Filed under: Opinions
When bigots have babies
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/when-bigots-have-babies/article1152429/
Wednesday, May. 20, 2009 09:13PM EDT
What kind of mother would send her child to second grade with a swastika on her arm – and then help her redraw it after a horrified teacher washed it off?
A clueless mother, to be sure. But an unfit one?
That’s the issue at the core of a high-profile case that began 14 months ago, when social workers seized two small children from a Winnipeg couple. They felt that the children were at risk of “emotional damage” because of their parents’ deviant beliefs.
The parents had a bunch of neo-Nazi paraphernalia in their home. Dad was fond of posting out-and-out hate speech on websites. Mom (who described herself at the time as a “white nationalist”) wore a swastika necklace. On the website, she allegedly described how cute it was to see the children goose-step. “It really is adorable, it’s more fun when we’re in the mall and I do it too.”
But now the father is arguing at a custody hearing that being a neo-Nazi should not disqualify a person from being a parent. He has also filed a lawsuit claiming that his constitutional rights to freedom of expression and to religion have been violated. He says he has “dedicated my entire life to being a skinhead.”
Drugs and alcohol may be other factors in this case, and the girl had missed a lot of school. The parents (now separated) seem to be as much white trash as they are white supremacists. Still, many people believe that their beliefs alone make them unfit to be parents. “Indoctrination to racial hatred and being a billboard for hatred is a form of child abuse,” says David Matas, legal counsel for B’nai Brith Canada. “It marginalizes the child from society, and it has a lasting impact on character development.”
But, as always, the question is: What’s deviant? Which ideologies are the taboo ones? And who decides?
“If you’re going to target neo-Nazis who haven’t actually hit or sexually abused their children, who’s to say conservative Christian evangelicals aren’t next?” Bill Whatcott, an anti-gay Christian activist, asked in an interview in the Winnipeg Free Press.
In fact, they have already been targeted. Seven years ago, child-protection authorities in Ontario seized the children of a family belonging to a tiny sect that believes in strict corporal punishment.
Some child-abuse cases are cut-and-dried. But some mirror the moral panic of the day. In Britain, the definition of abuse now extends to children who are overweight. Last fall, a six-year-old was taken into custody for being too fat and, according to the Daily Telegraph, obesity was a factor in at least 20 child-protection cases last year. “It is drastic, but it’s a long-term therapy,” said a director of the National Obesity Forum. “For the sake of the children, it does need to be done because we have got children who are horrendously fat.”
Well, so do we. Unfortunately, if the state started apprehending all the children whose parents think that pop and chips are a nutritious diet, it would have no place to put them. The same is true of odious beliefs. Personally, I would like to apprehend girls whose parents give them lipstick when they’re 7 and enter them in beauty pageants. Or how about the parents who have never read their child a book because they have never read one themselves?
There are many, many, many forms of child abuse, and helping your kid redraw a swastika on her arm is only one of them. The problem is that the state’s cure can be far worse than the disease. Being separated from your mom and dad is hard, even if they do happen to be fans of some guy called Hitler.
Meantime, the swastika mom has distanced herself (both literally and ideologically) from her husband. She has given up the Nazi gear, and you get the sense that she would do pretty much anything to get her kids back. Helping her daughter redraw the swastika, she says sadly, “was the stupidest thing I’ve ever done.
Filed under: Life
- Find whatever attracted you to him/her in the first place. Come on, there must be SOMETHING. Perhaps it’s the way he always holds the door open for you, or maybe it’s the way she laughs…just think way back to the first time you laid eyes on each other.
- Admit it: NO ONE is perfect. Even the hottest person alive has flaws of their own. Once you realize this, it’s less likely you will be annoyed/turned off by small imperfections. The rule is easy: always try to see the good, and acknowledge but don’t nag about the bad.
- Realize that love is absolutely not going to be like in your dreams, where everything works out in the end (unless you’re lucky). Ask yourself this: “What did you expect in this relationship, and, let’s face it, am I being realistic?”
- Know that love takes work. As a little kid, you might have thought of love as being a fantastical, dream-like experience. You pictured yourself looking into the eyes of your lover, and the rest being history. Well, if you haven’t already, you will figure out that this is not true. As fantastical and dream-like as love IS, you’ll discover that it takes WORK to be in a relationship. But just realize that it’s a small price to pay to have someone to love and love you back in your life.
- Try listening to songs you haven’t really heard since you first started falling in love. Even if it’s songs you never really listened to on your own, but were played a lot on the radio or by your friends during that time. If the music made you think of that special someone and you haven’t heard it in awhile. It will bring you back to the fluttery feelings you had. Make sure you think of something you haven’t heard in a long time.
- Revive old scents. The same goes with things like perfume you wore when you first started dating. You don’t necessarily have to start wearing it again, just smell it every now and then, but not too often.
- Try it with anything, movies, certain restaurants or houses you haven’t been to in a long time. Think of anything that has slipped your mind since the beginning. When you reunite your senses with certain tastes, sights or smells, you awake those same feelings, and it can not only help you “feel” more in love, but it might remind you of things you may have forgotten about your lover.
Filed under: Current Events
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says if he is re-elected next month he wants to have a face-to-face meeting with US President Barack Obama.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said he wanted to debate global issues with Barack Obama at the new UN session in September.
But he added that Iran would not discuss its nuclear programme outside the framework of the UN nuclear agency’s regulations.
In March, Mr Obama said he was seeking engagement with Iran.
Global issues
Speaking to foreign journalists, President
So Mr Obama’s hopes for a new and constructive dialogue with Iran on the nuclear issue look as far away as ever, says the BBC’s Jon Leyne in Tehran.
However, Mr Ahmadinejad did confirm that he would be presenting to the powers negotiating with Iran over its nuclear programme a package of proposals on managing global issues.
They are likely to include proposals for global nuclear disarmament, our correspondent says.
Last week Iran announced it had successfully launched a new medium-range
On the campaign stump for the
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/8067338.stm
Published: 2009/05/25 17:41:19 GMT
© BBC MMIX
Filed under: Current Events
Have We Already Lost Iran?
By FLYNT LEVERETT and HILLARY MANN LEVERETTPublished: May 23, 2009
- Washinginton
PRESIDENT OBAMA’S Iran policy has, in all likelihood, already failed. On its present course, the White House’s approach will not stop Tehran’s development of a nuclear fuel program — or, as Iran’s successful test of a medium-range, solid-fuel missile last week underscored, military capacities of other sorts. It will also not provide an alternative to continued antagonism between the United States and Iran — a posture that for 30 years has proved increasingly damaging to the interests of the United States and its allies in the Middle East.
This judgment may seem both premature and overly severe. We do not make it happily. We voted for Barack Obama in 2008, and we still want him to succeed in reversing the deterioration in America’s strategic position. But we also believe that successful diplomacy with Iran is essential to that end. Unless President Obama and his national security team take a fundamentally different approach to Tehran, they will not achieve a breakthrough.
This is a genuine shame, for President Obama had the potential to do so much better for America’s position in the Middle East. In his greeting to “the people and leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran” on the Persian New Year in March, Mr. Obama included language meant to assuage Iranian skepticism about America’s willingness to end efforts to topple the regime and pursue comprehensive diplomacy.
Iranian diplomats have told us that the president’s professed willingness to deal with Iran on the “basis of mutual interest” in an atmosphere of “mutual respect” was particularly well received in Tehran. They say that the quick response of the nation’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — which included the unprecedented statement that “should you change, our behavior will change, too” — was a sincere signal of Iran’s openness to substantive diplomatic proposals from the new American administration.
Unfortunately, Mr. Obama is backing away from the bold steps required to achieve strategic, Nixon-to-China-type rapprochement with Tehran. Administration officials have professed disappointment that Iranian leaders have not responded more warmly to Mr. Obama’s rhetoric. Many say that the detention of the Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi (who was released this month) and Ayatollah Khamenei’s claim last week that America is “fomenting terrorism” inside Iran show that trying to engage Tehran is a fool’s errand.
But this ignores the real reason Iranian leaders have not responded to the new president more enthusiastically: the Obama administration has done nothing to cancel or repudiate an ostensibly covert but well-publicized program, begun in President George W. Bush’s second term, to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to destabilize the Islamic Republic. Under these circumstances, the Iranian government — regardless of who wins the presidential elections on June 12 — will continue to suspect that American intentions toward the Islamic Republic remain, ultimately, hostile.
In this context, the Saberi case should be interpreted not as the work of unspecified “hard-liners” in Tehran out to destroy prospects for improved relations with Washington, but rather as part of the Iranian leadership’s misguided but fundamentally defensive reaction to an American government campaign to bring about regime change. Similarly, Ayatollah Khamenei’s charge that “money, arms and organizations are being used by the Americans directly across our western border to fight the Islamic Republic’s system” reflects legitimate concern about American intentions. Mr. Obama has reinforced this concern by refusing to pursue an American-Iranian “grand bargain” — a comprehensive framework for resolving major bilateral differences and fundamentally realigning relations.
More broadly, President Obama has made several policy and personnel decisions that have undermined the promise of his encouraging rhetoric about Iran. On the personnel front, the problem begins at the top, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. As a presidential candidate, then-Senator Clinton ran well to the right of Mr. Obama on Iran, even saying she would “totally obliterate” Iran if it attacked Israel. Since becoming secretary of state, Clinton has told a number of allies in Europe and the Persian Gulf that she is skeptical that diplomacy with Iran will prove fruitful and testified to Congress that negotiations are primarily useful to garner support for “crippling” multilateral sanctions against Iran.
First of all, this posture is feckless, as Secretary Clinton does not have broad international support for sanctions that would come anywhere close to being crippling. More significantly, this posture is cynically counterproductive, for it eviscerates the credibility of any American diplomatic overtures in the eyes of Iranian leaders across the Islamic Republic’s political spectrum.
Even more disturbing is President Obama’s willingness to have Dennis Ross become the point person for Iran policy at the State Department. Mr. Ross has long been an advocate of what he describes as an “engagement with pressure” strategy toward Tehran, meaning that the United States should project a willingness to negotiate with Iran largely to elicit broader regional and international support for intensifying economic pressure on the Islamic Republic.
In conversations with Mr. Ross before Mr. Obama’s election, we asked him if he really believed that engage-with-pressure would bring concessions from Iran. He forthrightly acknowledged that this was unlikely. Why, then, was he advocating a diplomatic course that, in his judgment, would probably fail? Because, he told us, if Iran continued to expand its nuclear fuel program, at some point in the next couple of years President Bush’s successor would need to order military strikes against Iranian nuclear targets. Citing past “diplomacy” would be necessary for that president to claim any military action was legitimate.
Iranian officials are fully aware of Mr. Ross’s views — and are increasingly suspicious that he is determined that the Obama administration make, as one senior Iranian diplomat said to us, “an offer we can’t accept,” simply to gain international support for coercive action.
Understandably, given that much of Mr. Obama’s national security team doesn’t share his vision of rapprochement with Iran, America’s overall policy is incoherent. For example, while the administration recently completed a much-ballyhooed review of Iran policy, it has made no changes in its approach to the nuclear issue. Administration officials argue, with what seem to be straight faces, that the Iranian leadership should be impressed simply because American representatives will now show up for any nuclear negotiations with Iran that might take place.
Similarly, some officials suggest that the administration might be prepared to accept limited uranium enrichment on Iranian soil as part of a settlement — effectively asking to be given “credit” merely for acknowledging a well-established reality. Based on our own experience negotiating with Iranians, and our frequent discussions with Iranian diplomats and political figures since leaving the government, we think that it will take a lot more to persuade Tehran of America’s new seriousness.
Tehran will certainly not be persuaded of American seriousness if Washington acquiesces to Israeli insistence on a deadline for successful American engagement with Iran. Although the White House spokesman, Robert Gibbs, had told reporters that no such deadline would be imposed, President Obama himself said, after his meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, that he wants to see “progress” in nuclear negotiations before the end of the year. He also endorsed the creation of a high-level Israeli-American working group to identify more coercive options if Iran does not meet American conditions for limiting its nuclear activities.
More specifically, Secretary Clinton and Mr. Ross have been pushing the other permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and Germany to intensify multilateral sanctions against Iran if Tehran has not agreed to limit the expansion of its nuclear-fuel cycle program by the time the United Nations General Assembly convenes in New York at the end of September.
This diplomatic approach is guaranteed to fail. Having a deadline for successful negotiations will undercut the perceived credibility of American diplomacy in Tehran and serve only to prepare the way for more coercive measures. Mr. Obama’s justification for a deadline — that previous American-Iranian negotiations produced “a lot of talk but not always action and follow-through” — is incorrect as far as Iranian behavior was concerned. For example, during talks over Afghanistan after 9/11 in which one of us (Hillary) took part, Tehran deported hundreds of Qaeda and Taliban operatives who had sought sanctuary in Iran, and also helped establish the new Afghan government. It was Washington, not Tehran, that arbitrarily ended these productive talks.
Beyond the nuclear issue, the administration’s approach to Iran degenerates into an only slightly prettified version of George W. Bush’s approach — that is, an effort to contain a perceived Iranian threat without actually trying to resolve underlying political conflicts. Obama administration officials are buying into a Bush-era delusion: that concern about a rising Iranian threat could unite Israel and moderate Arab states in a grand alliance under Washington’s leadership.
President Obama and his team should not be excused for their failure to learn the lessons of recent history in the Middle East — that the prospect of strategic cooperation with Israel is profoundly unpopular with Arab publics and that even moderate Arab regimes cannot sustain such cooperation. The notion of an Israeli-moderate Arab coalition united to contain Iran is not only delusional, it would leave the Palestinian and Syrian-Lebanese tracks of the Arab-Israeli conflict unresolved and prospects for their resolution in free fall. These tracks cannot be resolved without meaningful American interaction with Iran and its regional allies, Hamas and Hezbollah.
Why has President Obama put himself in a position from which he cannot deliver on his own professed interest in improving relations with the Islamic Republic? Some diplomatic veterans who have spoken with him have told us that the president said that he did not realize, when he came to office, how “hard” the Iran problem would be. But what is hard about the Iran problem is not periodic inflammatory statements from President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or episodes like Ms. Saberi’s detention. What is really hard is that getting America’s Iran policy “right” would require a president to take positions that some allies and domestic constituencies won’t like.
To fix our Iran policy, the president would have to commit not to use force to change the borders or the form of government of the Islamic Republic. He would also have to accept that Iran will continue enriching uranium, and that the only realistic potential resolution to the nuclear issue would leave Iran in effect like Japan — a nation with an increasingly sophisticated nuclear fuel-cycle program that is carefully safeguarded to manage proliferation risks. Additionally, the president would have to accept that Iran’s relationships with Hamas and Hezbollah will continue, and be willing to work with Tehran to integrate these groups into lasting settlements of the Middle East’s core political conflicts.
It was not easy for President Richard Nixon to discard a quarter-century of failed policy toward the People’s Republic of China and to reorient America’s posture toward Beijing in ways that have served America’s interests extremely well for more than 30 years. That took strategic vision, political ruthlessness and personal determination. We hope that President Obama — contrary to his record so far — will soon begin to demonstrate those same qualities in forging a new approach toward Iran.
Flynt Leverett directs the New America Foundation’s geopolitics of energy initiative and teaches at Penn State’s School of International Affairs. Hillary Mann Leverett is the president of a political risk consultancy. Both are former National Security Council staff members.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/opinion/24leverett.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=iran&st=cse
Filed under: Current Events
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a message on Thursday congratulated the US president-elect Barack Obama on his election victory.
He also said that it is expected basic and clear changes would take place in Washington’s foreign and domestic policies, as demanded by all nations worldwide and the American people.
I would like to offer my congratulations for your success in receiving the majority of votes in the election. You know that opportunities granted by God are transient and passing. These opportunities can be used both on the path to perfection of humankind, or God forbid, on the wrong path and against nations. I hope you choose the true interests of the people, fairness and justice over the insatiable demands of small self-interested unrighteous minority, and make the use this opportunity to serve and leave a good name and legacy behind.
Your election has sparked expectation among all nations of the world and American people that your administration will accord highest priority to and deliver promptly on the call for proper and fundamental change in domestic and foreign policies of the United States.
“Moreover, the American people who have spiritual bonds and affinities expect that efforts of the government to be fully employed to serve the people, to overcome the economic crisis, to restore their rightful standing, morale and hope, to put an end to poverty and discrimination, to have full respect for human dignity and rights and to strengthen the institution of family which are all part of the teachings of the divine prophets.
On the other hand, nations of the world expect that policies based on war, occupation, coercion, deception, humiliation of nations and imposition of discriminatory and unjust relations on them and on international relations that have brought the rage of all nations and majority of governments against American leaders and have undermined the standing of American people would be changed into behavior based on justice and respect for rights of all human beings and nations, friendship and non-interference into internal affairs of others and the limiting circle of interventions by the U.S. government to its own geographical boundaries. Above all, for the sensitive region of the Middle East, the expectation is that the unfair behavior over the past 60 years will change toward restoration of the full rights of nations of the region, especially the oppressed nations of Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan.
The great, civilization-making and justice-seeking people of Iran welcome fundamental, fair and real changes in policies and behaviors, especially in this region.
If steps taken are on the path of God and toward the teachings of the divine prophets, there is much hope that the Almighty will help and the past injuries and wounds will heal some extent.
I pray to the Almighty for the well-being, good health, honor and prosperity of each and every individual member of humanity. I also pray that leaders and those managing the affairs of our societies draw lessons from the past and avail themselves of the opportunities to serve, to be compassionate, to end injustices and promote justice and abide by divine rules.
