RUTHFULLY YOURS

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The latest parade of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard displayed a new ballistic missile, the Khorramshahr. Though it had been modified to appear less threatening, the new missile matches a North Korean ballistic missile known by different names in the West, including BM25. The Khorramshahr could eventually enable Tehran to threaten the capitals of Europe with nuclear warheads, and it raises the level of the Iranian missile threat to Israel.https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/parades-pyongyang-ends-up-tehran/

Iran’s leaders love military parades and hold them twice a year. The first is in April, when the Iranian Armed Forces – the legacy of the Shah’s imperial military machine – celebrates “Army Day.” During the second annual parade, in September, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) celebrates “Sacred Defense Week,” which commemorates the eight-year Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s.

The IRGC overlaps the official armed forces in almost every respect, deploying its own infantry, armor, air force, and navy. But it possesses one service that is uniquely its own: a strategic missile force. The IRGC is tasked by the regime to develop, manufacture, and deploy Iran’s long-range as well as tactical-range missiles, including the famous liquid propellant Shahab 3 missiles and the somewhat less renowned solid propellant Sejjil 2 missiles.

The IRGC’s annual parade is a combination of carnival, exhibition of future projects, and demonstration of military power. The parade is arranged by order of significance. It ends with columns of mobile long-range ballistic missiles on their launchers, preceded by trucks bearing banners that read “Death To America” and “Death To Israel” in three languages: Persian, Arabic, and English (the English version is somewhat more polite: “Down With” rather than “Death To”). This latter part of the parade gets most of the world’s attention because it flaunts Iran’s new missiles.

At the latest parade, on September 22, the Iranians displayed a brand new ballistic missile, dubbed the “Khorramshar” (after a border city where an epic battle of the Iran-Iraq war took place). It was hauled on the same TEL (transporter erector launcher) that is used for the Shahab 3 and the Sejjil, but the missile itself was evidently thicker and shorter. The Iranians covered its bottom section, presumably to hide its propulsion system and thus obscure its source. But this precaution did not help: Most observers immediately associated the “Khorramshar” with the North Korean HS10 IRBM, first displayed in Pyongyang in 2010. Indeed, in a video the Iranians released shortly after the Tehran parade showing a flight test (the only one to date) of the Khorramshar, it appeared to be leaving a trail of flame similar to that of its North Korean twin.

These two missiles – the North Korean and the Iranian – originated in development programs that North Korea commissioned at the Makeyev missile factory in Russia immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union. At the time, Russia’s defense industry, like the country in general, had reached a nadir, and the new government of President Yeltsin had difficulty supervising the arms factories. The Makeyev factory had been one of the pillars of the Soviet ballistic missile industry; it had developed the original Scud and the first seaborne ballistic missile of the Soviet Union, originally called the R27. This submarine-launched missile carried a single nuclear warhead of an unknown weight with a range of about 2,500 km (in improved models, the range increased to 3,500 km).

When Pyongyang came calling in the early 1990s, the Makeyev factory, like all the other former Soviet arms factories, was out of work and its engineers out of a livelihood. Almost anything could be bought from them. The North Koreans exploited the Russians’ distress and commissioned the Makeyev factory to develop two new missiles: a 1:1.5 scale-up of the Scud missile with a range of over 1,000 km; and a conversion of the sea-launched R27 (which was being phased out by the Russian Navy) into a mobile ground-launched missile.

The first project ended successfully, and the new missile, which in the West was called the Nodong (or Rodong), was displayed in Pyongyang in 2010. The second project was apparently stopped by the Russian government before completion, but the design documentation and the already manufactured components were transferred to North Korea along with a quantity of parts – mostly rocket engines – of R27 missiles that had been collected from Russian junk yards.

Seventy-eight-year-old Roger Pinto was sitting in his suburban Paris home the night of Sept. 7 when three young men broke in and cut off the electricity. They knocked Mr. Pinto unconscious, according to his account, and when he came to, one of them said: “The Jews have lots of money, and you will give us what you have.”

They tied up and beat Mr. Pinto, his 72-year-old wife and their son, held them for several hours, and eventually ran off with jewelry, cash and credit cards. The Pintos were treated for minor injuries. Authorities are investigating the attack as a hate crime: “The motivation for this cowardly act seems directly related to the religion of the victims,” said Interior Minister Gérard Collomb.

Such an acknowledgment is unusual in France. Parliament enacted a hate-crime law in 2003, in response to attacks on Jews during the height of the second intifada in Israel. But the idea of crimes motivated by bias sits uncomfortably with the French Republican model, based on the notion of integration into a uniform national identity. France officially does not classify its citizens according to race, religion or ethnicity.

Thus officials have often equivocated about designating anti-Semitic attacks as hate crimes. In 2014 four armed burglars allegedly broke into a young Jewish couple’s residence and raped the 19-year-old woman while pinning down her partner. As in the Pinto case, the suspects demanded money, asserting: “Jews, you have money at home, you do not put it in the bank.” Prosecutors charged the suspects with group rape, robbery and abduction but dropped hate-crime charges this past February.

French authorities initially denied anti-Semitic motives in the brutal 2006 kidnapping, torture and murder of 23-year-old Ilan Halimi by a band of Muslim thugs styling themselves the Gang of Barbarians, only to acknowledge them at trial three years later. The clues weren’t hard to find: When the working-class Halimis couldn’t pay the ransom his captors initially demanded, the gang replied: “Go and get it from your synagogue.” They also contacted a rabbi and told him: “We have a Jew.”

This past April Sarah Halimi, a 66-year-old Orthodox Jew (who had no direct relation to Ilan Halimi), was killed when a neighbor allegedly broke into her third-story Paris apartment, beat her and pushed her out the window. The suspect was captured in another neighbor’s apartment, where he was holed up chanting verses from the Quran. (The suspect has claimed insanity.) Only last week, after months of pressure from the Jewish community, did French prosecutors classify Sarah Halimi’s killing as a hate crime.

Jews have also been prominent public targets. A man pledging allegiance to Islamic State killed four at a Parisian kosher supermarket just after the Charlie Hebdo massacre in 2015, and Mohammed Merah’s 2012 shooting rampage at a Jewish school in Toulouse also took four lives. Pro-Palestinian protesters chanted “Death to the Jews” and “ Hitler was right” in 2014, as they marched through Paris setting Jewish shops ablaze and besieging synagogues. Street assaults, graffiti and taunts are common.

The violence and hostility are taking a toll on the community. Whereas 30 years ago most French Jews enrolled their children in public schools, only about one-third do today. Some 40,000 French Jews have emigrated since 2006, more than 20,000 of them between 2014 and 2016. After the 2015 supermarket murder, 12,000 soldiers were deployed to protect Jewish institutions. But there are half a million Jews in France, and the army isn’t big enough to guard all of their homes. CONTINUE AT SITE

What you would never know, from all this hand-wringing about “Islamophobia,” is that only a few weeks before the conference, the country’s media had reported on a popular imam in Biel who, in his sermons, “asked Allah to destroy the enemies of Islam — Jews, Christians, Hindus, Russians, and Shiites.”

The imam in question, Abu Ramadan, preached that Muslims who befriended infidels were “cursed until the Day of Judgment” — which, of course, is not radical at all, but is straight out of the Koran.

The crisis is real. But, says Swiss Muslim author Saïda Keller-Messahli, Swiss politicians, “especially on the left,” refuse to address it. Instead of trying to defend their country from radicalism, they think their job is to “protect minorities and multiculturalism.”

Mosque kindergartens and youth groups, too, are “places of religious indoctrination” for Swiss Muslims. So are the German-speaking public schools, in which imams are permitted to teach classes in Islam using instructional materials from Saudi Arabia or Turkey.

If you listen to some of Switzerland’s pollsters and government officials, the country is suffering from a serious and ever-intensifying crisis — anti-Muslim bigotry.

In August, a study concluded that Swiss Muslims “are generally well integrated into Swiss society.” Their main problem? They face “Islamophobia.”

Another study the same month found that the percentage of Swiss non-Muslims who feel “threatened” by Islam had more than doubled since 2004, from 16% to 38%.

At a September 11 conference, Switzerland’s Federal Commission against Racism (FCR) issued an explicit alert: “hostility toward Muslims,” it warned, was rising – and was “fed by facts that have nothing to do with Muslims themselves.”

Conference organizers blamed this “hostility” on online “propaganda”; Interior Minister Alain Berset accused Swiss citizens of erroneously holding “Islam responsible for all the extremist acts committed in its name.”

What you would never know, from all this hand-wringing about “Islamophobia,” is that only a few weeks before the conference, the country’s media had reported on a popular imam in Biel who, in his sermons, “asked Allah to destroy the enemies of Islam — Jews, Christians, Hindus, Russians, and Shiites.” The imam in question, Abu Ramadan, preached that Muslims who befriended infidels were “cursed until the Day of Judgment” — which, of course, is not radical at all, but is straight out of the Koran.

Abu Ramadan has been living in Switzerland for almost two decades. In 1998, he came to the Alpine country from Libya as an asylum seeker, but over the years has returned home several times — in addition to visiting Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries. This fact should have automatically negated his right to asylum and resulted in his expulsion. But the years went by, and the government, ignoring the evidence right there on his passport, did nothing.

On the contrary: over the years, in fact, the Swiss state had given Ramadan the equivalent of $620,000 in welfare payments.

Reportedly, some public officials were well aware of his hate sermons — but until the content of those sermons surfaced in the media, nobody in the government had made any effort to do anything about him. Instead, people such as Interior Minister Berset and the members of the FCR had kept busy going to conferences and tarring the general public as “Islamophobes”.

At least one high-profile individual in Switzerland has long rejected the official line about successful Muslim integration and unfounded infidel Islam-hatred: Saïda Keller-Messahli. Of Tunisian descent, living in Zurich, she has spent years investigating institutional Islam in Switzerland and urging politicians to take action against it. Asked in a recent interview whether Abu Ramadan is an isolated case, Keller-Messahli said no: such preaching, she explained, is common in Swiss mosques, part of an international strategy to plant a “discriminatory” and “violent” Islam in Switzerland and elsewhere in the West.

Keller-Messahli has just published a book entitled, Switzerland: An Islamist Hub (“Islamistische Drehscheibe Schweiz”). It is sort of a field guide to Islam in Switzerland. The country’s mosques belong to various networks based here and there in the Muslim world; many of the imams have been trained in Egypt or Saudi Arabia; many of the mosques receive funding — and take orders — from organizations in Turkey. In her book, Keller-Messahli draws all the connections, follows all the money trails, and spells out the poisonous articles of faith. And she prescribes strong medicine: monitor the mosques, cut off the foreign cash, and expel the preachers of jihad.

For thirteen years in a row, Business Insider – citing its standard of living, health-care system, and high life expectancy – has put Norway at the top of its annual list of “best countries to live in.” The high life expectancy is an objective fact; the other items are a matter of debate. Norwegian health care? It works admirably, unless you require an operation or treatment that the government considers too expensive or for which there’s a waiting list. Standard of living? Incomes are high, but so are taxes.

But I’m not here to argue with Business Insider’s rankings. I’m here to point out an aspect of Norwegian life that never figures on any of these “best country” lists, whether put out by Business Insider or the United Nations or whomever. I’m talking about statism – the degree to which the state is a palpable part of everyday life.

Briefly put, Norway is pretty much statism central. I’m more accustomed to it now, but when I was first living here I was acutely aware every single day of the presence of the government in my life. I’m not talking about some abstract, theoretical phenomenon. It’s a real, palpable feeling. A feeling of being a bit less of an individual and a bit more part of a collective. An awareness that your eleven-digit “person number” (which includes your birth date) comes up a lot more often than your social-security number ever did back in the U.S. A sense of being covered by an umbrella, but also surrounded by a wall.

For the last four years, to be sure, Norway has had a supposedly non-socialist coalition government, led by the Conservative Party, with Labor heading up the socialist opposition. In the September 11 elections, the governing coalition was returned to power. But the non-socialist label is deceptive: whichever party or parties happen to be running the country at any given time, the public sector is overwhelmingly dominated by Labor and other leftist parties. While in power, the so-called conservatives may pass legislation signaling a bit more support for business interests or the military, but they never do anything that significantly reverses Norwegian statism.

Now, to live under a statist system is, as it were, to live in someone else’s house, and thus to live by their rules. Nanny Norway doesn’t think it’s good for you to drink. So she doesn’t allow anyone other than herself to sell liquor, and makes buying it as costly and troublesome as possible. In my town of 12,000 people, there’s one state-owned liquor outlet. Hours are limited. The tax on (for example) a bottle of vodka is 300%. Beer is more than twice as expensive as anywhere else on earth.

Nanny Norway thinks it’s best for you to eat at home, so going out to dinner is also a pricey proposition. Lunch? Almost nobody goes out to lunch. Years ago, in a New York Times article about Norway’s high prices, I made casual reference to the matpakke, the modest packed lunch – usually a sandwich or two wrapped in wax paper or aluminum foil – that Norwegians of all socioeconomic levels take to work. After VG, Norway’s largest daily, ran an article about my article, I received hundreds of emails and text messages – including death threats – savaging me for insulting a beloved national tradition.

“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