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April 2025

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Don’t Waste Your Time: Iran’s Mullahs Will Not Abandon Their Nuclear Program by Majid Rafizadeh

By on April 12th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21546/iran-will-not-abandon-nuclear-program

Tehran has played this game before: Agree to talks. Make vague promises. Extract sanctions relief. Then quietly continue nuclear development under the radar. This formula has worked for more than two decades. Right now, the only reason Iran is talking is to stall, to promise just enough to prevent America from striking it — “We are almost there!” — to keep its regime and avoid seeing its uranium centrifuges and enrichment sites blasted to rubble. The regime does not want war — but it also cannot accept total nuclear disarmament.

The Islamic Republic has smoothly outmaneuvered every administration. It has accepted deals to avoid confrontation, then quietly violated them. With each round of negotiations, Iran gained what it needed — time, money, legitimacy — and gave away nothing it could not reverse.

Worse, Iranian officials have themselves confirmed what skeptics have long argued: that the regime’s nuclear program was always military in nature. Former parliamentary speaker Ali Motahhari openly admitted in an interview that the Islamic Republic’s nuclear activities were initially designed to build weapons, not generate electricity. That was not a slip of the tongue. It was a rare moment of honesty from a system built on lies.

[W]orse yet, [the regime] could announce one day that it already possesses several nuclear bombs — and that there is nothing anyone can do about it. Will the world then be forced to live with a nuclear-armed theocracy that sponsors terrorism, oppresses its people, and seeks to export its ideology across the region? That does not sound like a cheery future to accept.

The Islamic Republic has demonstrated that it cannot be trusted to negotiate in good faith. It has lied, manipulated and deceived at every turn. Hoping for a different outcome, unfortunately, is self-deceptive make-believe.

Negotiations only serve to give Iran what it wants: time and space to complete its nuclear project. Axios reported on April 10 that “sources said the Iranians think reaching a complex and highly technical nuclear deal in two months is unrealistic and they want to get more time on the clock to avoid an escalation.”

After watching what happened to Libya after it gave up its nuclear weapons program, and to Ukraine when it gave up its warheads. Iran’s regime could hardly have any intention of abandoning their quest for the bomb. Diplomacy will not stop them. Appeasement will not deter them. The only solution, sadly, seems to be force. If the US and Israel fail to act now, we will soon be facing a world where the Islamic Republic of Iran has crossed the nuclear threshold and commands its bombs. Then what?

Negotiations for Iran’s mullahs are simply a sign of strategic necessity. The regime needs breathing room — and, most importantly, it needs to preserve what it sees as its ultimate insurance policy: a nuclear arsenal.

The Trump administration is once again engaging with the Iranian regime, this time in Oman, to encourage it to end its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs the way Libya’s late leader Muammar Ghaddafi did. As US President Donald J. Trump transparently put it: “I would love to make a deal with them without bombing them.”

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Next Year in Jerusalem Passover reminds us of whose land “Palestine” really is. by Robert Spencer

By on April 12th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/next-year-in-jerusalem/

Passover 2025 begins on the evening of Saturday, April 12, and runs through Sunday, April 20. This is now the second Passover since Hamas brutally massacred 1,200 Israelis on October 7, 2023, and a massive propaganda campaign began to convince the world that Israel is a “settler colonialist” state that is illegally occupying land that belongs to the “Palestinians,” who are supposedly the indigenous people of the land.

And so as Jews around the world once again read the Passover Haggadah, which tells the foundational story of their liberation from slavery in Egypt, they will once again repeat the concluding statement of the Passover Seder, just as they have repeated it throughout the ages: “Next year in Jerusalem.”

This indelible phrase is a reminder to the world, if the world were interested in paying attention, of the fact that Zionism did not begin in 1948, with the founding of the modern state of Israel, or in the nineteenth century with the work of pioneering Zionist Theodor Herzl. No, Zionism, the aspiration of the Jews to return to their homeland, is many centuries older than either one, and older also than the “Palestinian people,” a KGB propaganda invention of the 1960s.

Zionism is older than the Ottoman Empire, the now-dead Islamic caliphate that did all it could to prevent the nineteenth-century Zionist movement from attaining its goals. It is older than the United States of America, on which today’s haters of Jews and Israel insist that the Jewish state now depends for its existence. It is older than the religion of Islam, on which, with its deeply rooted hatred of Jews, the “resistance” of the “Palestinian” people is actually based, although Western policymakers steadfastly ignore this fact.

Whose land is it? Well, which people has longed to return there for twenty centuries and more?

Yet as Passover begins once again, the voices insisting that Israel has no right to the land it inhabits, and that the Jews there are white supremacist, colonialist occupiers, are more insistent than ever. As Antisemitism: History and Myth shows, the October 7 jihad massacre was the occasion for a clearly carefully planned recrudescence of Jew-hatred, including the reappearance of ancient lies that most people thought had died in the ashes of Berlin in April 1945. But this antisemitism is, as always, based on lies.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

The Dos and Don’s of Negotiating with Iran By Kenneth R. Timmerman

By on April 12th, 2025

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/04/the_do_s_and_don_ts_of_negotiating_with_iran.html

Shortly after then-Secretary of State John Kerry concluded talks with his Iranian counterpart that led to the 2015 nuclear agreement, the wizards at Google had already delivered judgment. When I typed in the phrase, “how not to buy a carpet” at Google images, the first result was a photo of the two foreign ministers and their aides, facing each other across the negotiating table in Lausanne.

The ever-smiling Mohammad Javad Zarif told Kerry three times they had a deal, but that he needed to go back to Tehran to run it by the “Supreme Leader.” And three times he came back, demanding more.

Donald Trump called the deal the United States finally signed, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), “the worst deal ever” and withdrew the United States from it in 2018. He was right.

The President’s Middle East special envoy, Steve Witcoff, recently admitted that he got “duped” by Hamas during negotiations in Qatar with Hamas-appointed Arab mediators.

Having worked in the Middle East as a war correspondent and investigative reporter for forty years, let me say it straight: if the Arabs managed to dupe Mr. Witcoff, the Iranians are going to take him to the cleaners.

So here are a few “do’s and dont’s” for Witcoff when he travels to Oman this weekend.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The Climate Crisis Con Game The climate crisis isn’t just a narrative—it’s the Left’s longest-running confidence game, leveraging fear for our children to loot wallets, liberties, and the public trust. By Thaddeus G. McCotter

By on April 12th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/04/12/the-climate-crisis-con-game/

The technical term is “confidence game.” A crook gains the confidence of a victim (the “mark”) and preys upon their naivety, greed, and/or fear. Ultimately, the duped mark gives their money and/or property to the crook willingly.

Consider this real-world example provided in Connie Fletcher’s 1991 book, What Cops Know: Today’s Police Tell the Inside Story of Their Work on America’s Streets, wherein an anonymous Chicago Police Department (CPD) detective reminisces about a con game he redressed:

“One of the superintendents of the Chicago Police Department—his aunt was taken for $15,000… She was a recent widow, Italian. And during this con, they sent her back to Italy to dig up her husband’s body and take a button off his vest. International phone calls were made between Chicago and Palermo, Italy, continuing the con on this woman, warning her that she must do these things in order to keep her three grandchildren safe. It was five thousand dollars for each grandchild.”

“When I went to the [lead con artist, Louis]… I said, ‘Louis, you cost these people [fifteen thousand] dollars.’ He said, ‘I was taking a curse off their children.’ ‘Louis, come on.’ ‘Listen, are those children safe today?’ ‘Yeah, they’re safe.’ ‘Then it’s off. The curse has been taken off them.’ I said, ‘Why did you charge them [fifteen thousand] dollars?’ He said, ‘It was to take the curse off.’”

While this seems a rather involved scam, boiled down to its essence, it aligns with the experience of another CPD detective: “The best con is the simplest con.” At its stony heart, the con preys upon a grandmother’s love and fears for her grandchildren to extort money from her.

Viewed in its proper light, then, what to make of the Left’s “climate crisis?”

Despite the lack of any remote consensus regarding the alarmists’ proclamations of an impending climate apocalypse, what to make of the leftist “experts” and politicians who implore a concerned public to trust the science—i.e., the selectively chosen science that purports to support their alarmist position and deepens the “mark’s” fears for their offspring and/or planet?

What to make of the left’s incessant warnings of impending environmental doom despite the failure of past dire prognostications to materialize?

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump, Trade, and the Tragedy of the Working Class Moynihan’s warnings on family breakdown echo louder than ever, as cultural decay—not just trade policy—lies at the heart of America’s working-class collapse. By Stephen Soukup

By on April 12th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/04/12/trump-trade-and-the-tragedy-of-the-working-class/

Last month marked the 60th anniversary of the first serious attempt on the part of social scientists to analyze and evaluate the collapse of the traditional family in American society. On March 1, 1965, the U.S. Department of Labor released a report written by then-Assistant Secretary (and future Senator) Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D, NY) on the dissolution of black families in America. That report, “The Negro Family:  The Case for National Action,” was both groundbreaking and enormously controversial. Sixty years later, the study remains groundbreaking. However, its conclusions are, sadly, no longer especially controversial, having been corroborated by endless data spanning decades and extending to every race, culture, and creed in the country. At some point, the rescue of the American family will either become a serious and urgent focus of societal action, or it will prove the undoing of the great American experiment.

Among other things, Moynihan noted in his report the existence and the pervasiveness of black poverty and the correlation between that poverty and the breakdown of the black nuclear family. In an attempt to explain why black economic advancement lagged behind both political advancement and the economic fortunes of other ethnic groups, Moynihan examined reams of data and endless studies on black family life. And what he found—a paradox which came to be known as “Moynihan’s Scissors”—was” that welfare and male unemployment in the black community no longer appeared to be nearly perfectly correlated, as they were in the past and in other populations.

As it turned out, male unemployment was diverging from welfare outlays because the family was breaking down. In other words, welfare made it possible for women—black women, in this case—to survive and raise their children without the children’s father present in the home. In turn, the absence of the father from the home became necessary for the collection of welfare. A vicious circle had been created, and it was exacerbating black poverty tremendously.

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