RUTHFULLY YOURS

One week before the June 30 deadline for a nuclear deal with Iran, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei made a series of demands about the final terms. Among them: He called for an immediate end to all United Nations Security Council and U.S. economic sanctions on Iran; he said Iranian military sites would not be subject to international inspections; he declared that Iran would not abide a long-term freeze on nuclear research; and he ruled out interviews with individuals associated with Iran’s nuclear program as part of any enforcement plan.

The New York Times headline read “Iran’s Supreme Leader, Khamenei, Seems to Pull Back on Nuclear Talks.” That’s one explanation. The more likely one: Khamenei understands that Barack Obama is desperate for this deal and will agree to just about anything to make it a reality. In private remarks caught on tape, top White House foreign policy adviser Ben Rhodes likened the Iran deal to Obamacare in its importance to the administration. And on April 2, the president held a press conference to celebrate the preliminary “historic understanding with Iran” that, he said, was “a good deal, a deal that meets our core objectives.”

‘We welcome war with the U.S., as we believe that it will be the scene for our success to display the real potentials of our power.” So said Brigadier General Hossein Salami, the lieutenant commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), via state-run Iranian television last month.

What makes Salami so confident about going up against the world’s most extensive military? Maybe it’s the increasing clout of IRGC’s elite terrorist division, the Quds Force, in the Middle East, including its very public involvement in the fighting against ISIS in Iraq — as America’s influence lessens in that conflict.

Last January, ISIS revealed that it is smuggling terrorists into Europe by hiding them among the immigrants leaving Turkey.

“If Europe leaves us in the crisis, we will flood it with immigrants, and it will be even worse for Berlin if in that wave… there will be some jihadists of the Islamic State, too.” — Panos Kammenos, Defense Minister of Greece

Greece is a member of NATO. The whole world witnessed how the Defense Minister of one NATO country was threatening other NATO members with unleashing Islamic terrorists on them.

A Greek exit will lead to a power vacuum in the southeastern corner of Europe, which Russia (and China) will be only too eager to fill. The Chinese are currently negotiating with the Greek government to acquire an even larger part of the port of Piraeus.

CONTENTS
1. Jihadi against jihadi, as ISIS behead al-Qaeda
2. The BBC’s hypocrisy over terrorism
3. “Liking” the Tunisia attack on YouTube
4. The Guardian writes of a “massacre,” a “slaughter,” and of “terrorism”
5. Jihadi accused of French beheading, previously arrested for assaulting Jewish teen
6. French beheading suspect sent “selfie” with severed head, to Canadian contact
7. Vigil for beheading victim
8. Meanwhile activists in the West are targeting… Israel
9. “Love Among the Ruins” (By Bari Weiss, Wall Street Journal, June 27, 2015)
10. “After Tunisia, Kuwait and France we should not be afraid to call evil by its name” (By Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian, June 27, 2015)

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About the Authors: Myrna Katz Frommer and Harvey Frommer are a wife and husband team who successfully bridge the worlds of popular culture and traditional scholarship. Co-authors of the critically acclaimed interactive oral histories It Happened in the Catskills, It Happened in Brooklyn, Growing Up Jewish in America, It Happened on Broadway, and It Happened in Manhattan, they teach what they practice as professors at Dartmouth College.

Paul Chaim Eisenberg, Chief Rabbi of Vienna, is a small, rotund man, about 50 years old with a wispy, rather untended short beard — gray but shaded with streaks of reddish blonde, and china blue eyes that are a perfect match to the open collared shirt he wears. His overall demeanor is lively, even jolly, punctuated with a handy repertoire of Jewish-related jokes of the kind that would stand a Catskill comic in good stead. (Example: A couple are on a cruise. The steward says, “Mr. & Mrs. Rubinstein, the captain wants to invite you to eat at his table tonight.” The wife turns to her husband and says, “Ach, I knew they were anti Semites. Because we’re Jewish, we have to eat with the crew.”)

Laughter comes easily to this rabbi. His eyes, however, are sad. Perhaps that is because the subtext of our conversation is as dark as the deserted street outside his office this rainy November night. Vienna’s Jewish Center is close by Kartnerstrasse, the city’s major pedestrian thoroughfare. But we walked up and down the streets in the cold drizzle unable to find it until two uniformed police officers actually escorted us to the front door of a narrow, inconspicuous building in a row of others of identical size and style.

TEHRAN, Jun. 25 (MNA) – Iranian Guardian Council approved the bill passed in Majlis to require protection of Iran’s nuclear achievements.According to Mehr correspondents, the Majlis bill to obligate the Islamic Republic Administration to safeguarded nuclear achievements was approved by Guardian Council on Thursday. Iran’s Guardian Council discussed the bill thoroughly and found it in compliance with the Iranian Constitution and Islamic laws.

Gaining the yes vote of the Iranian lawmakers a day earlier, the bill requires the diplomatic leg of the Executive branch to observe some concerns of the MPs including the immediate removal of imposed sanctions on Tehran over its nuclear program upon the enforcement of the Iran-Sextet deal in prospect.

In the second article of the bill, the MPs dismiss giving any extra-conventional permission to IAEA to inspect Iran’s highly sensitive military and security sites.

The grand project of European Union bureaucrats — bringing the united continent under ever tighter centralized control exercised from the EU capital of Brussels — is the real sick man of Europe.

Greece has closed its banks for at least a week, banned the cashing of checks, halted almost all payments outside the country, and limited the amount of money that an individual can withdraw from an ATM to $66 per day.

All of this came after the European Central Bank ended more emergency loans needed to keep the Greek banking system afloat. That move was in retaliation for the decision by the far-left Greek government to reject new bank-bailout terms from its creditors and instead call a referendum on July 5. On that day, the Greek people will be asked to make a choice: either “surrender” and give in to cuts in pensions and higher taxes or refuse and perhaps be forced to exit the euro and go back to a depreciated drachma as their national currency.

Can you imagine George W. Bush having an agenda item, like securing the border, and then saying, “I will veto all bills that come across my desk until the border fence is fully funded”, and then carrying through on his promise? Can you imagine Mitt Romney doing that, or John McCain, or Jeb Bush?

If you can’t, meet Maine Governor Paul Le Page. He has all the worst qualities that the media finds in a Republican–combative, ideological, pugnacious. Why the very first sentence of the New York Times article introduces him as “Paul R. LePage, Maine’s combative governor”!

The problems began with Mr. LePage’s desire to eliminate the income tax by increasing and broadening the sales tax.

Moscow doesn’t always need tanks and troops when trying to dominate its neighbors.

Russia’s assault on Ukraine over the past year has made it clear that President Vladimir Putin is out to reassemble as much of the former Soviet Union as he can, having once called its collapse “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” It should be of great concern in the West that Bulgaria, a member of NATO and the European Union, is one of his targets.

In a September address in Sofia to members of the America for Bulgaria Foundation, Bulgarian President Rosen Plevneliev compared Moscow’s stealthy undermining aggression toward Bulgaria to a “Trojan horse” attempt by Russia to penetrate NATO. Our foundation, perhaps Eastern Europe’s biggest, seeks to help Bulgarians preserve their hard-won independence.

ISIS and other jihadis show their global reach on a single day.

Jihadists have a fondness for anniversaries, so maybe we shouldn’t be surprised by three terror attacks, on three continents, all taking place on the eve of the Islamic State’s declaration of a caliphate last June 29. That makes the prospect of follow-on strikes through Monday that much more plausible—and more difficult to stop.

ISIS took credit for only one of the three atrocities—a suicide bombing at a Shiite mosque in Kuwait, in which at least 27 people were killed. But their near-simultaneity suggested some kind of coordination, or at least joint inspiration. Ramadan began last week, and an ISIS spokesman recently called on “mujahadeen everywhere” to make it “a month of disasters for the infidels.”