The AP is reporting that the U.S. delegation stayed seated while Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad waxed philosophical about the historical accuracy of the Holocaust and the illegitimacy of the “Zionist regime” yesterday, even as Israel’s ambassador to the UN walked out in protest. I don’t see Susan Rice on the Fox News video, but at least three U.S. officials remained in their chairs (one of whom seemed to be diligently taking notes).
A UN walkout can be an important symbol of rejection when done effectively, but the fact that Israel left alone, while the U.S. stayed to listen to Ahmadinejad’s eliminationist musings, sent another message. Taken with Obama’s refusal to meet with Netanyahu, and the recent dismissal of Israeli “noise,” there’s a growing sense that the administration is distancing itself from Israel because it wants nothing to do with a potential attack on Iran:
Iran’s president called Israel a nuclear-armed “fake regime” shielded by the United States, prompting Israel’s U.N. ambassador to walk out of a high-level U.N. meeting Monday promoting the rule of law.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad also accused the U.S. and others of misusing freedom of speech and failing to speak out against the defamation of people’s beliefs and “divine prophets,” an apparent reference to the recently circulated amateur video made in the U.S. which attacks Islam and denigrates the Prophet Muhammad. ….
The U.S. delegation did not walk out of Monday’s meeting, as it has in the past when Iran attacked Israel directly.
Ahmadinejad did not name either Israel or the U.S. in his speech but his targets were clear when he said: “We have witnessed that some members of the Security Council with veto right have chosen silence with regard to the nuclear warheads of a fake regime while at the same time they impede scientific progress of other nations.”
This paragraph (via Breitbart) is also a clear allusion to Iran’s Holocaust denial conferences:
[Ahmadinejad] also bore down on those who have revolted at Holocaust revisionism. He did this by calling attention to those who “infringe upon other’s freedom and allow sacrilege to people’s beliefs and sanctities, while they criticize posing questions or investigating into historical issues.”
Keep in mind that yesterday’s speech was just a warmup for Ahmadinejad — he’s set to give his big UN address on Yom Kippur tomorrow. Unless he somehow manages to steal another term (not permitted under the Iranian constitution), this is his last hurrah at Turtle Bay. So we can expect plenty of insanity on Wednesday.
At the Washington Times, Kerry Picket flags a USA Today report that President Obama’s UN speech today will denounce, yet again, the anti-Islam film the administration has repeatedly blamed for provoking riots across the Middle East. The Obama administration gave a perfunctory condemnation of Ahmadinejad’s speech yesterday, but the big question is, will Obama’s speech address Ahmadinejad’s anti-Semitic vitriol, as well?
No one from the US should have been present when that ass–le was ranting. It's a huge embarrassment. nI'm for war with Iran after they strike first,just like Japan. If we strike first,we're the bad guys.
Are you willing to let their first strike be nuclear?
Sure he is, as long as it is at Israel.
rexford2446 — nDo you have any idea how many Japanese lives would have been saved had the US and England been willing to enforce the arms restrictions against Japan (and Germany) that were intended to keep the peace after WW-1? n nDo you have any idea how many Japanese lives would have been saved HAD we struck first? On a like note, do you have any idea how many *JAPANESE* lives were saved because we nuke Hiroshima & Nagasaki? n nForget the projections of American dead and wounded, and those numbers were staggering, we would have had to kill every Japanese male over the age of 12, maybe over the age of 10. They truly intended to fight "to the last man" and we would have had to kill them all. n nThe mistake Obama made was not supporting an Iranian revolution. I would not prefer to see a lot of Iranians killed — particularly since they want no part of this in the first place. n n
The answer to the big question (posed in the last sentence of your article) should be YES. Obama should demonstrate righteous indignation on behalf of every decent, civil, considerate individual who has any sense of compassion and respect for the only people on earth to have suffered the murder of six million of its brethren simply because of their ethnic and religious heritage. Obama should directly mention the anti-semitic hatred that emanates from the insecure, envious Iranian government, and he should denounce, with all the power and brilliance of his oratorical power, the stupidity and idiocy of the moronic Iranian government. n nBut Obama will not say anything critical of any muslim. And Jews, well, if the world allowed six million of us to be murdered only a few decades ago, then the world, including Obama, will not be overly stressed if another six million are murdered in Israel by the hand of Iran and its moslem allies. n nWe Jews must not expect support from anyone else – we must learn from history. As history is our teacher, we must note that Obama will not help us. We are alone in a world that does not like us.
Sad but true. n nEvery fiber of Obama's being is unfavorably disposed to the Jews and their concerns. n nHe is more Jeremiah Wright and Louis Farrakhan than Abraham Lincoln – narcissistic sociopath that he is.
I can only concur with all of your comments.The most alarming news today is in an op-ed article by MIchael Mukasey (Bush Attorney-general) in the Wall Street general. He writes that the disturbing signs are that Obama is considering releasing the blind sheik-mastermind of many terrorist atrocities. if this ever happens, we will know that those who insist that Obama is really a moslem were indeed right.
"we will know that those who insist that Obama is really a moslem were indeed right. " nNo, we won't. It's just as likely that he is a clueless appeaser and a leftist ideologue. The nitwits who infest ANSWER, Code Pink, ISM and all the BDS groups are not Muslim either.
michaelmas12 — if Obama actually releases the blind sheik — and I am not sure if the POTUS even has the legal authority to commute/pardon one convicted of a *state* crime, and even if he was only prosecuted for the Federal offenses involved, conspiring to do something like this also inevitably broke a whole bunch of New York State laws. The statute of limitations may have run out on some, but memory is that three people died and even if they were the perps (one might not have been) it still is a conspiracy resulting in death and I don't think there is any statute of limitation on that. (Alana, you gotta check on both this and POTUS authority to pardon for *state* offenses — my gut feeling is that the Principles of Federalism (and the 11th Amd) preclude this.) n nRemember that the 11th Amendment was passed because the states considered themselves sovereign in their own internal affairs — and the emphasis towards Federal court in the civil rights era was that the states *weren't* convicting/punishing people for stuff like bombing (Birmingham), murder and whatnot. If the NY Gov wanted to fight his release, if NY either had convicted or intended to try the sheik for NY law violations, this would be the same as when Mexico wanted to stop Texas from executing the illegal alien/Mexican citizen and notwithstanding what the Obama Admin wanted, Texas executed him.
Michaelmas12 — lets say Obama did actually pry the blind sheik and sent him home. nOf course he does this after the election — either as a lame duck or as the re-elected POTUS. n nFirst, it is grounds for impeachment. Impeachment is a political process, look not to Nixon or Clinton but Andrew Johnson and what he was impeached for. It starts in the house where everyone is up for re-election in 2014, terrorism is a greater threat to urban/BLUE areas, and Obama can't run again in 2016 — why would a Dem stake his/her/its career on him? n nSecond – and this is the part that terrifies me most in all of this — you will see a lot of terrorism suspect dying "resisting arrest" and a lot of folks making bombs that "accidentally" detonate the bombs they are making and wind up blowing themselves up. There is always the very real risk of vigilantees and the very real risk that if the LEOs stop having faith that the terrorists they arrest will go to jail and stay there, they simply will decide to kill them on the spot for what they perceive to be the greater good of the country. n nThis is how the KKK started — after the Civil War, for a variety of reasons, there were a lot of (white) Southern women being raped and no lawful authority (i.e. Occupying Federal Troops) did anything to prevent this — in fact, its drunken soldiers were some of the perpetrators. And anyone who had fought for the Confederacy couldn't even vote let alone hold public office (i.e. Sheriff) and these men saw their wives, daughters and other women they cared about being raped and nothing being done about it. n nFormer Confederate Colonel Nathan Bedford Forrest and others formed a group to punish rapists — rape was a capitol offense back then and they simply executed known rapists without benefit of trial or due process — vigilanteeism. That is where the Klan came from — and while Forrest eventually realized the evil entity he had created and tried (unsuccessfully) to shut it down, that is where it started. n nThe "Regulator" movement in San Francisco prior to the Civil War is another example and reflecting on this gives one a deeper understanding of (and appreciation for) Robert's Rules of Order — he was dealing with that society. And let us not forget the rather unpleasant side of the American Revolution — the "Committees of Public Safety" and "Lynch's Law" (and "Lynching"). n nThings could get rather nasty….cops do make mistakes sometimes, occasionally some of the folks on trial for stuff are actually innocent….
ztrakyga — n nFacts do matter and I need to state two things which may not be popular but which are true. n nFirst, remember that there were no satellites in the 1940s, it was copper wires that left Ireland and came ashore in Canada — back then, both part of Great Britain — and during WW-1, it had *only* been the TransAtlantic cable(s) because radio was in its infancy and not viable yet. nThe British used their control of the cable to promote propaganda, the example I remember was the repeated stories of "pitchforked babies" — that the German war atrocities included the wholesale murder of British babies with pitchforks. n nAfter the war, it became widely known that none of these stories had been true and that the British had used propaganda to help get the US into the war on their side. n nThere were real issues with the _Luisitania_ and particularly the "cheese" and "butter" and every bit of evidence we now have, including (a) diver reports that the ship's hull is bent *outward* as from an internal explosion, (b) some of Churchill's papers, and (c) the German sub commander's sheer astonishment of the explosion from just one of his torpedoes because he had never seen anything like this happen before (remember this was WW-I and German torpedoes weren't what they became in WW-II) — every bit of this evidence indicates that the torpedo (which might have caused a leak but wouldn't have sunk the _Luisatania_) touched off this suspicious cargo, some sort of ordinance, and *that* is what sunk her. n nHence when the initial reports of Holocaust atrocities started coming out of Europe, it was the classic case of "the boy who cried wolf." No one believed them because there had been so much propaganda 20 years earlier. Yes, there was antisemitism, and I include FDR amongst the antisemites and notwithstanding his strategic political decisions to appoint specific Jewish individuals to various posts, any objective review of FDR, including his telling said appointees that "they were guests in a Christian country" makes it fairly clear where he was coming from. n nAnd yes, the intellectual basis of the Holocaust started here IN AMERICA with the Eugenics movement and Margaret Sanger (of Planned Parenthood) and remember that the Holocaust extended beyond just Jews — it started with the Retarded and included both Blacks & Gays. See above reference to Margaret Sanger and look at what she said about aborting Black babies to "improve the human race" and tell me that isn't close to Hitler's "Aryan" ideals… n nAnd yes, it is far easier not to believe something you don't want to believe, but the British propaganda during WW-I made it easy to believe that the early Holocaust reports of WW-II were also British propaganda. This is why I say "facts matter" — it would be like if the considered-biased MSM were to report accurately on something bad about Romney, how many of us would believe it at this point? n nSecond, and this is a real ethical quagmire of multiple dimensions — once the Holocaust became known to be true, should Allied military resources have been diverted to try to stop it, at the expense of extending the war? Or should the effort have been to stop it by winning the war? nAssuming the ability to rescue specific groups of Jews, should that have been done at the known expense of giving the Nazis more time to (a) find/kill other Jews still in hiding, and (b) work on weaponry that might help them win the war at which point (c) the Nazis would be free to kill the folks we had liberated from them. n nAmongst similar lines there is the question of Dresden. While the railyards outside the city were a different story — and they were not hit — Dresden was a German "arts city" — not really a military target — and British/American bombers dropped a mixture of explosive (to blow apart the wooden roofs) and incendiary (to light them afire) bombs, creating an urban forest fire which Curt Vonnagat survived only because he was in a insulated meat locker and described in _Slaughterhouse 5_. Damage and loss of life was far more extensive than anything the atomic bomb did. n nWas this a "war crime" or was it a legitimate attempt to shatter German morale? Was the world ignoring the Holocaust once it became clear it was actually happening, or was there an intent to end it via a speedy end to the war? I don't have answers to this, nor do I want to try.
Susan Rice HAD to stay. It would be just rude to leave a tape recorder to capture all of Obama's next anti Israel bullet points.
As I understand the events, Rice did not stay, only several of her crony assistants. But she could have stayed and thrown a bomb on the podium. If the means and the opportunity presented itself, what decent person would not do that? It should have been done. The question then is whether to try and convict the angel or present the angel with the congressional medal of honor? Of course, the latter. Why didn't someone do that with Hitler? Possibly 60 million innocent lives saved. Here we muffed a second chance at it. Tragic.
This is not a new idea. I remember the film wherein Peter O'Toole was ready to shoot Hitler in the head – before WWII erupted. His beloved sweetheart was tortured to death by the Nazis. A very common event back then (and now in Muslim lands?). He was a distance from Satan and a marksman with a long rifle. Sadly for the world, he was caught just before the world could be saved.
You know, the very diplomatic immunity behind which that truly evil person is hiding is what (allegedly) he was party to violating relative to the US Embassy back in 1979. It would create lots and lots and lots of problems, but one side of me says let's ignore his diplomatic immunity too. n nThe other, of course, is realistic and knows both that we really can't do this and that the American left would loose it. But…
Alana — was there a need for a US presence to veto something that would have been introduced in their absence? n nThe Soviet Union made this mistake in 1950 — they had walked out of a Security Council meeting in protest of something else, I forget what, and then when the resolution for the UN to go into Korea was proposed, they weren't there to veto it. That is how it was the UN that went into Korea to fight on behalf of South Korea. n nCould the US & Israel folk have discussed/planned this, knowing that the US would be there to veto/object/etc to whatever, and hence that Israel didn't have to be, that Israel would make the public gesture of walking out — but that the US had to remain and would speak for Israel if needed. n nI am asking, and I am remembering the Soviet mistake of 1950. n nOn the other hand, I also remember that there has already been one war started on Yom Kippur and I am thinking one possibility that would be truly scary, what if his speech is to announce his decision to declare war on Israel and that attacks are beginning…. n nWhat will the Boy President do then?????