Thursday, October 04, 2007

dickhead of the week: kevin rudd

PM-to-be, Kevin Rudd, once visited a strip club with Col Allan, Aus-expat editor of the New York Post...


The Post rather famously declared George II the "winner" of an "election" that he'd lost (but that he later "won"). It's owned by Rupert Murdoch.


Editor Allan supports the Neo-con agenda, & US military intervention in the Middle East (including Iran).


Rudd has now declared that, under his government, Australia would seek to bring the Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, before the International Criminal Court.


Rudd's indictement: incitement to genocide, based on Ahmadinejad's declaration to wipe Isreal off the map.


Rudd obviously has much less facility with Farsi than he does with Chinese: Ahmadinejad's oft repeated statement is a mistranslation...


Admadinejad actually quoted Ayatollah Khomeini, who died seventeen years previously, as saying, "the occupation regime over Jerusalem must be erased from the page of time"

(from: http://www.juancole.com/2006_05_01_juanricole_archive.html)

[Ahmadinejad] made an analogy to Khomeini's determination and success in getting rid of the Shah's government, which Khomeini had said "must go" (az bain bayad berad). Then Ahmadinejad defined Zionism not as an Arabi-Israeli national struggle but as a Western plot to divide the world of Islam with Israel as the pivot of this plan.

The phrase he then used as I read it is "The Imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem (een rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods) must [vanish from] from the page of time (bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad)."

Ahmadinejad was not making a threat, he was quoting a saying of Khomeini and urging that pro-Palestinian activists in Iran not give up hope-- that the occupation of Jerusalem was no more a continued inevitability than had been the hegemony of the Shah's government.

Whatever this quotation from a decades-old speech of Khomeini may have meant, Ahmadinejad did not say that "Israel must be wiped off the map" with the implication that phrase has of Nazi-style extermination of a people. He said that the occupation regime over Jerusalem must be erased from the page of time.

Again, Ariel Sharon erased the occupation regime over Gaza from the page of time.

I should again underline that I personally despise everything Ahmadinejad stands for, not to mention the odious Khomeini, who had personal friends of mine killed so thoroughly that we have never recovered their bodies. Nor do I agree that the Israelis have no legitimate claim on any part of Jerusalem. And, I am not exactly a pacifist but have a strong preference for peaceful social activism over violence, so needless to say I condemn the sort of terror attacks against innocent civilians (including Arab Israelis) that we saw last week. I have not seen any credible evidence, however, that such attacks are the doing of Ahmadinejad, and in my view they are mainly the result of the expropriation and displacement of the long-suffering Palestinian people.

...UN security council resolution 242 (1967) calls on Isreal to withdraw from the occupied territories, ie, get its military out of Jerusalem.


So, relative understanding of international law:

Admadinejad 1,

Rudd 0.

... how does the New York Post report Admadinejad's statement?


That's right!

Admadinejad supports the right of return for Palestinean refugees; a bit controversial in some quarters, but the international community has voted on this one & UN security council resolution 89 (1950) supports the legality of just such an outcome....

revised score:


Admadinejad 2
,

Rudd 0
.

Admadinejad also supports a unified state in Isreal/Palestine, with a popularly elected democratic government.

Whoops! Palestineans would be in the majority - just as they were before 1948.

(Hmmm... Personally, I think a 2 state solution might be a better solution - much safer for everybody.)


Democracy: its a great idea in principle...


Now as for Australian "democracy": did I do a Rip Van Winkle here? I'm struggling to recall when it was that I voted on the invasion of Iraq?


Because, under the Geneva convention, that invasion was an illegal war of agression.


ie: a war crime


in fact, (quote from the Nuremberg trial transcripts) it "
is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."

Hmmm... Johnny Howard, how would you like a taxpayer-subsidised trip to Brussels?


We've got a cold, dark prison cell waiting for you.

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