The Wall Street Journal reports on the excellent trading relations European firms have with genocidal Iran. 

The worst offender among European states is Germany, and the worst offender among German companies is Siemens:

Yet because of the sheer volume of its trade with Iran, Germany, the economic engine of Europe, is uniquely positioned to pressure Tehran. Still, the obvious danger of a nuclear-armed Iran has not stopped Germany from rewarding the country with a roughly €4 billion trade relationship in 2008, thereby remaining Iran’s most important European trade partner. In the period of January to November 2008, German exports to Iran grew by 10.5% over the same period in 2007. That booming trade last year included 39 "dual-use" contracts with Iran, according to Germany’s export-control office. Dual-use equipment and technology can be used for both military and civilian purposes.

One example of Germany’s dysfunctional Iran policy is the energy and engineering giant Siemens. The company acknowledged last week at its annual stockholder meeting in Munich, which I attended, that it conducted €438 million in trade with Iran in 2008, and that its 290 Iran-based employees will remain active in the gas, oil, infrastructure and communications sectors.

Concerned stockholders and representatives from the political organization Stop the Bomb, a broad-based coalition in Germany and Austria seeking to prevent Iran from building a nuclear-weapons program, peppered Siemens CEO Peter Löscher with questions about the corporation’s dealings with the Iranian regime. A Stop the Bomb spokesman questioned Siemens’s willingness to conduct business with a country known for its human- and labor-rights violations, ranging from the violent oppression of women to the murder of gays to the repression of religious and ethnic minority groups. The spokesman referred to Siemens’s Nazi-era history as an employer of forced labor from the Auschwitz extermination camp and asked how, in light of the corporation’s Nazi history, the company could support an "anti-Semitic and terrorist regime" that threatens to wipe Israel off the map.

Mr. Löscher replied to the 9,500 stockholders in Olympic Hall that, "For Siemens, compliance and ethics have the highest priority, including where human-rights issues are involved." Yet, after further questions from the Stop the Bomb spokesman, he acknowledged that Siemens and its joint partner, Nokia, had delivered state-of-the-art communications surveillance technology to Iran last spring. 

 … with disappointing reality; gets no stimulating massage from the stimulus message.

Jennifer Rubin writes at Commentary’s ‘contentions’ website:

It seems that the Obama team is losing all sorts of things. Newsweek’s Michael Hirsh sounds panicky as he warns the President “has all but lost control of the agenda in Washington at a time when he simply can’t afford to do so.” We are told:

The decisive issue here is leadership. The lack of it is what is plaguing the Obama administration. Every war needs a successful general, and this administration doesn’t have one yet.

Hirsh thinks the problem is giving in to those tiresome Republicans who don’t want to lard up a “stimulus” bill. But, of course, the real problems started when the President ceded the floor to Nancy Pelosi and in return got what virtually everyone agrees is an embarrassing, unworkable bill.

Politico says he’s “losing the stimulus message war.”

And Chris Matthews may have lost the tingle:

You knew Kennedy wanted the Peace Corps; wanted to put a man on the moon, wanted civil rights. You knew Reagan was out there cutting taxes to make government smaller. What’s Barack Obama doing? He keeps talking about his stimulus package like it’s some big Santa’s bag filled with all sorts of sundry items: extended unemployment benefits, “green” jobs, aid to states. But how on earth does this trillion-dollar grab bag work? How does spending this money—all of it borrowed—repeat, all of it borrowed, going to help the country get moving again?

But all of this “losing” raises a question about temperament. Remember how critical that was, how impressed everyone was with Obama’s temperament during the campaign? Well, some ofus questioned ”the Zen-like benefits of inactivity.” And sure enough it seems that vaunted temperament has manifested itself as passivity or cluelessness. Yes, he’s very calm — as he’s losing control and losing influence.

Granted, calm is good. Focus, decisiveness, good judgment and leadership would be better.

 Feminists throughout the Western world are shocked at this report. Aren’t they? Funny that their outrage has been so quiet that we haven’t heard a peep from them.

From Jihad Watch:

She had them raped and then turned them into suicide bombers so they could escape the shame 

Mother of the Believers

Otherwise they would have been killed anyway – by stoning as adulterers – but this way, they were celebrated as heroes.

"Iraqi woman had 80 women raped then recruited as suicide bombers," from Agence France-Presse, February 4 (thanks to all who sent this in):

A WOMAN suspected of recruiting more than 80 female suicide bombers has confessed to organising their rapes so she could later convince them that martyrdom was the only way to escape the shame.

Samira Jassam, 51, was arrested by Iraqi police and confessed to recruiting the women and orchestrating dozens of attacks.

In a video confession, she explained how she had mentally prepared the women for martyrdom operations, passed them on to terrorists who provided explosives, and then took the bombers to their targets.

"We arrested Samira Jassim, known as ‘Um al-Mumenin’, the mother of the believers, who was responsible for recruiting 80 women”, Major General Qassim Atta said….

 These questions are in our minds.. But we put them down here not to invite answers (though if any readers do answer them, we’ll be glad), but because they are worth asking and worth thinking about. We expect Time to provide answers in due course. 

Some Republicans murmur that they ‘want President Obama to succeed’. But to succeed at what, to what end?

***

1. Many who voted for Obama dismissed Republican fears that he intended to turn the US into a socialist country like the fading European states. But what if he does? Would they then regret voting him into power?

Why were they so sure that he could not have any such intention, when he himself said that he wanted to redistribute wealth? The forcible redistribution of wealth by a government IS socialism.

What if his Party, now dominant in Congress, selected him as its presidential candidate because they wanted a leader to take them to the goal of West-European-type Socialism? There are plenty of indications that the ‘progessives’, as they now like to call themselves, find nothing abhorrent about such governments; and in their pursuit of ‘social justice’ seem positively to approve of them.

2. What if his ultimate aim is even more of a change in that he intends to bring about a radical Marxist revolution? Not by violent means, let’s say, but by using the constitutional powers he and his party now have?  The ‘long march through the institutions’ is now completed by his reaching the pinnacle of power.  All the marchers have to do now, under his leadership, is change the economy and the form of government to the Marxist model.

His political education was entirely Marxist. His father was a Communist. His mother involved herself in the New Left movement of the late 1960s.The mentor chosen for him in his adolescence by his grandfather was Frank Marshall Davis, a ‘card-carrying Communist’. He became a ‘community organizer’, a profession invented by Saul Alinsky, the radical Communist teacher of practical subversion and Marxist revolution-by-stealth. He was launched into his political career by William Ayers, a violent Communist revolutionary. At university, by his own admission, he sought the company and instruction of Marxists.  Is it then not likely that he IS a Marxist, or that he might desire to establish a Communist regime?

3. Does Obama hold any of these opinions that are common in the international Left?

i) Israel has no right to exist and should be eliminated.  

ii) The demands of Islam should be met, whatever they are.

iii) All nation states should come as soon as possible under a world government to be developed out of the United Nations.   

iv) the world’s wealth should be evenly distributed amongst all populations.

v) Every person should be made to work , and his wage should be set by the state.

vi) Living accommodation should be rationed and shared.

vii) Public transport should replace private cars.

viii) Food should be limited in choice and rationed. 

ix) Medical services should be provided and rationed by the (national at first, later international) government, and only the government.

x) Education should be provided and regulated by the government and only the government. 

xi) Only one Party can put up candidates for election.

xii) The supreme head of government shall rule for his lifetime. 

xiii) Dissidents should be re-educated or, if they prove unreformable, eliminated. 

*

We are not convinced that Obama has any ideas at all, or if he has, that he thinks them through to the point where he can see the dangers in them.

We suspect he may be a thing of air and paper (hot air and newspaper), trying to fly like a kite above trouble, but destined to be torn apart by the first strong wind that hits him.

But if he is an empty man, trying to float above the tumult of decision-making and letting others take the blame for everything that goes wrong, he will be easily manipulated by those in his Party who do have strong beliefs and intentions.

He is still at present a cipher.  We wait to know more.

But what if he is an unreconstructed Alinsky-ite, and these are his aims?

And what if he succeeds in achieving them?

Is it what the majority of those who elected him actually want? Surely not! So would they regret electing him? And if they do, won’t it be too late? 

 These questions are in our minds.. But we put them down here not to invite answers (though if any readers do answer them, we’ll be glad), but because they are worth asking and worth thinking about. We expect Time to provide answers in due course. 

Some Republicans murmur that they ‘want President Obama to succeed’. But to succeed at what, to what end?

***

1. Many who voted for Obama dismissed Republican fears that he intended to turn the US into a socialist country like the fading European states. But what if he does? Would they then regret voting him into power?

Why were they so sure that he could not have any such intention, when he himself said that he wanted to redistribute wealth? The forcible redistribution of wealth by a government IS socialism.

What if his Party, now dominant in Congress, selected him as its presidential candidate because they wanted a leader to take them to the goal of West-European-type Socialism? There are plenty of indications that the ‘progessives’, as they now like to call themselves, find nothing abhorrent about such governments; and in their pursuit of ‘social justice’ seem positively to approve of them.

2. What if his ultimate aim is even more of a change in that he intends to bring about a radical Marxist revolution? Not by violent means, let’s say, but by using the constitutional powers he and his party now have?  The ‘long march through the institutions’ is now completed by his reaching the pinnacle of power.  All the marchers have to do now, under his leadership, is change the economy and the form of government to the Marxist model.

His political education was entirely Marxist. His father was a Communist. His mother involved herself in the New Left movement of the late 1960s.The mentor chosen for him in his adolescence by his grandfather was Frank Marshall Davis, a ‘card-carrying Communist’. He became a ‘community organizer’, a profession invented by Saul Alinsky, the radical Communist teacher of practical subversion and Marxist revolution-by-stealth. He was launched into his political career by William Ayers, a violent Communist revolutionary. At university, by his own admission, he sought the company and instruction of Marxists.  Is it then not likely that he IS a Marxist, or that he might desire to establish a Communist regime?

3. Does Obama hold any of these opinions that are common in the international Left?

i) Israel has no right to exist and should be eliminated.  

ii) The demands of Islam should be met, whatever they are.

iii) All nation states should come as soon as possible under a world government to be developed out of the United Nations.   

iv) the world’s wealth should be evenly distributed amongst all populations.

v) Every person should be made to work , and his wage should be set by the state.

vi) Living accommodation should be rationed and shared.

vii) Public transport should replace private cars.

viii) Food should be limited in choice and rationed. 

ix) Medical services should be provided and rationed by the (national at first, later international) government, and only the government.

x) Education should be provided and regulated by the government and only the government. 

xi) Only one Party can put up candidates for election.

xii) The supreme head of government shall rule for his lifetime. 

xiii) Dissidents should be re-educated or, if they prove unreformable, eliminated. 

*

We are not convinced that Obama has any ideas at all, or if he has, that he thinks them through to the point where he can see the dangers in them.

We suspect he may be a thing of air and paper (hot air and newspaper), trying to fly like a kite above trouble, but destined to be torn apart by the first strong wind that hits him.

But if he is an empty man, trying to float above the tumult of decision-making and letting others take the blame for everything that goes wrong, he will be easily manipulated by those in his Party who do have strong beliefs and intentions.

He is still at present a cipher.  We wait to know more.

But what if he is an unreconstructed Alinsky-ite, and these are his aims?

And what if he succeeds in achieving them?

Is it what the majority of those who elected him actually want? Surely not! So would they regret electing him? And if they do, won’t it be too late?