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Some Perspective On Iran  Francis Menton

Posted By on January 6th, 2020

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-1-5-some-perspective-on-iran

As you probably know, over the course of several weeks in December Iranian proxies known as the Kataib Hezbollah carried out multiple attacks against military installations in Iraq. On December 27, one of those attacks killed an American contractor, and wounded several other Americans and Iraqis, at the K1 military base near Kurkuk. Then on December 31 the same Iran-backed group stormed the U.S. embassy compound in Baghdad. On January 3, the U.S. military, under orders from President Trump, conducted a retaliatory strike that killed the leader of Iran’s so-called Quds Forces, Qasem Soleimani. Subsequently, Iran has threatened further rounds of retaliation against the U.S., although those have not occurred as of this writing.

Before getting too caught up in the tensions of the current moment, perhaps we should step back and look at how things have been going lately for Iran. The answer is, not very well. This is one of those things that you can figure out if you look around enough, but rarely is the information compiled in one place. So I’ll do it for you. As I have remarked before, the U.S. has been incredibly blessed over the years by the rank incompetence of its geopolitical adversaries. Think Russia, Cuba and North Korea as examples. China too, although I’ll save more detail on that one for a future post.

Iran’s population in 2020 (from worldometers.info) is just under 84 million. That is slightly more than 1% of world population, and makes Iran the second most populous country in the Middle East, after Egypt. And Iran has the seeming blessing of vast oil reserves.

So you would think that Iran would have a relatively large and growing economy. Not so. Iran’s GDP (IMF 2019 estimate) is only $458 billion, or about 0.57% of world GDP, and just over $5000 per capita. (For comparison, the per capita GDP of Mexico and China are around $10,000, Brazil about $9000, and the U.S. over $60,000.).

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB Comments turned off

FBI ABUSE, MORE BLACK AMERICANS GOING TO THE GOP, TRUMP DOCTRINE HUMILIATES ENEMIES AND THE LEFT

Posted By on January 6th, 2020

Inspector General Report Shows Special Counsel Replicated FBI Abuse
Margot Cleveland

https://thefederalist.com/2020/01/06/inspector-general-report-shows-special-counsel-replicated-fbi-abuses/

Shortly after the release of the special counsel report last year, I posited that Robert Mueller’s failure to investigate whether Russia interfered with the 2016 presidential election by feeding dossier author Christopher Steele disinformation established that Mueller was either incompetent or a political hack. Now, with the release of the inspector general’s report on FISA abuse, we know the answer: He was both.

Black Americans are coming home to the GOP Rebecca Hagelin

www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jan/5/black-americans-are-coming-home-gop/

They are bold, compassionate leaders who believe that every person is created equal by God himself. They understand that every human life has infinite value and limitless potential. They have suffered from some sort of discrimination — but are not bitter. Instead, they seek reconciliation, believe in redemption, and work to advance a more just society. They know that hard work, economic freedom, the preservation of the traditional family, and reducing government control are the keys to success.

And they are black Americans who support the policies of President Trump.

The Trump Doctrine Humiliates Both Foreign Enemies and Domestic Liberals
Kurt Schlichter,

https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2020/01/06/the-trump-doctrine-humiliates-both-foreign-enemies-and-domestic-liberals-n2558968?

This has been a really difficult time for Ben Rhodes, John Kerry, and the rest of the geniuses who zombie Neville Chamberlain recently hailed as “a flock of insufferable sissies crowded around the behind of America’s enemy, shamelessly smooching their dignity away.” Zapping Qassam Soleimani ruined an Iranian offensive that had started with such promise. When the dirtbag catspaws of the dirtbag Iranian mullahs surrounded the American embassy in Baghdad, American liberals were more excited than the old Weekly Standard’s staff would have been upon discovering that it was sharing one of its cruises with a pool boy and sexy gardener convention. Libs and their Fredocon submissives were practically salivating at the thought of fellow Americans being murdered by scuzzy foreigners and the opportunity such a tragedy would present for blaming Donald Trump. This was Trump’s Benghazi test, they chortled on social media.

 Yeah, except Trump passed his test.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

What Is the Middle East In the Middle Of Anymore? Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on January 6th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/01/05/what-is-the-middle-east-in-the-middle-of-anymore/

The United States is trying to square a circle, remaining strong and deterring dangerous elements, but to do so for U.S. interests—interests that increasingly seem to be fewer and fewer in the Middle East.

Since World War II, the United States has been involved in a series of crises and wars in the Middle East on the premise of protecting U.S., Western, or global interests, or purportedly all three combined. Since antiquity, the Middle East has been the hub of three continents, and of three great religions, and the maritime intersection between East and West.

In modern times American strategic concerns in no particular order were usually the following:

1) Guaranteeing reliable oil supplies for the U.S. economy.

2) Ensuring that no hostile power—most notably the Soviet Union between 1946-1989 and local Arab or Iranian strongmen thereafter—gained control of the Middle East and used its wealth and oil power to disrupt the economies and security of the Western world, Europe in particular.

3) Preventing radical Islamic terrorists from carving out sanctuaries and bases of operations to attack the United States or its close allies.

4) Aiding Israel to survive in a hostile neighborhood.

5) Keeping shipping lanes in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Suez Canal, and the Persian Gulf open and accessible to world commerce at the historical nexus of three continents.

6) To the extent we could articulate our interests, U.S. policy was reductionist and simply deterred any other major power for any reason from dominating the quite distant region.

7) Occasionally the United States sought to limit or stop the endemic bloodletting of the region.

Those various reasons explain why we tended to intervene in nasty places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, and Syria. Yet despite the sometimes humanitarian pretenses about our inventions in the Middle East, we should remember that we most certainly did not go commensurately into central Africa or South America to prevent mass killings, genocides, or gruesome civil wars.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Donald Trump Takes Out the Trash Daryl McCann

Posted By on January 6th, 2020

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/01/donald-trump-takes-out-the-trash/

Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) has just found another level of muddle and madness. I refer to the aftermath of the targeted assassination of Qasem Soleimani, commander of the Iran’s Quds Forces, the foreign legion division of Tehran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps on January 3. The problem with TDS is that it diminishes critical-thinking skills which means, paradoxically, groupthink is embraced without a skerrick of critical thinking. All we have are facts in the face of their fanaticism, and for that reason let us unemotionally consider the specifics of President Trump’s first televised explanation for terminating Soleimani. As Don McLean would say: “They would not listen/they do not know how/Perhaps they’ll listen now.”

The theme of President Trump’s rationale was this: “We took action last night to stop a war. We did not take action to start a war.” Whether or not this turns out to be true, let us at least recognise that Donald Trump’s thinking on foreign policy hardly fits the pattern of a warmonger, in the Middle East or anywhere else for that matter.

The “AP Fact Check” brings up the furphy that Donald Trump, then a private citizen, was for the Second Iraq War before he was against it, and yet all there is to this is a throwaway line, spoken on September 11, 2002, in response to a question about whether he would support a prospective invasion of Iraq: “Yeah, I guess so.” He also made a comment, in the context of America’s initial victory over Saddam Hussein’s army, that it “looks like a tremendous success from a military standpoint”.

Only after March 2003, according to the AP Fact Checker, did Trump become an outspoken critic of the Iraq War. What was intended as a brutal takedown of President Trump’s public statements by journalist Hope Yen shows something different. Before entering the White House, Trump exhibited little appetite for war. Not exactly in the Bernie Sanders category, to be sure, but definitely subdued. Donald Trump’s shortage of warmongery could just have easily been the basis of Hope Yen’s article. My own Quadrant Online Fact Check reveals, not so surprisingly, that the widely syndicated Hope Yen herself suffers from TDS. Her monomaniacal mission to disparage President Trump at every turn, never allowing any positive aspect of the man to see the light of day, is thinly disguised as “fact checking”.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The multiple faces of anti-Semitism For all their insistence that anti-Semitism is one thing and anti-Zionism something else entirely, however, on the streets of European and American cities, the two work hand-in-glove. Ben Cohen

Posted By on January 6th, 2020

https://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/the-multiple-faces-of-anti-semitism/

Several years ago, in an article for Commentary magazine, I offered a distinction between two kinds of anti-Semitic mindsets. I named the first one “bierkeller” anti-Semitism and the second one “bistro” anti-Semitism, as a way of illustrating the cultural gulf between these two forms.

Bierkellers, or “beer cellars,” were the drinking establishments in Germany that during the 1920s and ’30s were the domain of Nazi thugs. They also provided an arena for Adolf Hitler to refine his foaming gutter rhetoric targeting communism, liberalism, and most of all, the Jews. There was no attempt to camouflage or prettify any of this rhetoric, which loudly declared that the Jews were Germany’s misfortune. The thorough dehumanization of the Jews in Nazi propaganda prepared the ground for a decade of persecution that culminated in the Holocaust.

Bierkeller anti-Semitism, then, was unmistakable and instantly recognizable. But “bistro” anti-Semitism – named a bit mischievously in honor of the cozy restaurants and bars where metropolitan intellectuals tend to gather – was, I argued, harder to identify. That is because Jews as Jews are rarely the direct targets of these writings, speeches, parliamentary resolutions and so on. Instead, the bistro mindset relies upon qualifiers, codes and euphemisms that seek to separate “Jews” and “Judaism” from “Zionism,” “The State of Israel,” “The Jewish Establishment” and the other bugbears of progressives who advance anti-Semitic arguments while indignantly deflecting the charge of anti-Semitism as a reputational smear without foundation.

This contrast between the full-throated anti-Semitism that denies the Jews their humanity and the camouflaged anti-Semitism that denies the Jews their nationality isn’t the only difference. Arguably more important is the observation that the “bierkeller” form of anti-Semitism explicitly aims to visit physical violence upon Jews, whereas in its “bistro” form, protestations against Jewish power and privilege manifest in the main non-violently form: for example, boycott campaigns, demonstrations against pro-Israel and Zionist speakers on university campuses, the constant opprobrium poured upon the Jewish state in the halls of the United Nations, and by leading human-rights NGOs like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Immune from slogans The Left’s insistence on focusing on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s indictments only proves that it has little to offer voters on its own merits.

Posted By on January 6th, 2020

https://www.israelhayom.com/2020/01/03/immune-from-slogans/

The prime minister deliberated quite a bit on the matter of immunity. Unlike previous chapters in the saga of his investigations, where he knew how to prepare the groundwork, the current development caught him almost entirely unprepared. He had a short deadline and his political rivals are waiting around the corner. While he was able to shrug off the police’s recommendation to indict him with a quick press conference in which he mocked the cops (“So there will be recommendations, so what?”) this time, the game is different.

It’s not only a legal matter, but also – even mainly – a political one. The fact that he failed to win two elections and was twice unable to put together a governing coalition has cracked his self-confidence. Benjamin Netanyahu is facing an election, and it looks like for the first time, he doesn’t know what approach to take. How can he overcome the polls and the previous two election results and bring the right-wing bloc the 61 seats it needs? The decision to request immunity from prosecution was another Hail Mary pass in the shaky morass of uncertainty in which he is sinking.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Palestinians in Syria: Another Year of Death and Misery by Khaled Abu Toameh

Posted By on January 6th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15379/palestinians-syria-death-misery

The world, including the United Nations, Europe and other international human rights and “pro-Palestinian” organizations, have not moved to help the Palestinians of Syria in the past nine years — so, why should this year be any different?

How has this terrible dismissal come to pass? Simple: Because these Palestinians’ problems cannot be blamed on Israel. They are being killed and tortured in an Arab country, by their own brothers, and as far as the world is concerned, as long as there is no way to hold Israel responsible, it is fine for Arabs to commit atrocities against their Palestinian brothers.

The Arab countries have long proven that their sole interest in the Palestinians is to use them as puppets to serve the interests of Arab dictators and corrupt Arab regimes. The Palestinians in Syria have long known that, for them, no Arab country is a safe haven.

It appears it is going to be another bad year for the Palestinians in Syria as they continue to face death and fall victim to various repressive measures, including displacement, torture, and extra-judicial killings.

It is unlikely, however, that 2020 will witness any change in the international community’s attitude towards the plight of the Palestinians there. The world, including the United Nations, Europe and other international human rights and “pro-Palestinian” organizations, have not moved to help the Palestinians of Syria in the past nine years — so, why should this year be any different?

How has this terrible dismissal come to pass? Simple: Because these Palestinians’ problems cannot be blamed on Israel. They are being killed and tortured in an Arab country, by their own brothers, and as far as the world is concerned, as long as there is no way to hold Israel responsible, it is fine for Arabs to commit atrocities against their Palestinian brothers.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Thanks to the President, U.S. Policy Heading in the Right Direction by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on January 6th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15378/us-iran-policy-soleimani

“… you should know that I… control the policy for Iran with respect to Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza, and Afghanistan.” — The late Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani, to US General David Petraeus, The Guardian, July 28, 2011.

Under Soleimani’s rule, Iran’s military was also implicated in the 9/11 attacks.

To the likely dismay of Washington’s critics, President Trump’s Iran policy has been heading in the right direction. Maximum pressure is the right policy to bridle this predatory regime.

The critics of President Trump’s Iran policy have been proven wrong once again: Not only have the US sanctions imposed significant pressure on the ruling mullahs of Iran and their ability to fund their terror groups, but in addition, President Trump recently ordered a game-changing military attack that killed both Iranian Major-General Qassem Soleimani, head of the elite Quds Force, and Iraqi militia commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis near the Baghdad airport.

According to the US Department of Defense, Soleimani “was actively developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region.”

The unexpected death of Soleimani should be regarded as a severe blow to the ruling mullahs. When it comes to authority in the Islamic Republic, Soleimani was considered Iran’s second man after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

A staunchly loyal confidante to Khamenei, Soleimani enjoyed enormous influence over dictating the Iranian regime’s foreign policy. Soleimani was not bragging when he wrote in a message to US Gen. David Petraeus:

“… you should know that I, Qassem Suleimani, control the policy for Iran with respect to Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza, and Afghanistan. And indeed, the ambassador in Baghdad is a Quds Force member. The individual who’s going to replace him is a Quds Force member.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

With rising anti-Semitism, New Yorkers rally to hate Trump while hating “hate” By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on January 6th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/with_rising_antisemitism_new_yorkers_rally_to_hate_trump_while_hating_hate.html

Thanks to conservative Jewish friends in New York, I knew that there was going to be a rally on Sunday to speak out against the rising number of anti-Semitic attacks in the New York City region, both in New York State and in New Jersey. I also knew that they were concerned that the rally, rather than bringing black and Jewish communities together, would end up as a Leftist fest.They were correct.

We’ve already written here about a very malignant mindset affecting a small, but growing subset, of urban blacks, which manifests itself in violent, or demeaning, anti-Semitic attacks. The problem, happily, is not black culture at large. It’s limited to the effect that (a) Islam and (b) Progressivism are having on New York area urban black culture.

Progressives, from Mayor DeBlasio on down, ignore the evidence about the perpetrators of these anti-Semitic attacks and instead choose (1) to blame Trump, although none of the perpetrators in the New York region have appeared to be Trump supporters, and (2) to blame Jews, just for being, which is apparently more than enough to cause offense.

So it was that, according to non-progressive Jewish attendees, the rally against anti-Semitism quickly become an intersectionality gathering, complete with Trump Derangement Syndrome and Israel bashing, along with promises to fight some sort of generic “hate.” It was, in its way, reminiscent of when the House was going to censure Ilhan Omar’s open anti-Semitism but eventually resolved that House members were against all types of -isms, including but not limited to anti-Semitism.

I don’t have to take my friends’ words for it. Many attendees posted pictures on Twitter. One gal, Simone Zimmerman, was good enough to take a lot of photos.  Because she’s a Leftist herself, she was completely on board with the “blame it on Trump” attitude – never mind that there has never been an American president with warmer feelings toward Jews (including his beloved daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren) or towards Israel:

Simone Zimmerman @simonerzim
Replying to @simonerzim

Stating simple fact- that trump bears responsibility – has already inspired multiple ppl to come up to us, call us Kapos, question our Jewishness & our legitimacy and tell us to go home. Fighting antisemitism is political and there is no such thing as Jewish unity. #NoHateNoFear

FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Trump gives Iran and Congress a warning about America’s future plans By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on January 6th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/trump_gives_iran_and_congress_a_warning_about_americas_future_plans.html

Predictably, following the targeted strike on General Qasem Soleimani when he stepped onto Iraq soil, Iran responded with its usual bombastic, existential (and, of course, anti-Israel) threats. What must have surprised the mullahs was that Trump, rather than countering with vague diplomatic language, gave as good as he got. That was Saturday. On Sunday, Trump upped the ante.

As you may recall, on Saturday, the mullahs promised to bomb American targets, destroy shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, and attack Israel:

[Gen. Gholamali] Abuhamzeh, commander of the Revolutionary Guards in the southern province of Kerman, foreshadowed a possible attack on “vital American targets” located in the Strait of Hormuz in retaliation of Soleimani’s death.

“The Strait of Hormuz is a vital point for the West and a large number of American destroyers and warships cross there,” Abuhamzeh said according to a Reuters report, citing Tasnim news agency.

“Vital American targets in the region have been identified by Iran since long time ago … some 35 U.S. targets in the region, as well as Tel Aviv, are within our reach.”

Each of those threats is unlikely. The mullahs know that if they touch the American homeland, none will survive the next few hours. They also know that the American military is feeling unconstrained under Trump and will respond ferociously to any attacks on military targets. Israel, with Trump in the White House, will also go full speed ahead should Iran target it. Lastly, with America now a major oil exporter and Israel a major natural gas producer, the threat to the Strait of Hormuz matters significantly less.