A little touch of Tehran on the Hudson
"The move by officials at the Treasury and Justice Departments is designed to stop the flow of funds they say are used to help Iran's efforts to build nuclear weapons." Right from New York.
"Feds Seize New York Office Building Tied to Iranian Government," by Lee Ross for FoxNews, December 17 (thanks to Banafsheh Zand-Bonazzi):
650 Fifth Avenue in New York City was seized Wednesday by federal authorities for its ties to Iran.Federal authorities moved in Wednesday to seize control of a New York City office building partially owned by a company with ties to the Iranian government.
The move by officials at the Treasury and Justice Departments is designed to stop the flow of funds they say are used to help Iran's efforts to build nuclear weapons.
The office tower, located on New York's famed Fifth Avenue, was built by an Iranian non-profit group in the 1970s. Over the years the ownership of the building has evolved into what federal officials say is an attempt to hide the stake held by an Iranian state-owned bank.
The government alleges that Assa Corp., the building's owner, is a shell company for Bank Melli, which is accused of facilitating the movement of nuclear materials for the Iranian government. Officials contend that Bank Melli was heavily involved in the day-to-day operations of Assa Corp. and its management of the Fifth Avenue building, which generated rental income that was sent back to Iran....
This is good news. But for every cockroach you see, there are hundreds more you don't see; so one down, hundreds more to go.
Now, in order to finish the job, all Iranian- and Arab-owned assets in the West must be confiscated, as Hugh has suggested in so many of his postings, and that should be combined with energy independence from A-rab oil. That way, begging for baksheesh will be the only way for the slaves of allah to continue financing their expansion of Dar al-islam.
And the few non-muslim fools that they might find to donate to their cause won't provide them with anywhere near enough money to help them realize their grand view for taking the whole world back to the VII Century.
What for Obama to give it right back. As a "gesture of understanding".
So I guess that means AIG is done, right?
Oh, I forgot, Sharia does not help terrorism against us. It's just a few who have the wrong idea somehow.
There are assets of Iranians all over the place. There are certain buildings in cities with many colleges, for example, where all of the apartments in a building turn out to be owned by are rich Middle Easterners. These can be identified, and such illiquid assets seized, as the assets of enemy aliens were seized during World War II, without the slightest objection from anyone. But first you have to be able to grasp the nature of, to recognize, that war, in the absence of large-scale battles and armies.
In Dubai hundreds of billions of dollars has been invested by Iranians, including mullahs who have made out like gangbusters -- though they were really the gangs -- for nearly the past thirty years. If Westerners, however, including Western celebrities, simply stop buying apartments, or working as wage-slaves in Dubai, the value of that Iranian-owned property can be made to plummet. We have it in our power to do terrible economic damage to Iran. We just have to discourage, here and there, people from seeing Dubai as a place to visit, much less to inves,t or live, in.
They can start with Memorial Hall, 1021 E. 3rd Street, Bloomington, Indiana 47405, and Weatherly Hall, 1800 East Tenth Street, Bloomington, IN 47406. Those are both Saudi-owned and controlled.
somewhat off topic, OPEC is feeling the heat with dropping prices for oil, and now want to drop oil being pupmped. Drill here, drill now should start sooner, and let those opec welfare cheats eat their oil.
A bright spot in a sea of bad news.
Actually, Zena, oil prices are still plummeting despite OPEC's decision to cut production. Pretty hilarious. They pressure KSA to do it first, then the rest grudgingly go along. It backfired. Even sound economic policies fail when Muslims touch them because they simply can't do anything right. Oh, and they're about to have a food shortage on top of skyrocketing food prices. I read that on epaminondas' blog. Schadenfreude is fun.
Unrelated to this but very interesting:
AQ Khan tried to sell Osama bin Laden nuclear secrets.
Not sure how solid this, but I wanted to share this,
http://ishare.rediff.com/filevideo.php?id=529435
-Ayo Gorkhali
... including mullahs who have made out like gangbusters -- though they were really the gangs -- for nearly the past thirty years.
And indeed, through the modern prism Mohammed and his Companions constituted, in their earliest days, nothing but a gang in the truest sense of the word.
Extortion, protection rackets, robbery, murder, kidnapping, the works. The only thing that set them apart from the Crips or the Blackstone Rangers was (is) their growth plan.
Oh, and the pretense of being a religion.
Organized crime. That's what Islam is.
It's about time Iran has been our number one enemy since 1979 when Pres. Jimmy let our ally the Shah of Iran go down on his own and get his head lobbed off plus he let Iran hold 300 hostages for almost one year . The U.S. never lost so much face in the Arab world than we did then. We know Iran is and has been behind every attack on America since then and thousands of Iranian students , military , and even mobsters remained in the U. S. or imigrated illegally. We have been under attack from Iran for more than 25 years ,what are we waiting for ? till they have a small nuclear device to bring into our country and demand what they want and then detonate it anyway. Iranians do not negotiate and they believe anyone who does is weak or foolish .
They can start with Memorial Hall, 1021 E. 3rd Street, Bloomington, Indiana 47405, and Weatherly Hall, 1800 East Tenth Street, Bloomington, IN 47406. Those are both Saudi-owned and controlled.
Hoosierland U has done a good job of exploiting the edge they have with the American Language Institute and other language programs there. They can take a seat from a midwestern kid and hand it over to a young Paki, Yemeni, or Egyptian, feel all pious and good about themselves, and outpace the competition among American universities to destroy themselves in blind pursuit of Islamization.
Hmmm. Wonder if the docs down there in the Gulch are performing clitordectomies now. One would think that female sex organ chops have to be in high demand there.
This is the type of thing that George Kennan advised us to do during the Iranian embassy seizure in 1979.
As Kennan noted, the seizure of an embassy and dipolmatic personnel is an act of war. The U.S. should have declared war on Iran right away. Kennan pointed out that war does not necessarily mean mass bombings and D-Day style invasions. But it does create a situation recognized in international law that would have allowed the U.S. to: seize all Iranian-owned assets in the U.S., to round up and deport all Iranian nationals in the U.S., and seize or sink all Iranian ships and cargoes, among other things.
But of course we had Jimmy Peanut in charge at the time, so we did nothing.
Slightly OT, but I remember that, then, CBS News every evening had prominently displayed on camera the number of days since the seizure. In those days the MSM still had some sense of honor and patriotism. It would nice if one or more of the present day newscasts had a similar prominent figure each evening for the number of days since 9-11.
Oh, 33:21, no Pakis. Admitting unqualified Pakis does not appease the Saudi overlords. Only severely inbred, sometimes retarded, Arabs who speak no English, think the Earth is flat, behave like the psychopaths they are, and invariably get away with it. You should see how long the list of adjuncts in the Saudi Agenda Department is. It even spreads into women's studies and African studies (as if Islam and Arab imperialism don't destroy African culture and language -- look at Egypt, the Berbers of Morocco and Algeria, or Somalia, or what it's done to Nigeria and Ghana in just the last 30 years). It's like a cancer, albeit a cancer which affects people who imbibe mercury (Marxism). The adjuncts don't even get offices in Weatherly because there are just so damn many of them on the take, many of them chairing departments. They don't have to even do anything in the Saudi Agenda Department, not even teaching a single cross-listed course. It's obscene. You can guess why we don't have classes on Fridays.
Maybe they can seize the universities as well? These have been shown to be hotbeds for Islamist funding & subsequent indoctrination as well as recruitment grounds for Islamic terrorists.
The whole darn building? Makes you wonder what else they own......
Just a thought....why don't we seize Iranian assets in the U.S. to pay for the war in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan? War is deceit, after all.
Too bad. I was there this morning. They were planning a nice lobby renovation in the very near future.
Death to Islam.
Oh, and "Champ" used to be my friend. Our falling out is as confusing to me as it is painful. I feel her loss most in this, this most festive time of the year.
Merry Christmas Champ.
ZENA: "OPEC is feeling the heat with dropping prices for oil, and now want to drop oil being pupmped. Drill here, drill now should start sooner, and let those opec welfare cheats eat their oil."
RESPONSE: As gratifying as the drop in the price of oil is (sanctions on Iran wouldn't have had 1/100th of the impact as this dramatic fall-off), the down side is that multinationals suddenly have no incentive to drill.
"...a little touch of Harry in the night." Is that the line? The Branagh version of Henry V is incredibly good.
33:21:
I doubt Islam is just organized crime. There is probably a real spiritual being behind it. In which case it would be a religion of sorts, but one led by a tyrannical Being running against the main course of divine evolution and seeking, over the long run, to eliminate the human soul and the human individual from that evolution. The Being in question would be seeking to tear away whatever can be torn away from the main flow of development and to incorporate the captured elements into his own degraded spiritual and material realms. Perhaps hell is, among other things, a sort of stagnant pocket in the spiritual and earthly evolutionary process. (Obviously I'm not talking about Darwinian evolutionary process, since the Darwinian and neo-Darwinian outlooks consider only the material aspect, and a somewhat narrowed portion of matter at that.)
One kind of hell seeks more or less subconsciously to reject the evolutionary process and leap backward to a past paradise at or before the beginning of time. Another hell seeks to escape the evolutionary process by making a sudden leap to an alleged future paradise. Islam is more in the second category, I think, insofar as Islam has a revolutionary drive to overturn most earthly arrangements and institutions -- hardly the conservative extremism of the first kind of hell. No, Islam, ironically, represents a progressive form of extremism, the second kind of hell. The first hell is presided over by Lucifer and luciferic beings. The second hell is presided over by Ahriman and ahrimanic beings. Ahriman is a demonic figure perceived particularly by the past Zoroastrians of Persia. Lucifer and Ahriman are each other's great enemies, yet their enmity is a kind of collusion between them, since they strengthen each other by it.
In rejecting a spiritual evolutionary process, both hells reject human freedom. The Judaic and then the Judeo-Christian culture were the first and arguably the only major religious traditions to step out of the closed cyclical view of reality and to recognize an historical process composed of individual lives that were not mere repetitions of mythical archetypes. Or that is my understanding of Mircea Eliade and some notable others on this.
Just to add a bit more of evidence to what Hugh said about how Dubai is a horrible place to live in, a Brit has recently earned a month behind bars in that place for flipping off a few A-rab youths that almost ran him over:
http://www.newsoftheworld.co.uk/news/99031/Holiday-Brit-jailed-in-Dubai-for-flicking-middle-finger.html
In addition to the topic of its main story, the article above also mentions that yet another expat was once arrested for doing push-ups on a beach when local authorities concluded that he was having sex with the ground in public. Or perhaps they arrested him because seeing someone exercise could make A-rabs feel bad about their own enormous waistlines.
Traeh, you've made a fascinating point, but I actually think 33:21 was just referring to the Arab student visa racket.
Come to think of it, though, Islam and futurism actually strive for decadence. It was always about going backward. It destroys progress. Jahiliya is really the future, even though it's the past, because, if Islam comes to a new land that jahiliya, even if it's as old as the Pyramids, is still millenia ahead of Islam. Islam has never, nor could it ever, aspire to come within 5000 years of any society it approaches. Those Bedouins were a good 10,000 years behind even the bushmen of that time, who were hunter-gatherers with social hierarchies and customs. The Bedouins who demonstrated any sign of progress imported it from other, Judeo-Christian, parts of the Middle East. Islam destroyed what little prgress those Bedouins had achieved. Islam destroys, not so that it can build anew, but so that everyone can forever live in ruin. It's about making everything suck, which was your point, but I disagree that it's actually forward-looking in its aspirations.
7 years to finally move on this Iranian business interest? 7 years...who the hell is in charge, Jorge Ibn al-Suad ibn Bush, Vice President of Mexico??
It's about time. Now if the Feds can just eliminate all the other terrorist funded assests in the states, it'll send a message to the Islamists who want to use our resources for one thing and one thing only.
traeh
did you ever read David Bentley Hart's 'The Beauty of the Infinite'? I think I recommended it to you, a long time ago. Because he - and Tom Cahill, in 'The Gifts of the Jews' - make exactly the point that you've made in your final paragraph, and make it pretty much on the basis of an exegesis of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures.
You find the same point also in just about anything by Jacques Ellul - but try The Ethics of Freedom, and The Meaning of the City.
And Franz Rosenzweig - The Star of Redemption.
YHWH is the Liberator. I have always remembered one line from a sermon I heard, years ago: "The future is open".
By contrast, Islam is one of the most absolute and thoroughgoing systems of slavery and enslavement - considered from every imaginable dimension - that the human mind (possibly with a bit of prompting from infernal dimensions, as you suggest) has ever come up with.
Seizure of an Iranian-owned or partly-owned building is very fine, but what about the lawsuit of those held hostage in the Embassy in Tehran, in that celebrated act of androlepsy which should have been treated as an act of war? What about the Iranian role in the killing of neary 280 Marines in Beirut? In both cases, family members wished to sue the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the American government intervened, in the process, on the side not of the American families, but of the Islamic Republic of Iran? If policies are now to be saner, then those lawsuits should be reinstituted, and the American government should not only not stop, but actively encourage, all victims of Islamic terrorism -- including those who wished to sue Saudi Arabia for the 9/11/2001 mass-murdering -- to sue and sue and sue. The money is the key. Take away as much of the Arab and Iranian money as possible, and keep taking it away. And then work to suppress demand for oil -- put the tax on gasoline now, on oil now, while the price is depressed. Don't continue to be idiots about oil policy, about energy policy. There's no more time for the mixture as before -- that is, the simple-simon idiocy.
What has been the Iranian reaction to this seizure of 'their ' property?
I would expect them to call it an 'act of war'...
By the way, since we're talking about Iran, did you know that the Bush administration wants approval from Congress for a nuclear cooperation agreement with the United Arab Emirates?
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-gulfnukes16-2008dec16,0,2314626.story
Since Iran has very close ties to the UAE, and it was through Dubai that "Abdul Qadeer Khan used a Dubai company to secretly sell sensitive atomic components to Iran, Libya and North Korea", that probably means that Israel might have to repeat what it did, in the early 80s, to that Iraqi nuclear reactor built with help from the French.
Merry Christmas Awake.
Hypothesis 1:
Place was completely wired.
Bugs discovered and removed (renovation work?).
Building seized.
Hypothesis 2:
Demand for oil continues to plummet.
Use of alternative energy sources and conservation efforts continue to expand.
Iranian oil exports boycotted.
OPEC fills in the difference.
Iran collapses.
said jdamn:
Ok, but here's what I was responding to from 33:21:
Sounds like 33:21 is referring to more than just the Arab student visa racket. He's making a pretty unqualified statement there. I merely wished to add that I think there are spiritual beings of some backward sort behind that criminality.
Said jdamn:
The key word there is "actually." And I think if you were to peruse what I wrote before, you'd see that I agree with you: the "forward-looking" aspect is a kind of counterfeit, just as Lenin's communism was a counterfeit of forward-looking aspirations. Because a counterfeit future is aimed at, the result is retardation and decadence. But one can still distinguish between the kind of retarded spiritual being that seeks to evade time and cling to and recreate a past paradise, and the retarded spiritual being that seeks to evade time by leaping over it into a falsely imagined future paradise. Perhaps Islam falls more into the camp of the pseudo-progressives rather than among the pseudo-conservatives.
Said dumbledoresarmy:
Yes, I think you did and I should look for it and am interested in it.Said dumbledoresarmy:
Yes, I've read that and several others by Cahill Thank you for the suggestion. I haven't read Jacques Ellul, just heard his name. I guess that Spengler guy who is interesting (though he says sort of idiotic things about Spencer once in a while) talks a lot about Rosenzweig. I'm interested. Remarkable how that truth has gotten buried -- largely, I guess, by bad Christians representing their religion poorly."a bit of prompting"? Perhaps it was only a bit. Yet isn't there much about Islam that suggests very large forces, more than just human, have inspired it? Why do you think it was only "a bit of prompting"?
I don't even think it's "a bit of prompting." There is no satan. Everything about Islam is so unbelievable wordly that to even consider any sort of divine force, good or evil, could have been behind it is ridiculous. Look at the Islamic concaption of the afterlife. It's like it was dreamed up by a 12-year-old. It's a brilliant political and war doctrine, two very human spheres, and it completely lacks theology and morality. It was devised by (a) very sick, very evil people/person who wallowed in the basest aspects of themselves/himself, of humankind, and of the human spirit. Satan would have gotten it right the first time and not had to abrogate a thing because he would have evil down pat.
Traeh - if you haven't read Ellul, you *must*. Mr Fitzgerald speaks highly of him and Mr Fitzgerald doesn't speak highly of just anybody. His main claim to fame here at Jihadwatch is that he mentored, and befriended, and generally encouraged, Bat Yeor...and wrote prefaces for two of her books: on dhimmitude, for 'The Dhimmi', and on jihad, for 'The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam'. In fact, it was googling the net for Ellul that brought me to Bat Yeor's site...and thence, to jihadwatch.
Ellul was sui generis. He claimed to be an anarchist and a communist but really, what he was was...Jacques Ellul, and indeed, since before anything else he identified himself as a Christian, having undergone a devastatingly thorough conversion encounter with the Biblical God, and since he lived out that faith with remarkable consistency, I would go so far as to call him one of the great teaching saints of the Church in France. Besides the books I've already mentioned, 'The Humiliation of the Word' is an example of his theological reflections at their best.
(He's also famous in secular circles for two books - 'Propaganda' [a classic dissection of the modern practice of propaganda - which he despises and ruthlessly anatomises] and 'The Technological Society').
I've read most of his books, some in English translation, a few in the original French. He's brilliant. He's so very, very French - and so profoundly Christian. I don't necessarily agree with everything he says, but he always makes you stop and think.
His tree stands in the Avenue of the Righteous at Yad Vashem in Israel, because of his efforts in the French Resistance during World War II, assisting Jews to escape the Nazis.
If you read French, you must read 'Un Chretien Pour Israel', which is his book in defence of Israel. Twenty years before Phyllis Chesler wrote 'the new antisemitism', Ellul had already seen that, as he put it, antizionism was the latest avatar of antisemitism. His dismissal, in that book, of the World Council of Churches and of the UN is simply scathing.
It was the reading of that book - which, in Australia, may be found only in one copy in one library - that immunised me permanently against 'Palestinian' anti-Israel propaganda.
I expect I'll be looking into Ellul. Thanks for the tip and the info.
Traeh, you've made a fascinating point, but I actually think 33:21 was just referring to the Arab student visa racket.
No, Jdamn, Traeh was right. I was indeed postulating that the street gang element that sits at the center of Islam's tawdry history, and thereby at the center of its mythology, persists.
* 2:216 * 4:74 * 9:111 * 8:12 * 4:96 * 56:22 * 38:51 * 55:56 * 55:76 * 56:22 * 8:74 * 9:2 *
Please lease tell me that you were only kidding when you said that IU no longer holds classes on Fridays. That would be just way too disgusting. I'll never give them another nickel. A Dinar maybe, but not a single chunk of American currency.