House to examine plan for United Nations to regulate the Internet

House lawmakers will consider an international proposal next week to give the United Nations more control over the Internet.

The proposal is backed by China, Russia, Brazil, India and other UN members, and would give the UN’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU) more control over the governance of the Internet.

Iran's "Hitler" Ahmadinejad attacks West, prompts walk-out

Associated Press

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad flayed the West on Thursday for a catalog of misdeeds, but his address to the United Nations passed over Tehran's nuclear program and the Palestinian statehood issue.

In his 30-minute speech, the Iranian leader also failed to mention the pro-democracy uprisings that have swept the Arab world this year, including Syria, Iran's closest Arab ally.

U.S. delegates walked out when Ahmadinejad said "arrogant powers" threatened anyone who questioned the Holocaust and the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States with sanctions and military action. Other Western delegates also left, in what has become an annual feature of Ahmadinejad's U.N. appearances.

Ahmadinejad struck out at Zionism, but did not comment on the issue that has dominated this year's General Assembly -- the Palestinian plan to ask the Security Council to admit their nascent state as a full U.N. member.

He accused Washington of using the "mysterious" September 11 attacks as a pretext for wars on Iraq and Afghanistan and said Western powers "view Zionism as a sacred notion and ideology."

The White House dismissed Ahmadinejad's attack and accused Iran's government of "vile mistreatment" of its own citizens.

British Prime Minister David Cameron also assailed the Iranian leader in his own speech to the United Nations.

"He didn't remind us that he runs a country where they may have elections, of a sort, but they also repress freedom of speech," Cameron said, accusing Iran of violently suppressing protests and "torturing those who argue for a better future."

Mark Kornblau, spokesman for the U.S. mission at the United Nations, said Ahmadinejad had "again turned to abhorrent anti-Semitic slurs and despicable conspiracy theories."

PROTESTS OUTSIDE UNITED NATIONS

Thousands of people protested against Ahmadinejad outside the United Nations complex in New York.

The demonstrators, mostly Iranian-Americans, chanted "Down with dictators, down with Ahmadinejad" and called for the overthrow of the Iranian leader, whose bitterly disputed 2009 re-election touched off months of street protests in Iran.

"We are hoping to see that the people of Iran are represented in the U.N. by a democratically elected official," said Hamid Azimi, a computer systems engineer from California.

Ahmadinejad, wearing a jacket with no tie, has often used the U.N. podium to lecture the West on its responsibility for the evils of slavery, colonialism, poverty and militarism.

This year was no exception, but the Iranian president was taking to the world stage as a figure somewhat diminished by sharp political challenges to his authority at home.

Iranian politicians, clerics and the Revolutionary Guards, who quelled the 2009 protests, have taken the president to task for his differences with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Ahmadinejad has suffered a series of setbacks in his contest with Khamenei, his former mentor. In the past few months, at least 25 associates of Ahmadinejad have been arrested and several websites affiliated with them have been blocked.

His closest ally, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, has been accused of graft, of leading a "deviant current" that seeks to challenge the theocratic establishment, and of links to a $2.6 billion bank fraud described as Iran's biggest ever.

Although Ahmadinejad did not mention Tehran's disputed nuclear program in his U.N. speech, he said later that Iran would stop producing 20 percent enriched uranium if it is guaranteed fuel for a medical research reactor, seeking to revive a fuel swap deal that fell apart in 2009.

"Any time they can guarantee us this sale ... we will stop 20 percent enrichment," he told reporters. "Whenever these assurances are given, we will do our part."

Tehran's refusal to halt enrichment has provoked four rounds of U.N. sanctions on the world's No. 5 oil exporting state and tighter U.S. and European Union restrictions.

Ahmadinejad acknowledged sanctions had hit the Iranian economy but said "they do not have a decisive effect."

The West believes Iran is covertly seeking nuclear weapons, a charge Tehran denies.

French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe met his Iranian counterpart in New York and told him France and five other big powers were worried about the U.N. nuclear watchdog's latest report, which suggests Iran is violating U.N. resolutions.

SIXTH TRUMPET WATCH! Palestinians prepare to submit UN statehood bid

Yahoo News

Nearly two decades after embarking on historic peace talks with Israel, Palestinians prepared to sidestep that troubled route on Friday to seek U.N. recognition of an independent state — hoping to leverage this dramatic move on the world stage to realize their dream of an independent homeland.

Earlier in the week, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas rebuffed an intense, U.S.-led effort to sway him from the statehood bid, saying he would submit the application to U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon as planned. A top aide, Mohammed Ishtayeh, said Thursday that Abbas asked Ban and the Council's Lebanese president this month to process the application without delay.

"We're going without any hesitation and continuing despite all the pressures," Abbas told members of the Palestinian diaspora at a hotel in New York on Thursday night. "We seek to achieve our right and we want our independent state."

To be sure, Abbas' appeal to the U.N. to recognize Palestinian independence in the West Bank, east Jerusalem and Gaza Strip would not deliver any immediate changes on the ground: Israel would remain an occupying force in those first two territories and continue to severely restrict access to Gaza, ruled by Palestinian Hamas militants.

Beyond that, Security Council action on the membership request could take weeks or months.

The strategy also put the Palestinians in direct confrontation with the U.S., which has threatened to veto their membership bid in the U.N. Security Council, reasoning, like Israel, that statehood can only be achieved through direct negotiations between the parties to the long and bloody conflict.

Also hanging heavy in the air was the threat of renewed violence over frustrated Palestinian aspirations — perhaps not immediate, because Abbas has vowed to prevent unrest, but possibly down the road if negotiations continue to stall.

Yet by seeking approval at a world forum overwhelmingly sympathetic to their quest, Palestinians hope to make it harder for Israel to resist already heavy global pressure to negotiate the borders of a future Palestine based on lines Israel held before capturing the West Bank, east Jerusalem and Gaza in 1967.

In recent weeks, international mediators have been furiously trying to piece together a formula that would let the Palestinians abandon their plan to ask the Security Council for full U.N. membership, and instead make do with the more modest goal of asking a sympathetic General Assembly to elevate their status from permanent observer to nonmember observer state. The other part of that formula would include the resumption of negotiations in short order.

The U.S. and Israel have been pressuring council members to either vote against the plan or abstain when it comes up for a vote. The vote would require the support of nine of the council's 15 members to pass, but even if the Palestinians could line up that backing, a U.S. veto is assured.

The resumption of talks seems an elusive goal, with both sides digging in to positions that have tripped up negotiations for years. Israel insists that negotiations go ahead without any preconditions. But Palestinians say they will not return to the bargaining table without assurances that Israel would halt settlement building and drop its opposition to basing negotiations on the borders it held before capturing the West Bank, east Jerusalem and the Gaza in 1967.

Israel has warned that the Palestinian appeal to the U.N. will have a disastrous effect on negotiations, which have been the cornerstone of international Mideast policy for the past two decades. Netanyahu, who is to address the General Assembly later Friday, shortly after Abbas makes his own address, opposes negotiations based on 1967 lines, saying a return to those frontiers would expose Israel's heartland to rocket fire from the West Bank.

He also fears that if that principle becomes the baseline for negotiations, then Palestinians won't settle for anything less, despite previous understandings between the Palesitnians and previous Israeli governments to swap land where settlement blocs stand for Israeli territory.

Talks for all intents and purposes broke down nearly three years ago after Israel went to war in the Gaza Strip and prepared to hold national elections that ultimately propelled Netanyahu to power for a second time. A last round was launched a year ago, with the ambitious aim of producing a framework accord for a peace deal, but broke down just three weeks later after an Israeli settlement construction slowdown expired.

Palestinians say they turned to the U.N. in desperation over 18 failed years of peace talks. But Israelis say the Palestinians are to blame for their own predicament and accuse them of going to the United Nations precisely to avoid talks.

Hatch: Defund UN if it votes for Palestinian state

Washington Examiner

Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, introduced the Solidarity with Israel Act today, a bill that would defund the United Nations if that body votes to recognize Palestine as a state.

“This vote undermines Israel’s security, and should the United Nations change Palestine’s current status, this legislation would prevent valuable American resources from funding the United Nations," Hatch said. "Make no mistake, there will be consequences associated with efforts to undermine the security of America’s friends and allies."

The United States will veto any vote by the UN Security Council that recognizes Palestine as a state, but Hatch's bill would pull funding if the General Assembly voted to classify Palestine as an "observer state," which the United States cannot interdict.

Students at Columbia University “excited” about dining with IRAN'S HITLER

Radicalislam.org

Students at Columbia University say they are “excited” about the prospect of dining with one of the world’s most brutal chief executives, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Scheduled to speak on 23 September 2011 at his fifth United Nations (UN) General Assembly appearance, Ahmadinejad has somehow been permitted to invite Columbia student members of a group called CIRCA, the Columbia International Relations Council and Association, to a private dinner. When threatened with civil and criminal legal action by the Israel Law Center, Columbia president Lee C. Bollinger hastened to clarify that the event would not be held on campus. Nevertheless, the failure of Columbia students and faculty to recognize the moral repugnancy of appearing anywhere willingly in public with a man personally responsible for directing the vicious suppression of his own people’s struggle to be free, as well as his country’s Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) programs and global terrorist activities is troubling, to say the least.

As Mona Charen asked plaintively in her 16 September 2011 National Review Online op-ed, “Are leading American universities producing moral illiterates?” Unfortunately, the answer to that question clearly is “Yes” and has been for a long time. But it’s much worse than the moral bankruptcy of generations of students raised on an anti-American, antisemitic, post-modernist, progressivist hash of moral relativism. Students already emptied of any inclinations to critical thinking by the time they arrive at such “elite” institutes of higher learning such as Columbia University, make easy prey for a faculty known as advocates for appeasement and rapprochement with the world’s number one state sponsor of terrorism.

Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) includes such student role models as the outspokenly pro-Iranian regime advocate, Professor Gary Sick. A former member of the Board of Directors at the American Iranian Council (AIC), an organization that openly favors a friendly official U.S. foreign policy with Tehran’s clerical rulers, Sick routinely finds ways to gloss over that regime’s jihadist activities even as it continues to support Iraqi and Taliban terror militias that kill Americans on a regular basis. This is the sort of Columbia professor who blogs, “Amen, brother” to U.S. presidential candidate Ron Paul’s moonbat assertion that “Iran is not a threat to the United States. Not even close.”

Another SIPA staffer is Palestinian-American Rashid Khalidi, historian and director of SIPA’s Middle East Institute. Former director of the official Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) press agency WAFA (Wikalat al-Anba al- Filastinija) in Beirut from 1976 to 1982, Khalidi also served on the PLO “guidance committee” at the Madrid peace conference. The constants running through Khalidi’s political outlook are equally deep strains of anti-Israeli animus and pro-Palestinian bias. These are the same Palestinians whose PLO and HAMAS charter documents are dedicated to jihad and the destruction of the State of Israel.

The Columbia University inclination to associations with apologists for terrorism includes more than its pro-Tehran and pro-PLO faculty. Two years ago, in November 2009, CIRCA co-sponsored an Eid al-Adha dinner with the Muslim Brotherhood front group, Muslim Students Association (MSA). MSA was the first Brotherhood organization founded in the U.S. in 1964 and has since expanded to over 600 campuses across North America. CIRCA’s featured speaker for the MSA event was Haroon Moghul, a Columbia graduate and Executive Director of the Maydan Institute, who, in February 2011, published a rather sophomoric piece online whose absurd conclusion stated that, “In the last few decades, the Brotherhood has moved decisively away from violence, and toward a more social, albeit nonpolitical, religious role.” Whether deliberately disingenuous, naïve, or just uninformed, Mr. Moghul should have known better—and perhaps did.

His colleague at the Maydan Institute is the Imam Khalid Latif, nominated in 2007 by Mayor Michael Bloomberg to be the youngest chaplain in history of the New York City Police Department. More recently, in August 2011, Latif jumped on the Center for American Progress (CAP) and Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) bandwagon, to complain online about “Islamophobia.” A CAP report entitled “Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America,” was published that same month by the Washington, D.C. think tank and echoed OIC themes about the supposed “injustice” of linking Islam and terrorism, simply because Muslim doctrine, laws, and scriptures do so.

Both the mainstream media and seasoned international observers are beginning to wake up to the sickening feeling that the so-called “Arab Spring” is not quite shaping up to the Google-addled imagery promoted by either the social networking generation or its elder generation in positions of high trust in Western governments. The UN has just awarded Libya’s General Assembly seat to al-Qa’eda, which dominates Tripoli’s rebel military command. The government in Kabul looks on course to revert to Taliban control in coming months, while Baghdad slips daily more firmly under the hegemony of Iran. Up to a decade’s worth of U.S. blood and treasure is ending with the fulfillment of al-Qa’eda’s number one top objective: a Western pull-out that leaves both places under the rule of Islamic law (which the U.S. Department of State helped write into their constitutions). The Muslim Brotherhood is poised to step into the post-Mubarak power void in Egypt with the approval and backing of a mind-boggling trio of powers: the U.S. government, Iran, and Turkey—the latter two both with ambitions to lead the emerging Islamic Caliphate (Imamate) across the Middle East.

It’s not just the CIRCA students at Columbia University. Things are going badly off the tracks all over the place. It’s just that their lack of a moral grounding in the fundamental principles of America’s Founding Fathers is especially discouraging, given the hopes and trust for the future of this Republic that are placed in their generation.

Bon Appétit, kids.

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