He's in deep trouble at home
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/27/mossad-binyamin-netanyahu-meir-dagan-israel

"Israel is better than Iran in most regards– for Israeli citizens it has more of a rule of law and more personal liberties."

Little things like that….Jesus. Next we're gonna hear that at least Mussolini made the trains run on time.

Which trumps the 5 things Juan was able to find.

Probably ahead of the United States.

Again, not one of the five ways Iran is better than Israel.

killed during the slaughter that outraged much of the world last year - conducted by Nutenyahu. That resulted in a lot of bad press for the right wing asshole, didn't it.

www.pchrgaza.org/portal/en/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=10491:statistics-victims-of-the-israeli-offensive-on-gaza-since-08-july-2014&catid=145:in-focus

Fuck you, Juan Cole, you piece of dog shit. Iran butchers its LGBT community, but hey, at least they only kill their own people.

I'm unclear. Does that fact that Iran is murderous towards its gay population absolve Israel of all its misdeeds?

No, it doesn't absolve Israel of its misdeeds. I'm plenty harsh on Israel when it comes to their treatment of Palestinians. Yet another reason why I despise the faux anti-imperialists: it's all black and white, no matter how much they may say they demand "nuance." Not on board with Russia's shit in Ukraine? Warmonger! Point out Iran's atrocious human rights record? Deflecting from Israel!

What I'm fucking tired of is this bullshit that Russia/Iran/Zimbabwe/Venezuela are all just "misunderstood" by the evil, evil MSM. Juan Cole goes off and suggests Iran's lack of outward military aggression is somehow based in some fucking virtue, rather than the total lack of capability to do so, and that makes it "surprisingly better" than Israel.

It's horseshit, and anyone with a functioning fucking brain stem knows it.

What if Britain and the US had just left them the hell alone in 1953 and allowed them to control their own oil? They'd probably have been the first Muslim-majority state in the ME to have marriage equality.

No, the US shouldn't have interfered in Iran's internal affairs. But that doesn't change the fact that they've made their own choices since then, and not every single one of those can be blamed on Israel or the West.

But thanks for making my point yet again.

How did I manage to forget that?

I like Jimmy Carter, but this 1978 quote from him is a real face-palm moment: 'Under the Shah’s brilliant leadership Iran is an island of stability in one of the most troublesome regions of the world. There is no other state figure whom I could appreciate and like more.'

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tehranbureau/2009/11/30-years-after-the-hostage-crisis.html

Yeah, in no way could I have been referring to the Iranian government, before and after the 1979 Revolution.

Look, I get you want to absolve that homophobic and repressive regime of all responsibility for its own actions, but they've made their own decisions.

Religion took on an oppositional role under the Shah that would never have otherwise happened. The Ayatollah would have been leader of just another faction otherwise.

But at some point the Iranian government started making its own decisions.

Before that, all sectors of society participated, and did not anticipate their betrayal.

(well, first Pahlavi Shah) from power and lead to the strong Majlis. And that was an actual invasion aimed to overthrow the regime, unlike Operation Ajax (and Ajax seems to have been a mess that was only saved in the end by royalist sympathizers in the army). And by the time Mossadegh was overthrown, he had already dissolved the Majlis and taken emergency powers (if I remember correctly, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi also had the ability to dismiss him - and he was the one who appointed him in the first place).

"Deflecting from Israel." Well, this was a thread about how Israel isn't so nice.

Iran, of course, is fair game on many counts. But your rage is boring.

nails it, bulls-eye, whatever you can say but it really defines the reality.

This is news to me.

With so many people saying "Russian aggression" and you could argue it is true in Crimea, though this was the least popular "pro-West" region of Ukraine... East is very different.

While US & Iran provide aid to Iraq, they indirectly arm Iran-backed Shia militias indirectly helping neighborhood ethnic cleansing


I agree with the article or Israel isn't much worse than their oppressive neighbors. They're probably the biggest hypocrites & there is a lot of "my enemy of my enemy" -- which defines the Middle East -- with Saudi with US playing the middle.

However, Iran is not an aggressor state, and Israel is. Someone else said that they don't have the military capacity for that. How come? They have plenty of oil wealth, and if they wanted the military capacity to be a local imperial power, they could easily afford it.

Very different political identities & circumstances so I didn't quite want to use that word but a civil war took off in Iraq following the "Battle of Fallujah" with Iran quite clearly arming & supplying a side of the conflict just as they are in Syria. With the 70s Shia political leaders installed as prime minister who happened to spent exile in Iran, looked the other way as the unregulated militias continued to grow. They practically took over their neighboring country almost by accident.

With the Ukraine civil war, there is a campaign part of it to obfuscate the divisions within Ukraine to prove how much of Russia's army or equipment & supply they provide is going over the border & Putin is the latest Saddam, a bad guy focus on part of the marketing.

Iran aggression as an official policy, nation vs nation? Probably not too much of that. I don't think the Saudi Arabia or 'House of Saud' has officially invaded anybody since their early history such as the Egypt-Wahabbi war but very liberal in supplying the militias that spread their what was once their very unique ideology w/ goals of aggression. US shared their anti-communism agenda which explains why they shared involvement in fighting the communists in Afghanistan.

They can have all the oil they want, but if virtually nobody is willing or able to do business with them, it doesn't mean much.

The Iranian military is made up of three different types of equipment: Russian and Chinese surplus (not cutting edge in the least), reverse engineered and copycat weapons and vehicles, and pre-1979 US and British weapons and equipment.

They simply don't have the means or the opportunity to fight an aggressive war with their neighbors, so they instead fund Shi'a groups like Hezbollah.

There are plenty of ways of getting around sanctions. The plain fact is that Iran is not an aggressor state.

They're a Shiite militant group that gets a lot of support from Syria and Iran to advance their agenda.

And frankly, if there were ways to get around the sanctions, Iran would have found them by now. Their military is completely incapable of launching an aggressive war, but not for their lack of trying. They simply don't have the equipment or manpower to invade and occupy their neighbors--if neither the USSR nor the US could hold onto Afghanistan and the US couldn't hold onto Iraq, there's no way a military with 40 year old equipment could.

http://truthout.org/debunking-top-7-myths-irans-middle-east-policies/1305944848

Myth #3: The bulk of Lebanon’s Hezbollah funds come from Iran.

My position on Hezbollah and that of virtually every other observer of Hezbollah is that Iran has no effective control over Hezbollah's political actions today (as opposed to 30 years ago).

The program documented clearly the charitable actions carried out by Hezbollah that were supported by Iran. Iran never denied this. At the same time, the program clearly pointed out the correct statement that the bulk of Lebanon's redevelopment funds came from foreign remittances and from the Gulf States.

From Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine-- pp 460-62 in the hardcover edition

Lebanon's shock resistance went beyond protest. It was also expressed through a far-reaching parallel reconstruction effort. Within days of the cease-fire, Hezbollah's neighborhood committees had visited many of the homes hit by the air attacks, assessed the damage and were already handing out $12,000 in cash to displaced families to cover a year's worth of rent and furnishings. As the independent journalists Ana Nogueira and Saseen Kawzally observed from Beirut, "That is six times the dollar amount that survivors of Hurricane Katrina received from FEMA."

And in what would have been music to the ears of Katrina survivors, the Hezbollah leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, promised the country in a televised address, "You won't need to ask a favor of anyone, queue up anywhere." Hezbollah's version of aid did not filter through the government or foreign NGOs. It did not go to build five-star hotels, as in Kabul, or Olympic swimming pools for police trainers, as in Iraq. Instead, Hezbollah did what Renuka, the Sri Lankan tsunami survivor, told me she wished someone would do for her family: put the help in their hands. Hezbollah also included community members in the reconstruction—it hired local construction crews (working in exchange for the scrap metal they collected), mobilized fifteen hundred engineers and organized teams of volunteers. All that help meant that a week after the bombing stopped, the reconstruction was already well under way.

TV station--
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Manar

Al-Manar was the first TV station to report Hezbollah's condemnation of the September 11 attacks. Other non-state attacks against the United States have also been condemned on Al Manar, including the 2000 USS Cole bombing suicide attack against a US Navy destroyer.[40]


They ally with and protect Christians in Lebanon. When they were only a militant group, their ideology was far more intolerant, but actually having political power changed that.

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2012/1221/In-Hezbollah-stronghold-Lebanese-Christians-find-respect-stability

In Hezbollah's early days, its creed was "virulent," and in the past, it may have been responsible for fanning some of those flames. But as Hezbollah gained power and joined the political system, that changed, says Paul Salem, director of the Carnegie Endowment Middle East Center.

“It doesn’t carry with it an anti-Christian strain anymore," he says. "That’s almost entirely gone. It’s not in their rhetoric, it’s not in their creed.”

Recently, when the Shiite holiday of Ashura was approaching, the streets were choked with residents shopping and passing out sweets and blanketed with black banners commemorating the martyrdom of Hussein Ali. But Christians live openly here, and they describe Hezbollah as a tolerant group that has steadfastly supported their presence, even sending Christmas cards to Christian neighbors like Gholam.

Gholam, who throws a party every year in honor of Nasrallah’s birthday and places a photo of him in her Christmas tree, is certainly an anomaly. But other Christian families also speak approvingly of their life under Hezbollah, especially when compared to its predecessor, Amal, which they say forced many Christian residents to sell their homes. In contrast, Hezbollah extended financial support to the Christian families when Dahiyeh needed rebuilding after the civil war and the 2006 war with Israel.

Rony Khoury, a Maronite Christian who was born in Harat Hreik and still lives in the same apartment, says he feels comfortable drinking alcohol on his front porch, in full view of members of Hezbollah, and his wife feels no pressure to don a head scarf or follow other rules governing Muslim women's attire. They have property in a predominantly Christian area of Beirut, but have no desire to move.

But I don't see a lot of folks from the US flocking to immigrate to Iran.

Stupid, cherry picking article.

The deal. Same goes for those in the United StaTes

This is just so fucking stupid