According to Die Welt, Venezuela has agreed to allow Iran to establish a military base manned by Iranian missile officers, soldiers of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and Venezuelan missile officers. In addition, Iran has given permission for the missiles to be used in case of an “emergency”. In return, the agreement states that Venezuela can use these facilities for “national needs” – radically increasing the threat to neighbors like Colombia. The German daily claims that according to the agreement, Iranian Shahab 3 (range 1300-1500 km), Scud-B (285-330 km) and Scud-C (300, 500 and 700 km) will be deployed in the proposed base. It says that Iran also pledged to help Venezuela in rocket technology expertise, including intensive training of officers.
“I see no future for recognizable Jews, in particular because of anti-Semitism, specifically in Dutch Moroccans, who continue to grow in number,” Bolkestein reportedly said.
The former politician added that the many Arab television channels in the Netherlands contribute to the spread of anti-Semitism. He said he has no confidence in proposed measures to combat anti-Jewish sentiment.
“The Palestinian-Israeli conflict continues to fester,” Bolkestein said. “I foresee no quick solution, and anti-Semitism will continue to exist. Moroccan and Turkish young people won’t care about the measures.”
Politician Geert Wilders, who visited Israel this week, responded that “Jews shouldn’t emigrate, anti-Semitic Moroccans should.”
It is tragic that Holland, for centuries a bastion of tolerance and accepting of the oppressed from all over (e.g., before the East Anglian Puritans came to New England they had gone to Leyden) has absorbed an intolerant poisonous culture into its body politic. Charles Martel would be appalled. This won’t end well.
Now the Republic’s enemies must be asking themselves: where is the bottom to these people’s incompetence? Can they do anything at all? How safe is it to rush ahead? Why don’t we try?
And if they do, what tools will President Obama have left? Diplomacy? Economic incentives or sanctions? Moral authority? Maybe the military. Yes that’s it. But his competence at war is predicted by his incompetence in peace. One would hope he’d have the sense to stay away from truly dangerous tools and that probably means he doesn’t know better.
What were they thinking, two years ago?
[Update late morning]
Gee, I’m pretty sure that some people pointed this out to Mark Kleiman at the time. Another quote du jour (this one for today):
What’s terrifying is the possibility that he hasn’t thought seriously about the problem: that’s the downside of electing a President without long experience in Washington, or any experience as a manager.
You mean there was a downside to that? But what about the hope? And the change?
Pejman tries to talk sense to Andrew Sullivan. Just the latest example of why I delinked him years ago. And I agree that the word “neocon,” if it ever had any use, does no longer, except as a mindless epithet.
Is there any prominent person or editorial board (outside of the administration) on the left who made a huge stink about Valerie Plame’s outing who is remotely as horrified by the ongoing Wikileaks travesty?
The outrage is indeed selective.
What I want to know is why Wikileaks can’t get its hands on Obama’s college transcripts. Apparently, there are some secrets that the administration can keep.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Michael Ledeen actually kind of likes the leaks. Well, some of them are damaging to the terrorists. And it’s nice to see that the administration and State Department aren’t as utterly clueless in private as they are in public.
OK, that’s long enough. Between this sort of thing and Stuxnet, I’m glad to see that someone is doing something about this. I wish that I had confidence that it was us.
The attacks could be a concerted effort to retard Iran’s nuclear progress, or they could be meant to hype Iran’s own “terror threat” and provide an excuse to crack down on domestic opposition. The only certainty is that the life expectancy of Iranian nuclear physicists is falling rapidly, and is now almost as low as that of Iran’s civil-rights activists, journalists, and public intellectuals.
Given the stated goals of the Iranian nuclear program, I’m hoping that it will go lower.
I’m shocked, shocked to hear that the anti-Israel types got it all wrong.
They had promised that an “even-handed approach” to the Middle East that “put daylight” between the US and Israel would lead to Israeli gestures, at which point Arab regimes would reciprocate. Nothing of the sort came out of the Riyadh meeting. Instead of admitting that they had somehow gotten Saudi priorities or intentions wrong, that crowd doubled down and insisted that the Saudis cared so much about the Palestinians that Obama needed to put even more pressure on Israel to bring around Arab countries.
On the other side you had Middle East experts like Dan Diker, who insisted on One Jerusalem Radio’s Omri Ceren Show that the Saudis gave Obama a bruising lecture on what they actually care about, and it wasn’t the Palestinians. Under this theory King Abdullah expected to talk about militarily confronting Iran, and he couldn’t believe it when Obama kept reciting bromides about the earth-shattering importance of the Israeli/Arab conflict and his enthusiasm for solving it. That was a regular public topic between the two – Obama’s first talk with Abdullah focused on Gaza and the President later emphasized his abiding support for Saudi Arabia’s “Israel Has To Commit Suicide” plan – but the King kind of thought he was dealing with a serious person who could separate spectacle from policy. Instead he got the equivalent of an International Relations graduate student enamored with pseudo-sophisticated “insights” he’d gleaned from Arab media outlets. Ergo, meltdown.
“The main thing was the way he said he hated Americans,” Stull said. “It was serious. He looked me in the eye and had this look in his eye, like it was his determination in life — ‘I hate Americans.'” Now that we have lots of guys named Mo, it probably makes sense to wonder how many of them share this Mo’s “determination in life.”
It’s a question that the multi-cultis don’t like to ask.