US corners 42 percent of world arms market

Posted on October 2, 2007 by kf1

The United States reaffirmed last year its leadership in world arms trade, cornering nearly 42 percent of the market as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan prompted a weapons shopping spree among neighboring nations, according to a congressional report set to be released Monday.

But the overall volume of weapons trade shrunk almost 13 percent, dealing a blow to France and other Western European suppliers, which are facing stiff competition from across the Atlantic, said the Congressional Research Service in its annual survey of international arms sales.

The United States ranked first in international arms transfer agreements last year, concluding 16.9 billion dollars worth of them and securing 41.9 percent of the market, according to the report.

The total represented a 3.4-billion-dollar increase over 2005.

Russia boosted its worldwide arms sales by 1.2 billion dollars, ending 2006 in second place with a total of 8.7 billion dollars, or 21.6 percent of the market.

Britain came in third, but its arms exports grew only 200 million over 2005 and the overall volume of arms transfer deals stood at just 3.1 billion dollars, less than a fifth of the US total.

All told, the United States, Russia and Britain controlled last year more than 71 percent of international arms trade.

But the size of the market has shrunk as major buyers took a pause to absorb previous purchases.

Worldwide weapons orders, according to the report, declined from 46.3 billion dollars in 2005 to 40.3 billion last year.

Western European nations were among those hit hardest by the slump. The four major regional suppliers — France, Britain, Germany and Italy — saw the collective value of their arms agreements with developing nations drop by half — from 10.9 billion dollars in 2005 to 5.5 billion last year.

Meanwhile, Western Europe’s market share decreased, according to the report, from 34.4 percent to 19.1 percent.

Richard Grimmett, the top national defense expert at the CRS and main author of the study, made it clear he saw growing competition from the United States as the main reason for the European Union’s woes.

“The demand for US weapons in the global arms marketplace, from a large established client base, has created a more difficult environment for individual West European suppliers to secure large new contracts with developing nations on a sustained basis,” he wrote.

But Grimmett also noted a major shift in political and economic interests driving post-Cold War era international weapons sales.

During the Cold War, he argued, the underlying rationale for US arms sales was to ensure adequate arms supplies to friendly states.

“Today that motivation may be based as much on economic considerations as those of foreign or national security policy,” the expert pointed out.

But the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with the traditional rivalry between India and Pakistan, seemed to be fueling regional arms races.

Pakistan, a key US partner in the war on terror, ranked first last year among all developing world weapons purchasers after concluding 5.1 billion dollars worth of arms deals, the CRS said.

India came in a distant second with 3.5 billion while Saudi Arabia, a nervous neighbor of Iraq and Iran, ranked third with 3.2 billion in arms agreements.

The United States will be selling Pakistan, among other things, 36 upgraded versions of the F-16 fighter aircraft for 1.4 billion dollars, a variety of missiles and bombs for them for over 640 million, and 52 million dollars worth of upgrades for self-propelled howitzers.

In Saudi Arabia, it will be modernizing the kingdom’s AH-64A Apache helicopters, a deal worth 340 million, and providing new military communications equipment, the report said.

Meanwhile, the United Arab Emirates are buying from Washington “Seasparrow” ship-to-air missiles for 106 million dollars.

Source

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From Iraq to Burma – Hypocrisy Rules the West By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

Posted on October 2, 2007 by kf1

Shame has vanished from Western “civilization.” Hypocrisy has taken its place.

On September 28, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown could be heard on National Public Radio decrying the use of violence against democratic protesters by the government in Burma. Brown declared the British people’s revulsion over the violence inflicted by the Burmese government on its people. But Brown said nothing about the violence the British government was inflicting on Iraqis and Afghans.

George W. Bush also struck the blameless pose when he declared: “The world is watching the people of Burma take to the streets to demand their freedom, and the American people stand in solidarity with these brave individuals.”

Bush and Brown do not have the same sympathy for the peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan. Neither Bush nor Brown stand in solidarity with those who are demanding their freedom from foreign occupation by American and British troops. Indeed, Bush and Brown, as commanders in chief, are on a killing spree that makes the government in Burma look extremely restrained by comparison.

Why were British soldiers sent to kill Iraqis and Afghans? September 11 had nothing whatsoever to do with the UK. No doubt but that the corrupt Tony Blair was paid off to drag the British people into Bush’s Middle East war for American/Israeli hegemony, but Brown has done nothing to terminate Bush’s use of the British military as mercenaries.

The NPR announcers also supported the Burmese people, but they, too, show little disturbance over Bush’s five-year old wars that we now know were based entirely on lies. Al Qaeda is not the Taliban, and Iraq had no WMD. Neither country was a threat to the US. Now that we know this, why does the media still give Bush and Brown a free pass to use violence against Iraqis and Afghans?

To cut to the chase, what is the difference between Bush and Brown on one hand and the murderous Burmese government on the other? Bush and Brown are actually worse. They pretend to be democrats concerned with what people actually want. The Burmese government doesn’t pretend to be anything but a military dictatorship. Moreover, the Burmese government is clean by comparison as it hasn’t committed acts of naked aggression–war crimes under the Nuremberg standard–by invading other countries and attempting to occupy them.

Despite all the killing Bush has accomplished, he thirsts for yet more blood. Iran is in his and Israel’s sights. All indications are that Bush is going to attack Iran. Propaganda, demonizations, and crass lies are pouring out of the Bush regime and its media and academic propagandists such as Columbia University president Lee Bollinger. Both parties in Congress have lined up behind the coming attack on Iran. The despicable senator Joe Lieberman even snuck language into a bill to give Bush the go ahead.

Who is going to stop Bush from a third war crime? Not his vice president, Not his national security adviser, not his secretary of defense. Not his secretary of state. Not Congress. Not the US military. Not the corporate fat cats. Not the Israel Lobby. Not the bought and paid for “allies.” Not the anti-war movement. Not the American people. Certainly not the media.

Americans are content with whatever crimes their government commits as long as the justification is Americans’ safety.

Americans’ willingness to murder others out of fear for their own safety is a result of September 11. The antiwar movement is impotent, because it has accepted the government’s 9/11 story. To oppose a war when you accept the government’s reason for the war is an indefensible position.

The Bush regime knows that if people will believe its 9/11 story, they will believe anything. Propaganda silences facts, and Americans fall for one set of falsehoods after another. The alleged 9/11 hijackers all came from countries allied with the US, principally Saudi Arabia, but Americans believe the government’s lies that Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and Syria are responsible. Americans have been convinced that without “regime change” in these countries, the American superpower will remain helpless in face of stateless Muslims armed with box cutters.

Americans have been brainwashed to believe that Muslims hate us for our “freedom and democracy,” whereas in fact the problem is the US government’s immoral foreign policy and interference in the internal affairs of Muslim countries. Bush’s message to the Middle East is clear: Be a puppet state or be destroyed.

In the meantime, to prevent democracy and civil liberties from getting in the way of making Americans safe, Bush has set aside habeas corpus, due process, right to legal representation, privacy, and the separation of powers mandated by the US Constitution. Otherwise, Bush says, we will lose the “war on terror.”

Bush says he has made Americans safe by ridding them of these constitutional impediments to their safety. And once American bombs fall on Iran and Syria, those countries will be free and democratic, too, like Iraq and Afghanistan.

In leading Americans to this conclusion, Bush has sunk the United States to a new low in human intelligence and morality.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

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Rabbis Meet Ahmadinejad In New York

Posted on October 2, 2007 by kf1

Rabbis-meet-with-iranian-President-Ahmadinejad-September-24-2007


PRESS TV reports: A number of Jewish rabbis carrying placards of “I’m a Jew, not a Zionist” have met President Ahmadinejad at his residence in New York.

The senior Jewish rabbi welcomed the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and called the meeting an extraordinary good fortune for the Jewish rabbis.

The senior Jewish rabbi said the memory of this meeting would never fade, adding that the Iranian President understands the Jews, and makes a distinction between the violent actions of the Zionists and Jewish religious belief which is of great importance for us.

President Ahmadinejad also expressed his delight at the meeting, saying, “All prophets share one mission, that is, the guidance of mankind. Today people of the world have come to realize the fact that Judaism is different from Zionism. Jews are followers of Moses and Zionists are seeking political opportunities.”

The rabbis offered a silver cup to Iran’s President in commemoration of Ahmadinejad’s friendship toward the Jewish community. Source

Neturei Karta: Ahmadinejad wants peace

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wants peace and is a friendly leader, Neturei Karta International spokesman Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss said in a statement issued ahead of a meeting between the Jewish organization leaders and the Islamic republic’s president.

“It is always our pleasure to visit with President Ahmadinejad. This will be the third such meeting, in addition to our many visits to Iran in the past. We have each time emphasized to the Iranian leadership that we have found the Iranian people and their leaders to be friendly and respectful,” Weiss wrote.

According to Weiss, the international accusations that the president is a warmonger are not true, and Israel is to blame for the tension in the Middle East. “Likewise, although we as Jews are not to be involved in politics, we have found the Iranian President to be a deeply religious man, dedicated to a peaceful world, based on mutual respect, fairness and dialogue.”

“This State continually oppresses other people in the name of Judaism and the entire Jewish people. This movement has exacerbated anti Semitism throughout the world. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad understands this distinction between traditional Judaism and Zionist distortion”, he added.

In the statement, Weiss added that Ahmadinejad had expressed his good intentions toward Iran’s Jews. “It is sad that so few have actually attempted to speak to the Iranian president or seek the true opinion of Iranian Jewry who live in peace and practice their faith throughout that nation”.

“We have met this man who has demonstrated time and again that he is sincerely interested in the well being of Iran’s Jewish community and has deep respect for world Jewry and their Torah faith, The Zionist attempt to socially isolate this man and his people is immoral and disastrous.” According to Weiss, the international community, and particularly the leadership in Jerusalem, should take an example from the Iranian leader. Source

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An Opening Shot for War on Iran? – Why Did Israel Attack Syria? By JONATHAN COOK

Posted on September 28, 2007 by kf1

Israel’s air strike on northern Syria earlier this month should be understood in the context of events unfolding since its assault last summer on neighboring Lebanon.

From the leaks so far, it seems that more than half a dozen Israeli warplanes violated Syrian airspace to drop munitions on a site close to the border with Turkey. We also know from the US media that the raid occurred in close coordination with the White House. But what was the purpose and significance of the attack?

It is worth recalling that, in the wake of Israel’s month-long war against Lebanon a year ago, a prominent American neoconservative, Meyrav Wurmser, wife of Vice-President Dick Cheney’s recently departed Middle East adviser, explained that the war had dragged on because the White House delayed in imposing a ceasefire. The neocons, she said, wanted to give Israel the time and space to expand the attack to Damascus.

The reasoning was simple: before an attack on Iran could be countenanced, Hizbullah in Lebanon had to be destroyed and Syria at the very least cowed. The plan was to isolate Tehran on these two other hostile fronts before going in for the kill.

But faced with constant rocket fire from Hizbullah last summer, Israel’s public and military nerves frayed at the first hurdle. Instead Israel and the US were forced to settle for a Security Council resolution rather than a decisive military victory.

The immediate fallout of the failed attack was an apparent waning of neocon influence. The group’s program of “creative destruction” in the Middle East — the encouragement of regional civil war and the partition of large states that threaten Israel — was at risk of being shunted aside.

Instead the “pragmatists” in the Bush Administration, led by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the new Defense Secretary Robert Gates, demanded a change of tack. The standoff reached a head in late 2006 when oilman James Baker and his Iraq Study Group began lobbying for a gradual withdrawal from Iraq — presumably only after a dictator, this one more reliable, had again been installed in Baghdad. It looked as if the neocons’ day in the sun had finally passed.

Israel’s leadership understood the gravity of the moment. In January 2007 the Herzliya conference, an annual festival of strategy-making, invited no less than 40 Washington opinion-formers to join the usual throng of Israeli politicians, generals, journalists and academics. For a week the Israeli and American delegates spoke as one: Iran and its presumed proxy, Hizbullah, were bent on the genocidal destruction of Israel. Tehran’s development of a nuclear program — whether for civilian use, as Iran argues, or for military use, as the US and Israel claim — had to be stopped at all costs.

While the White House turned uncharacteristically quiet all spring and summer about what it planned to do next, rumors that Israel was pondering a go-it-alone strike against Iran grew noisier by the day. Ex-Mossad officers warned of an inevitable third world war, Israeli military intelligence advised that Iran was only months away from the point of no return on developing a nuclear warhead, prominent leaks in sympathetic media revealed bombing runs to Gibraltar, and Israel started upping the pressure on several tens of thousands of Jews in Tehran to flee their homes and come to Israel.

While Western analysts opined that an attack on Iran was growing unlikely, Israel’s neighbors watched nervously through the first half of the year as the vague impression of a regional war came ever more sharply into focus. In particular Syria, after witnessing the whirlwind of savagery unleashed against Lebanon last summer, feared it was next in line in the US-Israeli campaign to break Tehran’s network of regional alliances. It deduced, probably correctly, that neither the US nor Israel would dare attack Iran without first clobbering Hizbullah and Damascus.

For some time Syria had been left in no doubt of the mood in Washington. It failed to end its pariah status in the post-9/11 period, despite helping the CIA with intelligence on al-Qaeda and secretly trying to make peace with Israel over the running sore of the occupied Golan Heights. It was rebuffed at every turn.

So as the clouds of war grew darker in the spring, Syria responded as might be expected. It went to the arms market in Moscow and bought up the displays of anti-aircraft missiles as well as anti-tank weapons of the kind Hizbullah demonstrated last summer were so effective at repelling Israel’s planned ground invasion of south Lebanon.

As the Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld reluctantly conceded earlier this year, US policy was forcing Damascus to remain within Iran’s uncomfortable embrace: “Syrian President Bashar al-Assad finds himself more dependent on his Iranian counterpart, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, than perhaps he would like.”

Israel, never missing an opportunity to wilfully misrepresent the behavior of an enemy, called the Syrian military build-up proof of Damascus’ appetite for war. Apparently fearful that Syria might initiate a war by mistaking the signals from Israel as evidence of aggressive intentions, the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, urged Syria to avoid a “miscalculation”. The Israeli public spent the summer braced for a far more dangerous repeat of last summer’s war along the northern border.

It was at this point — with tensions simmeringly hot — that Israel launched its strike, sending several fighter planes into Syria on a lightning mission to hit a site near Dayr a-Zawr. As Syria itself broke the news of the attack, Israeli generals were shown on TV toasting in the Jewish new year but refusing to comment.

Details have remained thin on the ground ever since: Israel imposed a news blackout that has been strictly enforced by the country’s military censor. Instead it has been left to the Western media to speculate on what occurred.

One point that none of the pundits and analysts have noted was that, in attacking Syria, Israel committed a blatant act of aggression against its northern neighbor of the kind denounced as the “supreme international crime” by the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal.

Also, no one pointed out the obvious double standard applied to Israel’s attack on Syria compared to the far less significant violation of Israeli sovereignty by Hizbullah a year earlier, when the Shia militia captured two Israel soldiers at a border post and killed three more. Hizbullah’s act was widely accepted as justification for the bombardment and destruction of much of Lebanon, even if a few sensitive souls agonized over whether Israel’s response was “disproportionate”. Would these commentators now approve of similar retaliation by Syria?

The question was doubtless considered unimportant because it was clear from Western coverage that no one — including the Israeli leadership — believed Syria was in a position to respond militarily to Israel’s attack. Olmert’s fear of a Syrian “miscalculation” evaporated the moment Israel did the maths for Damascus.

So what did Israel hope to achieve with its aerial strike?

The stories emerging from the less gagged American media suggest two scenarios. The first is that Israel targeted Iranian supplies passing through Syria on their way to Hizbullah; the second that Israel struck at a fledgling Syrian nuclear plant where materials from North Korea were being offloaded, possibly as part of a joint nuclear effort by Damascus and Tehran.

(Speculation that Israel was testing Syria’s anti-aircraft defences in preparation for an attack on Iran ignores the fact that the Israeli air force would almost certainly choose a flightpath through friendlier Jordanian airspace.)

How credible are these two scenarios?

The nuclear claims against Damascus were discounted so quickly by experts of the region that Washington was soon downgrading the accusation to claims that Syria was only hiding the material on North Korea’s behalf. But why would Syria, already hounded by Israel and the US, provide such a readymade pretext for still harsher treatment? Why, equally, would North Korea undermine its hard-won disarmament deal with the US? And why, if Syria were covertly engaging in nuclear mischief, did it alert the world to the fact by revealing the Israeli air strike?

The other justification for the attack was at least based in a more credible reality: Damascus, Hizbullah and Iran undoubtedly do share some military resources. But their alliance should be seen as the kind of defensive pact needed by vulnerable actors in a Sunni-dominated region where the US wants unlimited control of Gulf oil and supports only those repressive regimes that cooperate on its terms. All three are keenly aware that it is Israel’s job to threaten and punish any regimes that fail to toe the line.

Contrary to the impression being created in the West, genocidal hatred of Israel and Jews, however often Ahmadinejad’s speeches are mistranslated, is not the engine of these countries’ alliance.

Nonetheless, the political significance of the justifications for the Israeli air strike is that both neatly tie together various strands of an argument needed by the neocons and Israel in making their case for an attack on Iran before Bush leaves office in early 2009. Each scenario suggests a Shia “axis of evil”, coordinated by Iran, that is actively plotting Israel’s destruction. And each story offers the pretext for an attack on Syria as a prelude to a pre-emptive strike against Tehran — launched either by Washington or Tel Aviv — to save Israel.

That these stories appear to have been planted in the American media by neocon fanatics like John Bolton is warning enough — as is the admission that the only evidence for Syrian malfeasance is Israeli “intelligence”, the basis of which cannot be questioned as Israel is not officially admitting the attack.

It should hardly need pointing out that we are again in a hall of mirrors, as we were during the period leading up to America’s invasion of Iraq and have been during its subsequent occupation.

Bush’s “war on terror” was originally justified with the convenient and manufactured links between Iraq and al-Qaeda, as well as, of course, those WMDs that, it later turned out, had been destroyed years earlier. But ever since Tehran has invariably been the ultimate target of these improbable confections.

There were the forged documents proving both that Iraq had imported enriched uranium from Niger to manufacture nuclear warheads and that it was sharing its nuclear know-how with Iran. And as Iraq fell apart, neocon operatives like Michael Ledeen lost no time in spreading rumors that the missing nuclear arsenal could still be accounted for: Iranian agents had simply smuggled it out of Iraq during the chaos of the US invasion.

Since then our media have proved that they have no less of an appetite for such preposterous tales. If Iran’s involvement in stirring up its fellow Shia in Iraq against the US occupation is at least possible, the same cannot be said of the regular White House claims that Tehran is behind the Sunni-led insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. A few months ago the news media served up “revelations” that Iran was secretly conspiring with al-Qaeda and Iraq’s Sunni militias to oust the US occupiers.

So what purpose does the constant innuendo against Tehran serve?

The latest accusations should be seen as an example of Israel and the neocons “creating their own reality”, as one Bush adviser famously observed of the neocon philosophy of power. The more that Hizbullah, Syria and Iran are menaced by Israel, the more they are forced to huddle together and behave in ways to protect themselves — such as arming — that can be portrayed as a “genocidal” threat to Israel and world order.

Van Creveld once observed that Tehran would be “crazy” not to develop nuclear weapons given the clear trajectory of Israeli and US machinations to overthrow the regime. So equally Syria cannot afford to jettison its alliance with Iran or its involvement with Hizbullah. In the current reality, these connections are the only power it has to deter an attack or force the US and Israel to negotiate.

But they are also the evidence needed by Israel and the neocons to convict Syria and Iran in the court of Washington opinion. The attack on Syria is part of a clever hustle, one designed to vanquish or bypass the doubters in the Bush Administration, both by proving Syria’s culpability and by provoking it to respond.

Condoleezza Rice, it emerged at the weekend, wants to invite Syria to attend the regional peace conference that has been called by President Bush for November. There can be no doubt that such an act of détente is deeply opposed by both Israel and the neocons. It reverses their strategy of implicating Damascus in the “Shia arc of extremism” and of paving the way to an attack on the real target: Iran.

Syria, meanwhile, is fighting back, as it has been for some time, with the only means available: the diplomatic offensive. For two years Bashar al-Assad has been offering a generous peace deal to Israel on the Golan Heights that Tel Aviv has refused to consider. This week, Syria made a further gesture towards peace with an offer on another piece of territory occupied by Israel, the Shebaa Farms. Under the plan, the Farms — which the United Nations now agrees belongs to Lebanon, but which Israel still claims is Syrian and cannot be returned until there is a deal on the Golan Heights — would be transferred to UN custody until the dispute over its sovereignty can be resolved.

Were either of Damascus’ initiatives to be pursued, the region might be looking forward to a period of relative calm and security. Which is reason enough why Israel and the neocons are so bitterly opposed. Instead they must establish a new reality — one in which the forces of “creative destruction” so beloved of the neocons engulf yet more of the region. For the rest of us, a simpler vocabulary suffices. What is being sold is catastrophe.

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. He is the author of the forthcoming “Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State” published by Pluto Press, and available in the United States from the University of Michigan Press. His website is www.jkcook.net

Source

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President Ahmadinejad Delivers Remarks at Columbia University – Transcript

Posted on September 27, 2007 by kf1

President Bollinger’s Introductory Remarks at SIPA-World Leaders Forum with President of Iran 

CQ Transcripts Wire
Monday, September 24, 2007; 4:25 PM

SPEAKER: IRANIAN PRESIDENT MAHMOUD AHMADINEJAD

[*]

AHMADINEJAD (THROUGH TRANSLATOR): In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful…

TRANSLATOR: The president is reciting verses from the holy Koran in Arabic.

AHMADINEJAD (THROUGH TRANSLATOR): Oh, God, hasten the arrival of Imam al-Mahdi and grant him good health and victory and make us his followers and those to attest to his rightfulness.

Distinguished Dean, dear professors and students, ladies and gentlemen, at the outset I would like to extend my greetings to all of you. I am grateful to the almighty God for providing me with the opportunity to be in an academic environment, those seeking truth and striving for the promotion of science and knowledge.

At the outset I want to complain a bit from the person who read this political statement against me. In Iran tradition requires that when we demand a person to invite to be a speaker we actually respect our students and the professors by allowing them to make their own judgment and we don’t think it’s necessary before this speech is even given to come in with a series of claims…

(APPLAUSE)

… and to attempt in a so-called manner to provide vaccination of some sort to our students and our faculty.

I think the text read by the dear gentleman here, more than addressing me, was an insult to information and the knowledge of the audience here, present here. In a university environment we must allow people to speak their mind, to allow everyone to talk so that the truth is eventually revealed by all.

Certainly he took more than all the time I was allocated to speak, and that’s fine with me. We’ll just leave that to add up with the claims of respect for freedom and the freedom of speech that’s given to us in this country.

Many parts of his speech, there were many insults and claims that were incorrect, regretfully.

AHMADINEJAD (THROUGH TRANSLATOR): Of course, I think that he was affected by the press, the media, and the political, sort of, mainstream line that you read here that goes against the very grain of the need for peace and stability in the world around us.

Nonetheless, I should not begin by being affected by this unfriendly treatment. I will tell you what I have to say, and then the questions he can raise and I’ll be happy to provide answers. But as for one of the issues that he did raise, I most certainly would need to elaborate further so that we, for ourselves, can see how things fundamentally work.

It was my decision in this valuable forum and meeting to speak with you about the importance of knowledge, of information, of education. Academics and religious scholars are shining torches who shed light in order to remove darkness. And the ambiguities around us in guiding humanity out of ignorance and perplexity.

The key to the understanding of the realities around us rests in the hands of the researchers, those who seek to discover areas that are hidden, the unknown sciences, the windows of realities that they can open is done only through efforts of the scholars and the learned people in this world.

AHMADINEJAD (THROUGH TRANSLATOR): With every effort there is a window that is opened, and one reality is discovered. Whenever the high stature of science and wisdom is preserved and the dignity of scholars and researchers are respected, humans have taken great strides toward their material and spiritual promotion.

In contrast, whenever learned people and knowledge have been neglected, humans have become stranded in the darkness of ignorance and negligence.

If it were not for human instinct, which tends toward continual discovery of truth, humans would have always remained stranded in ignorance and no way would not have discovered how to improve the life that we are given.

The nature of man is, in fact, a gift granted by the Almighty to all. The Almighty led mankind into this world and granted him wisdom and knowledge as his prime gift enabling him to know his God.

In the story of Adam, a conversation occurs between the Almighty and his angels. The angels call human beings an ambitious and merciless creature and protested against his creation.

But the Almighty responded, quote, “I have knowledge of what you are ignorant of,” unquote. Then the Almighty told Adam the truth. And on the order of the Almighty, Adam revealed it to the angels.

The angels could not understand the truth as revealed by the human being.

AHMADINEJAD (THROUGH TRANSLATOR): The Almighty said to them, quote, “Did not I say that I am aware of what is hidden in heaven and in the universe?” unquote.

In this way the angels prostrated themselves before Adam.

In the mission of all divine prophets, the first sermons were of the words of God, and those words — piety, faith and wisdom — have been spread to all mankind.

Regarding the holy prophet Moses, may peace be upon him, God says, quote, “And he was taught wisdom, the divine book, the Old Testament and the New Testament. He is the prophet appointed for the sake of the children of Israel, and I rightfully brought a sign from the Almighty, holy Koran (SPEAKING IN PERSIAN),” unquote.

The first words, which were revealed to the holy prophet of Islam, call the prophet to read, quote, “Read, read in the name of your God, who supersedes everything,” unquote, the Almighty, quote again, “who taught the human being with the pen,” unquote. Quote, “The Almighty taught human beings what they were ignorant of,” unquote.

You see, in the first verses revealed to the holy prophet of Islam, words of reading, teaching and the pen are mentioned. These verses in fact introduced the Almighty as the teacher of human beings, the teacher who taught humans what they were ignorant of.

In another part of the Koran, on the mission of the holy prophet of Islam, it is mentioned that the Almighty appointed someone from amongst the common people as their prophet in order to, quote, “read for them the divine verses,” unquote, and quote again, “and purify them from ideological and ethical contamination” unquote, and quote again, “to teach them the divine book and wisdom,” unquote.

AHMADINEJAD (THROUGH TRANSLATOR): My dear friends, all the words and messages of the divine prophets from Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, to David and Solomon and Moses, to Jesus and Mohammad delivered humans from ignorance, negligence, superstitions, unethical behavior, and corrupted ways of thinking, with respect to knowledge, on the path to knowledge, light and rightful ethics.

In our culture, the word science has been defined as illumination. In fact, the science means brightness and the real science is a science which rescues the human being from ignorance, to his own benefit. In one of the widely accepted definitions of science, it is stated that it is the light which sheds to the hearts of those who have been selected by the almighty.

Therefore, according to this definition, science is a divine gift and the heart is where it resides. If we accept that science means illumination, then its scope supersedes the experimental sciences and it includes every hidden and disclosed reality.

One of the main harms inflicted against science is to limit it to experimental and physical sciences. This harm occurs even though it extends far beyond this scope. Realities of the world are not limited to physical realities and the materials, just a shadow of supreme reality. And physical creation is just one of the stories of the creation of the world.

Human being is just an example of the creation that is a combination of a material and the spirit. And another important point is the relationship of science and purity of spirit, life, behavior and ethics of the human being. In the teachings of the divine prophets, one reality shall always be attached to science; the reality of purity of spirit and good behavior. Knowledge and wisdom is pure and clear reality.

It is — science is a light. It is a discovery of reality. And only a pure scholar and researcher, free from wrong ideologies, superstitions, selfishness and material trappings can discover — discover the reality.

AHMADINEJAD: My dear friends and scholars, distinguished participants, science and wisdom can also be misused, a misuse caused by selfishness, corruption, material desires and material interests, as well as individual and group interests.

Material desires place humans against the realities of the world. Corrupted and dependent human beings resist acceptance of reality. And even if they do accept it, they do not obey it.

There are many scholars who are aware of the realities but do not accept them. Their selfishness does not allow them to accept those realities.

Do those who, in the course of human history, wage wars, not understand the reality that lives, properties, dignity, territories, and the rights of all human beings should be respected, or did they understand it but neither have faith in nor abide by it?

My dear friends, as long as the human heart is not free from hatred, envy, and selfishness, it does not abide by the truth, by the illumination of science and science itself.

Science is the light, and scientists must be pure and pious. If humanity achieves the highest level of physical and spiritual knowledge but its scholars and scientists are not pure, then this knowledge cannot serve the interests of humanity, and several events can ensue.

First, the wrongdoers reveal only a part of the reality, which is to their own benefit, and conceal the rest. As we have witnessed with respect to the scholars of the divine religions in the past, too, unfortunately, today, we see that certain researchers and scientists are still hiding the truth from the people.

Second, science, scientists, and scholars are misused for personal, group, or party interests. So, in today’s world, bullying powers are misusing many scholars and scientists in different fields with the purpose of stripping nations of their wealth.

AHMADINEJAD (THROUGH TRANSLATOR): And they use all opportunities only for their own benefit.

For example, they deceive people by using scientific methods and tools. They, in fact, wish to justify their own wrongdoings, though. By creating nonexistent enemies, for example, and an insecure atmosphere, they try to control all in the name of combating insecurity and terrorism.

They even violate individual and social freedoms in their own nations under that pretext. They do not respect the privacy of their own people. They tap telephone calls and try to control their people. They create an insecure psychological atmosphere in order to justify their warmongering acts in different parts of the world.

As another example, by using precise scientific methods and planning, they begin their onslaught on the domestic cultures of nations, the cultures which are the result of thousands of years of interaction, creativity and artistic activities.

They try to eliminate these cultures in order to separate the people from their identity and cut their bonds with their own history and values. They prepare the ground for stripping people from their spiritual and material wealth by instilling in them feelings of intimidation, desire for imitation and (inaudible) submission to oppressive powers and disability.

Making nuclear, chemical and biological bombs and weapons of mass destruction is yet another result of the misuse of science and research by the big powers.

AHMADINEJAD (THROUGH TRANSLATOR): Without cooperation of certain scientists and scholars, we would not have witnessed production of different nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

Are these weapons to protect global security?

What can a perpetual nuclear umbrella threat achieve for the sake of humanity?

If nuclear war wages between nuclear powers, what human catastrophe will take place?

Today we can see the nuclear effects in even new generations of Nagasaki and Hiroshima residents, which might be witnessed in even the next generations to come.

Presently, the effects of the depleted uranium used in weapons since the beginning of the war in Iraq can be examined and investigated accordingly.

These catastrophes take place only when scientists and scholars are misused by oppressors.

Another point of sorrow: Some big powers create a monopoly over science and prevent other nations in achieving scientific development as well.

This, too, is one of the surprises of our time. Some big powers do not want to see the progress of other societies and nations. They turn to thousands of reasons, make allegations, place economic sanctions to prevent other nations from developing and advancing, all resulting from their distance from human values and the teachings of the divine prophets.

Regretfully, they have not been trained to serve mankind.

AHMADINEJAD (THROUGH TRANSLATOR): Dear academics, dear faculty and scholars, students, I believe that the biggest God-given gift to man is science and knowledge. Man’s search for knowledge and the truth through science is what it guarantees to do in getting close to God. But science has to combine with the purity of the spirit and of the purity of man’s spirit so that scholars can unveil the truth and then use that truth for advancing humanity’s cause.

These scholars would be not only people who would guide humanity, but also guide humanity towards a better future.

And it is necessary that big powers should not allow mankind to engage in monopolistic activities and to prevent other nations from achieving that science. Science is a divine gift by God to everyone, and therefore, it must remain pure.

God is aware of all reality. All researchers and scholars are loved by God. So I hope there will be a day where these scholars and scientists will rule the world and God himself will arrive with Moses and Christ and Mohammed to rule the world and to take us toward justice.

I’d like to thank you now but refer to two points made in the introduction given about me, and then I will be open for any questions.

Last year — I would say two years ago — I raised two questions. You know that my main job is a university instructor.

AHMADINEJAD (THROUGH TRANSLATOR): Right now, as president of Iran, I still continue teaching graduate and Ph.D.-level courses on a weekly basis. My students are working with me in scientific fields. I believe that I am an academic, myself. So I speak with you from an academic point of view, and I raised two questions.

But, instead of a response, I got a wave of insults and allegations against me. And regretfully, they came mostly from groups who claimed most to believe in the freedom of speech and the freedom of information. You know quite well that Palestine is an old wound, as old as 60 years. For 60 years, these people are displaced.

For 60 years, these people are being killed. For 60 years, on a daily basis, there’s conflict and terror. For 60 years, innocent women and children are destroyed and killed by helicopters and airplanes that break the house over their heads. For 60 years, children and kindergartens, in schools, in high schools, are in prison being tortured. For 60 years, security in the Middle East has been endangered. For 60 years, the slogan of expansionism from the Nile to the Euphrates is being chanted by certain groups in that part of the world.

And as an academic, I asked two questions; the same two questions that I will ask here again. And you judge, for yourselves, whether the response to these questions should be the insults, the allegations, and all the words and the negative propaganda or should we really try and face these two questions and respond to them?

AHMADINEJAD (THROUGH TRANSLATOR): Like you, like any academic, I, too, will keep — not yet become silent until I get the answer. So I’m awaiting logical answers instead of insults.

My first question was if — given that the Holocaust is a present reality of our time, a history that occurred, why is there not sufficient research that can approach the topic from different perspectives?

Our friend referred to 1930 as the point of departure for this development. However, I believe the Holocaust from what we’ve read happened during World War II, after 1930, in the 1940s. So, you know, we have to really be able to trace the event.

My question was simple: There are researchers who want to approach the topic from a different perspective. Why are they put into prison? Right now, there are a number of European academics who have been sent to prison because they attempted to write about the Holocaust or research it from a different perspective, questioning certain aspects of it.

My question is: Why isn’t it open to all forms of research?

I have been told that there’s been enough research on the topic. And I ask, well, when it comes to topics such as freedom, topics such as democracy, concepts and norms such as God, religion, physics even, or chemistry, there’s been a lot of research, but we still continue more research on those topics. We encourage it.

But, then, why don’t we encourage more research on a historical event that has become the root, the cause of many heavy catastrophes in the region in this time and age?

AHMADINEJAD: Why shouldn’t there be more research about the root causes? That was my first question.

And my second question, well, given this historical event, if it is a reality, we need to still question whether the Palestinian people should be paying for it or not. After all, it happened in Europe. The Palestinian people had no role to play in it. So why is it that the Palestinian people are paying the price of an event they had nothing to do with?

The Palestinian people didn’t commit any crime. They had no role to play in World War II. They were living with the Jewish communities and the Christian communities in peace at the time. They didn’t have any problems.

And today, too, Jews, Christians and Muslims live in brotherhood all over the world in many parts of the world. They don’t have any serious problems.

But why is it that the Palestinians should pay a price, innocent Palestinians, for 5 million people to remain displaced or refugees abroad for 60 years. Is this not a crime? Is asking about these crimes a crime by itself?

Why should an academic myself face insults when asking questions like this? Is this what you call freedom and upholding the freedom of thought?

And as for the second topic, Iran’s nuclear issue, I know there is time limits, but I need time. I mean, a lot of time was taken from me.

We are a country, we are a member of the International Atomic Energy Agency. For over 33 years we are a member state of the agency. The bylaw of the agency explicitly states that all member states have the right to the peaceful nuclear fuel technology. This is an explicit statement made in the bylaw, and the bylaw says that there is no pretext or excuse, even the inspections carried by the IAEA itself that can prevent member states’ right to have that right.

Of course, the IAEA is responsible to carry out inspections. We are one of the countries that’s carried out the most amount of level of cooperation with the IAEA. They have had hours and weeks and days of inspections in our country, and over and over again the agency’s reports indicate that Iran’s activities are peaceful, that they have not detected a deviation, and that Iran — they have received positive cooperation from Iran.

But regretfully, two or three monopolistic powers, selfish powers want to force their word on the Iranian people and deny them their right.

AHMADINEJAD (THROUGH TRANSLATOR): They keep saying…

(CROSSTALK)

AHMADINEJAD (THROUGH TRANSLATOR): They tell us you don’t let them — they won’t let them inspect. Why not? Of course we do. How come is it, anyway, that you have that right and we can’t have it? We want to have the right to peaceful nuclear energy. They tell us, don’t make it yourself, we’ll give it to you.

Well, in the past, I tell you, we had contracts with the U.S. government, with the British government, the French government, the German government, and the Canadian government on nuclear development for peaceful purposes. But unilaterally, each and every one of them canceled their contracts with us, as a result of which the Iranian people had to pay a heavy cost in billions of dollars.

Why do we need the fuel from you? You’ve not even given us spare aircraft parts that we need for civilian aircraft for 28 years under the name of embargo and sanctions because we’re against, for example, human rights or freedom? Under that pretext, you are deny us that technology? We want to have the right to self-determination toward our future. We want to be independent. Don’t interfere in us.

If you don’t give us spare parts for civilian aircraft, what is the expectation that you’d give us fuel for nuclear development for peaceful purposes?

For 30 years, we’ve faced these problems for over $5 billion to the Germans and then to the Russians, but we haven’t gotten anything. And the words have not been completed.

It is our right. We want our right. And we don’t want anything beyond the law, nothing less than international law.

We are a peaceful, loving nation. We love all nations.

(APPLAUSE)

MODERATOR: Mr. President, your statements here today and in the past have provoked many questions which I would like to pose to you on behalf of the students and faculty who have submitted them to me.

Let me begin with the question to which you just alluded…

AHMADINEJAD: Just one by one, one by one — could you just…

MODERATOR: Yes.

(APPLAUSE)

MODERATOR: The first question is: Do you or your government seek the destruction of the state of Israel as a Jewish state?

AHMADINEJAD (THROUGH TRANSLATOR): We love all nations. We are friends with the Jewish people. There are many Jews in Iran, leaving peacefully, with security.

You must understand that in our constitution and our laws and in the parliamentary elections for every 150,000 people, we get one representative in the parliament. For the Jewish community, for one- fifth of this number, they still get one independent representative in the parliament.

So our proposal to the Palestinian plight is a humanitarian and democratic proposal. What we say is that to solve this 60-year problem, we must allow the Palestinian people to decide about its future for itself.

This is compatible with the spirit of the Charter of the United Nations and the fundamental principles enshrined in it. We must allow Jewish Palestinians, Muslim Palestinians and Christian Palestinians to determine their own fate themselves through a free referendum.

AHMADINEJAD (THROUGH TRANSLATOR): Whatever they choose as a nation, everybody should accept and respect. Nobody should interfere in the affairs of the Palestinian nation. Nobody should sow the seeds of discord. Nobody should spend tens of billions of dollars equipping and arming one group there.

We say allow the Palestinian nation to decide its own future, to have the right to self-determination for itself. This is what we are saying as the Iranian nation.

(APPLAUSE)

QUESTION: Mr. President, I think many members of our audience would like to hear a clearer answer to that question. That is…

(APPLAUSE)

The question is: Do you or your government seek the destruction of the state of Israel as a Jewish state? And I think you could answer that question with a single word, either yes or no.

(APPLAUSE)

AHMADINEJAD (THROUGH TRANSLATOR): You asked the question, and then you want the answer the way you want to hear it. Well, this isn’t really a free flow of information.

(APPLAUSE)

I’m just telling you what my position is. I’m asking you: Is the Palestinian issue not an international issue of prominence or not? Please tell me, yes or no?

(APPLAUSE)

There’s the plight of a people.

QUESTION: The answer to your question is yes.

AHMADINEJAD (THROUGH TRANSLATOR): Well, thank you for your cooperation. We recognize there’s a problem there that’s been going on for 60 years. Everybody provides a solution. And our solution is a free referendum.

Let this referendum happen, and then you’ll see what the results are.

AHMADINEJAD: Let the people of Palestine freely choose what they want for their future. And then what you want in your mind to happen there will happen and will be realized.

QUESTION: (OFF-MIKE) second question, which was posed by President Bollinger earlier and comes from a number of other students: Why is your government providing aid to terrorists?

Will you stop doing so and permit international monitoring to certify that you have stopped?

AHMADINEJAD (THROUGH TRANSLATOR): Well, I want to pose a question here to you. If someone comes and explodes bombs around you, threatens your president, members of the administration, kills the members of the Senate or Congress, how would you treat them?

Would you reward them, or would you name them a terrorist group?

Well, it’s clear. You would call them a terrorist.

My dear friends, the Iranian nation is a victim of terrorism. For –26 years ago, where I worked, close to where I worked, in a terrorist operation, the elected president of the Iranian nation and the elected prime minister of Iran lost their lives in a bomb explosion. They turned into ashes.

A month later, in another terrorist operation, 72 members of our parliament and highest-ranking officials, including four ministers and eight deputy ministers’ bodies were shattered into pieces as a result of terrorist attacks.

AHMADINEJAD (THROUGH TRANSLATOR): Within six months, over 4,000 Iranians lost their lives, assassinated by terrorist groups. All this carried out by the hand of one single terrorist group. Regretfully, that same terrorist group now, today, in your country, is being — operating under the support of the U.S. administration, working freely, distributing declarations freely, and their camps in Iraq are supported by the U.S. government.

They’re secured by the U.S. government. Our nation has been harmed by terrorist activities. We were the first nation that objected to terrorism and the first to uphold the need to fight terrorism.

(APPLAUSE)

QUESTION: Mr. President, a number of questioners — sorry — a number of people have asked…

AHMADINEJAD (THROUGH TRANSLATOR): We need to address the root causes of terrorism and eradicate those root causes. We live in the Middle East. For us, it’s quite clear which powers, sort of, incite terrorists, support them, fund them. We know that. Our nation, the Iranian nation, through history has always extended a hand of friendship to other nations. We’re a cultured nation.

We don’t need to resort to terrorism. We’ve been victims of terrorism, ourselves. And it’s regrettable that people who argue they’re fighting terrorism, instead of supporting the Iranian people and nation, instead of fighting the terrorists that are attacking them, they’re supporting the terrorists and then turn the fingers to us.

AHMADINEJAD (THROUGH TRANSLATOR): This is most regrettable.

QUESTION: Mr. President, a further set of questions challenged your view of the Holocaust. Since the evidence that this occurred in Europe in the 1940s, as a result of the actions of the German Nazi government, since that — those facts — are well documented, why are you calling for additional research? There seems to be no purpose in doing so, other than to question whether the Holocaust actually occurred as a historical fact.

Can you explain why you believe more research is needed into the facts of what are — what is — what are incontrovertible?

AHMADINEJAD (THROUGH TRANSLATOR): Thank you very much for your question. I am an academic, and you are as well.

Can you argue that researching a phenomenon is finished, forever done? Can we close the books for good on a historical event?

There are different perspectives that come to light after every research is done. Why should we stop research at all? Why should we stop the progress of science and knowledge?

You shouldn’t ask me why I’m asking questions. You should ask yourselves why you think that that’s questionable? Why do you want to stop the progress of science and research?

Do you ever take what’s known as absolute in physics? We had principles in mathematics that were granted to be absolute in mathematics for over 800 years. But new science has gotten rid of those absolutisms, come forward other different logics of looking at mathematics and sort of turned the way we look at it as a science altogether after 800 years.

So, we must allow researchers, scholars, they investigate into everything, every phenomenon — God, universe, human beings, history and civilization. Why should we stop that?

I am not saying that it didn’t happen at all. This is not that judgment that I am passing here.

I said, in my second question, granted this happened, what does it have to do with the Palestinian people?

AHMADINEJAD (THROUGH TRANSLATOR): This is a serious question. There are two dimensions. In the first question…

QUESTION: Let me just — let me pursue this a bit further.

It is difficult to have a scientific discussion if there isn’t at least some basis, some empirical basis, some agreement about what the facts are. So calling for research into the facts when the facts are so well established represents for many a challenging of the facts themselves and a denial that something terrible occurred in Europe in those years.

(APPLAUSE)

Let me move on to…

AHMADINEJAD (THROUGH TRANSLATOR): Allow me. After all, you are free to interpret what you want from what I say. But what I am saying I’m saying with full clarity.

In the first question I’m trying to actually uphold the rights of European scholars. In the field of science and research I’m asking, there is nothing known as absolute. There is nothing sufficiently done. Not in physics for certain. There has been more research on physics than it has on the Holocaust, but we still continue to do research on physics. There is nothing wrong with doing it.

This is what man wants. They want to approach a topic from different points of view. Scientists want to do that. Especially an issue that has become the foundation of so many other political developments that have unfolded in the Middle East in the past 60 years.

Why do we stop it altogether? You have to have a justified reason for it. The fact that it was researched sufficiently in the past is not a sufficient justification in my mind.

QUESTION: Mr. President, another student asks — Iranian women are now denied basic human rights and your government has imposed draconian punishments, including execution on Iranian citizens who are homosexuals. Why are you doing those things?

AHMADINEJAD (THROUGH TRANSLATOR): Freedoms in Iran are genuine, true freedoms. Iranian people are free. Women in Iran enjoy the highest levels of freedom.

We have two deputy — two vice presidents that are female, at the highest levels of specialty, specialized fields. In our parliament and our government and our universities, they’re present. In our biotechnological fields, our technological fields, there are hundreds of women scientists that are active — in the political realm as well.

It’s not — it’s wrong for some governments, when they disagree with another government, to, sort of, try to spread lies that distort the full truth.

Our nation is free. It has the highest level of participation in elections, in Iran. Eighty percent, ninety percent of the people turn out for votes during the elections, half of which, over half of which are women. So how can we say that women are not free? Is that the entire truth?

But as for the executions, I’d like to raise two questions. If someone comes and establishes a network for illicit drug trafficking that affects the youth in Iran, Turkey, Europe, the United States, by introducing these illicit drugs and destroys them, would you ever reward them?

People who lead the lives — cause the deterioration of the lives of hundreds of millions of youth around the world, including in Iran, can we have any sympathy to them? Don’t you have capital punishment in the United States? You do, too.

(APPLAUSE)

AHMADINEJAD (THROUGH TRANSLATOR): In Iran, too, there’s capital punishment for illicit drug traffickers, for people who violated the rights of people. If somebody takes up a gun, goes into a house, kills a group of people there, and then tries to take ransom, how would you confront them in Iran — or in the United States? Would you reward them? Can a physician allow microbes symbolically speaking to spread across a nation?

We have laws. People who violate the public rights of the people by using guns, killing people, creating insecurity, sells drugs, distribute drugs at a high level are sentenced to execution in Iran.

And some of these punishments, very few, are carried in the public eye, before the public eye. It’s a law, based on democratic principles. You use injections and microbes to kill these people, and they, they’re executed or they’re hung. But the end result is killing.

QUESTION: Mr. President, the question isn’t about criminal and drug smugglers. The question was about sexual preference and women.

(APPLAUSE)

AHMADINEJAD (THROUGH TRANSLATOR): In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals, like in your country.

(LAUGHTER)

We don’t have that in our country.

(AUDIENCE BOOING)

AHMADINEJAD (THROUGH TRANSLATOR): In Iran, we do not have this phenomenon. I don’t know who’s told you that we have it.

(LAUGHTER)

But, as for women, maybe you think that being a woman is a crime. It’s not a crime to be a woman.

AHMADINEJAD (THROUGH TRANSLATOR): Women are the best creatures created by God. They represent the kindness, the beauty that God instills in them. Women are respected in Iran. In Iran, every family who is given a girl — is given — in every Iranian family who has a girl, they are 10 times happier than having a son. Women are respected more than men are.

They are exempt from many responsibilities. Many of the legal responsibilities rest on the shoulders of men in our society because of the respect, culturally given, to women, to the future mothers. In Iranian culture, men and sons and girls constantly kiss the hands of their mothers as a sign of respect, respect for women. And we are proud of this culture.

QUESTION: Mr. President, I have two questions which I’ll put together.

One is, what did you hope to accomplish by speaking at Columbia today? And the second is, what would you have said if you were permitted to visit the site of the September 11th tragedy?

AHMADINEJAD (THROUGH TRANSLATOR): Well, here, I’m your guest. I’ve been invited by Columbia, an official invitation given for me to come here. But I do want to say something here.

In Iran, when you invite a guest, you respect them. This is our tradition, required by our culture. And I know that American people have that culture, as well. Last year, I wanted to go to the site of the September 11th tragedy to show respect to the victims of the tragedy, to show my sympathy with their families.

But our plans got overextended. We were involved in negotiations and meetings until midnight. And they said it would be very difficult to go visit the site at that late hour of the night. So, I told my friends then that they need to plan this for the following year so that I can go and visit the site and to show my respects.

Regretfully, some groups had very strong reactions, very bad reactions. It’s bad for someone to prevent someone to show sympathy to the families of the victims of the September 11 event — tragic event. This is a respect from my side. Somebody told me this is an insult. I said, “What are you saying? This is my way of showing my respect. Why would you think that?”

Thinking like that, how do you expect to manage the world and world affairs?

AHMADINEJAD (THROUGH TRANSLATOR): Don’t you think that a lot of problems in the world come from the way you look at issues because of this kind of way of thinking, because of this sort of pessimistic approach toward a lot of people, because of a certain level of selfishness, self-absorption that needs to be put aside so that we can show respect to everyone, to allow an environment for friendship to grow, to allow all nations to talk with one another and move toward peace?

What was the second question?

I wanted to speak with the press. The September 11th tragic event was a huge event. It led to a lot of many other events afterwards. After 9/11 Afghanistan was occupied, and then Iraq was occupied. And for six years in our region there is insecurity, terror and fear.

If the root causes of 9/11 are examined properly — why it was happened, what caused it, what were the conditions that led to it, who truly was involved, who was really involved — and put it all together to understand how to prevent the crisis in Iraq, fix the problem in Afghanistan and Iraq combined.

QUESTION: Mr. President, a number of questions have asked about your nuclear program. Why is your government seeking to acquire enriched uranium suitable for nuclear weapons? Will you stop doing so?

AHMADINEJAD (THROUGH TRANSLATOR): Our nuclear program, first and foremost, operates within the framework of law.

And, second, under the inspections of the IAEA.

And, thirdly, they are completely peaceful.

The technology we have is for enrichment below the level of 5 percent level.

AHMADINEJAD: And any level below 5 percent is solely for providing fuel to power plants. Repeated reports by the IAEA explicitly say that there is no indication that Iran has deviated from the peaceful path of its nuclear program.

We are all well aware that Iran’s nuclear issue is a political issue. It’s not a legal issue. The international atomic energy organization — agency has verified that our activities are for peaceful purposes.

But there are two or three powers that think that they have the right to monopolize all science and knowledge. And they expect the Iranian people, the Iranian nation, to turn to others to get fuel, to get science, to get knowledge that’s indigenous to itself, to humble itself. And then they would, of course, refrain from giving it to us, too.

So we’re quite clear what we need.

If you have created the fifth generation of atomic bombs and are testing them already, what position are you in to question the peaceful purposes of other people who want nuclear power?

We do not believe in nuclear weapons, period. It goes against the whole grain of humanity.

(APPLAUSE)

So let me just joke — try to tell a joke here. I think the politicians who are after atomic bombs or are testing them, making them, politically, they are backward, retarded.

(APPLAUSE)

QUESTION: Mr. President, a final question. I know your time is short and that you need to move on. Is Iran prepared to open broad discussions with the government of the United States?

What would Iran hope to achieve in such discussions?

How do you see, in the future, a resolution of the points of conflict between the government of the United States and the government of Iran?

AHMADINEJAD (THROUGH TRANSLATOR): From the start, we announced that we are ready to negotiate with all countries.

AHMADINEJAD (THROUGH TRANSLATOR): Since 28 years ago, when our revolution succeeded and we established, we took freedom and democracy that was held at bay by a pro-Western dictatorship. We announced our readiness that besides two countries, we are ready to have friendly relations and talks with all countries of the world.

One of those two was the apartheid regime of South Africa, which has been eliminated. And the second was the Zionist regime. For everybody else around the world, we announced that we want to have friendly, brotherly ties. The Iranian nation is a cultured nation. It is a civilized nation. It seeks — it wants talks and negotiations. It’s for it.

We believe that in negotiations and talks, everything can be resolved very easily. We don’t need threats. We don’t need to point bombs or guns. We don’t need to get into conflicts if we talk. We have a clear logic about that.

We question the way the world is being run and managed today. We believe that it will not lead to viable peace and security for the world, the way it’s run today. We have solutions based on humane values and for relations among states. With the U.S. government, too, we will negotiate — we don’t have any issues about that — under fair, just circumstances with mutual respect on both sides.

You saw that in order to help the security of Iraq, we had three rounds of talks with the United States, and last year, before coming to New York, I announced that I am ready in the United Nations to engage in a debate with Mr. Bush, the president of the United States, about critical international issues.

AHMADINEJAD (THROUGH TRANSLATOR): So that shows that we want to talk. Having a debate before the all the audience, so the truth is revealed, so that misunderstandings and misperceptions are removed, so that we can find a clear path for brotherly and friendly relations.

I think that if the U.S. administration, if the U.S. government puts aside some of its old behaviors, it can actually be a good friend for the Iranian people, for the Iranian nation.

For 28 years, they’ve consistently threatened us, insulted us, prevented our scientific development, every day, under one pretext or another.

You all know Saddam, the dictator, was supported by the government of the United States and some European countries in attacking Iran. And he carried out an eight-year war, a criminal war. Over 200,000 Iranians lost their lives. Over 600,000 Iranians were hurt as a result of the war.

He used chemical weapons. Thousands of Iranians were victims of chemical weapons that he used against us.

Today, Mr. Noble Vinn (ph), who is a reporter, an official reporter, international reporter, who was covering U.N. reports in the U.N. for many years, he is one of the victims of the chemical weapons used by Iraq against us.

And since then, we’ve been under different propaganda, sort of embargoes, economic sanctions, political sanctions. Why? Because we got rid of a dictator? Because we wanted the freedom and democracy that we got for ourselves? That, we can’t understand.

We think that if the U.S. government recognizes the rights of the Iranian people, respects all nations and extends a hand of friendship with all Iranians, they, too, will see that Iranians will be one of its best friends.

AHMADINEJAD (THROUGH TRANSLATOR): Would you allow me to thank the audience a moment?

Well, there are many things that I would have liked to cover, but I don’t want to take your time any further. I was asked: Would I allow the faculty at Columbia and students here to come to Iran? From this platform, I invite Columbia faculty members and students to come and visit Iran, to speak with our university students. You’re officially invited.

(APPLAUSE)

University faculty and students that the university decides, or the student associations choose and select are welcome to come. You’re welcome to visit any university that you choose inside Iran. We’ll provide you with the list of the universities. There are over 400 universities in our country. And you can choose whichever you want to go and visit. We’ll give you the platform. We’ll respect you 100 percent. We will have our students sit there and listen to you, speak with you, hear what you have to say.

Right now in our universities on a daily basis there are hundreds of meetings like this. They hear, they talk, they ask questions. They welcome it.

In the end I’d like to thank Columbia University. I had heard that many politicians in the United States are trained in Columbia University. And there are many people here who believe in the freedom of speech, in clear, frank conversations.

I do like to extend my gratitude to the managers here in the United States — at Columbia University, I apologize — the people who so well organized this meeting today.

AHMADINEJAD (THROUGH TRANSLATOR): I’d like to extend my deepest gratitude to the faculty members and the students here. I ask Almighty God to assist all of us to move hand in hand to establish peace and future filled with friendship and justice and brotherhood.

Best of luck to all of you.

(APPLAUSE)

MODERATOR: I’m sorry that President Ahmadinejad’s schedule makes it necessary for him to leave before he’s been able to answer many of the questions that we have, or even answer some of the ones that we posed to him.

(LAUGHTER)

(APPLAUSE)

But I think we can all be pleased that his appearance here demonstrates Columbia’s deep commitment to free expression and debate. I want to thank you all for coming to participate.

(APPLAUSE)

Thank you.

END

.ETX

Sep 24, 2007 15:24 ET .EOF

Source: CQ Transcriptions

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Posted in Speeches | 1 Comment

“The Shock Doctrine”

Posted on September 24, 2007 by kf1

On Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine”
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Leftists used to think that at least as a general axiom, if not by a precise deadline, capitalism was doomed. When I first arrived in the United States in the early 1970s, there was enough exuberance in the air even for mild-mannered reformers to be pushing plans for the abolition of the Federal Reserve, World Bank and kindred institutions.

But today most of these same leftists deem capitalism invincible and fearfully lob copious documentation at each other detailing the efficient devilry of the executives of the system. The internet serves to amplify this pervasive funk into a catastrophist mindset. It imbues most of the English-speaking left west of the Atlantic after seven years of Bush and Cheney, and frames Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine, The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.”

At the outset Klein permits herself a robust trumpet blast as intrepid pioneer:

“This book is a challenge to the central and most cherished claim in the official story — that the triumph of deregulated capitalism has been born of freedom, that unfettered free markets go hand in hand with democracy. Instead, I will show that this fundamentalist form of capitalism has consistently been midwifed by the most brutal forms of coercion, inflicted on the collective body politic as well as on countless individual bodies.”

The arc of triumph she is alluding to spans the half century from the Eisenhower administration’s onslaughts on political and economic nationalism in Iran and Guatemala in the early 1950s, to the US attack on Iraq in 2003 and its subsequent occupation. These are not decades where official apologetics have been entirely without challenge until Ms. Klein embarked on her researches. There are shelves worth of books on the ghastly consequences of the covert interventions and massacres organized or connived at by the United States in the name of freedom and the capitalist way. Klein’s own bibliography attests that there has plenty of detailed work on the neoliberal onslaught that gathered strength from the mid-70s on, marching under the intellectual colors of one of her arch villains, the late Milton Friedman, the Chicago School economist.

Where Klein would presumably claim originality is in identifying the taxonomy of this “shock doctrine”, the latest in capitalism’s phases of “creative destruction”, as Schumpeter described the soul of the system. So she describes the shock of a sudden attack, whether the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973 or the bombing of Baghdad in 2003; the shock of torturers using sensory deprivation techniques and crude electrodes to instill fear and acquiescence; Friedman’s economic “shock treatment.” Methodically combined and elaborated, these onslaughts now amount, on Klein’s account, to a new and frightful chapter in the history of capitalist predation.

Klein begins with a chapter on the CIA-sponsored psychic “de-patterning” experiments of that monster, Dr Ewen Cameron of McGill University’s Allan Memorial Institute, and states explicitly that torture, aside from being a tool, is “a metaphor of the shock doctrine’s underlying logic”. To use shock literary tactics to focus attention on the deliberate and sadistic engineering of collective social trauma is certainly no crime. But, as often happens after a shock, one eventually retrieves a sense of proportion, one that is not entirely flattering to the larger pretensions.

Capitalism, after all, as always been a shock doctrine of selfish predation, as one can discover from Hobbes and Locke, Marx and Weber, none of them saluted by Klein. Read the vivid accounts of the Hammonds about the English enclosures of the eighteenth century, when villagers would find nailed to the door of the parish church an announcement their common lands had been privatized. Protesters may not have “depatterned”, but were briskly hanged or relocated to Botany Bay. Klein could have used Karl Polanyi to better effect than as an epigraph. The wrenching conversion of peasant societies to cash economics, private property, the job regime, has always been brutal.

The Chicago Boys laid waste the southern cone of Latin America in the name of unfettered private enterprise, but 125 years earlier a million Irish peasants starved to death while Irish grain was exported onto ships flying the flag of economic liberalism. Klein writes about “the bloody birth of counter-revolution” in the 1960s and 1970s, but any page from the histories of Presidents Jackson, Polk or Roosevelt discloses a bleak and blood-stained continuity with the past. Depatterning? Indian children were taken from their families and punished for every word spoken in their own language, even as African slaves were given Christian names and forbidden to use their own, or to drum. Amid the shock of the Civil War the Republicans deferred by several years the freeing of slaves, while hastening to use crisis to arrange a banking and monetary system to their liking.

Just as there is continuity in capitalist predation, there is continuity in resistance. Here’s where Klein’s catastrophism distorts the picture. Her controlling metaphor for the attack on Iraq is the initial “shock and awe” bombardment, designed to numb Saddam’s forces and the overall civilian population into instant surrender and long-term submission. But “shock and awe” was a bust. It didn’t work. Its value even as a metaphor is useless, except as illustration of what parlor wargamers in Washington DC can hype. Having sensibly decided not to fight or die on an American timetable, many of Iraq’s soldiers regrouped to commence an effective resistance. Iraqi civilians struggle along as best they can under awful conditions and, un-numbed, tell pollsters that they wish the Americans would leave at once.

“Shock therapy” neoliberalism really isn’t most closely associated with Milton Friedman, but rather with Jeffrey Sachs, to whom Klein does certainly give many useful pages, even though Friedman remains the dark star of her story. Sachs first introduced shock therapy in Bolivia in the early 1990s. Then he went into Poland, Russia, etc, with the same shock therapy model. Sachs’ catchy phrase then was that “you can’t leap over an abyss step-by-step,” or words to that effect. This is really where contemporary neoliberalism took shape. And, it wasn’t just Sachs.

It was also other slightly left of center mainstream economists, most notably Summers and Paul Krugman as well. To his credit, Krugman has now recanted; Sachs also, but only partially. It’s true that you can make a case that this all goes back to Friedman. David Harvey’s book, A History of Neoliberalism, actually traces the origins of neoliberalism to Friedman in Chile. It’s an interesting perspective. But, as the left economist Robert Pollin remarks, to blame Friedman for the whole thing, and not how the entire economics mainstream went along–including the “liberals” like Sachs, Krugman, and Summers–is to let these people off the hook and to misrepresent history.

As Pollin, a brilliant and creative economist who spends much of his time advancing progressive counter-models–both for African nations and for advanced capitalist countries–emphasizes, “it’s important to pummel the Sachs’s of the world on this point, because they are changing, slowly. To get the world to change, their 1980s-1990s views need to be totally discredited. It’s not enough to just say Milton Friedman was an ultra right winger and leave it at that.”

There are huge third world economies that have been ravaged by neoliberalism that haven’t endured “the shock doctrine”, in the torments that phrase, as defined by Klein. India in the early Nineties was not on the receiving end of physical ‘shock and awe’ bombardment. Tortures were not inflicted by electric shock devices or techniques of sensory deprivation. Death squads have not rampaged through the countryside. If Friedman counseled the Congress Party or the BJP this is not recorded by Klein, who only gives India one brief mention. Yet the neoliberal policies advanced by the World Bank and other multilateral agencies and also enthusiastically seized upon by home grown politicians and government officials–many springing from a Keynesian (or further left) tradition–have certainly been sweeping and savage in consequence. Month after month on our CounterPunch site P. Sainath has described the immiseration of half a billion peasants from circumstances that were bad in the first place, along with the suicides of ruined farmers–a total now running well above 100,000. India has no place in Naomi Klein’s model of the “shock doctrine” and “the rise of disaster capitalism”, which suggests that model’s limitations.

Capitalists try to use social and economic dislocation or natural disaster–New Orleans is only the latest instance – to advantage, but so do those they oppress. War has been the mother of many a positive social revolution, as have natural disasters. The incompetence of the Mexican police and emergency forces after the huge earthquake of 1985 prompted a huge popular upheaval. In Latin America there has been shock attacks and shock doctrines for 500 years. Right now, in Latin America, the pendulum is swinging away from the years of darkness, of the death squad and Friedman’s doctrines. Klein’s outrage is admirable. Her specific exposes across six decades of infamy are often excellent, but in her larger ambitions her metaphors betray her. From the anti-capitalist point of view she’s too gloomy by half. A capitalism that thrives best on the abnormal, on disasters, is by definition in decline. As Cassius put it, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings”.

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More http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shock_Doctrine

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Yuvraj

Posted on September 21, 2007 by kf1

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Israel’s Agenda For Ethnic Cleansing and Transfer – Victoria Buch – 19 Sep.07

Posted on September 20, 2007 by kf1

The stage for ethnic cleansing of Palestinians has been set in the Occupied Territories, and ethnic cleansing is in progress. At present, this is the major project of the state of Israel. For an impartial person of medium intelligence, a tour of the Occupied Territories may be sufficient to understand this fact.

The prime ethnic cleansing tool is, forever, land grab of Palestinian property in conjunction with expansion of settlements. Various stages of annexation process are in evidence in the originally rural part of the West Bank, constituting 60 per cent of its area. By now, nine per cent of the West Bank land has been transferred to the direct control of the settlements. A recent Peace Now investigation (July 2007) revealed that only twelve per cent of this land is being used at all. “The state earmarks huge tracts for the settlements, out of all proportion to their size, in order to prevent Palestinian construction in those areas. Yet once an area is closed to Palestinians, the settlers begin seizing adjacent Palestinian lands, often privately owned, that lie outside their jurisdiction”.

According to B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization, already in 2002, 41.9 per cent of the West Bank was assigned to the Israeli regional councils. And for years, the entire rural Area C has been under administrative control of the so called “Civil Administration”, which, in close cooperation with other branches of the Israeli army and with the settlers, toils to make the life of its Palestinian residents as miserable as possible; the obvious objective being to make them leave. (Comprehensive information can be found, e.g., in the Occupation Magazine, the website of the Israeli anti-occupation activists.)

In the remaining West Bank, Palestinians became virtual prisoners in their own towns and villages. Every aspect of normal Palestinian life – economy, health, education, is being crushed by a well organized and deliberate military-bureaucratic machine, masquerading as a security establishment. Every now and then, the strangulation noose around Palestinian existence is being tightened. Ethnic cleansing, by means of home and field demolitions, is also pursued diligently by the state of Israel towards its Bedouin citizens residing in the Negev desert (see the excellent tutorial movie at the website Adalah – the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights).
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All of the above scarcely registers in minds of my compatriots. No wonder, since it is covered by a monumental but eagerly believed hoax of “negotiations with Abu-Mazen”, diplomatic efforts, and promises of good will gestures towards Palestinians (which are forever un-implemented, or implemented marginally for short periods). For reasons of their own, some Palestinian politicians including President Abbas chose to participate in this farce.

An average Jewish-Israeli does not know – or does not want to know – about the ethnic cleansing program executed by their state – she or he prefers to think of it as “fight against terror”.

Jewish-Israeli citizens live in virtual reality, thoughtfully provided for them by the leaders, the media, and the education system. In this reality, the Israelis figure as good guys, fighting for their existence, rather than as colonizers and occupiers. In this virtual world, it is believed that our government has worked hard to achieve a peace agreement with the Palestinians; and if this goal has not been not achieved, it is because of Palestinian intransigence. Impediment of negotiations by settlers is admitted, but settlers are viewed as troublesome extremists, rather than as an offshoot of deliberate and consistent annexationist policy of the Israeli government.

But the key Israeli politicians KNOW – the ethnic cleansing project could not possibly proceed otherwise. I have been wondering if every new minister in Israeli government gets a manual spelling the facts of life, written in the past by somebody like Golda Meir or Arik Sharon. Otherwise, how would you explain the remarkable continuity of Israeli policies in the Occupied Territories during the long years of the Occupation? How come the current maps of the Jewish settlements and the Palestinian enclaves match the Drobles and Sharon’s blueprints for colonizing the West Bank, prepared decades years ago? However I rather think that no such manual exists, and every minister is expected to figure it out by himself/herself. Yitzhak Rabin paid with his life for what then appeared to be a sincere effort to break away from the ethnic cleansing program (although Rabin never even tried to remove the settlements; and his was the idea of the infamous “bypass roads” for settlers; in the end, the Oslo years turned out to be a golden opportunity for settlement expansion under the cover of the bogus “peace process”. Barak, promoter of large scale colonization projects in the West Bank, seems to have made the last failed effort to set a (very limited) form of coexistence with Palestinians. But he must have finally decided that “if you cannot fight it, join it”, as indicated by his current activities as a new Minister of Defense.

(One recent example can be found in the article “Hamastan as a challenge”, by Shlomo Gazit, NRG, June 25, 2007: “Simultaneously with its total takeover of the Gaza Strip, the Hamas leadership implemented a unilateral ceasefire with Israel . For a whole week, not a single Qassam was fired at Sderot and the surrounding district. But then, after only one day as Defence Minister, the new Minister [Ehud Barak] authorized a new operation to seek out people on the wanted list in the Khan Younis region. Five Palestinians were killed while others were injured. As if by magic, the firing of Qassams towards Sderot resumed the very next day.” Maintaining low grade violence appears necessary for the ongoing Israeli policies of presenting Palestinians as terrorists, and presenting Israeli colonization projects and military operations to crush Palestinians – both in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip – as the “fight against terror”.)

It was Sharon, a brilliant politician, who, under the cover of the “disengagement from Gaza”, converted the ethnic cleansing program to the “only game in town” in the Israeli politics. By now, the entire Zionist establishment has been enlisted, from the Hebron settlers to the Shomer Hatzair (socialist youth movement), who, as army conscripts, provide those same settlers with security cover. The current policies of the State of Israel are determined by the collusion of settlers’ insatiable appetite for land, and the generals’ insatiable appetite for “action”. The elected leaders who execute these policies range from whole-hearted supporters to more or less willing accomplices, mindful of their careers. Presently, none of the leaders opposes actively the ethnic cleansing program. In the background, there is the ever-intensifying humming of propaganda which designates Palestinians – both citizens and non-citizens – as A DEMOGRAPHIC DANGER WHICH SHOULD BE ADDRESSED.

The Israeli policy towards Palestinians can be summarized briefly – “inflict all the damage you can get away with”. But how do the Israeli leaders envisage the end of this game? The hard core nationalists spell it loudly – “transfer”, i.e. expulsion of Palestinians. But what do the main-stream leaders think – the ones who actually carry out the expulsion (presently – the internal one, to the Palestinian ghettos and the enclaves)? The operation is too well organized for one to believe that the end-game was never considered.

I believe that the final objective of our rulers is to set the stage for the second Naqba. Otherwise what is the point of the endless goading of Palestinians into violence? Any minimally thoughtful person understands that the Israeli policies in the Occupied Territories will lead to an eventual paroxysm of violence. Do not tell me that our leaders never thought about it. Granted, amongst them there are total opportunists who do not care about anything except staying in power. But somebody is pushing the ethnic cleansing forward. Sharon was the foremost among them, but judging from the well organized continuation, his associates are fully operational and in business. These people are actually looking forward to the violence. They have their eyes on the real-estate prize – the West Bank. A paroxysm of violence would enable the State of Israel to annex the West Bank – the entire West Bank, that is, while getting rid of most of Palestinian inhabitants. Just like in 1948. This is, in my view, the envisaged end-game. Where do they propose to expel the Palestinians? Jordan? The Gaza Strip? Syria? I do not know.

Will the ethnic cleansing succeed? The authors of these policies obviously count on it. The opening is there, with the present US administration backing Israel whatever it does, and the EU and the Arab countries unable or unwilling to stand up to the US. It is likely that the forthcoming outburst of violence will be initiated by the desperate and destitute Palestinians; and then, for the umptieth time, our propaganda machine will be able to present us to the world as victims, and Palestinians as victimizers. Israeli responses will be presented as legitimate defensive actions. Later, the history may judge otherwise, but meanwhile (if the present political constellation persists for a while), who cares about the Palestinians.

But in the long run, disaster looms for Israel. This is since we are a small nation, and Palestinians are a similarly sized nation which is moreover a part of the vast Moslem world. The experience of South Africa suggests that the apartheid-type system imposed on Palestinians is not viable in the long run, even if it seems invincible at the beginning. As exemplified by last year’s invasion to Lebanon, the performance of the Israeli army is deteriorating, corrupted by years of operating as a colonial militia. At the same time, the generals are becoming increasingly unbridled and reckless. The Israeli economy rests on support of the similarly reckless US corporate-political establishment, but this very expensive support is unlikely to last forever. The ability of the US to dictate the world is also likely to wane as Russia and China are coming to their own. And perhaps most importantly – the Dome of the Rock – the third holiest place of Islam – is at stake.

In my view, my country Israel has embarked on suicidal policies. Something like that already happened in the Jewish history, some 1940 years ago – see the “The Jewish War”, by Josephus Flavius. And just like in those days, most of Israeli public does not realize, that they are being dragged to disaster by their own leaders.

Victoria Buch is an Israeli academic, anti-occupation activist, and a member of the editorial board of the Occupation Magazine www.kibush.co.il. She is can be reached at vvbb54@yahoo.com

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Fears of dollar collapse as Saudis take fright – Telegraph UK – 20 Sep.07

Posted on September 20, 2007 by kf1

Saudi Arabia has refused to cut interest rates in lockstep with the US Federal Reserve for the first time, signalling that the oil-rich Gulf kingdom is preparing to break the dollar currency peg in a move that risks setting off a stampede out of the dollar across the Middle East.

“This is a very dangerous situation for the dollar,” said Hans Redeker, currency chief at BNP Paribas.

“Saudi Arabia has $800bn (£400bn) in their future generation fund, and the entire region has $3,500bn under management. They face an inflationary threat and do not want to import an interest rate policy set for the recessionary conditions in the United States,” he said.

The Saudi central bank said today that it would take “appropriate measures” to halt huge capital inflows into the country, but analysts say this policy is unsustainable and will inevitably lead to the collapse of the dollar peg.

As a close ally of the US, Riyadh has so far tried to stick to the peg, but the link is now destabilising its own economy.

The Fed’s dramatic half point cut to 4.75pc yesterday has already caused a plunge in the world dollar index to a fifteen year low, touching with weakest level ever against the mighty euro at just under $1.40.

There is now a growing danger that global investors will start to shun the US bond markets. The latest US government data on foreign holdings released this week show a collapse in purchases of US bonds from $97bn to just $19bn in July, with outright net sales of US Treasuries.

The danger is that this could now accelerate as the yield gap between the United States and the rest of the world narrows rapidly, leaving America starved of foreign capital flows needed to cover its current account deficit — expected to reach $850bn this year, or 6.5pc of GDP.

Mr Redeker said foreign investors have been gradually pulling out of the long-term US debt markets, leaving the dollar dependent on short-term funding. Foreigners have funded 25pc to 30pc of America’s credit and short-term paper markets over the last two years.

“They were willing to provide the money when rates were paying nicely, but why bear the risk in these dramatically changed circumstances? We think that a fall in dollar to $1.50 against the euro is not out of the question at all by the first quarter of 2008,” he said.

“This is nothing like the situation in 1998 when the crisis was in Asia, but the US was booming. This time the US itself is the problem,” he said.

Mr Redeker said the biggest danger for the dollar is that falling US rates will at some point trigger a reversal yen “carry trade”, causing massive flows from the US back to Japan.

Jim Rogers, the commodity king and former partner of George Soros, said the Federal Reserve was playing with fire by cutting rates so aggressively at a time when the dollar was already under pressure.

The risk is that flight from US bonds could push up the long-term yields that form the base price of credit for most mortgages, the driving the property market into even deeper crisis.

“If Ben Bernanke starts running those printing presses even faster than he’s already doing, we are going to have a serious recession. The dollar’s going to collapse, the bond market’s going to collapse. There’s going to be a lot of problems,” he said.

The Federal Reserve, however, clearly calculates the risk of a sudden downturn is now so great that the it outweighs dangers of a dollar slide.

Former Fed chief Alan Greenspan said this week that house prices may fall by “double digits” as the subprime crisis bites harder, prompting households to cut back sharply on spending.

For Saudi Arabia, the dollar peg has clearly become a liability. Inflation has risen to 4pc and the M3 broad money supply is surging at 22pc.

The pressures are even worse in other parts of the Gulf. The United Arab Emirates now faces inflation of 9.3pc, a 20-year high. In Qatar it has reached 13pc.

Kuwait became the first of the oil sheikhdoms to break its dollar peg in May, a move that has begun to rein in rampant money supply growth.

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Spicy Potato wedges

Posted on September 18, 2007 by kf1

Potato wedges full of Spice

Ingredients:
4 large potatoes
. – oil for frying
3 tablespoon corn flour
1 large onion skinned and finely chopped
1 teaspoon garlic paste
1 teaspoon ginger paste
1 teaspoon cumin seeds, zeera
1/2 teaspoon mustard seeds
1.5 teaspoon garam masala
1 teaspoon chilli powder
1 teaspoon salt
4 tablespoon lemon juice
1/4 cup coriander, fresh, chopped

How to Cook:
1. Wash and pat dry potatoes, and cut into 1\2 inch thick wedges. Boil in salted water or sprinkle salt and microwave, until almost tender, but still retain their shape. Drain and keep aside to cool. Toss the wedges in corn flour.
2. Heat oil in medium pan. Add onions, garlic and ginger, saut? for about 5 minutes or until onion is tender, but not brown.
3. Add mustard seeds, cumin, garam masala, chilli powder and salt, saut? for 2 minutes, until fragrant.
4. Heat 2 tablespoon oil in a medium pan and fry wedges, in small batches until golden and crisp, about 5 minutes. Remove from pan, keep warm, repeat with remaining wedges.
5. Reheat the sauce and pour over the wedges, carefully toss the wedges with the spicy sauce.
6. Add coriander and lemon juice, toss or stir carefully and transfer to a serving dish. Serve immediately.
Serve with roasted chicken or lamb.

This recipe serves 6 people.
Preparation Time: 15 minutes.
Cooking Time: 15 minutes.

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