AMERICAN PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA. Can we have our stealth drone back, please?
IRANIAN THUG-IN-CHIEF MAHMOUD AHMADINEJAD. Let me put it this way: if we had a dozen of these birds based in Cuba fitted with nuclear warheads, we'd happily turn your eastern seaboard into a molten radioactive ruin.
AMERICAN PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA. How about if we go soft on those sanctions?
IRANIAN THUG-IN-CHIEF MAHMOUD AHMADINEJAD. How about if you chop off your own head and save us the trouble, Infidel?
AMERICAN PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA. I'm so glad we have these fruitful conversations proving to all Americans once more that dialogue is the path to understanding.
Iranian student activist Payman Aref wrote a letter to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad after the last election in Iran. That must have been some letter. He was sentenced to a year in prison and 74 lashes (One wonders how they came up with that particular number of strikes with a whip -- was it based on word count?).
This echoes the punishment meted out to Somayeh Tohidlou. She was whipped 50 times while her hands and feet were chained together, as punishment for taking part in post-election demonstrations.
When Iran's Islamist state and justice system is described as medieval, this is no exaggeration.More >>
As Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad prepares for another round of theatrics at the UN this week for the 66th session of the United Nations General Assembly, victims of his regime and others are routinely ignored, as Ben Cohen points out in yesterday's New York Post. It's a useful time to bring to shed light on of the Iranian regime's favoured means of crushing dissenters: institutionalized and systematic rape.
Beneath the outer horrors of repression in Iran—the scenes of brutal attacks by police and security forces against peaceful protestors witnessed in the streets of Tehran throughout 2009 and 2010—lie the underground horrors that those protestors and other political activists face once they find themselves inside Iran’s prison system. The preponderance of torture in Iran’s prisons is well documented by human rights organizations, and it’s long acknowledged that the Iranian justice system often denies detainees the right to legal representation, to a fair trial, and many are simply ‘disappeared’ within the prison system. However, rape as a form of torture is particularly prevalent as a tool used by the state to punish and debilitate dissenters.
Reports of rape in Iranian prisons- carried out by guards as well...More >>
If you thought a uni-polar world based on American supremacy was a bad idea, what do you think of a planet modeled on Iranian justice?
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says that Iran and India need to help spread justice in the world, as the pair share humane perspectives on international affairs.
Iranium, the documentary film about Iran's nuclear weapons ambitions, has gotten glowing reviews. Glowing? Uranium? Get it? OK, fine. Just watch the movie!More >>
While visiting Jerusalem last year, I went to the Yad Vashem museum which archives the history of the Holocaust. Even to this present day, researchers there are still documenting the history of the victims until all of the names have been recorded. I wrote about my experience in an essay called "The Holocaust and Hard Choices", and the very real lessons this dark period holds for us today.
UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown awarded medals this week to citizens who chose to help save the lives of those who would otherwise have been destroyed in the Holocaust. The award is reportedly etched with the words, "In the Service of Humanity".
Meanwhile, Bulgaria also paid tribute to those who fought against the deportation of Jews to Nazi death camps. In contrast, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad continued to cast doubt on the very historical fact of the Holocaust, following up by noting of the world's only Jewish state that "with Allah's help, this regime will be annihilated."
“It’s like the Iranians have set something in motion and they’re able to shut down a film in the capital of Canada,” said Fred Litwin. "It's frightening to think that the Iranian embassy could complain and a film could be cancelled in the capital of Canada," Litwin said.
"They obviously thought they could push around some people and they were right."
Hossein Derakhshan, the Iranian-Canadian 'blogfather' who published instructions on how to blog in Farsi - thereby sparking a kind of blogging renaissance in Iran - has, according to reports, been sentenced to 19 1/2 years in jail by an Iranian court. He was convicted of, among other things, insulting Islamic religious figures and ideas, co-operating with hostile countries, promoting counter-revolutionary groups, and spreading propaganda against the ruling establishment.
Derakhshan was confirmed as being in an Iranian jail way back in 2008 after venturing inside the country's borders, and he's rotted in Iran's judicial system since despite the efforts of the Canadian government to secure his release - the problem being that Iran does not recognize dual citizenships. Once they've gotten someone, that person stays gotten.
The Propagandist has talked a little about Derakhshan's case before, and while it is somewhat heartening that he has not been sentenced to death - as it was earlier speculated he might - this is quite obviously a loss for freedom of speech. Iran's descent into the barbarism of petty tyranny...More >>
Authoritarian regimes have had their eyes on the bedrooms of their nations this month.
In Iran, president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has decided that Iran’s “decades of internationally-acclaimed family planning” that effectively managed a serious overpopulation problem that kept unemployment high and poverty on the rise is “ungodly and a Western import”.
How will it work? Through a scheme to pay parents for every child they produce: $950 at birth and $95 every year after that, with matching deposits by the parents. The money will be safely stowed away in the baby's bank account, which they can then access when they turn 18 years, and use for godly enterprises like marriages that produces lots of babies, ideally fundamentalist ones who would vote for people like Ahmadinejad. "Those who raise idea of family planning, they are thinking in the realm of the secular world," Ahmadinejad reminds us condom-toting and pill-popping infidels.
There are only 75 million people in Iran and Ahmadinejad is sure that the country can handle twice that. Besides the little problem that a high fertility rate means it may not...More >>
While visiting Jerusalem last year, I went to the Yad Vashem museum which archives the history of the Holocaust. Even to this present day, researchers there are still documenting the history of the victims until all of the names have been recorded. I wrote about my experience in an essay called "
Hossein Derakhshan, the Iranian-Canadian 'blogfather' who published instructions on how to blog in Farsi - thereby sparking a kind of blogging renaissance in Iran - has, according to reports, been 
Authoritarian regimes have had their eyes on the bedrooms of their nations this month.
