RUTHFULLY YOURS

We were told three years ago that showering Cuba with U.S. tourists and business investments would eventually work in the interest of Cubans.

Well, it’s not working yet! It’s the same old Cuba, according to The Washington Post:

IN HAVANA on Dec. 20, a group of artists and activists were preparing to perform a piece titled “Psychosis.”

The plot revolves around a person enclosed in a very small space, showing signs of madness, who wants to leave.

The play was inspired by events in 2010 at a psychiatric hospital in Havana, where 26 patients died of hunger and cold.

The story is obviously a metaphor about the regime of Fidel and Raúl Castro, who have ruled the island for nearly six decades, intolerant of dissent and free speech.

In the performance, there were to be allusions to Raúl Castro and terms such as “dictatorship.”

Predictably, before the performance, the authorities swooped in and made arrests.

The director was detained temporarily, as well as the chief actor.

Also arrested was activist Lia Villares. When released Dec. 22, she said she had scratched a message on the prison cell walls: “Art Yes, Censorship No. I am free.” She was fined for defacing the walls.

The authorities warned her sharply against any activity on behalf of Cuba Decide.

If there is one lesson the world should have learned from Iran’s ‘Green Revolution’ of 2009 and the so-called Arab Spring that followed, it is this: the worst regimes stay. Rulers who are only averagely appalling (Tunisia’s Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak) can be toppled by uprisings. Those who are willing to kill every one of their countrymen stay. So it is that after almost half a million dead we enter 2018 with Bashar al-Assad still President of Syria and with Iran’s mullahs approaching the 40th anniversary of their seizure of power in 1979.

Last week this lesson got a chance to be learned again when protests broke out on streets across Iran, and the world wondered which date this one might echo. A revolution finally to counter 1979? Or just another replay of the brutally suppressed protests of 2009?

The origins and cause of these latest protests are already contested. The regime claims foreign interference. Others warn of clerics even more hardline than the regime. But most early reports indicate that protesters began by highlighting the country’s living standards. Specifically, they complained about the government’s use of its recent economic bonus (from the lifting of sanctions) not to help the Iranian people, but to pursue wider regional ambitions. Iranian forces are currently fighting in Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. This from a power whose defenders still claim is not expansionist.

Iran is experiencing low growth, high unemployment and inflation (10 per cent) and the increasing unaffordability of necessities such as eggs and milk. But the most striking factor is how swiftly the protests became not just critical of the government, but openly anti-regime. Outside the gates of Tehran University a crowd chanted slogans against the nation’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, including ‘Death to the dictator’. The nationwide demonstrations, which have not been led by any single demographic, class, or group, have included cries of ‘Leave Gaza, leave Lebanon, my life (only) for Iran’. Chants of ‘Death to Hezbollah’ (Iran’s terrorist proxy currently fighting in Lebanon, Iraq and Syria) have also been heard from Mashhad to Kermanshah. After several days, Ayatollah Khamenei tried to dampen this motif by appealing (unsuitably for a cleric who claims to be devoted solely to Allah and the Imam) to the patriotism of all Iranians. The regime may be worrying. Whereas 2009’s protests centred on Tehran, these are rural as well as urban, and remarkably widespread.

Brig. Gen. (ret.) Yossi Kuperwasser, formerly the head of the Military Intelligence Directorate’s research division, believes the latest protests in Iran have dealt a strategic blow to the ayatollah regime, and warns of a “domino effect” in Iran.

Even if the Iranian regime survives this, it will have sustained a serious strategic blow,” says Brig. Gen. (ret.) Yossi Kuperwasser, who previously headed the Israel Defense Force’s intelligence research division, referring to the wave of anti-government protests across Iran in recent weeks.

Kuperwasser knows, as does any intelligence expert, that in the Middle East, perception sometimes becomes reality. And like anyone who has served in Israeli intelligence since the 1973 Yom Kippur War debacle, he also knows that sometimes the seemingly impossible can suddenly become a reality.

In his view, the unrest that has engulfed Iran suggests that the Iranian masses have finally managed to smash the concept the ayatollah regime has perpetuated since its rise to power in 1979.

“All of a sudden, it became apparent that there is not a lot of support for the big undertaking – turning Iran into a hegemonic power in the region – and for the Islamic idea. It turns out that it is just an empty slogan,” Kuperwasser says.

He adds that unlike the protests of 2009, when the Iranian masses took to the streets to protest against election fraud, the current protests are not about a specific grievance but against the very idea of the Islamic republic.

“The protests, in large part, reflect a demand not just for reform but for a revolutionary change,” he says.

The scoundrel and son of the scoundrel and liar Jacobo Timmerman is still described as a “human rights advocate” on Wikipedia….rsk

Former Argentine Minister of Foreign Affairs (2010-2015) Hector Timerman is now under house arrest. He is not in prison only because he is terminally ill and he was granted the privilege. He was accused of betraying his country by secretly negotiating a Memorandum of Understanding with the Islamic Republic of Iran together with other officials of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner´s government. Prosecutor Alberto Nisman denounced that the ultimate goal of that pact was to exculpate the perpetrators of the 1994 AMIA attack. Shortly before presenting his evidence to the National Congress, he was found dead with a shot in the temple. The Argentine Justice has just determined that he was murdered.

Mr. Timerman has responded to the charge of treason to the nation through his lawyers. He also reacted publicly, through letters, articles and interviews in which he sought to present himself as a victim — of the national political powers as well as of the local Jewish community.

In one of his most “dramatic” acts -a performance of feigned indignation, in fact- Timerman resigned as a member of AMIA, taking advantage of the indecision of the local Jewish authorities as to whether to expel him from the institution, or not. He was, after all, the acting Minister of Foreign Affairs of the country, and the community leadership feared for the repercussions of such a decision. In a letter sent to AMIA and DAIA (the political representation of the Jewish community) in April 2015, Timerman compared himself to Theodor Herzl:

“I have noticed with displeasure that the referents of AMIA and DAIA have fallen back into the vulgar accusation that every Jew who criticizes their actions, and they are not few, be branded with the worn-out argument of being ‘shameful Jews’. They should remember that the first Jew to be accused in such a way was Theodore Herzl, founding father of modern Zionism. It happened in 1898 when Karl Strauss accused him of hating the Jews so much that he wanted to eradicate them all from Europe. Since then, this accusation is valid only for those who believe they can measure the Jewishness of others.”

After his house arrest in December 2017, Timerman gave an interview to the leftist, pro-Kirchnerismo newspaper Página12 in which he once again underlined his Jewishness by presenting himself as a victim of historical prejudices. “It hits me twice because I am a Jew. Jews are often accused of double loyalty, as if we were second-class Argentines. It makes me go back to my childhood, when they pressured us asking us if we were loyal to Argentina or Israel. It is an infamy.”

Recently, Timerman reiterated his anguished protest in the opinion page of The New York Times in an article in which he defined himself as a “political prisoner” and a “target of the anger of the Jewish community.” He also claimed that the pact with Iran aroused “vindictive anger” against him. He accused the judge who ordered his house arrest to deny him medical attention in time, which “is like condemning me to death.” “Argentina´s Constitution does not permit the death penalty,” he said with a heavy-heart, “but with a judge like this, that is little guarantee.”

In the 2014 book Princess: More Tears to Cry by Jean Sasson, the protagonist, Princess Sultana Al’ Sa’ud of Saudi Arabia, recounts how “to this day there are teenage Saudi boys living in Riyadh who, taught by their fathers and the clerics, consider women to be second-class citizens and cast stones at what they consider to be an offensive sight – an unveiled female face.”

The princess asserts that it is her “sincere wish that the day will come when … an uncovered face will not cause violence in the street.” She declares that “nothing reveals more to [her] of a young woman’s personality than the will to fight against any injustice against women, and certainly something as personal as the face veil, which is not required by the Islamic faith, as all those who are truly familiar with our holy book will know.”

She relates a tale of a young girl in a poor hamlet in Al-Kharz who aspired to be a doctor. As she was the last of four daughters, this resulted in her father saying to his wife, “I divorce you” three times (Quran 2:222-286), and the deed was done. The baby’s mother, who had just given birth, witnessed her now ex-husband grab the newborn baby, shouting that he was going “to bury [her] alive in the desert.” He wanted to take the “infant into the desert, where he would have scooped sand with his hands until he had created a hole large enough to hold a tiny baby, and then he would have pushed that sand over the baby so that she would have sucked sand rather than air into her lungs until she had died an agonizing death.” He then “shouted for his three older daughters to line up and wait for his return as he was going to throw those three in the village well.”

Fortunately, an uncle to the little baby intervened and asked that the father pass the newborn to him; instead, the newborn was “tossed on the dirt floor” while her father left. Since her father did not insist upon custody of his daughters, the unwanted child had a sliver of a chance at life. In Saudi Arabia, “if a man claims custody from the first day of a child’s birth, no one will defy the father.” Had the infant’s father “demanded guardianship, no one would have stood in his way,” and he would have murdered all his daughters.

I was interviewed Wednesday, January 3, 2018 about the ongoing demonstrations in Iran by Audrey Russo.

In the interview, I elaborated on why these nationwide demonstrations differ, dramatically, from what I have come to refer to as the 2009 Green Movement .

The Green Movement’s chief ideologues — political leader Mir Hossein Mousavi and “spiritual guiding force” Ayatollah Montazeri (d. 2009) — were both full-throated, bigoted Shiite Sharia supremacists, who were pro-Iranian nukes (Mousavi helped godfather Iran’s nuke program; Montazeri affirmed it till his death in December, 2009), virulently anti-Western, and anti-“infidel.” Each also, sadly, championed Iran’s annihilationist, Shiite Islamic Jew-hatred. Ayatollah Montazeri, to his unique, and lasting shame, was the main contemporary Iranian clerical “revivalist” of the odious Shiite doctrine of najis. The doctrine dehumanizes non-Muslims as physically, politically, and spiritually “impure,” and in Iran has historically, through the present, made their very existence parlous.

Indeed, as I also pointed out during the interview, the elections of Rouhani in 2013 and 2017 represents the triumph of the Soylent Green ideology because Rouhani shares the views of Mousavi and Ayatollah Montazeri. As Iranian journalist Borzou Daragahi acknowledged in a January 3, 2018 essay, even amongst Iranian youth, “many of those who took to the streets in the 2009 ‘Green’ uprising … are sitting these protests out. They stood in long lines in 2013 and 2017 to elect Rouhani.”

Why might they be sitting out these protests? Unlike in 2009, the current protests are revolutionary.

They are directed at uprooting the entire Shiite theocratic system that was Iran’s form of governance (notwithstanding invasion and internal conflict in the 18th Century) from its founding by Shah Ismail in 1501 through 1925. Iran underwent a forced secularization/Westernization under the authoritarian Pahlavi Shahs from 1925 until 1979. The return of Shiite theocratic rule upon Khomeini’s ascension to power through his retrograde “revolution” had restored the theocratic norms of the 16th through the early 20th Centuries.

What were those (i.e., 1501-1925) “norms?” As characterized by the renowned Persianophilic scholar E.G. Browne in 1924: “The Mujtahids [an eminent, very learned Muslim jurist/scholar who is qualified to interpret the law] and Mulla [a scholar, not of Mujtahid stature] are a great force in Persia and concern themselves with every department of human activity from the minutest detail of personal purification to the largest issues of politics.”

“I say that when a girl walks about like that, it is a patriotic duty to sexually harass her and a national duty to rape her.” — Nabih Wahsh, Islamist lawyer, on Egypt’s al-Assema TV, October 19, 2017.

The Iranian Revolution of 1979 sparked off increasingly revolutionary movements across the Islamic world, and in the process saw women in many countries denied the freedoms they had started to acquire under earlier regimes. The veil returned widely, notably in Turkey, following the growing power of authoritarian and fundamentalist President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, with women’s rights being increasingly denied.

We urgently need to drop our unwillingness to contrast Western and Islamic values — whether regarding violence, treatment of religious minorities, anti-Semitism, or treatment of women. There are also growing numbers of Muslims, as we are seeing today in Iran, who find wider Islamic attitudes abhorrent and work hard, mostly against the odds, to bring their faith closer to modern values.

For a time, one could not open a newspaper or visit an online news site without finding yet another scandal about sexual harassment. Lawyers are presumably going to have a field day for years to come. In the UK, a further wave of accusations has shaken an already shaky parliament and the Government, whose Cabinet is increasingly in disarray. In the US Congress, Hollywood and elsewhere, similar claims are still being made, with #MeToo stories being shared by women, while there is an unknown number of accusations in US statehouses.

Sex scandals in the West are far from new.[1] The irony is that this brings us face to face with attitudes to the same problem in the Islamic world.

For many years in the West, it was common practice for sexual harassment and rape among celebrities and public figures to be hushed up. To secure silence, abusers often used bribes or threats. Young women feared the loss of their careers or reputations; in many instances, the police would reject claims of abuse. This happened more than once in the UK, when young victims of “Asian” grooming gangs were not believed by social workers and police; in Europe authorities tried — and still try (see here, here and here) — to cover up harassment and rape committed by Muslim migrants. There will be a lot of work to do to protect women and children from the excesses of so many men.

Just watch and marvel at this short clip from a debate on Egypt’s al-Assema TV, aired on October 19, 2017, or read an English transcript. The Director-General of al-Assema is Brigadier-General Muhammad Samir, a former spokesman for the Egyptian armed forces. His appointment has been criticized on the grounds that it is “a miserable attempt by the military regime authorities to nationalize the media, unify its message, and block any opposing voices against the government”. In that sense, al-Assema represents a semi-official voice.

On Thursday, French president Emmanuel Macron criticized the United States and Israel for encouraging anti-regime protests in Iran claiming, inter alia, that such talk would lead the world closer to war. “The official line pursued by the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia, who are our allies in many ways, is almost one that would lead us to war,” Macron told reporters.

Unlike his predecessor, who capitulated to the whims and dictates of the mullahs, President Donald Trump voiced strong support for the protesters and leveled harsh criticism against the oppressive theocratic regime. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu criticized Europe’s tepid reaction to the rapidly unfolding events throughout Iran and issued encouragement to the protesters, referring to them as “heroic” and “brave.”

With his pusillanimous comments, Macron demonstrates yet again why France is, and will always be a third rate power. Few nations in the world today pose more of a threat to world peace than the Islamic Republic of Iran. But France, steeped in the craven mindset of 1938 Munich is either unwilling or unable to recognize the clear and present danger posed by this malevolent regime.

Iran has planned and carried out dozens of acts of terror across five continents. The regime currently provides financial and military support to Hamas, Hezbollah, and Islamic Jihad, groups listed as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO) by the State Department and designated as terrorist organizations by the European Union as well as several Arab nations. Iran enabled Assad to perpetrate genocide against his own people, enabled Hezbollah to swallow Lebanon whole, has spread misery in Yemen and provided deadly Explosively Formed Projectiles (EFP) to Jihadists battling American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Israel and the U.S. are amplifying criticism of Iran’s role in Middle East conflicts, part of a coordinated effort to curb Tehran’s influence in the region as antigovernment protests put pressure on the country’s leaders.

Since protests began last week in Iran, Israel has accused Tehran of setting up a terrorist cell in the Palestinian West Bank and blamed Iran for supplying mortars fired on Israeli territory by militants from the Gaza Strip. Iran hasn’t responded to the allegations.

“The fact that they have exposed [Iran] now is related to a broader pressure campaign,” Daniel Shapiro, former U.S. ambassador to Israel, said of the Israeli accusations. “When Iran is under pressure it’s a good idea to increase the pressure.”
People in Iran have demonstrated against the government in the biggest wave of protests to hit the country in almost a decade. Here’s what could be next for Iran and what the unrest means for more than 80 million Iranians.

When the new year started, U.S. officials said, domestic protest in Iran wasn’t expected to be at the top of the Trump administration agenda. But the demonstrations are now part of the administration’s evolving effort to cast Iran as an international pariah.

President Donald Trump has tweeted about Iran five times in recent days. “The people of Iran are finally acting against the brutal and corrupt Iranian regime,” he said on Twitter on Tuesday. “All of the money that President Obama so foolishly gave them went into terrorism and into their ‘pockets.’ The people have little food, big inflation and no human rights. The U.S. is watching!” CONTINUE AT SITE

Nikki Haley, America’s formidable ambassador to the United Nations, has done it again. The Iranian uprising has been hard to “see.” Cell phone videos, photos, Facebook posts and Twitter allow us only sporadic peeks, and even those are being shut down in places, as the Islamic regime works to close Iranian access to the wider world. Ambassador Haley used her microphone to spread the slogans of the protesters:

“Let go of Palestine”
“Not Gaza, not Lebanon, my life (only) for Iran”
“Leave Syria. Think about us.”
“Don’t be afraid; don’t be afraid, we’re all together.”
“Feel some shame (Khameini). Let go of the country.”
“All these brigades have come out to the street; they’ve come out against the leader.”
“Political prisoners must be freed.”
“Independence, freedom, Iranian Republic.”

For all that the mainstream media, and erstwhile members of the Obama “echo chamber” would have us believe this is an economic uprising, it is inextricably tied to the political desire of the Iranian people for freedom and a government that responds to their needs and aspirations. It is inextricably tied to Iranian nationalism – and tied to the choices of their government to spend the national treasury on war. Yes, the Iranian economy is terrible – even after the easing of trade sanctions and the delivery of pallets of cash by the Obama administration. But the Mullahs running the Islamic Republic are not interested in the economy, the people, or nationalism. Months ago, I wrote in a different context: