Posted on 07/25/2010 1:59:45 PM PDT by ScaniaBoy
You may recall that back in 2007, some arrests were made in New York City in connection with a terrorist plan to blow up fuel tanks at Kennedy Airport. Now, three years later, the trial is on, and you can read about it – indeed you must read about it — in the — get this! — local news section of the New York Times. It is indeed quite a story, and it is written by one A.G. Sulzberger, a surname that undoubtedly gets due respect at the Times. But it’s tucked away under local news instead of appearing on the front page, for reasons best left to the editors (although I have a pretty good guess about the main reason).
According to the story, one of the accused, a former official in Guyana by the name of Abdul Kadir, was wired to the government of Iran. After first denying that he had been in touch with Iranian officials in Venezuela, Kadir admitted the contacts. Indeed, he was arrested in Trinidad three years ago while en route to Iran via Caracas.
Kadir insisted, at least for a while, that his intimacy with the Islamic Republic was religious, not political. He sent several of his kids to Iran for religious study (someone with a suspicious turn of spirit might suspect they were being indoctrinated and trained to follow in their dad’s clawsteps).
That suspicious soul would find confirmation in the explosive discovery that Amir Kadir had had extensive communications with one Mohsen Rabbani, the Iranian “diplomat” indicted in connection with the terrorist attack on the Jewish Social Center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in the mid-1990s.
That’s quite a connection, don’t you think? If I were Mr. Sulzberger’s editor, I’d have hammered home that point: “accused terrorist in cahoots with Iranian terror master,” or some such.
Actually, the late lamented New York Sun was all over this story at the time of the initial arrests. Eli Lake, now a star at the Washington Times, said it very well back in 2007:
If Iran’s hand is found behind the JFK airport plot, it would raise an alarm about the Islamic Republic’s recent alliances with America’s hemispheric enemies. Since the 2005 ascendance of President Ahmadinejad in Iran, the Iranian regime has strengthened ties with such leaders as President Castro of Cuba, President Chavez of Venezuela, and even President Reagan’s one-time foe, President Ortega of Nicaragua.
Mr. Chavez, for example, has signed a series of cooperation agreements with Iran and allowed Iranian television producers to consult on Venezuela’s plan to offer a Spanish-language satellite television station. The Venezuelans have also allowed the Lebanese group Hezbollah, which receives funds and guidance from Tehran, to operate openly in their country.
One would have a lot more to say about the Iranian-Venezuelan connection today, what with Chavez and Ahmadinejad holding love fests with striking frequency. Or maybe not. Maybe some crowd of self-appointed media censors gathers in a virtual chat room every day to figure out how to downplay the stories most important for the American future. One way would be to bury such stories in the local news, even one about an international plot to kill thousands of Americans that involves the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism, and which happens to be the central ingredient in one of this administration’s most embarrassing and dangerous failures: the “extended hand” to our enemies gambit.
If I were the headline writer, I’d have said something like “Accused Iranian Agent In Plot to Blow Up JFK.” The actual headline is “Trial Focuses on Iran Ties of Kennedy Plot Suspect,” (which I originally thought was about the Kennedy Assassination).
One final point: that crowd of anti-Semites that insists we have nothing to fear from Iran, and says that anyone who wants to topple the evil regime in Tehran is doing it at the behest of Likud, will ignore this story and others like it. They don’t want the American people to see that Iran is a threat to us. Better to blame the Jews for it all. Yes that’s you, Walt and Mearsheimer, and you, Buchanan, and you, Giraldi, and…
That crowd is going to get a lot of Americans killed one of these days. Just ask Amir Kadir. He seems to have tried.
All triple endorsed by obama!
Ping!
This “head-in-the-sand” defense strategy of Zer0’s may have a few minor flaws.
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