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Iran’s Mullahs Love Hiding Behind Their Proxies — It Is Time to Stop Letting Them by Majid Rafizadeh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20919/iran-proxies

Iran’s regime and its proxies constantly launch attacks – at Sunni Gulf States, at Israel and at US troops — with the seeming goal of eradicating the Jewish state and driving “The Big Satan” out of the region. That way, the mullahs appear to believe, Imperial Iran would be able to enjoy the run of the corral without interference from countries they allege are imperialist, and revel in an unfettered “open season.”

Iran and its proxies have attacked US troops in the region more than 150 times just since October. The US response has not exactly been a deterrent. In the meantime, the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism continues cheerfully to put the finishing touches on its nuclear weapons program.

The regime hides behind its proxies because it would rather its proxies receive retaliatory strikes instead of Tehran, Isfahan, Qom or Natanz, and it seems above all to fear losing its grip on power. The mullahs doubtless are aware that they lack broad support among the Iranian people, so it is easier to extend their influence and Islamist ideology through their proxies. Why should a country that does not treat its own people well treat others any better?

The time to put a stop to Iran’s runaway aggression is long overdue – before it launches nuclear weapons.

For nearly four decades, since the rise of Iran’s Islamist regime in 1979, the West has funneled substantial political and economic resources into combating Iran’s proxies. To what effect? Not enough, it would seem, to write home about.

After all these years, the West might consider, instead, facing a crucial realization: it might consider attacking the source, not merely its symptoms. It is high time for the West to wake up.

An Iron Curtain is Descending On Us Freedom is disappearing across the free world. by Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/an-iron-curtain-is-descending-on-us/

Over the last five years, American, British, Canadian and Brazilian governments unleashed unprecedented waves of repression against political opponents using martial law, military occupations of major cities, government censorship of the internet, nationwide manhunts, televised raids and extended detentions without trial. Most of those arrested were guilty of political speech and protests generally far less violent than leftist riots by regime supporters.

Three of those leftist governments, the Biden-Harris administration, the Starmer and Lula regimes, unleashed crackdowns after taking power using various pretexts. The fourth crackdown, in Canada under the Trudeau regime, took place during an election year.

The pretexts, J6, Brazil’s election protests or the UK’s anti-migrant rallies, are far less significant than the pattern of leftist regimes taking power and launching crackdowns against opponents who disputed elections or, in the case of the Starmer regime, protested against policies.

Governments that moan about “authoritarianism” abroad eagerly adopted every element of the authoritarian playbook from endless investigations of political opponents like Trump and Bolsonaro to declaring states of emergency over political protests and censoring speech. They often justify their authoritarian measures as necessary to stop their “authoritarian” opponents.

The leftist regimes that have taken to locking up people who merely express support online for opposition political protests are not averse to chaos, social unrest or riots. Before J6, Kamala Harris and every prominent Democrat and media outlet had endorsed BLM race riots. In the years since, leftist mobs have routinely invaded the United States Capitol, intimidated members of Congress, occupied their offices and fought Capitol Police officers in the name of every cause from banning oil to supporting Hamas with little result other than light slaps on their wrists.

In the years before Trudeau used martial law to silence truckers protesting against vaccine mandates, BLM rioters had been allowed to block streets in Canadian cities with the backing of the regime. No less a figure than Trudeau had ritually knelt to the race rioters and their cause.

Before and after the Starmer regime launched a ruthless crackdown on opponents of mass migration, Hamas supporters had rallied and rioted across London and other cities, threatening Jews and proudly flying the flags of Islamic terrorist organizations officially at war with the UK.

The anti-US Iran-Venezuela-Hezbollah axis Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger

http://bit.ly/47cvzhe

*Venezuela’s geo-strategic location in Latin America has been leveraged by Iran and its chief proxy, Hezbollah, to undermine the strategic posture of “The Great American Satan” in the US’ own backyard. The Iran-Venezuela-Hezbollah axis has erected a mutually beneficial anti-US network of intelligence, terrorism, drug trafficking, money laundering, training, weapons, supplies, and know-how, transforming Venezuela into a central hub of transnational organized crime and international terrorism.  However, since 1979, the State Department has persisted in its diplomatic option toward Iran’s Ayatollahs, which has bolstered the Ayatollahs’ anti-US capabilities, threatening the survival of every pro-US Arab regime.

*According to the Atlantic Council: “The dual-use nature of Iran’s cooperation with Venezuela’s Maduro regime, layered with the illicit financial connections of its facilitators, and Hezbollah’s established crime-terror network in Venezuela, creates a tier-one national security concern for the United States. It is multifaceted and requires a robust response.”

David Lammy’s shameful appeasement of Hamas Punishing Israel with a partial arms embargo will embolden Islamofascists everywhere. Brendan O’Neill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/09/03/david-lammys-shameful-appeasement-of-hamas/

Bereft of vision, the modern politician is obsessed with ‘optics’. Which makes foreign secretary David Lammy’s announcement this week that the UK will be suspending some arms exports to Israel all the more surreal. The optics of withholding weapons from the Jewish State the day after we discovered that its enemy is so ruthless it will happily murder young Jews in cold blood are atrocious. Did not one functionary in the Foreign Office think to raise his or her hand and say: ‘Sir, should we at least wait until the bodies of those six Israeli hostages are cold before we shame and punish the nation they came from?’

This goes way beyond optics, of course. It is more than a failure of spin. It is a failure – a colossal, unforgivable one – of morality. As the bodies of the six slain Jews found in one of Hamas’s hellish lairs in Rafah were being transported back to a grief-stricken Israel, our government took action not against the Islamist extremists who carried out this unutterable atrocity, but against the nation that suffered it. Mere hours after the discovery of an act of fascistic savagery, our government handed a propaganda victory to the fascists by dragging Israel’s name through the mud. What were they thinking? Shameful doesn’t cover it.

Mr Lammy has said around 10 per cent of arms sales to Israel will be suspended. Thirty out of 350 arms-exports licences will be cancelled, primarily affecting parts for fighter jets, helicopters and drones. The reason for this smug, haughty smackdown of the Jewish State? Because there’s a ‘clear risk’, said Lammy, that such equipment will be used to ‘commit or facilitate a serious violation of international humanitarian law’. Big talk from a politician who noisily supported the West’s imperial bombardment of Iraq that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians and the widescale torture and rape of prisoners.

Many are damning Lammy’s partial embargo as gesture politics. ‘What is the point?’, headlines wonder. Denying Israel a few parts for planes won’t make much difference, some moan. For the frothing Israelophobes of the iffy left, nothing less than a complete arms embargo will do. They want not one gun to go to crazy Israel. If only there was a word to describe people who agitate morning, noon and night for the disarming of a Jewish nation that recently suffered the worst act of anti-Semitic violence since the Holocaust.

Fired up in Merri-Bek Roger Franklin

https://quadrant.org.au/

Late last year, two arsonists broke into a hamburger eatery in Caulfield, as captured on CCTV footage. Victoria Police allege the duo emptied a pair of jerrycans, struck a match and bolted into the night as the restaurant exploded in a massive fireball.

Buildings go up in flames for all sorts of reasons — vengeance, bad luck and bad wiring, insurance scams — but owner and high-decibel Palestinian advocate Hash ‘River to Sea’ Tayeh  was having none of that. Nor were senior Muslim organisations, which pumped out press releases blaming … you guessed it … those rotten Jews.

“It is imperative that this investigation be handled with the utmost care and urgency, and that the offending parties are dealt with by law enforcement for their racial and politically motivated violence,” demanded the Islamic Council of Victoria (ICV), paying no heed whatsoever to the assurances of police investigators adamant the fire-bombing was garden variety arson connected to the ongoing “tobacco wars” and in no way an attack on Muslims.

Like so much of what VicPol does these days — apart, that is, from blasting anti-lockdown protesters with rubber bullets, doing what Labor demands, arresting pregnant women in their kitchens for social media posts and collecting speeding-fine revenue — efforts to calm the Prophet’s followers were worse than useless.

How could it not be the Jews? That was the immediate surmise of, let us be frank, noxiously aggressive bigots and anti-Semites. Tayah’s restaurant was in Caulfield, the heart of Jewish Melbourne, there was a synagogue nearby, and the October 7 massacres were a recent memory — a heartening one, according to ICV president Adel Salman. “What we don’t denounce, very clearly, is legitimate acts of resistance and for the Palestinians to rise up on October 7 and say we are no longer going to tolerate this siege, this occupation,” said Salman, whose organisation, it is worth knowing, receives generous state government funding.

Who knew roasting babies alive is “legitimate” resistance?

Sleepwalking into War Rebecca Weisser

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2024/09/sleepwalking-into-war-rebecca-weisser/

Our international editor, John O’Sullivan, has compiled an excellent collection of essays called Sleepwalking into Wokeness, which I heartily recommend to readers. It prompts me to wonder whether the West is now sleepwalking its way into a Third World War, or at least a war engaging great powers on three continents: North America, Europe, the Middle East and the Far East.

After my three-month fellowship at the Danube Institute in Budapest, of which O’Sullivan is the founder and president, the Russian invasion of Ukraine feels far too close for comfort. It’s not just that Hungary shares a land border with Ukraine, and Budapest is located less than 1000 kilometres from the front line. Up to 75,000 ethnic Hungarians live in Ukraine, many of whom are fighting the Russian invasion, and more than 60,000 refugees from Ukraine have arrived in Hungary, of whom more than 44,000 have registered for temporary protection.

Meanwhile, Russia and Belarus have weaponised the entry of up to 400 illegal migrants a day into Poland, some of them violent and armed with homemade spears and broken bottles, one, on June 6, stabbing a Polish border guard to death. Finland has closed its border with Russia entirely after it experienced a sharp increase in migrants from Somalia and Iraq who had been aided by Russian security agencies.

The European Union was outraged at Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s audacity in independently promoting peace negotiations by calling on all the key protagonists while Hungary is President of the EU, but he may have helped focus minds on the end game.

One prospect of a speedy end to the conflict rests on the second coming of Donald Trump. Perhaps Orban’s visit to Mar-a-Lago reminded the warring parties of Trump’s bold promise that if he is re-elected he will end the war before he reaches the White House.

Germany Vows ‘Knife Control’ After ISIS Refugee Slashes Throats at Diversity Festival ‘Knife Free Zones’ will stop Islamic terrorists. by Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/germany-vows-knife-control-after-isis-refugee-slashes-throats-at-diversity-festival/

After a Syrian Muslim refugee slashed the throats of a few middle aged people at the Festival of Diversity, the German government has announced that it will ban knives over three inches long.

The ISIS terrorist was one of over a million migrants who had invaded Germany while claiming to be “refugees”. The migrant was also one of the many scheduled to be deported, but was not.

All that the Muslim terrorist had to do to evade deportation was leave government housing when the authorities came looking for him. And then when the military age Arab Muslim migrant came back, the deportation order had expired and he couldn’t be deported. Undeported Muslim refugees have been one of the largest sources of terrorism,crime and violence in Europe.

So the German government is proposing a ban on knives over three inches.

After laying a white rose at the site of the Diversity Festival slashing that left three dead and eight wounded, Chancellor Olaf Scholz promised rapid action would be taken against knives.

Right now, German people can carry knives up to 4.7 inches long, the law will be modified so that they can only carry knives up to 2.4 inches long. No one appears to have considered the possibility that Muslim terrorists on the way to killing as many infidels as possible might violate the law and carry a concealed knife of 4 inches or longer. Such thoughts are unthinkable.

However the authorities are also proposing ‘knife free’ zones around railway stations and other areas where stabbings and slashings tend to happen to finally put an end to the violence.

Hindus in Bangladesh Facing Genocide? by Uzay Bulut

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20890/hindus-bangladesh-genocide

The protests that started against the former Bangladeshi government have since descended into rampant violence against the Hindu community.

” Jamaat-e-Islami has made a list of Hindu houses and businesses, and they are systematically targeting Hindus. I am also being told that JeI has blocked several roads with mobs walking around with guns. The network is also intermittently down and they are hardly able to contact each other. Essentially, the Hindus are boxed in a situation where they are not being allowed to communicate with each other and form groups to help each other. The situation, according to them is extremely dire. There is also news of at least 3 Hindu girls being abducted by the Muslims. There are probably far more…” — Nupur J Sharma, a journalist in Delhi, X, August 7, 2024.

“That Bangladesh has violently toppled a democratically elected government and is going in the direction of Afghanistan is not news anymore…. The victims have no one to turn to, as global organizations such as the United Nations sold their souls to their Islamic masters long ago…. Bangladesh has descended into a true Islamic abyss. There are mutilated, naked, dead bodies suspended from giant structures in full public view. Islamic apologists in India have done everything in their power to whitewash the Islamic onslaught on Hindus in Bangladesh…. Leftists dub the anarchy in Bangladesh as a victory of democracy….” — Ashlyn Davis, political analyst, jihadwatch.org, August 6, 2024.

Ironically, the land that is now called Bangladesh was majority-Hindu before its Islamization, which occurred after Islamic armies invaded and conquered the Indian subcontinent beginning in the eighth century. So was Pakistan.

“[T]here has been a long history of violence and repression against Hindus in Bangladesh including genocide of an estimated two million then East Pakistani citizens (mostly Hindu), the ethnic cleansing of 10 million ethnic Bengalis (mostly Hindus) who fled to India, and the rape of 200,000 women (also mostly Hindu) in camps set up for the sole purpose of raping and terrorizing.” — The Hindu American Foundation.

Terrifying videos of riots, lynchings, and arsonists setting fire to houses and offices are being shared on social media platforms. Will the United Nations or anyone intervene and stop the atrocities? Or will the world once again see and ignore yet more crimes against humanity with no accountability for those Islamists who perpetrate them?

Hindus in Bangladesh are under attack. Islamists who have sabotaged the students’ anti-government protests have been rioting and hunting down defenseless Hindus across the country since Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was forced to resign and flee to India on August 5.

According to reports and social media posts from the region, Hindu homes have been burned, shops looted, and temples vandalized. Muslim mobs are wreaking havoc on the Hindu minority. Countless Hindus have been victimized by the rampaging Islamists.

We need more anger about Islamist terrorism, not less After Solingen, it’s time for a fightback against both the Islamo-fascists and our complacent elites. Brendan O’Neill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/08/26/we-need-more-anger-about-islamist-terrorism-not-less/

The wisdom of the late Norm Macdonald has rarely felt so prescient. ‘What terrifies me’, the Canadian comic once tweeted, ‘is if ISIS were to detonate a nuclear device and kill 50million Americans. Imagine the backlash against peaceful Muslims.’ It was a perfectly aimed jab at those who fear the public reaction to terrorism more than terrorism itself. At those leftish talking heads and phoney liberals who see people in Manchester, Paris or Brussels being blown limb from limb by radical Islamists and instantly think: ‘Oh no, the Islamophobia is going to be terrible.’ These cowards and fainthearts have been out in force once more following the ISIS knife atrocity in Solingen.

The bodies of the people slain by the Islamist fanatic were barely cold before sections of the media were fretting over how the ‘far right’ might react. It was on Friday evening, at a festival celebrating the 650th anniversary of the founding of the west German city, that a man went on a knifing frenzy. Three people were killed and eight wounded, four seriously. The suspect is a 26-year-old from Syria who, according to German prosecutors, shares the ideology of the Islamic State and was acting on those tyrannical extremist beliefs when he wielded his knife. He arrived in Germany as an asylum seeker in 2022, but although his claim was rejected, the authorities failed to deport him. ISIS has claimed responsibility for the slaughter, describing it as an intentional slaying of European Christians ‘to avenge Muslims in Palestine and everywhere’.

So this was an act of war. A low-level, lone-wolf act of war, but an act of war nonetheless. It was a violent assault not only on the citizens of Solingen but also on Germany itself, and in particular on its Christian heritage.

The Quiet Before the Storms in Ukraine, Gaza, and Taiwan? Amid doubts about Biden’s ability to effectively lead the U.S. in his remaining months as president, our enemies abroad might see an opportunity to alter the global balance of power. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2024/08/26/the-quiet-before-the-storms-in-ukraine-gaza-and-taiwan/

There are three current hot or cold wars: on the Ukrainian border, in the regions surrounding Israel, and in the strategic space between Taiwan and mainland China. All three conflicts could not only expand within their respective theaters but also escalate to draw in the United States.

And all three involve nuclear powers.

Various Russian megaphones routinely threaten to use tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine. Some boast about sending strategic nuclear bombs or missiles against its Western suppliers, especially as the costs of Russian aggression mount and the humiliation of Putin escalates.

Nuclear Israel and near-nuclear Iran have both exchanged attacks on their respective homelands—and promise to do so again.

China likewise on occasion existentially threatens Taiwan. Its freelancing generals and spokesmen periodically warn Japan and the U.S. of dire nuclear consequences should they intervene on Taiwan’s behalf.

In all these theaters, there superficially appears to be stasis and deadlock: Israel is said to be bogged down in Gaza as it seeks to neutralize 400 miles of subterranean command-and-control installations and munitions, find and rescue surviving Israeli hostages, and take out the Hamas leaders. And no one believes that the degradation of Hamas will mark the end of the war, given the agendas of Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iran, to attack periodically and chronically the Jewish state.

Combined Russian and Ukrainian dead, wounded, and missing may be nearing one million. Experts argue about whether the current apparently successful Ukrainian counteroffensive towards Kursk inside Russia was merely a demonstration to gain diplomatic concessions. Or was it designed to take and hold ground inside the Russian homeland? Or intended to draw off Russian offensives to the southeast? Some call it brilliantly conceived but dangerous—given the risk of its ending like the ill-fated Battle of the Bulge German offensive of 1945 that achieved startling initial success but was soon ground down by superior numbers and ultimately weakened the overall German defense.