THERE IS NO SUCH COUNTRY AS IRAN
At a meeting of the Nonaligned Movement in the Malaysian city of Putrajaya this week, Iran's Foreign Minister Manoucher Mottaki announced to reporters that "there is no such country" as Israel.
Since Israel does indeed exist, Mottaki means that Iran doesn't diplomatically "recognize" Israel's existence, that Iran wants to extinguish the political existence of Israel, that Israel's current existence is accidental, an illusion that will be swept away by the total triumph of Islam in the Middle East.
Israel Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni should now feel free to announce that there is no such country as Iran. Its existence as an intact nation-state is make-believe. Its existence is as ephemeral as the Soviet Union's or Yugoslavia's, and is soon to break apart as did they.
Last week in Iran Unraveling? you learned about the protest demonstrations by Turkish-speaking ethnic Azeris (who make up over 1/3 of Iran's population) over a cartoon in a government newspaper depicting Azeris as cockroaches. The demos grew this week and are getting violent.
BUGGED BY WEB BUGS
I signed up several months ago for a service which gave me free delivery on some products (value $10), knowing I would get a weekly e-mail from the business.
I never got around to reading those weekly messages, and they began to pile up in my e-mail box. After a few months, I got a message from the company with this title: "Dennis - Are you missing out on a good thing?"
No, sir or ma'am, I am not - or at least I didn't plan to. I opened the message and read the following: "Dear Dennis: We've noticed that you haven't been opening our weekly emails. We don't want to impose, so we've decided to stop sending them to you."
Huh? This was unbelievable! Not that they were considerate enough to stop spamming me (although that is pretty unbelievable in itself!); it was the first sentence that threw me.
How, pray tell, would they know whether or not I opened their message? How could they?
Through the use of "Web bugs," that's how.IRAN UNRAVELING?
Things have not been going well for Ahmadinejad the Persian Midget and his sour band of terrorist mullahs this week. This is thanks to Porter Goss giving Michael Hayden a lesson in how to run psy-ops at the CIA before his departure tomorrow (Friday, 5/26).
Take the riots in Tabriz and other Azeri-populated cities in northwest Iran. On May 23, a government newspaper in Tehran published a cartoon depicting an Azeri-speaking cockroach. Oops.
That very day, Azeri demonstrators marched on government offices in Tabriz, riots broke out in a number of Azeri towns, the Tabriz main bazaar was shut down with shopkeepers joining the demonstrators, who had to be dispersed with teargas.
The irony of the mullahs having cartoon riots directed at them is just too delicious. I wonder how such a cartoon slipped into a government newspaper? "No comment" from Porter.
HOW DIFFERENT IS AMERICAN EDUCATION FROM COMMUNISM?
When I went to college I had my biggest problem with the discipline of history. It may have started when I was a kid in Hungary and first ran up against official "scholars" who rewrote Hungary's history-renamed the streets in Budapest, rewrote all the textbooks, and reshuffled the holidays, and even completely recast Western intellectual history.
Under Marxism there was room for just one account of the development of philosophy, namely, what Karl Marx and his epigones wrote.
At first I thought that in a relatively free society historians could be trusted a lot more than under Marxism. But I am not so sure about this now.
To begin with, the one major institution of American society that's very similar to what it had been under communism is education.CONGRESS: OUT OF TOUCH AND ABOVE THE LAW
A rare bipartisan unity was achieved in the House of Representatives this week. What was it that brought lawmakers together? A determination to win the war on terror? A plan to secure our borders? A compromise to save Social Security from bankruptcy?
Nah. Democratic and Republican leaders in the House joined together to protest the search the FBI made last weekend of the offices of Rep. William Jefferson (D-La), who is under investigation for allegedly accepting a bribe from a Kentucky businessman.
Partisan differences are set aside when (and apparently only when) the privileges of lawmakers are threatened.
One would imagine that in the wake of the Duke Cunningham and Jack Abramoff scandals, the GOP would be grateful for the attention devoted to Mr. Jefferson, because his case, and that of Rep. Alan Mollohan (D-WVa), make Democratic denunciations of the "Republican culture of corruption" seem a case of the pot calling the kettle black.
But one would be wrong.SENATE SHAMNESTY
Right now, the Senate is desperately trying to convince the American people that their immigration bill is something else - anything else - than what it is: a massive amnesty for all 15 million to 20 million illegal aliens without any meaningful enforcement provisions.
The same open-borders crowd that has betrayed the American middle class for years is hoping to fool us again.
This "shamnesty" bill spells out the level of contempt the Senate has for middle-class Americans. This "comprehensive" bill includes:A RATIONAL FRENCHMAN LOOKS AT THE WORLD
No snide comments how "rational Frenchman" is an oxymoron. There are plenty of them, albeit not enough. I had lunch with one of them here in DC yesterday. He's Pierre Lellouche, who represents Paris (4th district) in the National Assembly (France's Parliament) and is President of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly.
If you had been there with me, you'd have come away wishing he were Bush's National Security Advisor for Europe. Even better, though, is that after Nicolas Sarkozy is elected President of France next April (see Sarko vs. Eurabia, January 2005), M. Lellouche may be France's Defense Minister.
So if you had joined me for lunch, here's how you would have heard him describe France and the world.
A BOUNTY ON COYOTES
If you Google "coyote hunting," you'll get 2,790,000 hits. It's a popular sport among outdoorsmen, and a necessary one. As one hunter puts it:
Coyote populations across the country are exploding and taking an unprecedented toll on wildlife. Zero predator control by state and federal agencies and low fur prices have kept trapping to a minimum, hence predator populations are booming. The opportunity to add some prime coyote pelts to your trophy collection and reduce the predator pressure on the local game and bird populations have never been better.
Coyotes are pests, varmints, hated not only by cattle and sheep ranchers, but by anyone with a regard for all the wildlife they kill. In many states, they can be shot on sight with no permit required in a year-round open season. Ed Boggess, Minnesota's Department of Natural Resources fish and wildlife policy chief explains:
Coyotes are an unprotected species and can be taken at any time of year, in any quantity, by almost any methods.
It's time this perspective is applied to human coyotes - for "coyote" is what smugglers of illegal aliens from Mexico into the US are called.
THE WORST SENATE OF MODERN TIMES
Get a few conservative Congressmen together over a few beers and a favorite conversational topic will be, Who's the worst president in modern memory?
No, it's not George Bush. But a number of them can make out a good case that it's his father.
Worse even than Jimmy Carter? will come the astounded response. Yes, they say. Carter inherited a lousy economy and the Soviets on the imperial march. He was a disaster because the little wimp made a bad situation so much worse.
Bush the Elder, on the other hand, inherited a revitalized America, a surging economy, and a collapsing Soviet Union. He did everything to reverse all three. Then he rescued Red China.
Yet you won't get a debate out of them as to the worst Senate of modern times. No question about it: this one, with fellow Republicans in charge.
THE ROOT CAUSE OF THE IMMIGRATION CRISIS
We're going to get deep and serious here, and I'm going to ask you to reflect on a number of previous articles. We're not going to fulminate against George Bush, illegal immigrant-hiring businesses and the whores in the Senate they pay off, Democrats who see every illegal alien as a potential welfare recipient who will vote for them, or even Reconquista Mexicans attempting to recapture the American Southwest.
No, we're going to get to the heart of the matter and figure out the fundamental cause of the problem. The problem that lies at the heart not just of the immigration crisis, but of so much else, from the destruction of American education and culture to the war with Islamic terrorism.
Let's begin with an experience I had in a small country restaurant in France.