From the ABC

Iran labels Israel 'dying tree'
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has again made provocative statements about Israel, this time calling the Jewish state "a rotten, dried tree that will be eliminated by one storm".

He has made the comments at the start of a three-day international conference in Tehran, where Islamic leaders are discussing how to raise funds for the new Hamas-led Palestinian Authority.

Mr Ahmadinejad has predicted that Israel will soon be "annihilated by a storm".

"Whether you like it or not, the Zionist regime is approaching its end," he said.

"The Zionist regime is a dying tree and soon its branches will all be broken down."

Funding call
Opening the conference, Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has called on Islamic nations to give all possible support to the Palestinian people and the new Government.

Ayatollah Khamenei has also lashed out at the United States and Israel.

"America, like a guardian, defends the rights of this occupying regime and the international treaties and agreements will be ignored," he said.

"This country even attacks the neighbouring countries like Egypt, Lebanon and Syria and even takes their land."

The Iranian President provoked an international outcry last year when he rejected the Holocaust and said Israel should be "wiped off the map".

Read more at the ABC
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Gus ponders...
Where's than aggressive anger coming from, I may ask? Is it something I said or is it due to a succession of international threats and deadly wars using Saddam as a foil that have pushed this madman over the edge?... Unless we tone down our rhetoric ourselves we've got no leg to stand on, apart from howling howitzers...

WE need to find a compromise soon, even if it is an uneasy stand off, but not war again... One of the problem is that every time we could possibly solve an issue there is band of our rabid evangelists who want to conquer their landscape... even peacefully, with honorable help in hand... but conquer their mind they wish. Not accounting for our profiteers who rub their hands anywhere anytime anyhow... Peace? let's cooperate and loot... War? Let's fight and loot... Open slater? let's loot and loot... Spoils the ethics and the altruism of humanity even if these fellows like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad do not understand the meaning of humanity yet... We can't behave like hooligans with nukes in hand and thunder on all sides... it's very untidy... Somebody will die and usually it's bystanders... billions of bystanders? See the problem is not the accuracy of the hits which we would expect to be GPS millimetre quality, but the fall out... Not the nuke fall out, but the revenge factor... Rippling across the planet like a strong bad desperate smell of mustard gas....

Someone needs to start rewriting Ahmadinejad's speeches and those of Bushee soon...and help put a sock in those of Blair and his minions...

We don't hear much from our grocer in chief on this subject, apart from a few diplomatic farts, himself may be worried that — although his whitewash at the Cole inquiry — so transparent he may as well not have been there — was not allowed to dig into his mind with a sharp knife (so sorry I meant question) — someone may come with the idea of a class action suing the PM for telling porkies or not, or being incompetent in leading a group of people who did not tell him anything about nothing... and praising them to boot. Say, 10 bucks a head, find a million people prepared to that end, a hundred Gs to manage the fund and Bob's your uncle Pete... recall everybody involved, including Peter Reith, and tie the noose end (sorry I meant loose end) so we can get to bottom of this with precision. At the moment, the government appears to be swimming in balmy autumnal vagueness nearly as bad as my own senioritised memory. But then I do not claim to be a leader of men and women, and although I can hardly remember the time of the day, I can remember with great precision if someone gave me a hefty fright... or a backhand...

But then we could make him an offer, get out of the primordial grocery business and let him use his sensational magic "Trompe L'Oeil" skills to broker a deal between the west and Iran... If someone can do it, it's our Johnnee... That would be swell...

‘The current pressure to attack
Iran is building. The hard right Israeli lobby in the United States is
advocating attacking Iran to stop the development of nuclear weapons. 

A full
page advertisement in The New York Times on April 4 on page A-15
sponsored by the American Jewish Committee urged an attack on Iran, drawing a
map with Iran in the center showing how far it is from various countries in
Asia, Europe and African asking: "Can anyone within range of Iran's
missiles feel safe?" 

Just as the pro-Israel lobby beat
the war drums for the invasion of Iraq, they are doing the same for Iran.
AIPAC, the powerful pro-Israeli lobby has a special page on Iran's
escalating threat. 

The concern of many has been
heightened by reported comments by Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
challenging the reality of the Holocaust and that Israel must be "wiped
off the map."’ 

The Investigative Reporter
vs. The President

From the ABC
Pope calls for nuclear diplomacy
Pope Benedict has called for an "honourable solution" to the nuclear standoff with Iran, a truly independent Palestinian state, and global cooperation to combat terrorism.

read more at the ABC

‘America’s own domestic law enforcement entity has defined
terrorism as “threatened use of force or violence”, intimidation, and coercion
against governments or civilian populations for the “furtherance of political
or social objectives”. 

What could be more threatening or
violent than a nuclear attack? What could be more coercive than the US
imposition of its will, culture, and ruthless economic agenda on a global
populace like a domineering father abusing his cowed children? Employing
terrorist tools of intimidation, coercion and threats of violence, the United
States consistently sets the political and social objectives for the rest of
the world. 

Remember, Iran, “All
options are on the table.”

America is the Don Corleone of
the world community. They make offers you can’t refuse. “Fat Man” and “Little
Boy” delivered the Sicilian message that nations defying the United States
would find many of their innocent civilians “sleeping with the fishes”. 200,000
dead Japanese showed the skeptics that the Godfather meant business.’ 

Forget the Middle
East