Israpundit

by Jerry Gordon

One Iraq? C’mon, even the Iraqi constitution, with banal elements of Sharia in it that the US fashioned with the aid of Kanan Makiya - an Iraqi Shia expatriate academic consultant from Brandeis and controversial Noah Feldman - a Jewish professor from NYU Law School, recognized sectarian turfs in this artificial country.

After Saddam Hussein’s foot was lifted from the necks of his haplessly oppressed subjects - Kurds, Sunni and Shia - we got a snake pit of sectarianism. The Iraq constitution recognized the ethnic religious divisions of this made up country as a good Plan B. So, federation is obviously in the cards.

Even more so since the Iraqi oil revenue sharing plan went south. The al Maliki government in Baghdad can’t or won’t contain Shiite insurgents or the Qods Force suppliers of explosive devices used to kill U.S. troops. What option is there, but to implement federation in fractured Iraq? (more…)

by Gil Ronen, INN

(IsraelNN.com) Former US ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton told Conservative Party delegates in Britain Sunday that efforts by the UN to negotiate with Iran had failed and that he saw no alternative to a pre-emptive strike on suspected nuclear facilities in the country. Influential conservative thinker Norman Podhoretz told a British paper that he has advised President George W. Bush to do just that.

“This is not an attractive option, but after four-plus frustrating years watching European diplomacy fail time and time again and watching our options more and more constrained, I do not know what the alternative is,” Bolton told delegates at the Conservative Party’s annual conference in the northern British holiday town of Blackpool. “Because life is about choices,” he said, “I think we have to consider the use of military force. I think we have to look at a limited strike against their nuclear facilities.”
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By Fred Abbas

Nowadays, we see Arabs, Persians, and Turks fighting so hard to cancel any gains Kurds made in Kurdistan of Iraq or within the new Federal Iraq by the use of sanction, embargo, isolation, and threats.

A few days ago Iran closed its border with Kurdistan to prevent any goods coming to it; on the other hand, Syria and Turkey are working in tandem do the same or in gradual manner. A few days ago, the Iraqi Oil Minister, Hussein al Shahristani declared any agreements with Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) to be an illegal agreement and during a recent interview with CBS he said ” Iraq’s neighbors - Syria, Iran and even Turkey - have said they will only allow oil over the border to market that is being exported by the federal government”.
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By MARK STEYN

“I’m proud of my university today,” Stina Reksten, a 28-year-old Columbia graduate student from Norway, told the New York Times. “I don’t want to confuse the very dire human rights situation in Iran with the issue here, which is freedom of speech. This is about academic freedom.”

Isn’t it always? But enough about Iran, let’s talk about me! The same university that shouted down an American anti-illegal-immigration activist and the same university culture that just deemed former Harvard honcho Larry Summers too misogynist to be permitted on campus is now congratulating itself over its commitment to “academic freedom.” True, renowned Stanford psychology professor Philip Zimbardo is not happy. “They can have any fascist they want there,” said professor Zimbardo, “but this seems egregious.” But, hey, don’t worry: He was protesting not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s presence at Columbia but Donald Rumsfeld’s presence at the Hoover Institution.

At some point during this past week, it was decided that the relevant Ahmadinejad comparison was to Nikita Krushchev. The Soviet leader toured America in 1960, was taken to a turkey farm, paid a visit to Frank Sinatra and Co. on the set of “Can-Can” and pronounced the movie “decadent.” And yet the republic survived. As one of my most distinguished fellow columnists, Peggy Noonan, put it in the Wall Street Journal, Krushchev’s visit reminded the world that “we are the confident nation.” And, as several e-mailers observed, warming to Noonan’s theme, back then hysterical right-wing ninnies didn’t get their panties in a twist just because a man dedicated to the destruction of our way of life was in town for a couple of days. CONTINUE

Kingdom Urges New Approach to Middle East
P.K. Abdul Ghafour, Arab News

JEDDAH, 30 September 2007 — Saudi Arabia yesterday called upon major international powers to change the current approach toward the Arab-Israeli conflict and find a just and lasting solution to the 60-year-old dispute in order to promote world peace and save the region from an impending catastrophe.

[For Arabs a “just solution” means undoing ‘67 and ‘48.]

Addressing the 62nd session of the UN General Assembly in New York, Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal said the Israeli occupation of Arab territories was the main reason for the spread of extremism and terrorism in the region.

[Utter nonsense]
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