The protesters reportedly claimed the series defames the large and powerful Bakhtiari tribe. A Bakhtiari family in the series is depicted as corrupt, nouveau riche and monarchist.
I see no reportage of the video up top on either site, not that I’m looking too hard for that or expect that from a system invested in controlling constituent access to global information.
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If the world’s on fire, we can see it today, but no one can see it all at once. I’ve missed protests in Venezuela, a now ongoing story in major media, and am not inclined to keep up daily with the tragedy dogging the Burmese Rohingya (Malaysia, which accepts members of the Muslim tribe, would do well to attend their defense and retrieval) or the Central African Republic (CAR), where Christian militia have been persecuting Muslims, although that conflict I might well bring on to these virtual pages.
This episode well portrays the different workings of “western” and “eastern” minds. The western mind wants the protests to be about “freedom of speech”; the eastern one, apparently, wants it to be about freedom from insult.
The protesters reportedly claimed the series defames the large and powerful Bakhtiari tribe. A Bakhtiari family in the series is depicted as corrupt, nouveau riche and monarchist.
President Janos Ader and Prime Minister Viktor Orban in separate messages felicitated the anniversary of victory of the Islamic Revolution to President Hassan Rouhani and First Vice-President Eshaq Jahangiri.
In his message, President Ader underlined the efforts of both countries in expansion of bilateral cooperation in all fields, which secure interests of the two countries.
There have been additional references to Hungary in relation to other subjects, e.g., European reparations to the Jewish community, but it’s the drift into nationalism that catches play here and with it movement within the European aligned NATO state to cement relationships with the Islamic Revolution in Iran.
As as happened over the course of Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan’s tenure, drift toward fascism may draw a strong liberal response from the middle and thereby stall a conservative state movement.
Similar dynamics have also surfaced in Kiev — Ukraine protests take center-stage at EU foreign ministers meeting in Brussels | News | DW.DE | 10.02.2014 – which population has found itself in The Bear Trap, i.e., aesthetically, politically, and spiritually aligned with European modernity and its social values but beholden to a state in which the “vertical of power” — the Autocrat — determines the character, position, and values of the state and states it makes its buffer.
Hungarians may express themselves, take to the streets, and throw fits, but Papa Putin with the checkbook and gas tap has sufficient clout for leaving the Ukrainian government to shrug off its liberal critics.
That particular Bear has also aligned itself with Iranian interests — the better to drum up defense and nuclear sales business — and to the extent that it also holds Hungarians in its paws by way of energy supply and sales, it may stalls Hungary’s westward inclinations and, possibly, encourage those who feel comfortable with thuggish mafia-style Putinesque Russian politics.
The effects of the axis — Putin-Assad-Khamenei — made visible by the collapse of Syria, a lingering post-Soviet artifact may be just emergent in the discussion eastern European politics.
If I had budget plus swift graphic arts I would do this with clusters, but a linear verbal illustration might suffice:
Where tanks may once have been dispatched, cash and energy may suffice — and money gets around without conscience.
Additional Reference
Hungary
Viktor Orbán in Moscow: “Putin’s new little kitten”? | Hungarian Spectrum – 2/1/2014: “Moreover, one must keep in mind that for Hungary Russia is a much more important partner than vice versa. In trade relations the Hungarian share of Russian imports is only 2%. On the other hand, Hungary because of its dependence on natural gas and oil is heavily dependent on Russian goodwill.”
Putin $14 Billion Nuclear Deal Wins Orban Alliance – Bloomberg – 1/15/2014: “The deal shows Putin’s ability to use Russia’s control over energy resources to extend his sway beyond the former Soviet Union. Last month, he pledged a $15 billion bailout and a cut in the price of natural gas to Ukraine and promised to lend as much as $2 billion to Belarus.”
From the above cited BBC news link: “Washington’s European envoy Victoria Nuland was heard using an expletive to disparage the EU’s handling of the crisis and revealing Washington’s determination to influence the outcome of the Ukrainian struggle.”
Obama cancels meeting with Putin amid Russia tensions – NBC News.com: “Given our lack of progress on issues such as missile defense and arms control, trade and commercial relations, global security issues, and human rights and civil society in the last twelve months, we have informed the Russian Government that we believe it would be more constructive to postpone the summit until we have more results from our shared agenda,” the White House said.
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The collapse of the Soviet Union left Soviet business and political relationships as well as Soviet style in place: at least as much would seem embodied in the post-KGB, now FSB person of Russian President Putin who has accepted the defeat of Russian communism — or the armored covering of it — but not of Russian empire and the idea of a Russian way of doing things, even if regress to a 19th Century stance with class empowerment through patronage and equal footing with despots similarly endowed becomes the price paid by Russia’s constituency for the privilege of being different, quintessentially Russian, and now as in the Romanov-then, also cut out of the money but restored in pride.
SOCHI, Russia — A Russia in search of global vindication kicked off the Sochi Olympics looking more like a Russia that likes to party, with a pulse-raising opening ceremony about fun and sports instead of terrorism, gay rights and coddling despots.
And that’s just the way Russian President Vladimir Putin wants these Winter Games to be.
According to reports received by “Human Rights Activists for Democracy in Iran”, despite Mr. Boroujerdi’s serious and worrisome health conditions, and instead of transferring him to a hospital, Movahedi, deputy prosecutor to Special Clerical Tribunal went to his cell to harass and psychologically torture Mr. Boroujerdi.
Ayatollah Hossein-Kazamani Boroujerdi, a senior member of the Shiite Muslim clergy, is presently serving the eighth year of an 11-year sentence handed down to him by the Islamic Republic’s courts for advocating the separation of state and religion inside Iran. He has also spoken against political Islam and its leaders.
For the regime, one may imagine, the political prisoner is a thorn set aside and safe from creating further botheration.
For opponents to the regime, the same political prisoner may be treated as a convenient perennial.
It would appear then that Ayatollah Seyed Hossein Kazemeini Boroujerdi has become a reliable fixture as a prisoner of conscience.
As anarchy and civil war grind on in Syria — and the major politicians mouth sock puppet platitudes — Boroujerdi, even in prison for many years, stands signal for the manners and values promoted by Ayatollah Khamenei’s: autocracy, imprisonment, kleptocracy, subjugation.
Earlier this morning, the issue of Iran’s nuclear development programs came up on Facebook with the posting of this piece, which pointed toward disinformation in the U.S. – NATO perception of Ayatollah Khamenei’s kleptotheocracy.
“At present, Iran can best be described as a country determined to preserve for itself the option of acquiring nuclear weapons capability at some future date: to shorten, to the greatest extent possible, the time it will take to build these weapons (and to warn the world) once the decision is made to do so, by developing dispersed, hardened dual-use nuclear fuel cycle capabilities; and to seek shelter from international nonproliferation pressure in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty’s (NPT) promise of access to nuclear technology for peaceful purposes.” 2012 – CFR – http://www.cfr.org/iran/iran-nuclear-challenge/p28330?excerpt=1
As no one pays me anything, lol, I’m definitely not paid enough to sift data on Iran’s nuclear development programs, whether for civilian grid distribution or fast warhead or other weapons system delivery.
It takes time to dig up and dig into intelligence themes (even in what is becoming called “Open Source Intelligence). Try not to be swayed by the latest in claims without evaluating them with other data broadly compiled and at hand.
Deeply controlling and narcissistic personalities suffer from the hubris that they alone may control an entire information environment, and so they may but with gaps and holes streaming in data of greater integrity.
To misinform an enemy’s intelligence gathering apparatus while refusing third-party inspections in an area critical to regional and world peace has its own disingenuous and hideous cast: controlling a lie is not control: in fact, it is opposite as it invites aggression and seeds chaos.
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The former “Evil Empire” will host the Winter Olympics starting Friday. As then, as now: Russia, whether its constituents like it or not, has to keep buried beneath tons of glamour, glitter, ice, and snow the fact that it has supported an incredibly brutal dictatorship in Syria and just a step beyond it the same Ayatollah that has kept in prison and tortured another senior cleric for advocating what Russians prefer: a secular society separating church from state.
Russians online, I am certain, read the news too and doubtless follow the Syrian Civil War and its many themes, including the anachronistic Shiite-Sunni rivalry that energizes a certain portion of humanity while enriching beyond wildest dreams the dictators who profit on mass murder and suffering, albeit, lucky for them today, as sponsors of war of benefit to themselves.
Addendum
In addition to the routine imprisonment and torture of a political rival, the kindly-looking Ayatollah Khamenei via his client against the west Bashar al-Assad also supports (whether he knows it or not — but then how could he not know it?) this kind of behavior: UN quietly documents Syria’s war against children | The World – Financial Times blog – 2/5/2014.
What Russians are doing aligned with the Assad and Khamenei regimes today, I leave to Russians to answer for themselves.
The US government is concerned about al Qaeda gaining strength in Iraq. Now, Washington is sending missiles and drones to help Baghdad in the fight against the terror organization.
Two smugglers were transporting C4 explosives, TNT, armor-piercing explosives, mobile phones and circuit boards, among other supplies, into Bahrain. The boat was als0 carrying “50 Iranian-made hand bombs” and almost 300 commercial detonators stamped “Made in Syria,” Al Hassan said.
Security sources say that the porous border region around Ersal is used to smuggle Syrian weapons and fighters involved in the country’s bloody civil war. It was unclear if the Syrians injured in Wednesday’s attack were fighters or civilians.
Turkish security forces have seized a truck laden with weapons bound for Syria and arrested three people including a Syrian, local media reported on Thursday.
The missiles being moved include long-range Scud D missiles that can strike deep into Israel, short-range Scud C’s, medium-range Iranian Fateh rockets, Iranian Fajr rockets and anti-aircraft weapons that are fired from the shoulder.
Ships waiting to remove Syria’s chemical weapons have returned to port in Cyprus because the country has missed a December 31 deadline.
Syria was supposed to have removed part of its chemical weapons arsenal for destruction on Tuesday, but Wael Nader Al Halqi, Syria’s prime minister, said security concerns and bureaucracy had caused delays in transporting the weapons to the Syrian port of Latakia.
Perhaps the conflict in Syria and whatever’s brewing in Iraq will expand in proportion to the volume of contested and loose weapons “in play” across the multi-state theater.
The powers that be would seem to be contesting their grip on conventional weapons and the reality of their control over WMDs.
“The loss of this military equipment is what pulled the plug on the U.S. operation,” one source with direct knowledge of the events told Fox News. “No one at the State Department wanted to deal with the situation if any more went wrong, so State pulled its support for the training program and then began to try and get the team moved out of the country.”
“I know where those weapons are coming from. They are the weapons left over from the Bosnian war. They are being shipped out in large measure through Croatian ports and airports and I can tell you they are making vast sums for corrupt forces in the Balkans.”
Saudi Arabia has pledged $3bn for the Lebanese army, Lebanese President Michel Suleiman announced, calling it the largest grant ever given to the country’s armed forces.
The pledge comes just as Lebanon held a funeral for Mohamad Chatah, the former finance minister, amid rising tensions over who might have killed him.
The increasingly familiar scene of shattered glass and twisted metal left little doubt that Lebanon’s slide toward conflict is accelerating as the country becomes embroiled in the broader sectarian rivalries threatening to engulf the region.
One starts to wonder if its the weapons that have the soul and humans in their vicinity have become the machinery that enables them to express themselves before growing old, unstable, and feeble with corrosion.
It’s an odd grim poetic thought, but the reality oddly supports it: whether involving the Saudi treasury or an al-Nusra ruse, the middle east, with Syria as a hub burning and smoldering with war through the winter, is today crawling with weapons, and some that were watched have disappeared and, probably, are moving to fulfill their purpose.
Addendum
The upheaval also affirmed the soaring capabilities of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the rebranded version of the al-Qaeda in Iraq organization that formed a decade ago to confront U.S. troops and expanded into Syria last year while also escalating its activities in Iraq.
The event in the year 1358 was a counterattack. Our courageous and religious youth attacked the U.S. embassy and discovered the truth and identity of this embassy, which was the Den of Espionage, and presented this fact to people throughout the world.
In those days, our youth called the U.S. embassy the “Den of Espionage”. Today, after the passage of 30-plus years since that day, the name of U.S. embassies in countries which have the closest relationship with America – that is to say, European countries – has become the den of espionage. This means that our youth are 30 years ahead of the rest of the world. This event was related to America as well. These three events were related, in different ways, to the government of the United States of America and its relations with Iran. Therefore, the 13th of Aban – which is tomorrow – was named “Day of Fighting Against Arrogance”.
This same regime supplies its terrorist proxies, Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, with thousands of rockets, rockets that are aimed at Israeli civilians, rockets that are precision-guided munitions that are increasingly lethal and deadly. This is a regime committed to our destruction. And I believe there must be an unequivocal demand alongside the negotiations in Geneva for a change in Iranian policy. This must be part and parcel of the negotiations. In other words, I’m saying that what is required is not merely a shift and a diminution of Iran’s capability and elimination of its capability to produce nuclear weapons, but also a demand to change its genocidal policy. That is the minimal thing that the international community must do when it’s negotiating with Iran.
The Jews and all who would travel with them have been defying the “malignant narcissist” from the first pages.
Even before Exodus, God himself in Genesis arranges for Eve to partake of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, share it with Adam, and become the two of them — this I regard as the most important part — aware, self-aware, and possessed of conscience.
Whatever animals may be left to do, the First Couple have ascended from that base existence, covered and signaled consideration for the other, and been prepared — read carefully: God himself sews the first protective clothing — to live like human beings.
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In contemporary political life there seem to be a thousand pharaohs holding captive and suffocating millions of souls. In their own heads, the lives of others pale before their own, and the control of others in the cause of their own adoration takes precedence over every other consideration.
In the next breath, however, the ayatollah spoke harshly of France’s stand with the United States in opposition of much of the nuclear deal being forged in Geneva, vowing that Iran would “slap aggressors in the face in such a way they will never forget it,” Ynet News reported.
The militia members, in response, chanted “Death to America.”
“Iran’s policy of constructive interaction with the world states has forced the world to see the realities of Iran’s capabilities,” Rouhani said during a meeting with Bushehr’s MPs on Monday.
“You see that those powers which were thinking of destroying Iran’s enrichment capability, have now admitted that they cannot stop Iran’s industrial progress and enrichment due to the indigenization of this industry and its expansion,” he added.
“In our region there’s been a wound for years on the body of the Muslim world under the shadow of the occupation of the holy land of Palestine and the beloved al-Quds (Jerusalem),” Rouhani said, according to a translation by the Reuters news agency.
The earlier quote, which came from ISNA, was most notable for its inclusion of the call for the “wound” to be “removed”:
“The Zionist regime has been a wound on the body of the Islamic world for years and the wound should be removed,” ISNA quoted Rouhani as saying.
In the Iranian regime’s relationship with the greater world, the encouragement of trust by way of sweet words would seem matched by an idée fixe — Islamic succession, perhaps — accompanied by a reputation for treachery.
As with others of similar mien, what the public knows and is told leaves the swallowing black shadow of things less divulged or not divulged at all.
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Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei controls a business empire worth around $95 billion (£59 billion) – a sum exceeding the value of his oil-rich nation’s current annual petroleum exports, a six-month Reuters investigation shows.
The little-known organization, called Setad, is one of the keys to the Iranian leader’s enduring power and now holds stakes in nearly every sector of Iranian industry, including finance, oil, telecommunications, the production of birth-control pills and even ostrich farming.
The 82-year-old Iranian woman keeps the documents that upended her life in an old suitcase near her bed. She removes them carefully and peers at the tiny Persian script.
There’s the court order authorizing the takeover of her children’s three Tehran apartments in a multi-story building the family had owned for years. There’s the letter announcing the sale of one of the units. And there’s the notice demanding she pay rent on her own apartment on the top floor
There is an old saw regarding the mentality of the power behind a medieval narrative: “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law!”
The malignant create laws to exclude, persecute, and thieve from others, and oh my the things that may be taken from any person subject to a monster: family, identity, labor, property, reputation, and wealth.
And life.
If Ayatollah Khamenei’s ambition and methods as an empire builder seem grandiose and rife with injustice to outsiders, there is nothing delusional about them: what you have read, what you have seen, what you have heard in relation to the aims of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, all of that is true as well.
London: Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper has published satellite images that it says prove Iran is developing a second path to a nuclear weapons capability by operating a plant that could produce plutonium.
The images – commissioned by the Telegraph and taken as recently as February 9 – show steam rising at the heavily-guarded Arak heavy water production plant, about 240 kilometres south-west of the capital Tehran. International inspectors have been barred from the plant since August 2011.
Iran’s Mullahs, with the aid of the beguiled illiterate and religiously fanatic masses, strengthened their stranglehold as they blamed others for their incompetence and larcenous nature for the people’s intractable problems. The ever-machinating Mullahs had to find a scapegoat, preferably many scapegoats, to blame. True to form they turned and bit the hand that helped bring them to power — the United States. For good measure, the Mullahs included Israel. Jews have always been good scapegoats for Islamists, going back to the time of Muhammad in Medina. The prophet of Allah, as soon as he gathered enough power, found it expedient to plunder the Jews’ properties, kill the men and take the women and children as slaves to exploit or sell.
Iran, once OPEC’s second-largest producer, is talking with European companies about future projects, Bijan Namdar Zanganeh told reporters today in Vienna. The minister said he hopes Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM:US), Royal Dutch Shell (RDSA) Plc, BP (BP/) Plc, Eni SpA and Statoil ASA (STL) will invest in the country. Iranian officials will meet with international companies in London in March, he said, declining to identify them.
The Islamic republic agreed last month to restrict work on its nuclear program for six months in return for a loosening of sanctions that offers about $7 billion in relief and access to $4.2 billion in oil revenue frozen in foreign banks.
Hezbollah plots in Europe over the past year exposed a return to violent operations being conducted by the Iranian-supported Lebanese Shiite group. Plots in Bulgaria and Cyprus led to a rigorous debate among European Union member states over whether or not to ban the organization’s military wing. But this only marks Hezbollah’s return to violent operations in Europe. Hezbollah has long used Europe as a staging ground for operations to be carried out elsewhere, as a logistical hub, and as a place where the group and its supporters could raise funds through a variety of criminal enterprises. The focus of this article is the wide variety of criminal activities Hezbollah engages in, revealing a global network that conducts extensive criminal operations throughout Europe.
Thirty years ago last month, Hezbollah blew up the barracks of the U.S Marines and French paratroopers stationed at the Beirut airport, killing 241 U.S. servicemen and 58 Frenchmen. It wasn’t Hezbollah’s first terrorist operation, but this attack, the most memorable in Lebanon’s vicious and chaotic 15-year-long civil war, marked the Party of God’s entry onto the world stage.
Sometimes, as in Panama, there are only intimations or incomplete reports. One sources suggests everybody knows Hezbollah has been laundering money through banks in Panama City — and there the piece stops.
Back up to the bombing of a Panamanian airliner in the 1990s and that too concludes shrouded in mystery.
On the more logical positive side, arms caches and interrupted shipments tell stories too, although, as with the findings of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, not much happens beyond some validation of knowing what was once merely suspected — or knowing with a higher level of probability.
In the wild, however contemptible and heinous the crime, whatever its depth in inhumanity, nothing need happen to perpetrator who may be remote, who may disappear, who may enjoy social sanctuary among good friends, or the sanctuary of altered identities and reduced public appearances, or who may sufficiently corrupt or threaten officials and others — whatever works — and get away with operations shuttered by arrests or surreptitious and ongoing.
As most, possibly all, unfunded mini-projects around here, the following affords but a glance at what the web has on Hezbollah in relation to whatever country comes to mind.
Nowhere is the new reality of the West African organized crime-terrorism nexus more evident than in what recently transpired in a Nigerian courtroom. There, three Lebanese men, Mustapha Fawaz, Abdallah Thahini, and Talal Ahmad Roda sat uncomfortably in the dock as masked members of the Department of State Services, the country’s primary domestic intelligence service, testified against them. The three were accused of plotting terrorist attacks against American and Israeli targets in the northern city of Kano, as well as lesser charges of money laundering and illegal importation of goods. Nigerian police found a significant cache of weapons stashed at one of the accused men’s businesses in the capital Abuja and another cache at a private home in Kano. Although the men, all of whom have long standing commercial interests in Nigeria, pleaded innocent to the charges, they confessed to their affiliation with Hezbollah.
Meanwhile, reports in 2009 and 2010 from French, Japanese, South Korean, and Israeli sources described North Korean programs to provide arms and training to Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, two groups on the U.S. list of international terrorist organizations. Large quantities of North Korean arms bound for Iran, intercepted in 2009, contained weapons that Iran supplies heavily to Hezbollah and Hamas. Moreover, a large body of reports describe a long-standing, collaborative relationship between North Korea and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Prosecutors said Bouterse agreed to accept a multimillion-dollar payoff in exchange for allowing large numbers of Hezbollah fighters to use Suriname as a base for attacking American targets.
The indictment describes a sophisticated international sting in which Bouterse was recorded meeting in Greece and Panama with people posing as Hezbollah agents and Mexican drug traffickers. In reality, they were actually confidential sources and undercover agents with the US Drug Enforcement Administration, the indictment said.
Beyond the rhetoric lies a strategic alliance that has seen Caracas, along with Damascus and Havana, vote against United Nations sanctions on Iran over its nuclear program, and increasing Iranian investment in the Venezuelan economy, now worth more than $5 billion.
He doesn’t believe that Asad will give up his chemical weapons, and he will do any sort of trick in order to conceal them and hide what he has in his stockpiles of death. The Russians have won a big victory over the United States, and they are taking advantage of Europe’s lack of will to use force. And in general, what is all this business about giving up chemical weapons? Can a murderer’s punishment be mitigated by confiscating the pistol that he used to commit murder? What kind of ethical or legal standard is that? Why don’t they even issue an international arrest warrant against al-Assad to bring him to justice in the International Criminal Court? How is he different from Omar al-Bashir of Sudan and Milosevic of Yugoslavia?
I’ve added the citation to the previous post, but for those involved with strategic analysis in the middle east, it’s worth a careful reading.
My line has been consistent: Russia by way of Putin needs to clean up its Syrian client’s act, and it cannot do that today with deceits, RT cameras, and massive state-controlled media: it needs to become an authentic force, even if or especially if authoritarian and reactionary, for peace and social justice in Syria. The political cynicism brought to the brutal Assad regime’s state of affairs has steeped in blood and misery long enough for Russian foreign policy to either pivot about or become the familiar old criminal and domestically, internally much loathed state.
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