RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://freebeacon.com/columns/trump-calls-the-ayatollahs-bluff/

The successful operation against Qassem Soleimani, head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, is a stunning blow to international terrorism and a reassertion of American might. It will also test President Trump’s Iran strategy. It is now Trump, not Ayatollah Khamenei, who has ascended a rung on the ladder of escalation by killing the military architect of Iran’s Shiite empire. For years, Iran has set the rules. It was Iran that picked the time and place of confrontation. No more.

Reciprocity has been the key to understanding Donald Trump. Whether you are a media figure or a mullah, a prime minister or a pope, he will be good to you if you are good to him. Say something mean, though, or work against his interests, and he will respond in force. It won’t be pretty. It won’t be polite. There will be fallout. But you may think twice before crossing him again.

That has been the case with Iran. President Trump has conditioned his policies on Iranian behavior. When Iran spread its malign influence, Trump acted to check it. When Iran struck, Trump hit back: never disproportionately, never definitively. He left open the possibility of negotiations. He doesn’t want to have the Greater Middle East—whether Libya, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, or Afghanistan—dominate his presidency the way it dominated those of Barack Obama and George W. Bush. America no longer needs Middle Eastern oil. Best keep the region on the back burner. Watch it so it doesn’t boil over. Do not overcommit resources to this underdeveloped, war-torn, sectarian land.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/leader-of-iranian-revolutionary-guard-s-foreign-wing-killed-11578015855

President Trump ordered a U.S. airstrike that killed Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, leader of the foreign wing of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, in an attack that is expected to stoke heightened tensions between Washington and Tehran and inflame frictions in the volatile Middle East.

Top Iraqi paramilitary commander Abu Mahdi al-Mohandes was killed alongside Gen. Soleimani when the convoy they were traveling in together was struck on a road leading to Baghdad International Airport.

Gen. Soleimani was actively developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region, the U.S. Department of Defense said Thursday night.

Iran’s state television said the strike that killed Gen. Soleimani came from U.S. helicopters. The country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, declared three days of mourning for his death and warned that a “hard revenge awaits criminals.”  CONTINUE AT SITE

www.jewishpolicycenter.org

There were apparently two groups of invaders at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad — hordes of rioting protesters in the streets and well-covered, professional-looking, careful militia members entering the out building. Security forces (and some contractors) used tear gas and stun guns against the demonstrators as the United States protected its embassy compound — sovereign American territory by international convention.

A bit of U.S.-Iranian history is instructive here. When the Iranians overran the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979, President Jimmy Carter dubbed the Ayatollah Khomeini “a holy man” with whom, presumably, one could do business. President Barak Obama was certain, in 2015, that “the only alternative to the JCPOA is war with Iran,” presumably meaning that the so-called “Iran nuclear deal” was the way to avoid war and restore Iran to the family of nations.

The result of Carter’s assistance to the ayatollah, and Obama’s lapse in memory — the Iranians had actually been in a declared state of war with the United States (and Israel) since 1979 — was to allow the juggernaut of Shiite expansionist theology to ruin Iran, invade Iraq, incubate ISIS, occupy Syria, bring its proxy to power and ruin Lebanon, run the Houthi war in Yemen, undermine Bahrain, attack Saudi Arabia, and spread its tentacles across Africa. And this transpired all while Iran violated the U.N. ban on Iranian arms imports and exports, the U.N. ban on the development of Iranian ballistic missiles, and the P5+1-ratified-by-the-U.N. ban on the development of nuclear weapons technology.

https://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/French-Philosopher-Left-wing-Islamism-and-antisemitism-have-a-future-612682

“In France, it [antisemitism] is part of the extreme Left and a growing part of the population with a migration background,” he told the German magazine Der Spiegel on Saturday. “It is particularly worrying that the extreme left defends radical, antisemitic Islam for two reasons: ideologically, because for them, the Muslims are the new Jews, the disenfranchised; but also for tactical reasons, because today there are many more Muslims than Jews in France. So, left Islamism also has a future, and I’m afraid of that.”

In February, a Yellow Vests protester hurled antisemitic insults at Finkielkraut, calling him a “dirty Zionist shit” who should “go back to Tel Aviv.”

“Antisemitism is not a thing of the past, it even has a future,” Finkielkraut said. “I was actually the object of aggression with a proven antisemitic character. But I was not called ‘dirty Jew’ but ‘dirty  Zionist shit.’ The peculiarity of contemporary antisemitism is that it uses the language of anti-racism. Because of the existence of Israel, the Jews are now considered racists. ‘Filthy Jew’ – that was a morally disgraceful term. ‘Dirty racist’ – that is highly moral today.”

According to Der Spiegel, in Finkielkraut’s new autobiography, In First Person, he writes about how he and the leftist, gay philosopher Michel Foucault opposed the loathing of Israel during the 1970s.

“Michel Foucault was very attached to Israel,” Finkielkraut said. “That is forgotten today. He found the United Nations resolution which put racism and Zionism on the same level as intolerable. That was one of the reasons for the break between him and Gilles Deleuze, the other great philosopher of the era. The left-wing intellectuals around Deleuze were just beginning to demonize the State of Israel beyond legitimate criticism of Israeli politics. It occurred to me as much as to Foucault.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15368/iran-shia-militias-iraq

The President’s robust response to the recent upsurge in Iranian-sponsored violence in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East certainly appears at odds with the perception that he has no interest in conducting military operations in the Middle East, and that his main objective is to reduce Washington’s military presence in the region ahead of this year’s presidential election contest.

And it should also send a clear signal to Tehran that its reliance on Shia militias to carry out attacks on its behalf will no longer be tolerated.

The intense pressure Iran is facing over its continued meddling in Iraq is the key factor behind the recent upsurge of violence in the Middle East that has resulted in American warplanes carrying out their biggest attack in a decade on Iran-backed militias.

Ever since the ayatollahs came to power more than 40 years ago, they have sought to distract attention away from their domestic unpopularity by getting Iran-backed Shia militias to carry out high profile attacks.

From the devastating car bomb attacks the Iranian-backed Hizbollah militia carried out against American bases in Beirut in the 1980s to the more recent attacks on Saudi Arabia’s Aramco oil facilities in October 2019, the Iranian regime has repeatedly used its proxy Shia militias to great effect to distract attention away from its domestic travails.

The beauty of this arrangement, so far as the ayatollahs are concerned, is that, by relying on Shia militias to do their dirty work, whether it is firing missiles at Israel or carrying out assassinations in Europe, Tehran is able to deny any involvement in wrongdoing.

No longer. By launching a series of air strikes against Iranian-backed militias in Iraq and Syria on Sunday night, the Trump administration has made it abundantly clear that it will no longer tolerate Tehran’s denials of its involvement in attacks against the US and its allies.

Moreover, after Washington accused Iran of being responsible for the subsequent attacks against the US Embassy in Baghdad that followed the air strikes, Tehran is risking a direct military confrontation with the US if it persists with the underhand tactic of employing proxies to carry out attacks on its behalf.