Joke of the Week: Iran Accuse U.S to have Terrorist Training Schools!

Once in a while, I enjoy surfing websites that are run by crazies and nut-jobs. Recently, I have been reading a lot of articles in Press TV. I want to see what Propaganda looks like these days. However, I must say I was quite surprised. This article captured my mind:

US runs academic courses to train terrorists: Iran MP
An Iranian lawmaker says the United States and its close ally, Israel, are the main sponsors of terrorism in the world, and run academic courses on terrorist subjects.

The funniest part was that they have included this picture (on the right) as a proof of these courses.

This picture is from a U.S. Command Center and it has nothing to with any sort of training and/or courses in any schools or universities. So much for honesty and/or integrity of this so-called "News-Source".

So Iran accuse U.S to have Terrorist Training courses. Really?! I really would love to hear the official definition of “terrorism” according to the Iranian Regime. I believe terrorism is quite clear: targeting civilian population to send a political message or make political gains. That is pretty much the broad definition of terrorism. American forces are not intentionally targeting civilians to send a political message. There is no American Policy handed down in the military to target civilians to send a political message or gain. It is Iran and their proxies in the region who are constantly involved in acts of terrorism in order to destabilize the region for political gain for the Islamic Regime of Iran. From Iraq, to Afghanistan, to Yemen, to Saudi Arabia, to Israel, to Bulgaria, to South East Asia, to Argentina: foot prints of the Iranian Regime and their acts of terror have been identified. Their diplomats and embassies in every continent have provided safe heaven to terrorist in order to TARGET innocent civilians. Yet, they are accusing U.S of training people for terrorism.
The funniest part is that Iranian people themselves are sick of these acts. They do not want to be associated with terrorism around the globe and that is one of the significant aspects of their hatred for this government. Iranian Regime from its inception back in 1979 started programs to promote and train terrorists. If you have any doubts, read the book that entails diaries of Ayatollah Montazeri. Right after the revolution, without any delay, Iran started programs to export their “Islamic Revolution.” It resulted in an unnecessary war with Iraq that killed over two million people. Instead of rebuilding the country, this regime started globalizing their deadly ideology and used terrorism to expand its influence in the region. This regime has never had any respect for civilian life and that is why “terrorism” is a simple tool for them to promote their ideologies. They see killing civilians as a justified military method to exert their superiority and power in the region. This regime would not hesitate to blatantly rape and murder its own citizens let-alone when it comes to other nations. Having these track records, of course this regime and its propaganda mouth-pieces would accuse other nations of terrorism.
Just for the humor part, wasn’t it the Iranian Regime who established terrorist camps right after the 1979 revolution in the “holy” city of Qum? Wasn’t Iran who mastered the art of suicide bombing and promoting it in the region? Wasn’t it Iran who started training terrorists and exported them to other nations?
I just find it very funny that Press TV would publish stuff like these. I have a feeling that there might be an internal competition as to who could put the stupidest article as new on that website.

The Fight for Israel is the Fight for Humanity

I read an article in Ynetnews.org and I must say I was very impressed. However, what caught my attention is this:

If a Jewish, democratic state is inherently discriminatory, indeed "racist," those who oppose it can be honored as "freedom fighters." If Israel "steals Arab lands," then those who struggle to regain what is rightfully theirs are reasonable. If Israeli settlements are "illegal," it is a crime that should be punished. This ugly portrait of Israel is intentional, one that has no descriptive shades, no positive images, or perspective. It is one-dimensional evil.
The power of propaganda is that it lacks critical thinking, the essence of brainwashing. Delegitimizing Israel, therefore, needs to be reconsidered not only as an informational problem, but as a philosophical issue.
For the first time in history, Christian and Muslim Jew-hatred, liberals, anarchists, fascists and communists, dictators and presidents have merged into a formidable coalition against Israel, an international, multi-faceted onslaught to bring Israel to its knees.

Propaganda lacks Critical Thinking:

For many years, I have been screaming that Palestinian Cause has been nothing but propaganda. When you are dealing with propaganda, it lacks critical thinking as this article mentions. Once it lacks critical thinking, you see many questionable stories of what is presented as “facts” to back their arguments. The perfect way of getting around is by making over-generalizing arguments such as “Gazans are starving” or “it is an open-air prisoner” or “Israel is a stolen land”. Once this kind of arguments is being made, it legitimizes the total destruction of Israel as an country and ultimately the brutal murder or removal of its people. Then my question is this: how would these people even support peace when they are resorting to deceits, lies, and propaganda to form an argument against a party to a negotiation process?! How does the “Shalom Akhshov (Peace Now)” or “Betzlem” legitimize their actions through being “pro-peace”? Plus, why would Israel even negotiate with such school of mind when the ultimate goal of your opposing party is your total destruction?! There is no answer to this question.
The lack of critical thinking in a “cause” or “method of thinking” is what would destroy a nation that is supporting such cause. History is perfect example of it and this region is the prime example of it. From Palestinian territories to Iran’s ruling regime to Egypt’s newly formed government, they have abandoned critical thinking and their living standards, their economy, their cultural progress, and many other aspect of their society are taking hits or been installed as the result of such disastrous move. Egypt is only beginning to walk down that path which is a government that lacks critical thinking. I cannot wait to see what happens to it.
Israel on the other hand has always kept open the critical thinking process. It has been done by guaranteeing the basic freedoms and protecting them by any means necessary. That is why Israel is THE ONLY FLOURISHING DEMOCRACY IN THE REGION!

Formidable alliance between Dictators, Faschists, Communists, Islamist...

As you go through that list, you could see who would jump on the Pro-Palestinian band wagon. They have one thing in common which is the “critical thinking” aspect of it. Many of these groups including “Islamist” are fierce enemies of “Critical Thinking”. Even the adversaries of “peace” have abandoned such thinking. Israel is not only protecting itself in this battle against these groups, Israel is the actual front line against dictator, fascists, communists, and people who lack of “critical thinking” and wants to remove it from the society by making claims that they are the ones who hold the “ultimate truth”. They are the one who are arguing that “look my ways is the truth of reality and if you deny it, you question it through ‘critical thinking’, you are denying the truth and therefore you have committed a crime.” This is the path to dictatorship and Middle-Ages mentality. Israel’s fight is not only to protect itself, rather than it is the fight for humanity. This is the ultimate fight of “good v. evil”. As history has proven it, good will always overcomes evil.
For the majority of the anti-Israel camp, most of these ideologies have been either destroyed, taken huge blows, and/or they are on their decline. The fight for Israel or to destroy Israel is a way for these groups to legitimize or revitalizing these bankrupt schools of thoughts by tapping into the old global anti-Semitism. They need to do this in order to buy support for their dying causes who are nothing but frauds or they are at their deathbeds. Israel will be victorious in this battle. There is no question about it, however, the question who wants to be on the right side of the history here.

CAIR’s 9/11 Message is Nothing but a Lie

Today is the 10th Anniversary of September 11th attack on World Trade Center and Pentagon. That is the day that changed the course of history and the last decade. The results were two wars and hundreds of thousands of people dead on both sides.
Of course what pursued after that day is subject to different argument and perspective. That is something I will not do because there is no point in it. However, what grabbed my attention was CAIR’s (Council for Islamic-American Relation) announcement for the anniversary. The leader said:

“It was always a gang of criminals, called al-Qaeda, who happened to be Muslim, who are trying to justify their acts through faith and through religion,” Rehab said. Rehab says the American people should not allow politicians, right-wingers and TV networks make them fear fellow Americans who are Muslim.

First and foremost, it was not a Gang of Criminals WHO HAPPENED TO BE MUSLIM. It was a Gang of criminals who WERE Muslims and having faith in Islamic FUNDAMENTALIST was the motivating factor behind their attack. It was no accident that they were Muslim. Being Muslim was a big factor in motivating them to conduct such deadly attack. What sect of Islam is the responsible party is a different argument. However, let’s not deceive the world. The second issue is that they were not a gang criminals. As a matter of fact, many of these terrorist did not have any criminal records. The acts in itself is criminal. However, up to the point of attack, they pretty much held a clean criminal record. Therefore, this statement in itself is a lie because 1. They were not a gang of criminals and 2. they did not “happen” to be Muslims.
However, on the eve of September 11th, there are major issues that CAIR needs to address instead of such a pathetic statement that is nothing but a lie. Instead of stepping up to the plate, they simply passed the bucket and blamed others for their problems. CAIR needs to tackle issues such as their ties to Islamic Terrorist Groups such as Hamas. CAIR needs to clean its act and its stand against Israel before it could even try to blame others for the problem. CIAR has been misleading Americans for way too long and only recently FBI finally got the memo and cut off contact with this group. This group has been subject to numerous investigations.
The main issue is CAIR being a group that support terrorism and they use Islamic law of Taghieh (which allows for a Muslim to lie and deceive for greater good of Islam) to push their agenda. One should not mistake CAIR with typical Muslims. In the U.S., 99.99% of Muslims are peaceful Muslims that have found refuge in this country and they are simply trying to go through their lives. I personally happen to have a lot of friends who are Muslims. However, groups like CAIR are not the representative of these people.
CAIR needs to clean up its act. They need to take a stronger stand against ALL SORTS OF ATTACK ON CIVILIANS INCLUDING ISRAELIS. If CAIR wants to be taken seriously, they need to stop encouraging Anti-Israel actions on campuses, support for Islamic Groups in the region, and using their resources to put a more humanitarian face on the terrorist groups in Israel.

Unknown Heroes Behind the Mission that Located Osama Bin Laden

This is an amazing story about a man who was behind the mission who captured the arch terrorist of our decade or possibly this century. Heroes like these never receive public acknowledgment of their success nor will they ever be publicly thanked by the main-stream Media. It has to do with these agents safety and security. However, some of it has to do with the fact that our society has lost touch with who are the true heroes of our society. They are more concerned about consumerist and pop-culture heroes or some dumb singers, actors, and/or activist doing something for publicity stunt and they hold them up as to be the icon of our society. However, heroes like these don’t need public recognition of their good work. I believe they get the true satisfaction when they can see the title “mission accomplish” and that would be more than enough for them. From bottom of my heart, I salute heroes like “John” and I thank them for their hard work. Here is the story from MSNBC.com:

WASHINGTON — After Navy SEALs killed Osama Bin Laden, the White House released a photo of President Barack Obama and his Cabinet inside the Situation Room, watching the daring raid unfold.
Hidden from view, standing just outside the frame of that now-famous photograph was a career CIA analyst. In the hunt for the world's most-wanted terrorist, there may have been no one more important. His job for nearly a decade was finding the al-Qaida leader. The analyst was the first to put in writing last summer that the CIA might have a legitimate lead on finding Bin Laden. He oversaw the collection of clues that led the agency to a fortified compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. His was among the most confident voices telling Obama that Bin Laden was probably behind those walls.
The CIA will not permit him to speak with reporters. But interviews with former and current U.S. intelligence officials reveal a story of quiet persistence and continuity that led to the greatest counterterrorism success in the history of the CIA.
Nearly all the officials insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to reporters or because they did not want their names linked to the Bin Laden operation.
The Associated Press has agreed to the CIA's request not to publish his full name and withhold certain biographical details so that he would not become a target for retribution.
Call him John, his middle name. John was among the hundreds of people who poured into the CIA's Counterterrorism Center after the Sept. 11 attacks, bringing fresh eyes and energy to the fight.
Disparate strands
He had been a standout in the agency's Russian and Balkan departments. When Vladimir Putin was coming to power in Russia, for instance, John pulled together details overlooked by others and wrote what some colleagues considered the definitive profile of Putin. He challenged some of the agency's conventional wisdom about Putin's KGB background and painted a much fuller portrait of the man who would come to dominate Russian politics.
That ability to spot the importance of seemingly insignificant details, to weave disparate strands of information into a meaningful story, gave him a particular knack for hunting terrorists. "He could always give you the broader implications of all these details we were amassing," said John McLaughlin, who as CIA deputy director was briefed regularly by John in the mornings after the 2001 attacks.
From 2003, when he joined the Counterterrorism Center, through 2005, John was one of the driving forces behind the most successful string of counterterrorism captures in the fight against terrorism: Abu Zubaydah, Abd al-Nashiri, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, Ramzi Bin Alshib, Hambali and Faraj al-Libi. But there was no greater prize than finding Bin Laden. Bin Laden had slipped away from U.S. forces in the Afghan mountains of Tora Bora in 2001, and the CIA believed he had taken shelter in the lawless tribal areas of Pakistan.
In 2006, the agency mounted Operation Cannonball, an effort to establish bases in the tribal regions and find Bin Laden. Even with all its money and resources, the CIA could not locate its prime target.
By then, the agency was on its third director since Sept. 11, 2001. John had outlasted many of his direct supervisors who retired or went on to other jobs. The CIA doesn't like to keep its people in one spot for too long. They become jaded. They start missing things. John didn't want to leave. He'd always been persistent. In college, he walked on to a Division I basketball team and hustled his way into a rotation full of scholarship players.
The CIA offered to promote him and move him somewhere else. John wanted to keep the Bin Laden file. Champagne was uncorked at the CIA's headquarters after it was confirmed that Navy SEALs had killed Osama Bin Laden.
He examined and re-examined every aspect of Bin Laden's life. How did he live while hiding in Sudan? With whom did he surround himself while living in Kandahar, Afghanistan? What would a Bin Laden hideout look like today?
'We'll get there'
The CIA had a list of potential leads, associates and family members who might have access to Bin Laden. "Just keep working that list bit by bit," one senior intelligence official recalls John telling his team. "He's there somewhere. We'll get there." John rose through the ranks of the counterterrorism center, but because of his nearly unrivaled experience, he always had influence beyond his title. One former boss confessed that he didn't know exactly what John's position was. "I knew he was the guy in the room I always listened to," the official said. While he was shepherding the hunt for Bin Laden, John also was pushing to expand the Predator program, the agency's use of unmanned airplanes to launch missiles at terrorists.
The CIA largely confined those strikes to targets along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan. But in late 2007 and early 2008, John said the CIA needed to carry out those attacks deeper inside Pakistan. It was a risky move. Pakistan was an important but shaky ally. John's analysts saw an increase in the number of Westerners training in Pakistani terrorist camps. John worried that those men would soon start showing up on U.S. soil. "We've got to act," John said, a former senior intelligence official recalls. "There's no explaining inaction." John took the analysis to then CIA Director Michael Hayden, who agreed and took the recommendation to President George W. Bush.
In the last months of the Bush administration, the CIA began striking deeper inside Pakistan. Obama immediately adopted the same strategy and stepped up the pace. Recent attacks have killed al-Qaida's No. 3 official, Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, and Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud. All the while, John's team was working the list of Bin Laden leads. In 2007, a female colleague whom the AP has also agreed not to identify decided to zero in on a man known as Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, a nom de guerre.
Other terrorists had identified al-Kuwaiti as an important courier for al-Qaida's upper echelon, and she believed that finding him might help lead to Bin Laden. "They had their teeth clenched on this and they weren't going to let go," McLaughlin said of John and his team. "This was an obsession." It took three years, but in August 2010, al-Kuwaiti turned up on a National Security Agency wiretap. The female analyst, who had studied journalism at a Big Ten university, tapped out a memo for John, "Closing in on Bin Laden Courier," saying her team believed al-Kuwaiti was somewhere on the outskirts of Islamabad.
Bigger picture
As the CIA homed in on al-Kuwaiti, John's team continually updated the memo with fresh information. Everyone knew that anything with Bin Laden's name on it would shoot right to the director's desk and invite scrutiny, so the early drafts played down hopes that the courier would lead to Bin Laden. But John saw the bigger picture. The hunt for al-Kuwaiti was effectively the hunt for Bin Laden, and he was not afraid to say so. The revised memo was finished in September 2010. John, by then deputy chief of the Pakistan-Afghanistan Department, emailed it to those who needed to know. The title was "Anatomy of a Lead."
As expected, the memo immediately became a hot topic inside CIA headquarters and Director Leon Panetta wanted to know more. John never overpromised, colleagues recall, but he was unafraid to say there was a good chance this might be the break the agency was looking for.
The CIA tracked al-Kuwaiti to a walled compound in Abbottabad. If Bin Laden was hiding there, in a busy suburb not far from Pakistan's military academy, it challenged much of what the agency had assumed about his hideout.
But John said it wasn't that far-fetched. Drawing on what he knew about Bin Laden's earlier hideouts, he said it made sense that Bin Laden had surrounded himself only with his couriers and family and did not use phones or the Internet. The CIA knew that top al-Qaida operatives had lived in urban areas before. A cautious Panetta took the information to Obama, but there was much more work to be done. The government tried everything to figure out who was in that compound.
In a small house nearby, the CIA put people who would fit in and not draw any attention. They watched and waited but turned up nothing definitive. Satellites captured images of a tall man walking the grounds of the compound, but never got a look at his face.
Again and again, John and his team asked themselves who else might be living in that compound. They came up with five or six alternatives; Bin Laden was always the best explanation.
This went on for months. By about February, John told his bosses, including Panetta, that the CIA could keep trying, but the information was unlikely to get any better. He told Panetta this might be their best chance to find Bin Laden and it would not last forever. Panetta made that same point to the president.
Panetta held regular meetings on the hunt, often concluding with an around-the-table poll: How sure are you that this is Bin Laden? John was always bullish, rating his confidence as high as 80 percent. Others weren't so sure, especially those who had been in the room for operations that went bad. Not two years earlier, the CIA thought it had an informant who could lead him to Bin Laden's deputy. That man blew himself up at a base in Khost, Afghanistan, killing seven CIA employees and injuring six others.
That didn't come up in the meetings with Panetta, a senior intelligence official said. But everyone knew the risk the CIA was taking if it told the president that Bin Laden was in Abbottabad and was wrong. "We all knew that if he wasn't there and this was a disaster, certainly there would be consequences," the official recalled.
Reassuring confidence
John was among several CIA officials who repeatedly briefed Obama and others at the White House. Current and former officials involved in the discussions said John had a coolness and a reassuring confidence.
By April, the president had decided to send the Navy SEALs to assault the compound. Though the plan was in motion, John went back to his team, a senior intelligence official said. "Right up to the last hour," he told them, "if we get any piece of information that suggests it's not him, somebody has to raise their hand before we risk American lives."
Nobody did. Inside the Situation Room, the analyst who was barely known outside the close-knit intelligence world took his place alongside the nation's top security officials, the household names and well-known faces of Washington.
An agonizing 40 minutes after Navy SEALs stormed the compound, the report came back: Bin Laden was dead. John and his team had guessed correctly, taking an intellectual risk based on incomplete information. It was a gamble that ended a decade of disappointment. Later, Champagne was uncorked back at the CIA, where those in the Counterterrorism Center who had targeted Bin Laden for so long celebrated. John's team reveled in the moment.
Two days after Bin Laden's death, John accompanied Panetta to Capitol Hill. The Senate Intelligence Committee wanted a full briefing on the successful mission. At one point in the private session, Panetta turned to the man whose counterterrorism resume spanned four CIA directors.
He began to speak, about the operation and about the years of intelligence it was based on. And as he spoke about the mission that had become his career, the calm, collected analyst paused, and he choked up.

Click here for the link to the story on MSNBC.com