RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15378/us-iran-policy-soleimani

“… you should know that I… control the policy for Iran with respect to Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza, and Afghanistan.” — The late Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani, to US General David Petraeus, The Guardian, July 28, 2011.

Under Soleimani’s rule, Iran’s military was also implicated in the 9/11 attacks.

To the likely dismay of Washington’s critics, President Trump’s Iran policy has been heading in the right direction. Maximum pressure is the right policy to bridle this predatory regime.

The critics of President Trump’s Iran policy have been proven wrong once again: Not only have the US sanctions imposed significant pressure on the ruling mullahs of Iran and their ability to fund their terror groups, but in addition, President Trump recently ordered a game-changing military attack that killed both Iranian Major-General Qassem Soleimani, head of the elite Quds Force, and Iraqi militia commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis near the Baghdad airport.

According to the US Department of Defense, Soleimani “was actively developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region.”

The unexpected death of Soleimani should be regarded as a severe blow to the ruling mullahs. When it comes to authority in the Islamic Republic, Soleimani was considered Iran’s second man after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

A staunchly loyal confidante to Khamenei, Soleimani enjoyed enormous influence over dictating the Iranian regime’s foreign policy. Soleimani was not bragging when he wrote in a message to US Gen. David Petraeus:

“… you should know that I, Qassem Suleimani, control the policy for Iran with respect to Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza, and Afghanistan. And indeed, the ambassador in Baghdad is a Quds Force member. The individual who’s going to replace him is a Quds Force member.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/01/soleymani-aftermath-lloyd-billingsley/

Iranian general Qassem Soleymani was a master terrorist who orchestrated atrocities around the world that claimed thousands of lives, including hundreds if not thousands of Americans. That was the default position after President Trump took out Soleymani last week. The Democrats’ furious reaction overlooked realities about the Iranian regime in general and Soleymani in particular.

Israel had also targeted the Quds Force commander, but according to the Kuwaiti Al-Jarida, the Obama administration tipped off the Tehran regime. Soleymani emerged unscathed and continued to spearhead the Islamic regime’s military and terrorist operations. Those were funded by criminal activity, and on that front the previous administration also lent a helping hand.

“In its determination to secure a nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama administration derailed an ambitious law enforcement campaign targeting drug trafficking by the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, even as it was funneling cocaine into the United States.” That was the finding of a Politico investigation by Josh Meyer. In 2010, Meyer recalled, John Brennan, then a presidential adviser on homeland security and counterterrorism, announced plans to build up “moderate” elements within Hezbollah, which he described as “an interesting organization.”

In 2008, the United States launched “Project Cassandra” against Hezbollah, but as U.S. agents targeted the terrorist hierarchy, “Obama administration officials threw an increasingly insurmountable series of roadblocks in its way.” As Meyer found, officials in the Justice and Treasury Departments rejected requests for investigations, prosecutions, arrests and financial sanctions.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/breaking-iran-ends-commitment-to-nuclear-deal-it-never-abided-by-in-the-first-place/

The New York Times reports that “Iran’s government said it was ending all its commitments under the 2015 nuclear deal and that it would no longer limit its enrichment of uranium.”

The announcement came after Iran’s National Security Council held an emergency meeting on Sunday to discuss the country’s nuclear policy in the aftermath of Maj. Gen. Qassim Soleimani’s assassination.

The statement said: “The Islamic Republic of Iran will end its final limitations in the nuclear deal, meaning the limitation in the number of centrifuges. Therefore Iran’s nuclear program will have no limitations in production including enrichment capacity and percentage and number of enriched uranium and research and expansion.”

This would be earth-shattering news if Iran ever stuck to the limitations of the nuclear deal in the first place.

The Iran Nuclear Deal, officially called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action went into effect in July of 2015 and has a been a disaster ever since. Three months after the deal was made, Iran launched a ballistic missile test, in violation of the agreement Obama hailed for effectively containing Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

In April of 2016, Barack Obama conceded that Iran was already violating the “spirit” of the deal, though he claimed they were still sticking to the “letter” of the deal. A month later, Iran had officially violated the terms of the nuclear deal, as well as U.N. resolutions for three times. By July, German intelligence believed that Iran was attempting to acquire technology that could be used for its military nuclear program, again, in violation of the deal. In November of 2016, the U.N.’s atomic watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), reported that Iran had, for the second time, exceeded a soft limit on sensitive material under the nuclear deal.

All this was while Barack Obama was still president.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-u-s-iraq-and-iran-11578263875?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The U.S. strikes in Iraq against Iranian-backed militias and Qasem Soleimani were necessary, but they always risked a nationalist backlash. The Iraqi Parliament’s symbolic vote Sunday to oust U.S. troops from the country is an example of that backlash, but it’s also far from the last word.

The vote was not decisive, as only a little over half of Iraq’s 329 members of parliament were present to vote on the nonbinding resolution. Kataib Hezbollah, the militia allied with Iran’s Quds Force that stormed the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad last week, issued threats against lawmakers who voted against the resolution.

Shiite lawmakers hold a majority and most voted in favor, while Kurdish and most Sunni members didn’t show up. Iraq’s minorities understand better than anyone the risk of Iranian domination, and both have supported a continuing American military presence.

Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi supported the vote, but he’s a caretaker who in November promised to resign after widespread protests sapped the legislature’s legitimacy. Elections for a new parliament are expected this year. The public already has registered its disgust with the Iraqi ruling class, and no doubt the U.S. and Iranian presence in the country will be major election issues.

The parliament also voted to file a complaint with the United Nations about the strike against Soleimani. Those suddenly concerned about international law apparently weren’t worried that Soleimani’s presence in Iraq was illegal under a 2007 United Nations Security Council resolution that was still in force. If the terrorist ringleader had adhered to that U.N. travel restriction, he’d still be alive.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15369/christmas-christians-beheaded

How much bigger and more extended must this war on Christians become before the West considers it a “genocide” and acts to prevent it?

The day after Christians were beheaded in Nigeria, Pope Francis admonished Western society. About beheaded Christians? No. “Put down your phones, talk during meals”, the Pope said. He did not speak a single word about the horrific execution of his Christian brothers and sisters. A few days before that, Pope Francis hung a cross encircled by a life jacket in memory of migrants who lost their lives in the Mediterranean Sea. He did not commemorate the lives of Christians killed by Islamic extremists with even a mention.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said that her priority will be fighting climate change. She did not mention persecuted Christians. Meanwhile The Economist wrote that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, a passionate defender of persecuted Christians, politically “exploits” the issue.

“The United Nations has held inquiries and focuses its anger on Israel for defending itself against that same terrorist organization [Hamas]. But the barbarous slaughter of thousands upon thousands of Christians is met with relative indifference”. — Ambassador Ronald S. Lauder, President of the World Jewish Congress, The New York Times, August 19, 2014.

Martha Bulus, a Nigerian Catholic woman, was going to her bridal party when she was abducted by Islamic extremists of Boko Haram. Martha and her companions were beheaded and their execution filmed. The video of the brutal murders of these 11 Christians was released on December 26 to coincide with Christmas celebrations. It is reminiscent of the images of other Christians dressed in orange jumpsuits bent on their knees on a beach, each being held by a masked, black-clad jihadist holding a knife at their throats. Their bodies were discovered in a mass grave in Libya.

On the scale of Nigeria’s anti-Christian persecution, Martha was less fortunate than another abducted girl, Leah Sharibu, who has now been in captivity nearly two years and just spent her second Christmas in the hands of Boko Haram. The reason? Leah refused to convert to Islam and deny her Christianity. Nigerian Christian leaders are also protesting the “continuous abduction of under-aged Christian girls by Muslim youths…”. These girls “are forcefully converted to Islam and taken in for marriage without the consent of their parents”.

https://www.city-journal.org/anti-semitism-paris-new-york

Anti-Semitism seems to be as ancient as the Jewish people themselves. Hellenistic texts from 300 BC exude stereotypes regarding Jews’ physical traits and supposed love for money. Anti-Semitism, however, comes in many shades, depending on the local culture, just as being Jewish in the diaspora is a varied experience. Living in Paris and New York, I see this difference explicitly. When I first rented a place in Manhattan, I was flabbergasted by the mezuzahs attached at so many entrances, including of commercial establishments. Despite the recent outbreak of anti-Semitic attacks in New York, Jews are not a tiny minority in the city and have no reason to hide. In Paris, we tend to be more discreet; if we have a mezuzah, we will usually place it inside.

In New York, Jews are divided into distinct communities—Conservative, Modern Orthodox, Reform, ultra-Orthodox—not familiar in France. In Paris, where Jews are scattered around the city, the main distinction is between Ashkenazim—Jews with an Eastern European background—and Jews who came to France in the 1960s from Algeria and other North African colonies, following independence. This second group now constitutes a majority and doesn’t always see eye-to-eye politically and culturally with the Ashkenazim, especially on the question of Israel. French society, however, which promotes active laicization as a positive value much more vigorously than does America, has largely secularized all of us. The French generally do not attend religious services, except for weddings and funerals: on Sunday morning, churches stay mostly empty, and the same goes with most synagogues on Saturday. Paris’s Orthodox Jewish community is rather small and concentrated in specific neighborhoods of Paris and its suburbs.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/iranian-analytics/

For all the current furor over the death of Qasem Soleimani, it is Iran, not the U.S. and the Trump administration, that is in a dilemma. Given the death and destruction wrought by Soleimani, and his agendas to come, he will not be missed.

Tehran has misjudged the U.S. administration’s doctrine of strategic realism rather than vice versa. The theocracy apparently calculated that prior U.S. patience and restraint in the face of its aggression was proof of an unwillingness or inability to respond. More likely, the administration was earlier prepping for a possible more dramatic, deadly, and politically justifiable response when and if Iran soon overreached.

To retain domestic and foreign credibility, Iran would now like to escalate in hopes of creating some sort of U.S. quagmire comparable to Afghanistan, or, more germanely, to a long Serbian-like bombing campaign mess, or the ennui that eventually overtook the endless no-fly zones over Iraq, or the creepy misadventure in Libya, or even something like an enervating 1979-80 hostage situation. The history of the strategies of our Middle East opponents has always been to lure us into situations that have no strategic endgame, do not play to U.S. strengths in firepower, are costly without a time limit, and create Vietnam War–like tensions at home.

But those wished-for landscapes are not what Iran has got itself into. Trump, after showing patience and restraint to prior Iranian escalations, can respond to Iranian tit-for-tat without getting near Iran, without commitments to any formal campaign, and without seeming to be a provocateur itching for war, but in theory doing a lot more damage to an already damaged Iranian economy either through drones, missiles, and bombing, or even more sanctions and boycotts to come. If Iran turns to terrorism and cyber-attacks, it would likely only lose more political support and risk airborne responses to its infrastructure at home.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15300/germany-middle-eastern-criminal-clans

“For decades, police turned a blind eye to extended criminal families, in part to avoid being accused of racial discrimination. This has made the present-day challenge all the more difficult as clan structures have solidified, parallel societies have formed, and the enemy has grown.” — Deutsche Welle, February 3, 2019.

“There are now half a million people across Germany who belong to a clan…. Clans behave in their German surroundings as if they were tribes in the desert. Everything outside the clan is enemy territory and available for plunder”. — Ralph Ghadban, a Lebanese-German political scientist and a leading expert on clans in Germany; The German Times, October 2019.

“It is known that the Osmanen Germania gang has received financial assistance from Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development (AKP) party. The gang has essentially functioned as [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan’s armed wing in Germany.” — Sebastian Fiedler, head of the Association of German Criminal Investigators.

The clans see the state as, “an object of ridicule, a target for exploitation” — Falko Liecke, Neukölln’s deputy district mayor and district councilor for youth and health. The German Times, October 2019.

In a recently aired documentary by German broadcaster ARD, about Germany’s Middle Eastern criminal family gangs — or clans, as they are called in Germany — the head of Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Agency (BKA) Holger Münch, said “In about one-third of proceedings, suspects also included immigrants — and that means that we need to keep a very close eye on this phenomenon”.

Münch seems to have been referring to the fact that migrants who arrived in Germany from Syria, Iraq and other countries during the migrant crisis in 2015-16 are now starting to compete with Germany’s long-established criminal family gangs whose original founders arrived in Germany from Lebanon in the late 1970s during Lebanon’s civil war.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/justice-arrives-for-soleimani-11578085286?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

“The least credible criticism is coming from American Democrats, especially those who worked for the Obama Administration. Their policy was to appease Tehran with a nuclear deal that would supposedly induce its leaders to join the civilized world. Instead the deal’s cash windfall empowered Soleimani to export revolution.”

For a generation, Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani bestrode the Middle East spreading terror and death. President Trump’s decision to order the general’s death via drone attack in Baghdad Thursday night is a great boon for the region. It is also belated justice for the hundreds of Americans whom Soleimani had a hand in killing.

One reason the U.S. could track and kill Soleimani near Baghdad International Airport was the impunity he had cultivated. The general often appeared in public, especially in Syria and Iraq, as he sought to build Shiite militias and spread Iranian influence. He was killed with Abu Mahdi al-Mohandes, an Iraqi-Iranian militia leader who had met Soleimani at the airport and was outside the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad this week during an assault that Soleimani had approved.

Soleimani arrived in Baghdad with “plans to attack American diplomats and service members,” the Pentagon said in a statement. Mr. Trump’s critics are demanding to see the evidence of such plans. But why does it matter? Soleimani has killed enough Americans over the years to justify the strike as a defensive act to deter other attacks and send a message that killing Americans won’t be tolerated.