RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17400/iran-will-pursue-nukes

It is important to expect that whatever the deal, the Iranian regime will continue to pursue its nuclear ambitions and clandestine nuclear activities: there are historical precedents for it.

Tehran claimed that the “secret atomic warehouse,” located in a village of Turquz Abad in the suburbs of Tehran, was a place where carpets were cleaned.

The IAEA at first ignored the reports. This should not come as a surprise: the IAEA has a long history of misreporting the Islamic Republic’s compliance with the deal and declining to follow up on credible reports about Iran’s illicit nuclear activities.

The mullahs of Iran will not honor any deal with the international community. While the mullahs will gladly reap the profits of any nuclear deal and its lifting of the sanctions, their regime will continue pursuing its covert attempts to obtain nuclear weapons and overt attempts — with China — to take over the Middle East.

Just recently, we have seen Iran’s entrenchments in Syria and Iraq; its takeover of Lebanon by its proxy Hezbollah; its stepped-up aggression against Saudi Arabia by its proxy, the Houthis, and its 4,000-rocket war this month on the tiny country of Israel by yet another proxy, Hamas.

Whatever “deal” is struck in Vienna, Iran is not interested in “stabilizing” the Middle East. As the Biden administration has correctly pointed out, Iran’s leaders, with China, seem interested only in destabilizing, then dominating it.

The argument that negotiating and reaching a nuclear deal with the mullahs of Iran will curb their nuclear ambitions and prevent the Iranian regime from obtaining nuclear weapons is, sadly, a dangerous fantasy.

The nuclear deal has sunset clauses that soon remove restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program after the deal expires. In short, the nuclear deal, rather than preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, as it was falsely touted to do, in fact paves the way for Tehran to become a legitimized nuclear state after it concludes.

Even before that, however, it is important to expect that whatever the deal, the Iranian regime will continue to pursue its nuclear ambitions and clandestine nuclear activities: there are historical precedents for it.

It was not one year into the 2015 nuclear deal that two credible intelligence reports revealed that Iran had no intention of honoring the terms of the deal it had just reached with the Obama-Biden administration. Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, revealed in its annual report in 2016 that the Iranian government had been pursuing a “clandestine” path to obtain illicit nuclear technology and equipment from German companies “at what is, even by international standards, a quantitatively high level.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17394/persecution-of-christians-april

In a video released on April 17, Muslims connected to the Islamic State in Sinai executed 62-year-old Nabil Habashi Salama, a Christian. Salama appears on his knees in the video, with three men holding rifles standing behind him….

“We should remember that Greece spent 400 years under Turkish Islamic rule and that the fight for freedom was bloody. With that in mind it is even more dramatic seeing these images of fighting age migrants desecrating Greek holy places and having no respect for the country they are allegedly seeking refuge in.” — Greek City Times, April 12, 2021.

“[H]e was kept in at least three different police stations and illegal torture cells, where he was mentally and physically tortured to confess to the baseless accusation [of blasphemy]… [P]olice repeatedly threatened to kill him…. The police investigators…also tortured him into naming other members of the Bible study circle…” — Aneeqa Maria, Salamat Masih’s attorney, Morning Star News, April 29, 2021, Pakistan.

The Slaughter of Christians

Egypt: In a video released on April 17, Muslims connected to the Islamic State in Sinai executed 62-year-old Nabil Habashi Salama, a Christian. Salama appears on his knees in the video, with three men holding rifles standing behind him. The one in the middle launches into a typical jihadi diatribe: “All praise to Allah, who ordered his slaves [Muslims] to fight and who assigned humiliation onto the infidels” —pointing contemptuously at the kneeling Christian before him — “until they pay the jizya while feeling utterly subdued.” The words are a paraphrasing of Koran 9:29, which commands Muslims to “fight the people of the book,” understood as meaning Christians and Jews, “until they pay the jizya (monetary tribute) with willing submissiveness and feel themselves utterly subdued.”

The middle speaker continued by threatening “all the crusaders of the world” — a reference to Christians in the West — while singling out the countrymen of the one about to be slain: “as for you Christians of Egypt, this is the price of your support for the Egyptian army.” The speaker then points his rifle at the back of the Christian’s head —as chants of “jihad! jihad! jihad!” blare out — and fires at point-blank range, killing him.

It is unclear when the video was made — Salama was abducted at gunpoint over five months earlier for helping to build the only church in the area. “He kept the faith till the moment he was killed,” the group Sinai Province said of the slain Copt in a statement. During the months of his captivity, several Egyptian activists accused the authorities of indifference in not being able to locate and secure the release of Salama, which they say could easily have been done. Ironically, the Egyptian government issued a statement the day after the video was released saying that they had located and killed the same three terrorists that had executed the Copt—without offering any specifics. The claim was met with skepticism.

In a separate incident, on April 3, in the streets of Minya, a Muslim man butchered a Christian woman and her toddler son with a machete—”as if he were slaughtering chickens,” said eyewitnesses. The murderer, a tuk-tuk driver, is Abu Muhammad al-Harami; his victims were Mary Sa’d and her six-year-old son, Karas. When their paths crossed in the streets, he had made threatening and derogatory comments to Mary. When she said she would report him to police, Abu Muhammad leapt on her with his machete, butchering her and her son. Although Egyptian media and authorities claimed, as they always do, that the man’s motives appear not to have been religious, the fact is every once in a while such “random” attacks on Egypt’s Christians occur.

In late December 2020, for instance, two Muslim brothers went on a stabbing spree against Christians, killing one and critically injuring two others. Authorities said the brothers were in mourning and upset because their mother had died earlier that day. But as a local Christian clergyman said, “what does the death [of the Muslims’ mother] and the Copts have to do with each other?” The same year, on January 12, 2020, a Muslim man crept up behind a Coptic woman walking home with groceries, pulled her head back with a hand full of hair, and slit her throat with a knife in his other hand. Catherine Ramzi was rushed to a nearby medical center, where her throat was sewn with 63 stitches; doctors told her she came within an inch of dying. It is believed that he may have identified her as a Christian for not wearing a hijab around her hair or for having a cross tattoo on her wrist.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17396/iran-election-candidates

With Iran arguably stuck in its deepest crisis in decades while economic meltdown, rampant corruption and Covid-19 chaos wreak havoc on an unprecedented scale, the Khomeinist regime is in dire need of reasserting its legitimacy.

The terms “Russophile” and “Americanophile” may need to be explained. Neither means any actual sympathy for either Russian or American ways of life and political systems…. Both want to “export” revolution, destroy Israel, if possible, and impose hegemony on the Middle East. In short, both wear beards, though of different styles.

Russia isn’t a potential ideological rival because the “Russian way of life”, unknown to most Iranians, lacks any seductive power capable of challenging Khomeinism. In other words, the Khomeinist regime has a better chance of survival under Russian protection than it could have under American tutelage.

Within days the all-powerful Council of the Guardians of the Constitution is expected to publish the list of “approved candidates” for next month’s presidential election in the Islamic Republic in Iran.

According to official reports, a total of 592 men and one woman have filled in the forms for consideration as a candidate. The council, however, is expected to approve no more than seven to 10 applicants.

What is not clear is whether the council will assess the applicants on the basis of existing regulations or in accordance with new rules it published last month. The Interior Ministry, which has the charge of organizing the elections, says nothing outside the existing regulations should be at play. The council, however, says the ministry’s role does not include an assessment of applications.

The dispute may furnish some fuel to feed the low-burning fire of this bizarre election. Everyone knows that the final list will be established by the “Supreme Guide” who has the final word in the Khomeinist regime.

If previous elections are to be taken as a guide, this time, too, the “Supreme Guide”, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is likely to use the election as a multipurpose exercise.

The first objective is to ensure as large a turnout as possible.

Khamenei has described elections in the Islamic Republic as referenda on the regime itself. With Iran arguably stuck in its deepest crisis in decades while economic meltdown, rampant corruption and Covid-19 chaos wreak havoc on an unprecedented scale, the Khomeinist regime is in dire need of reasserting its legitimacy.