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It Is Time for NATO to Confront Iran by Con Coughlin

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19125/nato-ukraine-iran

For decades Tehran has consistently lied about the true extent of its nuclear ambitions, so it should come as no surprise that Iran’s instinctive response when confronted about its military support for Russia has been to issue a denial.

Iran’s belated admission that it is actively supporting the Russian war effort is certainly an alarming development, one that completely destroys the argument that Iran’s malign activities are solely confined to the Middle East.

The implications of Iran’s deepening involvement in the Ukraine conflict can no longer be ignored, as they now constitute a direct threat to European security, a development that Nato leaders need to take on board as a matter of urgency.

Nato has already demonstrated a welcome display of unity in providing vital military support for Ukraine in its battle to defeat Russian aggression. Nato leaders must now take similar measures to support all those states, whether they are in Europe or the Middle East, that want to protect themselves against Iran’s intimidating conduct.

Iran’s belated admission that it has provided Russia with sophisticated drones to boost its war effort in Ukraine should serve as a wake up call to all those Western policymakers who claim the threat posed by Tehran’s aggressive regime is only limited to the Middle East region.

Despite credible reports that Russian forces have been deploying Iranian-made drones to launch attacks against Ukraine’s critical infrastructure, inflicting electricity and water shortages on the country’s civilian population, Tehran has consistently denied the weapons originated from Iran.

Egyptians: We Do Not Want the Islamists to Return to Power by Khaled Abu Toameh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19124/egypt-islamists

The Islamists, in other words, failed in their latest attempt to instigate unrest and violence in Egypt with the hope of returning to power.

President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and many other Egyptians seem to prefer less democracy and freedom of speech to the return of the Islamists to power.

“The Muslim Brotherhood’s eyes are on [wanting] the authority to control the people who rejected them.” — Moneer Adib, Egyptian counter-terrorism expert, Al-Ain, November 14, 2022.

“They lied to the Egyptians when they said that they were good for Egypt and when they claimed that they had magical solutions to the economic, social and religious problems.” — Ahmed El-Messiri, Egyptian former Muslim Brotherhood member, Al-Ain, November 11, 2022.

Habusha warned that the Islamists’ “desperate attempts” to undermine Egypt and its people are not accepted because the Egyptians said no to the organization 2013.

The collective sigh of relief expressed by Egyptians over the failure of the Islamists to ruin their country and return to power is a refreshing approach in Egypt and other Arab countries. It is good to see that the Egyptians are eager to keep the Muslim Brotherhood away from their lives and centers of power.

It now remains to be seen whether the Palestinians will follow suit and get rid of the Iranian-backed Islamists in the Gaza Strip, where they have destroyed the lives of tens of thousands of Palestinians. Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad continue to hold the two million Palestinians of the Gaza Strip hostage, offering them terror attack tunnels and weapons instead of schools and hospitals.

It also remains to be seen whether the apologists in the West who continue to search for ways to appease Iran’s mullahs and other Islamists will learn from the Egyptians’ horrific experiences and distance themselves from the terrorists.

Is the banned Muslim Brotherhood organization trying to return to power in Egypt?

Many Egyptians believe that the Muslim Brotherhood was behind calls to Egyptians to hold nationwide protests during the UN Climate Change Conference (COP27), which is now in progress at the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm al-Sheikh. The Islamists, they say, justified their call by arguing that the planned demonstrations were designed to protest human rights violations and bad economic conditions in Egypt.

A True Progressive Top Court Takes On Climate Change: The Case Of Germany Francis Menton

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-11-14-how-a-true-progressive-top-court-handles-climate-change-the-case-of-germany

Two of my recent posts have looked at critiques from the left of the Supreme Court’s decision in West Virginia v. EPA — the June 30 decision that held that the Clean Air Act did not clearly give EPA authority to order the phase-out of all fossil-fuel generated electricity in the U.S. My July 5 post, “How To Think Like A Liberal Supreme Court Justice,” summarized Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent in the West Virginia case. My September 12 post, “How The Left Views Administrative Law,” discussed the presentation at the Federalist Society convention by Professor Sally Katzen of NYU Law School, where she stated her belief that EPA did have the authority in question, and criticized the Court for having taken “an extreme action to shut down rule-making.”

But the Kagan dissent and Katzen presentation are just critiques of the approach to this matter taken by our constitutionalist-dominated Supreme Court. A separate question is, what would the liberals do if they suddenly found themselves in control of the top court — say, if a new Democrat-controlled Congress decides to create six new justices to be appointed by President Biden?

At the lunch following the panel where Professor Katzen spoke, I found myself sitting next to two lawyers who had come from Germany to attend the convention. One of them said to me, in essence, you have no idea what a country’s top court might do when it feels that its powers are unconstrained. He then referred me, on the subject of climate change, to a Decision from the German Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht) from March 2021; and he gave me sufficient pointers to find information about the Decision in English.

It turns out that the Constitutional Court has an English-language portion of its website, where can be found both a press release of April 29, 2021, summarizing the Decision, as well as a full translation of the Decision itself. The full Decision has some 270 “paragraphs,” some quite long, and would likely be around 200 pages if typed out in the format used by our courts. It is unanimous, and there are no concurrences or dissents. Unlike cases from our Supreme Court, the Decision does not have a caption naming plaintiffs and defendants. They suggest referring to the Decision as the “Order of the First Senate of 24 March 2021.” (The Constitutional Court is divided into two halves, called “Senates,” of eight judges each. They divide the cases between themselves based on subject matter.)

A Cold Winter for Europe: Blame Strategic Blindness by Burak Bekdil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19065/europe-energy-strategic-blindness

In 2008, the “flawless democrat” Putin invaded Georgia. The West was shocked. Putin critics… were shocked that the West was shocked. In 2014, Putin invaded the Crimean Peninsula, sovereign Ukrainian territory. The West remained shocked. In February 2022, Putin invaded Ukraine and annexed parts of the sovereign state. Was the West still shocked? It should not have been.

Apparently the “flawless democrat” Putin is hoping to weaponize winter and force Europe to surrender, but giving in to the Kremlin would be disastrous.

The EastMed pipeline project was designed to improve Europe’s energy security by diversifying its routes and sources and providing direct interconnection to the production fields while reducing dependence on Russian gas supplies…. U.S. President Joe Biden stepped in with a historic strategic miscalculation that came with a strategic cost: appeasing NATO’s pro-Putin, part-time ally Turkey and jeopardizing Europe’s energy security.

Only a few weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine in February, Biden surprised the EastMed partners by abruptly withdrawing U.S. support for the pipeline, thereby effectively killing the project, preventing a diversified energy supply to Europe, and further assuring Putin’s energy blackmail against Europe.

The White House said the $6.7 billion project was antithetical to its “climate goals.” Biden presumably hopes no one will actually still be using fossil fuels by 2025, the date for the planned completion of the EastMed pipeline. The Biden administration also cited a supposed lack of economic and commercial viability, even though a 2019 study financed by the EU confirmed that “the EastMed Project is technically feasible, economically viable and commercially competitive.”

If the Europeans freeze this winter or must pay sky-high bills, they should drink a toast to the likes of Schroeder and Biden.

The story goes back to early 2000’s when German’s then Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder decided to develop strategic relations between Berlin and Moscow. He went so far as to offer partnership to Russia in EADS, a multinational European defense and aerospace powerhouse. In November 2004, Schroeder called Russian President Vladimir Putin a “flawless democrat.” Unsurprisingly, in 2004, Schroeder hailed Turkey’s Islamist autocrat, then prime minister (now president) Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as a “great reformer.”

In Egypt, Climate Catastrophism as Usual Michael Kile

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2022/11/climate-business-as-usual-in-egypt/

Another year, another United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP) on how to persuade the bogeyman of our age, climate change (CC), to cease misbehaving. Time – and money – is running out yet again.

With more than 30,000 delegates attending this “watershed moment” – yes, over 30,000 — COP27 will be full of sound and fury, dire warnings, purveyors of dodgy carbon credits (including the UN’s own carbon offset platform), utopian fantasists and the usual crowd of jeremiahs, politicians and bureaucrats preaching “climate chaos”. Many will have form too, having spent years hyping the issue at every opportunity.

The event is being held in Sharm El Sheikh, a resort city located at the southern tip of Egypt’s South Sinai Protectorate. There has not been as much excitement there since the 1967 Six-Day War. The discovery of the Great Green Pyramid of Gaia a decade ago in the Ruba’ el-Khali (Empty Abode) also drew world attention to the region.

As the days turn into weeks, around midnight on the final day “transformative climate solutions”  could emerge from COP27’s so-called “innovation hubs”. If so, they will include demands for more climate finance. Yet many developed countries are themselves moving closer to recession (or worse) after joining the UN’s Race to Zero. Aptly named, given its ultimate destination is surely the Valley of the Jackals or the Tomb of Anubis.

That said, the Race to Zero is promising to deliver virtually everything on a green activist’s wish list: “A healthy, resilient, zero carbon recovery that prevents future threats, creates decent jobs, and unlocks inclusive, sustainable growth.” Led by “high-level champions” Mahmoud Mohieldin and Nigel Topping, it strives to “mobilize actors outside of national governments to join the Climate Ambition Alliance.”

The Dangerous Nexus: Russia and Iran’s Mullahs by Majid Rafizadeh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19100/iran-russia-nexus

The Iranian regime, which has long argued that it is not seeking to develop nuclear weapons… has lately changed its tone and is boasting that it currently has the ability to build a nuclear bomb.

Biden’s new nuclear deal, if reached, will also allow Russia to cash in on a $10 billion contract to further expand Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.

Sadly, this still seems to be the legacy that the Biden administration wants to leave: Iran’s predatory regime, the top state sponsor of terrorism, armed with nuclear bombs, and an empowered Russia that does not hesitate to use aggression and military force to invade other countries.

No wonder Biden is being called a “Russian stooge.”

The Iranian regime is now providing weapons and troops to Russia with full impunity. What are the ruling mullahs of Iran getting in return?

First of all, Iran’s theocratic establishment is rushing to cross the nuclear threshold in order to become a nuclear-armed state. Iran wants Russia to help it bolster and speed up its nuclear program. On October 24, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky accurately warned:

“In eight months of full-scale war, Russia has used almost 4,500 missiles against us. And their stock of missiles is dwindling. Therefore, Russia went looking for affordable weapons in other countries to continue its terror. It found them in Iran.”

How They Count Votes in Brazil Augusto Zimmermann

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2022/11/how-they-count-votes-in-brazil/

The second round of Brazil’s presidential elections was held on Sunday, October 30. The former president, Lula da Silva, who has served prison time for corruption, apparently won 50.90% of the vote and the incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro, received 49.10%. In other words, Lula was declared winner with less than 1 per cent lead over Bolsonaro. This is according to judges of the Superior Electoral Tribunal (TSE), Brazil’s top electoral authority. It was an unexpected comeback for the former president, who was directly responsible for the biggest series of corruption scandals in the nation’s history.[1] Lula is “back at the scene of the crime”, according to the description made not a long time ago by his own vice-president in the presidential ticket. According to J.R. Guzzo, one of Brazil’s most accomplished journalists, the 2022 election in Brazil has been “a legal and political fraud as we have never seen in this country”.[2]  In an article entitled De Volta à Cena do Crime (Back at the Scene of the Crime), he commented:

Lula returned to the presidency via the general collapse of the Constitution and Brazilian laws throughout the electoral process – the result of an unprecedented meddling of the judiciary, which was entirely illegal in each step of the process. The basic fact is that the judiciary, with Justice Alexandre de Moraes issuing orders and Lula in the role of its sole beneficiary, did everything it could for any neutral observer to conclude this was a rigged election … Basically, Supreme Court justices and its electoral arm, the Superior Electoral Tribunal, put together piece by piece a mechanism designed to favour the leftist candidate. The first step was for these unelected judges to simply overturn the four criminal convictions against Lula and, with it, perform the “magic” of disappearing with all the dirty record which precluded him from being a candidate.[3] 

But there is a rather decisive international element in Lula’s victory as well. Just after a few outlets called the election in Brazil, U.S. President Joe Biden orchestrated a rapid international embrace of Lula. In a statement released immediately after the result was officially announced, Biden claimed that Lula had won “following free, fair, and credible elections”.[4]  In short order, Canada’s Justin Trudeau, French President Emmanuel Macron, and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak all released statements congratulating Lula. “The people of Brazil have spoken”, said Trudeau, writing within an hour and a half of the result.[5]

In August 2021, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan visited Brazil to issue the following warning to the Brazilian president: do not even dare even to question the reliability of your country’s electronic voting system.[6] A month earlier, in July 2021, the newly installed Biden sent his CIA director, William Burns, to travel to the country to meet with senior Brazilian officials. During that meeting, the U.S. delegation warned the Brazilian government that President Bolsonaro “should stop casting doubt in his country’s [entirely electronic] electoral process”.[7] Next, at the June 2022  Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles, the Biden administration notoriously repeated the same warning that the U.S. government would not tolerate Bolsonaro casting any doubt on the reliability and security of the nation’s voting machines.[8] Since these messages came before the outcome of the election, this was a clear warning of dire consequences should the Brazilian president contest the alleged fairness and transparency of the electoral process

France Sliding toward Barbarity and Chaos by Guy Millière

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19080/france-barbarity-chaos

Hundreds of thousands of immigrants enter Europe illegally each year. Many head for France and stay there. They have been benefiting, since 2000, from financial aid and free medical care to which even poor French citizens do not have access. If they are arrested, like Lola’s murderer, they are ordered to leave the country, but are not placed in a detention center so the order, never enforced, is not an order at all. In 2020, 107,500 orders to leave France were issued; fewer than 7% took place.

Approximately 48% of all crimes committed in Paris in 2021, he notes, were committed by illegal immigrants. Murders almost as gruesome as Lola’s — most of which are committed by illegal immigrants — are committed nearly every day. No one even mentions them. The victims often have their throats slit.

Maurice Berger, a psychiatrist, speaks of “gratuitous violence”: violence for no other reason than the pleasure of committing it. He reports that in France, gratuitous violence resulting in injury or death happens, on average, every two minutes. France reports more than two hundred rapes a day.

In L’archipel français (“The French Archipelago”)… sociologist Jérome Fourquet writes of a French “collective nervous breakdown” and the “crumbling” of French society. He notes that the religious and historical moorings of the French people are disappearing: churches are empty, important moments in the country’s history are no longer taught in schools… France’s Muslim population, on the other hand, maintains its culture, customs and traditions, assimilates into French society less and less, and appears more and more filled with contempt and hatred for France…

Speaking about a “great replacement” of the population in France is taboo. Anyone who does it is immediately demonized and described as a follower of conspiracy theories. But the numbers are clear… In addition to hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants already in France, approximately 400,000 more immigrants from Africa and the Arab world enter France each year. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of French people emigrate from France annually. In 2018, the most recent year for which figures are available, 270,000 French people left. Over the past 20 years, the number of French people living abroad has increased by 52%.

Whenever someone is arrested, injured or killed by the police in or near a no-go zone, riots break out. When an arrest turns violent, the police are asked to let criminals seeking refuge in a no-go zone escape. The government evidently fears that a larger conflagration might occur.

Inside classrooms, in high schools and primary schools, the French educational system is subject to Islamic intimidation…. Those who might have thought that the beheading of Samuel Paty would lead the authorities to make drastic decisions were proven wrong. Today, teachers throughout France report the relentless threats they receive. In the complaints they file, many say that Muslim students threaten “doing a Samuel Paty” to them.

Economically, France is in decline. French GDP has gone from fifth in the world in 1980 to tenth today…. France is among the European countries which impose the heaviest tax burden on its population (45.2% of GDP in 2022). France also has the highest level of public expenditure in the developed world (57.9% of GDP in 2022) — and an increasing share of public expenditure goes toward financial aid to immigrants, legal and illegal…. Taxes, however, are insufficient to pay for these public expenses….

“Worse than the rise of barbarity is the feeling that our leaders are in denial and unable to take the strong and effective decisions that would be necessary to ensure the protection of the population. Barbarity spreads when the authorities no longer know how to be the guarantors of law and order.” — Céline Pina, author, Le Figaro, October 19, 2022.

“You Think You Can Run Away?”: The Persecution of Christians, by Raymond Ibrahim

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19081/persecution-of-christians-september

In the video, the 36-year-old mother of three] appears naked, with both of her arms and legs cut off. One of her eyes is clearly gouged out. A severed finger appears sticking out of her mouth, and another appears to be sticking out of her private parts. The Muslim soldiers videotaping their handiwork… can be heard laughing and joking in the background. Video footage similarly showed Azerbaijani soldiers overpowering and forcing down an elderly Armenian man, who cries and implores them for mercy, as they casually carve at his throat with a knife. — Video, September 13, 2022, Azerbaijan/Armenia.

Bashir threatened the Christians: “If you continue insisting that Jesus is the Son of God, then Allah will kill all of you.” — “Bashir,” before drowning five Christians, Morningstar News, September 8, 2022, Uganda.

“There is still no breathing space for Christian communities in southern Kaduna, as terrorists, jihadists, bandits and armed herdsmen have continued to plunder and wreck Christian communities in the southern part of Kaduna state.” — Statement from the Southern Kaduna Peoples Union on extensive murders, saharareporters.com, September 19, 2022.

The following are among the abuses Muslims inflicted on Christians throughout the month of September 2022:

The Muslim Slaughter of Christians

Iran: Old Recipes From the Devil’s Kitchen by Amir Taheri

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19088/iran-recipes-devil

By the time of this writing, we had the names of 385 protesters killed, including 40 women and 32 children, and 7 security men. A further 12,500 people have been arrested, according to statistics presented to the International Committee of the Red Cross.

“People just don’t believe what our authorities say,” complains former Islamic Majlis (parliament) member Masud Pezeshkian.

Living in another time zone that bears no relation to reality, the Khomeinist regime is deeply anachronistic. It boasts about conquering the world for the Khomeinist version of Islam while not a single nation has bought or is likely to buy that bundle.

While it lives in another time, the Khomeinist regime also thinks it lives on another planet.

The Supreme Guide boasts of his imaginary triple alliance with China and Russia to “end American domination”. But the fact is that neither China nor Russia is prepared to put a penny into the Khomeinist begging bowl.

Even if it weathers the current storm, the Khomeinist system is on life-support and borrowed time.

Even in new versions, the old recipe from the devil’s kitchen won’t whet the Iranian people’s appetite.

The kitchen is the same, as is the chef. The ingredients are also the same. But when the witches’ brew is served in the restaurant, Chez Ayatollah, would-be clients reject it in disgust. This is the image that comes to mind as the Islamic Republic of Iran struggles to crush the latest popular revolt.