Eunice Shriver
August 12, 2009
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The Enemies List, Updated
August 12, 2009
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Iran warns opposition on prisoner rape claims
August 12, 2009
Iran’s powerful conservative camp rejected yesterday claims that election protesters were raped in custody and issued a stern warning to opposition leader Mehdi Karoubi for raising the allegations.
As the political turmoil raged on, lawmakers urged Iran to review ties with Western nations they accuse of “meddling” in its affairs, saying the US, Britain and France were backing opposition groups.
“The issue of detainees being sexually abused is a lie,” parliament speaker Ali Larijani told the assembly, the official Irna news agency reported…
Defeated presidential candidate Karoubi claimed in a letter to powerful cleric Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani that several protesters had been raped and called for an investigation.
“A number of detainees have said that some female detainees have been raped savagely. Young boys held in detention have also been savagely raped,” Karoubi said in a letter dated July 29.
His allegation surfaced as the Islamic Republic continues to battle a damaging political crisis triggered by the June 12 re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, which the opposition claims was rigged.
But Larijani issued a stern warning over the rape claims.
“This is also a warning to politicians to take care and not to make any claims to the media before a proper investigation is done so that it is not exploited by foreigners,” he said.
Who’s In Your Wallet?
August 12, 2009
French ban Muslim woman from pool for wearing ‘burkini’ swimsuit
August 12, 2009
Telegraph: (pic at link)
The woman, named only as Carole, 35, was told that the garment, a swimsuit that covers most of the body, was “inappropriate” clothing for a public baths.
Pool staff said her three-piece Islamic swimsuit she bought in Dubai – consisting of a headscarf, tunic and trousers – was against pool regulations and unhygienic.
They had “reminded her of the rules that apply in all [public] swimming pools which forbid swimming while clothed,” said Daniel Guillaume, a manager at the pool in the suburb of Emerainville.
The ban was imposed as President Nicolas Sarkozy’s government is considering an outright ban on all Islamic dress, such as the head-to-toe burka or niqab, that it considers a “sign of subservience” and “not welcome” in France.
“Burkini” is derived from the words bikini and burka.
Carole, who converted to Islam aged 17, said that one lifeguard had initially given her permission to wear the garment…
The Congressional Budget Office Town Hall Meeting
August 12, 2009
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Biden’s Speechwriter
August 12, 2009
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Man jumps into river to escape nagging wife
August 12, 2009
BEIJING, Aug. 10 — A 45-year-old man jumped into the Yangtze River from a ship because he was frustrated with his “constantly nagging” wife on August 4th.
The last words Zhou spoke before jumping into the river were: “I want some peace.”
Everyone on the ship thought Zhou would drown in the roaring water. However, he swam to shore and local police found him.
Seeing him alive, his nagging wife, surnamed Hu, 42, hugged him and promised to try and keep quiet.
The Shame of Academia: College presidents refused to condemn Nazism- will they do better with Iran?
August 12, 2009
How should America’s university presidents respond to the savagery in Iran today?
The incarcerated student protesters forced to lick toilet bowls. The imprisoned dissidents beaten to death in holding pens, some with their fingernails torn out. The many murdered protesters, including Neda Agha-Soltan, the now-iconic young philosophy student shot in cold blood. The banning of foreign and domestic journalists from honest coverage or even access to news events. The arrest of professors and shuttering of academic institutions.
Here are a few hints from another era.
Night of the Long Knives. Kristallnacht. Auschwitz. Nuremberg.
Too strong a comparison unless what takes place next in Iran is mass murder?
Granted, vast differences exist between Nazi Germany then and Islamic Iran now. But the vast similarities are also plain. The insistence that state power trumps individual rights. The unaccountable supreme leader. The mass trial. The phony exhortations by rulers to a nonexistent Volk, a unified people. The attacks on and discrimination against women. The existence of militia-like forces, wreaking violence on dissidents. Fascism is fascism…
This time, though, our academic leaders should get it right. Because Stephen H. Norwood’s just-published, brilliantly researched, utterly thorough and morally upsetting The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower: Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses (Cambridge University Press) shows how they got it wrong in the 1930s. A chilling chronicle of pro-Nazi enthusiasm, shabby indifference, and amoral tolerance toward Hitler in elite American academe of the 1930s, this book should exert direct impact in this season of cracking heads and bones in Tehran. It relentlessly names names, depositing fact after sordid fact before the reader in a way that leaves its implications for then and today overwhelming.
Norwood, a professor of history at the University of Oklahoma and co-editor of the Encyclopedia of American Jewish History, attracted media attention when he unpacked some findings in the past. At a conference last year about Columbia University’s ties to Nazi Germany, he detailed how its longtime president, Nicholas Murray Butler, invited the Nazi ambassador Hans Luther to campus in 1933, remained friendly with Nazi-run German universities into the mid-30s, and punished Columbia faculty members and students who protested.
Speaking at a 2004 Boston University conference on the Holocaust, Norwood shared other research that now appears in his fully detailed chapter on Harvard’s bad behavior. In the updated version, he describes in gruesome detail how prominent “Harvard alumni, student leaders, The Harvard Crimson, and several Harvard professors assumed a leading role in the 10-day welcome and reception accorded the Nazi warship Karlsruhe when it visited Boston in May 1934.”
At the 25th reunion that year of the Class of 09, writes Norwood, President James Bryant Conant, who’d sailed the previous year to Europe on a Nazi ocean liner, feted Ernst Hanfstaengl, “one of Hitler’s earliest backers” and his foreign-press chief. In the summer of 1935, Harvard allowed its student band to perform regularly on a Nazi ship. In 1936, Conant dispatched a delegate to help celebrate the 550th anniversary of the Nazified University of Heidelberg, despite its bonfire of “un-German” books in 1933. Conant allowed the German consul in Boston to place a laurel wreath, swastika affixed, in one of Harvard’s memorial chapels. Conant continued to maintain until Kristallnacht, Norwood writes, that Nazi universities remained part of the “learned world” and should be treated politely. In the 1950s, Conant, then U.S. ambassador to Germany, drew repeated denunciations from Congressional officials for his efforts to free Nazi war criminals, including some of the most bestial.
And who knew that the “stiff-armed Nazi salute and Sieg Heil chant” was “modeled on a gesture and a shout” that Hanfstaengl had used as a Harvard football cheerleader?
Air Pork One
August 12, 2009
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On The Plus Side
August 12, 2009
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