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Archive for the ‘rogue states’ Category

Gov. Christie praises Israel's tech industry during Bridgewater town …

ru1bailbonds.com4/11/12

Gov. Chris Christie today said he believes free market ideals have allowed Israel's high-tech industry to flourish BRIDGEWATER — In the first of a series of town hal…

Israpundit » Blog Archive » Why is Israel so happy? What, me worry?

www.israpundit.com4/10/12

Israel is much happier than all the European countries that experienced their last war six decades ago. The Jewish state's population exceeds 7.5 million, nine times that of 1948, the year of the state's creation. Israelis are …

Israel ranked 14th in the United Nations first World Happiness Report, conducted by Columbia University’s Earth Institute.

And it’s a result that is likely to surprise a lot of people.

Denmark, Finland, Norway and the Netherlands topped the list, while Benin, Central African Republic, Togo and Sierra Leone came in last.

Canada came in right behind The Netherlands in fifth.

And the United States ranked 11th, while the United Kingdom came in 18th.

The 158-page report was commissioned for the United Nations Conference on Happiness, which aims to “review the state of happiness in the world today and show how the new science of happiness explains personal and national variations in happiness.”

The report was based on findings published by the Gallup World Poll between the years 2005-2011, as well as three other surveys.

The rankings compile a “life evaluation score,” which is based on various factors including health, job security, political and personal freedom and corruption.

According to the report,

“while basic living standards are essential for happiness, after the baseline has been met happiness varies more with the quality of human relationship than with income.”

Israel Ranked 14th?

If you think the report must be wrong when it comes to Israel and perhaps the USA too, then take a look at,

World’s Happiest Countries – Happiness Index From Forbes.com

Threats To Israel

Israel is under contestant threat from many Islamic countries that have vowed to destroy it.

Iran is going nuclear and continually threatens to wipe Israel off of the map

Arabs fire rockets every day at civilians in Ashkelon, Beersheba, Ashdod and Sderot

And suicide bombers would blow themselves up in cafes and shopping mall if they were able to.

Israel is the only nation without recognized borders.

And organized propaganda is endlessly used against it by Islamic countries, third world countries, and liberals that love to support the perceived underdog.

Divisions In Israeli Society

Israel’s social fabric is deeply divided, between its Ultra-Orthodox Jews and its Secular Jews.

Between nationalists and leftists.

So What Is The Source Of Their Happiness?

Perhaps because,

Israelis have one of the longest life expectancies of any nation in the world.

Their country has a history of scintillating enlightenment, with the highest production of scientific publications per capita in the world, more museums per capita and the highest worldwide publication of new books.

Economic success! No other industrialized country does it better, especially for a nation that doesn’t have natural resources and has a population roughly half of Belgium’s.

Israel’s high-tech industry is flourishing, making the country known as the “start-up nation".

In a war-ravaged country like Israel, the past few years saw five Israeli Nobel Prize winners.

There is attachment to the land, whereas love for one’s land, is a nationalistic taboo in most of the West.

For a country the size of Wales, Israel has the varied landscape of the US but the distance from the north to the south is only around 500km or 310 miles.

Israel’s population is very resilient. A new governmental study just found that Intifada-era violence did nothing to affect Israel’s national morale.

Israelis are also happy because they know that Dimona and the IDF are there to protect them.

To Summarize

In Israel, the celebrations of life are far more important than the memories of death, and to quote Golda Meir.

“We will have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us”.

And perhaps Israel is a lighthouse of life, on the border between survival and destruction, believing that ultimately, that life will overcome death?

Iranian general sanctioned as drug trafficker – CNN Security …

security.blogs.cnn.com3/7/12

By Jamie Crawford The United States imposed sanctions Wednesday on a senior member of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Qods Force and designated him as a narcotics trafficker, the first such designation of an … Gholamreza Baghbani, the current chief of the ICRG-QF office in Zahedan, Iran, has allowed Afghan narcotics traffickers to smuggle opiates through his zone of operations in exchange for money, the U.S. Treasury Department said in a statement.

Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran Supreme Leader, Hails Obama Comments …

www.huffingtonpost.com3/8/12

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Iran's top leader Thursday welcomed comments by President Barack Obama advocating diplomacy and not war as a solution to Tehran's nuclear ambitions, a rare positive signal in long-standing hostile transactions … The Senate Banking Committee approved tough new penalties in January that would target Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps, require companies that trade on the U.S. stock exchange to disclose any Iran-related business to the …

A just released report from the Green Experts of Iran, an opposition group with sources inside the Islamic republic, provides details of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ connections to drug trafficking, money laundering and counterfeiting.

And the report confirms an interconnected web of criminal enterprises, run by the Guards and often facilitated by Iranian diplomatic consulates, intended to fund the Iranian military’s worldwide terror operation.

The Revolutionary Guards’ Mafia-like network in Europe has grown steadily since Iran’s 1979 revolution, and last year the U.S. government designated Iran as a “Primary Money-Laundering Concern" and imposed new sanctions on Iran’s energy sector.

And on Wednesday, March 8, 2012 the U.S. government named Gen. Gholamreza Baghbani, a general in Iran’s elite Quds force which is a branch of the Guards as a narcotics “kingpin", citing a career of facilitating heroin trafficking from Afghanistan into Iran.

The Green Experts of Iran report, which is written in Farsi, reveals a grand project by the Guards called a “Time for the Collapse", and the Guards according to this plan, intend to destabilize the West through terror, drugs and money laundering.

News media have widely reported that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in his power struggle with those loyal to supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has talked of many secret ports across Iran that are used by the Guards for smuggling.

About seventeen months ago, the report states, members of a drug gang were arrested in Baku, Azerbaijan and among them were two Iranians that Iran’s consulate shielded from prosecution.

Other members of the gang were citizens of Azerbaijan, Albania and Tajikistan however, and they confessed to their connection to the Revolutionary Guards’ drug network.

In connection with that arrest, the Green Experts report explains, modern counterfeiting equipment was confiscated, along with information that the Guards had placed similar counterfeiting operations on the borders of Russia and across East Asia.

That information, the report states, led to more arrests eleven months ago in Macau, which is an island protectorate of China, an information that was gathered resulted in the seizure of high-quality forged U.S. treasury bonds.

Those bonds, the report said, were already being easily transacted through regional banks, and arousing no suspicion.

The authorities ultimately tracked the forged currency to a criminal network in Europe which was distributing large sums of counterfeit dollars and euros, in collaboration with the Guards, and had been doing so since at least July 2011.

Information from arrests in Europe showed that the Guards and the Iranian intelligence apparatus were involved in a major money-laundering scheme that involved the assistance of Iranian consulates.

The Green Experts report states that an organized crime family in Albania has collaborated with the Guards for years, running a major money-laundering operation that sends fake currency into Europe.

The Guards, it is said, have been successfully recruiting mostly poor Albanians, who are sent to Iran for intelligence and military training, after which they are sent to work for the European network.

Investigations have shown that one center of distribution of phony banknotes is an Iranian-affiliated company in Hong Kong.

The Revolutionary Guards’ illicit activities have expanded throughout Europe, including to England, Germany, France and, in cooperation with Italian Mafiosi, to northern Italy.

Arrests just weeks ago in Zurich, Switzerland also led to confiscation of a a somewhat hard to believe $6 trillion in fake U.S. bonds and the arrests of eight individuals in Italy, and a further $2 billion in fake bonds were also seized in Rome.

Those arrested in that law-enforcement operation were widely reported to have been trained in Iran, were part of the Guards’ smuggling network, and were planning to buy plutonium from Nigerian contacts.

The bonds they were carrying had originally been transported from Hong Kong to Zurich in 2007

On Feb. 21, 2012, Azerbaijan officials announced the arrest of a gang with links to the Revolutionary Guards and the militant terrorist Hezbollah group.

Azerbaijan said.the gang members, who were involved in drug trafficking, were armed with explosives and intended to commit acts of terrorism against foreign nationals,

According to a respected Iraian opposition website called Balatarin, a company belonging to former Revolutionary Guards commander Mohsen Rafiqdoust transfers drugs in small packages from Iran via boats and airplanes to Albania, Romania and Bulgaria after which the packages are distributed through Western Europe in trucks belonging to Albanian and Romanian companies.

The same report suggests that the Guards’ drug operation nets $20 billion annually.

A former Guards intelligence officer confirmed this in November, saying that the Guards are trying to undermine the West through their links with global crime networks.

While the trafficking of drugs funds terrorist activities, drug cartels also transport arms and explosives and move terror cells’ personnel from place to place.

And the Guards run the terror cell operation out of Venezuela and into Latin America as a means to enter Mexico and from there into the U.S., according to an April 2010 Pentagon report.

The Guards also use Iranian industries under their control to expand their terrorist activities with one example being the Iran Khodro Company, which is the leading Iranian automaker with many branches outside Iran.

In 2011 a shipment of 286 pounds of heroin was intercepted in Nigeria along with 13 containers of arms and ammunition.

The heroin was hidden in auto parts destined for the Iran Khodro branch in Senegal, which is operated by the Quds Forces.

Green Experts are an opposition group tied to the Green Movement in Iran that opposes the reign of Khamenei.

The movement proposes free elections and the release of Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, who are Green movement leaders that have been under house arrest since the 2009 uprisings in Iran.

* For more information on the drug links between Hezbollah and Mexican drug cartels check out Hezbollah Now Linked To Mexican Drug Cartels