Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says the West created Israel to control the Middle East, condemning the all-out Western Support for the crimes committed by the Zionist regime.

The Iranian president made the remarks at the closing ceremony of the 5th International Conference on the Palestinian Intifada in Tehran on Sunday.

Describing the creation of Israel as the most heinous historical crime, Ahmadinejad said that occupation of Palestine was an international issue and a crime against all humanity.

The Iranian president criticized the West for not tolerating any argument which involves the existence of Israel.

He added that Israel has been so sanctified in the West that any criticism of the Zionist regime is tantamount to being a terrorist.

Iran's supreme leader rejected the Palestinians' U.N. statehood bid on Saturday, saying any deal that accepted the existence of Israel would leave a "cancerous tumor" forever threatening the security of the Middle East.

As leader of a country under a long-standing threat of military action from Israel and the United States, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned the Jewish state and its allies to expect "paralyzing blows" that a NATO missile shield could not prevent.

"Any plan that seeks to divide Palestine is totally rejected," Khamenei told a conference on the Palestinian issue.

"The two-state scheme, which has been clad in the self-righteousness of the acceptance of the Palestinian government and membership at the United Nations, is nothing but a capitulation to the demands of the Zionists or the recognition of the Zionist regime on Palestinian land," he declared.

The law on the use of lethal force by executive order is specific. This assassination broke it - that creates a terrifying precedent

Is this the world we want? Where the president of the United States can place an American citizen, or anyone else for that matter, living outside a war zone on a targeted assassination list, and then have him murdered by drone strike.

This was the very result we at the Center for Constitutional Rights and the ACLU feared when we brought a case in US federal court on behalf of Anwar al-Awlaki's father, hoping to prevent this targeted killing. We lost the case on procedural grounds, but the judge considered the implications of the practice as raising "serious questions", asking:

"Can the executive order the assassination of a US citizen without first affording him any form of judicial process whatsoever, based on the mere assertion that he is a dangerous member of a terrorist organisation?"

Has anyone noticed that the political air is wafting rancid lately? That is the smell of modern barbarism. Modern barbarism is a malodorous umbrella concept. Underneath the umbrella are lots of fetid phobias, isms and behaviors: Islamophobia, homophobia, xenophobia, semi-fascism, scapegoating, stereotyping, bullying, libeling and a growing, aggressive intolerance of everything and everyone who is not to the liking of the modern barbarian. Here are some recent instances of this phenomenon.

Part I - Mistaking the Particular for the General

Michael Quigley, a Democratic Congressman from Chicago, made the New York Times on 24 September 2011. He made it by promoting the virtues of tolerance and diversity and lamenting the suffering that occurs when tolerance fails. Out and about in his Chicago district, he stopped in at a meeting of the American Islamic Conference. He made a short speech to the 100 or so conferees during which he said "discrimination comes in many forms, many shapes and many guises. You have my pledge to work with you to fight them, and I think it is appropriate for me to apologize on behalf of this country for the discrimination you face." Mr. Quigley was correct about the growing levels of Islamophobia that confront Muslim Americans. Islamophobia is a delusional mind-set which mistakes the general for the particular, which condemns an entire group (which happens to have a billion plus members) for the particular actions of a very few. There is no logic to such an overreaching generalization. It is irrational.

In the wake of COINTELPRO and the Watergate scandal, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas sent a letter to a group of young lawyers at the Washington State Bar Association. "As nightfall does not come all at once," he wrote, "neither does oppression. In both instances there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air - however slight - lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness."[1]

The recent dramatic expansion of intelligence collection at the federal, state and local level raises profound civil liberties concerns regarding freedoms and protections we have long taken for granted. If people generally appear unaware of "change in the air," a large part of the reason is the unparalleled resort to secrecy used by the government to keep its actions from public scrutiny. According to the new American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) report, "Drastic Measures Required," under President Obama (who had vowed to create "an unprecedented level of openness in Government" when he first took office), there were no fewer than 76,795,945 decisions made to classify information in 2010 - eight times the number made in 2001.

There are layers of secrecy that cannot even be penetrated by most members of Congress. In the recent debate over the re-authorization of three sections of the USA Patriot Act with sunset provisions, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), who is a member of the Joint Intelligence Committee, declared in the Senate in May 2011 that there was a secret interpretation of Patriot Act powers that he could not even tell them about without disclosing classified information. [2] "When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they will be stunned and they will be angry," said Wyden. The determination of the Obama administration to imitate its predecessor and maintain a wall of secrecy around anything that could be connected (however tenuously) with "national security" is evident in the zeal with which it has pursued whistleblowers and its use of the state secrets privilege in judicial proceedings, including in the recent court challenge to the FBI use of the informant Craig Monteilh to spy on mosques in Orange County, California.

A French businessman says President Nicholas Sarkozy and Interior Minister Claude Gueant must acknowledge their roles in the kickbacks on the arms deal and illegal funding.

In an interview with French financial newspaper La Tribune published on Saturday, French millionaire arms broker Ziad Takieddine said that he was commissioned by Gueant, Sarkozy's former presidential election campaign head, to conclude arms contracts with former Libyan ruler Muammar Gaddafi, and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

"I remember telling Gueant: You know me more than anyone else. Each of my acts amount to an official mission," Takieddine stated.

"I went to see Gaddafi in Libya, and Assad in Syria only on the request and authorization from the president," the Franco-Lebanese businessman added.

The remarks come as Gaddafi's son, Saif al-Islam had said in March that Libya would publicize all the bank details relating to Sarkozy's campaign funding in 2007.

President Nicolas Sarkozy's allies came out fighting on Friday as a graft scandal threatened to derail his re-election bid, but their panicked response drew more fire from his opponents.

This week two of Sarkozy's closest associates, including the best man at his 2008 wedding, were arrested and charged by police investigating alleged kickbacks on an arms deal and illegal campaign finance contributions.

The money was allegedly kicked back to former Prime Minister Edouard Balladur's failed 1995 presidential campaign by middlemen in a contract to supply French submarines to Pakistan.

Sarkozy was the campaign's spokesman at the time of the alleged payments, but angrily insists he had nothing to do with funding. Government stalwarts leapt to his defence, but the response has been muddled.

Three allies of President Nicolas Sarkozy of France on Friday found themselves the focus of an expanding investigation into a 17-year-old case involving suspected corruption in the sale of submarines to Pakistan.

The inquiry has gathered momentum at a difficult time for Mr. Sarkozy, only seven months before he is to seek re-election.

The case, known here as "the Karachi Affair," centers on kickbacks that investigators suspect were paid to secure the sale of three submarines to Pakistan in 1994 and then used to help finance the presidential campaign of former Prime Minister Edouard Balladur in 1995.

On Thursday, the police arrested one of Mr. Sarkozy's allies, Nicolas Bazire, who was a witness at his wedding to Carla Bruni in 2008 and was also Mr. Balladur's campaign chief in 1995. Mr. Bazire was accused of complicity in the misuse of public money.

The aristocratic wife of a former aide to President Nicolas Sarkozy has publicly accused her estranged husband of making frequent trips abroad in the 1990s to collect "bags of cash" for illegal political funds.

In her first public comments on a deepening political scandal, Princess Hélène of Yugoslavia, 50, also said she had been threatened by her husband with losing custody of her children and "ending in an asylum" if she spoke too freely to independent investigators.

Princess Hélène, the great-grand-daughter of the last king of Italy, has become one of the key figures in the so-called "Karachi affair" since her husband, Thierry Gaubert, and Nicolas Bazire, another close associate of Mr Sarkozy, were arrested last week and formally accused of handling kick-backs on multibillion-dollar arms contracts.

French President Nicholas Sarkozy's bid to be re-elected to office for a second term has been dealt a severe blow by an ever-widening arms deal scandal. Three of Sarkozy's close aides are already under investigation for their parts in a sordid story of kickbacks, failed presidential campaigns and fatal bomb blasts in Pakistan. The French sure do turn up in arms deal sagas rather frequently eh?

Known in France as L'affaire Karachi, or less lyrically in English, "The Karachi affair", it has enraptured French media in recent weeks. It is, after all, the most explosive corruption investigation in recent French history and poses a significant threat against the President himself. The scandal dates all the way back to 1995 when France sold Pakistan three submarines. It is alleged that the commissions "earned" by the French officials who secured the deal, theoretically helped fund the presidential campaign of former Prime Minister Edouard Balladur. Sarkozy was the finance minister at the time and a spokesman for Balladur. French prosecutors are also investigating an additional case which alleges that the failure of French officials to pay "kickbacks" to their Pakistani counterparts who had helped to secure the deal, resulted in a bomb attack on a bus in Karachi in 2002 in which 15 people, including 11 French submarine engineers, died.