Iran is now a 'nuclear state' says Ahmadinejad as thousands take to the streets

By MAIL FOREIGN SERVICE
Last updated at 6:49 PM on 11th February 2010

• Gordon Brown: The world's patience is wearing thin
• Security forces fire tear gas and paint balls on opposition protesters
• Internet connections attacked in Tehran as regime tries to foil opposition
• Opposition leader attacked

Iran is now a 'nuclear state', President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced this morning.

As Gordon Brown warned that the world's patience is wearing thin, Ahmadinejad told scores of cheering Iranians that the Islamic Republic is capable of producing weapons-grade uranium.

He spoke as tens of thousands of people took to the streets in Tehran to mark the 31st anniversary of the Islamic revolution.

Despite fears of violence, opposition supporters found themselves largely overwhelmed by the clerical regime and pro-government demonstrators.

The massive security clampdown appeared to succeed in preventing protesters from converging into a cohesive demonstrations.

Large numbers of riot police, members of the Revolutionary Guard and Basij militiamen, some on motorcycles, deployed in back streets near key squares and major avenues in the capital to move against protesters.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad addresses tens of thousands of Iranians gathered in Azadi (Freedom) Square in southwestern Tehran today, marking the 31st anniversary of the Islamic revolution

Pro-regime supporters shout slogans (left) while a caricature of US President Barack Obama joins the sea of Iranian flags

He said it had produced its first batch of 20 per cent enriched uranium - and had the capability to enrich to far higher levels at its Natanz plant.

Enriching uranium produces fuel for a nuclear power plants but can also be used to create material for atomic weapons.

The international community has warned Iran against further enrichment activities, threatening new UN sanctions.

Today Gordon Brown again reiterated the threat of sanctions.

'I believe the mood around the world is now increasingly one where, patience not being inexhaustible, people are turning to look at the specific sanctions we can plan on Iran,' Mr Brown said.

'This is a critical time for Iran's relationship with the rest of the world.'

MrBrown said the international community did not want to impose sanctions but would do so if Iran did not cooperate more fully over its nuclear plans

The Iranian leader insisted the material was not intended to produce an atomic bomb, however.

'We have the capability to enrich uranium more than 20 percent or 80 percent (the level needed to create an atomic bomb),' he said in a speech broadcast live on state television.

'But we don't enrich (to this level) because we don't need it...

Supporters wave flags and placards as they gather in Tehran's central square

A close-up of the giant Iranian flag as it snakes down the street as supporters march in Azadi (Freedom) Square

'When we say we do not manufacture the bomb, we mean it, and we do not believe in manufacturing a bomb,' he told the crowd. 'If we wanted to manufacture a bomb we would announce it.'

Thousands of supporters had been brought in on buses to hear Ahmadinejad speak as security forces threatened to crush any opposition protests.

Witnesses say security forces fired paint balls to disperse anti-government protesters in one of the first clashes of the day's ceremonies.

The unrest began after protesters began to chant opposition slogans in Sadeqieh Square, which is about a half-mile (one kilometer) from a huge pro-government gathering where President Ahmadinejad delivered his speech.

Witnesses say there were no apparent injuries among the several hundred protesters.

Security forces stand guard as crowds of Iranians gather to listen to President Ahmadinejad's address

Iranian women wave flags and a sign reading 'Down with USA' in Tehran today

Internet speeds around the capital dropped dramatically this morning as the government tried to foil demonstrations against the regime.

State television showed live footage of crowds carrying Iranian flags and pictures of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei making their way to Azadi (freedom) Square in central Tehran, where the main gathering is being held.

Opposition members went on rooftops late Wednesday and shouted Allah-u-Akbar ('God is greatest') in protest - echoing similar cries after the disputed June election as well as anti-shah protests more than three decades ago.

More...

• Obama accuses Tehran of building a bomb as Iran threatens to stun West with ‘punch’
• Pakistan is my biggest worry - not Iran or Afghanistan, warns U.S. vice president Joe Biden

'There is a heavy presence of security forces everywhere. Police trucks are at every major intersection,' said a witness in central Tehran. Police helicopters were flying over the city.

An opposition website, Iran Green Voice, reported large numbers of opposition supporters gathering in several cities, including Tehran and the northern city of Tabriz.

'In some parts of Tehran, opposition supporters are chanting 'Death to the Dictator'' the website said.

Security forces are equipped with water cannon to disperse opposition protests, the opposition website Jaras reported.

Enlarge

President Ahmadinejad, centre, greets well wishers from his car, as he arrives at the rally

Other opposition websites spoke of groups of protesters in the hundreds, compared to much larger crowds in past demonstrations

One protester told The Associated Press she had tried to join the demonstrations but soon left in disappointment.

'There were 300 of us, maximum 500. Against 10,000 people,' she told an AP reporter outside Iran. She said there were few clashes.

'It means they won and we lost. They defeated us. They were able to gather so many people,' she said. 'But this doesn't mean we have been defeated for good. It's a defeat for now, today. We need time to regroup.'

Another protester insisted the opposition had come out in significant numbers, but 'the problem was that we were not able to gather in one place because they (security forces) were very violent.'

Pro-government Iranian female demonstrators stand behind posters showing late revolutionary founder Ayatollah Khomeini, right in each poster, and supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, at left in posters, during today's rally

'Maybe people got scared,' he said. 'The idea wasn't to lose or win today ... But what is certain, today was not a good day.'

The opposition leaders have promised to join street rallies, including the Green movement founder and former presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi.

Police chief Esmail Ahmadi-Moghaddam said on Wednesday the Revolutionary Guards and Basij Islamic militia were ready for any incident.

'In case of any riots, public disturbance and disorder ... police will detain and keep rioters in prison until April 9,' an unnamed official told the semi-official Fars news agency on Thursday.

The Islamic state is facing its worst domestic crisis in three decades as opposition supporters have rallied round reformists who lost to Ahmadinejad in the election.

Today President Ahmadinejad announced that the Islamic Republic had produced its first batch of 20 per cent enriched uranium. He is pictured here at the Natanz nuclear plant

In recent months, the opposition has built its street protest strategy around days of important political or religious significance in attempts to embarrass authorities.

The tone of the rallies, however, has shifted from outrage over alleged fraud in President Ahmadinejad's re-election to wider calls against the entire Islamic system, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Neither side has shown much appetite for compromise in the eight months since the disputed June presidential vote, which the opposition says was rigged to secure Ahmadinejad's re-election.

Iran faces growing Western calls for targeted sanctions against it after Ahmadinejad ordered production of higher-grade uranium, stirring fears that Tehran aims to make nuclear bombs, not just fuel for civilian use as it says is the case.

The authorities, who say the poll was fair, have struggled to suppress the protests, and opened trials in recent weeks of people charged in connection with bloody riots on December 27.

Opposition leaders have said the trials were an attempt to deter people from taking part in protests today.

Opposition leaders Mir Hossein Mousavi (left) and former president Mohammad Khatami (right), who is said to have been attacked by security forces today

Iranian authorities again tried to squeeze off text messaging and Web links in attempts to cripple protest organisers. The opposition has used internet and text messaging as its main communication channels.

Internet service was sharply slowed, mobile phone service widely cut and there were repeated disruptions in popular instant messaging services such as Google chat.

But several Iranians reached by The Associated Press said some messenger services, including Yahoo!, and mobile phone texting were still sporadically accessible. Many Internet users said they could not log into their Gmail account, Google's e-mail service, since last week.

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei yesterday promised Iran will deliver a ‘punch’ that will stun the West to mark today's celebrations

'We have heard from users in Iran that they are having trouble accessing Gmail,' said Google in a statement. 'We can confirm a sharp drop in traffic and we have looked at our own networks and found that they are working properly.'

An Iranian opposition website claimed today that security forces attacked opposition leader Mehdi Karoubi when he attended a rally.

'Karoubi was attacked by security forces in central Tehran... they shattered his car's windows ... Karoubi was not seriously injured,' Jaras website reported. The same website said security forces also attacked former president Mohammad Khatami.

The Islamic Republic has survived many challenges, not least a 1980-88 war started by Iraq's Saddam Hussein, whose forces were propped up by Gulf Arab oil money and Western weaponry.

But the national unity forged in that trauma has long given way to rifts within clerical and political elites that widened after the June election. Street protests have flared periodically ever since, sometimes around official rallies.

Attending February 11 events is a tradition for many in the country of 70 million, over half of whom have only ever known the Islamic Republic established by the revolution led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

'If we all stay at home, our youngsters will be left alone on Bahman 22 (February 11). We should support them,' said Laleh, a 67-year-old housewife. 'I have nothing to lose.'

Iranian Nobel Peace laureate Shirin Ebadi said on Wednesday her country faced a catastrophe that would wreck peace in the whole Middle East if what she called government repression of the people were not halted.

Opposition leaders Mir Hossein Mousavi and Karoubi say the reform movement is alive despite pressure from the hardline rulers to disband. Karoubi predicted last month that Ahmadinejad would not be able to complete his four-year term.

'Even if he stays in power until the end of his term, he will be the weakest president since the revolution,' an Iranian analyst who did not want to be named said this week.

Exiled Iranians shout slogans as they stand behind posters showing Khaminei and Ahmadinejad during a protest outside the Iranian embassy in Berlin today

An Iranian student in Singapore holds a sign during a protest to call on the Iranian government to stop violence against demonstrators

22 Bahman – Iran 11 February – Video

Any average person on the street in America and Europe could have told the government that this was happening and that we should have done something years ago. Just as everyone knew that they were playing us for time this entire past year as Obama was apologizing to the Arab World. Why, because it is common sense!! You really have to wonder why we keep electing socialist leaning, anti-American, Ivy League elitists who have sold us down the river and can’t get it through our thick heads that Isreal is right on this matter and that people like Sarah Palin are the kind of people “average people… like most Americans, that may not be from Harvard and write notes on her hand, who would always decide for America and for Freedom, instead of ideologies that never have and never will work and only enslave people. Whether it is Sarah Palin, Ron Paul or someone we haven’t even met yet… the elitists will continue to make them look bad and poll bad to try to keep “the people” down. Remember where we came from, the Founding Fathers and start using some common sense and living by the Constitution and removing those from office who don’t!!

Source: DailyMail/UK

Glenn Beck: EU moving...right?

British politician and Member of the European Parliament, representing South East England for the Conservative Party.

GLENN: From Radio City in Midtown Manhattan, third most listened to show in all of America. I love this guy. We've had him on before. His name is Daniel Hannan. He is a member of parliament for the EU and I think he hates it as much as a lot of people apparently hate the EU in Europe. Daniel Hannan, welcome to the program.

CALLER: Hi, Glenn, nice to be here.

GLENN: Good to talk to you. So this weekend you guys did some crazy thing where you have an election, you know, on a weekend when people are around.

HANNAN: Exactly. Well, they do on the continent. In Britain we have those on Thursday but then weirdly we're not allowed to count them until the last polling station is closed on the continent. So we did not actually count them until last night.

GLENN: Okay. So what are we supposed to learn? Because the media here is saying that this is a surge to the right.

HANNAN: Yeah.

GLENN: First of all, explain what that means. What does your right means because there's also stories now that the right is like the Nazi party right.

HANNAN: Sure. It's a very good question. The term "Right" isn't used in exactly the same way on this side of the Atlantic. First of all they mean really the big beneficiaries are the kind of Christian Democrat parties which would be Democrats, I guess, in the U.S. I mean, they certainly wouldn't be what a Glenn Beck listener would recognize as a conservative rightwing party. And they've done pretty well because you know what? The left always does well when the right has sorted out under the circumstances. And the left always does badly when people realize that there is work to be done. So the leftwing party did really well after the Cold War because conservative parties had made Europe safe for them. And suddenly they thought they could splurge out of welfare and all this kind of stuff. And then the recession came along and people thought, that's enough, we need the grownups now, we can't have this anymore. And so there was a swing back. You are right, some of the parties that are called far right are, of course, nothing of the kind. There is an outrageous semantic trick being played whereby parties which are corporatist and socialist, that want nationalization, that hate free trade, you know, you are called rightwing because our media used the word "Rightwing" as a synonym for bad guy.

GLENN: You know, it's amazing because we've been having this discussion on the radio and on television here on my show for a while that the choices in America are becoming big government Republican or big government Democrat, and there's nobody really representing freedom and small government or the smallest possible government. And it strikes me as that's kind of what the game is being played here in Europe as well, that you have the rightwing which seems to be a nationalist, statist or corporatist sort of party and then you've got the socialist. So you've got big government whichever way you go.

HANNAN: I think that's true. I mean, look, I wish we had your problems. You are right in what you say. I'm just saying this as an outsider, but I think that is true. I think the Republican Party, of which I'm generally a big supporter, and I'm a much more complicated supporter of your party than my own party. But in the Bush years they made mistakes and they went down this road towards big federal spending and budget deficits and, you know, trampling over states rights even on ludicrous issues like the gay marriage amendment. You know, they became the party of field tariffs and external protectionism and in the end they became the party of bailout and nationalizations. And so you are right. But you know what? With all of that I would rather have the choice that you have than the choices that we have in Europe because you are at least starting from a position where there is the choice of the free market whereas we have moved decades away from that and there is an assumption of state control in both the Christian and Democrat parties in Europe. And there are some tiny kind of libertarian parties on the fringes, but the real challenge for us, I mean for the British conservative party is to try and create in the European Union some kind of official opposition because for 50 years the European parliament has worked on the basis that everyone wants more government, everyone wants more tax, everyone wants more European integration. And our challenge is to try and piece together different parties from different countries of decent free market patriotic politicians and saying, hang on, there's a different way of doing this.

GLENN: And that seems to be what people are voting on. It's almost like here in America where people are starting to say, you know what, I believe in state rights, or, I want the control not to be in Washington but closer to my home, et cetera, et cetera. That's kind of the same feeling that I'm sensing from Europe that it is they want the power pulled back to their own countries.

HANNAN: Absolutely right they do. And clearly that is the result of the election in the United Kingdom that we've just had. Seven out of ten votes went to Euro skeptic parties, the parties that campaigned on a pro Brussels ticket were clobbered. You know what? Again I compare your system to the EU system, and I would love to swap my problems for yours. I mean, your Constitution in my version is 11 pages long and it has rights for the individual. The proposed EU Constitution is 580 pages long and is about the power of the state. Your Declaration of Independence promises life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. Our charter of fundamental rights guarantees your right to strike action, affordable housing and free healthcare. You know, there is an absolutely basic foundational difference between the philosophy of the European Union and the philosophy of the U.S. You were very lucky in when you were founded as a country. Your founders had fought against a system of remote government where they feared the concentration of power because they had seen where it led and they deliberately tried to create a Constitution based on what you had, the principles, the diffusion of power, the decentralization of decision making. I'm afraid the EU is also a child of its time and it is based on the idea of ever close a union. Item 1, line 2 commits to an ever closer union and therein lies all the problems because if you have more centralization of power, you get more bureaucracy, you get higher taxes, more regulation, less competition.

GLENN: I have to tell you, I mean, we're talking to Daniel Hannan. He is a member of the EU parliament from England and, you know, I'm always ashamed when I talk to you because everybody is I mean, like you, you just I mean, you know every me, I know Henry the 8th I think killed a bunch of his wives and Winston Churchill was the prime minister. I don't know enough about English history. You know what I mean? It seems like a lot of people overseas kind of know a little bit more about America than we know about them. I guess maybe that's why we're

HANNAN: Yeah, okay, but listen. I'm not sure that is true, but the reason that I'm interested in the U.S. is not just out of kind of historical interest. It's because I can see that your system is working. And with all its floors and I'm not going to say that it's perfect at the moment. I listen to your show enough to know that there are plenty of people that were unhappy about things. But, you know, there are way worse alternatives, and the there were tens of millions of people tuning in all over the world to listen to your president's inauguration speech. Now, you may or may not have supported the president but what a vote of confidence in the system that people all over the world believe in the U.S. in the capacity of the ballot box to change direction. You can't imagine people tuning in to watch the results of the European elections that we've just had. Yet alone the annual meeting of the national people's congress in Peking or the results of the Duma elections in Russia. You know, we are very lucky in the world in who the preponderant power is. And you guys I suspect sometimes take for granted, will do this, you take for granted things that you've grown up with and that you assume are a permanent fixture, that there are qualities of the American political system which go right back to the vision your founders had which are unique. You know, this idea of electing everybody from the garbage guy to the, you know, school board to the sheriff, the idea of having referendums on things, recall, you know, the idea of primaries to choose your candidate, these things I'm sure you don't even discount, you don't even really debate them. But very few other countries approximate that system as though things that have kept you free and prosperous and made you strong and powerful.

GLENN: Let me take you here. Are you familiar with the band Muse?

HANNAN: No.

GLENN: I'm a fan of the band Muse and they are huge over in Europe and if you listen to their lyrics, they are very much "Take the power back." And you can sense the European disenfranchisement with government. Are you at all concerned? Are you seeing any developing trends of, you know, what your own security service said in England is coming this summer calling it the summer I think they called it the summer of rage.

HANNAN: Definitely there is a sense of disconnection between government and governed. That is very obvious. It's obvious not just in the election results but in the abstentia rates. I mean, the single most clunking facts about the elections to the European parliament is that every election results in a lower turnout from the previous one. There hasn't been a break. It's been an unbroken decline since we started electing the European parliament in 1979. The more people know about this system, the less they like it and the less they want to kind of dirty their hands with the ballot paper. These things can be solved. I mean, this sense of distance between lawmakers and the rest of us, there are mechanisms that you could use to narrow the gap and there are a lot of things we could import or reimport from your system. You say, you know, I'm interested in U.S. history, but it's because I'm interested in how we can repatriate the best elements of our revolution. If I look back to what your founders were saying or the patriot leaders at the time of the American war of independence were saying, they didn't see themselves as rebels. They saw themselves as conservatives. In their own eyes they were defending what they had always assumed was their right to be free born Englishmen. And the tragedy is in this country those things are dying out, the ones that we exported, to you and other continents, we have turned our back on here in the United Kingdom. And the grievances that your leaders laid against George III, that taxes were being raised without consent, that laws were being passed without due constitutional process, that the executive was too big and the legislature was too small, the power had solicited from the citizens to the state, all of those things are coming true in the old world. They are happening now. This is happening now as a result of this wretched superstate, it's happening as a result of the growth of modern socialism in the way that it's now emerged, and it's happened in the growth of the kind of standing bureaucracies that have sucked power away from elected presidents. We have you know, 200 years on, we vindicated all of the fears that your revolutionaries had.

GLENN: If you were an advisor to the Democratic Party or to any of the parties that are, you know, progressive in nature here in America or you were an adviser to President Obama, what would you say is the lesson or lessons that they should take away from the election in Europe?

HANNAN: Don't copy us, you know? Picture me like that guy in H. G. Wells' time machine, the guy from the future who comes back and states, do not go where I've gone. We are further down the process, further down the road that you have just started walking down, towards, you know, universal healthcare, more generous welfare provision, a more powerful state, government regulation of industry and enterprise and so on. And you can see looking at us where it leads. It leads to bankruptcy, moral and literal bankruptcy, it leads to debt, it leads to stagnation, and it leads to a collapse of confidence in political institutions such as what we've just seen in these elections.

GLENN: Daniel, people are saying I mean, you say here in America free healthcare, and there's a lot of people that would say, oh, my gosh, free healthcare, that would help me out a lot, et cetera, et cetera. How do you make the case that you don't know what free healthcare is like?

HANNAN: If it really were free healthcare, you'd have to be insane to be against it, right? Somebody's paying for it. The difference is are you paying for it through your tax system or are you paying for it as a consumer. And if you are paying for it through the tax system, which is what we do in the United Kingdom. We have a basically socialist system where everybody contributes according to how much tax they pay and then there is no price mechanism when you claim it. What you find is that there is no incentive for anyone to reduce costs. Now, of course some people are going to say, well, why should there be any? For heaven sake we're talking about people who are very ill and it's shocking to think that there should be conversations of the competency in here. But when you have no consideration of reducing costs, what that means is that there is less to go around for everyone else, and the people are needlessly suffering because the resources have been squandered elsewhere. Now, I don't think that your system is perfect by any means. You know, and nor do I think the Continental European systems are perfect. You get that problem also when you have a completely insurance based model. I mean, you know, I had a flood here in my bathroom the other day and the first thing that the builder said when he came around to his, is this on insurance, right? How much he quoted for the repair was going to depend on whether I told him that somebody else was paying for it. And, you know, an insurance based system also has inefficiencies. But nothing like a system which is run on socialist lines where everyone pays into the pot and then everything is just distributed by a standing bureaucracy.

GLENN: Whenever the right here in America loses an election, it's happening right now, the media can't stop airing stories about, you know, the only way the right's going to be able to get back in is if they move to the left, move to the left, move to the left. Abandon the principles that they supposedly had and move to the left. Is your media today over in Europe littered with stories about how the only way the left is going to be able to get back into power is to move to the right?

HANNAN: No, weirdly it never works that way, does it? Meaning the conservatives have to be nice to the labor people or the Republicans have to be nice to Democrats. It never applies the other way. I was really amused by an editorial in the New York Times that I have to see the other day saying it's appalling that George Bush stuffed the Supreme Court with these ideological conservatives and what we now need is Obama to stuff the Supreme Court with ideological... either is right or is wrong to have politically based judges. It isn't only right when it's a liberal doing it. Of course, rather in the media world it is because they as I said earlier, they inhabit this funny world where rightwing is a synonym for battered. I think what people are the big story here in Britain and in a number of other countries, the big story now is the rise of what they are calling the far right, which as I say is really the far left, it's the far left party that happens also to be racist. And there is nothing rightwing about these parties. Hayek brilliantly demonstrated in the road to surf Dom that the battle to fascist is a battle between two brothers, two strains of the same ideology that believes in state control. And these parties are a symptom of disenchantment with political class people, use the election as a kind of megaphone to shout at everybody else and they say, okay, these are the guys you least want, then we're going to vote for them just to tell you guys what we think of you. But, of course, the way that is then covered is, oh, it's shocking that there has been this swing to the right. And when they use that word, rightwing, to talk about parties like the British National Party, it doesn't make anyone think more badly of the British National Party. It makes people think more badly of the mainstream right, which is why they carry on linking the words together that way.

I've only got about a minute here. I just wanted to ask you. We're putting all these treasury bonds up for sale. We're selling our debt, and everything must go this week and, you know, we've got China worried about us. How concerned are you, since the last time we talked? More concerned, less concerned, about as concerned that we're trashing our dollar?

HANNAN: Since we last talked, we've not only emptied our treasury and started our credit, we've started this insane policy of printing money and actually I think we reached a new low when there was an editorial in a state run newspaper in Zimbabwe about Britain for its economic mismanagement. They couldn't do anything to dishonor us more in the eyes of the world but being pitied by the Zimbabweans because of the inflationary rate, yeah, you guys are in a worse situation when we last talked but I'm afraid we're falling further down, you know, look down from the cliff and you'll see us almost about to hit the bottom.

GLENN: Holy cow. Daniel, thank you so much.

Source: GlennBeck.com

Posted: Knowledge Creates Power

Queen Elizabeth Snubbed! War Declared on France

By BRUCE CRUMLEY / PARIS - Thursday, May 28, 2009

Queen Elizabeth in May

Phil Noble / REUTERS

France and England have fought each other in the 100 Years' War, the Seven Years' War, the Napoleonic Wars and scads of less memorably named conflicts. And more recently, the French and English have treated the blood-and-tears clashes between their national rugby and soccer teams as fetishes for those battles of yore. The geysers of bile pouring forth from the London tabloids this week suggests a new chapter in Anglo-French enmity may be upon us. Call it the "Great D-Day Hissy Fit." 

The casus belli in the latest cross-Channel spat is the slight dealt by the French government to Queen Elizabeth II in failing to invite her to the June 6 ceremonies marking the 65th anniversary of the 1944 Allied invasion at Normandy. While the Queen has attended — and also skipped — various previous D-Day commemorations, this year's event seems to have been given heightened allure by the planned attendance of U.S. President Barack Obama, who remains the King of Pop on the diplomatic circuit. British tabloids have gone ballistic over what they see as French President Nicolas Sarkozy trying to hog the Obama-radiated limelight.

"A diminutive egomaniac, the stain of Nazi collaboration and why the French can't forgive us for saving them in the War", was Thursday's headline in London's Daily Mail, above an article filled with denunciation of the French and their leaders as cheese-eating surrender monkeys. For good measure, the paper ran a second story titled, "What did YOUR dad do in the war, Sarkozy?" The paper's answer to its own question was to claim Sarkozy's Hungarian-born father celebrated D-Day by fleeing collaborationist Budapest for Nazi-controlled Germany to escape advancing Soviet troops. The same story also alleges that the family of Sarkozy's current wife, industrial scion Carla Bruni Sarkozy, had been pretty chummy with Mussolini.

The D-Day contretemps began on Wednesday, after the British tabloids discovered that their sovereign had been snubbed by the French — and was reportedly not amused. And the vitriol went up a notch on Thursday after French officials didn't bother denying they hadn't invited the Queen.

"The June 6 celebration is foremost a Franco-American celebration," said French government spokesman Luc Chatel, noting the event takes place on U.S. territory in Normandy that houses the American military cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer — a detail that appears to ignore the tens of thousands of British and Canadian troops that hit the beaches along with U.S. forces. Chatel provided further ammo for tabloid accusations that Sarkozy was looking to steal the show by stressing that the bilateral nature of the event was of particular significance this year, since it will be the first Obama attends as President.

The unapologetic candor from Paris had even the broadsheet Daily Telegraphon Thursday running the "gotcha" headline "France admits not inviting the Queen to 65th D-Day anniversary." France also appeared to try to shift responsibility onto the scandal-plagued British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. An invitation, French spokesmen noted, had been sent to the U.K. and was accepted by the Prime Minister. "The British wanted to be associated with this ceremony, and they are naturally welcome," Chatel said, oozing innocence and virtue. "(But) it is not up to France to designate British representation."

Amid the barrage from the London papers, perplexed French reporters covered the British pique with reports quoting Buckingham Palace officials denying that the Queen had been hacked off by the matter — royally or otherwise. Still, there was some sense of unease in France over the affair. French people young and old still express enduring gratitude for the sacrifices of the Allied forces that drove the Germans out of France — an effort that cost the Allies some 37,000 lives in Normandy. That feeling prompted many in France to wince at the British tabloid accusations of wartime fecklessness and current ingratitude. Still, those French who are even aware of the British ranting are weathering it with Gallic shrugs. After all, how much is really new about a spat between the British crown and a diminutive French leader?

And to add additional insult to the matter, Queen Elizabeth is the only reigning Monarch and only living Head of State to have served in WWII. 

Posted:  Ask Marion – Knowledge Creates Power

Barack Obama's New World Order

President Barack Obama speaks during a town-hall meeting at Rhenus Sports Arena in Strasbourg, eastern France, on April 3, 2009 - Lionel Bonaventure / AFP / Getty

• The United States is still the same country it was a year ago, give or take about 6 million jobs. But its international branding campaign, as led by the new President, Barack Obama, is so different that the rest of the world might be forgiven if it has to do a double take.

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• Educate Yourself

Most of the hallmarks of the foreign policy of George W. Bush are gone. The old conservative idea of "American exceptionalism," which placed the U.S. on a plane above the rest of the world as a unique beacon of democracy and financial might, has been rejected. At almost every stop, Obama has made clear that the U.S. is but one actor in a global community. Talk of American economic supremacy has been replaced by a call from Obama for more growth in developing countries. Claims of American military supremacy have been replaced with heavy emphasis on cooperation and diplomatic hard labor. (Read "Obama in Europe: Facing Four Big Challenges.")

The tone was set from Obama's first public remarks in London on Wednesday, at a press conference with Prime Minister Gordon Brown, where the American President said he had come "to listen, not to lecture." At a joint appearance with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Baden-Baden on Friday, a German reporter asked Obama about his "grand designs" for NATO. "I don't come bearing grand designs," Obama said, scrapping the leadership role the U.S. maintained through the Cold War. "I'm here to listen, to share ideas and to jointly, as one of many NATO allies, help shape our vision for the future."

On Thursday night, after the G-20 summit ended, Obama took so many questions from the foreign press, including British, Indian and Chinese reporters, that a group of them applauded when he left the stage. Two American reporters asked Obama for his response to the claim by Brown that the "Washington consensus is over." Obama all but agreed with Brown, noting that the phrase had its roots in a significant set of economic policies that had shown itself to be imperfect. He went on to talk about the benefits of increasing economic competition with the U.S. "That's not a loss for America," he said of the economic rise of other powers. "It's an appreciation that Europe is now rebuilt and a powerhouse. Japan is rebuilt, is a powerhouse. China, India — these are all countries on the move. And that's good."

At a town hall in Strasbourg, France, Obama stood before an audience of mostly French and German youth and admitted that the U.S. should have a greater respect for Europe. "In America, there's a failure to appreciate Europe's leading role in the world," he said before offering other European critical views of his country. "There have been times where America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive."

The contrast is striking. Only four years ago, George W. Bush, in his second Inaugural Address, described what he called America's "considerable" influence, saying, "We will use it confidently in freedom's cause." Bush's vision of American power was combative and aggressive. He said the U.S. would "seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture." He continued, "We go forward with complete confidence in the eventual triumph of freedom."

Obama, by contrast, is looking for collaboration. He is looking to build a collective vision, not to impose an American one. And the response has been notable, from the endless flashbulbs that fired off at his town hall to the cheers of spectators who lined his motorcade routes and gathered outside his events in London. At the end of Obama's Friday press conference, French President Nicolas Sarkozy addressed the issue directly, speaking through an interpreter. "It feels really good to be able to work with a U.S. President who wants to change the world and who understands that the world does not boil down to simply American frontiers and borders," he said. "And that is a hell of a good piece of news for 2009."

By MICHAEL SCHERER / STRASBOURG Friday, Apr. 03, 2009

Posted:  Time.com/World

'Buy American' -- or Bye-Bye America

by  Patrick J. Buchanan

"British jobs for British workers!" thundered Gordon Brown, as he emerged from the shadow of Tony Blair to become prime minister.

His populist sloganeering has now come back to bite him.

Across Britain, thousands laid down tools in wildcat strikes in solidarity with a walkout from a French-owned oil refinery in North Killinghome -- to protest a $300 million contract to an Italian company that plans to bring in 400 Italian and Portuguese workers to fulfill it.

As Brown pleaded from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that Britain must not retreat into "protectionism," strikes spread to Scotland, Wales and Ulster.

Britain's commitment to let foreigners buy up its utilities and industries and bring in foreign workers to run them has backfired. Brown's own Labor Party is now angrily demanding that he live up to his pledge: British jobs for British workers.

"The Return of Economic Nationalism," wails the alarmed cover of The Economist. And understandably so.

For the stimulus bills of both Houses have a "Buy American" provision mandating that in "public works" only U.S. iron, steel and manufactures be used. The provision came out of the appropriations committee of the House on a 55-to-0 vote.

The Senate watered it down by declaring the Buy American provision must be consistent with all U.S. trade commitments. But Congress is sending a message: The rebuilding of America is to be a project of, by and for Americans, not outsourced. Sen. McCain's free-trade amendment, to strip all Buy American provisions from the bill, was routed 65 to 31

The reaction of Barack Obama, a NAFTA skeptic in 2008 with bumper stickers that read, "Buy American, Vote Obama," was to genuflect to the gods of globalism and recant his economic patriotism.

"I think it would be a mistake ... at a time when worldwide trade is declining, for the United States to start sending a message that somehow we're just looking out after ourselves," he told Fox News. We don't want to "trigger a trade war," he told ABC.

Apparently, Obama was unnerved by rumbles from Europe, which is threatening to drag us before a World Trade Organization tribunal and have "Buy American" banished forever.

But there is no easy way out now for a Democratic Party where economic nationalism is rampant. If Congress drops or Obama refuses to enforce the Buy American provision, and billions of stimulus dollars are spent on foreign iron, steel and cement, Middle America will know whom to blame. But if Americans get the contracts, and Europeans get nothing, Europe will have to decide whether to retaliate and start a trade war with a populist and nationalist America.

We may be at a turning point in history. For we are about to choose whether to fully and finally cast our lot with globalism, or to become again a nation and people who put Americans first.

We are about to decide, perhaps for all time, whether we believe in a deepening interdependence leading to one world government, or we restore the independence won for us by the men on Mount Rushmore: Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt.

All four were economic nationalists. All would today be decried as protectionists. For all believed that the nation's independence and prosperity hung upon its ability to stand alone in the world, and that foreign goods should never enjoy as privileged access to America's markets as American goods made in the U.S.A.

All four put America first. And it was they who created out of 13 rural colonies the greatest manufacturing power in history. Is not their record superior to what Bush-Clinton-Bush left us: a hollowed-out industrial nation dependent on foreigners for the needs of our national life and for the loans to pay for them?

Even John Maynard Keynes came around in 1933 to believe in "national self-sufficiency."

Those who prattle about the perils of protectionism need to be asked: What has free trade produced, but a bankrupt America that must go hat-in-hand to Beijing to borrow the money to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure? Are we also to use Chinese iron, steel and cement because they, with their Third World wages, will work for less than our fellow Americans?

As for Europe's threat of a trade war, bring it on!

We would eat their lunch. As analyst Charles McMillion writes, in eight years of Bush, Canada ran up $500 billion in trade surpluses at our expense, Japan ran up $600 billion, the European Union $800 billion.

These three trading partners, often by imposing value-added taxes on U.S. imports, and rebating those taxes on goods sold here, racked up $1.9 trillion in trade surpluses, sucking jobs, factories and technology out of the United States. These trade deficits, and the even larger ones with China, says Paul Volcker, are behind our present crisis.

America is bust. It is shameful to have to go to China and Japan to borrow the money to rebuild America. But to go to China and Japan and borrow billions, and not spend the money here, makes zero sense.

We have indulged in free trade for a quarter century. And look where it has gotten us.    

Source:  The Daily Thought Pad/Human Events