"Death to America"

Kind of catchy, especially when chanted by the masses… but it’s getting old. Standard stuff (printed on walls and banners too), actually, that is a necessary precursor to any speech by Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It’s been a bad week for Islamic Fundamentalists vs. the West. If you’re in the West.

The father of the “Muslim Atom Bomb,” Pakistani Dr. A. Q. Khan, was released from a prolonged house arrest (for leaking nuclear secrets to North Korea, Iran… well, you know the drill) – think Pakistan is trying to send the U.S. a less-than-subtle signal (aren’t they our “ally”)? The Taliban beheaded a Polish engineer as they further solidified their hold on the vast majority of the Afghani countryside. And some Muslim extremists seem to be taking credit for setting a few of those most murderous and devastating series of wildfires in Australia. Who knows if they did, but some of their firebrand leaders are suggesting that wildfires set in Western nations is merely payback time for Western devastation in the Islamic world.

Split elections in Israel mean that coalitions will be forming soon, and since the Iranian menace has been a major subject of the campaign, so it will be interesting where that issue sits when the dust settles. Hardliners did not come away with a clear victory, but with the parliamentary form of government practiced in Israel, parties with something in common often join forces for an awkward form of shared government. Not that our American ballet of “voting down party lines” all too often shows much in the way of “something in common” these days.

Barack Hussein Obama came into the Middle East with a “first in terview” on Arab satellite television and a pile of peace feelers, but the grassroots Muslim constituency, reeling from what they saw as needless overkill in Gaza, wondered why Obama did not decry the purported use of phosphorus by the Israeli military, a particularly cruel and “almost impossible to extinguish fire” weapon system that is banned all over the world. Odd, they don’t seem to mention the rain of rockets from Gaza over the innocents in southern Israel.

Slight good news, though. At one of those “Death to America” rally speeches, Ahmadinejad responded somewhat positively to President Obama’s invitation to engage in dialog: "The Iranian nation is ready for talks [with the U.S.], but in a fair atmosphere with mutual respect." The Iranian President muddied his response by adding: “"If you really want to fight terrorism, come and cooperate with the Iranian nation, which is the biggest victim of terrorism so that terrorism is eliminated. ... If you want to confront nuclear weapons ... you need to stand beside Iran so it can introduce a correct path to you." Iran expects the U.S. to treat this nuclear menace as an “equal superpower” – another way of saying if you have nukes, so should we.

In short, the world is a constantly moving stage. Even as the House and Senate grapple with a massive bailout bill that absolutely no one can predict with any certainty will work, the rest of the world didn’t set their issues aside while we figured out what to do to restart our and hopefully the world’s economy. $2.5 trillion?! Got my attention, Mr. Geithner (okay, you didn’t give exactly that number, but there is talk th at…) Western Europe still thinks America is to blame (hey, we did screw up a few things) for the managed depression – notwithstanding that their banks actually demanded even more of those delicious-but-ultimately-toxic derivatives and many of those economies borrowed themselves silly too.

On a planet with 6.6 billion people, funny how it’s all about “me,” particularly when the going gets tough (and the tough don’t get going, because there’s no place to run to!).

I’m Peter Dekom, and I approve this message.