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The Iran Ceasefire: A Dicey Intermission by Amir Taheri

Posted By on July 13th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21748/iran-ceasefire-dicey-intermission

[T]he recent flare-up has deeper reason than a concern about Iran building a nuclear arsenal, something which all directors general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) from Hans Blix to Muhammad Al-Baradei and Rafael Grossi have repeatedly said they cannot confirm.

Tehran’s fourth demand may be the hardest for any American administration to even contemplate accepting: Accepting the Islamic Republic’s right to “export” its model of governance, its Islamic values and its campaign for “global justice” just as the US does by propagating its values. In other words, Tehran says: Let us do what we please and we promise not to make the bomb that we have always said we never intended to build.

[M]id-term election in the US… could transform Trump into a lame-duck president if Elon Musk’s new political Tesla manages to rob the Republicans of just six seats in the Congress and two or three in the Senate. At the same time, Israeli Prim Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s numerous political enemies may eventually manage to bring him down.

Thus, regime insiders believe it is imperative to prolong the current ceasefire, even through negotiations, until the two big clouds shaped like Trump and Netanyahu disappear like morning mist.

The current political situation doesn’t have only two sides: steadfastness and surrender. The third side is change, of course. which means giving the enemy a victory it didn’t win with war.

The recent attack by Israel and the US on parts of Iran’s nuclear project has already been dubbed by some commentators as the Twelve Day War.

However, that cut-off time was chosen by Tehran to back a claim that Iran managed to fight twice as long as Arab states led by Egypt did in the Six Days War of 1967.

In fact, with varying degrees of intensity and a diversity of locations, this war started more than four decades ago when the new revolutionary authorities raided the Israeli diplomatic mission in Tehran and handed it over to PLO leader Yasser Arafat on a visit as special guest of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. A few months later, the new revolutionary regime repeated the exercise by raiding the US Embassy and seizing its diplomats as hostages.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Iran’s New Trap vs. Trump’s Once-in-a-Lifetime Chance to Transform the Middle East by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on July 13th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21736/trump-iran-transform-middle-east

President Donald J. Trump, through a bold and unapologetic foreign policy, has emerged in just a few short months, as the only leader in recent history capable of reshaping the region and challenging Iran’s theocratic dictatorship with real consequences. His actions have already produced historic results…

If Trump settles into believing that setting back Iran’s nuclear program by a few years is enough, the world will soon fall into the very trap that Tehran has set. The regime will rebuild, rearm, and reemerge stronger, angrier, and even nearer to having its bomb. The world will then once again face the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran—with perhaps no leader to stop it.

Now is not the time to offer the regime a lifeline in the form of negotiations or sanctions relief. The regime will doubtless try its old tricks—sending diplomats to Western capitals, promising temporary compliance, and begging for centrifuges for “peaceful energy” and a new “deal.” This is a trap

Any deal now will not benefit the United States. It will only help the Iranian regime recover, rebuild its economy, and ultimately return to its path of terror. The time has come to “finish the job.”

The Iranian regime must not be allowed to survive long enough to recover. The goal is not to delay the problem but to solve it.

It took decades — across multiple presidencies, wars, and failed negotiations — before the United States finally had a president who understood, with both clarity and conviction, how to confront the Iranian regime and transform the trajectory of the Middle East.

President Donald J. Trump, through a bold and unapologetic foreign policy, has emerged in just a few short months, as the only leader in recent history capable of reshaping the region and challenging Iran’s theocratic dictatorship with real consequences. His actions have already produced historic results — from crippling the regime’s nuclear infrastructure to fostering unprecedented peace deals.

ANTI-SEMITISM, BOOKS, HISTORY Comments turned off

How the Left Became Anti-Semitic Daryl McCann (This essay appeared in our November 2012 issue.)

Posted By on July 11th, 2025

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/from-our-archives/how-the-left-became-anti-semitic/

Robert Wistrich’s latest work, From Ambivalence to Betrayal, defines Zionism as a national liberation movement. Marx pre-dated Zionism but the analytical tools he bequeathed to his ideological successors predisposed them to sneer at the concept of Jewish national self-determination as a petty-bourgeois folly. Consequently, Kautsky, Luxemburg, Lenin and Trotsky all derided Zionism, and yet Wistrich accuses none of these icons of the Old Left of being overtly anti-Semitic: catastrophically wrongheaded, yes; but anti-Semitic, no. Wistrich has far less sympathy for the anti-Zionist Left of today. Its impenitent pro-Palestinian and pro-terrorist stance marks yet another chapter in the longest hatred of all: anti-Semitism.

Given that Karl Marx accepted in principle the right of Jews in a bourgeois society to demand civil liberties, he was not, in this sense at least, anti-Semitic. Still, these so-called bourgeois privileges were of minor consequence in the greater scheme of things. In a post-capitalist world, Judaism—an antiquated religion of the ego, according to Marx—would become redundant: “Under socialism or communism, there was no need for Jews as Jews to maintain their existence.” Marx’s class-based analysis, insists Wistrich, was a key reason for the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), and later the Russian Social Democratic Party (RSDP), to spurn Zionism.

Because Zionism emerged towards the end of the nineteenth century, the SPD had to make sense of a Jewish national movement without Marx, who had died in 1883. It was Karl Kautsky (1854–1934), the so-called Pope of Marxism, who “came closest to applying the Marxist method of historical materialism in a coherent fashion” to the Zionism project. Kautsky concluded that the Jews were “not a race, a nation, or even a people, but a ‘caste’ with certain quasi-national attributes” that would disappear with the arrival of socialism. This expectation that Jews would lose their “illusionary national characteristics” with the fall of capitalism was disproved by the Soviet Union. Even so, says Wistrich, the line taken by Kautsky runs all the way through to present-day neo-Trotskyist and New Left critiques of Zionism.

OPINION Comments turned off

The revenge of the woke Lionel Shriver on Trump’s stumbles, Mamdani’s rise and why the culture war rages on. VIDEO

Posted By on July 11th, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/podcast-episode/the-revenge-of-the-woke/

Lionel Shriver – novelist, journalist and author of Mania – returns to The Brendan O’Neill Show. Lionel and Brendan discuss the insanity of the Democrats, the fall of New York and why Starmer’s Britain is a tinderbox.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

What Hamas Says vs. What Hamas Means Seth Mandel Is the terror group really willing to end the war?

Posted By on July 11th, 2025

https://www.commentary.org/seth-mandel/what-hamas-says-vs-what-hamas-means/

Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Washington this week had a celebratory but unfinished air. The Israeli prime minister and President Trump were somehow chummier and more businesslike than in previous meetings.

There’s a good reason for that: While the two have been working on a plan for postwar Gaza, the cease-fire has to come first—and it’s proving somewhat elusive.

The delay isn’t on Trump’s end. The president plainly was hoping to announce a deal while Netanyahu was in town. And the delay isn’t on Bibi’s part, because the prime minister clearly wants to give Trump the win he’s looking for. After all, Netanyahu nominated the president for the Nobel Peace Prize, gifted him a mezuzah in the shape of an American B-2 bomber and made from an Iranian missile, and showed off a hat in the MAGA style that said “TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING!”

By process of elimination, then, the culprit is our old friend Hamas. Why the cold feet?

One likely reason is that, while Netanyahu has seemingly come to accept the need to end the war in the near future, Hamas has gone in the opposite direction.

Any cease-fire deal that ended the war entirely would likely only do so after a 60-day period, which means that what transpires during those two months is what the two sides (three, if you include the U.S.) are arguing about. Here, it is helpful to distinguish between what Hamas says and what it means.

Hamas says that it suspects Netanyahu will be looking for any excuse to resume fighting even if negotiations for extending the cease-fire are taking place.

What it means is that Hamas’s usual strategy of incrementally violating the cease-fire to test Israel’s restraint is riskier than usual for the terror group because their fighting force and their control over the strip are both at low tide.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Mark P. Mills Zohran Mamdani, AI, and the Job Apocalypse The disaffected laptop class fears the artificial intelligence revolution.

Posted By on July 11th, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/zohran-mamdani-artificial-intelligence-jobs

Does Zohran Mamdani, an unapologetic socialist, owe his political rise as New York City’s leading mayoral candidate to artificial intelligence?

We’re not referring to whether Mamdani, a TikTok and Instagram virtuoso, used AI to help propel himself to victory in the primaries (he may have). Instead, consider the anxieties that AI is fueling in the demographic that voted for him. Ever since ChatGPT ignited the modern AI era, we’ve seen a stream of headlines and studies predicting that AI will soon perform virtually all knowledge work. Mamdani captured his big majorities among the laptop class of middle- and upper-middle income citizens, not in working-class neighborhoods. Socialism’s central nostrum—that well-intentioned experts and ruling elites should tame the predations of market and technology disruptions—becomes more appealing during periods of social and economic upheaval.

There is no shortage of reasons for anxiety and unhappiness today, not least the intensity of political and cultural debates over “woke” ideas, “social justice,” the impact of social media, natural disasters blamed on human behavior (the climate-disaster thesis), and ongoing wars. Now, added to this already turbulent backdrop, comes the fear of an AI-driven jobs apocalypse. Few concerns, aside from health issues, cause more stress than the threat or fact of job loss. A May 2025 survey by the American Psychological Association found that three-fourths of employees feel stressed over job insecurity.

These worries are not unfounded. Recently, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said that the company would hire 30 percent to 50 percent fewer people because of AI, while Amazon CEO Andy Jassy aroused employee ire for observing that, with AI, “we expect the total number of employees to decrease over the coming years.” Ford CEO Jim Farley asserted that AI “is going to replace literally half of all white-collar workers in the U.S.” A Wall Street Journal headline echoed the point: “CEOs Start Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud: AI Will Wipe Out Jobs.”

ANTI-SEMITISM, HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Muslim Doctor Who Tried to Run Jewish Congressman Off the Road Indicted Will Islamic Jew-hate be discussed at the trial of Feras Hamdan? by Robert Spencer

Posted By on July 11th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/muslim-doctor-who-tried-to-run-jewish-congressman-off-the-road-indicted/

A Muslim physician threatened to kill a Jewish congressman from Ohio, and that’s only one small part of what he did. On Tuesday, that errant doctor was indicted, but the deep hatreds that led to his behavior remain, and we will see them play out again.

The victim, Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio), says that it was a “bizarre” incident, adding: “The whole thing was weird.” There is no doubt about that. How many times does a man who is professionally dedicated to healing and improving lives threaten to take one? All in all, however, Miller’s characterization is a trifle too cavalier. It was something far worse than bizarre and weird: it was an ominous sign of the times, and of the direction in which our society is heading unless things change, and change drastically, before it’s too late.

It happened on June 19. Miller recounted: “I’m on the freeway. I have somebody who has cut me off, who is flipping me off, who is showing me a Palestinian flag, and is yelling to kill me.” This was Rep. Miller’s introduction to Dr. Feras Hamdan, a physician in Avon, Ohio, who also screamed at him that old standby of ayatollahs and other hate-filled people everywhere: “Death to Israel.”

Cleveland Jewish News (CJN) reported Wednesday that it happened when Miller and Hamdan were both driving on Ohio’s Interstate 90 in Rocky River, and Hamdan started honking his horn at Miller. Miller paid no attention, but Hamdan persisted, pulling his car “window-to-window with me,” says Miller. Once their cars were side by side, the good doctor began “screaming” at the congressman.

MEDIA, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Who’s Hungry For The Truth About Food Stamps? (Hint: Not Journalists)

Posted By on July 11th, 2025

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/07/11/just-how-dumb-are-todays-journalists/

A headline in Axios over the weekend carried this scary warning: “An increasing share of American adults are going hungry.”

Look at what has happened since Trump has been in office. It’s back down to where it was nearly two years ago and appears to be moving sideways.

Axios is hardly the only news site to claim that the One Big Beautiful Bill “slashes” food stamps – which now goes under the euphemism Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program – and will cause millions to go hungry.

As The Guardian put it, “the cuts amount to the largest in the program’s history. They come at a time when food insecurity is already on the rise in all 50 states.”

The Guardian apparently got its talking points from the leftist Center for American Progress, which makes the same point. “Moreover, this legislation comes at a time when food insecurity is rising across all 50 states, reaching levels not seen since 2014.”

But look at the sources that the Center for American Progress (CAP) – a favorite “think tank” for many journalists – links to in its screed about the horrors of the OBBB.

The “shocking data point” comes, the story says, “at a time when the stock market is hitting record highs and President Donald Trump just signed a bill slashing food benefits.”

But take a look at the chart Axios published in that tear-jerking story, which is based on data from Morning Consult. Notice anything?

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Culture War Goes to Court Three recently decided SCOTUS cases were family-friendly. By Larry Sand

Posted By on July 11th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/07/11/the-culture-war-goes-to-court/

June 1 marked the 100th anniversary of Pierce v. Society of Sisters. This landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision struck down an Oregon law that prohibited parents from educating their children in private and religious schools and required public school attendance.

Justice James McReynolds wrote, “The child is not the mere creature of the state,” which summed up the majority opinion in the decision.

A century later, however, the battle continues. On June 27, SCOTUS ruled 6–3 that Maryland parents who have religious objections can pull their children from public school lessons using “LGBTQ+ inclusive” storybooks. The Mahmoud v. Taylor decision maintains that parents have a fundamental right to direct their children’s moral and religious upbringing and that parental rights don’t end at the classroom door.

Children aged 5-11 were required to read or listen to stories such as Prince & Knight, about two male knights who marry each other; Love Violet, about two young girls falling in love; and Born Ready: The True Story of a Boy Named Penelope, about a biological girl transitioning to a boy.

It’s important to note that the dissenting parents didn’t challenge the curriculum or demand that the district banish the controversial books. They simply wanted to be notified and have the opportunity to opt their children out of inappropriate and objectionable indoctrination provided at government-run schools. They did not advocate for schools to teach a specific religion or beliefs, but rather, they only asked that schools respect parents’ constitutional right to guide their children’s moral development.

Justices Jackson, Sotomayor, and Kagan dissented. In her opinion, Sotomayor incoherently argued that the majority was trying to allow parents to separate their children from experiences that are “critical to our nation’s civic vitality” and would sow “chaos” in public schools across the United States.

FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Warnings to President Trump on the Future of Gaza by Robert Johnson

Posted By on July 11th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21747/trump-gaza-future

The Trump administration is being sent early warnings of the priorities of its possible “partner,” Qatar, for the future of the Gaza Strip.

“His Excellency” Mohammed al-Rumaihi, Qatar’s former ambassador to the United States, and former Minister of Municipality and Environment, noted on July 5 that he is concerned about “keep[ing] the Palestinian cause alive – and its people,” and slammed Israel: “No major capital—neither Beijing, nor Moscow, nor Washington—has labelled the Gaza campaign as ‘systematic killing,’ let alone moved to punish Israel under Chapter VII of the UN Charter.”

You are not left to guess which side of the conflict he is on.

Meetings currently appear to be underway to create a possible “consortium” of Arab and Muslim nations to govern the Gaza Strip – basically leaving in place many of the same radical Islamic adherents of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, of which it is an offshoot, as before — most likely to make sure that Israel can be attacked again in the future as many times as necessary to ensure its extinction.

“Qatar is at the top of funding terrorism worldwide, even more than Iran.” — Udi Levy, former senior official of Israel’s Mossad spy agency, who dealt with economic warfare against terrorist organizations, Ynet, April14, 2024.

President Donald Trump — whose initial instincts are often perfect until “advisors” try to talk him out of them – originally suggested an American-built “Riviera” on the Gaza Strip. Combined with a military base, it would greatly serve the interests of the United States as well as Israel – similarly to how the US stations the forward HQ of Central Command and Air Forces Central Command at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, to protect the oil-rich peninsula. American forces at Al-Udeid, the largest US military base in the Middle East, effectively serve as Qatar’s private air-force. Qatar might even have snookered some US bureaucrats into thinking that they are doing the US a favor by allowing its troops to be there.

Trump’s original idea of a US “Riviera” in Gaza, stems from an “America First” point of view, may be the most constructive way to successfully deter further military engagement for the United States in the Middle East.

At the moment, however, it is crucial not to allow Qatar, Egypt or any Arab state to get anywhere near Gaza. “His Excellency” al-Rumaihi from Qatar is clearly telling you so.

The Trump administration is being sent early warnings of the priorities of its possible “partner,” Qatar, for the future of the Gaza Strip.

“His Excellency” Mohammed al-Rumaihi, Qatar’s former ambassador to the United States, and former Minister of Municipality and Environment, noted on July 5 that he is concerned about “keep[ing] the Palestinian cause alive – and its people,” and slammed Israel:

“No major capital—neither Beijing, nor Moscow, nor Washington—has labelled the Gaza campaign as ‘systematic killing,’ let alone moved to punish Israel under Chapter VII of the UN Charter.”

You are not left to guess which side of the conflict he is on.