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Iran’s school curriculum exposes diplomatic option failure Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinge

https://bit.ly/3eeK0Kp

*”Iran is fighting a global war and calls on oppressed Muslims and non-Muslims to unite under Islam and the Islamic Republic of Iran to overthrow the evil regimes [the “infidel” West led by the US and the “heretic” Sunni regimes]. The Islamic Revolution knows no borders [hence, the right of Iran to interfere in many conflicts in the Middle East and beyond]; it applies to the whole world (Literature and Humanities, Grade 12, 2021‒2022, page 110).

School curriculum reflects ideology

The school curriculum of Iran’s Ayatollahs is consistent with their constitution, domestic repression of ethnic and religious minorities, the subjugation of women, and the proliferation of anti-US terrorism in the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. It provides a roadmap for an apocalyptic commitment to a global, anti-US Islamic revolution.

While US and Western policy makers rely heavily on statements and commitments made by Iran’s Ayatollahs in the negotiation rooms and in the public arena, the Ayatollahs’ school curriculum reflects most authentically their fanatic, religious and megalomaniacal anti-US strategy, tactics and vision: toppling the Sunni “apostate and heretic” regimes and bringing the Western “infidel” (especially “The Great American Satan”) to submission.

Moreover, Iran’s Ayatollahs have mastered the art of the Quran-sanctioned Taqiyya: dissimulation, doubletalk and deception-based statements and agreements, aimed at shielding the “believers” from the “infidels,” to be abrogated once conditions are ripe.

Furthermore, the school curriculum of the Ayatollahs has become an effective production-line for terrorists and suicide bombers.

Man Falsely Credited With Ending the Cold War Dies Robert Spencer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/09/man-falsely-credited-ending-cold-war-dies-robert-spencer/

Reuters was up front about it, headlining their obituary this way: “Last Soviet leader Gorbachev, who ended Cold War and won Nobel prize, dies aged 91.” CNN lamented that “Mikhail Gorbachev’s tragedy is that he outlived the thaw in the Cold War between Moscow and the US, after doing more than anyone to engineer it.” The same alleged news network headlined another story on their fallen hero: “Mikhail Gorbachev, former Soviet president who took down the Iron Curtain, dies.” The BBC was just a trifle more circumspect, going with the headline: “Mikhail Gorbachev: The Soviet leader who helped end the Cold War.” Gorbachev did indeed help end the Cold War, but chiefly by doing something that Reuters, CNN and the Beeb don’t deign to mention: Gorbachev helped end the Cold War by losing it.

The Leftist intelligentsia that runs the propaganda organs known as CNN, the BBC and Reuters, along with the rest of the establishment media, will never admit it, but the man who actually ended the Cold War was Ronald Reagan. As Rating America’s Presidents explains, Reagan became president in the era of détente, when it was generally agreed that the best way to deal with the Soviet Union and global Communism in general was to play down differences, turn a blind eye to the human rights abuses endemic to socialist states, seek accords that would ease tensions, prevent the use of nuclear weapons, and allow the two sides to continue in much the same way indefinitely. The détente era reached its apex on June 18, 1979, when Jimmy Carter and Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev signed the SALT II Treaty, and then, as the world watched agog, Carter embraced and kissed the Communist despot.

President Reagan set a different tone. He was a public critic of détente as disadvantageous to American interests. On June 8, 1982, in a speech before the British House of Commons, he contradicted the conventional wisdom that the Soviet Union was here to stay and boldly predicted its demise. Reagan said, “The march of freedom and democracy…will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history, as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people.”

Hamas in Turkey: Money Laundering, Turkish Passports, Government Collusion and Terror Bank Accounts by Uzay Bulut

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18844/hamas-turkey-money-laundering

Beside Erdoğan’s regular antisemitic outbursts, other alarming issues — such as Hamas’ secret investment portfolio in Turkey and Turkey’s granting passports to Hamas terrorists — need to be addressed by Turkish government authorities.
See the US Treasury’s list of specially designated nationals whose businesses operate in Turkey and elsewhere.
“It seems that Hamas has chosen to manage its secret investment portfolio in Turkey because of the weak financial system in Turkey, which enables Hamas to hide its money laundering activity and tax violations from the regulatory bodies. Trend Gyo, controlled by Hamas, has five subsidiaries in Turkey. Senior officials in the investment portfolio hold dual, high-ranking positions in all five companies.” — Double Cheque, February 2, 2018.
As Turkey-Israel relations appear to be entering a so-called “new phase”, the government of Turkey needs to publicly explain the following: When Hamas began operating in Turkey, what its political, financial, military, and diplomatic activities have been there, how many Hamas terrorists have lived in Turkey, and why Turkey has enabled them. Why did Turkey give them Turkish citizenship? And if they really deported a few of them, what has changed? Does Turkey see Hamas as a terrorist organization now? How many Hamas terrorists remain in Turkey as of today? And why?
[A] senior Turkish official and other sources told Middle East Eye that Turkey had not expelled any Hamas members and was not planning to expel the Muslim Brotherhood presence in the country, either. As Hamas is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, it is probably not a reach to assume that Turkey has no plans to ask Hamas to leave any time soon.
Until the Turkish government officials honestly and transparently answer these questions and take concrete steps to end Hamas’ presence in Turkey, its “rapprochement” with Israel should be understood only as an unauthentic attempt to benefit Erdoğan’s regime and harm Israel.

“Tayyip [Erdoğan] is a Jew who pretends to be a Muslim,” wrote Yüksel Üstün, on his Facebook account in 2020. In November 2021, a criminal court sentenced Üstün with a fine of 7,000 Turkish liras ($385) for “insulting the president.” In the complaint, filed by Hüseyin Aydın, an attorney for President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the expression “Jew” (when applied to Erdoğan) was deemed “humiliating, damaging to honor and dignity.”

The Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office of the city in which Üstün resides filed the lawsuit against Üstün after the Ministry of Justice gave permission to prosecute him. The indictment argued that the suspect committed the alleged crime in his post by “offending the honor, dignity and respectability of the president”. The court initially sentenced the defendant to 10 months and 20 days in prison. The judge later commuted the sentence to a judicial fine. The defendant nearly went to prison for calling Erdoğan “a Jew.”

China Is Torturing Critics in Psychiatric Hospitals by Gordon G. Chang

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18843/china-torture-psychiatric-hospitals

In the ankang—”peace and health”—system, detainees are strapped onto beds, pumped full of drugs, receive electric-shock therapy, and left to lie in their own excrement.

Researchers Chi Yin and Jerome Cohen, writing on the Diplomat site, report that some Chinese are confined for their lifetimes.

The system also appears to be grounded in the Chinese Communist Party’s optimistic totalitarian notion that medical treatment can make people obedient.

Chinese medical personnel administered drugs that damaged the central nervous system of adherents of that faith, intentionally overdosed them, applied extreme-strength electroacupuncture, and brutally force-fed them.

The abuse of psychiatry has continued for seven decades in the People’s Republic of China. The Chinese Communist Party has changed the organizational structures and the methods of how it destroys people in psychiatric institutions, but the destruction of life continues.

Safeguard Defenders—and the international community—must finally acknowledge that the Party is inherently murderous. The only way to end the abuse of psychiatry in China as well as the Party’s other horrific crimes is to end its rule of China.

China’s regime is torturing and killing critics, petitioners, activists, dissidents, and religious adherents in psychiatric hospitals, thereby bypassing its horribly misdescribed criminal justice system. The “barbaric practice,” as a Madrid-based NGO termed it this month, is still widespread.

R.I.P. Gorby, the Man Who Watched Others Tear Down the Iron Curtain By Michael Brendan Dougherty

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/r-i-p-gorby-the-man-who-watched-others-tear-down-the-iron-curtain/

Mikhail Gorbachev was born in 1931 and was old enough to remember the suffering of his family during World War II and the great Stalinist purges, in which one of his grandfathers was tortured and another executed. Many obituarists will focus on his tentative reforms of the Soviet Union, and rightly so. He allowed more political freedom in elections, though less than any of us would recognize as legitimate. He reestablished relations with the Vatican, eased up on official state atheism, and conducted successful arms treaties with the United States. He broke the taboos on talking openly about Russian history and the quality of life in the Soviet Union.

But all this was not enough to save Russia from the collapse.

In this space, it is important to state clearly that Gorbachev’s dull optimism and his dull passivity was turned into the end of the Soviet Union by more nimble statesmen like Hungary’s prime minister Miklós Németh, and German chancellor Helmut Kohl, with big assists from forward-seeing activists like Poland’s Lech Walesa and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. Németh first and Kohl later would present one fait accompli after another to the cautiously optimistic Americans (Bush and Secretary of State James Baker) and the dithering and overwhelmed Gorbachev. The statesmen and political movements of Central and Eastern Europe wanted to get into Western political structures like NATO and the European Community faster than the White House or Brussels wanted to accept them. Some obituarists will claim that Gorbachev tore down the Iron Curtain. No. The end of the Soviet Union and reunification of Germany as a full NATO member was a stampede through a door that Gorbachev was unwilling to bolt shut again. But his optimism and passivity in the face of fast-moving events prevented these days from becoming the bloodbath that history would lead us to expect during a European security realignment. With the exception of Lithuania, most Soviet member states were allowed to escape peacefully. This was a miracle, and Gorbachev can be thanked inasmuch as his awareness of his and Russia’s then limitations allowed the Cold War to end without going hot again.

Russia’s Mariupol Show Trials The Kremlin subjects prisoners of war to torture and sham trials.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/russias-mariupol-show-trials-ukraine-prisoners-of-war-denis-pushilin-vladimir-putin-11661894589?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

Ukrainian prisoners of war already face deprivation and torture, and Russia now plans to subject them to a show trial that violates the laws of war and international agreements that Russia has signed.

In May some 2,500 Ukrainian soldiers under siege in Mariupol surrendered to save the lives of severely wounded comrades. Last week Denis Pushilin, the Russia-backed head of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, said a tribunal in Mariupol would hear some 80 cases of war crimes.

The trials will focus on captured members of the Azov Regiment of Ukraine’s national guard. Formed in 2014, the unit was accused of including anti-Semites. The regiment says it has since dishonorably discharged extremists in its ranks, and its members now include Jewish soldiers. The unit fought alongside Ukrainian marines and other soldiers in Mariupol, and their stand pinned down Russian troops that could have been deployed elsewhere.

But the Kremlin claims it is “de-Nazifying” Ukraine, and it is using the Azov Regiment as propaganda to justify the invasion. In August Russia’s Supreme Court designated the Azov Regiment a terrorist organization, paving the way for lengthy jail sentences for its captured members. Leonid Slutsky, a deputy of the Russian Duma, has said Azov Regiment members “do not deserve to live.”

Mikhail Gorbachev Dies at 91: Russian Media By Diana Glebova

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/mikhail-gorbachev-dies-at-91-russian-media/

Mikhail Gorbachev, the final leader of the Soviet Union died after a long illness on Tuesday, Russian media outlet RIA reported.

Gorbachev was 91 years old.

China Threatens to Destroy Elon Musk’s Starlink by Judith Bergman

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18793/china-threatens-to-destroy-elon-musk-starlink

Chinese military researchers are threatening that Musk’s Starlink satellites must be destroyed. The problem, however, does not appear so much to be the fear of collision, but rather that China believes that Starlink could be used for military purposes and thereby threaten what China calls its national security.

“[A] combination of soft and hard kill methods should be adopted to make some Starlink satellites lose their functions and destroy the constellation’s operating system.” — Five senior scientists in China’s defense industry, led by Ren Yuanzhen, a researcher with the Beijing Institute of Tracking and Telecommunications, under the People Liberation Army’s (PLA’s) Strategic Support Force, by Stephen Chen, scmp.com, May 25,2022

Soft kill methods target software and operating systems of the satellites, whereas hard kill methods physically destroy the satellites….

Unsurprisingly, China has eagerly copied Elon Musk’s SpaceX to achieve its own space ambitions: China’s Long March 2C rocket, for instance, which China launched in the summer of 2019, had parts that were “virtually identical” to those that are used to steer the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

China’s threats against Musk’s Starlink is more proof that the country is not ready to let anyone stand in the way of its “fierce space game”, as China puts it.

In addition… China is forging ahead with a number of projects that will significantly accelerate the country’s space capabilities.

China has reportedly sped up its program to launch a solar power plant in space. The purpose of the plant is to transmit electricity to earth by converting solar energy to microwaves or laser and directing the energy to Earth, according to the South China Morning Post… It is probable that China got the idea from the US; NASA reportedly proposed a similar plan more than two decades ago but never went on to develop it.

China’s explicit goal is to become the world’s leading space power by 2045. It is important to keep in mind that China’s space program – even what might look like harmless, civil aspects of space exploration… – is heavily militarized.

Chinese military researchers recently called for the destruction of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites, an extraordinary threat for a state to make against a private foreign enterprise.

In December 2021, China filed a complaint with the United Nations, claiming that two of Musk’s Starlink satellites had nearly collided with the Tianhe module of its Tiangong Space Station — in April and October of 2021– and that Chinese astronauts had been forced to maneuver the module of the station to avoid the collision. Starlink is part of Elon Musk’s SpaceX and the satellites are part of a plan to make internet coverage from the satellites available worldwide, with the goal of launching nearly 12,000 Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit.

Europe’s Twilight: Christianity Declines, Islam Rises by Giulio Meotti

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18786/europe-christianity-islam

Comparing only the weekly frequency of Friday prayers in the mosque and Sunday Mass in the church, the future is clear: 65% of practicing Catholics are over 50 years old. By contrast, 73% of practicing Muslims are under the age of 50.

In an essay on L’Incorrect Frédéric Saint Clair, political scientist and analyst, explains that “the milestone of 10,000 mosques, at the current rate, will be reached around 2100”. Will we have 10,000 full mosques and 10,000 practically empty churches?

“[A] mosque is erected every fortnight in France, while a Christian building is being destroyed at the same rate.” — Edouard de Lamaze, president of the Observatory of Religious Heritage in Paris; Catholic News Agency, May 4, 2021.

“During my first trips to the Middle East, in the early 1980s, I did not see veiled women and gradually the veil spread everywhere. It is the sign of the re-Islamization of Muslim societies and, in this sense, it takes on a political and geopolitical dimension. It is part of a conquest strategy. France is in a state of self-dhimmitude…. a legal and political status applicable to non-Muslim citizens in a state governed by Islam according to a prescription of the Koran (9:29). [Dhimmis] do not enjoy equal citizenship with the ‘true believers,’ who are Muslims.” — Annie Laurent, essayist and scholar author of several books on Islam, Boulevard Voltaire, May 19, 2022.

“…France, due to a colonial complex and a sense of guilt, anticipates a legal and political situation that is not (yet) imposed on it but which could be a day in which Islam it will be a majority and therefore able to govern our country…. [T]he situation is really worrying. Before it becomes dramatic, it is urgent to put an end to the concessions we are multiplying to Islamism by hiding behind our values. Because by doing so we erase our own civilization”. — Annie Laurent, Boulevard Voltaire, May 19, 2022.

Christianity in Germany “seems stable, but in reality it is on the verge of collapse. Pastors and bishops, but also many actively involved lay people, see landscapes in bloom where in reality there is nothing but the desert “. — Markus Günther, essayist, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, December 29, 2014.

“Muslims, the winners of demographic change,” headlined Die Welt. “US researchers predict that for the first time in history there will be more Muslims than Christians. Societies change. Even Germany’s”.

In Trier, Germany, where Karl Marx was born, the diocese announced an unprecedented cut in the number of parishes which, in the next few years, will be reduced from 900 to 35.

L’Echo, the main Belgian economic newspaper, says: “Brussels was at the forefront of secularization before confronting an active Muslim minority. The first religion in Brussels today is Islam”…. Belgian anthropologist Olivier Servais confirmed a Muslim presence in Brussels at 33.5 percent, predicting a majority in 2030.

French writer André Malraux said it: “A civilization is everything that gathers around a religion”. And when one religion declines, another takes its place.

Sarcelles, Saint-Denis, Mulhouse, Nantes, Chambéry, Strasbourg, La Rochelle… The impressive images of stadiums full of Muslim faithful, who arrived from all over France for the feast of Eid Al Kabir, seventy days after the end of Ramadan. In Saint-Denis, the city where the kings of France rest; in Nantes, the city of the Dukes of Brittany; in Strasbourg, the city of the cathedral and seat of the European Parliament, in Mulhouse, in the heart of Alsace.

Tehran Debates the Bomb by Amir Taheri

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18840/tehran-debates-the-bomb

Interestingly, none of the problems that nation-states might have with one another, problems such as border disputes, competition for sources of raw materials and markets, water-sharing disputes, irredentism, maltreatment of kith-and-kin, and bitter historic memories, exist between Iran and Israel.

No Iranian leader, even under the present regime, could rationally explain why Israel should be regarded as Iran’s enemy.

The danger is that the mullahs might regard the bomb as a status symbol, using Biden’s weakness as an opportunity to humiliate the “Great Satan.”

After more than three decades, a debate that started during the Iran-Iraq war seems to be making a comeback in Tehran: Should the Islamic Republic take the final steps towards building a nuclear arsenal?

The original debate that took place behind the scenes was prompted by the revelation that, with French help, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein had been trying to build a nuclear capacity around Osirak, a nuclear power station and research center which was wiped out in a surprise attack by the Israeli Air Force.