Why Israel and not Iran represents the greatest threat to world peace. (3 Viewers)

[тхеодоре кацзынски]

doing what trick?

Sorry,dissuade them from developing nuclear weapons.

 

[тхеодоре кацзынски]

It's essentially the same thing.
They are not making this fuel for a power plant, they are making it for weapons.
So they are in the process of making nuclear weapons.

Not really though,ayatollah Khonemni issued a fatwa against nuclear weapons when the shah was overthrown,the current ayatollahs may not wish to go against that and its they who hold supreme power not the president.There's currently quite a struggle going on between the two groups.

 

[тхеодоре кацзынски]

http://www.haaretz.com/news/diploma...et-to-decide-to-build-nuclear-weapon-1.419300

 

[Mormon Nailer]

I'm not much of a fan of nuclear weapons myself but if I was an Iranian I'd find it a bit galling to be told by someone armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons that Iran won't be allowed have one. It's not making a good guy of Iran to say that this whole fuss about Iranian nuclear weapons has a whiff of saddam's WMD saga.

I'd also point out how North Korea, who are nuclear powered, are treated compared to Iran.
You don't see Kristol and all the other neo-con and theo-con loonies calling for war with North Korea or looking for salvation for the population there.

 

[Psycho Punk]

I'd also point out how North Korea, who are nuclear powered, are treated compared to Iran.
You don't see Kristol and all the other neo-con and theo-con loonies calling for war with North Korea or looking for salvation for the population there.

Yeah, NK has no oil. It hasn't much of anything. If theres ever a reunification the costs will make the German reunifaction look like a petty cash issue.

 

[theoootini]

I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

 

[Psycho Punk]

I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

If you're going to the bother of strikes from orbit then make it worth your while: nuke Mullingar & Tullamore and a few more Bog Metropolises.

 

[Denny Oubidoux]

nuke Mullingar

Back off

 

[Psycho Punk]

Back off

Well, I've got friends in the area. But they could always renounce Culchieism.

I used to be a Culchie but I took out Dublin Citizenship.

Now I'm a happy member of the Culchie Control Platform.

 

[Denny Oubidoux]

edit - nevermind, not getting into that!

 

[Psycho Punk]

Anyone in London? You might be interested in this.

Hopi weekend conference: April 21-22, central London

The danger of a new war in the Middle East is increasing every day. The war drums are beating ever louder, especially in Israel. Hands Off the People of Iran is hosting this weekend conference in order to highlight the dynamics behind the sabre rattling. Sessions include:

Saturday April 21

War, imperialism and the capitalist crisis
- Mike Macnair, Communist Party of Great Britain
- Istvan Meszaros, invited

Israel, Iran and the Middle East
- Moshe Machover, Israeli socialist and founder of Matzpen
- Anahita Hosseini, exiled Iranian student



Sunday April 22

The political economy of the Iranian regime
- Mohamed R. Shalgouni, Rahe Kargar/Organisation of Revolutionary Workers in Iran
- Yassamine Mather, chair of Hands Off the People or Iran

Solidarity with the people in Iran
- John McDonnell MP
- Donnache De Long, president of National Union of Journalists (NUJ)
- Sarah McDonald, participant of marathon in aid of Workers Fund Iran

Download a leaflet in English and in Farsi.

Saturday and Sunday, April 21-22, University of London Union, Malet Street, London.

All welcome!

http://hopoi.org/?p=1975

 

[Psycho Punk]

Time is fast running out
It is clear that the Obama administration is preparing US public opinion for war, writes Yassamine Mather

Israel: ready to attack
On Saturday April 14 Iran will attend talks with six world powers. The US has indicated this is Iran’s “last chance” to avoid military intervention and the Obama administration is taking very specific demands to the talks as preconditions for further negotiations: for example, Iran “must immediately close” a large nuclear facility allegedly built underneath a mountain if it wants to avoid a devastating strike.

Other “near term” concessions to avoid a potential military conflict include the suspension of high-level uranium enrichment and the surrender by Tehran of existing stockpiles of the fuel, according to senior US officials. US secretary of state Hillary Clinton made the usual noises about time “running out for diplomacy”, while expressing “doubts” about whether Iran has any real intention of negotiating a solution. In other words, preparing US public opinion for an attack that is possibly already scheduled.

The preconditions put Iran’s Islamic government in an impossible situation and, although Tehran might use the talks to buy more time, accepting such conditions would represent such a terrible humiliation that it would be tantamount to political suicide for a dictatorship whose unpopularity continues to rise. But, there again, the US is hardly aiming to make life easy of the theocracy. In Tehran, some senior clerics are hoping that the 12th Shia Imam will make his reappearance even sooner than they are apt to predict.

As for Washington, in an election year the Obama administration has decided it cannot afford to look “weak” on Iran, as the Republican right ups the pressure for military action. To add to the pressure, the US navy has announced the deployment of a second aircraft carrier, the USS Enterprise, to the Persian Gulf region, where it will join the USS Abraham Lincoln. This will increase its ability to launch a massive air war on Iran at short notice.

Meanwhile, the Canadian Centre for Research on Globalization quoted political analyst Ralph Schoenman to the effect that Nato and the US are arming Israel with missile capacity in relation to a “projected and planned attack upon Iran”, According to Schoenman, Italy’s sale of 30 M-346 training jets to Israel is part of these preparations. And the Israeli military has gained access to airbases in Azerbaijan, according to Mark Perry of the journal Foreign Policy:

“Obama administration officials now believe that the ‘submerged’ aspect of the Israeli-Azerbaijani alliance - the security cooperation between the two countries - is heightening the risks of an Israeli strike on Iran ... senior diplomats and military intelligence officers say that the United States has concluded that Israel has recently been granted access to airbases on Iran’s northern border.” One “senior administration official” is quoted as saying: “The Israelis have bought an airfield … and the airfield is called Azerbaijan.” [1] ...

More: http://www.cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1004797

 

[Psycho Punk]

Dear friends and supporters of Hands Off the People of Iran,

I am writing to you, as the threat of war against Iran further escalates. In response to this awful prospect, Hands Off the People of Iran has intensified its campaigning work and is seeking to draw new forces into the fight. For example, this month we are hosting an important conference to look at the political and economic dynamics behind the war drive (http://hopoi.org/?p=1975). Also, we are advertising Hopi’s message more widely with a full page advert in the New Statesman’s Iran special, available in late April. These two initiatives alone will set us back £4,000.

Hopi is run on a shoestring. We are totally reliant on the support of anti-war activists who recognise the unique value of our work for the cash to make it happen. That’s why I’m writing to you. We need donations big and small. If every comrade who thinks our campaign does a good job – that the anti-war movement needs a voice like Hopi’s – made a donation, then we could not simply fund the activities I describe above, but could look to expand our work and influence in the coming period.

You can donate via the Paypal button on our website (www.hopoi.org) or by sending a cheque to Hopi, PO Box 54631, London N16 8YE
I look forward to hearing from you - your help is much appreciated.

In solidarity,

Yassamine Mather
Chair, Hands Off the People of Iran

www.hopoi.org

[email protected]

 

[Psycho Punk]

Mobilise against threat

We must mobilse against the threat of war with Iran says Yassamine Mather

On Saturday April 14, Iran attended talks on its nuclear programme with six world powers in Istanbul. In the end, this ‘summit’ was little more than talks about talks - to take place in May in Baghdad. The uneasy stand-off continues and the strong possibility remains of an attack on Iran within months. Indeed, the outcome of the meeting has provoked a degree of cynicism, with press outlets in the US, the UK and Israel pointing out that Syria now seems to have learned the ‘Iran method’ - that is, agree to talks simply to buy time and postpone intervention.

Israel’s so-called ‘frustration’ threatens to boil over - there is no guarantee that it will simply wait. A major Israeli TV station has reported that the country’s air force is psyched up for an attack on Iran. *A reporter from Channel 10 spent several weeks interviewing pilots and other military personnel at an Israeli air base and remarked upon the palpable sense of excitement they displayed at the prospect of Israel’s first full-scale air campaign in 30 year. Many spoke openly about the “years of preparation” that are now almost over, as the momentum towards military action gathers pace. The reporter, Alon Ben-David, saw “dozens if not more planes” being readied to carry out an attack on Iran’s nuclear sites, including F-15 fighter jets, escort planes and air tankers to refuel the squadron en route to its target.

An attack on Iran would be a disaster and threaten to unleash reactionary developments across the region. Hands Off the People of Iran has organised a school over the weekend on April 21-22 to arm comrades in the workers’ and progressive movement with a thorough understanding of the pressures that are now pushing towards another catastrophic war in the Middle East.

 

[taubstumm]

alan shatter is some eejit

and using the phrase "cultural fascism" just makes him sound like rick from the young ones

 

[Psycho Punk]

Full text at link.

Iran and Islamophobia
http://www.cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1004850

Is there something suspect about the opposition of Hands Off the People of Iran to the Iranian theocracy? Yassamine Mather answers some of the allegations

One of the arguments put forward against Hands Off the People of Iran is that our slogan, ‘No to the theocracy’ (which usually follows ‘No to imperialism’), is pandering to Islamophobia, especially at a time when there is a threat of war against Iran. In dismissing such accusations we have to point out one more time that it is not Islamophobic to support the call for separation of state and religion in a country where three decades of Shia governance has left religion’s reputation in tatters. There is a difference between being anti-Islamic and being against the rule of the clergy: the left cannot compromise on the basic democratic demand for separation of church and state.

In addition there are major differences between the propaganda used in the current escalation of imperialist threats against Iran and the anti-Islam arguments used in justifying ‘the war on terror’ and the subsequent Islamophobia. In the aftermath of the attack on the Twin Towers in New York, as the United States went on a mission to spread ‘liberal democracy’ through conflict, it was necessary to identify an enemy, albeit a largely invisible one, and to a certain extent a very specific form of anti-Islamic propaganda was used: Islam (of a certain type) was ‘the other’, whose terror had to be defeated. However, even then, the ‘war on terror’ was not presented as a war against Islam as such, but against a specific enemy.

At its height we did not see the demonisation of Saudi Arabia or the Gulf states who preach and finance Islamic fundamentalism. Although most of the perpetrators of 9/11 suicide attacks were from Saudi Arabia, the air raids and military invasion were directed against Afghanistan. The western ‘allies’ did not want to mention that the origins of the group claiming responsibility for 9/11, Al Qa’eda , could be traced to the deliberate politicisation of Islamic groups during the cold war by the United States and its allies. Recent history was brushed under the carpet, with media analysts and military experts failing to mention that since the 1950s western governments had encouraged, financed and even initiated Islamic groups in the Arab world and beyond in order to undermine and confront secular, nationalist and socialist forces. From Hamas in Palestine to the Taliban in Afghanistan, they were indeed creations of imperialism, with the deliberate aim of weakening revolutionary forces in the region.

So in many ways the ‘Islamic’ in this ‘war on Islamic terrorism’ was at best ambiguous and at worst misleading. Of course, in France, where the Arabs are the poor of the banlieues, the war was an excuse to attack the underclass, and to a certain extent in the rest of continental Europe, as well as the United Kingdom, a side benefit of the ‘war on terror’ was to isolate further a section of the immigrant population. In other words, its anti-Islamic character was only stressed when it suited the warmongers. At no time was their anti-Islam aimed at rich Saudis, Kuwaitis or Qataris - even though, for example, the Saudi royals continued to apply its constant state of internal terror in the name of Islamic fundamentalism. According to Alain Badiou, the predicate ‘Islamic’ in ‘Islamic terrorism’ has no function except to give content to the word ‘terrorism’.[1]

One could argue that, far from being a war against Islam, the ‘war on Islamic terrorism’ was used to incriminate, victimise and therefore control a certain section of dark-skinned migrants. Here I am not advocating indifference to the plight of Muslim migrants who bore the brunt of the attacks in response to 9/11. However, this fictitious war on Islam was not a war against a Muslim nation (such a thing does not exist) and in forming alliances to oppose it the left should have been honest about the reactionary nature of Al Qa’eda and the Taliban, and less eager to excuse Islamic fundamentalism.

Having said that, as far as the threat of war against Iran is concerned, the issue of ‘war against Islamic terrorism’ is not relevant. No-one in authority in the US or Europe has used the term for the last few years and military action against Iran is proposed not on the basis of the regime’s Islamic fundamentalism as such, but because of its alleged intention to acquire nuclear weapons. In fact vilification of the country’s civilian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is far more prevalent than that of senior clerics. The occasional attempts by US military officials to link the Iranian regime with Al Qa’eda and the Taliban backfired. It is now known that in fact Iran arrested bin Laden’s relatives in the early 2000s.[2]

 

[Psycho Punk]

Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran
By DAVID E. SANGER
Published: June 1, 2012

WASHINGTON — From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program.

Mr. Obama decided to accelerate the attacks — begun in the Bush administration and code-named Olympic Games — even after an element of the program accidentally became public in the summer of 2010 because of a programming error that allowed it to escape Iran’s Natanz plant and sent it around the world on the Internet. Computer security experts who began studying the worm, which had been developed by the United States and Israel, gave it a name: Stuxnet.

At a tense meeting in the White House Situation Room within days of the worm’s “escape,” Mr. Obama, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency at the time, Leon E. Panetta, considered whether America’s most ambitious attempt to slow the progress of Iran’s nuclear efforts had been fatally compromised.

“Should we shut this thing down?” Mr. Obama asked, according to members of the president’s national security team who were in the room.

Told it was unclear how much the Iranians knew about the code, and offered evidence that it was still causing havoc, Mr. Obama decided that the cyberattacks should proceed. In the following weeks, the Natanz plant was hit by a newer version of the computer worm, and then another after that. The last of that series of attacks, a few weeks after Stuxnet was detected around the world, temporarily took out nearly 1,000 of the 5,000 centrifuges Iran had spinning at the time to purify uranium.

This account of the American and Israeli effort to undermine the Iranian nuclear program is based on interviews over the past 18 months with current and former American, European and Israeli officials involved in the program, as well as a range of outside experts. None would allow their names to be used because the effort remains highly classified, and parts of it continue to this day.

These officials gave differing assessments of how successful the sabotage program was in slowing Iran’s progress toward developing the ability to build nuclear weapons. Internal Obama administration estimates say the effort was set back by 18 months to two years, but some experts inside and outside the government are more skeptical, noting that Iran’s enrichment levels have steadily recovered, giving the country enough fuel today for five or more weapons, with additional enrichment.

Whether Iran is still trying to design and build a weapon is in dispute. The most recent United States intelligence estimate concludes that Iran suspended major parts of its weaponization effort after 2003, though there is evidence that some remnants of it continue.

Iran initially denied that its enrichment facilities had been hit by Stuxnet, then said it had found the worm and contained it. Last year, the nation announced that it had begun its own military cyberunit, and Brig. Gen. Gholamreza Jalali, the head of Iran’s Passive Defense Organization, said that the Iranian military was prepared “to fight our enemies” in “cyberspace and Internet warfare.” But there has been scant evidence that it has begun to strike back.

The United States government only recently acknowledged developing cyberweapons, and it has never admitted using them. There have been reports of one-time attacks against personal computers used by members of Al Qaeda, and of contemplated attacks against the computers that run air defense systems, including during the NATO-led air attack on Libya last year. But Olympic Games was of an entirely different type and sophistication.

It appears to be the first time the United States has repeatedly used cyberweapons to cripple another country’s infrastructure, achieving, with computer code, what until then could be accomplished only by bombing a country or sending in agents to plant explosives. The code itself is 50 times as big as the typical computer worm, Carey Nachenberg, a vice president of Symantec, one of the many groups that have dissected the code, said at a symposium at Stanford University in April. Those forensic investigations into the inner workings of the code, while picking apart how it worked, came to no conclusions about who was responsible.

A similar process is now under way to figure out the origins of another cyberweapon called Flame that was recently discovered to have attacked the computers of Iranian officials, sweeping up information from those machines. But the computer code appears to be at least five years old, and American officials say that it was not part of Olympic Games. They have declined to say whether the United States was responsible for the Flame attack. ...

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/01/w...rdered-wave-of-cyberattacks-against-iran.html[/QUOTE]

 

[Psycho Punk]

Flame cyberweapon is tied to Stuxnet program
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2012/06/flame-stuxnet-share-code.html
18:12 11 June 2012
Cybersecurity
Paul Marks, senior technology correspondent

The game appears to be up for the US and Israeli intelligence agencies who created the potent Stuxnet worm and Duqu trojan: analysis by software engineers at Kaspersky Lab in Moscow shows they also created Flame, the powerful espionage software that has mainly been infecting computers in Iran.

Kaspersky Lab, which was commissioned by the UN to investigate the cause of massive document losses in a raft of Middle Eastern computer networks, identified Flame last week. In a bulletin issued today, Kaspersky says that a module from Stuxnet, known as "Resource 207" is actually a Flame plugin that allows the malicious code to spread via USB devices. "The code of the USB drive infection mechanism is identical in Flame and Stuxnet," says Kaspersky.

Coming soon after the New York Times detailed classified White House meetings that confirmed the US is behind Stuxnet, this is a further embarrassment for the Obama administration, which is now seen to be preaching cybersecurity defence at home while deploying a battery of offensive cyber threats abroad - and ones that undermine the software integrity of America's software champion, Microsoft, to do so.

Flame works by using cryptological skulduggery to scupper Microsoft's update system. And Stuxnet used vulnerabilities in Microsoft operating systems that, ordinarily, would be reported to Microsoft, repaired and sent out to millions of users as an update patch. Worse, perhaps, a coding error (the US reportedly blames Israel and vice versa) allowed Stuxnet to escape into the wild and reveal its existence - which a secret cyberweapon should of course not do.

It means the taxpayer-funded US National Security Agency is working at odds with the Department of Homeland Security, which is attempting to bolster online defences. Only last week, US homeland security secretary Janet Napolitano met industrialists at the White House to "discuss DHS's current efforts to secure cyberspace".

Napolitano says the DHS is "working with partners at universities and the private sector...to protect against evolving cyber threats". Whether those threats will be variants of this new breed of home-grown cyberweapon remains to be seen.

 

[Psycho Punk]

Report: US and Israel Behind Flame Espionage Tool
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/06/us-and-israel-behind-flame/
By Kim ZetterEmail Author June 19, 2012 | 4:29 pm | Categories: Flame, Stuxnet

The United States and Israel are responsible for developing the sophisticated espionage rootkit known as Flame, according to anonymous Western sources quoted in a news report.

The malware was designed to provide intelligence about Iran’s computer networks and spy on Iranian officials through their computers as part of an ongoing cyberwarfare campaign, according to the Washington Post.

The program was a joint effort of the National Security Agency, the CIA and Israel’s military, which also produced the Stuxnet worm that is believed to have sabotaged centrifuges used for Iran’s uranium enrichment program in 2009 and 2010.

“This is about preparing the battlefield for another type of covert action,” a former high-ranking US intelligence official told the Post. “Cyber collection against the Iranian program is way further down the road than this.”

Flame was discovered last month by Russia-based antivirus firm Kaspersky Lab, following reports in Iran that malware aimed at computers belonging to that country’s oil industry had wiped data from the computers. In trying to investigate that issue, Kaspersky came across components of the Flame malware, which the researcher believed was not directly connected to the malware that wiped the Iranian computers clean but which they believed was created by the same nation states behind Stuxnet.

Kaspersky disclosed last week that Flame in fact contained some of the same code as Stuxnet, directly tying the two pieces of malware together.

According to the Post Flame was designed to infiltrate highly secure networks in order to siphon intelligence from them, including information that would help the attackers map a target network. Flame, as previously reported, can activate a computer’s internal microphone to record conversations conducted via Skype or in the vicinity of the computer. It also contains modules that log keyboard strokes, take screen shots of what’s occurring on a machine, extract geolocation data from images and turn an infected computer into a Bluetooth beacon to siphon information from Bluetooth-enabled phones that are near the computer.

Flame exploited a vulnerability in Microsoft’s terminal service system to allow the attackers to obtain a fraudulent Microsoft digital certificate to sign their code, so that it could masquerade as legitimate Microsoft code and be installed on a target machine via the Microsoft software update function.

Flame was developed at least five years ago as part of a classified program code-named Olympic Games, the same program that produced Stuxnet.

“It is far more difficult to penetrate a network, learn about it, reside on it forever and extract information from it without being detected than it is to go in and stomp around inside the network causing damage,” said Michael V. Hayden, a former NSA director and CIA director who left office in 2009, told the Post.

It’s still unclear whether the malware used to attack computers in Iran’s oil ministry is the same malware now known as Flame. According to the Post, the attack on the oil ministry computers was directed by Israel alone, a matter which apparently caught US officials off guard, according to anonymous sources who spoke with the newspaper.

 

[Morkel]

The main thing is that the Israeli show the world their power by using weapon and other thing.While Iran don't show that even they have more power and weapon.So you don't say exact that which one is threat for the world.