RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21684/iran-weakness

These empty threats [to Hamas in January and Iran in March], more than anything, seem to have reinforced Iran’s belief that it could stall, maneuver, and harden its position while the U.S. scrambled, desperate for a leverage it appeared to have dropped.

The U.S. appeared afraid of escalation. The U.S. seemed to want a deal more than Iran did.

Iran’s negotiators dragged their feet, demanded more concessions, and eventually made it unmistakably clear that they would not halt uranium enrichment. Khamenei, in a rare address, explicitly stated that uranium enrichment was Iran’s “sovereign right” and “not subject to foreign dictates.”

Instead of walking away, Trump did something that most likely stunned even Iran’s most skeptical officials — he reached out to Russia. He asked Russian President Vladimir Putin, Iran’s closest global ally, to help mediate a deal. After drawing red lines and watching them crumble, after declaring enrichment a non-negotiable issue, the U.S. turned to Russia — the same Russia that Iran is arming in the Ukraine conflict — for help. For Iran, this was not just weakness. It was a full display of incompetence.

In Tehran’s calculus, this moment confirmed everything it had suspected: that the U.S. was willing to crawl, plead and negotiate on its knees to get Iran to… sign a piece of paper! They saw Trump’s pivot to Putin as a validation of their strategy — stall, resist, and wait for Washington to blink.

Meanwhile, Israel had been sounding the alarm for years. Its intelligence services repeatedly uncovered secret Iranian sites, hidden stockpiles and covert operations…. Time had run out.

The Islamic Republic of Iran was no longer hiding its ambitions or disguising its defiance. It was openly confronting the United States, discarding every red line and ultimatum Washington drew in the sand.

At the center of the regime’s defiance lay one uncompromising reality: Iran would not stop enriching uranium. U.S. President Donald J. Trump made it clear: if Iran wanted a deal, enrichment had to stop. Period. Iran repeatedly came back with “no.” Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and his top nuclear negotiators declared again and again that enrichment was off the table. In fact, they escalated it. Iran’s leaders mistook Trump’s preference not to use crushing military force for a lack of resolve to stop them.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/06/13/iran-is-everything-they-accuse-israel-of-being/

For decades, an aggressive, quasi-imperial state has been at the centre of conflict in the Middle East. It has consistently antagonised its neighbours and in some cases threatened their very existence. And through its shadowy military operatives, it has sought to impose its will on allies and enemies alike.

That state is the Islamic Republic of Iran. It is everything the West’s bourgeois leftists imagine Israel to be. It has a genuinely ‘rogue’ and far-right government. A regime that, through its infamous Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and heavily armed regional proxies, has sought to project its power and influence throughout the Middle East. Unlike Israel, it even has a genuinely genocidal objective – namely, the eradication of the Jewish State, or the ‘Zionist entity’ to use its leaders’ own patois. As its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, put it in 2020, Israel is a ‘cancerous tumour’ that ‘will undoubtedly be uprooted and destroyed’.

That is why the prospect of the Islamic Republic developing nuclear weapons has always terrified Israel’s leaders. Because for a regime ideologically committed to the destruction of Israel, nuclear weapons are much more than a deterrent – they are a means to a Jew-annihilating end.

And that is why, early on Friday morning, the Israel Defence Forces carried out lethal aerial attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities, scientists central to Iran’s atomic plans and several senior generals. Because Israel’s leadership was rightly concerned that Iran would soon be in possession of its own nuclear warheads.

Indeed, on Thursday, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which monitors signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, ruled that Iran had violated its treaty obligations. It claims Iran has amassed 400 kilos of highly enriched uranium, which is ideal for military use. Within hours of the IAEA’s announcement, Israel had started an operation designed, in the words of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to roll back ‘the Iranian threat to Israel’s very survival’.

It really didn’t have to be this way. Indeed, it is only in recent decades that Iran has posed, as Netanyahu puts it, ‘a threat to Israel’s survival’. Indeed, after Israel’s founding in 1948, Iran under the Shah actually had a cordial relationship with the fledgling Jewish State. Iran was seen by Israel as a regional mediator, at points even an ally. And vice versa – the Iranian novelist and anti-Western critic, Jalal Al-e Ahmad, visited Israel in 1963 and subsequently praised the collectivist spirit of Zionism.

So, while anti-Semitic violence ravaged Arab nations like Egypt, Iraq, Libya and Syria during the 1950s and 1960s, there were no pogroms or purges in Iran. While an estimated 60,000 Iranian Jews did leave for Israel during its first three decades of existence, by 1978, there was still a thriving 85,000-strong Jewish community within Iran. It constituted perhaps the largest Jewish population in the Middle East outside Israel.

But that all changed in 1979, with the Iranian Revolution and the eventual ascendency of the Ayotallah Khomeini and his Islamist clique. With the foundation of the Islamic Republic, Iran’s relationship towards Israel became markedly hostile almost overnight. Its Islamist leaders, burning with anti-Semitic zeal, effectively turned the destruction of Israel into a raison d’être, and made life within Iran near enough intolerable for its Jewish population. Just 9,000 Jews live there today.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/death-to-irans-regime/

Last month, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei told an enraged crowd of Islamists that President Trump’s statements weren’t even “worthy of a response.”

As the crowd chanted “Death to America”, Iran’s leader called Trump a liar, and warned that, “America should leave the region, and leave it will.” Then he called for the destruction of the Jewish State while the crowd chanted, “Death to Israel.”

The only question was whether America and Israel would take the regime’s threats seriously.

That question was answered when Israel, after two decades of trying to get the mostly fictitious “international community” to do something about Iran’s nuclear program, finally took action.

The endless negotiations in pursuit of an impossible deal that would somehow allow Iran to have nuclear technology without nuclear weapons were based on refusing to listen to what the Islamist terror regime said, as recently as weeks ago, and refusing to believe that it meant it.

To believe in a nuclear deal, you also had to believe that a terror state that gets its electricity from its abundant natural gas resources for a fraction of the cost of our electricity wanted a civilian nuclear program. To believe in any kind of deal with Iran, you had to believe, as the New York Times insisted to sell Obama’s nuke deal, that Iran “has a complicated relationship with the phrase” and that when it says, “Death to America” and “Death to Israel”, it doesn’t really mean it.

“The situation between America and Iran is this: When you chant ‘Death to America!’ it is not just a slogan – it is a policy,” Ayatollah Khamenei explained in 2023.

What did that policy look like in practice?

https://www.foxnews.com/video/6374232360112

https://nypost.com/2025/06/13/world-news/israel-strikes-iran-live-updates-analysis-photos-more/

constant updates with photos.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/06/13/iran-brendan/

The world has awoken to news of a decapitation. Early this morning, Israel time, the air force of the Jewish State struck with astonishing precision against the tyrants and infrastructure of the Iranian regime. The top dogs of the Islamic republic have been taken out. Its nuclear facilities have been reduced to ashen wreckage. None of us can afford the luxury of political aloofness in this moment, far less that moral cowardice that masquerades as pacifism. Too much is at stake. Events compel us to stir from our insouciance and take a side for once.

From what we know, this would appear to be one of the most laser-focussed strikes against a hostile regime in the history of warfare. Those images of apartment blocks entirely intact aside from the floor where one of Iran’s despots lived are a testament to the exactness of Israel’s daring raid. The list of the dead is astounding. They include General Mohammad Bagheri, the chief of military staff, and Hossein Salami, leader of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards. Imagine the glee of the families of the 500 youths who were butchered by Salami’s guards in 2022 for the crime of believing that women deserve ‘life and freedom’.

Just like that, the regime’s two chief military autocrats are gone. The man responsible for Iran’s murderous, imperial foreign ventures (Bagheri) and the man charged with maintaining the unforgiving diktats of the republic against its own freedom-dreaming citizens (Salami) are no more. Just this week, Salami said: ‘Our next confrontation with the Israelis will be far more crushing, devastating and destructive.’ Yes, for you.

Other military leaders were assassinated, too. So were nuclear scientists, including Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani, the former head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation. Israel says these regime boffins were developing a ‘nuclear programme’ for ‘military objectives’. They’ve been ruthlessly pursuing the ‘weaponisation’ of uranium, it says. Indeed, the prime justification for Operation Rising Lion, as the mission has been christened, was to ‘eliminate the Iranian nuclear threat’.

Naturally, given this is a military venture by the state that luvvies and activists love to hate, Israel’s operation already finds itself shrouded in misinformation and shrill censure. Israel is a ‘rogue’ nation launching an ‘unprovoked’ assault on poor Iran, cry the morally lost leftists of the West. They echo the Iranian regime itself, which tweeted: ‘Remember we didn’t initiate it.’ Excuse my language, but yes you fucking did. You initiated this when you sponsored the largest mass murder of Jews since the Nazis and the largest exiling of Jews since the Arab wars of the 1940s.

As Israel embarked on its bold mission, Iran was on the doorstep of achieving a nuclear weapon. The Wall Street Journal warned that Iran is moving in defiance of the IAEA:

The IAEA board of governors passed a resolution finding Iran in noncompliance with its Safeguards Agreement, a crucial part of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) that has done much to stop the spread and use of nuclear weapons. Treaties are no substitute for American deterrent power, but the NPT has been among the more successful.

In reply Iran announced a major expansion of its nuclear-breakout capability—revealing more NPT violations—which would make it harder to detect or stop an Iranian move to enrich uranium to weapons-grade. Tehran is calling the world’s bluff on whether it takes non-proliferation seriously.

The IAEA finds that Iran has been hiding nuclear material. Accordingly, “the Agency is not able to verify that there has been no diversion of nuclear material required to be safeguarded under the Agreement to nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices,” it writes.

Iran covered up its nuclear weapons sites amidst negotiations with the U.S.:

Then there are Iran’s attempts to cover all of this up. Consider its Marivan site. The IAEA assesses that Iran conducted four tests there in 2003 of “full-scale hemispherical implosion systems” for nuclear weapons. It was also preparing for a cold test that would have contained nuclear material and planned to make neutron initiators there. When the IAEA asked to inspect Marivan in 2019, Iran promptly razed the site’s support area. It didn’t allow inspectors to visit the control bunker, which it also subsequently demolished.

The IAEA concludes that Marivan and at least two other sites were “part of an undeclared structured nuclear programme,” and that Iran kept nuclear material or equipment from this program at another location, Turquzabad, from 2009 to 2018, with current whereabouts unknown.

https://www.theeditors.com/p/five-early-lessons-from-israels-strikes-against-iran?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=2110503&post_i

Last night’s attack by Israel on Iran is just the beginning of what the Israeli ambassador in Washington, Yechiel Leiter, said is a “long haul” that “will be measured in days, not in hours.”

Yet it is not too soon to draw some preliminary conclusions.

First, the show of strength positions Israel as the regional superpower. Thomas Friedman wrote in the New York Times June 10, 2025 of Israel in a situation where “the Jewish state is a pariah state — a source of shame, not of pride.” This operation puts Israel in the opposite position. The same way that the Hezbollah pager operation won Israel respect, the technical military feat of carrying out a long-range strike with surprise against high-value targets with minimal Israeli casualties will also translate into admiration.

This was visible even in President Trump’s comments, where he associated U.S technology with Israel’s breathtaking achievements: “the United States makes the best and most lethal military equipment anywhere in the World, BY FAR, and that Israel has a lot of it, with much more to come – And they know how to use it.”

As former Pentagon analyst Harold Rhode put it, “Now, in Muslim world, they are in total shock and awe at the power and will/determination of the Jewish State. What Israel is accomplishing in this war totally negates the Muslim narrative that the Jewish people (and the Christians) are at best ‘2nd class citizens’ and abandoned by G-d.”

Rhode went on, “In the Middle East and the Muslim world in general, two things are respected: the ability and the will to win. And that is exactly what Israel is demonstrating.”

Israeli author and analyst Hen Mazzig reports that Saudi Arabia, Azerbaijan, Qatar, Jordan, Turkey, and the UAE all “participated in intercepting Iranian missiles and drones attack against Israel.” Some of that reflects Sunni Muslims siding against Shiite Muslim Iran, but some of it reflects realpolitik respect for Israeli military, economic, and scientific power, which its neighbors want to benefit from. Medium- to long-term, as David Wurmser has explained in some of his pieces for us here, a diminished Iran may allow the rise of Turkey and Qatar as a kind of Sunni Muslim Brotherhood threat, so a defeated Iran would not mean a total regional “all clear” for Israel or American interests, but that is for another day.

Second, the Iranian people, with Israeli help, will have to decide if this is a moment for regime change. Prime Minister Netanyahu and his government have oscillated between calling for a “free Iran” and emphasizing the need to keep the current regime from obtaining nuclear weapons. Netanyahu has been doing some of both, and it may ultimately be up to Iran and Iranians which direction this goes. Last night, Netanyahu spoke to the Iranian people, saying, “The day of your liberation is near….we roll back a murderous tyranny.” By far the best outcome is a regime change in Iran rather than a setback to the nuclear program and ballistic missile program that stops short of a regime change. Israelis understand that from the example of Gaza, where, between 2007 and 2023, Israel repeatedly went in and “mowed the lawn” with strikes against Hamas. Each time, Hamas rebuilt until, with Iranian backing, it ultimately launched the October 7, 2023, attack.

https://www.thefp.com/p/the-ultimate-deception-how-trump?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

They died in their own beds. Hossein Salami and Ali Shamkhani—Iran’s most senior military officers and the stewards of Iran’s nuclear weapons program—had spent years threatening Israel with destruction. They issued taunts, organized terrorist attacks, and orchestrated, since October 7, the encirclement of the Jewish state in a ring of fire of their terror proxies. And they knew—without the slightest illusion—that Israel had the capability and resolve to kill them.

This cohort saw the Israeli air force bury Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah in his bunker, hundreds of meters beneath the streets of Beirut. They saw Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh vaporized in a presidential guesthouse—in Tehran, no less. Yet on Thursday night, they came home as usual and went to sleep—unguarded, unworried, carefree. Like insurance salesmen and bank tellers following their daily routines, it never occurred to them that they might not wake in the morning.

But they didn’t.

In 1967, Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser made a similar mistake. He moved forces to Israel’s border, declared war in all but name, and left his MiG fighter jets parked in neat rows. Israeli prime minister Levi Eshkol hesitated publicly—then struck with speed, ferocity, and total surprise. By the time Nasser understood what had happened, his air force was already in ruins.

History just repeated itself. But why did these seasoned Iranian officers—veteran warriors, intelligence chiefs, regime survivors—lower their guard so completely? How did Israel achieve strategic surprise?

The simple answer: Benjamin Netanyahu read Donald Trump better than the Iranians.

Beginning around April 12, Trump gave Iran a 60-day deadline, which ended near June 11. The Israeli strike that killed Shamkhani came on June 13—just after the deadline expired. In that interval, Trump repeatedly warned Iran to dismantle its nuclear weapons infrastructure or face violent consequences. In an early May interview with radio host Hugh Hewitt, the American president offered Iran’s leaders two stark options for dealing with their nuclear facilities: “blow them up nicely”—meaning under international supervision—or “blow them up viciously.”