Category Archives: Iran

America Doesn’t Know Shiite From Shinola: Iran (Shia) Worries About Afghanistan Insanity (Sunni)

English, Individual Rights, Iran, Islam, John McCain, Terrorism, The West

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The title for this blog post comes from a 2014 column, “Don’t Know Shiite From Shinola,” in which I write that America is “a mulish military power which doesn’t know Shiite from Shinola.” The original expression is 100% American: “Doesn’t know shit from Shinola“:

Shinola was a brand of shoe polish previously manufactured in the USA. The alliteration of the expression ‘doesn’t know shit from Shinola’ partly explains the derivation. Also, without putting too fine a point on it, the two things named in the expression could possibly be confused. However, only one of them would be good to apply to your shoes and only particularly dim people could be expected to muddle them up.

To continue the theme of the previous blog post, “Afghanistan And Its Neighbors; China And Those Uyghurs,” you’re not considered properly American unless you’re carping about “Iran, Iran, Iran.” The John McCain version is, “Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.”


For merely asking, “When last did Iran commit terrorism against the US?,” Tucker Carlson was attacked viciously by Mark Levin. Carlson, however, was on the money. As I chronicled in this 2017 blog post: “Iranians Killed ZERO Americans In Terrorist Attacks In U.S. Between 1975 -2015.”

Iran is neighbor to Afghanistan, sharing a long border with it. And, “Iran … has a more tortured relationship with the Taliban. Its leaders are certainly delighted to see the Great Satan, America, abandon its bases next door.”

As always, The Economist offers informed analysis in, “Afghanistan’s neighbours are preparing for life with the Taliban”:

“Shia Muslims … view their own Islamic revolution as a modernising movement.” After all, “Women can study, work and hold office in Iran, so long as they veil.” Yes, Iranians “look askance at the Taliban’s hidebound Sunni fanaticism.”

Swamped for decades with destitute refugees and cheap heroin from Afghanistan, Iran is also worried about a new influx, particularly of Hazaras, a Shia ethnic minority that the Taliban have viciously persecuted in the past.

“With little leverage over the Taliban and no liking for the tottering government in Kabul, Iran is likely instead to lend support to local Afghan militias in the border region, which recently beat off a Taliban assault on the city of Herat.”

What do you know? When compared with the Sunni Islam (Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabism), a faction of Islam with whose practitioners the West feels much more simpatico—Shia Islam (Iran’s poison of choice) is more enlightened. Yet America and Israel side with Saudi Arabia, the epitome of Sunni insanity. Go figure. And the title says it all:

America Doesn’t Know Shiite From Shinola.

Thoughts from Twitter:

We invade and then centralize:

Totally tribal: This would sound like a brand name to our idiots, but it’s how Afghans think and feel.

Our fight for democracy is not necessarily theirs.

 

*Image courtesy LinkedIn

UPDATED (9/29/022): Iranian Mad-Hatter Masih Alinejad: Please, Take Her

Feminism, Gender, Intelligence, Iran, Journalism, Neoconservatism, Propaganda

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WARNING: ADULT HUMOR

When Iranian dissidents approach me on LinkedIn, I confess to ignoring them. They are invariably interventionist agitators, and I’m an avid, longtime non-interventionist, as you know.

Loud, banal, with a mad-woman’s tumbleweed hair; mouthing the kind of cliched ideas of which we have an abundance and get a load of incessantly in America from the most tiresome, troublesome #MeToo women—Masih Alinejad, Iranian-American “journalist,” is alleged to have been the object of a kidnapping plot by the Iranian mullahs.

However, I don’t believe the Iranians want her back. (Would you? She’s hardly a keeper.)  I don’t buy the whole hype around the alleged kidnapping plot hatched by Iranians. The FBI says so. Yes: Where have we heard that before without a shred of evidence!? (We go to wars based on the intelligence community’s habitual lies.)

AND:

She said she had been working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation since the agency approached her eight months ago with photographs taken by the plotters.

What do you know? This has been going on for a while. Well, it takes time (and funds) for the FBI to lay a trap.

This sounds like vintage FBI entrapment. Some low IQ Abduls are enticed by out-of-control FBI agents into committing a crime they had no intention of committing until approached.

The woman, Alinejad, is irksome, but she’s irrelevant in the American and Iranian grander scheme.

Just like they need to pick-up the scent and chase after Cuba, the neoconservative press and political establishment likes to push the idea that America—near bankrupt, financially and morally—needs to bestow freedom on Iran. Ludicrous.

Lift embargoes on both Iran and Cuba. Both are impoverished. And with respect to Iran, let the International Atomic Energy Agency do its job. (The IAEA is pretty good, and was spot on about Iraq!) The Europeans don’t want a nuclear Iran in their neighborhood. That’s the best we can do without destroying another country with hubris.

*Image credit

Revolving Door Between Cable Media And DC Duopoly

America, Critique, Democrats, Ethics, Iran, Media, Morality, Republicans

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The revolving door between cable media, neoliberal (CNN) or neocon (Fox), and the D.C. duopoly is sickening. Whether practiced by the Left or the Right; this revolving door between politics and the media is indisputably a moral, if not a legal, conflict of interest.

Fox News has hired warmonger Mike Pompeo. The skirts from the Trump administration, ideologically insignificant all, are on the Fox payroll. Corrupt—neither is the content smart: all day long it’s “the poor Uyghurs, invade Iran.”

Naturally, examples abound on the other side.

UPDATE II (12/5/022): If They Can’t Kill Directly, US Neocons Steal From Iranians To Starve ‘Em

Argument, Barack Obama, Foreign Policy, Iran, Justice, Middle East, Military, Neoconservatism, Political Economy

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If they are not permitted to invade countries not theirs, US neoconservative, Deep-State establishments, like the U.S. Justice Department, find ways to kill indirectly.

From their standpoint, American men and matériel should be allowed to reach all corners of the world. If they can’t move in directly for the kill, these mercenaries will find ways to kill indirectly.

The neoconservative faction is unperturbed by the fact that Iran has been crippled economically; that millions live below the poverty line there because of constant economic sanctions, cheered by chubby Michael Pompeo, US secretary of state.

Likewise, under Barack Obama’s reign of terror abroad—the Iranian currency lost 65 percent of its value and endured a SWIFT and devastating eviction from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication.

Iranians are starving, due to sanction. So, what does the US do? Steal the oil they own and are trying to sell to stay alive.

On Friday, the DoJ announced the U.S. had seized more than 1.1 million barrels of petroleum, owned by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, from four merchant tankers bound for Venezuela.

“The government announced today that it has successfully executed the seizure order and confiscated the cargo from all four vessels, totaling approximately 1.116 million barrels of petroleum. With the assistance of foreign partners, this seized property is now in U.S. custody,” reads a statement from the Department of Justice.
“These actions represent the government’s largest-ever seizure of fuel shipments from Iran.”

… A seizure order for the cargo from all four vessels was issued by U.S. District Court Judge Jeb Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia,” reads the statement.

The nature of the political dispensation in Iran is none of America’s business. Poverty and hunger are widespread in “rich” America. Iranians do not fix on invading us and replacing our immiserating leaders.

Image: 57 Million Below the Poverty Line

UPDATE (8/17):
Facebook has censored my anti-starving-Iran post: https://lnkd.in/grX-57k My anti-starving-and-stealing-from-Iran blog post is here. Who would have thunk? It’s a pretty conventional, anti-starving-Iranian position, common among principled libertarians

Iranians have not killed and maimed and terrorized Americans; Saudi Arabians have!! For another, why suddenly such belief in what US intelligence “says” a/b anything? Lastly: regional conflicts. Let Israel & Saudis police their neighborhoods.

UPDATE (12/5/022) : And, we freeze Iranian assets. Why of course. We are America The Good. Ask Dinesh D’Souza. He’ll tell you in his hermetically “tight” argumentation style that because we are good, we can steal from other nations. I’m convinced. You?

Iranian frozen assets in international accounts are calculated to be worth between $100 billion[1][2] and $120 billion.[3][4][5] Almost $2 billion of Iran’s assets are frozen in the United States.[6] According to the Congressional Research Service, in addition to the money locked up in foreign bank accounts, Iran’s frozen assets include real estate and other property. The estimated value of Iran’s real estate in the U.S. and their accumulated rent is $50 million.[1] Besides the assets frozen in the U.S., some parts of Iran’s assets are frozen around the world by the United Nations.[1]