Saturday, September 29, 2012

Redlining their own neighborhood

This view of last week's UN highjinks from the great Iranian cartoonist Mana Neyestani, passed on from Richard Silverstein's Tikun Olam.

Also from Silverstein, an excellent rundown of the State Department's removal from its list of terrorist organizations of the Iranian exile group Mujahedin-e-Khalq, which I have fussed about before. Silverstein's post also features a brilliant postography, or whatever you call a bibliography of online writings.

I do think Silverstein is too harsh in calling the delisting one of Hillary Clinton's "great shams". The official notice is pretty honest, anyway—
With today’s actions, the Department does not overlook or forget the MEK’s past acts of terrorism, including its involvement in the killing of U.S. citizens in Iran in the 1970s and an attack on U.S. soil in 1992. The Department also has serious concerns about the MEK as an organization, particularly with regard to allegations of abuse committed against its own members.
—though it doesn't mention very recent acts of terrorism, namely those assassinations of Iranian physicists. But something really had to be done about them, especially those abused members; they are absolutely not welcome in Iraq, now that Iran and Iraq are close allies (thanks, President Bush and Ambassador Wolfowitz and all you cute kids!),  and you're going to have a lot of trouble getting some other country to adopt them if you don't stop calling them terrorists ("Hello, Prime Minister? I've got some Persian terrorists in need of a home, you don't suppose you could—Prime Minister? Are we cut off?").

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