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“It’s a match made in hell,” writes journalist Benny Avni of the nuclear weapon and ballistic missile proliferation nexus between Iran and North Korea. This international, potentially apocalyptic version of what is known as a “red-green alliance” between radical Islamic and leftist elements makes America’s often neglected missile defense efforts all the more urgent.

Various commentators have noted a “stark contrast” between the ideological natures of the Iranian and North Korean regimes. As Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies observes, the Islamic Republic of Iran is a theocracy, while North Korea is a hereditary tyranny with an anti-religious, Marxist ideology. Nonetheless, these two rogue state international outcasts, once included in President George W. Bush’s “axis of evil,” both “feel a serious threat from the United States and the West,” notes Harvard University’s Matthew Bunn.

Accordingly, Israeli analysts have observed that the “nuclear and ballistic interfaces between the two countries are long-lasting” since the carnage of the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War. During the conflict, Iran internationally “was a pariah, desperate for military equipment and ammunition,” notes North Korean military analyst Joseph S. Bermudez, Jr. “If Iran has sometimes been desperate to buy arms and military technology, North Korea has always been desperate to sell arms and military technology,” given the country’s economic isolation, writes Cordesman. Thus, North Korea “needed money more than it needed anything else. Iran, which needed missiles more than anything else, was the ideal partner,” concludes the think-tank Geopolitical Futures.

The Iran-Iraq War began a relationship in which, one Israeli academic notes, “several analysts believe that Iran was the primary financial supporter of North Korea’s missile development program.” In exchange for Iranian oil wealth, North Korea provided Iran with Scud-B missiles that North Korea began producing in 1987 after having reverse-engineered them from missiles procured from Egypt in the late 1970s. By the end of the 1980s, Iran had received hundreds of Scud-B and Scud-C missiles.

Subsequently, Iran agreed in 1992 to provide North Korea with $500 million for joint nuclear weapons and ballistic missile development. As a result, North Korea fielded the Nodong missile in the 1990s while Iran deployed its clone, the Shahab-3, in 2003 after several years of testing. While North Korea’s Nodong missiles can hit parts of Japan, Representative Ted Poe (R-Texas) notes that from Iran, the Shahab-3 can strike Israel and Central Europe. North Korea’s Musudan missile, 19 of which Iran obtained sometime before 2007, has theoretically an even longer range, capable of striking from Iran targets like Berlin and Moscow.

While some analysts deny the existence of Iran-North Korea missile design collaboration or joint development, Iranian-North Korean ballistic cooperation extends beyond missiles themselves to fields such as test data exchanges. “It’s doubtful there has been a single Iranian missile test where North Korean scientists weren’t present, nor a North Korean test where Iranian scientists didn’t have a front row seat,” notes the American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Rubin. Missile test sites in Iran and North Korea also exhibit strong similarities.

Evidence concerning Iran-North Korea nuclear cooperation remains more indefinite, although both countries have used similar nuclear supply chains like that of Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan. Despite numerous reports through the years of technical personnel exchanges and visits, sometimes involving hundreds of individuals, Cordesman notes that American intelligence has never confirmed such cooperation. Yet British officials on September 10 argued that the rapid progress of North Korea’s nuclear weapons development indicated foreign help from a country like Iran or Russia.

RIYADH—Saudi Arabia on Tuesday lifted the world’s only ban on women driving, removing a restriction in the deeply conservative kingdom that had become a symbol of women’s oppression.

In a royal decree, King Salman announced that women will be allowed to obtain driving licenses starting next June, after a government committee studies how to allow women onto the roads driving their own vehicles.

The decision, immediately condemned by many Saudi conservatives on social media, comes at a time of profound change championed by the Saudi monarch and his son, Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who are leading efforts to relax the country’s strict social rules as they move to open up and modernize the country’s oil-dependent economy.

It also comes as the monarchy clamps down on perceived opposition: Saudi authorities have arrested dozens of people this month, from clerics to academics, in what the authorities described as a nascent antigovernment plot ahead of the king’s widely expected abdication in his son’s favor, the timing of which remains unclear.

“We refer to the negative consequences of not allowing women to drive, and the positive aspects of allowing them to do so, taking into consideration the necessary Shari’ah regulations and compliance with them,” King Salman said in the decree, referring to Islamic law.

The announcement caps a decadeslong campaign led by Saudi women to abolish a rule that drew widespread condemnation from both friends and foes of the kingdom, tarnishing its reputation internationally.

“We are very excited. We are over the moon,” said Hatoon al Fassi, a Saudi historian and one of the leaders of the campaign to let women drive. “Our struggle, the years of work have at last yielded a result, our right has been realized. It’s a historical moment. King Salman made a historical decision.” CONTINUE AT SITE

What has been revealed about the Labour party at its annual conference in Brighton should make all decent people shudder.

A fringe meeting hosted a call for Labour to debate whether the Holocaust actually happened, the libelling of Israel as a racist, Nazi, apartheid and colonialist state and a demand that Jews who supported Israel should be kicked out of the Labour party.

What was so chilling was not just that the meeting, called Free Speech on Israel (aka Safe Space for Hate) provided bigots with the opportunity to spew their bile. It cheered and applauded them.

Israeli-American author Miko Peled told it Labour members should support the freedom to “discuss every issue, whether it’s the Holocaust, yes or no, whether it’s Palestine liberation – the entire spectrum. There should be no limits on the discussion.”

Michael Kalmanovitz, a member of the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, called for two pro-Israeli groups to be expelled from the party. He said: “The thing is, if you support Israel, you support apartheid. So what is the JLM (Jewish Labour Movement) and Labour Friends of Israel doing in our party? Kick them out.” The Mirror reported: “Loud cheers, applause and calls of ‘throw them out’ erupted in the room of around a hundred activists in response.”

Fringe meetings are not run by the party and Labour says it isn’t responsible for their content. Nevertheless, the event was advertised in official conference literature. It was chaired by an individual called Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi. Watch this clip of her addressing the conference plenary session to see just what a piece of work she is.

She was opposing the proposed rule change to make it easier to expel antisemites. In addition to ranting and raving about Israel with a breathtaking stream of defamatory falsehoods, distortions and smears – including a swipe at the Balfour Declaration – she was actually booed by journalists when she claimed that Jewish groups behind the rule change had been briefing certain newspapers. She then received a ecstatic standing ovation when she stated: “I am not an antisemite. This party does not have a problem with Jews”.

Ah, how the conference loved that. Look at their faces on the clip. They are beside themselves with joy that they are being given permission by a Jew to hate the collective Jew in the State of Israel.

The situation could not have been clearer or more disquieting. It is Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi who is the problem with the Labour party – the problem she denies exists. And in not only giving her a platform but ecstatically applauding her bigotry, the Labour party was showing that Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi is not in fact the issue. The real problem is the Labour party itself.

Like the venomously anti-Israel Israeli professor Avi Shlaim, who was speaking at the launch of yet another groupuscule Jewish Voices for Labour, Kalmanovitz said the claims of antisemitism in the party were part of a right-wing effort to undermine Jeremy Corbyn and the left. But people like him ensured we could all see for ourselves this could not be the case. For antisemitism was on rank display at those Corbynista meetings.

Those behind “Free Speech on Israel” showed their true colours on free speech by reportedly ordering those attending not to tweet or take photographs for fear of “hostile coverage”. Meanwhile leaflets were passed around claiming that concerns about rising antisemitism were a “manufactured moral panic”.

Yet elsewhere, one Jewish Labour activist reported that leaflets were being passed around the conference floor demanding the expulsion of the Jewish Labour Movement from the Party; and Izzy Lenga, the Vice-President of the National Union of Students tweeted: “I didn’t think it was possible, but I feel a whole lot more unsafe, uncomfortable and upset as a Jew on [the Labour Party Conference] floor right now than I do at NUS”.

Today, the party passed the rule change making antisemitic abuse and harassment by Labour members a punishable offence. The Guardian reported:

“The rule change proposed by the Jewish Labour Movement, which has been backed by the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn and the party’s national executive committee, will tighten explicitly the party’s stance towards members who are antisemitic or use other forms of hate speech, including racism, Islamophobia, sexism and homophobia.”

Yet this change is worse than meaningless. Yes, it enables the party to expel antisemites. But crucially, it leaves unresolved the definition of what antisemitism actually is. And you can bet your bottom dollar that Labour will never, ever accept that demonisation and delegitimisation of Israel is the contemporary form of the oldest hatred.

How could it accept that? Its members overwhelmingly subscribe to it – even though many of them haven’t the faintest clue that what they believe to be the truth about the Arab-Israel conflict is in fact a pack of lies from start to finish.

In maintaining this fictitious distinction, Labour wields what it believes to be the ultimate weapon: the anti-Zionist Jews who offer themselves as human shields to protect those who they hope will destroy the State of Israel through demonisation and delegitimisation.

The assumption is that no Jew can be an antisemite; so if Jews say Israel is a Nazi apartheid racist murderous colonialist state committing unspeakabke atrocities, that cannot be antisemitism.

But that’s rubbish. Antisemitism has unique characteristics, including double standards applied to no-one else but the Jews, systemic lies and falsehoods, imputation of a global conspiracy to harm the world in their own interests, blame for crimes of which they are not only innocent but are the victims, and so on. All these characteristics that make antisemitism a unique collective derangement apply to the demonisation of Israel.

Henry I. Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, is the Robert Wesson Fellow in Scientific Philosophy and Public Policy at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He was the founding director of the FDA’s Office of Biotechnology.

The annual meeting of the United Nations General Assembly last week, and President Trump’s widely noted remarks there, focused much-needed attention on the organization. The dithering and inaction on critical international problems Trump noted served as a reminder that the U.N. has long been dysfunctional and disappointing. That is not surprising: It was designed to fail.https://amgreatness.com/2017/09/26/the-u-n-is-designed-to-fail/

Best-known for its so-called “peace-keeping” efforts in areas of conflict—where it enjoys a mixed record, at best—the organization’s other agencies, commissions and panels have a dismal record of accomplishment, especially while acting as the world’s regulator-wannabe for all manner of products and processes. The U.N. regularly panders to activists and, not coincidentally, adopts policies that expand its own scope and responsibilities. Science routinely gets short shrift in U.N. brokered international agreements, where everything becomes an exercise in international horse-trading.

As both a candidate and as president, Donald Trump has criticized the under-performance and lavish self-indulgence of U.N. bureaucrats. The United States has long been a hugely disproportionate funder of U.N. activities—our mandatory assessment and voluntary contributions totaling some $8 billion each year—but the era of America as the U.N. sugar-daddy is about to end. In the Spring, State department staffers were instructed to find significant cuts in U.S. funding for U.N. programs (above the mandatory assessment). That was the first signal of long-overdue belt-tightening.

Why are incompetence and profligacy rife within the sprawling organization? In several respects, it’s in the U.N.’s DNA.

First, the U.N. is essentially a monopoly. Inefficiency and incompetence are not punished by “consumers” of their products. It is not as if the services of the U.N. can be spurned in favor of patronizing a more efficient and competent competitor. On the contrary, it is not uncommon in these kinds of bureaucracies for failure to be rewarded with additional resources. Contrary to good business practice, if a program isn’t working, government bureaucrats clamor to make it bigger.

“Angela Merkel has ruled this country for twelve years. She has imposed a debt burden of billions on the Germans to protect the southern part of Europe from collapsing and to implement her idea of ​​a European community. She has shaken the German energy industry to save the world’s climate. And she has opened the gates of the country to hundreds of thousands of refugees because she considered it a humanitarian obligation. She also changed the traditional notion of marriage, as marriage of husband and wife, just like that….” — Tagesspiegel.

“We will reclaim our country and our people.” — Alexander Gauland, a former CDU official who is now co-chairman of the Alternative for Germany party (AfD).

“The reality is that as of today, September 24, Ms. Merkel is in effect a lame duck.” — Handelsblatt.

Chancellor Angela Merkel has won a fourth term in office, but the real winner of the German election on September 24 was the Alternative for Germany, an upstart party that harnessed widespread anger over Merkel’s decision to allow into the country more than a million mostly Muslim migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

Preliminary election results show that Merkel’s center-right CDU/CSU alliance won around 33% of the vote, its worst electoral result in nearly 70 years. Merkel’s main challenger, Martin Schulz and his center-left SPD, won 20.5%, the party’s worst-ever showing.

The nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD) won around 13% to become the country’s third-largest party, followed by the classical liberal Free Democrats (FDP) with 10.7%, the far-left Linke party with 9.2% and the environmentalist Greens with 8.9%.

“With only 33%, Merkel has not only achieved the worst result of all the campaigns she has led, but also the second-worst in the party’s history,” wrote Die Zeit.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel speaks to the media in Berlin on September 25, the day after her CDU/CSU party alliance won first place with 32.9% of the vote — its worst electoral result in nearly 70 years. (Photo by Maja Hitij/Getty Images)

Merkel now has two main options for building a governing coalition: a so-called grand coalition between the CDU/CSU and the SPD, or a three-way coalition comprising the CDU/CSU, the FDP and the Greens. Building a stable coalition will be difficult, given that all the parties have differing ideologies, platforms and priorities.

Merkel has governed twice in a grand coalition with the SPD and once in coalition with the FDP. Schulz has insisted that the SDP will not agree to another grand coalition because it would leave the AfD as Germany’s main opposition party, which would give it special rights and privileges in parliament.

Chelsea Manning, a former American soldier jailed for leaking troves of classified information, said on Monday that she was banned from entering Canada due to criminal convictions in the United States.

Manning had tried to cross at the official border office at Lacolle, Quebec, on Friday. On Monday, she posted a letter from Canadian immigration officials to her Twitter account that said she was not admitted because she was convicted of offences deemed equivalent to treason in Canada.

“So, I guess Canada has permanently banned me? Denied entry b/c of convictions similar to “treason” offence,” she wrote.

The document said that Manning had committed a crime outside the country that “would equate to an indictable offence, namely treason” in Canada and which carries a maximum sentence of 14 years imprisonment.

Committing a crime elsewhere that would carry a maximum sentence of at least 10 years in Canada is grounds for a person to be denied entry, the document said.

Justin Trudeau, the Canadian Prime Minister, declined to comment “on any specific case” at a news conference, and said he looked “forward to seeing more details about this situation.”

Canadian Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale suggested on Monday he would think hard before overruling a border officer’s decision.

“No such request has been made to me with respect to that matter,” Mr Goodale said, according to the National Post.

Profile | Chelsea Manning

“And, when a Canada Border Services officer has exercised appropriately within their jurisdiction the judgment that they are called upon to make, I don’t interfere in that process in any kind of a light or cavalier manner.”

Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison in 2013 for leaking more than 700,000 classified documents to WikiLeaks three years earlier, when she was known as Bradley.

She served seven years, and twice tried to take her own life last year alone, before then-president Barack Obama commuted her sentence just days before he left office in January.

Manning was released from Fort Leavenworth’s all-male prison in May.

During her incarceration, Manning battled for – and won – the right to start hormone treatment. She now has cropped blonde hair and a decidedly feminine look.

German general elections are usually rather boring affairs, with polite debates, disagreements over minor issues and predictable outcomes. The one last Sunday was an exception. It was interesting not because the incumbent, veteran “center-right” Chancellor Angela Merkel (a nominal Christian Democrat), and the “center-left” opposition leader Martin Schulz (a nominal Social Democrat) differ on any major issue—they don’t—but because the cosy bipartisan idyll is over. The barbarians are inside the gates. The AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) has entered the Bundestag with 12.6 percent of the vote, which will translate into over 90 deputies.

This is an immensely important development. The AfD is the first authentically opposition party to enter the diet since the Federal Republic came into being in 1949. It is the first party which represents millions of Germans who are sick and tired of not being allowed to express their views on the meaning of being German, who no longer want to be told how to think about their culture, identity, history, ancestors . . .

For over seven decades since the Untergang it has been first desirable, then necessary, and ultimately mandatory for a mainstream German to be ashamed of his past. De-nazification of the early occupation years had morphed into de-Germanization. An integral part of the final package is to subscribe to the postmodern liberal orthodoxy in all its aspects. It must include the willingness to welcome a million “migrants” in a year (with millions more to come if the Duopoly so decides – and Merkel and Schulz both agree that there must be no upper limit.) The AfD begs to differ, but when its leaders make a reality-based statement like “Islam does not belong to Germany,” or a common sense one like “We don’t need illiterate immigrants,” they are duly Hitlerized.

The result, on September 24, was a revolt of the deplorables. It did not amount to an uprising yet, but nothing will stay the same. The Social Democrats (SPD), having suffered the worst result in history with twenty percent of the vote, will go into opposition. Merkel’s CDU-CSU lost 8 percentage points to capture under one-third of all votes. She will continue to rule by forming an uneasy coalition with the Free Democrats—who are back from the cold—and the Greens (the “Jamaica coalition,” named after the parties’ colors of CDU’s black, FDP’s yellow and green), but her power and authority are fatally undermined.

Except for the State of Israel and the Kingdom of Jordan, there isn’t one state in Western Asia that is viable inside its present borders at a 20-year horizon. All the powers with interests in the region want to kick the problem down the road, and that is why the whole world (excepting Israel) wants to abort an independence referendum to be held by Iraq’s eight million Kurds on Sept. 25. If Iraq’s Kurds try to convert the autonomous zone they have ruled for a quarter of a century into a fully independent state, the Iraqi state probably will collapse, Turkey likely will invade northern Iraq and Syria, and Iran will join Turkey in military operations against Kurdish-led forces in Iraq.

There is no precedent in diplomatic history for the whole world closing ranks against the aspirations of a small people, let alone one that has governed itself admirably amidst regional chaos for the past generation. On Thursday, the United Nations Security Council voted unanimously to warn of “potentially destabilizing effects” of the independence vote. Turkey’s parliament Sept. 23 renewed a mandate for the Turkish army to invade Syria and Iraq, and Ankara’s defense minister warned that the vote could collapse a “structure built on sensitive and fragile balances.” The White House warned, Sept. 15 that “the referendum is distracting from efforts to defeat [the Islamic State] and stabilize the liberated areas.”

Just what is the “sensitive and fragile balance” that the Kurds might up-end by substituting the word “independent” for “autonomous” in the description of their land in Northern Iraq?

Most of Turkey’s military-age men will come from Kurdish-speaking families by 2040 or so, because Turkey’s 20 million Kurds have twice as many children as ethnic Turks. Last year I reviewed Turkey’s 2015 census data, which show the trend towards Kurdish demographic preponderance accelerating (“Turkey’s Demographic Winter and Erdogan’s Duplicity”). Concentrated in Turkey’s southeast, the Turkish Kurds dominate a part of the country contiguous to the Kurdish Autonomous Region of Iraq. After half a century of dirty war by the Turkish army against the Kurdish minority, Turkey’s Southeast might break away to join an Iraq-centered Kurdish state.

Stitched together from three Ottoman provinces by the British Colonial office, Iraq maintained a brutal sort of stability under the minority rule of Sunni Arabs who controlled the army and used it murderously against the Shi’ite Arab majority as well as the Kurdish minority. George W. Bush insisted on majority rule, namely Shi’ite domination, which pushed the Sunnis into the embrace of al-Qaeda and later ISIS, and left the Kurds to fend for themselves.

An Iraqi police man stands next to a flag of Imam Hussein in Tuz Khurmato, Iraq on Sept. 24, 2017. Photo: Reuters/Ako Rasheed

Iran faces a demographic catastrophe over the next 20 years because the present generation of Iranians were born to families of seven children, but have only one or two children. As the present generation ages, Iran’s elderly depends will comprise 30% of the total, about the same as Europe, but with about a tenth the per capita GDP. Iran will be the first country to get old before it gets rich, and its economy will implode. Like Turkey, though, Iran has huge ethnic disparities in birth rates. In Tehran province, Iranian women have less than one child apiece on average, but in the restive province of Baluchistan on the Pakistani border, women have 3.7 children.

Syria’s Sunni majority suffered long under the heel of a deviant Shi’ite (Alawite) minority, and rebelled with Obama’s encouragement in 2011. With Russian and Iranian backing, the Assad government squared off against al-Qaeda and ISIS elements, until the Kurds created a third force that could defeat ISIS on the ground while holding off Assad’s Iranian mercenaries. After the Iraq and Afghanistan wars America lacked the stomach to put boots on the ground, and the Kurds became America’s designated proxy.

The United States brawled into the region in 2003 in order to create a stable and democratic Iraq, and instead opened Pandora’s Box. That left Russia (as well as China) in a quandary: the emergence of a Sunni jihad movement claiming the legitimacy of a new caliphate threatens the security of Russia, a seventh of whose citizens are Muslims, and overwhelmingly Sunni. Suppressing the Sunni jihad was a prime objective of Russia’s intervention in Syria, and its uneasy alliance with Shi’ite Iran.

Washington is left without an appetite for a fight, and without the gumption to declare its Mesopotamian and Afghan adventures a failure. America’s military leadership of the past 20 years rose through the ranks by supporting nation-building in Iraq. Although the US military has backed and armed the Kurds, it will not support any action that undermines Iraq’s territorial integrity.