A CERTAIN JUSTICE

"Few would recognise Abbas Abdi, 49, as the leader of the students who stormed the American Embassy in Tehran in October 1979. High on the hope of a new Iran after the Shah's deposition, the students from the capital's Amir Kabir university caused an international crisis by holding US staff at the embassy hostage for 444 days. But most revolutions destroy their own vanguard, and Iran's was little different. Mr Abdi was released from jail a month ago. It was his second term in the capital's Evin prison, where he served 2� years, much of it in solitary confinement. His freedom is at the whim of the regime, so his caution comes as little surprise. "I'm free only so long as they don't send me back," Mr Abdi said....

Mohsen Mirdamadi, 50, was one of Mr Abdi's comrades in the embassy seizure, an ad hoc operation designed to prevent a US-backed counter-revolution. He went on to serve as a Revolutionary Guard for two years during the war with Iraq. "We thought we had established a democratic system with freedom of speech," he said. "No one felt that we would move towards a new dictatorship. But now our freedom is sacrificed. Many of those students are still my closest friends and think like me. The hardliners of today weren't even at the forefront as we were."

So what have the revolution's expectations translated into, 26 years on? A country with the second-largest natural gas reserves outside Russia and 7 per cent of the world's oil, Iran suffers chronic unemployment, economic malaise and corruption. While the Iranian regime's dictatorship is in no way comparable with that of Saddam Hussein's Iraq, civil liberties and human rights suffer at the whim of the leadership's small, entrenched cartel....

The situation is typified by Akbar Ganji, another former Revolutionary Guard turned reformist journalist, who was jailed in 2000 after naming dissidents allegedly murdered during the presidency of Hojatoleslam Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the present favourite election candidate. Mr Ganji was temporarily released from jail last week but has disappeared."

From The Times

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ELSEWHERE

It looks like Congress is considering the introduction of hate-crimes legislation again. Christians will be the main targets of course. They have been in both Australia and Canada under such laws. Details of the latest proposal here.

An article on TCS completely blows out of the water the moronic Leftist claim that the late Pope is the cause of African AIDS. Just one excerpt: "Superimposing maps of prevalence of AIDS on prevalence of Catholicism is enough to sink the link between the Catholic Church and AIDS. In the hospice which is Swaziland nowadays, only about 5 per cent of the population is Catholic. In Botswana, where 37 per cent of the adult population is HIV infected, only 4 per cent of the population is Catholic. In South Africa, 22 per cent of the population is HIV infected, and only 6 per cent is Catholic. But in Uganda, with 43 per cent of the population Catholic, the proportion of HIV infected adults is 4 per cent"

Bias to lose Federal funding: "A House subcommittee voted yesterday to sharply reduce the federal government's financial support for public broadcasting... In addition, the subcommittee acted to eliminate within two years all federal money for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting -- which passes federal funds to public broadcasters -- starting with a 25 percent reduction in CPB's budget for next year, from $400 million to $300 million".

MSM praise for killer of Americans: "If you wanted to see the perfect example of the ethical and moral collapse of the Mainstream Media, you could not do better than a long article in the New Yorker of May 23, 2005. The article is entitled, "The Spy Who Loved Us." Written by a teacher at the University of Albany, named Thomas Bass, it's about a man named Pham Xuan An. Now very old, An was -- among many other things -- a correspondent in Saigon during the Vietnam War for Time magazine.... He was also a Communist spy, working for the North Vietnamese, informing them of what he knew about American military plans, troop movements, political agendas. He even helped the Communists win large battles by directing Vietcong and North Vietnamese troops against American and South Vietnamese forces. He helped plan the Tet Offensive of 1968, including helping the man who planned the attack on the U.S. Embassy. This was the offensive where thousands of innocent civilians were massacred by the Communists..... the whole article is about how cute and smart and clever and brave a guy An is. A lovable, brilliant, brave man who sent Americans and innocent civilians to their deaths.... In this article, which I would guess to be about 8,000 words or more, there is not one hint, not one whisper, of sympathy for the American soldiers who fought and died or were maimed in Vietnam."

There is an appalling story here about the stormtroopers at the EPA. The whole agency needs to be shut down and environmental protection left to the States. That way there might be some States offering refuge from environmental crazies.

KBJ sums it up "He is implying that it is contradictory to be both pro-life on the issue of abortion and in favor of the death penalty. It's not contradictory, of course, as anyone with any sense knows. The relevant principle is that innocent human life must not be destroyed. We Texans execute convicted murderers because, and only because, we value innocent human life. Have liberals lost the concept of the innocent, or are they just stupid?"

Rightist "racism" "There was one occasion when a worker had refused to eat at the same table as aboriginal workers. Joh told his sister to get the man a tray and then told him to eat outside! And, much to Joh's sister Neta's amusement, the man did. Word of this - in an era when normally a white man would be inside and aborigines outside - spread through the district like a bushfire. But that was Joh. He did what he knew to be right. Joh's favourite singer, Kamahl, sang the Lord's Prayer at his funeral and still wears a set of cuff links his old friend once gave him. [Joh was the "Far-Right" Premier of my home State of Queensland. Kamahl is a very dark Sri Lankan]

Jeff Jacoby has a good article on the way businesses are being shaken down in the name of "reparations" for slavery -- slavery that the businesses had nothing to do with.

Good to see that New York's biggest standover man -- Eliot Spitzer -- has met his Waterloo. Now that he has been shown up as a paper tiger, businesses should be a lot more resistant to his shakedown attempts.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftist movers and shakers is perfectly shown by the 2004 Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftist ideologues are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist"

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