Thursday, April 23, 2009

Invitation to Appease

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/21/AR2009042103515.html

Will the Obama administration talk to Iran while it persecutes Americans and libels Israel?

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

LAST WEEK, the Iranian regime brought American journalist Roxana Saberi before a closed court and in a one-hour trial convicted her of espionage -- a blatantly bogus charge. She was sentenced to eight years in prison. On Monday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was last seen inaugurating a new facility for Iran's nuclear program, appeared at the U.N. conference on racism in Geneva to deliver a speech seemingly calculated to cause maximum outrage in the United States and other Western countries. They had, he said, "resorted to military aggression" in order to create Israel "on the pretext of Jewish sufferings and the ambiguous and dubious question of the Holocaust." Thus has Iran answered President Obama's offer of dialogue and the decision by his administration to join talks on Tehran's nuclear program. To the consternation of some European officials, Washington has insisted on dropping a long-standing demand that Iran obey U.N. resolutions ordering it to suspend uranium enrichment before negotiations begin. Iran could have responded to this concession by releasing Ms. Saberi, who holds U.S. and Iranian citizenship, and ex-FBI agent Robert Levinson, as the administration asked it to do in a State Department letter last month. Instead the charges against Ms. Saberi were ramped up, from practicing journalism without a credential and buying wine, to espionage; the regime does not even admit that it is holding Mr. Levinson.

Then came Mr. Ahmadinejad's speech, which repeated the numerous anti-Israel and anti-Semitic libels that have made the Iranian president a pariah in the West. Western delegates walked out on the address, which the State Department rightly called "vile and hateful." Yet Mr. Ahmadinejad had accomplished his aim: advancing Iran's claim to represent radical Arab and Islamic opinion, along with his own campaign for reelection in June.

Iran watchers point out that Mr. Ahmadinejad has sent other messages recently. He said he would welcome direct talks with Washington, and over the weekend he dispatched a letter to Ms. Saberi's prosecutor urging that she be allowed to defend herself. These are not necessarily contradictions. What Iran is doing is inviting Mr. Obama to humiliate his new administration by launching talks with the regime even while it is conspicuously expanding its nuclear program, campaigning to delegitimize and destroy Israel and imprisoning innocent Americans. Mr. Ahmadinejad's unlikely concern for Ms. Saberi's defense, along with other regime statements suggesting her sentence could be reduced, sound like an offer to make her a bargaining chip -- to be exchanged, perhaps, for members of the Revolutionary Guard Corps who are in U.S. custody in Iraq.

Mr. Obama has always said that talks with Iran must be conducted under the right circumstances and in a way that advances U.S. interests. The administration won't meet that test if it allows negotiations to become a means of vindicating Mr. Ahmadinejad's radical agenda. It should postpone any contact until after the Iranian election in June -- and it should look for clear signs that Iran is acting in good faith before talks begin. The unconditional release of Ms. Saberi and Mr. Levinson would be one.

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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article5977339.ece

From The Times
March 26, 2009
West turns blind eye to friend it dare not offend
Catherine Philp, Diplomatic Correspondent

Shortly before noon on September 12, 2001, a visitor stopped by the palace, looking for Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdel Aziz al-Saud, the Crown Prince. The man who now sits on the throne of Saudi Arabia was kneeling in shock and prayer.

He had prayed there all night and had received news from Washington, but could still not believe that the hijackers who crashed their planes into New York and Washington were his countrymen.

That experience is credited widely as part of the impetus behind King Abdullah’s attempts to reform his reactionary kingdom. But Saudi Arabia remains as he did that night – in deep denial. However, it is also a rich and powerful country on which the West depends heavily for oil, and those who do business with it have learnt better than to risk puncturing its self-deluding bubble.

Terrorism remains its most sensitive point. Since September 11 Saudi Arabia has declared itself at the forefront of the fight against terrorism, cracking down on home-grown militants, inviting Western journalists to film its antiterrorist forces in training and launching a much vaunted project to rehabilitate violent Islamists. It also sought to remake its international image as a factory of extremism with the sponsorship of an interfaith conference in New York.

But Saudi billions fund the promotion of extreme forms of Islam around the world. Saudi is the home of Wahhabism, the austere interpretation of Islam that it has pioneered and the faith espoused by Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda followers.

An estimated $90 billion (£62 billion) of Saudi money has gone to build mosques and madrassas, distribute religious literature and fund Islam across the world, with a portion of it, according to terrorism experts, directly or indirectly funding the violent expression of those beliefs.

Jonathan Evans, the director-general of M15, told the Government last year that the Saudi Government’s multimillion-dollar donations to British universities had led to a “dangerous increase in the spread of extremism in leading university campuses”.

Official slights like these are rare. Saudi Arabia, in the words of a former diplomat there, “gets away with things other countries could not” because of the West’s dependence on it – for oil, for arms contracts, for intelligence, for military bases and for being a firm friend in an often unfriendly neighbourhood.
Thanks A7 news

Comments by Aggie:Obama repeatedly reaches out to Iran, only go be rebuffed and have his hand slapped, if not his face with punishing and diplomatically humiliated actions. When will he realize that he is getting nowhere? Will it be when Iran has finally developed the nuclear bomb?

We ignore, appease, and smile at the Saudis because we are dependent on them for oil and other niceties. They use this dependence to spread the vile form of Wahhabism in the US, UK and worldwide, teaching hatred, particularly of Jews. The most dangerous aspect of this is the mind molding of the student body at universities by donating millions and millions of dollars to fund Islamic teachings, er studies.

The UK is beginning to wake up. When will the US?

Aggie

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