Fausta’s Blog

Video of Neda’s death (very graphic and disturbing):

Jules Crittenden has a roundup.

Regime Change Iran: Movement Seeks to Eliminate ‘Supreme Leader’ Position

A report from Saudi Arabia’s al-Arabiya, Iranian clerics seek supreme leader alternative, indicates that Rafsanjani is seeking to eliminate the Supreme Leader. Not just the man, but the position and role presiding over Iranian politics and the Iranian society.

That is huge, if it comes to pass.

Iran’s Web Spying Aided By Western Technology
European Gear Used in Vast Effort to Monitor Communications

The monitoring capability was provided, at least in part, by a joint venture of Siemens AG, the German conglomerate, and Nokia Corp., the Finnish cellphone company, in the second half of 2008, Ben Roome, a spokesman for the joint venture, confirmed.

Why don’t Siemens and Nokia jam their own equipment, then?

UPDATE
Andy McCarthy: Understanding Obama on Iran

Call me thick, but I continue to be baffled by a lot of the commentary, cited by Rich and others, which gives as the rationale for President Obama’s diffidence his purported determination to preserve the opportunity to negotiate with the mullahs on their nuclear program. Obama is resigned to Iran getting nukes (perhaps even having them already) and has no intention of doing anything meaningful about it.

The fact is that, as a man of the hard Left, Obama is more comfortable with a totalitarian Islamic regime than he would be with a free Iranian society. In this he is no different from his allies like the Congressional Black Caucus and Bill Ayers, who have shown themselves perfectly comfortable with Castro and Chàvez. Indeed, he is the product of a hard-Left tradition that apologized for Stalin and was more comfortable with the Soviets than the anti-Communists (and that, in Soros parlance, saw George Bush as a bigger terrorist than bin Laden).
…
I think Victor had this right on Saturday: “Obama is almost more at ease with virulent anti-Westerners, whose grievances Obama has long studied (and perhaps in large part entertained),” (though I’d have omitted the “almost”). Mark Steyn made the same point in a post last week (about a Robert Kagan column that Pete Wehner also discussed).

It’s a mistake to perceive this as “weakness” in Obama. It would have been weakness for him to flit over to the freedom fighters’ side the minute it seemed politically expedient. He hasn’t done that, and he won’t. Obama has a preferred outcome here, one that is more in line with his worldview, and it is not victory for the freedom fighters. He is hanging as tough as political pragmatism allows, and by doing so he is making his preferred outcome more likely. That’s not weakness, it’s strength — and strength of the sort that ought to frighten us.

Tags: Fausta's blog, Neda

This entry was posted on Monday, June 22nd, 2009 at 3:43 pm and is filed under Barack Obama, Iran, Islam. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.