PARADE MAGAZINE Features It's Annual Worst Dictators Issue This Weekend

PARADE MAGAZINE does a great public educational service to the American audience which overlooks the crimes against humanity that run rampant in many nations, including some major U.S. "trade partners". For financial benefit, many rotten regimes such as in China or Saudi Arabia are overlooked by the American financial community, while some in the American left seem to want to wrongly offer some apology to awful regimes like Iran, looking for any way possible to ignore their pathetic human rights abuses or huge military.

The American business comunity chooses to ignore a major manufactured goods supplier like China's human rights record because of the ready access of cheaply produced goods with low labor costs. PARADE properly noted that in a full 22 areas, China is a major human rights abuser. This not only includes restriction on freedom of speech and religion, but some executions for nonviolent crimes such as "bribery or stealing oil" according to PARADE. Yet the American business community seems unfazed by the brutality and human rights abuses of this government.

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia is also considered another major human rights abuser where outrageous antiChristian and Jewish textbooks are used in the schools and the Christian faith is brutally suppresed. Yet there is no move to cut off oil from a rotten regime like this from either the American government or big oil.

On the other hand, many in the American left look for ways to apologize for the rotten regime in Iran. As PARADE well noted, the real power in Iran rests with the 12-man Guardian Council of religiouus clerics such as Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Khamenei, although the wacky antics of screwball Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are best known to the American public and Western world. Important human rights details such as women being stoned to death for adultery or executions of homosexuals seem to be ignored by left wing apologists for Iran, who look for any possible way to point this regime as not all that bad. The latest example is the absurdity of those who ignore that some Iranian arms are being smuggled into Iraq by some Iranians.

But even the arms smuggling issue does have some real limitations. Most arms in Iraq are likely the old arms in Iraq that the U.S. failed to secure in 2003 from the old Saddam Hussein regime that have been retrofitted, such as cannon shells into roadside bombs. Saddam Hussein's Iraq was like a giant ammo dump, with guns and shells all over the nation. Also arms smugglers from Jordan and Syria bring in more arms as well.

It is an open secret that hundreds of thousands of Iranians operate in Iraq, most peacefully involved in trade, medicine or other matters. Yet the role to deny that some arms from Iran could possiby be flowing into Iraq by either arms smugglers or by Iranian government covert activity in Iraq seems to be a major cause for some on the left. The Bush Administration perhaps hasn't conclusively proved who in Iran is directly responsible for the arms brought into Iraq, smuggled or otherwise, but proof still exists that some Iranian arms are indeed in Iraq.

The new PARADE MAGAZINE is well worth getting this weekend. Both the American business community which is mainly conservative politically as well as the political left wing that apologizes for Iran just don't have much to stand on based on the human rights records in some places like Saudi Arabia, China or Iran.