OK, Angry Now

I saw a report on the TV news just now of a passenger plane (military transport, supposedly) which crashed into an apartment block.

It's pretty sad, lots of people were killed, none of them deserved to be in an accident like that.

Then, at the end of the report, the woman doing the voiceover said something to the effect of "This is not an isolated incident... many of Iran's military transports are ancient and are involved in many accidents. The age of the fleet is because America refuses to allow new, Western aircraft to be sold to Iran."

OK, firstly, that's not why this plane crashed, and it's pretty low to blame America for an Iranian plane crash. There are many old planes still flying all over the world, with proper maintenance they can last a long time. Some of them are DC-3s (C-47s) from the 1940s, still in commercial use!

Secondly, Iran just bought 1 billion dollars worth of Surface-to-air missile systems from Russia. They couldn't afford to buy a few of the cheap, effective Russian transport planes to replace the oldest in their fleet, in order to prevent accidents like this one happening again?

I'm sure Russia and France would both love to sell Iran some new planes. I doubt America can do more than block the sale of Boeing aircraft, which are not the only option out there. While they're at it, maybe they could spend less money on building nuclear weapons to wipe out Israel and spend it instead on aircraft maintenance.

Thirdly, Iran's policy of "Death to America" is probably at least partially responsible for their poor trade relations.

This is a most disgusting episode of reporting. I feel very sorry for the people affected by this accident, and I wish we could fix up their planes, but until Iran's leaders are ready to become mature and denounce their policies of terror and destruction, we're not going to be going out of our way to sell them military technology.

The Anti-American sentiments in our media are getting almost insidious as the Nazi's Anti-Jew sentiments. Everything that goes wrong is blamed on them! How am I the only person noticing this?

As I said... Angry Now.