Here's a wonderful story detailing just how petty and disgraceful Team Bush and the US Federal Government is when it comes to maintaining the drumbeat leading up to another war based on ideology and false information.
A woman from Iran goes into space - the very first Iranian to do so - and goes to the International Space Station, she can't wear the Iranian Flag.
How wrong is that?
Almost three years after Mrs. Shirin Ebadi, a lawyer and human rights activist who be came the first Iranian to receive the prestigious Nobel Peace Prize, Mrs. Anousheh Ansari became the first Iranian to go into space with a Russian Soyuz spacecraft that took off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Monday 18 September 2006.
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She came bearing gifts:
[Her] two-day trip to the International Space Station was saddened because the Americans refused her bearing the flag of her natal nation of Iran along with the flag of the United States, the country she is a citizen, on her space suit, in a sign of possible reconciliation between the two antagonist nations.
Oh God no.... not reconciliation! Anything but that, apparently.
Well...not free speech, either, apparently:
She was also asked, by Russian and US governments, not to make any political statements while on board the ISS.
The mishandling of this is wrong on several levels; amongst them this observation:
"Actually, the Americans made a big mistake in refusing Mrs. Ansari putting on Iran's flag, as it could help defusing animosity between the tow nations. Now, more Iranians would hate the United States", one political analyst prognosticated, as she is reported to have already attracted praise from Iranians and Americans alike on her blog.
I doubt that is really a "mistake" and think it's just like when Team Bush tried to get Americans to tone down al that "Peace on Earth" noise in the Christmas prior to the invasion of Iraq.
Reconciliation, peaceful coexistence, just plain getting aalong: out of the question in our jikackd, ever-more-fascist country.
And homegirl is NO slacker:
After immigrating to the United States in 1984 escaping the harsh realities imposed by the Islamic Republic, the Ansari family left Iran and the young Anousheh, who did not spoke English at the time, went on to earn a bachelor's degree in electronics A telecommunications tycoon engineer from Texas, the computer engineering from George Mason University, to be followed by a master's degree in electrical engineering from George Washington University before joining American company MCI.
At 35, Ms Ansari was one of only two women to be featured in a Fortune magazine list of America's 40 most successful business figures under the age of 40. She was described as "the boldest newcomer".
In 1993, Ms Ansari set up a telecommunications company with her husband Hamid. This was eventually sold for hundreds of millions of dollars and part of the fortune went into funding Ms Ansari's interest in the space industry, including $10m to the X-Prize competition - a race to be the first private company to put a craft into space twice in two weeks.
Team Bush, in their ideological fervor to ramp-up as much animosity towards Iran as possible, loses sight and misses out on an opportunity to stand up for Women (since
W stands for Women)and to demonstrate the vast superiority of Western values such a equality and enthusiasm for science.
Mrs. Ansari's flight into space is a thorn into the eyes of the clerical leaders of the Islamic Republic that, because of Islamic laws on which the regime is based, bares women from such activities.
So I find this ridiculous conduct though wholly unsurprising. Here Team Bush gets to diss Iran, women, Science, Peace & Reconciliation, and basic human decency all in one rude gesture while making all Americans look like petty, mean-spirited numbskulls.
Absolutely Embarrassing! Team Bush Disses First Iranian in Space