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2007-03-29 Syria-Lebanon-Iran
UAE Announced Intention To Say Neutral In US-Iranian Conflict
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Posted by Anonymoose 2007-03-29 00:00|| || Front Page|| [11132 views since 2007-05-07]  Top

#1 Methinks the prob key phrase is AGAINST IRAN, as opposed to FROM IRAN, espec iff Dubya refuses to blink for 2008 [ Elex + March timetable].
Posted by JosephMendiola 2007-03-29 00:40||   2007-03-29 00:40|| Front Page Top

#2 This announcement was expected. Being close to the Iranian missile threat, 'canaries will sing to the nearest cage'. This opens up the prospect for the 'windfall' down the line when oil output will have to be increased to cover the Iranian infrastructure destruction by the US! Ie, the UAE could come out of this smelling like a rose!!
Posted by smn 2007-03-29 00:45||   2007-03-29 00:45|| Front Page Top

#3 Effing cynical as all Hell, smn. I like it!
Posted by Zenster">Zenster  2007-03-29 02:09||   2007-03-29 02:09|| Front Page Top

#4 Call me old fashioned but this entirely predictable announcement leaves me all the more anxious for the day when that Xanadu in Dubai is flattened by some WMD equipped Orc. Not that any of these little events will prevent UK industry from doing business there in the meantime.
Posted by Excalibur 2007-03-29 09:03||   2007-03-29 09:03|| Front Page Top

#5 In a major policy statement on the eve of Arab summit in Riyadh, Shaikh Khalifa disclosed that the UAE had sent a written communication to Iran to assure that 'we shall never allow the use of our soil for any military, security or intelligence activities against them'...

In other words, they won't allow their soil to be used by those fighting against Iran. This is a "Please don't hurt us!" aimed at Iran, much like the Swiss neutrality during WWII when Nazi supply and troop trains transversed the country to the Eastern fronts every night.
Posted by trailing wife 2007-03-29 09:24||   2007-03-29 09:24|| Front Page Top

#6 The democratic retreat plan from Iraq has something to do with this as well.
Posted by Captain America 2007-03-29 10:16||   2007-03-29 10:16|| Front Page Top

#7 Can't use our soil...just make sure to stay on the sand.
Posted by Capsu 78 2007-03-29 10:33||   2007-03-29 10:33|| Front Page Top

#8 tw you are incorrect about Switzerland's role in WW II.

Armed neutrality as practiced in Switzerland requires that the country join neither warring party and fight either side should they attempt to use Switzerland in their war. It's a Monroe doctrine for a small island of freedom in the middle of Europe. For a country of a few million people, that's a lot more integrity and courage than what other European countries did. Swiss men spent years guarding the borders, while women had to run farming, factories, etc. The Swiss government repeatedly informed the Nazis that should they choose to invade Switzerland the Swiss would never surrender, would destroy all factories and rail lines, and thus would ensure that the cost of the invasion would be greater than any advantage Germany was hoping for. Italy tried to get weapons from Switzerland and the answer was "no". Not a single Jew was delivered from Switzerland to Germany. All the gold that Switzerland received during the war for payment of indirect trade between the Axis and Allies (much of it via Portugal) was delivered to the US at the end of WW II (without compensation). All the private wealth hidden by foreigners in Switzerland before and during WW II was returned to their rightful owners, in three major efforts -- when they could be found; the only blemish in that respect may have been that the Swiss government insisted it had no role to play in that, that it was purely a business activity on the part of financial companies. There was, however, a reason for this behaviour: the Swiss government had already been made to pay tribute twice to the US after WW II, and wanted to avoid any possible judicial inference of guilt at the State level.

By the way, when Senator d'Amato forced their hands a few years ago to reveal endless lists of owner names for "inactive" secret bank accounts, there was widespread panic across socialist European countries where some families had for decades been hiding old fortune from government. The Swedish government announced that it would carefully comb the lists, for instance.

Note that Switzerland, unlike the rest of Europe, has a systematically armed militia, and had for 150 years a constitution inspired by the American experience.
Posted by Kalle (kafir forever) 2007-03-29 12:48||   2007-03-29 12:48|| Front Page Top

#9 tw, you may also want to look at a map and wonder why the Nazis would ever have wanted to transit via Switzerland on their way to the Eastern front...
Posted by Kalle (kafir forever) 2007-03-29 12:50||   2007-03-29 12:50|| Front Page Top

#10 Kalle, I'm willing to concede that I was wrong about the destination of the Nazi trains. Sadly, I'm geographically retarded, which afforded my friends in Germany great amusement when I got lost on my way to their homes for tea.

However, what I know about the Nazi trains running through Switzerland at night (not an invasion, but free passage) was told to me by one of my German tutors, a lovely Swiss-German lady (who as a child was the patient of one of my mother's cousins, oddly enough) who was kept awake nights by those self-same trains running through her neighborhood in St. Gallen. In fact, the reason she emigrated to the States was her fury over the hypocrisy of the adults around her pretending they'd known nothing about things they'd been involved in arranging. As for the Swiss not turning over their Jews to the Nazis, that's true, but it was at the demand of the Swiss that the Germans added the designation "J" to the passports of their Jewish citizens, so the Swiss would know who not to allow to enter. I've several cousins who were barred entry at the Swiss border that way, at least one of whom ended up in Auschwitz. In the same vein, there are endless stories of Jews and non-Jews who made their way to Switzerland after the war to retrieve the money in their bank accounts, only to have the bank managers refuse to accept their identification... or the papers from family members documenting their deaths. That's why at least some of those numbered accounts were deemed inactive.
Posted by trailing wife 2007-03-29 15:34||   2007-03-29 15:34|| Front Page Top

#11 This is silly.

You'll take an anecdotal story over historical fact? there is zero evidence of trains transporting Jews across Switzerland. There was transport of goods across the country because Switzerland being neutral had to abide by all its signed treaties. That's a condition of neutrality -- not siding with or against either warring party. You do realize that Switzerland was entirely surrounded by Germany and its allies from June 1940 to August 1944? what do you suggest the country should have done? attack the Axis and commit suicide?

Switzerland --a country of 4 million at the time-- gave asylum to over 50,000 civilian refugees and interned more than 100,000 foreign soldiers, but 20-25,000 refugees were rejected at the border. While that meant sure death for most of them, what was the alternative for Switzerland? commit suicide in another form by opening its borders to anyone showing up there while in the middle of a continental war?

As for the infamous "J" -- so what? it wasn't Swiss diplomats who made the Nazis get to power in Germany, build concentration camps, and wage war across Europe and Africa, was it? or do you claim that Germany had no anti-Jewish discrimination or identification in place and got the entire idea from Switzerland?

As for the anecdotal rejection of identification papers -- you make it sound like a widespread problem in a fundamentally corrupt banana republic. It wasn't and it's not. Recourse to the law is very easy there. You're aiming venom at a whole country that refused to surrender to the Nazis, never rounded Jews up for delivery to them, and with a population that tried to help as many people as it could, within the limits of what was possible and what fears they had -- while food was rationed and all backyards in the country had to be used for gardening so they wouldn't starve.

tw, I always have great respect and appreciation for your comments, but in this case I regret to say not at all.
Posted by Kalle 2007-03-29 18:04||   2007-03-29 18:04|| Front Page Top

#12 For a country of a few million people, that's a lot more integrity and courage than what other European countries did.

Kalle, have you ever watched the Frontline report, "Nazi Gold? If you had, I don't think you would be so staunch in your defense of Switzerland's World War II role. They were up to their ears in collaboration with the Nazis and, despite previous gestures, have only of late begun to reveal the true extent of how they plundered the Holocaust's helpless victims.
December 1, 1997: The first interim report on the "Nazi gold" affair is released by a panel of historians (the Bergier Commission). It states that Swiss banks handled 76% of Nazi Germany's gold transactions amounting to $450 million. A portion of this had been looted. This Swiss government-appointed panel of Swiss and international historians is the first to put a figure on the amount of Germany's gold which Switzerland handled.
[emphasis added]

As to prisoner trains, there is ample proof of more Swiss collaboration:
To start, we found witnesses whose stories do support the charge that Italians were forcibly sent through Switzerland.

Elena Dreher, an Italian partisan, described her unit's attempts to stop freight trains loaded with people before they passed into Switzerland. She recalled how the Germans would round up Italians in towns and villages by offering free cigarettes to all men between 18 and 40. They would be arrested and shipped to Germany as slave laborers; many would be worked to their deaths. The partisans attempted to stop these transports and were occasionally successful in derailing trains before they reached the Swiss border.

Otto Frey, a Swiss railway supervisor told us how he helped arrange for trains with cattle cars full of Italians to be transported against their will through Swiss territory. He emphasized, "We were told to get the trains through Switzerland as quickly as possible." We heard similar accounts from five additional retired trainmen, including one description of a train that was stopped by rail workers within Switzerland, so the people inside could escape.

We found material in the U.S. National Archives on use of the Swiss rail system by the Germans. There were U.S. intelligence documents from the war which confirmed a massive amount of traffic through the Gotthard mountain passage between 1943 and 1944. German trains with coal and non-strategic supplies for Italy were passing through Switzerland at the rate of up to one every ten minutes. There have also been on-the-record accounts of hidden weapons and soldiers on the same route including a report by Jean Ziegler, a radical Swiss parliamentarian, who, as a young man claims to have witnessed a derailed freight train in 1944 with weapons and Nazi soldiers giving orders: an incident that, officially, never took place.
[emphasis added]

Dear trailing wife, please keep fighting the good fight. Never forget, never forget, NEVER FORGET.

This world is on the verge of another Holocaust and it calls upon those of us who honor memory of the Shoa's victims to never allow those who perpetrated this callous crime against humanity to shirk a scintilla of their guilt. Only by aggressively laying the blame upon those who collaborated in slaying so many helpless innocents can we hope that the world will recall this horrid catastrophe and seek to avert any repeat of it.

Islam's abject refusal to abandon its obsession with genocide against the Jews must have only one result, a Muslim holocaust. They deserve nothing less for their vile and murderous troubles.
Posted by Zenster">Zenster  2007-03-29 18:16||   2007-03-29 18:16|| Front Page Top

#13 "...a Muslim holocaust. They deserve nothing less..."
Can't we just do it without any more holocausts?
/throws hands up in disgust/
Posted by Darrell 2007-03-29 18:27||   2007-03-29 18:27|| Front Page Top

#14 Yes, that documentary was all hear-say and framed to undermine the actual report that came out. BBC/PBS rhymes with CBS. You should know better than going by anecdotes, leftist hearsay, and political hysteria.

There is zero evidence of prisoner transport via Switzerland. It all went via Austria and France. If you have evidence saying otherwise, I promise there are countless Swiss historians who would be delighted to get their hands on what you have.

The Nazis are the ones who tried to exterminate all European Jews and waged war across Europe. To blame and denounce Switzerland as you and tw are doing is a fundamental injustice, massively dropping all context.

By the way, Ziegler is a known marxist who hates Switzerland (and America) with a passion. If you knew him you wouldn't pay anymore attention to what he says as one should to Medea Benjamin's idiotic rants.

Right, NEVER FORGET who actually killed Jews, who actually waged war against the rest of Europe -- and which countries actually didn't surrender and actually saved tens of thousands of Jews.

The Swiss-hatred on display is on a par with Bush-hatred. Please check your facts and premises.
Posted by Kalle 2007-03-29 18:32||   2007-03-29 18:32|| Front Page Top

#15 Do you understand what the word "collaborate" means?

Switzerland did NOT collaborate. This is beyond silly.

I'll say it once, politely: Calm down and study the facts.
Posted by Kalle 2007-03-29 18:38||   2007-03-29 18:38|| Front Page Top

#16 #5 You're thinking of Sweden allowing Germans transit rights during the later's invasion of Norway.

As to the dear Swiss, looky here (don't be put of be the site's name).
Posted by gromgoru 2007-03-29 18:59||   2007-03-29 18:59|| Front Page Top

#17 Kalle, Third Reich robbed Europe and Swiss were their fences. There're mountains of evidence.
Calm down and study the facts.
Posted by gromgoru 2007-03-29 19:13||   2007-03-29 19:13|| Front Page Top

#18 Can't we just do it without any more holocausts?

I'd love to think that we could. However, there is zero reason for any optimism when it comes to Islam. Violence is the only deterrent that Muslims recognize. So long as the Koran's central doctrine pivots upon forceful global domination and enslavement of all Infidels, all I can forsee is a Muslim holocaust.

Darrell, what do you forsee for Islam? Do you actually think that, in its current form, Islam can be reformed or sufficiently subdued in a way that it will no longer pose a substantial threat to the remaining world? If you can just get over your false accusations of advocating genocide, I'm more than willing to engage you in honest debate regarding this. Islam desires genocide and that goal simply cannot be allowed. Violence is the sole instrument that functions in dealing with Islam. Not threats of violence, the Muslim death wish is far too strong for threats to have any effect. Only violence works to combat Islam. Given Islam's stubborn refusal to abandon its goal of genocide against the Jews, little alternative exists beyond physically eliminating all followers of violent jihad. I'm proud that America is making a last stab (as it were), at bringing freedom to the MME (Muslim Middle East), but it sure as Hell doesn't seem to be working too well, regardless of our noble intentions.

Islam absolutely will not brook the least idea of free thought, internal criticism, reformation or even the simple notion of peaceful coexistence. Given those basic facts, the prospects for Islam's continuing survival can only rate as rather bleak.
Posted by Zenster">Zenster  2007-03-29 20:53||   2007-03-29 20:53|| Front Page Top

#19 We no more need to wipe out all of the Islamic world to protect ourselves and Israel than we needed to wipe out every last man, woman, and child in Japan to win WWII. Right now our biggest threats are AQ, the Iranian regime, and their proxies. As for Iran, I think I've been clear that in my opinion they've needed a devastating blow for a long time. But that doesn't mean an Iranian holocaust. That means turning their nuclear, missile, and general military capabilities to dust. Qom too. Repeat as necessary. No occupation desired.
Posted by Darrell 2007-03-29 21:12||   2007-03-29 21:12|| Front Page Top

#20 Darrell, all that you mention is short term in nature. I'm talking about the long term outlook for dealing with Islam. I've already made it clear elsewhere here about how Iran needs to be taken down and that it can be accomplished with conventional weapons for a host of good reasons.

None of this addresses what it will take to permanently neutralize the threat of Islam and its quest for global domination. Try to understand that I do not advocate genocide. I predict it, which is another matter entirely. Until you or someone else can come up with compelling evidence that there is a way to subdue Islam's quest for global jihad without having to eliminate huge portions of its followers through violent means, my opinion will remain unchanged.
Posted by Zenster">Zenster  2007-03-29 21:26||   2007-03-29 21:26|| Front Page Top

#21 "I do not advocate genocide. I predict it"
does not square with
"Islam's abject refusal to abandon its obsession... must have only one result, a Muslim holocaust. They deserve nothing less for their vile and murderous troubles."

You incite holocaust/genocide and then you slither away under the cover of "prediction".
Posted by Darrell 2007-03-29 21:36||   2007-03-29 21:36|| Front Page Top

#22 Not in the least. If Islam cannot abandon its obsession with genocide, its followers represent a constant and unchanging threat to this entire world. Eliminating that threat is an obligation to all sane people. To date, Islam continues to show no sign that it will reform itself or abandon violent jihad. Given that, only extermination will protect humanity from its threat.

Darrell, while you busily try to smear me, you have yet to deliver a single shred of evidence regarding how this world is supposed to coexist with Islam. Either do so now or be placed on "ignore".
Posted by Zenster">Zenster  2007-03-29 21:44||   2007-03-29 21:44|| Front Page Top

#23 Okay, here's a "shred" -- I know several fine Pakistan-origin Muslim people who have lived and worked in this country for several decades and have no more interest in jihad or subjugating us than I, a Christian, have an interest in running off to Yemen as a missionary. They are good people who are able to ignore the violent aspects of the Koran. They work hard, they pay their taxes, they have good (western) educations and manners, and their kids have no interest in jihad or Pakistan. Go ahead, Zenster, kill them. You win.
Posted by Darrell 2007-03-29 21:56||   2007-03-29 21:56|| Front Page Top

#24 Darrell, last chance. Posit some way that Islam, in its present form, can be made compatible with the rest of this world or be permanently discounted. I could give a rat's ass about your Paki friends. I'm talking about untold millions upon millions of Muslims who have zero problem with their religion being violently forced upon the rest of this world. You still have yet to mention any way of dealing with this inconvenient fact. Instead, you keep trying to tar me with all your might. You come across like a nitpicking chump who points out someone's mismatched socks in an effort to distract attention from the fact that thay have no answers.
Posted by Zenster">Zenster  2007-03-29 22:30||   2007-03-29 22:30|| Front Page Top

#25 Kalle, I said Nazi troop transport and supply trains. Not transport of Jewish prisoners. I don't hate the Swiss, not even those of my Swiss cousins who are a trifle annoying at times (I've cousins pretty much everywhere, it seems). Nor do I blame the Swiss alone. My mother and her grandparents had to go into hiding specifically because they wouldn't be able to exercise their American visas for a full decade; they only moved up the list to January 1946 because so many on the list had died. But it was a Swiss demand that caused the poisonously antisemitic Nazis to label passports with a J. The Germans hadn't yet thought of such a thing themselves.

I'm sorry. In many ways the Swiss (all four languages of them!) are a charming and admirable people. But not a perfect one.

gromgoru, I couldn't possibly be thinking of Sweden. Although I have cousins there, too, I know practically nothing about their part in the war. Perhaps if I have the opportunity to learn Swedish...
Posted by trailing wife 2007-03-29 22:51||   2007-03-29 22:51|| Front Page Top

#26 TW - iron for the NAZI war machine plus transit to norway via troop trains.
Posted by 3dc 2007-03-29 22:57||   2007-03-29 22:57|| Front Page Top

#27 I apoligize to fellow Rantburgers for being off topic here but I've had enough of Darrell's endless horse hockey.

Darrell, it is exactly as I thought, you are nothing more than a handwringer. You have no solutions or even any sort of approach to the real problems at hand. Instead, you have elected to constantly tar me when others here have even more extreme viewpoints. So be it. You are now on permanent "ignore".

It is your type that present one of the greatest dangers of all. Your type would dither endlessly when confronted with a critical decision point. Your type would get us all killed while you agonized over a difficult choice. You are also someone who criticizes without being able to do so constructively. By avoiding or refusing to engage in real debate you have rendered all of your arguments hollow. You are an intellectual coward and not worth any more of my time. Let this incident stand as proof of your inability to properly participate in any further discussion of Islam and the fight against terrorism. You are disgusting.
Posted by Zenster">Zenster  2007-03-29 23:48||   2007-03-29 23:48|| Front Page Top

#28 Slither away, Darell.
Posted by Zenster">Zenster  2007-03-29 23:54||   2007-03-29 23:54|| Front Page Top

#29 Off-topic or abusive comments deleted]
Posted by Saveababykillademocrat 2007-03-29 00:03||   2007-03-29 00:03|| Front Page Top

02:24 saveababykillademocrat
02:05 saveababykillademocrat
01:27 saveababykillademocrat
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00:01 Saveababykillademocrat
23:57 Cromert
23:54 Zenster
23:48 Zenster
23:45 RD
23:45 smn
23:38 smn
23:37 SteveS
23:35 RD
23:24 Phineter Thraviger
23:14 JosephMendiola
23:11 Jackal
23:04 JosephMendiola
23:04 RD
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22:58 JosephMendiola









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