Iran

[Simon]

You used the word 'unstoppable', no?

Well, I said we couldn't have stopped it, which is the same thing said a different way. No problem with that.

But I most certainly did not state or imply that it was well-known. It most certainly wasn't, not to the general public or the mass media. It was only well-known to certain groups of people, most of whom were happy to go along with it, for reasons which are fairly clear on investigation, even if these reasons, too, still, are not widely-known. Those few who were not comfortable with an Israeli nuclear state were, as I said, unable to prevent it.

If we can be clear on this, we can perhaps move on to an understanding of why your point about MV was irrelevant.

[Bryn]

Not for nothing did 'Simon' gain the soubriquet "Wriggletto" on the old BBC Radio 3 Forum. :whistle:

[Resurrection Man]

Not for nothing did 'Simon' gain the soubriquet "Wriggletto" on the old BBC Radio 3 Forum. :whistle:

But he does have a point. I went back to look at the original posts regarding this.

This was the part of Simon's post that was quoted by Ams...

Allowed? We couldn't have stopped it: their agents were so deeply involved in the programmes since inception and post WWII that they were always going to get the bomb. But remember that this was at a time when they were - legitimately - carving out a niche for themselves after a horrendous 10+ years, and when Jews had the general sympathy of much of the rest of the world.

Latterly, of course, things have changed. Israeli behaviour towards the Palestinians has brought about a rethink in the minds of many informed commentators, even those historically disposed to be supportive of Israel. Unfortunately, said rethink has apparently not yet affected enough of those who make the policy decisions in, say, the USA. Now, why do you think that is?

To which Ams replied

And why, if it was all so well-known and unavoidable, has the Israeli state continued to persecute Mordechai Vanunu?

Try as I might, I can't see how Ams statement maps onto words in the quote. I can't see the relevance to Simon's post. I understood Ams explanation regarding Vanunu later on in another post and that made sense to me but not Ams' post above. It just doesn't make sense.

[Resurrection Man]

....
But I most certainly did not state or imply that it was well-known......

I think that these words in your post

post WWII that they were always going to get the bomb have been interpreted, incorrectly as it has turned out, to imply 'well-known'.

[Simon]

Not for nothing did 'Simon' gain the soubriquet "Wriggletto" on the old BBC Radio 3 Forum. :whistle:

It was coined by you yourself, IIRC, following yet another demolition by me of one of your "arguments". I did the same with you often enough as I'm doing now with Amateur: correcting a misinterpretation or misreading of a post. It's a tactic that you used to adopt - misinterpret, or exaggerate, in order to make your own arguments seem better. When pulled up about it, you accused me trying to "wriggle out" of the discussion, when in fact I was merely trying to revert to the facts - exactly as has happened in this case.

The difference is that you, being intelligent, I suggest did it deliberately. Apologies if this is not the case: do let me know. :winkeye: Am51 just misreads, I think.

[Simon]

[/COLOR]And why, if it was all so well-known and unavoidable, has the Israeli state continued to persecute Mordechai Vanunu?

Try as I might, I can't see how Ams statement maps onto words in the quote. I can't see the relevance to Simon's post. I understood Ams explanation regarding Vanunu later on in another post and that made sense to me but not Ams' post above. It just doesn't make sense.

Thanks, RM. That was exactly what I have been saying all along: the relevance is not there.

++++++++

As for:

I think that these words in your post

[I]"post WWII that they were always going to get the bomb"[/I]

have been interpreted, incorrectly as it has turned out, to imply 'well-known'

- I suspect that you are right. But how that interpretation has come about, I haven't a clue.

Perhaps an appeal to FF might be in order. Is the interpretation sound, ff, or am I right that AM51's comment doesn't bear on my earlier post? I'll be happy to accept your verdict, as I know it will be honest.

[Bryn]

It was coined by you yourself, IIRC, following yet another demolition by me of one of your "arguments". I did the same with you often enough as I'm doing now with Amateur: correcting a misinterpretation or misreading of a post. It's a tactic that you used to adopt - misinterpret, or exaggerate, in order to make your own arguments seem better. When pulled up about it, you accused me trying to "wriggle out" of the discussion, when in fact I was merely trying to revert to the facts - exactly as has happened in this case.

The difference is that you, being intelligent, I suggest did it deliberately. Apologies if this is not the case: do let me know. :winkeye: Am51 just misreads, I think.

Yet again your memory fails you. It was not I who coined the soubriquet, but I did recognise how apposite it was. I believe it was mahlerei who first used it, but it certainly was not me.

[amateur51]

Well, I said we couldn't have stopped it, which is the same thing said a different way. No problem with that.

But I most certainly did not state or imply that it was well-known. It most certainly wasn't, not to the general public or the mass media. It was only well-known to certain groups of people, most of whom were happy to go along with it, for reasons which are fairly clear on investigation, even if these reasons, too, still, are not widely-known. Those few who were not comfortable with an Israeli nuclear state were, as I said, unable to prevent it.

If we can be clear on this, we can perhaps move on to an understanding of why your point about MV was irrelevant.

I've been out all afternoon and I'm rather surprised to find that this is still rattling on.

Let's take this apart. From the above I understand Simon to mean that the development of the American bomb was well-known to certain American scientists ( including of course Werner von Braun) and to certain American politicians. Simon says that Israeli agents knew about it too. Now are these Israeli nuclear spies? In which case then it's fair to assume that certain Israeli nuclear scientists (including Mordechai Vanunu) and certain Israeli politicians knew about it. So it would be fair to say that the existence of the American atomic bomb and the Israeli atomic bomb was well-known to Israeli nuclear scientists and certain Israeli politicians and probably (the Israeli bit) to American nuclear scientists and to certain American politicians.

So ... lots of people knew in USA and Israel. But Vanunu spilled the beans in the mid-80s at a which time many people in Europe, USSR and and probably India, Pakistan and China et al were speculating that Israel had developed the bomb with American assistance. All he was doing was providing concrete evidence of a widely-held suspicion.

In which case, the cat was out of the bag! So why persecute him at such great length, as if it were such a tremendous secret? Persecuting him doesn't put the cat back into the bag, after all.

I hope that this helps.:smiley:

[heliocentric]

Having abandoned this thread, I then thought the following might make interesting reading. It's from an article (which is fully-referenced in the original) in the online political newsletter Counterpunch which deals largely with the idea that opposing an attack on Iran involves not "condemning" the Iranian régime. The passages quoted are those which deal more generally with the reality of life in Iran, and in particular the contrasts between now and in the time of the Shah, in a way which adds a bit of subtlety to the evil picture of Iran and its political system usually peddled in the Western media.

Since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, poverty has been reduced to one-eighth of what it was under the Shah.

Under the Shah, about a third of university students were women. By 2010, the figure was 65 percent.

One of the Revolution’s first priorities was to extend electricity to the countryside, where the most of the population lived. In 1977, only 16.2 percent of rural households had access to electricity. By 2004, the figure was 98.3 percent. This meant a real revolution in the lives of the rural poor, especially women. Can you imagine what it must have meant for a rural family to be able to get a refrigerator? Not to have to buy fresh food every day, to be able to cook a meal and store the leftovers? To have electric lights, a radio, a television set and other modern appliances? Aren’t these important achievements? Especially for women? Or don’t the lives of poor and working-class women matter?

Another priority of the new government was the extension of health care to the countryside and inner cities. In fact, universal access to health care is guaranteed by the Iranian Constitution. Iran today is dotted with local clinics where trained medical personnel treat minor injuries and illnesses and can refer more serious cases to regional hospitals. These “health houses” are dramatically extending the lives of the working poor. That’s not an important advance?

The government offers free schooling up through the university level. And even though there are not enough places in the universities to accommodate everyone, the majority of students are now women.

Women now work in virtually every profession in Iran. They are truck drivers, athletes, factory workers, retail clerks, scientists, movie directors and business owners. Yes, the law says women have to cover their hair, arms and legs. But, unlike in Saudi Arabia, a key U.S. ally, they can leave the house without a male escort, drive, vote and run for office.

And Iran, routinely accused of virulent anti-Semitism, has the largest Jewish population in the region outside of Israel. Tehran has 11 functioning synagogues, several kosher meat shops, a Jewish hospital and a government-funded Jewish community center. Like Christians and Zoroastrians, Iranian Jews are guaranteed representation in the Majlis, Iran’s parliament.

(…)

There are the royalists, who want to bring back a Shah. You see their supporters at anti-Iranian protests in the U.S., waving the old Shah-era Iranian flag with the lion and sword.

There are the armed groups that carry out attacks on government forces, such as the PKK in the Northwest, Jundallah in the Southeast and the MKO, which until recently operated with U.S. protection from bases in Iraq. Even though some of these violent organizations have been exposed as receiving substantial financial and military support from the U.S., they all claim to be promoting “democracy and social justice.”

Then there are the wealthy, ideological and disproportionately influential elements in the “pro-democracy” movement that promote a neocon agenda of privatization of the government-owned sections of the economy, particularly the oil and gas industries; deregulation of business and industry; and drastically scaling back social services for the poor. In the U.S. political context, that’s the Tea Party movement – complete with anti-government diatribes.

And there’s the matter of the tens of millions of dollars spent by first the Bush/Cheney and now Obama administrations to support Iranian “dissidents,” most of whom choose to live in the United States.

(…)

Are there real problems in Iran? Sure. Abortion is against the law – just like it is in 40 other countries, including Ireland and Brazil. (And it’s under pretty severe attack right now in Virginia.) The judiciary can be arbitrary. Abuses have taken place, as has been acknowledged by both Iran’s Supreme Leader and its president.

But by every honest measure, Iran is probably the most democratic country in the Middle East or South Asian regions. (I know, that’s supposed to be Israel, but that’s like saying saying apartheid South Africa was a great place for white people.)

Unlike in many Middle Eastern countries that are strong allies of the U.S., there are local and national elections, the majority of the people actually vote, including women, the political pendulum does swing right and left, there are real struggles between different government factions that are covered in the news media, and the average Iranian is quick to offer his or her opinion about political matters.

Are there restrictions on civil liberties? Even examples of state repression? Yes, there are, although the Green Movement also has a history of making wildly false charges.

But it’s important to remember that this is a situation in which the U.S., other Western powers and Israel are objectively at war against Iran: increasingly onerous sanctions; assassinations of scientists; industrial sabotage, including the infamous Stuxnet computer virus; and – according to crack investigative reporter Seymour Hersh – actual boots-on-the ground U.S. Special Ops training of violent, military, anti-government organizations such as the Jundallah. And now there’s the political rehabilitation of the MKO, a murderous, cult-like organization that for the last 30 years even the U.S State Department has classified as terrorist.

[amateur51]

Interesting article, helio but it does not mention the dire situation facing gay men in Iran, where the death penalty can be imposed. A gay friend who is recently back from Iran says the trick is not to be openly gay but he also said that the atmosphere of repression among the gay men he met was worse than he recalls in UK in the 1950s.:sadface:

[heliocentric]

Interesting article, helio but it does not mention the dire situation facing gay men in Iran, where the death penalty can be imposed. A gay friend who is recently back from Iran says the trick is not to be openly gay but he also said that the atmosphere of repression among the gay men he met was worse than he recalls in UK in the 1950s.:sadface:

Quite. I hesitated a long time before posting that quote for that very reason. The author doesn't go into much detail about the oppressive aspects of Iranian society but these are much more well-known anyway. The point is that like all other societies in the world today, it's full of contradictions, and it's those contradictions (like Iran's Jewish population) which tend to be swept under the carpet when attempts are made to paint a picture where, to quote the same article again, "Iran is just one great, big, miserable concentration camp in which 75 million Iranians spend every day yearning for the collapse of their government."

[amateur51]

Quite. I hesitated a long time before posting that quote for that very reason. The author doesn't go into much detail about the oppressive aspects of Iranian society but these are much more well-known anyway. The point is that like all other societies in the world today, it's full of contradictions, and it's those contradictions (like Iran's Jewish population) which tend to be swept under the carpet when attempts are made to paint a picture where, to quote the same article again, "Iran is just one great, big, miserable concentration camp in which 75 million Iranians spend every day yearning for the collapse of their government."

I understand helio - it was well worth posting for that aspect, for sure :ale::ok:

[scottycelt]

A very curious way of 'abandoning a thread' ... but, of course, there's quite another contradictory side to the story.

http://stopthebomb.org.uk/stb/?cat=414

Why you are quite so eager to completely 'swallow' one version of the Iran story, and not the other, and against the almost unanimous view of world leaders, you have still not properly explained?

[amateur51]

A very curious way of 'abandoning a thread' ... but, of course, there's quite another contradictory side to the story.

http://stopthebomb.org.uk/stb/?cat=414

Why you are quite so eager to completely 'swallow' one version of the Iran story, and not the other, and against the almost unanimous view of world leaders, you have still not properly explained?

Religions oppressing other religions is a world-wide problem scotty, certainly not confined to Islam in Iran as I'm sure you'll agree. As a non-religious person I call on all religious people to 'get it sorted' so that the rest of us can get on with our lives unmolested but I'm not holding my breath :smiley:

[heliocentric]

I understand helio - it was well worth posting for that aspect, for sure :ale::ok:

I'm relieved that it's possible (though not for everyone) to appreciate the spirit in which it was posted. :ok: