Posted on 04/28/2012 6:46:45 AM PDT by Kaslin
It was just a short clip on CNN. Reporter Erin Burnett recited some statistics that suggest Iran’s oil tankers are all tied up, that the Islamic Republic’s oil revenues have been hard hit. Economic sanctions have been tightened on the Mullahs’ tyrannical regime by the UN, the European Union, and the U.S.
“It appears the sanctions are working,” said Burnett. She challenged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s assessment of Iran’s headlong drive to build a nuclear weapon.
“How do you know what [the Iranians] are doing?” she asks, hoping perhaps to see the Prime Minister flustered. Maybe he will stumble. Or, he may be reduced to wringing his hands—as our own State Department spokespeople do every day on TV.
Netanyahu looks steadily at his interlocutor. He doesn’t waver. His baritone voice conveys finality: “We know,” he says. “We know, and others know. And we share what we know with others.”
The CNN reporter is just the latest in a long line of talking heads from that network. CNN was the favorite channel of Israel’s mortal enemy, the late terrorist Yasser Arafat. It was from watching CNN that Arafat got the idea for airline hijacking for terror purposes.
The CNN reporter is trying to build the case for more time for sanctions. The Prime Minister takes her to school, just as he did President Obama at their famous Oval Office meeting last year.
The sanctions, he politely informs her, have yet to take a bite out of Iran’s nuclear program. “The centrifuges are spinning,” he tells her levelly. The centrifuges, of course, are the critical component of a nuclear reactor, that unmistakable step in building nuclear weapons.
Benjamin Netanyahu is not about to be distracted by arcane discussions—which the media and the U.S. State Department love—of how many oil-laden Iranian tankers are riding at anchor in which Iranian ports and by how much their oil revenues have been decreased. Is it 56%? No, it’s 65%. Maybe even 67%!
These media/State Department fixations are a perfect replay of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s feckless leadership during the “Phony War” with Hitler in 1939-40. Convinced he could bring down the Nazis through economic warfare, Chamberlain latched onto every intelligence report that suggested Germany was on the verge of collapse, that German civilians were going hungry, that surely they would rise up and oust the Hitler regime.
So convinced was he of the efficacy of economic measures that he ordered the Royal Air Force to drop not bombs, but propaganda leaflets Germany’s industrial regions. Leaflets.
One RAF bombardier was actually reprimanded for failure to cut the strings binding a large bundle of Chamberlain’s notes before tossing them out. He might have hurt someone.
After the war, at their trial at Nuremberg, Nazi Generals Keitel and Jodl testified that Hitler’s regime could surely have been toppled had the English and the French moved quickly to invade Germany after they declared war on September 3, 1939. Attacking Poland, the Germans had few divisions defending their western borders.
But Hitler knew how weak, how irresolute, his enemies were. He read Chamberlain’s propaganda leaflets, too, and he took them for the exercise in fatuousness they were.
The obvious enthusiasm for economic sanctions displayed by the liberal commentariat and by the spokespersons in all the foreign offices and prime ministerial chanceries throughout the West are serving only to stiffen the Mullahs’ conviction: They won’t do anything to stop us. They are afraid of us. They’ll drop leaflets on us.
Every Mideast despot who has been overthrown, and even Osama bin Laden in his cinder block palace, have left behind stashes of luxury goods, plenty of food, alcohol, drugs and pornography. These evil men are doing just fine. Sanctions may bite their captive peoples, but they won’t even nibble at the dictators’ pleasure domes. If their hungry, oppressed people rise up, they are shot down. This is what the Mullahs did to protesters in the streets of Tehran following the fraudulent elections of June, 2009.
Prime Minister Netanyahu has put the world on notice: Israel will act when Israel must. This is the month of Holocaust Remembrance. This is the month when Israel reminds us that “Never Again” will she allow the fate of the Jewish people to be decided by others.
It was from watching CNN that Arafat got the idea for airline hijacking for terror purposes There were hijackings in the 1970s, and probably earlier, much before CNN was founded.
Start blow torches now! I don’t see Iran as our problem and in fact see the United States policy towards Iran as an attempt to defend them till they have there bomb. We should stay out if it and Israel should do what ever they deem necessary to defend themselves. We put ourselves in this position through many administrations by seeding our own energy production to foreign entities.
I caught that too. That is a glaring falsehood.
However, one error that I see:
...Nazi Generals Keitel and Jodl testified that Hitler’s regime could surely have been toppled had the English and the French moved quickly to invade Germany after they declared war on September 3, 1939. Attacking Poland, the Germans had few divisions defending their western borders.
Invaded with what? Great Britain and France had no forces with which to invade Germany, and no amphibious assault shipping with which to deliver them. After WWI, large standing armies were eliminated, and raising them would have been difficult in a world depressed economic climate. Only after the threat from Germany appeared existential did Great Britain decide they had to rearm.
Additionally, the Germans had developed their doctrine of Blitzkreig during the Spanish civil war. Everyone else was way behind integrating mechanized infantry, armor, artillery and close air support. In 1939, no other country in the world, except Germany, knew how to do this. There were small scale experiments in the U.S., some interest in GB, and France, and some professional doctrine development in the Soviet Union, but those generals were purged by Stalin.
Bottom line: Great Britain and France did not have the forces, doctrine, or equipment to successfully invade Germany in 1939 and all professional armies in the world knew this fact.
” The centrifuges, of course, are the critical component of a nuclear reactor, that unmistakable step in building nuclear weapons.”
NO.
Centrifuges are for enriching uranium for a bomb. Nuclear reactors can burn enriched fuel, but the centrifuge is not an integral part of a reactor. I see lotss of weirdness from townhall. Are these guys amateurs?
The lesson of Masada is clear; it is better to die as free men than to live as slaves.
Or, in this modern instance, to die as slaves.
As far at Netanyahu’s statement of “We know, and others know. And we share what we know with others.”, I believe it translates to "We have the coordinates".
Blits with a “z”. (sigh) It’s amazing how sharp the eye is after the “Enter” button is pressed.
Don't sweat it. This isn't a spelling bee! ;>)
It’s only a problem in so much that our evil corrupt leaders have made it so by stealing the freedom and dreams of the people!
I’m in the middle of reading “Gideon’s Spies:The Secret History Of The Mossad”, by Gordon Thomas.
Believe me, Prime Minister Netanyahu knows EXACTLY what Iran is up to.
If a Muslim leader gets a new butt boy or a new addition to his small livestock herd, Israel knows about it the next morning if not the day before the act occurs.
It was just a pre-emptive strike before the Grammar Police sound off, and I wasn't in the mood for a bitchy response to them.
That weakness, could be rectified near instantaninously by simply allowing energy exploration anywhere and everywhere inside the USA. I suspect that should a real war break out and energy were limited, it would change instantly.
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