WHAT SENATOR JOHN GLENN SAID &

Things that make you think a little:

There were 39 combat related killings in Iraq in January.
In the fair city of Detroit there were 35 murders in the
Month of January. That' s just one American city,
About as deadly as the entire war-torn country of Iraq

When some claim that President Bush shouldn't
Have started this war, state the following:

A. FDR led
us into World War II.

B. Germany never attacked us; Japan did.
>From 1941-1945, 450,000 lives were lost ..
An average of 112,500 per year.

C. Truman finished that war and started one in Korea.
North Korea never attacked us .
>From 1950-1953, 55,000 lives were lost ...
An average of 18,334 per year.

D. John F. Kennedy started the Vietnam conflict in 1962.
Vietnam never attacked us .

E. Johnson turned Vietnam into a quagmire.
>From 1965-1975, 58,000 lives were lost ..
An average of 5,800 per year.

F. Clinton went to war in Bosnia without UN or French consent.
Bosnia never attacked us.

Clinton was offered Osama bin Laden's head on a platter three
Times by Sudan and did nothing. Osama has attacked us on
Multiple occasions.

G. In the years since terrorists attacked us , President Bush
Has liberated two countries, crushed the Taliban, crippled
Al-Qaida, put nuclear inspectors in Libya, Iran, and North Korea without firing a shot, and captured a terrorist who
Slaughtered 300,000 of his own people.

The Democrats are complaining
About how long the war is taking

But It took less time to take Iraq
than it took Janet Reno
To take the Branch Dravidian compound.
That was a 51-day operation.

We've been looking for evidence for chemical weapons
In Iraq for less time than it took Hillary Clinton to find
The Rose Law Firm billing records.

It took less time for the 3rd Infantry Division and the
Marines to destroy the Medina Republican Guard
Than it took Ted Kennedy to call the police after his
Oldsmobile sank at Chappaquiddick

It took less time to take Iraq than it took
To count the votes in Florida!!!!

Our Commander-In- Chief is doing a HARD JOB !
The Military morale is high!

The biased
media hopes we are too ignorant
To realize the facts

But Wait there's more!

JOHN GLENN (ON THE SENATE FLOOR)
Mon, 26 Jan 2004 11:13

Some people still don't understand why military personnel
Do what they do for a living. This exchange between
Senators John Glenn and Senator Howard Metzenbaum
Is worth reading. Not only is it a pretty impressive
Impromptu speech, but it's also a good example of one
man's explanation of why men and women in the armed
Services do what they do for a living

This IS a typical, though sad, example of what
Some who have never served think of the military.

Senator Metzenbaum (speaking to Senator Glenn):
"How can you run for Senate
When you've never held a real job?"

Senator Glenn (D-Ohio):
"I served 23 years in the United States Marine Corps.
I served through two wars. I flew 149 missions.
My plane was hit by anti-aircraft fire on 12 different
Occasions. I was in the space program . It wasn't my
Checkbook, Howard; it was my life on the line. It was
Not a nine-to-five job, where I took time off to take the
Daily cash receipts to the bank."

"I ask you to go with me ... As I went the other day...
To a veteran's hospital and meet those men ...
With their mangled bodies in the eye, and tell THEM
they didn't hold a job!

You go with me to the Space Program at NASA
And go, as I have gone, to the widows and Orphans
Of Ed White, Gus Grissom and Roger Chaffee...
And you look those kids in the eye and tell them
That their DADS didn't hold a job.

You go with me on Memorial Day and you stand in
Arlington National Cemetery, where I have more friends
Buried than I'd like to remember, and you watch
Those waving flags

You stand there, and you think about this nation,
And you tell ME that those people didn't have a job?

What about you?"

For those who don't remember
During WW II, Howard Metzenbaum
was an attorney Representing the Communist Party in the USA.

And now he's a Senator!

If you can read this, thank a teacher.
If you are reading it in English
thank a Veteran.

It might not be a bad idea to keep this circulating to
others that might need to be updated...




Let us live like we are worth the price they paid!
Let us live like we are worth the price HE paid

Iran's top security official says he will 'negotiate' with West at Munich conference

The Associated Press
Wednesday, February 7, 2007

TEHRAN, Iran
Iran's top security official, Ali Larijani, said Wednesday he would hold negotiations with Western officials over the country's controversial nuclear program during a security conference in Germany this weekend.

His comments suggested Iran may be on a new diplomatic offensive in efforts to stave off sterner measures from the U.N. Security Council, should it fail to meet a 60-day deadline to suspend uranium enrichment that was imposed Dec. 23.

"On the sidelines of the Munich conference, there will be some negotiations with Western parties," Larijani was quoted as saying by Iran's official IRNA news agency.

Larijani — who will for the first time head the Tehran delegation to the Feb. 9-11 gathering in Munich, Germany, unlike earlier gatherings that were attended by lower level Iranian officials — sidestepped questions whether those talks would directly involve U.S. representatives.

"We have never said that we don't negotiate," Larijani said. He would not clarify whether he would talk to Europeans only or to Americans as well. On Monday, he denied that he might meet with Americans.

Larijani's meeting with Western officials would be the first such since the United Nations slapped limited sanctions on Iran in December over Tehran's refusal to halt uranium enrichment which the West fears could lead to nuclear bomb making. Enrichment can be used to make the material needed for a warhead — or fuel for a nuclear reactor, which Iran insists is the only goal of its nuclear program.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates is also expected to attend the Munich gathering.

Iran's influential former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a top figure in the clerical leadership, said Wednesday that "diplomacy is the only path for important international and regional issues ... Diplomacy can bring trust between the two sides."

"Placing pre-conditions for diplomacy on Iran's nuclear program is a mistake by European countries, which took this position under pressure from some powers," he said, referring to the United States.

Larijani also said that the U.S. demands this week for the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency to step up pressure on Iran had "no legal justification."

As a member of the U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, Iran is "enjoying full technical cooperation with the IAEA," Larijani said.

Diplomats accredited with the IAEA in Vienna, Austria, said on Monday that Iran has set up more than 300 centrifuges in two uranium enrichment units at its underground Natanz complex.

The move is a direct challenge to the Security Council and potentially opens way for larger scale enrichment operations. Iranian leaders have repeatedly said the Natanz underground hall would house first 3,000 centrifuges and ultimately 54,000 of the machines.

Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki reiterated on Wednesday the country's determination to pursue its nuclear program, which it says is peaceful.

Asked about those two new cascade units at Natanz, Mottaki dismissed any irregularities. He said the facility is "monitored by the IAEA cameras" and that activity at the plant is "following its normal trend."

The United States recently increased pressure on Iran, sending a second U.S. aircraft carrier into the Persian Gulf region and authorizing U.S. forces in Iraq to kill or capture Iranian agents who are plotting attacks.

Washington has also armed Iran's Arab neighbors with Patriot missiles, and the Pentagon halted sales of spare parts from the its recently retired F-14 fighter jet fleet because of concerns they could be transferred to Iran.

The Bush administration has said it has no plans to invade Iran, only to protect U.S. troops in Iraq.

Gates Says Cost of Defending Nation High, but Worth It
By Jim Garamone
American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON, Feb. 7, 2007 – The president's fiscal 2008 defense budget request may be high, but the expenditure is necessary, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates told the House Armed Services Committee today.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates testifies to the House Armed Services Committee Feb. 7. Photo by Staff Sgt. D. Myles Cullen, USAF  '(Click photo for screen-resolution image);high-resolution image available."The costs of defending the nation are high," Gates said in testimony before the committee. "The only thing costlier, ultimately, would be to fail to commit the resources necessary to defend our interests around the world and to fail to prepare for the inevitable threats of the future."

Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Marine Gen. Peter Pace testified on the president's fiscal 2008 defense budget request and the fiscal 2007 emergency supplemental request. The 2008 request is for $481.4 billion, and the supplemental 2007 request is for $93.4 billion. The president also requested $141.7 billion for operational costs.

The defense budget requests make the strategic investments necessary to modernize and recapitalize military capabilities, Gates said.

He also said the two requests will reduce stress on the military and help sustain the all-volunteer force. Servicemembers' needs are reflected in the significant money dedicated to quality-of-life improvements, Gates said.

One large aspect of the budget request will increase the size of the Army and Marine Corps. Conditions in the world mandate that increase, Gates said.

"I think that we need the full range of military capabilities," Pace said. "We need both the ability for regular force-on-force conflicts because we don't know what's going to develop in places like Russia and China, in North Korea, in Iran and elsewhere.

He said the military also needs more special operations forces. "An increase in the Special Forces is provided for in this budget to deal with situations such as we're encountering in Afghanistan and ... the Philippines and various other places around the world."

The increase in the number of troops and the number of units will give troops the time at home station they need to recuperate and train up for the next deployment, Gates said.

American forces are stationed around the world. Those requirements do not end simply because there is a war in Iraq or Afghanistan, he added. "One of the results of that plus the war in Iraq is that our active force is now down to a year at home and then a year deployed," Gates said. "In fact, our policy is that it be a year deployed and two years at home. Same way with the Guard -- ... a year deployed and five years (at home). Because the forces are stretched so thinly in a variety of places, ... especially Iraq, we've had to break that commitment."

Pace agreed that ground forces needed to increase. He also said that the budget needs to address equipment and training.

About 40 percent of U.S. forces' equipment is either in a combat zone or being repaired, he said. Units stationed in the United States have less than a full complement of equipment, Pace said.

Units that should train on up-armored Humvees cannot because all of those vehicles are deployed, the chairman said. Units make do and have 'workarounds' to make up for shortfalls in equipment, he said. Money in the 2008 request and the 2007 supplemental will address equipment shortfalls for units worldwide, the said.

Training is another consideration in forming the budget and increasing the size of the force. "With one year out and one year back, during the time that they're back, after they take a little bit of leave and get to know their family, the troops are being retrained for the mission to go back into Iraq or Afghanistan," Pace said.

"Instead of having the two years at home that we'd like them to have and have that time available to train to both the mission they're going to go to but also the unexpected missions of combined arms operations and the like, we are not able to train them fully to the missions that they may have to go to in addition to being able to train them for the mission they're going to," he continued.

The Army and Marine Corps are slated to grow by 92,000 troops through fiscal 2012. The change will enable the Army to field 48 brigade combat teams up from 42, and the Marines to fill out a third Marine expeditionary force.

Biographies:
Robert M. Gates
Gen. Peter Pace, USMC

Shias and Sunnis

The widening gulf
Feb 1st 2007 | CAIRO
From The Economist print edition

David Simonds

Amid Sunni fears of a growing “Shia arc”, tensions between the main Muslim sects are widening, while some governments are exploiting them
ISRAEL and America are stirring conflict between Sunni and Shia Muslims so as to plunder their wealth, declares Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Israel and America are stoking Sunni fear of Shias to distract from the true cause of Palestine, says the supreme guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mehdi Akef. Evidently, there is a meeting of minds between the leader of the most powerful Shia state and the head of the world's most influential Sunni political movement.

On the ground across much of the Middle East, the spectre of fitna, or sectarian schism, has rarely loomed larger. This week in Iraq, yet another round of bombs deliberately targeted Shia civilians, killing scores. Shia militias responded by lobbing mortars into Sunni districts and by snatching and executing Sunni men. A series of deadly attacks against Shia mosques in Pakistan added a dozen more victims to the estimated 2,000 killed over 15 years of sporadic sectarian violence. In Lebanon, a row in a college cafeteria snowballed into running street battles between followers of rival Sunni and Shia parties; four were killed. The preacher at a slain Sunni youth's funeral described him as a “martyr to Arabism”—a subtle jibe at the ostensibly “Persian” Shias and their leading party in Lebanon, Hizbullah.

This was the week of Ashura, a Shia festival that commemorates martyrdom and has often proved a tense period in places where Islam's two main sects both reside. Yet communal feelings are rising even where Shias, around 15% of the world's Muslims, have little or no presence. In December, Sudan's authorities closed Iran's stall at a Khartoum book fair after Sunni activists accused it of spreading Shia propaganda. Algerian newspapers say Shia missionaries are inveigling Sunni children to convert. Supporters of Fatah, a secular Palestinian party, have taken to chanting “Shia! Shia!” at backers of the Islamist (and Sunni) Hamas party, in a dig against its strong ties to Iran. In Jordan, villagers turned back pilgrims going to a local Shia shrine. Shias say that last month's attacks by vandals in the American city of Detroit on two Shia community centres and some Shia-owned businesses were sectarian.

Some of the alarm appears to be orchestrated. In the culmination of a month-long barrage of innuendo against Iran in Egypt's state-owned press, a recent editorial in the staid Cairo daily, al-Ahram, charged the Islamic Republic with undermining chances for peace in Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon. The goal, it suggested, was to weaken Sunni Arab states so as to realise “Safavid dreams” of Shia expansion, a reference to the 16th-century dynasty that enshrined Shiism as Iran's state religion. Citing unnamed Egyptian officials, the same newspaper floated charges that Iranian intelligence agents were responsible for the kidnap and murder of Egypt's ambassador in Iraq in July 2005.

A similar campaign has unfolded in Saudi Arabia, where increasingly internet chat sites, several of which are widely believed to be infiltrated by police agents, are rife with spurious tales of Shia perfidy. A typical item affirms that, when told of Sunni fears of a “Shia crescent” spreading across the region, Iran's president said he envisioned not a crescent but a full moon. While a columnist in one Saudi daily asserted, falsely, that Shias believe they must perform ablutions if they happen to touch an “unclean” Sunni, 38 senior Saudi clerics issued a call to arms in defence of Iraq against the “Crusader-Safavid-Rejectionist plot” that seeks to uproot Sunni Islam.

Such alarmism reflects, to a degree, a desire by the Sunni, American-allied governments of countries such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia to staunch what they see as a rising tide of Iranian influence. The capture of power by Iraq's long-oppressed Shias is perceived as having, for the first time in history, removed the main Arab bulwark against Persian expansion. Much as most loathed Saddam Hussein, the style and timing of his execution, on a day celebrated by Sunnis as their main annual feast, smacked to many of an ugly Shia triumphalism. Iran's wider assumption of leadership for Islamist “resistance” movements, underscored by the electoral success of Hamas and by Hizbullah's spirited fight in last summer's war with Israel, gives Arab leaders even worse jitters.

At the same time, their American ally is demanding support for its policy of boxing in Iran. Unable to lend much material weight to America's efforts, fearful of a negative backlash should America actually strike Iran, and unwilling to be seen as acting in Israel's interest, Arab countries appear to have chosen to exploit sectarian feelings to send a shot across Iran's bows.

With typical circumlocution, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia recently said as much. “We have advised them not to expose the region to dangers,” he said, declining to name the country to which he referred. “We don't interfere in anyone's affairs, [but] any state which resorts to unwise acts must bear the responsibility in front of the other countries in the region.”

Bark against the arc
The Saudi intent to thwart Iran's regional ambitions is clearest in Lebanon. The kingdom has lent strong financial and diplomatic support to the government of the prime minister, Fouad Siniora, whose coalition of Sunni, Druze and some Christian parties has been deadlocked in a duel with a grouping headed by Hizbullah. But what has squeezed the Shia party most is loss of the stature it recently gained among a wider Arab public. Seen last summer as the vanguard of the struggle against Israel, it is now viewed by many Sunnis as little more than a cat's paw for Iran.

As Iraq's agony has made clear, sectarianism is a dangerous genie. It was with a view to cooling recent excesses that Qatar, a rich Gulf emirate, invited some 400 top Sunni and Shia religious figures to a dialogue last month. In the event, rhetoric at the conference proved embarrassingly hot. Iran's chief delegate, Ayatollah Muhammad Taskhiri, was besieged with accusations. Iran was failing to stop the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad's Sunnis, he was told. It persecuted its own Sunni minority. Its agents were trying to convert Sunnis and spread Shia texts that insult historic figures revered by Sunnis. Why, retorted Shia delegates, did Sunni clerics so rarely condemn the slaughter of Iraq's Shias? And what of the disenfranchised Shia minorities in Sunni countries?

A message from a senior Lebanese Shia cleric, Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, provided a useful cold shower. If Sunnis and Shias did not cease their wrangling, he said, Muslims would end up turning to secularism as their saviour.

Copyright © 2007 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.

We do use books that call Jews 'apes' admits head of Islamic school
07.02.07
Add your view


Race row: Dr Sumaya Alyusuf

The principal of an Islamic school has admitted that it uses textbooks which describe Jews as "apes" and Christians as "pigs" and has refused to withdraw them.
Dr Sumaya Alyusuf confirmed that the offending books exist after former teacher Colin Cook, 57, alleged that children as young as five are taught from racist materials at the King Fahd Academy in Acton.
In an interview on BBC2's Newsnight, Dr Alyusuf was asked by Jeremy Paxman whether she recognised the books.
She said: "Yes, I do recognise these books, of course. We have these books in our school. These books have good chapters that can be used by the teachers. It depends on the objectives the teacher wants to achieve."
In another exchange, Dr Alyusuf insisted the books should not be scrapped, saying that allegedly racist sections had been "misinterpreted".
The school is owned, funded and run by the government of Saudi Arabia. Mr Paxman asked: "Will you now remove this nonsense from the Saudi Ministry of Education from your school?"
Dr Alyusuf replied: "Just to reiterate what I said earlier, there are chapters from these books that are used and that will serve our objectives. But we don't teach hatred towards Judaism or Christianity - on the contrary."
During the programme Louise Ellman, MP for Liverpool Riverside and chairman of the Jewish Labour Movement, accused the school of inciting racial hatred and hit out at Ofsted inspectors for failing to discover the textbooks. She said: "This whole situation is unacceptable. It is incitement. It is part of a deliberate Saudi initiative to install Wahabbism extremism among Muslims and in the rest of society. If Ofsted has not drawn attention to this, that is a failing of Ofsted.
"It is unacceptable and we should look to see if this is happening in other schools as well. This is about teaching children. I think the school should take immediate action and so should the regulatory authorities."
In his employment tribunal claim Mr Cook, who taught English at the school for 19 years, has accused it of poisoning pupils' minds with a curriculum of hate. Arabic translators have found that the books also describe Jews as "repugnant".
Dr Alyusuf initially claimed that the books were "not taught currently", saying: "We teach a different curriculum. We teach an international curriculum."
Asked by Mr Paxman, "Would you discipline any teacher who has used these teaching materials?", she replied: "Of course I would."
The principal, who has been in the post just under six months, also claimed: "I monitor what is taught in the classrooms. I have developed the curriculum myself."
Asked by Mr Paxman whether she agreed with the suggestion in teaching materials that non-believers in Islam are condemned to "hellfire", she said: "We don't teach that. We teach Islam and it is important for our students to assert their identity."
Mr Cook, of Feltham, was earning £35,000 a year and is seeking £100,000 in compensation. In legal papers submitted to a Watford employment tribunal, he alleged that pupils as young as five are taught that religions including Christianity and Judaism are "worthless". He also alleges that when he questioned whether the curriculum complied with British laws, he was told: "This is not England. It is Saudi Arabia".
Pupils have allegedly been heard saying they want to "kill Americans", praising 9/11 and idolising Osama bin Laden as their "hero".
Mr Cook claims he was dismissed last December after blowing the whistle on the school for covering up cheating by children in GCSE exams.
He is bringing a tribunal claim for unfair dismissal, race discrimination and victimisation. The school is vigorously defending his claims.