You remember the Heaven’s Gate cult in San Diego. 39 members of the cult, including Lieutenant Uhura’s brother, committed suicide in 1997 so that they could be beamed up to a UFO that was following the Hale-Bopp comet. A likely story. But it is it any harder to believe than that the Iranians were negotiating in good faith with the EU3 over the past few years? Here’s what the chief Iranian negotiator had to say about the gullability of the EU3 (via Telegraph):

“From the outset, the Americans kept telling the Europeans, ‘The Iranians are lying and deceiving you and they have not told you everything.’ The Europeans used to respond, ‘We trust them’,” he said…. “When we were negotiating with the Europeans in Teheran we were still installing some of the equipment at the Isfahan site. There was plenty of work to be done to complete the site and finish the work there. In reality, by creating a tame situation, we could finish Isfahan.”…..

He described the regime’s quandary in September 2003 when the IAEA had demanded a “complete picture” of its nuclear activities. “The dilemma was if we offered a complete picture, the picture itself could lead us to the UN Security Council,” he said. “And not providing a complete picture would also be a violation of the resolution and we could have been referred to the Security Council for not implementing the resolution.”….The Iranians’ biggest setback came when Libya secretly negotiated with America and Britain to close down its nuclear operations. Mr Rowhani said that Iran had bought much of its nuclear-related equipment from “the same dealer” – a reference to the network of A Q Khan, the rogue Pakistani atomic scientist. From information supplied by Libya, it became clear that Iran had bought P2 advanced centrifuges.

While it is lucky for the EU negotiators that they never met Marshall Applewhite, the late leader of Heaven’s Gate, it has been unfortunate for humanity. The negotiators would have served us better as ambassadors to Hale-Bopp.

UPDATE

On a more somber note, we recommend Roya Hakakian’s WSJ piece on the Teheran bus drivers’ plight.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 5th, 2006 at 9:41 am and is filed under art, culture, business, EU, General, idiots!, Religion, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.