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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sully- who wrote (79397)	4/30/2010 3:19:37 PM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 90947

Iran vs. Women By: Jay Nordlinger The Corner The news that Iran has been elected to the U.N. women’s-rights commission should really be ho-hum. After all, such states as Cuba, Zimbabwe, China, Saudi Arabia, and genocidal Sudan have sat on the human-rights commission. That is what the U.N. is for: the Kafkaesque. But the news about Iran is slightly hard for me to take just at the moment. I have been at the Oslo Freedom Forum, listening to, among others, Marina Nemat. She is one of the countless girls and women who have been seized by the regime, thrown into Evin Prison -- one of the darkest places on earth -- tortured, raped, and otherwise battered. The regime has been doing this right from the beginning. Right from about 1980. And it is going on now. Rape, in particular, has been a constant tool of the regime: a tool of punishment and control. Why do we know Marina Nemat’s name, of all the girls and women who have been through this? Once escaped to the West, she wrote a book, Prisoner of Tehran: One Woman’s Story of Survival Inside an Iranian Prison. It is a harrowing, mind-scrambling story. (Part II of my Oslo Journal -- my reports from the Freedom Forum -- appears on the homepage today. Nemat is not in it, but she is coming in a future installment. And would you like to know what got her thrown into Evin? When she was 16, she had the temerity to ask her calculus teacher to teach calculus, rather than to spout the Islamist propaganda of the regime.) We are reminded once more of the truth that Solzhenitsyn uttered many years ago: The U.N. is not the united nations but the united governments or regimes. And that body at large is no better than the governments or regimes that compose it. And, though the world has gone far in democratization, there are still many regimes that are as savage as can be imagined. And they sit on such panels as human- and women’s-rights commissions. You know? Understandable -- but still, as I said, hard to swallow. .

To: Sully- who wrote (79397)	4/30/2010 3:24:28 PM
From: Sully-	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 90947

Calamity in the Gulf Cont'd By: Jonah Goldberg The Corner From a reader: <<< Jonah, Isn’t a bit strange that people (including yourself) take this latest spill (and unfortunate loss of life) as possibly killing any possibility of more off-shore drilling when we just had 29 miners killed in West Virginia and I don’t remember too many people calling for the end of coal mining? Sorry if the following seems a bit bitter, but I guess losing a few “hillbillies” in West Virginia just doesn’t compare to having some birds covered in oil to East Coast elites. The fact is that there are real human and environmental costs in every energy industry - just think that should be pointed out now and again. >>> I think there's a good point in here, but it confuses the issues a bit. Loss of life, while tragic, has never been a significant part of the environmentalist's case against oil drilling or coal mining. If these twelve oil workers had died and not a drop of oil had spilled, it would have still be a real news story and it still would have been awful, but I doubt it would have moved the needle more than a hair when it comes to the fight over oil drilling. People understand that these are dangerous jobs. .