Posted on 06/17/2007 8:44:19 PM PDT by bnelson44
TEHRAN (Fars News Agency)- An Iranian Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) announced that it would pay a $150,000 prize to anyone who could put into effect a death sentence decree issued by the Late Founder of the Islamic Republic, Imam Khomeini, against Salman Rushdie for blasphemy.
Secretary General of the Headquarters for Honoring the Martyrs of Islam World Movement Forouz Raja'ee-Far told FNA here on Sunday that his headquarters had announced in 2004 that it would pay $100,000 to anyone who could put into effect Imam Khomeini's verdict and that after 3 years it has now raised the prize to $150,000.
Indian-born British author Salman Rushdie crushed Muslims' sentiments and beliefs and sparked protests in Muslim countries around the world with his book The Satanic Verses. In 1989 the late Founder of the Islamic Republic Imam Khomeini issued a verdict of death sentence against him for blasphemy.
The move by the Iranian NGO follows a recent controversial move by the British Queen who awarded Rushdie with a knighthood.
Raja'ee-Far reminded that many world Muslims have voiced preparedness to exercise Imam Khomeini's verdict since it was issued in 1989.
"And that's why Salman Rushdie has been living with continued nightmares during all these 18 years," he continued.
The NGO secretary general also added, "According to Imam Khomeini's verdict, it is an obligation for all Muslims to kill Salman Rushdie even if he repents from the bottom of his heart and becomes the pious man of the time."
"Also according to Imam's verdict, if a non-Muslim person can find and execute Rushdie sooner than Muslims, it will be an obligation for Muslims to provide such a person with whatever he wants as his payment or prize," he reminded.
Earlier on Sunday, Iranian foreign ministry lambasted Britain for having awarded Salman Rushdie with a knighthood, saying the measure reveals the anti-Islam stances of the senior British officials.
"This move will certainly place the British officials and statesmen against the Islamic societies," Iran's Foreign Ministry Spokesman Seyed Mohammad Ali Hosseini told reporters during his weekly press conference here in Tehran today.
"This action displays that insults to Islamic sanctities is not a haphazard move and that it is a pre-planned movement guided and supported by certain western countries," he continued.
we need to start giving back as they have given to us. thye only understand violence and respect power. one good shock & awe and no mission accomplished talk this time. keep on them until none are left.
There is a provision in the constitution for issuing letters of marque and reprisal. Perhaps it’s time to revive that approach to dealing with franchised terrorism - - beginning with a price on the head of the various Iranian officials announcing such awards as this,
http://www.progress.org/fold232.htm
Letters of Marque and Reprisal
by Fred E. Foldvary, Senior Editor
Many people disapprove of the U.S. war against terror, or of how it is being conducted. But what is the alternative, other than changes in U.S. foreign policy?
One alternative to U.S. military action against terrorists who have attacked the U.S. and other countries, and are threatening further attacks, is to enact Letters of Marque and Reprisal. Article I, Section 8, paragraph 11 of the U.S. Constitution authorizes Congress to “grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water.” A “reprisal” means an action taken in return for some injury. A reprisal could be a seizing of property or guilty persons in retaliation for an attack and injury. It could include forced used against the perpetrators for the redress of grievances. A reprisal could even involve killing a terrorist who is threatening further harm and cannot be captured.
“Marque” is related to “marching” and means crossing or marching across a border in order to do a reprisal. So a Letter of Marque and Reprisal would authorize a private person, not in the U.S. armed forces, to conduct reprisal operations outside the borders of the U.S.A.
Such Letters are grantable not just by the U.S. Constitution, but also by international law, which is why it was able to be included in the Constitution. The Letters are grantable whenever the citizens or subjects of one country are injured by those in another country and justice is denied by the government of that country, as happened with the attack by persons who were in Afghanistan.
In October 2001, Ron Paul, U.S. representative from Texas, introduced bills H.R. 3074, Air Piracy Reprisal and Capture Act of 2001, and H.R. 3076, September 11 Marque and Reprisal Act of 2001, to authorize the U.S. State Department to issue such Letters. Private U.S. citizens would then be able to hunt down, attack and collect assets from terrorists who have or are planning to commit hostile acts against the U.S. and its citizens. (See Ron Paul’s Press Release. http://www.house.gov/paul/press/press2001/pr101101.htm )
The Founders of the U.S. Constitution included Marque and Reprisal in addition to authorizing Congress to declare war, so that in some cases, the U.S. government would not have to engage the military and have a costly war. The risk would then be concentrated on those who chose to engage in the reprisal. This empowers private citizens to protect themselves and other Americans.
The Letters combined with high rewards for the capture of terrorists would create an incentive for Americans to conduct these operations. It would supplement U.S. government activity such as seeking out and eliminating the financial networks that terrorists use.
There has been little discussion in the mass media about Letters of Marque and Reprisal. Since these are authorized by the U.S. Constitution, introduced in a bill in Congress, and provide a possible alternative or supplement to U.S. military action, there should be more discussion and then action taken on this possibility. The terrorist threat seems to me to be a good example of the attacks that the Founders of the U.S. Constitution thought would be remedied by such Letters.
It’s good that at least one member of the U.S. House of Representatives is familiar with the U.S. Constitution and has taken action to implement this dormant power against attacks on the U.S. Why have other members of Congress not joined Paul to pass his bill on Letters of Marque and Reprisal?
Great Point,,,File that under : Things We Don’t Talk About.
(winkie,winkie)...We Call Em’ “Contractors” Nowdays...;0)
In other words: To compete with the Nobel Peace Prize, the Islamic world has created the Islamic Death Prize, awarded annually to the person or organization who most effectively uses death to advance the cause of the Religion of Peace.
Yeah. I think you’ve got it!
Since the letters of Marque and Reprisal were issued by the US Government, any actions of those issued the letters would be considered to be the actions of the US Government.
They would open the US Government up to charges of international terrorism and piracy.
The US constitution recognized slavery -- is that considered acceptable today?
How worried are you the UN won't like it?
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
Maybe you could check and see if it was repealed.
“Maybe it’s that little cap with the propeller he wears.”
I hadn’t noticed. Is it a different model from the one being worn by the rest of Congress who have allowed the national debt + national liability (unfunded SS and Medicare promises) to grow to a level that exceeds the national income by a factor of 4 or 5, and who have freely added to it every year they are in office? If so, perhaps we should spring for all of them to get his model.
“The US constitution recognized slavery — is that considered acceptable today?”
The short answer is: Yes, in some cultures and places.
http://www.freetheslaves.net/slavery/introduction/
http://www.uq.net.au/slsoc/manussa/tr05manu.htm
http://www.danielpipes.org/comments/79341
Perhaps that’s why there is yet another government program to address its persistence:
http://www.state.gov/g/tip/rls/tiprpt/2006/
“Right you are. No caps with propellers on them, let’s just jump right to turbans and burqas, since Ron Paul’s perspective on the war on terror will end up with nothing but an American surrender and/or literal defeat.”
If the rest of Paul’s associates in Congress are as successful at thwarting the designs of the Islamists as they are at operating within Constitutional limits and coming up with a sound fiscal policy for the US, then you may be correct. Perhaps the Muslim Congressman from Minnesota’s 5th District is a down payment on your vision, another unintended consequence of the current administration’s “flip flopping” from the foreign policy it ran on in 2000 to the current Wilsonian policy of ‘nation building’, this by a nation that is evidently not even in control of its own borders, or its fiscal stability. (Incidentally, is it just a satirical item from The Onion or Scrappleface, or is there really a plan afoot to transfer a couple of hundred INS border guards to Iraq to train new hires for the Iraqi government’s border partrols? Just wondering.)
Michael Scheuer, one of the authors Paul recommended to Giulani, has a different vision which, as he describes below, is difficult to communicate to Beltway denizens of either branch of the major factions wrestling for control of the mess inside the Beltway:
A REVIEW OF THE REVIEWERS
Michael Scheuer
The suggestion that I review the reviews of my book, “Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terrorism”, gives me a unique opportunity to evaluate the success of the book in prompting and influencing debate on the nature of America’s war on Islamist militancy, as well as to survey the range and content of the reviews the book has received.
What the book says
First, let me restate my intent in writing the book. My work was meant to inform Americans about the threat Islamist militancy posed to our country. The book is strongly nationalistic. I do not aspire to be a citizen of the world; being an American citizen is enough honor for one lifetime. The message I wanted to deliver can be summarized in three points.
1. Our Islamist enemies – led and personified by Osama bin Laden – attack America for what we do in the Muslim world, not for what we believe or the way we live. They attack us because they believe America, through its policies and actions, is trying to destroy Muslims and the Islamic faith. Our political leaders from both parties do not understand this, or, if they do, are willfully lying to the electorate. There is no other explanation for their abject wrong-headedness.
2. The war in which America is engaged is a war for survival, not a police action, a regime-changing or nation-building exercise, or, least of all, a law enforcement problem. We cannot talk our way out of this war, and we cannot – and must not try – to appease our way out of it. Indeed, we are faced not by a choice between war and peace, but a choice between war and endless war.
3. Today America is defending itself only through intelligence and military operations. These can hold the ring for a while, but to crush our Islamist enemy – as we must – the lethal power of these services must be complemented by a review of and debate about our policies toward the Muslim world. Not aimed at appeasement, this review, and the debate it engenders, would ensure that our long-in-place policies still serve U.S. national interests. If they do, fine, we will have make do with military and intelligence means. If they do not, we can alter them in a way that protects America’s interests while we simultaneously destroy our foes at every opportunity.
The book’s reception
I think any author would be pleased by the reception my book received. I was not only pleased, but shocked. The book has sold more than 150,000 copies, long excerpts have appeared in the New York Times and Washington Post, and it was on those papers’ bestseller lists for several weeks. I have had numerous opportunities to talk about the book and my ideas on television, radio, and in print interviews, and have been asked to present talks in several public venues. With the exception of several sui generis Fox TV correspondents, I have been well treated on all occasions. The best part of this media experience has been participating in radio call-in shows. The eagerness of Americans to seek new information, question my ideas and judgments, and try to pin me down for specifics have reaffirmed my belief that Americans are not the simpletons their political leaders too often treat them as.
Notwithstanding these many positives – for which I am genuinely grateful – I have been disappointed by the failure of many reviewers to understand the book’s intent. This failure speaks either to the murkiness of my prose and the weakness of my arguments, or to the agendas of my reviewers. Likely it is a mix of both.
Reviews from the left
My book has been embraced on the left by those eager to attack President Bush and his neoconservative advisers, especially on the issue of Iraq. I oppose the Iraq war because it made crushing our bin Laden-led Islamist enemies vastly more difficult, and because self-initiated, offensive wars are incompatible with the principles on which the Founding Fathers grounded U.S. foreign policy. This said, the book devotes only a few of three-hundred pages to Iraq, and rarely mentions President Bush. Simply, Imperial Hubris is not about either Iraq or President Bush.
After disgorging their anti-Bush venom, reviewers on the left have consistently referred to the “schizophrenic” nature of the book. The argument they make on this point is that while I claim that our Muslim foes hate and fight us because of what we do in the Islamic world, I also assert that more and more-lethal military and intelligence activities must be undertaken in America’s defense. Well, I am guilty as charged. At a basic level, America is suffering from the postwar mangling of our educational system that allows the inculcation of such errant nonsense as the idea that all wars are evil, as well as from the willingness of our elites to preach the lie that wars can be fought and won with few combatant casualties on either side and even fewer civilian casualties.
As a consequence, since 2001 most of the Taleban, al Qaeda, and the Iraqi armed forces escaped America’s daintily applied wrath, went home with their guns, and have lived to merrily fight another day. My point was not schizophrenic, but just this: It does not matter whether Muslims are angered by the simple fact that we intend to kill all those who intend to kill us. What matters, and this point was seldom caught by reviewers on the left, is that we cannot kill 1.3 billion Muslims, that while we must in the short term kill far greater numbers of our enemies, this lethality must be coupled to a policy review aimed at trying to cut into the now steadily growing numbers of Muslims willing to take up arms against America. We cannot stop this growth in its tracks, but we can decide to use all the tools at our command – economic, diplomatic, propaganda, as well as military and intelligence – to slow it over time. It does not seem to me schizophrenic to try to broaden the range of tools available to America by adding non-lethal ones to a more aggressive use of the lethal.
Reviews from the right
For the most part, reviews of Imperial Hubris from the right have been more straightforward and less nuanced. I am simply and variously described as a “liberal appeaser”, an “Islamist fellow traveler”, and – my personal favorite – a “rightwing weasel” who always “blames the Jews.” The consensus on the right seems to be that my intention was to “blame America” for the problems we are having at the hands of Islamist militants. The use of these epithets necessarily sets the tone and shapes the content of the reviews. Oddly, the reviews from the right have not noted the sharp nationalistic tone of my book, suggesting, perhaps, that the neoconservatives now in the saddle in Washington are truly more interested in the glories of empire than in the security of America.
There is, in the American context at any rate, nothing “conservative” about a policy of empire-building. Traditionally, as Colonel Ralph Peters brilliantly argues, America has been the killer of empires not their creator. American conservatism has meant regarding war as a last, not a first resort, and going to war only to destroy foes who present a genuine threat to America’s survival. Never has it meant or sanctioned offensive wars of our choosing, and the explicit rejection of John Quincy Adams’s timeless principle that “America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.”
Many of the reviews of my book from the right seem to me – as a Republican diehard, a nationalist, and a moderate isolationist – to be grounded in nothing more than repackaged Wilsonianism, a set of ideological fantasies that have helped to soak the world in blood since Versailles. The traditional principles of U.S. foreign policy – non-intervention, freedom of the seas, avoiding detrimental alliances, being the exemplar not the installer of democracy in the world, not picking fights abroad, etc. – appear as foreign to some of my reviewers on the right as they so manifestly are to the neoconservatives. Many in both categories would not know the difference between an American founder and an Atlantic flounder, although our current foreign policy suggests that the advice guiding it comes from minds similar in quality to the latter not the former.
Summing up
So far, I have failed in terms of what I intended my book to do. I have failed to stir any sort of substantive debate, and the nationalist, America first – not America alone – content of my argument has gone virtually unnoticed. I am responsible for that failure, and will work to clarify my prose and sharpen my argumentation on the chance I am tempted to write a third book on America’s war with Islamist militancy. There is also the chance, of course, that the problem is not my writing, but that I have not changed with the times. I suppose that there must be a chance that our elites are right when they preach casualty-free wars and the efficacy of democracy crusading; that everyday, working Americans really believe that their liberty is safe only if we impose our brand of freedom elsewhere at bayonet point; and that, to do so, American parents are gladly willing to spend the lives of their sons and daughters to ensure foreigners are just like us. Call me stubborn, but if there is anyone in non-elite America who believes this I would like to meet them because, as George Strait sings, I have some ocean-front property in Arizona to sell.
February 7, 2005
Is Ron Paul paying you by the word?
You ought to be ready for retirement by the time he loses in the primaries. LOL
“Is Ron Paul paying you by the word?
You ought to be ready for retirement by the time he loses in the primaries. LOL”
Of course he will lose in the primaries. What makes you think I expect him to do anything but lose? Or that he expects to do anything but lose, as well? (Can’t recall the source, perhaps some U-Tube mini-interview, but he said in answer to some question about his ‘dim prospects for election’ something like, “If I win, I think we will have to ask for a recount.”)
In the country of the clueless and the willfully blind, the one-eyed man is in for one hell of a ride. Why should it be any different this time?
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