Ralf Goergens

Jonathan mentioned in a comment to this post that Iran currently is still lacking a delivery system for its nukes. Unfortunately this won’t be true for much longer:

Former members of the Russian military have been secretly helping Iran to acquire technology needed to produce missiles capable of striking European capitals.
The Russians are acting as go-betweens with North Korea as part of a multi-million pound deal they negotiated between Teheran and Pyongyang in 2003. It has enabled Teheran to receive regular clandestine shipments of top secret missile technology, believed to be channelled through Russia.

Western intelligence officials believe that the technology will enable Iran to complete development of a missile with a range of 2,200 miles, capable of hitting much of Europe. It is designed to carry a 1.2-ton payload, sufficient for a basic nuclear device.

A senior American official said Iran’s programme was “sophisticated and getting larger and more accurate. They have had very much in mind the payload needed to carry a nuclear weapon.
“I think Putin knows what the Iranians are doing.”

As I wrote in my previous post, Putin doesn’t seem to be concerned about the prospect of an Iran with nuclear weapons, and seems to think that any resulting crisis would be to his advantage, no matter the outcome. There is nothing anybody can do about it directly. The only way to head off the march into an incredibly bleak future will be to take out the Mullahs, among a number of other regimes. If only European governments would realize that.

In the negotiations to somehow prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, the country has been treated with rather more deference than is warranted. This might well be one of the reasons:

The Saudi government is particularly sensitive about Shiite autonomy because the minority is concentrated in the oil-rich Eastern province, and any unrest or effort at secession might devastate Saudi oil production. A year after the war in Iraq, the Saudi regime has reached out to Shiite leaders.

“Things are really better than before. And Saudi Shia are ready for more and more,” said King Saud University professor A.A. Abdul Hai, a Shiite recently appointed to a new state-sponsored human-rights commission. “It is a natural thing that the majority should get their share of things, but at the same time that does not mean they deny the rights of the minority.”

Iranian agents are busy in Southern Iraq already, doing their best to stir up trouble among the Shia there, as the British found out to their sorrow in Basra. If they now can rile up the Saudi Shiites, and sabotage the Saudi oil production significantly, Iran would effectively be the only major oil supplier left in the region. They would increase their oil revenues by a huge margin, and at the same time make oil a much more effective weapon in their arsenal. On top of that it would make the threat of using the oil weapon much more credible than before, for sharply inflated prices would make it possible for them to reduce output, or to pick and choose whom to sell oil to, and to whom not. Oil may be fungible, but in case of a real shortage that won’t help any.

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An interesting article by Martin Walker

… The young blacks refuse to talk to white reporters, turning silently away to spit and talk among themselves.

…

‘We still have to live here when this is all over,’ muttered Bakil Anelka, who came to France eight years ago from Ivory Coast and works as a cleaner for the Metro. ‘The police will not stay here forever, but the gangs will still be here, back in charge of this district. As soon as I can, I`m moving. I don`t want my kids to grow up here.’

One of the striking features of the two weeks of rage that swept France is that so many of the rioters are black rather than Arab, though North Africans from Algeria and Morocco and Tunisia make up more than two-thirds of the estimated 6 million immigrants, their families included, in France.

The fixed idea that French Muslims would sooner or later rise up to declare Jihad on Secular and Christian French society blinded many observers, including most representatives of the press to the fact that these are race rather than Muslim riots. This is the first article I have read that spells this out this clearly:

…in places where the rioters were ‘beurs,’ as the French Arabs call themselves, Islam and religion seemed to play only a minor role. A tear gas bomb fired into the mosque of Clichy-sous-Bois on the first day of the riots infuriated local Muslims, but there have been no Islamic slogans and no taunts against the French as Christians…

Local Islamic leaders who tried to calm the young mobs have been routinely ignored, as have the fatwas issued by the leading Imams saying rioting and attacks on innocent people are against Islam.

‘It was the people from this congregation who called for calm when the tear gas grenade was fired into our mosque,’ Abdel-Rahman Boubout, the mosque director, told United Press International. ‘This is not about religion, I think. It is about race and discrimination and unemployment and the police, not about Islam.’

In other words, these riots are a lot more similar to the riots in Watts in the 60s, or the one in LA in ’92, rather than the Palestinian intifada. Jonathan’s point that the rioters are keeping the violence below a certain threshold, in order not to provoke a truly drastic response by the French state, certainly remains valid to some extent, but they also have to excercise restraint on behalf of their adult family members, for most rioting happens in the quarters they live in.

The article is worth reading in full, especially for the amazing points about black polygamy in France.

The incoming grand coalition of Christian and Social Democrats will not not support the lifting of the European Union’s arms embargo against China:

China regards the weapons ban as a “relict” of the Cold War and according to Li, “should have been thrown on the trash heap of history long ago.”

Schröder appeared to agree, although his position runs counter to those of the US and Japan, and many of his EU counterparts. Critics of his position said he was more concerned with German firms cutting deals in China than perhaps igniting a new arms race in Asia.

Then opposition leader Angela Merkel came out against lifting the arms embargo, although her remarks that she places great importance on the relationship between China and Germany have some in both Berlin and Beijing wondering if her position could change.

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Our new Chancellor Angela Merkel has already announced that the axis Paris-Berlin-Moscow will be a thing of the past once she formally assumes her new office. If the French continue with their self-destructive course that also is highly damaging for us, things might even go considerably further. ‘Divorce’ might not the be the wrong term for it.

Unfortunately it won’t happen like this:

“We get the kids and and the house, and you, Cherie, can go sleep in your burnt-out car”.

It would be short and sweet, but the chances that it would go like this are nil. A man can dream though, can’t he?