial in the Washington Post concerning John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.” Cohen makes the case that these writers are simply anti-Semitic. If such labels have a way of turning you off because of name-calling like “racist” and “fascist” that passes for intelligent discourse among the ill-informed, in this case, the label is certainly warranted. The book’s central “thesis” is <OminousKlezmerMusic> “The Lobby” </OminousKlezmerMusic> that it claims is running America’s foreign policy. Informed readers will not have to go any further than reading those scare quotes to know what this piece of trash of a book is about. Remember “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”? Of course, you do. Now we “The Lobby.” Whenever you get something this reductive you know you’re dealing with blind hate.

I, obviously a brain-washed gentile who is uncompromisingly pro-Isreal, go further than Cohen to say that any one who thinks Israel has no right to exist is de facto anti-Semitic. Cohen won’t say so because that is not really the gist of his argument. But it should go without saying that denying the Jews their right to a homeland after 2,000 years of a very bad spell in Christian Europe is a just a tinny-weeny bit heartless. That means I include Jews like Chomsky who will have nothing to do with Israel.

If a people have the right to vote, like Blacks, then why not a people whose roots go back to the Levant have a right to a homeland there? Or, would we say that denying Blacks the right to vote is racist? The comparison is not odd, especially if you consider that Blacks without the right to vote at least had a homeland in America, even if under cruel and inhumane circumstances. It is righteous that people have the right to vote. It is righteous that a people have a homeland if there is any way they can have one. This also holds, of course, for the Palestinians. If only they seemed to think so.

Cohen concludes:

If this sounds personal, it is, although I am only a footnote target for Mearsheimer and Walt. I am a public intellectual and a proud Jew; sympathetic to Israel and extensively engaged in our nation’s military affairs; vaguely conservative and occasionally hawkish. In a week my family will celebrate Passover with my oldest son — the third generation to serve as an officer in the United States Army. He will be home on leave from the bomb-strewn streets of Baghdad. The patch on his shoulder is the same flag that flies on my porch.

Yet I too take this personally. Unlike Cohen’s son, exactly what are John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt doing on behalf of Arabs who must be freed from hideous autocracies?

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By Andrew L. Jaffee

Despite the fact that the New York Times admitted Saddam’s ties to al-Qaeda back in 2004, and the BBC reported that WMD’s were found in Iraq in 2004, we still hear the drumbeat about President Bush’s “lies.” But Victor Davis Hanson puts 2 and 2 together. Here’s an excerpt:

First, notice how the old criticism that Saddam was not connected to al Qaeda has now morphed into a fallback position that “Saddam was not connected to September 11” — even though the latter argument was never officially advanced as a casus belli.

Opponents have retreated to this position because we know that al Qaeda cadres were in Kurdistan, and that al Zarqawi fled to Baghdad, as did a mastermind of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, Abdul Rahman Yasin.

The Clinton administration in 1998 officially cited Iraqi agents as involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. That is part of the reason why the U.S. Senate, not the Bush administration, authorized a war against Saddam in October 2002: “ Whereas members of al-Qaeda, an organization bearing responsibility for attacks on the United States, its citizens, and interests, including the attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, are known to be in Iraq.”

From the slowly emerging Baathist archives, we are learning that for more than a decade Saddam’s agents had some contacts with, and offered help to, al Qaeda operatives from the Sudan to the Philippines.

The issue is closed: Saddam Hussein’s regime had a mutually beneficial association with al Qaeda. All that remains in doubt is the degree to which Iraq’s generic support enabled al Qaeda to pull off operations like September 11. It may be that Saddam and Osama, in their views of Islam and jihad, were as antithetical to one another as Japanese and Germans were in attitudes about racial superiority. But in both cases, rogues find common ground in their opposition to hated Western liberalism.

Read Hanson’s discussion about “eight assumptions” continually made about Iraq and Bush, and you’ll see it all ties together.

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By Andrew L. Jaffee

The French banned religious symbols in schools, but that was France. I would hope the U.S. would maintain a higher standard for free expression. Apparently not at one Colorado school, which has banned the red, white, and blue; yet a school in Texas is flying the Mexican flag. Controlling students’ display of gang symbols is one thing; banning our national colors is quite another; and we as a nation should be able to distinguish between the two as a matter of common sense and rational consensus.

Regarding Colorado, from FOXNews:

Skyline High School Principal Tom Stumpf said American flags were brazenly waved in the faces of Hispanic students and in one case a Mexican flag was thrown into the face of another student.

“When it involves the American flag and its abuse in vilifying other people, we simply will not tolerate it,” Stumpf said. “They were using the symbol derisively as misguided patriotism.”

If there were scuffles, then they should’ve been broken up. Violence is normally handled by school policies on behavior. But suppressing free speech will send the wrong message to students. I doubt one could construe the American or Mexican flags as gang colors. Principal Tom Stumpf is killing the patient to cure the disease.

Now some commentary from Doug Wrenn at the Magic City Morning Star, including the Mexican flag being flown over an American school:

In one Colorado school, the American flag has been banned, at least for now. In Houston, Texas, a school principle hoisted a Mexican flag. Sounds to me like someone did not remember the Alamo! It is historically typical of the left to be cowardly and pandering; although they would have you believe they are “open minded,” “progressive,” or “objective.” At some point in our corrosive culture, cowardice and indecisiveness merged into elitism, and is now trendy at the types of parties in which the attendees’ noses and pinky fingers both extend in the same northerly direction.

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By Andrew L. Jaffee

And people still question whether President Bush’s push for democracy in the Middle East… Today, Kuwaiti women are voting for the first time. From the BBC:

Polling is taking place in a Kuwaiti council by-election in which women are allowed to vote for the first time.

Two women are also among eight candidates running for the seat in the Salmiya district, south of the capital.

The 28,000 eligible voters, 60% of whom are women, are voting in segregated polling booths, a condition demanded by Islamist and tribal MPs.

Women were granted equal political rights last year and will vote in full legislative polls in 2007.

Of course, to please the Islamist crazies, women had to vote in separate locations from the men, but election officials didn’t cave in completely:

Despite the segregated voting, women were required to show their faces to judges supervising the elections for the purposes of identification.

There are reports of at least one woman refusing to remove her Islamic veil and leaving the polling station without voting.

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by Daniel Pipes
New York Sun*
April 4, 2006
http://www.danielpipes.org/article/3496
* Cross-posted with permission

Since I argued in a column last week that Israel can and must defeat the Palestinian Arabs, a barrage of responses have contested this thesis. Some were trivial (Ha’aretz published an article challenging my right to opine on such matters because I do not live in Israel) but most raised serious issues that deserve an answer.

The ancient Chinese strategist Sun Tzu observed that in war, “Let your great object be victory,” and he was echoed by the 17^th-century Austrian war thinker, Raimondo Montecuccoli. His Prussian successor Clausewitz added that “War is an act of violence to compel the enemy to fulfill our will.” These insights remain valid today: Victory consists of imposing one’s will on the enemy, which typically means compelling him to give up his war goals. Conflicts usually end with one side’s will being crushed.

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By Andrew L. Jaffee

The EU loves to placate the Palestinians, and has proposed rather strange plans for solving the “Middle East Conflict.” I leave it to the reader to interpret the EU’s latest plan, from the Jerusalem Post:

If Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert consults the international community before implementing his “convergence” plan, one suggestion he is likely to hear is that Israel should lease the settlement blocs from the Palestinian Authority rather than annex them outright, a senior European diplomat said Monday.

Olmert has said a number of times, including in his victory speech last week, that he hoped to reach a negotiated settlement with the PA, but that if this proved impossible he would - after holding consultations with the US and the international community - determine the nation’s eastern border and incorporate the major settlement blocs into Israel, by 2010.

The senior European diplomat said that while Europe obviously favored a peace agreement, if Hamas were unwilling to negotiate, Europe would “reluctantly” hold discussions with Israel along the lines that Olmert had outlined.

“If Hamas won’t sit down and talk, what else should we do?” he asked. In such a case, he said, the EU’s hope would be that Israel would “be generous” and give the PA “more than the minimum.” He said that in the context of such talks, Israel’s leasing of certain settlements or settlement blocs “would certainly come up.”

Israel makes up 1/6 of one percent of the territory of the Middle East, and the Jewish state should “‘be generous’ and give the PA ‘more than the minimum?’” There’s an old expression: “One half of nothing is still nothing.” Israel has already been generous, giving up Gaza and now planning to give up the West Bank. We’re back to square one, where the Arabs, and their EU supporters, seem bent on demanding that all of little Israel be given up.

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By Andrew L. Jaffee

Rumors are circulating that al-Qaeda’s terrorist mastermind in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, has been demoted to a less prominent position amongst the country’s “insurgent” vermin. Is this just a PR move, or is pressure mounting on Iraq’s terrorists to tone down their murderous rampage, which has claimed the lives of 30,000 innocents? (Some PR campaign.) Here’s the background and news from Forbes:

The Jordanian-born militant, however, seized most of the attention because of his relentless Internet propaganda efforts, the brutality of his attacks - including hostage beheading videos put on the Web - and a series of suicide car bombings that targeted mostly Shiites.

Then came a November triple suicide bombing against hotels in Jordan that killed 63 people, mostly Arab Muslims. That sparked a backlash against al-Zarqawi in Jordan, where there had been some sympathy for the insurgency. Even some fellow militants called for halting attacks on civilians. …

On Sunday, Huthayafa Azzam, believed to have close ties to Iraqi militants, told The Associated Press that al-Zarqawi had been confined to a military role within the coalition, specifically barred from making public statements and from any political or propaganda role.

It was not clear how Azzam, a son of one of Osama bin Laden’s spiritual mentors, had learned the information, which could not be independently verified. The claim by Azzam, a Jordanian of Palestinian origin, could also simply be a sign of squabbling among insurgent factions.

Azzam said Iraqis in the Shura Council had demanded al-Zarqawi give up his political role - particularly in propaganda - because he had “embarrassed” them with beheading videos and statements about regional politics and al-Qaida’s activities. Azzam said al-Zarqawi agreed and “pledged not to target Iraq’s neighbors, mainly his native Jordan, because that has harmed the Iraqi resistance’s relations with the Arab world.”

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By Andrew L. Jaffee

I read a worthless “analysis” peace by BBC author Bridget Kendall which makes many politically correct assumptions, but is short on substantiation. Kendall’s premise was that, even though demonstrations against Condi Rice’s visit to several U.K. cities had tiny turnout, we should still accept the fact that Brits are anti-U.S. She didn’t mention Tony Blair’s resounding election victory last year, where Brits had a chance to vote their pro-Bush prime minister out of office. Here’s Kendall:

It is true the protests that greeted her in both Blackburn and Liverpool, though noisy and full of passion, were relatively small.

And it was always going to be the case that in a town like Blackburn, which is over 20% Muslim in terms of population, there was likely to be more heartfelt opposition, and in some cases downright hostility.

But misgivings in Britain about President Bush’s foreign policy extend far beyond Blackburn’s Muslim community.

And so, ironically, a visit that was meant to help enhance the bond between Britain and America, may instead have served to highlight the growing differences.

So how do a few protestors — par for the course — extrapolate to “highlight[ing] the growing differences” between the U.S. and U.K. vis-à-vis the Iraq war and foreign policy in general? She offered no poll numbers. And she certainly didn’t explain that, if the UK’s population was anti-Iraq-war, why would Blair’s Labour Party have been reelected? Labour now holds 356 seats in parliament, while the Conservatives (Tories) hold 198.

Blair won an unprecedented third term in office last year, despite the fact that he is President Bush’s closest ally, even though he has stood firm in the war against Islamo-fascism, and regardless of the fact that Britain maintains the second largest contingent of troops in post-war Iraq.

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