The Iraqi government reiterated here Sunday its insistence on the deportation of Iran's opposition Mujahedeen-e-Khalq group from Iraqi territories in spite of a US plan to remove it from the list of terror groups.

The Iraqi Prime Minister's office said in a release that Iraq's position towards the Iranian group remained unchanged, shrugging off a recent US plan to stop listing Mujahedeen-e-Khalq as a terrorist group.

"The Iraqi government's position on this organization, which is involved in terrorist acts against Iraqis, remains unchanged," it said.

"Therefore, its illegitimate presence on Iraqi soil marks a breach of Iraq's constitutional obligations and peaceful policies in the world," the release added.

It called on the UN and all world countries to fulfil their commitments related to fighting terrorist groups.

Iraq had agreed with the UN to transfer the Iranian opposition group's members from the border area with Iran to camp in west Baghdad as a prelude to deporting them.

New York - Prime Minister Stephen Harper called on the international community Thursday to do more to "step up pressure and isolate" Iran, which he labelled a regime "where evil dominates."

Shunning an opportunity to speak at the opening of the United Nations General Assembly, Harper delivered his attack on Iran after receiving the World Statesman Award from the New York-based Appeal of Conscience Foundation (ACF) .

He targeted Iran as a country that constitutes "unambiguously a clear and present danger" to the world both for its pursuit of nuclear weapons, its support of terrorism and its threat to the existence of Israel.

Harper, who recently closed Canada's embassy in Tehran and expelled Iranian diplomats from Ottawa, assured an audience that included former U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger and several prominent ACF donors that he is not advocating war.

"I say these things not to counsel any particular action, not to wish any additional hardship on the long-suffering Iranian people and certainly not to advocate war, but rather so that we not shrink from recognizing evil in the world for what it is," he said.

He called Iran's human rights record "appalling" and said its Islamic regime has a "truly malevolent ideology."

Harper also used the annual ACF fundraiser to condemn the anti-American riots around U.S. embassies and the attack on the American consulate in Libya that killed four Americans including the U.S. ambassador.

It's no wonder the Israeli Foreign Ministry initially held back from releasing a transcript of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's speech to the UN General Assembly: Bibi's wackiness doesn't bear close scrutiny. Perhaps "wacky" isn't quite the right word for his 40-minute peroration, during which he pulled out a bomb "diagram" and a red marker to illustrate where he would draw a "red line" defining the outer limits of Iran's nuclear program. Cartoonish is more like it. The cartoonish quality of the bomb drawing underscored the content and tone of the speech, which was the jeremiad of a radical ideologue rather than anything one would expect from a statesman:

"Today a great battle is being waged between the modern and the medieval. Israel stands proudly with the forces of modernity. We protect the right of all our citizens, men and women, Jews and Arabs, Muslims and Christians, all are equal before the law."

Israel, which privileges its priestly caste, has a state religion, and bases its national mythology on a "promise" from G-d, is as medieval as any of its neighbors. Aside from being a lie, however, this statement is interesting because it evokes the very same supremacist spirit that animates the controversial pro-Israel public relations campaign launched by the Jewish state's extremist American supporters. Posters in the public transport system, from New York to San Francisco, proclaim:

"In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat jihad."

No wonder the Israeli consulates in New York and San Francisco won't disavow those vile subway posters: Pamela Geller is the new public face of Israel.

Yes, Israel protects the rights of all citizens - unless they're Palestinians who happen to own property coveted by the "settlers," in which case it doesn't. And the key word here is citizens: of course, the Palestinians in the occupied territories are not citizens, but helots, with no rights, and no protection from fanatical Jewish fundamentalists who have launched hundreds of attacks on their homes, and sought to displace them at every opportunity, with the active complicity of the Israeli government.

In President Obama's remarks to the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, he stated, "... My plan will continue to reduce the carbon pollution that is heating our planet - because climate change is not a hoax. More droughts and floods and wildfires are not a joke. They're a threat to our children's future. And in this election you can do something about it."

The president's remarks support the ideology of climatism - the belief that manmade greenhouse gases are destroying Earth's climate.

Today, the world is in the grip of the madness of climatism. Our president and 191 other world leaders of the United Nations continue to pursue futile policies to stop global warming. Universities preach "sustainable development." Companies tout their "green" programs. Schools teach our children that if we change light bulbs, we can save polar bears. But an increasing body of science shows that the theory of catastrophic manmade warming is nonsense. Climate change is natural, and car emissions are insignificant.

The president did not mention the Keystone Pipeline in his speech. In January 2012, he halted the $7 billion Keystone project on recommendation by the State Department in order to assess potential environmental harm. During the last months of 2011, thousands of protesters gathered in front of the White House to protest the Keystone project. They claimed that the oil the pipeline would transport from Canadian tar sands would cause irreversible global warming. Dr. James Hansen of NASA was one of those arrested at the demonstrations. Media pundits speculated that the president halted the pipeline to strengthen his political support with environmental groups. But could it be that Mr. Obama believes that halting the pipeline was the right policy to save the planet?

At a time when the U.S. pretends to be a beacon of freedom and liberty to the world, one would expect that Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp - a symbol of blatant repression - would not exist. It logically would be seen as an anathema the U.S. would want to keep hidden. Instead, the U.S. flaunts it like a teenager showing off his muscles.

Why did the U.S. leadership decide to build it in Cuba in the first place? What kind of mentality did it take for Cheney, George Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, Ashcroft, and others to sit down and decide to construct a torture chamber out of a former military base?

If the question is approached from a psychological point of view, from a military standpoint, and as a law enforcement question, none of these frameworks explain the continued phenomenon. When Obama ran for office, shutting down Guantanamo was one of the myriad broken promises made by the president. Even before his election, he was disgusted with the obvious failures of this prison camp. As a nation all we could do with Bush's atrocities was to shake our heads in disbelief; yet, Obama continues on the same path as his predecessor.

Although Americans have prided themselves in promoting and touting democracy and a justice system based upon constitutional principles, our country remains silent in the face of a prison camp.

A prison camp just doesn't emerge out of nowhere on a particular day; nor does it arise from the destruction of buildings by a terrorist group. On the contrary, even though there could be military retaliation for a strike on a country's home soil, a prison camp requires much more. Indeed, it is necessary for a people, whether they be citizens or not, to be slowly inculcated with a mentality that imprisoning people in order to ensure national security and the ability to gather intelligence is acceptable legal and moral behavior. It also helps to de-humanize them as "enemy combatants" rather than as suspects or human beings.

Ironically, in the now-famous video that seems likely to end his political career, it could be said that Mitt Romney was speaking truth to power.

Of course, "speaking truth to power" is a phrase normally used to describe courageous souls who risk their own hides to take a principled stand challenging those in power - not exactly what Mitt was doing.

Rather, assuming he was speaking privately to like-minded multi-millionaires, the Republican presidential candidate told the $50,000-a-platers what they wanted to hear: that he hasn't any intention of helping the 47 per cent of Americans too poor to pay income tax. "My job is not to worry about those people."

With this truthfulness caught on tape, Romney has probably done more than incinerate his own presidential bid. He has so vividly exposed the cynicism and greed that lies at the heart of what is now called "conservatism" that he may have inadvertently begun its undoing.

The killing of the US ambassador to Libya and angry demonstrations across the Muslim world over a tacky anti-Islamic hate video have produced the usual flood of wrong-headed commentary from our media and politicians.

Across the land comes the familiar cry, "why do they hate us?" That any Americans can in this day and age still be surprised that their nation is hated by many people from Morocco to Indonesia to Nigeria is by far the biggest surprise. We have learned little from 9/11.

Those angry Muslims from Morocco to Bangladesh are not rioting and burning because they hate Christianity, fast food, America's consumer society, democracy, or feminism, as we are endlessly misinformed by politicians and media.

The mass fury does not come because Muslims are somehow irrational, primitive, violent beings.

Nor is the hate video, which was actually seen by only a limited number of the world's one billion Muslims, the real cause of the violence we have been witnessing: it is merely the spark that ignited the combustible haze of anti-Americanism that overlies over much of the Muslim world.

Many Americans believe they are innocent bystanders in the Muslim world, or involved there on an altruistic "mission" to uplift the benighted natives, to selflessly shoulder the heavy burden of policing the unruly globe, or abroad to wage an unending struggle against the dark forces of what we call "terrorism."

• Study found war against violent Islamists has become increasingly deadly
• Researchers blame common tactic now being used - the 'double-tap' strike
• Drone strikes condemned for their ineffectiveness in targeting militants

Just one in 50 victims of America's deadly drone strikes in Pakistan are terrorists - while the rest are innocent civilians, a new report claimed today.

The authoritative joint study, by Stanford and New York Universities, concludes that men, women and children are being terrorised by the operations '24 hours-a-day'.
And the authors lay much of the blame on the use of the 'double-tap' strike where a drone fires one missile - and then a second as rescuers try to drag victims from the rubble. One aid agency said they had a six-hour delay before going to the scene.

The tactic has cast such a shadow of fear over strike zones that people often wait for hours before daring to visit the scene of an attack. Investigators also discovered that communities living in fear of the drones were suffering severe stress and related illnesses. Many parents had taken their children out of school because they were so afraid of a missile-strike.

Today campaigners savaged the use of drones, claiming that they were destroying a way of life.

Clive Stafford Smith, director of the charity Reprieve which helped interview people for the report, said: 'This shows that drone strikes go much further than simply killing innocent civilians. An entire region is being terrorised by the constant threat of death from the skies. '

There have been at least 345 strikes in Pakistan's tribal areas near the border with Afghanistan in the past eight years.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon told the General Assembly at the start of this week that "the door may be closing for good on a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict." He added: "The continued growth of Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory seriously undermines efforts toward peace. We must break this dangerous impasse."

The truth of history, which most if not all world leaders know but dare not state, is that the door Ban Ki-Moon sees closing, was actually slammed shut 45 years ago. The precise date of the closure was 22 November 1967. What happened on that day?

In the aftermath of the Six Days War of that year, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted, after much agonizing over five drafts, Resolution 242. At the time it was hailed as the key to a just and lasting peace in the Middle East. It could never have been that and here's why.

Leaving aside the fact that 242 does not mention the Palestinians by name (it called only for a just settlement of "the refugee problem"), the key to understanding why the resolution was fatally flawed and bound to be a disaster for all who work seriously for justice and peace is in the fact that the 1967 war was a war of Israeli aggression, not as Israel asserted, and still asserts, a war of self-defense by way of a pre-emptive strike. (As I document in detail in Volume Three of the American edition of my book Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, the Arabs did not strike first and never had any intention of initiating war with Israel, a fact that was known to Israel's leaders. In my book I quote a number of them saying so).

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Friday announced $45 million in additional aid for Syrian opposition activists, the latest U.S. push for influence in a civil war that's raged beyond the international community's control.

Clinton announced the new aid package before meeting with visiting Syrian dissidents on the margins of this week's U.N. General Assembly, where world leaders sounded bleaker than ever about the prospects for a negotiated political resolution to the 18-month uprising against Syrian President Bashar Assad.

U.S. humanitarian aid for Syria now will total more than $132 million this year, though Syrian rebels are more interested in weapons and military training than in the American promises of more "nonlethal assistance." Of the $45 million pledged Friday, $30 million is earmarked for humanitarian assistance and $15 million for radios, training and other technical support for opposition activists.

The U.S. government has refused to directly arm or fund the so-called Free Syrian Army, a loose confederation of rebel militias, largely out of fear that the assistance would make its way to Islamist extremist groups that have joined the battle to unseat Assad.

U.S. policy is in a "really tough spot," said Joseph Holliday, a Washington-based researcher at the Institute for the Study of War who specializes in the Syrian conflict. While the administration's instincts to withhold direct aid from rebel fighters is understandable, he said, that strategy is backfiring.

"The irony of our fear of supplying Islamist groups is that the others who are arming the opposition - the Saudis, the Qataris, the Turks - are doing just that, providing weapons and ammunition to Islamists," Holliday said. "Our lack of giving support is actually leading to the Islamicization of the opposition."