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While attention has been focused on Iran’s nuclear ambition, it is Iran’s conventional power, which has made it the leading global epicenter of war, terrorism, drug trafficking and money laundering, including in Latin America and on US soil. Moreover, the aim to end war and terrorism, on the one hand, and Iran’s conventional potency, on the other hand, constitutes an oxymoron. In fact, the existence of the Ayatollahs regime, on the one hand, and any attempt to end war and terrorism, on the other hand is a contradiction in terms.

According to Dr. Evan Ellis, a Latin American specialist at the Strategic Security Institute at the US Army War College, Iran’s involvement in Latin America and the Caribbean constitutes a clear and present threat to the US mainland in the following manner:

*Increasing collaboration with China and Russia, in order to undermine the US strategic posture in its own backyard, Latin America;
*Planning, financing and launching anti-US terrorism in Latin America, around the globe and on US soil;
*Empowering and weaponizing anti-US regimes and organizations in Latin America and throughout the world;
*Bolstering illegal immigration to the US, which includes drug traffickers and terrorists;
*Undermining the stability of pro-US Latin American governments, such as Argentina and Paraguay;
*Leveraging ties with Latin America (e.g., export-import), in order to bypass US economic sanctions and score mega-billion-dollar money laundering.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21434/iran-terror-axis

In the US, in the past — many people may have forgotten — Iran was found guilty of supporting the 9/11 attacks…. Recently, Iranian state agents have been trying to murder senior US officials who served in the Trump administration, various dissidents, and Donald Trump himself.

Iran has an interest in having Democrats re-elected as soon as possible. Even while Iran fired on US forces in the region more than 160 times just since October 7, 2023, the Biden administration never stopped being inordinately generous to Iran and compliant with its nuclear weapons program.

Iran has also been busy setting up a drone factory in Venezuela, as well as expanding its presence in Cuba.

The mullahs might well hope simply to wait until President Trump’s term is over to break out their nuclear weapons and resume “exporting the Revolution.”

While the US might be reluctant to seek regime change in Iran, if the Trump administration allows the mullahs to stay in power, there will be no peace for the foreseeable future in the US, Europe or the Middle East. In addition, almost 90 million Iranians will continue to have to suffer unimaginable abuses and human rights violations that the mullahs daily impose on them.

Ending Iran’s regime would finally put a stop to its becoming a nuclear power and its incessant attacks on US assets in the Middle East, and finally could bring peace to the region. That prospect appears worth serious consideration by the Trump administration.

Iran’s terror axis, thanks to Israel’s military operations, is finally beginning to collapse. Iranian terrorist proxies have been seeming to disintegrate across the region.

In Gaza, Israel has degraded Iran’s Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) terrorist infrastructure. In Lebanon, Israel has severely decimated Hezbollah’s capabilities and killed its leaders and commanders. In Syria, Hezbollah, along with Iranian forces, have been shown the door. Even though roughly 2,000 Hamas and 7,000 PIJ terrorists are still operating in Syria, while Iran retains proxies in Iraq and the Houthis in Yemen, the Shia terrorist “octopus,” overall, has had several of its tentacles detached. Now, what about the rest of the octopus?

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/02/25/germany-cant-ignore-migration-any-longer/

Sunday’s federal elections in Germany produced a clear-cut result. The two right-wing parties came first and second. The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) picked up 28.5 per cent of the vote, while the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party won 20.8 per cent. Together, they will have 360 out of 630 seats in the Bundestag, enough to form a stable coalition that would reflect Germany’s political mood.

But it seems that won’t happen. The CDU, in common with all the other parties, has said that it will not co-operate with AfD. It will now open talks with the Social Democrats (SPD), which was the big loser of the election, falling from 25.7 per cent of the vote in 2021 to just 16 per cent this time round – its worst election result in over 100 years. The CDU and SPD together will have 328 seats, even with a combined vote share of only 45 per cent.

The reasons the other parties give for refusing to work at all with the AfD are partly its policies – the AfD is opposed to the provision of aid to Ukraine, sceptical about membership of NATO and against any sanctions on Russia (ironically all positions now espoused by the president of the United States). More importantly, it’s because Germany’s established political parties question whether the AfD can be trusted to uphold democracy. They also accuse some of its leading members of having Nazi sympathies.

The AfD actually started life as a party that opposed the euro in 2013, and was led by some mild-mannered economics professors. But it quickly shifted its focus on to immigration. It argues for a near total clampdown on arrivals and the large-scale deportation of illegal immigrants. In this, the party is in tune with the mood of the German electorate as a whole. All the polls before the election suggested that voters saw immigration as a major issue of concern. The fact that in the weeks before the election there were several fatal attacks mainly carried out by asylum seekers on members of the public served only to heighten this concern.

https://www.thefp.com/p/the-german-establishments-last-chance

The winner of Sunday’s German elections has been known for months, almost since the outgoing government, led by Social Democrats and dominated by Greens, collapsed last November. As expected, Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democrats have finished on top, albeit with a flabbier than foreseen 29 percent of the vote.

Out of power since Merz’s intraparty rival Angela Merkel stepped down in 2021, the center-right party is back. But that prospect is not why 83 percent of voters—the highest turnout in the history of post–Cold War Germany—thronged the polls on Sunday.

German voters have decided that stopping mass immigration, legal and illegal, is a national emergency. And the party addressing it most directly is the Alternative for Germany. The so-called AfD finished second with 21 percent of the vote, doubling its share of seats. But many on the country’s center and left claim it is exactly the kind of party the country’s post-Nazi constitutional order is meant to exclude.

The 69-year-old Merz comes to power in a tricky position. He was a star of the Christian Democratic party in the old days, until Merkel bested him for the leadership at the turn of the century and sent him into banking-industry exile. Now, it would seem, a majority of Germans want him to carry out the AfD’s policies—but without the AfD. How? The question will be hard to resolve within the highly regulated (some would say semi-) democracy that Germany has been since the Second World War.

Germany is getting less efficient. Its railroads, despite the stereotypes, are among the least punctual in Europe—only 31 percent of its intercity trains arrive on time. It is getting poorer, too: The German economy has shrunk two years in a row. Volkswagen, Bosch, and other industrial giants have laid off tens of thousands of employees. And for years, Germany’s American ally has been raising the price of its decades-old alliance. First Germany was supposed to trade less with China. Then, once Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the Amis demanded a boycott of Russian gas. Now Donald Trump is calling for a doubling of the country’s defense expenditures.

But the issue that has come to symbolize all these problems is migration. Germany’s foreign-born population has risen by millions since Merkel announced she would welcome refugees from the Syrian civil war in 2015. Assimilation has been difficult, as the buildup to election day made clear.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/02/22/why-germany-is-ripe-for-revolt/

As Germany’s federal elections approach this weekend, chancellor Olaf Scholz and his Social Democrats (SPD) are bracing for their worst results since 1887. The SPD is battling with its equally unpopular coalition partner, the Green Party, for a humiliating third place, behind the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) and the right-populist Alternative for Germany (AfD).

The coming bloodbath for Scholz’s government speaks to far more than the haplessness of his leadership or the unpopularity of his party. Germany has just endured two years of recession – the longest economic slump in its postwar history. Industry is in freefall, shedding almost a quarter of a million manufacturing jobs since the start of the pandemic. A series of terror attacks by Islamists and asylum seekers has made many Germans wonder if the state can do its basic duty to keep them safe. Talk of German efficiency and punctuality now sounds like a sarcastic joke, as roads and bridges fall into disrepair, trains are routinely late and infrastructure projects are plagued by delays and cost overruns. One in five German children lives in poverty. Germany is not merely in an economic downtown – it faces a profound structural crisis, largely of its elites’ own making.

None of these problems began in earnest in the Scholz era. The chancellor is merely the current frontman for a long-running ‘consensus’ that has now become unsustainable and unsupportable. Tellingly, at the last federal elections in 2021, Scholz campaigned as the continuity candidate following the long reign of CDU chancellor Angela Merkel, under whom he served as vice-president and finance minister in a ‘grand coalition’. He even aped her signature ‘Merkel rhombus’ hand gesture to ram this point home. The accusation that ‘politicians are all the same’ rings far truer in Germany than elsewhere. Every mainstream party is implicated in this crisis.

Foreign admirers of Germany praise the ability of its politicians to form a consensus, rather than squabble or try to score partisan points. This is what makes Germany a ‘grown-up country’, as John Kampfner puts it in his staggeringly poorly aged 2021 book, Why the Germans Do it Better.

A less charitable interpretation of contemporary German politics would be that its leaders are gripped by groupthink. Policies, ideologies, ways of doing things become easily entrenched. The result is that when the ideas of the day are bad, they are shared not only across parties, but also by the broader elites, in business, media and culture. The main challenge to this received wisdom comes from the fringes, and so it can comfortably be ignored. Not even a change of governing party will necessarily lead to a change of course.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21418/iran-same-nuclear-game

Adding to the regime’s apprehensions, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei recently repeated the need to enhance Iran’s military capabilities. His statement exposes the real intentions behind Iran’s diplomatic overtures…. The regime has absolutely no interest in abandoning its nuclear ambitions or curbing its support for terrorist groups; rather, it seeks to buy time and resources precisely to maintain its long-term strategic goals.

The only way to curb Iran’s aggressive ambitions is through sustained economic sanctions, military deterrence, dismantling its nuclear program, and especially regime change. No one must ever again receive 74 lashes or prolonged imprisonment for a song protesting women’s mandatory head coverings. Girls must be able to go to school again without fear of being gassed. People must be able to practice the religion of their choice without being flogged or imprisoned. And no woman or girl must ever again be murdered or flogged for declining to wear a headscarf…. In 2024 alone, 975 Iranians were executed – a “horrifying escalation.”

The world must not make the same mistake — leaving a fanatic regime in power to wield its fanaticisms — ever again.

In 2015, the Iranian regime successfully manipulated the West into believing that it was ready to embrace moderation and diplomacy. Under the so-called “moderate” president, Hassan Rouhani, Iran engaged in negotiations that led to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), known as the “Iran nuclear deal.” This agreement provided Iran’s ruling mullahs with significant sanctions relief, unfreezing billions of dollars in assets, allowing it to resume selling oil on global markets, and the ability legitimately to have as many nuclear weapons as they liked in just a few years – well after the deal’s father, President Barack “not on my watch” Obama was safely out of office — which just so happens to be this coming October 2025.

While Western governments portrayed the JCPOA as a diplomatic victory, the Iranian regime saw it as a lifeline. Iran’s economy had been severely weakened by sanctions imposed during the George W. Bush administration, but the Obama administration’s eagerness to secure a deal gave Tehran exactly what it wanted: money, legitimacy, time and a path to nuclear weapons.

The primary beneficiaries of the JCPOA were not the Iranian people. Instead, the biggest winners were the Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the regime’s network of proxy militias and terrorist organizations across the Middle East and beyond. With the influx of cash, Iran expanded the IRGC’s operations, funneled weapons and cash to Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, bolstered Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria, and raced ahead with its nuclear weapons program.

https://www.thefp.com/p/kemi-badenoch-i-dont-think-doge-is

On Monday at the ARC Conference in London I sat down with Kemi Badenoch, who has been in charge of the Conservative Party for a little more than 100 days. When I last spoke to her—in December, on Honestly—Trump had just become the president and she had just become opposition leader. I asked her if she could turn her party—and ultimately, her country—around? And if so, how? This week, we sat for a follow-up conversation on immigration, the economy, whether the vibe shift has made it to the UK, and more.

Bari: One of the things that everyone has been talking about over the past few days is the blistering speech that J.D. Vance gave in Munich in front of a stunned group of European bureaucrats. And I want to read just one line back to you. “The threat that I worry about most vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia. It’s not China. It’s not any other external actor. What I worry about most is the threat from within the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values.” What did you think of the speech?

Kemi: I thought he was dropping some truth bombs, quite frankly. The Munich Security Conference clearly was not expecting what he had to say. And I found it fascinating that the chair of the conference burst into tears at the end of it and needed a hug because of how tough J.D.’s speech had been.

This is what I was talking about when I gave my speech this morning. It’s not liberal values that are the problem. It’s weakness. And that’s what J.D. was trying to tell that conference, too, that we need to get tougher. There’s this belief that tolerance is the core fundamental European value. To the extent that we are tolerating things that are actually destroying everything else, it’s this extreme view of tolerance that is undermining our security.

BW: What are some of the things that Europe and specifically the UK have tolerated that you think are no longer going to be tolerated in our new political moment?

KB: Well, the UK is not having a new political moment just yet. That’s what I want to bring about.

BW: Do you agree there’s been a global vibe shift?

KB: No, I don’t think so. I think that that is premature. I think there has been a big shift in the U.S. There has not been a global shift. Because of the dominance of U.S. media it can sometimes mean that people think that’s everything that’s going on—but it is absolutely not.

Nothing has changed in the rest of the world, as far as I can see. It looks like something may be about to change in Ukraine. But what Europe needs to look at and what we need to fix right now is our understanding of what it is that we are protecting. And it’s not just protecting tolerance of things that will destroy us. One example is what’s happening in the courts. We are having novel and expansive interpretations of law used in a way that was never the intention of Parliament. Parliamentary sovereignty is being eroded. We need to fix all of that.

https://www.jns.org/icrc-despite-criticism-still-taking-part-in-hamas-hostage-ceremonies/

Although the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) previously issued a plaintive call for hostage releases to be carried out in a “dignified manner” following criticism from U.S. Senate leaders over its participation in Hamas’s handover ceremonies, the ICRC still took part in Thursday’s exhibition involving the transfer of four dead bodies.

While Israel’s Channel 12 reported that the ICRC had refused to cooperate in the ceremony, almost leading to a “blowup,” Arsen Ostrovsky, a human rights attorney and CEO of the Israel-based International Legal Forum, said that report wasn’t accurate.

“Apart from some timid request by the ICRC for a ‘private, dignified handover of hostages’, today’s release again descended into an obscene and macabre propaganda display, in which a Red Cross representative even joined a masked Hamas terrorist on stage, alongside the coffins of the four murdered hostages,” he told JNS.

Ostrovsky noted: “Under the Geneva Conventions, for which the ICRC serves as guardian, ‘humiliating and degrading treatment,’ such as what Hamas is doing in parading the hostages on stage, including the murdered captives, is considered a gross violation of international law and a war crime.” 

The ICRC, in a statement on Wednesday, urged “those with the responsibility and the authority over these releases, and those with influence on them, to ensure that they are conducted with privacy, respect, and care.” 

Hamas prisoner ceremonies, in which hostages are presented to braying Gazan crowds and forced to thank their tormentors, have been denounced by Israeli and U.S. leaders. 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned the crowds of Gazans who mobbed three Israelis during a Jan. 30 release. 

U.S. President Donald Trump expressed shock at the emaciated condition of three others released on Feb. 8. American lawmakers condemned the ICRC for its part in the ceremonies, saying the agency risked jeopardizing its image as an unbiased actor. (The Red Cross claims two of its seven principles are “impartiality” and “neutrality.”)

U.S. Sen. Ted Budd (R-N.C.), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told The Washington Free Beacon website on Wednesday, “Participating in Hamas’s propaganda ceremonies definitely calls into question their supposed neutrality. Seems like the ICRC is more concerned about their public image than actually fulfilling their mission to protect the lives and dignity of victims of armed conflict.” 

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21419/prosecuting-unacceptable-opinions

On CBS television recently — in a scene straight out of the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police for political repression — three German prosecutors being interviewed explain that their job is to suppress “unacceptable opinions.”

The question, however, clearly is not actually about repressing all false information – just that, it seems, which displeases the so-called “left” as well as many of Europe’s newcomers. As one of the three German prosecutors put it, “Freedom of expression is fine, but there are limits.” There are, and they are carefully laid out in the 1969 US Supreme Court decision Brandenburg v. Ohio…

The so-called “left”, nevertheless, appears to have reinvented itself in a form that rejects everything that is not itself.

Marie-Thérèse Kaiser, a politician from Germany’s right-wing political party Alternative für Deutschland… had posted on social media in 2021, questioning the socialist mayor of Hamburg’s decision to welcome Afghan refugees, by citing statistics about Afghan men’s involvement in gang rapes in Germany. The court ruled that her statements violated the “human dignity” of Afghan refugees as a group…. The court did not contest the validity of the statistics. She was therefore convicted not for peddling “false information,” but for telling the truth.

The good news is that the funding of this industry of lies by the US government is over. You can be skeptical of certain practices in Islam without being “phobic” and refuse to allow biological men (xy) to take part in women’s (xx) competitions without being “hateful”. Let us hope this trend will jump the pond.

A cultural war appears to be brewing between Europe and the United States.

At the Munich Security Conference on February 14, 2025, U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance surprised attendees by downplaying external threats to Europe, instead emphasizing what he called “the threat from within” Europe. Vance argued that the greatest danger to European democracy stems from its own leaders’ retreat from fundamental values, such as freedom of speech and democratic principles. He lambasted European governments for suppressing free speech, citing examples like Sweden’s conviction of a Christian activist for burning a Quran, Germany’s crackdowns on anti-feminist online comments, and the UK’s restrictions on religious expression near abortion clinics. Vance compared these actions to “Soviet-style” censorship, suggesting Europe is abandoning the liberties it once championed during the Cold War.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/muslim-terrorists-behead-70-christians-in-church-in-the-congo/

Open Doors International, a worldwide organization which supports Christians who suffer persecution and discrimination for their faith, reports that the bodies of 70 Christians were found in a church in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). They had been beheaded by jihadists in the latest horror of the ongoing Islamic genocide of Christians in that country and elsewhere throughout Africa.

According to local sources, at around 4 a.m. last Thursday (13 February) militants from the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) – a group with direct ties to the ISIS (Islamic State) terror group – seized 20 Christian men and women from their homes in Mayba in northeast DRC. Later, the militants surrounded the village and captured 50 more believers. All 70 were held hostage for a short period and then taken to a Protestant church in nearby Kasanga and slaughtered, reportedly with machetes.

You wouldn’t know any of this by checking in with the mainstream media, partly because they don’t care about the massacre of Christians anywhere in the world, partly because they can’t figure out how to blame Israel and the Jews for the beheadings of African Christians, and partly because they’re too busy ginning up outrage over Trump firing IRS employees and dismantling the DEI grift.

But some accounts on social media tried to raise awareness. The X account “Libs of TikTok” tweeted, “Seventy Christians were found beheaded in a church in the Democratic Republic of Congo. They were reportedly hostages of the Islamist group ADF—an ISIS affiliate. Why isn’t the MSM covering this story??”

Pro-life activist Lila Rose posted about the massacre as well: “Horrific. 70 Christians were brutally beheaded by an Islamist group inside a church in the Democratic Republic of Congo Where’s the media outrage? Pray for persecuted Christians.”