Does the North Korean dictator need a booster seat?

And what’s with the goofy hats worn by the men second from left and at far right? Do they store their lunch under there?

For the story on NK’s plan to attack America, read here.

The Nazi party strives to take Christ out of Christmas.

1937 ‘Neo-Pagans’ Target Carols

BERLIN — De-Christianization of famous German Christmas hymns, such as “Silent Night, Holy Night,” is the outstanding contribution to the current holiday season of the rapidly spreading German faith movement or “religion” of National Socialism.

In the new versions of the old songs reference to Nazi tenets of race, blood and soil replace familiar words concerning Christ, Child and the like. The accepted English translation of Mohr’s “Silent Night,” stanza three lines two and three is: “The Son of God loves pure light, radiant beams from thy Holy faith.” Equivalent lines in the Nazified version are “German blood, O how laugh the lips of thy children, blessed with joy.”

Reuters:

Officials at the White House and State Department were advised two hours after attackers assaulted the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11 that an Islamic militant group had claimed credit for the attack, official emails show.

The emails, obtained by Reuters from government sources not connected with U.S. spy agencies or the State Department and who requested anonymity, specifically mention that the Libyan group called Ansar al-Sharia had asserted responsibility for the attacks.

The brief emails also show how U.S. diplomats described the attack, even as it was still under way, to Washington.

U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed in the Benghazi assault, which President Barack Obama and other U.S. officials ultimately acknowledged was a “terrorist” attack carried out by militants with suspected links to al Qaeda affiliates or sympathizers.

Administration spokesmen, including White House spokesman Jay Carney, citing an unclassified assessment prepared by the CIA, maintained for days that the attacks likely were a spontaneous protest against an anti-Muslim film.

LA Times

Force Trumps talk in Syria

The resignation of Kofi Annan, the point man for international efforts to bring peace to Syria, emphatically confirmed what events there had already been making clear: The country’s fate is far more likely to be decided by force than by negotiations.

Ya think?

Assad has been murdering his own citizens for more than a year. Assad had Lebanon’s Rafik Hariri blown to bits in 2005.

Who is naive enough to think you can talk a tyrant into being nice?

Progressives and other fools who believe in the UN, that’s who.

And Nancy Pelosi, Hilary Clinton and John Kerry, all of whom recently touted Assad as a reformer.

William Jacobson on lefties claiming neo-c0ns are inventing Syrian WMD.

From a diarist at Daily Kos:

For anyone who remembers the WMD story hat started the war in Iraq, they may soon have a deja vu! …

Aha! A dictator with WMDs again. Time for war right? For anyone who forgot the Iraq movie, it seems that there is a repeat of the movie starting in the Wall Street Journal.

It also seems that some people really love wars. After months of an intense propaganda to obviously push for a new intervention and war in Syria, in support of the Saudi backed rebels, it seems that now we have another WMD story.

From a community blog post at Current.com:

The next step is for the US media to claim that the country has, or is willing to obtain “Weapons of Mass Destruction” (WMD).

In this case the lie/distortion of WMD’s using Israeli sources and Israeli intelligence sources operating out of the Pentagon is now being claimed about Syria.

Where have we heard this story before?

From the Assad regime, via USA Today, Syria says it will use chemical weapons if attacked:

The Syrian regime threatened Monday to use its chemical and biological weapons in case of a foreign attack, in its first ever acknowledgement that it possesses weapons of mass destruction.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Jihad Makdissi stressed, however, that Damascus would not use its unconventional arms against its own citizens. The announcement comes as Syria faces international isolation, a tenacious rebellion that has left at least 19,000 people dead and threats by Israel to invade to prevent such weapons from falling into rebel hands.

North Korea sends workers to China as slaves. Bush was right.

Barbara Demick in the LA Times:

China is quietly inviting tens of thousands of North Korean guest workers into the country in a deal that will provide a cash infusion to help prop up a teetering regime with little more to export than the drudgery of a desperately poor population.

The deal, which has not been publicly announced by either Beijing or Pyongyang, would allow about 40,000 seamstresses, technicians, mechanics, construction workers and miners to work in China on industrial training visas, businesspeople and Korea analysts say. Most of the workers’ earnings will go directly to the communist North Korean regime.

“The North Koreans can’t export weapons anymore because of [international] sanctions, so they are using their people to raise cash,” said Sohn Kyang-ju, a former South Korean intelligence official who now heads the Seoul-based NK Daily Unification Strategy Institute.

Although migrants from North Korea, as well as Vietnam, Myanmar and the Philippines, have worked illegally in China for years, it is unprecedented for Beijing to issue visas for unskilled and semi-skilled workers, several labor experts in China said. The deal, which provides workers for a region where China suffers no labor shortages, underscores how far Beijing is willing to go to support its potentially unstable protege.

Longtime leader Kim Jong Il died last year and was replaced by his son Kim Jong Un, who is in his late 20s.

“My gut feeling is that this is the beginning of a larger wave of North Korean workers coming in. It could be quite significant,” said John Park, an academic who has written widely on North Korean-Chinese relations. “It will allow the North Koreans to piggyback on China’s economic success to jump-start the economy under the new leadership.”

Over the years, North Korea has exported smaller numbers of workers to far eastern Russia, where they work in logging and mining, as well as to Libya, Bulgaria, Saudi Arabia and Angola. Hundreds of young North Korean women used to work in garment and shoe factories in the Czech Republic, but their contracts were canceled because of European human rights activists’ concern that they were virtually slave laborers…

…or ask for some, ahem, grass — they might just feed you fescue.

Seriously, North Korea is trying to attract tourists.

Eyebrows arched and tongues clucked among the cognoscenti when Dubya said North Korea was part of an axis of evil. How gauche of him to notice.

Yet how true. Here’s another first person tale, excerpted in the WSJ yesterday.

On Jan. 2, 2005, 23-year-old Shin Dong-hyuk squirmed through an electric fence and escaped from Camp 14, a political prison camp in North Korea. Between 150,000 and 200,000 people are estimated to be held in the country’s political camps, and Mr. Shin is the only person known to have been born in a camp who has made his way to the West. (His father, Mr. Shin eventually learned, was a prisoner because two of his brothers had defected to the south during the Korean War. Mr. Shin’s crime was being his father’s son.) In this excerpt from “Escape From Camp 14,” Blaine Harden details his unlikely escape.

In 1998, when Shin turned 16, he became an adult worker. His years of schooling to that point had only served as training for hard labor.

Many of his classmates were assigned to coal mines, where accidental death from cave-ins, explosions and gas poisonings was common. Shin was lucky—he was assigned to a pig farm, where 200 men and women raised about 800 pigs, along with goats, rabbits, chickens and a few cows. As a prisoner, Shin was not allowed to eat the meat of any livestock on the farm. But he and other prisoners could sometimes steal. The smell of roasting pork on the farm would alert guards, leading to beatings and weeks of half-rations, so they ate purloined pork raw.

In March 2003, Shin was transferred to the camp’s garment factory, a crowded, chaotic, stressful work site where 2,000 women and 500 men made military uniforms. Meals were skimpy, hours were endless, and Shin was always hungry. There was pressure to snitch on fellow prisoners.

In the garment factory, the superintendent wanted Shin to inform on an important new prisoner. Park Yong Chul, short and stout, with a shock of white hair, had lived abroad. He knew senior people in the North Korean government. The superintendent ordered Shin to teach Park how to fix sewing machines and to become his friend. Shin was to report back on everything that Park said about his past, his politics and his family. “Park needs to confess,” the superintendent said. “He’s holding out on us.”

In October 2004, Shin and Park began spending 14 hours a day together. Park paid polite attention to Shin’s instructions on sewing machine maintenance. Just as politely, he avoided questions about his past. But after a few weeks, Park began to open up. He said he was raised in a large apartment in Pyongyang and had followed the privileged educational trajectory of North Korea’s elites, studying in East Germany and the Soviet Union. He patiently attempted to explain what life was like outside Camp 14.

As they walked the factory floor, Park told Shin that the giant country next door was called China. Its people were rapidly getting rich. He said that in the south there was another Korea. In South Korea, he said, everyone was already rich. Park explained the concept of money. He told Shin about the existence of television and computers and mobile phones. He explained that the world was round.

Much of what Park talked about, especially at the beginning, was difficult for Shin to understand or care about. What delighted him—what he kept begging Park for—were stories about food and eating. These were the stories that kept Shin up at night fantasizing about a better life. Freedom, in Shin’s mind, was just another word for grilled meat…

Related: in a post from November 2009 a North Korean escapee recounts the death of her husband from starvation.

Bossy folks on the American left want to the government to regulate the Internet. So do the worlds’ autocrats, although for different reasons.

Robert M. McDowell

On Feb. 27, a diplomatic process will begin in Geneva that could result in a new treaty giving the United Nations unprecedented powers over the Internet. Dozens of countries, including Russia and China, are pushing hard to reach this goal by year’s end. As Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said last June, his goal and that of his allies is to establish “international control over the Internet” through the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a treaty-based organization under U.N. auspices.

If successful, these new regulatory proposals would upend the Internet’s flourishing regime, which has been in place since 1988. That year, delegates from 114 countries gathered in Australia to agree to a treaty that set the stage for dramatic liberalization of international telecommunications. This insulated the Internet from economic and technical regulation and quickly became the greatest deregulatory success story of all time.

Since the Net’s inception, engineers, academics, user groups and others have convened in bottom-up nongovernmental organizations to keep it operating and thriving through what is known as a “multi-stakeholder” governance model. This consensus-driven private-sector approach has been the key to the Net’s phenomenal success.

In 1995, shortly after it was privatized, only 16 million people used the Internet world-wide. By 2011, more than two billion were online—and that number is growing by as much as half a million every day. This explosive growth is the direct result of governments generally keeping their hands off the Internet sphere.

Net access, especially through mobile devices, is improving the human condition more quickly—and more fundamentally—than any other technology in history. Nowhere is this more true than in the developing world, where unfettered Internet technologies are expanding economies and raising living standards…

One for each N. Korean starved to death by Kim Jong-Il. For the evil monster, an hour long Bronx cheer would have been more appropriate. Good riddance.

John Hayward at Human Events.

The United Nations General Assembly observed a moment of silence for recently departed psychopathic totalitarian dictator Kim Jong-Il of North Korea today.  MSNBC reports:

Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nasser, president of the 193-nation General Assembly, saying he was following existing practice, led the moment of silence before an assembly meeting at 3 p.m. EST.

He offered condolences to the people of North Korea.

North Korea’s U.N. mission made a similar request to the U.N. Security Council, though Western diplomats said it was rejected.

“We didn’t think it would be appropriate,” a diplomat told Reuters on condition of anonymity.

Several Western diplomats said Pyongyang’s request for Kim to be honored was highly unusual. They voiced surprise that Nassir had granted it and added that their delegations would most likely boycott the moment of silence in the assembly.

North Korea is still officially under Security Council sanction for Kim’s habit of blowing billions on nuclear weapons while his people starve.  At least 200,000 North Koreans are rotting in political dungeons, many of them suffering brutal tortures, and not the kind that involve wet towels on the face.  Kim Jong-Il reached outside his borders to kill and kidnap South Koreans, Japanese, and others.  He’s brought the world to the brink of Armageddon repeatedly.

The only “moment of silence” it would be appropriate to observe in the name of Kim Jong-Il would be the one following the permanent shutdown of the United Nations circus.  Once again, the concessions made to allow barbarians and dictators into the great “parliament of mankind” corrupt it beyond recognition.  An ostensibly noble effort in international outreach is twisted into an absurdist nightmare because it feels obliged to take a horror show like North Korea seriously, and treat its abusive dictator as some sort of mighty statesman whose passage leaves the world poorer.

Instead, he should be treated as the obscene monster he was, and denounced with every breath taken by civilized men, while the moments of silence are reserved for his victims.

They need a 2nd Amendment for water pistols. WSJ

Authorities in authoritarian Iran have determined the latest threat to the Islamic Republic: squirt guns.

Agents of the regime fanned out across Tehran late last month to question toy store owners about whether the fake guns had been imported from America. Nope: made right in Iran or imported from China.

Why all this fuss? A water fight among playful youth at a water park.

After heeding a call on Facebook, a group of nearly 800 young men and women were among those who showed up at the park. They were surprised to find others there eager to drench anyone in sight.

They chased strangers around a giant water fountain, screaming and laughing as they splashed each other with water from toy guns, bottles and plastic bags.

“We had a blast. It was a rare chance for boys and girls to hang out in a public place and have fun,” said Shaghayegh, a participant who did not want her last name to be used.

Among Iranian authorities, the fun and games triggered a different reaction. Police raided the park, engaging in a four-hour cat-and-mouse game with the youth, who turned their squirt guns on the cops and threw plastic bags full of water on the policemen’s heads, according to participants and media reports.

While flash mobs have become a serious concern elsewhere—including London’s recent riots—such organized fun, in most parts of the world, would be regarded as yet another youthful rite of passage.

But that doesn’t apply in Iran, where a seemingly innocent gathering, especially one that involves men and women interacting, can be cast as a decadent rebellion against the government.

“These events are a disgrace to our revolution. Our security forces and judiciary must stop the spreading of these morally corrupt actions,” said conservative lawmaker Hossein Ibrahimi, according to official media.

Although the water wars and the government response have a comically absurd quality, the recent tension shows how fearful the regime is of its young.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez declared Tuesday that he will continue to recognize only Moamer Kadhafi as the legitimate leader of Libya, despite signs the regime is likely in its last throes.

In Libya, Chavez said, there is “only one government, the one led by Moamer Kadhafi,” the Venezuelan leader said, restating earlier criticism of the NATO bombardment that contributed to the collapse of the Libyan strongman’s regime.

“We affirm our solidarity with the attacked and bombarded Libyan people,” he said, in a statement made during a cabinet meeting broadcast by television and radio.

That’s all you need to know about Hugo.

Rob Long at Richochet

China, according to them, is the happiest nation on earth.  But that may just be sucking up to their powerful, and generous, neighbor to the northwest.  If China is in fact happier than North Korea, maybe North Korea needs to open some KFC’s and Haagen-Daz shops.

In case you’re interested, the United States ranks 203rd.

The whole list is here — in Korean — but the highlights of the list are here, from the Beijinger.com:

North Korea has released its rating of countries based on happiness, awarding China perfect marks. Where does North Korea place itself and others?

North Korea magnanimously gave away the number one spot and ranked itself second with 98 points out of 100.

Rounding out the top five are Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela.

Getting a dismal 3 happiness points and holding onto last place is the United States, referred to as “the American Empire.”

Probably the only people in the world who still believe in the “American empire” are the North Koreans.  Barack Obama has already disabused everyone else of that notion.

Ekaterina Loushnikova in oD Russia

…I stood outside the door for a long time. I’d never met a 100-year old before. “He probably doesn’t remember anything,” I thought doubtfully, as I rang the bell. The door opened immediately and before me stood a tall, thin old man with bright, youthful eyes.

Pavel Galitsky has outlived all his tormentors and almost all his contemporaries

“Just wait while I turn off the computer,” he said. “People keep trying to ring me on Skype.”

I was quite taken aback that a man of this age should know how to use the computer and Skype, as by no means everyone knows how to do this in Russia, and not only the elderly. I was even more surprised when we started with a concert: in honour of my visit, Pavel Kalinkovich began to sing the old Russian romance “The chrysanthemums have long since ceased to bloom”. His voice was so deafening that the red needle on my Dictaphone went right over the red line.

“Did you sing in the camp too, Pavel Kalinkovich?”

“I certainly did. For two weeks I was even on the propaganda team, but then I was chucked out because they clocked I was a ‘contra’  – I was sent to prison for ‘Anti-Soviet and counter-revolutionary propaganda and agitation’ (Article 58)”.

“And had you actually been agitating?”

Pavel Kalinkovich bursts out laughing. “I burst out laughing in exactly the same way when the interrogator said this to me. He barked ‘Stand up, you f*****!’  I got up and said ‘Comrade Pozdnyakov, why are you are contravening socialist legality?’ ‘I’m no comrade of yours, you bastard!’  He pressed a button to summon the guard. ‘Search this character!’

“Then they threw me in jail. The cell, a former peasant larder 4 metres long and 2 wide, had 32 people in it. People couldn’t even sit down. They had to stand and take turns to sleep. At that time arresting a man was as easy as falling off a log.”

I remember the story I was told by my grandmother, Valentina Nikolaevna. In 1937 she was working as an agronomist on a collective farm attached to an agricultural institute which studied plant selection. During the day.  But at night it was another “selection” — the selection of people. Every night the huge corridor of the communal flat where the specialists lived rang with the sound of footsteps. Every night each person waited for the knock on his door. Before going to bed they put a little suitcase with essentials by the bed.  My grandmother lived in the furthest room. She was lucky – they never came for her.

Police states do have their comical side. China’s paranoid rulers issue edicts on what stories not to cover, which makes them more interesting.

Stewart Baker at Volokh Conspiracy:

The press guidance provided by China’s censors is so voluminous and detailed that leaked copies of the guidance are now available on a regular basis.  China Digital Times publishes a weekly list of what China’s censors tell their journalists not to report or hype. It’s a remarkable glimpse into the dark soul of Chinese bureaucracy, a guide to what really scares China’s rulers.  But there’s irony there as well.  I mean, why read Chinese papers when we can get all the juiciest bits from the censors themselves?

And juicy they are.  The censors’ guidance is a kind of Drudge Report for China.  Take the story about the music student who was out driving his Cruze one night and hit a mother bicycling home from her job?  Fearing that she’d gotten his license plate and would make him pay for her broken leg, he stabbed her to death in the street.  Now he too is facing the death penalty.  It’s an irresistible tale of wealth, entitlement and tragedy in modern China.

How did I find the story? Thanks to China’s State Council Information Office, which instructed Chinese websites to cover it only by reprinting copy from the Xinhua News Agency.  “Do not conduct follow-up reports,” the censors warned, “and do not repost stories related to this case.”

Some of this is quite gruesome. You’ve been warned.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post decries Obama’s inaction as shameful.

We’re 100% behind you guys. Uh, who exactly are you?

Roger Simon:

We are currently doing everything we can to bomb, strafe and use missiles to carry the rebels into power in Libya. We want them to win. We just don’t know who they are.

This is not merely my opinion. It is the statement of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, our point person in meeting with the rebels.

She was in London Tuesday to meet with diplomats from 30 countries, most of whom showed up to get in the group picture. There are certainly not 30 countries aiding us in the war in Libya.

Most of the media headlined Clinton’s statement about possibly arming the rebels. Many stories left out what I consider her more important statement: that she really had no idea who the rebels are and that, in fact, they might actually include members of Al Qaeda, the terrorist group that attacked America on Sept. 11, 2001.

President Hugo Chavez urged Venezuelans on Sunday to cut their calories to avoid obesity – the latest lifestyle recommendation by the self-proclaimed socialist crusader.

Chavez has lobbied in recent weeks against what he calls the evils of capitalism, including alcoholism, breast implants and violent television programs.

“Be careful with weight gain!” warned Chavez on Sunday, speaking during his weekly television and radio program. “We are eating better, that’s been proven. We’re leaving malnutrition behind. It no longer exists in the country, but be careful with obesity.”

Chavez – who often dispenses advice to supporters during his marathon speeches – said he’d start a campaign to urge Venezuelans to consume less fatty foods and eat in a healthier fashion.

The former paratroop commander has taken issue with doctors who “convince women, many women – not all of them – that if they don’t have big bosoms, they should feel bad.”

Hugo should reconsider, lest it become obvious he’s the biggest boob in Venezuela.

Charles Krauthammer

President Obama is proud of how he put together the Libyan operation. A model of international cooperation. All the necessary paperwork. Arab League backing. A Security Council resolution. (Everything but a resolution from the Congress of the United States, a minor inconvenience for a citizen of the world.) It’s war as designed by an Ivy League professor.

True, it took three weeks to put this together, during which time Moammar Gaddafi went from besieged, delusional (remember those youthful protesters on “hallucinogenic pills”) thug losing support by the hour — to resurgent tyrant who marshaled his forces, marched them to the gates of Benghazi and had the U.S. director of national intelligence predicting that “the regime will prevail.”

But what is military initiative and opportunity compared with paper?      Well, let’s see how that paper multilateralism is doing. The Arab League is already reversing itself, criticizing the use of force it had just authorized. Amr Moussa, secretary-general of the Arab League, is shocked — shocked! — to find that people are being killed by allied airstrikes. This reaction was dubbed mystifying by one commentator, apparently born yesterday and thus unaware that the Arab League has forever been a collection of cynical, warring, unreliable dictatorships of ever-shifting loyalties. A British soccer mob has more unity and moral purpose. Yet Obama deemed it a great diplomatic success that the League deigned to permit others to fight and die to save fellow Arabs for whom 19 of 21 Arab states have yet to lift a finger.      And what about that brilliant U.N. resolution?

• Russia’s Vladimir Putin is already calling the Libya operation a medieval crusade.

• China is calling for a cease-fire in place — which would completely undermine the allied effort by leaving Gaddafi in power, his people at his mercy and the country partitioned and condemned to ongoing civil war.

• Brazil joined China in that call for a cease-fire. This just hours after Obama ended his fawning two-day Brazil visit. Another triumph of presidential personal diplomacy.

And how about NATO? Let’s see. As of this writing, Britain wanted the operation to be led by NATO. France adamantly disagreed, citing Arab sensibilities. Germany wanted no part of anything, going so far as to pull four of its ships from NATO command in the Mediterranean. France and Germany walked out of a NATO meeting on Monday, while Norway had planes in Crete ready to go but refused to let them fly until it had some idea who the hell is running the operation. And Turkey, whose prime minister four months ago proudly accepted the Gaddafi International Prize for Human Rights, has been particularly resistant to the Libya operation from the beginning.

And as for the United States, who knows what American policy is. Administration officials insist we are not trying to bring down Gaddafi, even as the president insists that he must go. Although on Tuesday Obama did add “unless he changes his approach.” Approach, mind you.

In any case, for Obama, military objectives take a back seat to diplomatic appearances. The president is obsessed with pretending that we are not running the operation — a dismaying expression of Obama’s view that his country is so tainted by its various sins that it lacks the moral legitimacy to … what? Save Third World people from massacre?

Rick Richman:

1. If you want to remain in power, you need to do more than send a man on a camel into crowds. Declare war on your people; hire other people to help out.

2. Do not worry if the U.S. president says you must “step down” and “leave.” It is only his personal opinion.

3. To ensure that the president does not focus unduly on your war, schedule it while he is preoccupied with other matters: a Motown concert, a conference on bullying, his golf game, and finalizing his Final Four picks.

4. Declare that the opposition is not “organic.” The president will not assist a non-organic revolution. If the revolution is organic, do not worry: an organic revolution is by definition one he does not need to assist. Either way, you’re fine.

5. Recognize that your membership on the UN Human Rights Council will be suspended — the president will send his secretary of state there to ensure that. Do not start a war against your people if you are not prepared for this. (more…)

Walter Russell Mead heaps heavy scorn on a long list of Gaddafi toadies.

The United States said on Thursday it supported expelling Libya from the United Nations Human Rights Council, saying the government had violated the rights of its people.

Ya think?

Witnesses have said Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi has used aircraft, tanks and mercenaries to try to crush protests against his 41-year rule of the oil-exporting nation in North Africa.

Maybe Obama should threaten to put Gaddafi on double secret probation.

ABC news lists the 112 ways you can spell you-know-who’s name. There must be an American Express ad in here somewhere.

• Qaddafi, Muammar
• Al-Gathafi, Muammar
• al-Qadhafi, Muammar
• Al Qathafi, Mu’ammar
• Al Qathafi, Muammar
• El Gaddafi, Moamar
• El Kadhafi, Moammar
• El Kazzafi, Moamer
• El Qathafi, Mu’Ammar
• Gadafi, Muammar
• Gaddafi, Moamar
• Gadhafi, Mo’ammar
• Gathafi, Muammar
• Ghadafi, Muammar
• Ghaddafi, Muammar
• Ghaddafy, Muammar
• Gheddafi, Muammar
• Gheddafi, Muhammar
• Kadaffi, Momar
• Kad’afi, Mu`amar al- 20
• Kaddafi, Muamar
• Kaddafi, Muammar
• Kadhafi, Moammar
• Kadhafi, Mouammar
• Kazzafi, Moammar (more…)

The late Italian journalist, Oriana Fallaci interviewed a few tyrants in her career including Ayatollah Khomeini. When interviewing Khomeni, she got into an argument about wearing the chador.

Fallaci – I still have to ask you a lot of things. About the “chador,” for example, which I was obliged to wear to come and interview you, and which you impose on Iranian women. [...] I am not only referring to the dress but to what it represents, I mean the apartheid Iranian women have been forced into after the revolution. They cannot study at the university with men, they cannot work with men, they cannot swim in the sea or in a swimming-pool with men. They have to do everything separately, wearing their “chador.” By the way, how can you swim wearing a “chador”?

Khomeini- None of this concerns you, our customs do not concern you. If you don’t like the islamic dress you are not obliged to wear it, since it is for young women and respectable ladies.

Fallaci – This is very kind of you, Imam, since you tell me that, I’m going to immediately rid myself of this stupid medieval rag. There !

Still, for Muammar al-Gaddafi she harbored special contempt.

Mike McDaniel at Pajamas Media.

Recent revelations about hostile incursions into South America have raised alarm in those who care about U.S. interests and security, particularly in America’s hemisphere. They have also raised questions about whether the Monroe Doctrine — America will tolerate no hostile incursions in her own hemisphere — is dead. These revelations have been, for the most part, ignored by those who care little for American sovereignty and security, such as the MSM and apparently the Obama administration.

Among the two most alarming revelations is the already completed sale and delivery, to Venezuela by Russia, of nearly 2,000 advanced, shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles capable of hitting aircraft as high as 19,000 feet. Equally and perhaps more alarming is an October agreement between Iran and Venezuela. The agreement establishes a joint ground-to-ground missile base on Venezuelan soil and calls for the sharing of missile technology and the training of technicians and officers. In addition, Venezuela may use the missiles as it chooses for “national needs” and in case of “emergency.” Several types of missiles will be deployed, giving Venezuela the ability to strike targets throughout South and Central America and throughout the U.S.

The dangers arising from the Marxist, cult-of-personality rule of Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez are many. These weapons are only the largest and most destructive purchased or finagled by Chavez. He has also purchased an enormous number of Russian assault rifles — the real thing, fully automatic military rifles, not the non-existent “assault weapons” of gun control imaginations and press releases — and related weapons and ammunition.

Just imagine how much “good” our Democrat betters could accomplish if they could pull this off.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on Tuesday asked congress to grant him special powers to enact laws by decree for one year, just before a new legislature takes office with a larger contingent of opposition lawmakers.

The measure would give the president the ability to bypass the National Assembly for the fourth time since he was first elected almost 12 years ago.

Vice President Elias Jaua made the request on Chavez’s behalf, saying the president will use the authorization to ensure fast-track approval of laws aimed at helping the nation recover from severe flooding and mudslides that left thousands homeless and in government shelters.

“The measures we have to take are deep. Almost 40 percent of the country was affected” by the heavy rains, Jaua said.

It is expected to win easy approval in the outgoing legislature dominated by Chavez allies.