Victor David Hanson on Dennis Miller Radio

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Read Dr. Hanson’s take on the Iran hostage situation over at Pajamas Media:

Jimmy Carter established the Western precedent, amplified by Ronald Reagan in the arms-for-hostages deals, that there is almost nothing a Western government won’t do to retrieve its kidnapped citizens. Now we see his ripples, as Iran promises to release the female soldier. If there are any minorities among the 15, expect them to follow as in 1979. Iran has “issues” with plenty of other governments. Why not kidnap a Russian diplomat in protest of cessation of fissionable material? The cynic answers that Russian assassination squads and worse might be turned loose.
Iran is betting that that a guilt-ridden and exhausted British public—scolded for decades over its past in Persia, furious at the Iraq war of “Blair-Bush,” having gutted the British military for social programs that bring demands for more rather
than gratitude—won’t or can’t do anything.

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Tehran's secret war against its own people

Sixteen Arab rights activists have been sentenced to death, according to reports in the Iranian media. They were found guilty of insurgency in secret trials before revolutionary courts. But most of the defendants were convicted solely on the basis of confessions extracted under torture. Ten are expected to be hanged in a couple of weeks, after the end of Ramadan. Amnesty International says that two of those sentenced to die, Abdolreza Nawaseri and Nazem Bureihi, were in prison when they were alleged to have been involved in bomb attacks. Three others — Hamza Sawa- eri, Jafar Sawari and Reisan Sawari — say that they were nowhere near the Zergan oilfield the day it was bombed.

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Tehran’s latest tactic is to hold Ahwazi children as hostages. According to Amnesty International, children as young as 2 have been jailed with their mothers to force their fugitive, political-activist fathers to surrender to the police. Protests against these abuses are brutally suppressed. Ahwazi political parties, trade unions and student groups are illegal. In the past year, 25,000 Ahwazis have been arrested, 131 executed and 150 have disappeared, reports AHRO. The bodies of many of those executed have been dumped in a place that the Government calls lanat abad, the place of the damned. They are buried in shallow graves; dogs dig up and eat the bodies.

Nearly 250,000 Arabs have been displaced from their villages after the Iranian Government’s confiscation of more than 200,000 hectares of farmland for a huge sugar-cane project. Dozens more towns and villages will be erased, making a possible further 400,000 Ahwazis homeless, by the creation of a military-industrial security zone, covering more than 3,000 sq km, along the Shatt al-Arab waterway, which borders Iraq.

Ironically, the Hezbollah in Lebanon — the supposed embodiment of Arab resistance in the Middle East — is complicit in the displacement of Ahwazi Arabs. On confiscated Arab land Tehran has set up training camps for Hezbollah and for the Badr Brigades, the Iraqi fundamentalist militia. Badr death squads in Iraq are murdering Sunnis, unveiled women, gay people, men wearing shorts, barbers, sellers of alcohol and people listening to Western music.
Tehran has a grand plan to make the Ahwazi a minority in their own land through “ethnic restructuring”. Financial incentives, such as zero- interest loans, are given to ethnic Persians to settle in Ahwaz. New townships are planned, which will house 500,000 non-Arabs. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of displaced Ahwazis eke out a subsistence existence in shanty towns on the outskirts of Ahwaz city. Others have been forcibly relocated to poverty-stricken, far-flung northern regions of Iran.

Ahwaz produces 90 per cent of Iran’s oil and Tehran expropriates all the revenues. An attempt by Ahwaz MPs to secure the repatriation of 1.5 per cent of these earnings back to the region for welfare projects was rejected this year. Yet it is the third poorest region of Iran: 80 per cent of the children suffer from malnutrition, and the unemployment rate of Arabs is more than five times that of Persians.

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'Global war curriculum' seen in Iran's schools

BRUSSELS -- The Iranian education system is preparing its students for a global war against the West in the name of Islam, according to an independent study of 115 textbooks and teachers guides released today. With Tehran accused of seeking to develop a nuclear weapons arsenal and the United States dispatching a second aircraft carrier to the Gulf, the report by the Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace highlights the uphill task Washington faces trying to persuade Iranian youth to distance themselves from the hard-line Islamist regime. The study, which claims to be the first of its kind, catalogs how pupils as young as 9 are conditioned to take part in a global jihad against such "infidel oppressors" as Israel and the United States. "Hate indoctrination is a professed goal of Iranian textbooks," said the report's author, Arnon Groiss, a Princeton- and Harvard-educated journalist who also has written critical studies of the Israeli, Palestinian, Syrian, Saudi and Egyptian education systems. According to Mr. Groiss, Iranian pupils learn from an early age that the Islamic republic is in mortal combat with Western powers bent on its destruction. One 11th-grade textbook, quoting former spiritual leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, refers to the United States and its allies as "the World Devourers" and says that if they "wish to stand against our religion, we will stand against their whole world and will not cease until the annihilation of all of them." Students are drilled for battle from age 12, when they are obliged to take defense-readiness classes, according to the study by the Israel-based nongovernmental organization. Some also are drafted into the Revolutionary Guard and other elite combat units, where they are taught how to handle shoulder-propelled rocket launchers, the study says.

Through stories, poems, wills and exercises, martyrdom is glorified as a means of defending the Islamic republic and attaining eternal happiness, the report says. A Grade 10 textbook on "defense readiness" boasts that during the eight-year war with Iraq in the 1980s, half a million students were sent to the front and "36,000 martyrs ... were offered to the Islamic Revolution." Describing Iran's school system as a "global war curriculum," Mr. Groiss said the emphasis on military training from such a young age instilled a "siege mentality" among many students. "It is a form of child abuse to install such notions in children's minds," he told journalists at a briefing in the European Parliament in Brussels...

The exclusionary hateful discourse from the medieval jihadist Islamic Republic, weekly Death chants sanctioned by mosques and clergies, glofrifying death over life, celeberating death of children as young as ten in the name of allah, all this keeps the Islamist connected to old immoveable tribal conceits and ‘frozen by decree’ Muslim traditions, these regulated by the utterly medieval Sharia. It stands to reason that in a place where ideas do not move, but are rather replaced with zillions of rules learnt by rote, pretty soon you have a population incapable of true original reasonning and other innovations (haram! i.e. complete Arabization/Islamisation of Persians)

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