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Iran’s Regime Probably Won’t Die Quietly Thanks to Obama’s deal, it could become the first nuclear power to undergo a violent revolution. By Ray Takeyh

The popular uprisings in Iran make it a sure bet that the Islamic Republic’s government will eventually collapse. That possibility in a nuclear Iran should have many in Washington losing sleep. What will happen to Iran’s centrifuges, enriched uranium, warhead designs and ballistic-missile technologies if the mullahs are toppled? What will happen to Iran’s scientists who are suddenly unemployed? Western governments should prepare.

The Islamic Republic was never the island of stability its Western enablers made it out to be. In the early 1980s, vengeful mullahs purged liberals and secularists who had naively joined Islamists to overthrow the shah. This produced a generation of young Iranians highly skeptical of their clerical elders. Students rebelled in 1999, the middle class in 2009. Last month tens of thousands of working-class Iranians finally decided they’d had enough.

These demonstrations must have been particularly unsettling for the clerical oligarchs, because the lower classes were supposed to be the mainstay of their power. For decades, the Islamic Republic has sought to tether this class to clerical rule by expanding the welfare state. Yet that welfare state is jeopardized by corruption and foreign adventures. Corrupt men of God are always more galling than crooked monarchs and army officers.

The Islamic Republic is no ordinary dictatorship heading toward the dust bin of history. In 2015 it was effectively granted a license by the U.S. and the other world powers to expand its nuclear program. The deal has not impeded Iran’s efforts to modernize its nuclear apparatus. Under the watchful eye of Ali Akbar Salehi, the MIT-educated head of Iran’s atomic program, Iran continues to enrich uranium, develop advanced centrifuges, test ballistic missiles, and train engineers. The regime, which has continuously lied about its ambition to acquire nuclear weapons, is determined to build an industrial-sized uranium-enrichment infrastructure equipped with cutting-edge technology and manned by a capable cadre of scientists.

Thanks to the nuclear deal, Iran could be the first country to undergo a violent revolution while in possession of an extensive nuclear network. The world has been lucky that the two nuclear states that collapsed did so peacefully. At the Cold War’s end Mikhail Gorbachev managed to liquidate the Soviet Union while safeguarding its atomic apparatus. In South Africa, the apartheid regime dismantled and destroyed its nuclear capability before handing over power to the majority.

Iran’s mullahs won’t go as quietly as Russia’s commissars and South Africa’s racists. These are men who claim to know the mind of God and have no compunction about shedding blood. The Islamic Republic will surely experience a prolonged period of internal strife, nationwide violence and ethnic separatism as it unwinds its theocratic experiment. In such circumstances, the command-and-control structure of the Iranian nuclear program may break down. Its enriched uranium and advanced centrifuges could go missing. And Iran’s enterprising scientists may find lucrative employment in unsavory places like North Korea and Pakistan. CONTINUE AT SITE

The green empress has no clothes By Viv Forbes

During December 2017, Germany’s millions of solar panels received just 10 hours of sunshine, and when solar energy did filter through the clouds, most of the panels were covered in snow. Even committed Green Disciples with a huge Tesla battery in their garage soon found that their battery was flat and that there was no solar energy to recharge it.

The lights, heaters, trains, TVs, and phones ran on German coal power, French nuclear power, Russian gas, and Scandinavian hydro, plus unpredictable surges of electricity from those few wind turbines that were not iced up, locked down in a gale, or becalmed.

Germany has long supported two incompatible ideas: engineering excellence and green totalitarianism. Angela Merkel’s support of climate alarmism while preaching energy efficiency continues this discordant tradition.

But King Winter has exposed the weak underbelly of Germany’s energy policy. Empress Merkel now faces a hostile political climate with no clothes.

The green energy retreat has started in the green energy movement’s own heartland.

Beyond the Iran Nuclear Deal U.S. policy should be to end the Islamic Republic before its 40th anniversary.John Bolton

President Trump seemingly served notice Friday that the days are dwindling for Barack Obama’s Iran agreement. Although deal proponents also gained time to pursue “fixes,” this is a forlorn option. No fix will remedy the diplomatic Waterloo Mr. Obama negotiated. Democrats will reject anything that endangers his prized international contrivance, and the Europeans are more interested in trade with Tehran than a stronger agreement.

There is an even more fundamental obstacle: Iran. Negotiating with Congress and Europe will not modify the actual deal’s terms, which Iran (buttressed by Russia and China) has no interest in changing. Increased inspections, for example, is a nonstarter for Tehran. Mr. Obama gave the ayatollahs what they wanted; they will not give it back.

Most important, there is no evidence Iran’s intention to obtain deliverable nuclear weapons has wavered. None of the proposed “fixes” change this basic, unanswerable reality.

Spending the next 120 days negotiating with ourselves will leave the West mired in stasis. Mr. Trump correctly sees Mr. Obama’s deal as a massive strategic blunder, but his advisers have inexplicably persuaded him not to withdraw. Last fall, deciding whether to reimpose sanctions and decertify the deal under the Corker-Cardin legislation, the administration also opted to keep the door open to “fixes”—a punt on third down. Let’s hope Friday’s decision is not another punt.

The Iran agreement rests on inadequate knowledge and fundamentally flawed premises. Mr. Obama threw away any prospect of learning basic facts about Iran’s capabilities. Provisions for international inspection of suspected military-related nuclear facilities are utterly inadequate, and the U.S. is likely not even aware of all the locations. Little is known, at least publicly, about longstanding Iranian-North Korean cooperation on nuclear and ballistic-missile technology. It is foolish to play down Tehran’s threat because of Pyongyang’s provocations. They are two sides of the same coin.

Some proponents of “strengthening” the deal propose to eliminate its sunset provisions. That would achieve nothing. Tehran’s nuclear menace, especially given the Pyongyang connection, is here now, not 10 years away. One bizarre idea is amending the Corker-Cardin law to avoid the certification headache every 90 days. Tehran would endorse this proposal, but it is like taking aspirin to relieve the pain of a sucking chest wound.

Facebook: Championing Blasphemy Laws by Judith Bergman

What is “harmful content” according to the new Facebook guide for Muslims? “Islamophobia, anti-Muslim hatred, far right extremism and terrorist inspired violent extremist content”.

The guide does not mention Islamic incitement to violence, which is rampant on social media and — unlike the other content mentioned — has deadly and tragic consequences in the real world. Most of those who perpetrate terrorist attacks in the real world are Muslims — not “Islamophobes,” anti-Muslims or right wing extremists.

Lakin v. Facebook is a lawsuit, representing 20,000 Israeli plaintiffs, which aims to stop Facebook from “continuing to facilitate terrorist activity directed at” Israelis.

Khan convened a special meeting of Muslim ambassadors to discuss how effectively to “raise the voice of the entire Muslim world against the madness unleashed against Islam and holy personalities in the name of freedom of expression”. — Pakistani Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan.

Facebook, in cooperation with a British Muslim group, Faith Associates, recently launched a new “guide” developed especially for Muslims: “Keeping Muslims Safe Online: Tackling Hate and Bigotry”.

The launch of the guide was hosted on November 29 at the British Parliament, where Karim Palant, Facebook’s UK Public Policy manager, acknowledged “the partnership of Facebook with Faith Associates and said this was a first step in a line of activities being planned to protect the Facebook family”. Simon Milner, Head of Policy UK at Facebook, stated:

“We’re proud to be supporting Faith Associates in the development of their online safety guide. Facebook welcomes all communities, and there is no place for hate on the platform”.

It is curious that of all the groups Facebook could have chosen to “protect” — if one is to believe that Facebook intends to “protect” other groups as well — it chose Muslims. Are Muslims the most targeted group in the world today? In Canada, according to fresh statistics, hate crimes against Muslims have fallen while hate crimes against Jews have risen. In the United States, according to Gatestone’s A. Z. Mohamed:

“Since 1992… anti-Semitic incidents have been higher than those perpetrated against other groups… To this day, the greatest number of reported religion-based hate crimes have been directed at Jews, and the second greatest against Muslims… in 2015… there was a sharp rise in religion-based hate crimes, particularly against Islam and Muslims. Yet even then, Jews were 2.38 times more likely than Muslims to become victims of a hate crime.”

The Quran Says Jerusalem Belongs to the Jews by Saied Shoaaib

Quranic passages clearly illustrate the Jews’ imperative to enter the land of Israel.

And [mention, O Muhammad], when Moses said to his people, “O my people, remember the favor of Allah [God] upon you when He appointed among you prophets and made you possessors and gave you that which He had not given anyone among the worlds. O my people, enter the Holy Land which Allah has assigned to you and do not turn back and [thus] become losers.” — Quran, Surah Al-Ma’idah 5:20-21.

According to verses in the Quran, God punishes the Jews for their sin of refusing to fight the indigenous people in the land, and God is angry that the Jews refused to convert to Islam. Yet the verses are consistent in their assertion that God gave the Jews the Holy Land.

Following U.S. President Donald Trump’s December 6 official recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, Muslims around the world held angry demonstrations, during which they chanted slogans about Jerusalem “belonging to Muslims.” This ought to seem odd to anyone versed in Islamic scripture, since the Quran specifically states that God promised the land of Israel, including Jerusalem, to the Jews.

Although ordinary Muslims who might not actually have read their holy book could be excused for their ignorance about the Jewish roots of and rights to Israel and Jerusalem, the same cannot be said for the leaders of Muslim countries, imams and the heads of illustrious Islamic institutions. Dignitaries and scholars of that caliber should know better. Yet many of them repeat false assertions that contradict the Quran and scholarly interpretations of its verses.

The fact is that the Quran does not mention Jerusalem or Palestine. It does refer to the sanctity of other holy places, such as Mecca — which is called the “Mother of Cities” — where the Prophet Muhammad was born and where the house of God was built by Abraham, the “father of the prophets.”

The Quran also mentions the city of Yathrib [Medina], where the Prophet Mohammed emigrated after he was persecuted in Mecca, and the location of his grave and the Prophet’s Mosque.

TRUDEAU’S GOVERNMENT ENABLING FEMALE GENITAL MUTILATION? VIDEOS

http://jamieglazov.com/2018/01/14/trudeaus-government-enabling-female-genital-mutilation/

On this new special edition of The Glazov Gang, we are featuringTrudeau’s Government Enabling Female Genital Mutilation? — a video which presents Canada’s Michelle Rempel exposing the Liberal government’s heart of darkness.And make sure to watch Anni Cyrus‘ recent stirring speech in Toronto, Canada, where she unveiled The Dire Danger of Canada’s M-103 and cast a terrifying light on how treacherous forces are willfully bringing Sharia and Jihad to your neighborhood.

E.R. Drabik The Coalition’s Immigration Challenge

Hand-over-fist immigration levels are straining hospitals, roads, public transport, affordable housing, jobs and the nation’s cultural cohesion. If the Prime Minister has any political nous — a dubious proposition, admittedly — he’ll address this issue before his backbenchers do it for him.

Is the long-standing bipartisan consensus in favour of high immigration set to unravel? While led, for now at least, by a ‘Big Australia’ enthusiast, a recent survey suggests that the Liberals might soon have little choice but to abandon their support for mass immigration if they are to avoid electoral wipe-out.

The issue is becoming too pressing to ignore. Australia’s population swelled by a staggering 384,000 in the year to March, 2017, with around 60% of this growth due to immigration. Propelled by the highest per capita immigration intake in the Western world — a migrant arrives on Australian soil every 2 minutes and 21 seconds — the population will surge past 25 million this year. Malcolm Turnbull is routinely lambasted as a do-nothing Prime Minister who has thus far failed to leave a lasting mark, but that is not entirely true: his supercharged immigrant intake is irrevocably transforming Australia in myriad of ways.

Despite a concerted effort by the major parties and the large parts of the media to smother public debate on the topic, Australians are noticing their urban and cultural environments changing rapidly around them. There appears to be a growing worry about the effects of high immigration, as suggested by an Australian Population Research Institute (TAPRI) survey of voters last August. The findings: around three-quarters of voters think Australia does not need more people, with significant majorities seeing such hand-over-fist population growth placing ‘a lot of pressure’ on hospitals, roads, public transport, affordable housing and jobs.

As prominent economist Judith Sloan recently observed, the immigration-fuelled population explosion is squeezing the life out of our major cities, with liveability crashing as the new infrastructure projects necessary to accommodate such rapid growth fall further behind. Another economic commentator, Leith van Onselen, has repeatedly warned that our cities, particularly Sydney and Melbourne, face an “infrastructastophe” due to population crush-loading. Australia, van Onselen has pointed out — not least to Andrew Bolt in the clip below — will need to build the equivalent of a new Melbourne every decade ad infinitum under current immigration levels, a scenario that is “unmanageable, unsustainable and undesirable.” Existing residents are quite rightly asking how Canberra’s plan to add millions more people to our already clogged major cities will do anything other than degrade their quality of life.

Turkey, the Arab World Is Just Not That into You by Burak Bekdil

Sunni Arabs do not wish to revisit their Ottoman colonial past. Still, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan insists.

A poll by Zogby found that 67% of Egyptians, 65% of Saudis, 59% of UAE citizens, and 70% of Iraqis had an unfavorable opinion of Turkey.

For the Sunni Saudis, the Turks were allies only if they could be of use in fighting Shiite Iran or its proxies, such as the Iraqi government or the Syrian regime. Meanwhile, as Turkey, together with Qatar, kept on championing and giving logistical support to Hamas, an Iranian satellite, Saudi Arabia and Egypt distanced themselves from the Palestinian cause and consequently from Turkey.

He runs around in a fake fire extinguisher’s outfit, holding a silly hose in his hands and knocking on neighbors’ doors to put out the fire in their homes. “Go away,” his neighbors keep telling him. “There is no fire here!” I am the person to put out that fire, he insists, as doors keep shutting on his face. That was more or less how Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s neo-Ottoman, pro-ummah (Islamic community), “Big Brother” game has looked in the Middle East.

After years of trial and failure Erdogan does not understand that his services are not wanted in the Muslim neighborhood: The Iranians are too Shiite to trust his Sunni Islamism; the (mostly Sunni) Kurds’ decades-long dispute with the Turks is more ethnic than religious; and Sunni Arabs do not wish to revisit their Ottoman colonial past. Still, Erdogan insists.

Turkish textbooks have taught children how treacherous Arab tribes stabbed their Ottoman ancestors in the back during the First World War, and even how Arabs collaborated with non-Muslim Western powers against Muslim Ottoman Turks. A pro-Western, secular rule in the modern Turkish state in the 20th century coupled with various flavors of Islamism in the Arab world added to an already ingrained anti-Arabism in the Turkish psyche.

Erdogan’s indoctrination, on the other hand, had to break that anti-Arabism if he wanted to revive the Ottoman Turkish rule over a future united ummah. The Turks had to rediscover their “Arab brothers” if Erdogan’s pan-Islamism had to advance into the former Ottoman realms in the Middle East.

It was not a coincidence that the number of imam [religious] school students, under Erdogan’s rule, has risen sharply to 1.3 million from a mere 60,000 when he first came to power in 2002, an increase of more than twenty-fold. Erdogan is happy. “We are grateful to God for that,” he said late in 2017.

Meanwhile, the Turkish Education Ministry added Arabic courses to its curriculum and the state broadcaster, TRT, launched an Arabic television channel.

Germans Tackling Exploding Anti-Semitism? by Khadija Khan

The teachers always hear from some of the Muslim students that the Jews must have been responsible for the way they were treated in the Holocaust because they had opposed the Nazi regime.

The situation demands an immediate review of policies and laws evidently too feeble to protect all residents equally, not to mention the even greater feebleness of political will to implement those laws.

If not stopped and countered in a timely way, possibly by these new proposals, this nest of hate-mongers carries with it the potential to trigger for Germany another really ugly time.

Finally, it seems, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government is proposing legislation that might even include deporting migrants who are anti-Semites, according to Die Welt.

The alarming scale of anti-Semitism in Germany has been escalating with newly arrived refugees, mainly from Muslim lands, and causing the government previously to launch a desperate integration program with a warning that this kind of hatred would not be tolerated in the country.

The German government also decided to introduce extensive discussions about Germany’s Nazi past in the course designed to make newcomers integrate into democratic societies.

The situation seemed to be getting out of control with escalating anti-Semitism among more than a million asylum seekers from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Teachers familiar with the curriculum, however, predict a bleak future for the efforts to convince the Muslim refugees about European history of Nazi Germany: most of them are already drunk with the anti-Semitic propaganda spread across the Muslim world by Nazi-sympathizing Islamists.

Germany’s Coalition of the Losing Angela Merkel clings to power with more policy concessions to the left.

Angela Merkel took a big step Friday toward forming a new government at long last, and it’s not a step forward. She’s paying a price for the stability that Germans are said to crave.

Mrs. Merkel has struggled to form a governing coalition since September’s murky election result left her Christian Democratic alliance (CDU/CSU) as the largest bloc in parliament but with a much-diminished plurality. She first tried and failed to form an odd-fellow deal with the free-market Free Democrats (FDP) and urban-leftist Greens. Now she has turned to the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) to form another unlikely Grand Coalition of the sort with which she’s governed for eight of her 12 years in power.

The SPD came reluctantly to the latest coalition talks. After suffering their worst electoral showing since 1949, they rightly concluded voters had punished them for cooperating with Mrs. Merkel instead of offering an alternative. Some had argued the party should enter a new Grand Coalition only if it could drag Mrs. Merkel much further to the left. The SPD rank and file could still tank the latest deal in a party vote later this month if they don’t think it goes far enough.

From that perspective, Friday’s preliminary deal could have been worse. Mrs. Merkel has won permission to offer €10 billion in income-tax relief by phasing out a “solidarity surcharge” originally imposed to rebuild the former East Germany. Both parties also admit Germany won’t meet its ruinously expensive goal of reducing CO2 emissions by 40% below 1990 levels by 2020. They now commit vaguely to hitting that target “as soon as possible.”

Yet most of the rest of the deal consists of bows to the SPD on economics. Rather than more aggressive tax relief, the outline agreement foresees €36 billion in public works and other spending. Mrs. Merkel also will make some pension benefits more generous and shift more of the cost of health insurance to employers from employees. This follows a coalition deal with the SPD four years ago that lowered the retirement age and introduced a minimum wage, among other sops to the left.