TEHRAN (FNA)- Iran was the first country in the region in terms of scientific achievements and scientific articles authoring last year, Iranian Vice-President for Science and Technology Nasrin Soltankhah announced.
 
Speaking to the Islamic republic news agency on Monday, Soltankhah announced that according to Scopus, the acclaimed ISI Web of Science, Iran published over 33,000 scientific articles in 2011.

As per the information released from ISI Web of Knowledge Iranian researchers published 18,600 articles in 2010, she added, adding Iran ranked 12th in terms of nano technologies and scientific achievements across the globe.

The remarks by Soltankhah came a day after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad lashed out at the West for using scientific capabilities to dominate the world nations, and stressed that the Iranian nation’s progress in science and technology will serve the interests of human society.

Iran has made huge achievements in various fields of science and technology, from nuclear knowledge to stem cell and Nano technology.

In a most recent case, Iranian Health Minister Marziyeh Vahid Dastjerdi announced in September that the country would soon start production of 15 types of anti-cancer drugs.

“15 types of monoclonal anti-body drugs are being synthesized with the help of the Scientific Department of the Presidential Office, using hi-tech technology,” Vahid Dastjerdi said.

Far be it from me to rain on the party but..

• The population of Iran is over 75 million. So 33,000 scientific articles published equates to approximately 44 per 100,000 of population. Israel’s output in 2009 was approximately 189 per 100,000, and on an upward trend.
• Analyze this:

Click to enlarge

[source: The Global Innovation Index 2011]

And I could go on and on, but even Israel’s harshest critics would have to recognize our scientific contribution to the world far outstrips anything from Iran.

I would just add that I’m glad to see the Iranian Health Minister announce Iran will soon start production of 15 types of anti-cancer drugs. It’s just their main cancer fighting strategy I have a big problem with.

Say what?

Meanwhile, I’d say Egyptian TV host Sheik Khaled Abdallah should try to get to the bottom of who infiltrated his forehead.

Update: Don’t worry, Egyptian MP Mustafa Bakri knows who to blame!

Most of the “official” Republicans don’t show much sign of understanding real personal freedoms in a framework of personal responsibilities either.

So like our frequent commenter here, juvanya, you’re drawn to the one man who, especially on domestic economics and personal freedoms in the US, says all the right things. I do get that.

And I also listen to the No Agenda Podcast and they love Ron Paul for most of the same reasons.

But on foreign policy he either doesn’t have a clue how it should be done or he’s evil. I veer toward the former. Barry Rubin picked apart a particular plank of Ron Paul platform on foreign issues: they hate us because we bombed them. It turns out if you actually look at Iranian history concerning the rise of the Shah instead of believing media soundbites, you learn something. When it comes to the 7th century form of Islam that rules Iran and as espoused by the Muslim Brotherhood elsewhere: they hate us. Why? Because we exist and continue not to bow down and submit.

But that’s just one aspect. The following started off as an email to Adam Curry and John C. Dvorak relating to things they said on No Agenda yesterday, but if it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for Israellycool readers!

1. The Israelis I know (real people) don’t want American GI’s fighting for us: we didn’t want Gulf War 1 or 2 and when the Scuds were falling the country had to forcibly restrained from fighting back. Iraq wasn’t Iran and even when the US et al went to Iraq the 2nd time, Israel was quietly screaming that Iran was the problem. All we ask is that if the shit really kicks off, you’ll help us with guns and bullets so we can hold our own: we don’t need guys, girls, gays or pilots: we have our own. In the past this hasn’t happened and in our hour of need we’ve been let down.

2. During the last war with Lebanon thousands of real Iranian and Syrian supplied rockets landed on real homes and real people in northern Israel. I know them. I know where they landed. I know my brother in law was wounded by an Iranian re-manufactured Chinese anti-tank missile. The ONLY reason we had so few civilian casualties was because we all (even me here in Tel Aviv 1 km from the sea) have mandated safe rooms in all new homes. In the north those saved countless lives. Some Israeli Arabs break the law and build without these expensive rooms: in the last war a disproportionate number of Israeli Arab civilians in the north died from Hezbollah’s rockets. Hezbollah called them Martyrs. Nice.

3. I know you guys follow the mantra “words matter” and they do, but your quibbling (and Dr P’s) about the exact words Ahmedinnnerjacket uses to wish me dead don’t matter in English translation. In the end it all comes down to the following because both Sunni and Shi Islam take the following line from the stories of the life of Muhammad as, well, “gospel” and very very seriously:

“The Hour [of Resurrection] will not come until you fight the Jews. The Jew will hide behind stones or trees. Then the stones or trees will call: ‘Oh Muslim, servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”

Add in that, like saying Voldermort in the Harry Potter books, Ahmedin-Jihad (which is what his name really means), can’t say Israel (there is a perfectly good Farsi word for us) so he uses various constructs around Zionist regime or Zionist rulers. There has never been any sane person who claims that should any Muslim army conquer present Israel, the result for us 6 million Jews (we’ve hit that number here now) living here would be pretty.

Update: I threw in the line above separating out the Jihad sound from the end of Ahmadinejad’s name more as a rhetorical flourish than a serious exegesis. I’m grateful to juvanya in the comments for the following:

As for Ahmadinejad, you are absolutely wrong about what it means and I highly recommend you correct this. Ahmadinejad means “from the race of Ahmad”.

There’s so much more not to like in Islamic scripture but if I had to pick only one it would be that one. It’s no coincidence this is a favourite passage when rulers want to whip up a mob. There’s no escaping that Muhammad by his own hand murdered hundreds of Jews: and he is the perfect man to be emulated.

Iran’s regime (and not just front man and puppet Ahmadinejad) are firm believers in an Iranian apocalyptic end of days form of Islam. The really are nuts: MAD doesn’t work with these guys and that is why we’re worried. I’ve also read the IAEA reports (I even have some inside info) but that agency was so thoroughly broken especially under El Baradi that we can’t trust anything it says (even when it says they are working on bad stuff).

In the end, and I know why you guys are suspicious of your government, there is one obligation I believe the Israeli government does take seriously and that is summed up by Never Again. The media in the US and the West never showed the photos of the train tracks, they never showed the photos of the camps and nothing was done. We’re not going quietly again. And after they showed it and after the “liberation”, the British kept as many Jews out of Israel as they could even (you don’t know this) cutting the food rations of the 100,000 survivors in the Displaced Persons camps in Europe if they tried to get to Israel.

BTW I, like many others in Israel, would prefer not to get the loan guarantees we get from the US with which we must buy US weapons. I’d prefer we made more of our own and exported them back to you but the realities of modern weapon systems are such that we don’t have the scale the US has. We already do that with upgrades as most of your top weapon systems have been improved here (again I have personal first hand experience with this). The F15 is only still in service because of Israeli upgrades.

I ain’t going back to the UK and America has turned me down once already. This is my home and we’ll fight to keep it.

A mass wedding ceremony for students was held at Tehran’s Shahid Beheshti University on Friday, 300 couples tied the knots. This was the 15th time such a program was being held.

Photos by Hemmat Khahi, ISNA

Want more mass weddings in Iran? Here is one from 2008 that was held in Qom.

A must-see video: Douglas Murray’s Cambridge Union masterclass in how to deal with appeasers of genocide. melaniephillips.com/test

— Melanie Phillips (@MelanieLatest) February 2, 2012

…though I didn’t get the chance to see it until just now.

That’s right, I said it. I retweeted it sight unseen. I’m that big a fan of Melanie’s work (for example, the Israel-related parts of her talk, “The World Turned Upside Down”, are spectacular) that when I see a tweet with an Israel-related link, I am confident enough to retweet it now and check out the link later. And no surprise, my faith was rewarded this time as well. Preach on, Douglas!

This YouTube video of the British writer Douglas Murray at the Cambridge Union last March has suddenly gone viral. It’s not surprising. It is a magnificent put-down of all those who dismiss the mortal threat posed by Iran’s nuclear programme. Given the lethal and amoral idiocy of those who are currently indifferent to the genocidal threat posed by Iran to the State of Israel in particular, this is a must-see.

Anytime an analyst/politician/journalist tries to apply MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction – the Cold War-era doctrine that assumes rational actors on both sides of a nuclear/WMD conflict) to this irrational, terror-supporting Iranian regime, that sound you hear is their credibility and/or objectivity circling the bowl.

UPDATE: For those of you who’d rather take your videos embedded than have to click through a link (right there with you), here is “The World Turned Upside Down”, the Melanie Phillips talk I mentioned above:

AP

Iran: We will help ‘cut out the cancer of Israel’

Iran will help anyone willing to “cut out the cancer” of Israel, its Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said today.

The religious leader also told worshippers at Friday prayers that the country will continue its controversial nuclear programme.

He warned that any military strike by the West would only make Iran stronger.

“From now on, in any place, if any nation or any group confronts the Zionist regime, we will endorse and we will help. We have no fear expressing this,” said Khamenei.

He said Israel is a “cancerous tumor that should be cut and will be cut”

Boy, what an A-hole. Here’s hoping this guy exists only in a cardboard version real soon.

Based on this movie.

In February 1, 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini — the leader of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution — returned triumphantly to Tehran on an Air France flight from Paris after 14 years in exile.

Now, 33 years later, that return was reenacted in a bizarre ceremony that saw guards carrying a giant cardboard cutout of Khomeini down the stairs of a passenger plane and a waiting crowd paying their respects to “him.”

Iranians have been faced with many unusual and absurd events in the past three decades of the rule of the clerics. The February 1 ceremony, however, may have topped them all.

Below is a small collection of Cardboard Khomeini’s from Mehr News.

Update: It looks like someone has created a blog all about our friend Cardboard Khomeini. 

At the end of the post, I included a comment from Dickie Sliverstein, Israellycool‘s parody version of anti-Israel blogger Richard Silverstein.

Dickie Sliverstein adds: Drama queens, the lot of you!

Well, once again, this wasn’t far off the mark. Here’s Silverstein’s actual reaction to the video:

http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun_olam/2012/01/31/israeli-film-depicts-iranian-first-strike-nuke-attack-on-israel/

The Israeli power of delusion is evident in this short film called, The Last Day, which purports to film the last moments of an Israeli family before Iran drops a nuclear bomb on Israel and obliterates it. The film, created by Ronen Barany, is shot in faux-documentary style with lots of shots of Israelis in extremis including suitably shaky, off kilter camera angles proclaiming it a product of ersatz cinema verite.

While the computer enhanced graphics showing massive explosions in the Israeli hillside may shock Israelis used to viewing a relatively tranquil landscape, the boom-boom screams out “computer enhancement.” If this were still photography critics would call it a photoshopped reality. We’ll have to come up with another name for an altered reality via video.

It should go without saying (but I’ll say it nevertheless), that the film is even more interesting for what it leaves out than what it includes. It presumes a backstory which the viewer fills in (hence the power of effective propaganda) of a hegemonic power-mad Iran hell-bent on getting nukes and using them on its bitterest foe, Israel. The poor Israeli shlumps in this movie are of course the collateral damage of Iranian megalomania. They’re innocent victims. No reference to any role Israel itself may’ve played in this conflict. Israel is doing nothing but defending itself from pure evil.

This film is a perfect example of how an entire people can be anesthetized and transported into an altered state of reality that shows them to be innocent lambs led to the slaughter; when in fact they are just as much agents of their own destiny as their enemies are.

The fact that this film is pimped by a RP rep for 5W PR, Ronn Torossian’s agency (who also pimps the Clarion Fund anti-Muslim films along with porn stars and has been charged with extorting millions of dollars from the followers of an Israeli Sephardic wonder rabbi) tells you reams about the film’s subtext.

So the main message Silverstein takes from this disturbing video is how Israel villifies Iran, yet is just as much to blame for any nuclear threat on our country as Iran is. There is no compassion or empathy towards Israelis who may fear the worst, and who – G-d forbid – might even face such an awful scenario.

Besides illustrating Silverstein’s predictability, it also shows just how much he hates Israel, despite his absurd claims of being a Zionist.

One gets the feeling that Silverstein might even like the idea of Israel being blown to smithereens, if not for the fact that he would really struggle for blog material if this were the case.

Update: In this tweet, Silverstein characterizes the video as “delusional paranoia.”

Wow.

Dickie Sliverstein adds: Drama queens, the lot of you!