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Ruth King

Once-in-a-Lifetime Opportunity: Defeat Iran’s Oppressive Regime by Majid Rafizadeh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21273/defeat-iran-regime

Iran’s mullahs would surely love nothing more than to cut a deal with the incoming Trump administration that would enable them to stay in power, build their nuclear weapons and unleash them at a later date.

Bribing adversaries to stop only provides funding, which finances their military so they can attack us later with bigger weapons. That is how North Korea and Iran built their nuclear weapons programs. China’s was built by direct investment: a gift to kill us from Uncle Sam.

Let us please ensure that Iran’s brutal theocratic tyranny will be gone for good. So long as it holds power, there will never be a peaceful future for the Middle East.

Rarely in history does an opportunity arise to confront a brutal regime that has not only oppressed its own population but also destabilized the world by support for terrorism and terrorist allies.

The Iranian regime is such a dictatorship. For more than four decades, this regime has systematically crushed the rights and freedoms of its citizens, and silenced dissent through violence, imprisonment and execution.

Beyond its borders, Iran’s regime has acted as a malignant force, spreading instability by funding and arming proxy groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis, while forming alliances with regimes hostile to the US and the West in regions as far-flung as China and Latin America. The regime’s actions have sown chaos and bloodshed across the globe, leaving a trail of destruction and despair. Now, for the first time in decades, the Iranian regime is at its weakest point, presenting a rare moment of unity for its adversaries to strike decisively to ensure a long-term future of stability and peace.

Thomas Hogan Biden and Garland’s Clemency Cloud of Shame The sentencing commutations follow a long record of dereliction and misjudgment.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/biden-commutes-prison-death-sentences-garland

With their recent commutation of death sentences for federal prisoners, President Joe Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland are leaving office not in a blaze of glory but under a cloud of shame.

The clemencies seem like a culmination to a long record of dereliction and misjudgment. Biden and Garland spent the last few years lamenting the death toll of Americans killed by fentanyl, with overdoses and the accompanying violence of drug dealing resulting in more than 100,000 deaths per year, according to the administration’s own threat assessment. Meantime, Biden left the nation’s southern border wide open, allowing drug traffickers easy passage to bring more fentanyl into the United States. For his part, the attorney general issued his infamous Garland Memo, telling federal prosecutors not to impose mandatory minimum sentences on fentanyl traffickers (and other drug dealers) unless the dealers met a byzantine list of requirements for prior violence, leadership roles, and criminal history, conditions virtually impossible to prove for shadowy drug couriers operating outside the United States.

The president had repeatedly stated that he would not pardon his son Hunter Biden, even as the younger Biden was convicted at trial of firearms offenses and then pled guilty to tax offenses. President Biden claimed the moral high ground, allegedly respecting the rule of law. Then Donald Trump won the election. With tallying of the election returns barely completed, Biden did an abrupt about-face, pardoning his son as sentencing proceedings loomed. The president did not merely pardon Hunter for the two federal cases in which he already had been convicted but for any conduct going back to 2014—a postdated, decade-long get-out-of-jail-free card designed to shield Hunter from some unsavory financial transactions that might have implicated the “big guy,” a term that government whistleblowers claim refers to the president himself.

And this was just a prelude. Supported by Garland’s Department of Justice, Biden then commuted the prison sentences of nearly 1,500 convicted federal criminals, the largest such grant ever given by an American president. Biden touted the historical nature of his action, claiming that the criminals affected had demonstrated “a strong commitment to making their communities safer.” But Biden and Garland must not have been paying close attention to whom they were granting their favors, as they managed to include a commutation for corrupt former judge Michael Conahan. Conahan was one of the infamous “kids-for-cash” judges in Pennsylvania who sentenced juveniles to prison in exchange for millions of dollars in kickbacks, a scheme that affected more than 2,500 children and involved the suicide of at least one young man.

Now the Hard Work Begins The battle ahead. by Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/now-the-hard-work-begins/

The Christmas and New Year festivities have been joyous for us Americans who have suffered through the four years of incompetence and malignity inflicted upon us by the previous administration, the most dysfunctional since at least World War II. Both at home and abroad, a Democrat party hijacked by the left-over left defied nature and nature’s God with policies and programs astonishing for their gross violations of reality and morality, not to mention common sense and the laws of science.

But as we rejoice over our deliverance, and look hopefully to January 20, we should gird our loins and steel ourselves for the fight to come, starting with whatever feckless policies that lame-duck Biden’s puppeteers manage to get passed. The damage to our culture and Constitutional order has deep roots, and has poisoned our institutions and culture both openly and so insidiously that even those who know better still tolerate or endorse the same policies that have weakened our Republic.

Most of us can catalogue the examples of Democrat malfeasance. Take the “renewable energy” and “net-zero carbon” grift that has disrupted our economy and fed inflation in a nation blessed with huge reserves of oil and natural gas, enough to make us energy self-sufficient. But no, the Lefty Dems have been addled by the scientifically dicey “global warming” hypothesis tarted up with lurid apocalyptic panic and promiscuous scientism, all greased by corporate subsidies and tax incentives that have befouled the free market, and created a huge moral hazard for the future. At the same time, an already existing, actually “clean and renewable energy”––nuclear power–– has been put on the shelf and starved of funding, while billions are squandered on intermittent solar and wind energy that enriches China.

Another Dem failure to “follow the science” is the transgender fad preying on neurotic children and teens. Science tells us that mammals are either males and females that together procreate, yet doctors presumably trained scientifically are openly poisoning children with puberty blockers and cross-hormone treatments, then move on to irreversible surgeries that leave their victims mutilated for life. Whether through greed or misplaced “compassion,” doctors are blatantly violating their Hippocratic Oath that in the original Greek requires physicians not just to do no harm, but to benefit their patients.

Nor should we forget the Uniparty’s feckless economic policies that print, borrow, tax, spend, and redistribute trillions of dollars to political clients. Or what Rudyard Kipling called “Robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul,” and Churchill dubbed “Government of the dole-drawers, by the dole-drawers, and for the dole-drawers.” The unscientific mitigation policies and spending sprees during the Covid pandemic damaged millions of people, and flooded the economy with more money chasing fewer goods, the eternal formula for inflation.

Obama’s ‘Censorship’ Office Goes Bankrupt The State Department’s Global Engagement Center, accused of censoring U.S. media while combating disinformation, lost funding and was shut down after allegations of overreach and bias. By Gabe Kaminsky

https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/02/obamas-censorship-office-goes-bankrupt/

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.

he Global Engagement Center, an office housed within the State Department and aiming to thwart disinformation and misinformation, has been forced by Congress to close up shop. It’s no mystery why; the taxpayer-backed GEC violated its mandate to work only overseas and devolved into a partisan enabler of speech suppression in the United States.

Here’s how.

Founded in 2016 and technically the product of an Obama-era executive order on counterterrorism, the GEC lapsed in December and lost congressional funding. Over the last two years, my investigative reporting in the Washington Examiner as well as that of Racket News journalist Matt Taibbi pulled back the curtain of the GEC’s ties to foreign and domestic NGOs trying to defund news outlets they say peddle disinformation – including RealClearPolitics. My reporting showed that the GEC and the State Department-funded National Endowment for Democracy combined granted almost $1 million to the British Global Disinformation Index, which created a blacklist of U.S.-based websites that published content it determined to push “adversarial narratives” and then pressured advertisers to shut them down (think the Hunter Biden laptop story and COVID-19 lab leak hypothesis).

The GEC, moreover, was involved with the Election Integrity Partnership, a consortium of left-wing nonprofit groups, universities, and federal agencies that pressured Twitter and Facebook to remove GOP-aligned content in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election. The GEC also bankrolled New York-based company NewsGuard, a “misinformation” tracker that, along with the Global Disinformation Index, has found itself at the center of a lawsuit brought by the Federalist, the Daily Wire, and the State of Texas against the GEC for allegedly funding an unconstitutional “censorship scheme” that suppressed voices on the right.

Taibbi, the former Rolling Stone writer, demonstrated that the GEC pressured social media platforms in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic to moderate extensive content, testifying to Congress in March 2023, “We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation ‘requests’ from every corner of government: the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA.”

Germany’s New Morgenthau Plan Eighty years ago, Germany’s former conquerors rejected wrecking the defeated nation as too harsh. But now Germany is willfully pastoralizing, disarming, deindustrializing—and destroying—itself. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/02/germanys-new-morgenthau-plan/

Less than a year before the end of World War II, then U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau drew up a nightmarish plan to punish postwar Germany.

After the serial 1870-1871 Franco-Prussian War, World War I, and World War II—along with the failed Versailles peace treaty of 1919—the Allies in World War II wanted to ensure there would never again be an aggressive Germany powerful enough to invade its neighbors.

When the so-called Morgenthau Plan was leaked to the press in September 1944, at first it was widely praised. After all, it would supposedly render Germany incapable of ever starting another world war in Europe.

Morgenthau certainly envisioned a Carthaginian peace, designed to ensure a permanently deindustrialized, unarmed, and pastoral Germany.

Postwar Germany would have resembled something akin to the ancient, pre-civilized frontier that the first-century AD historian Tacitus wrote about in his Germania.

The plan would have ensured that within six months of Germany’s surrender, all of its industrial plants and equipment were to be dismantled.

The Ruhr, the renowned center of European industrial strength, was to be permanently neutered, starved of its energy, raw materials, and infrastructure.

After the war, the plan demanded virtual complete disarmament of Germany. Its once-feared armed forces were to be rendered nonexistent.

Is This The Beginning Of A Terror Wave?

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/01/02/is-this-what-were-in-for-in-2025/

The New Year had barely begun when one and possibly two terrorist attacks were unleashed that claimed the lives of more than a dozen innocent people.

In New Orleans, 15 people have so far died after a driver rammed a truck through a crowd of revelers on Bourbon Street Wednesday morning. The driver had an ISIS flag in the rented pickup and likely didn’t act alone.

Police have since reported pipe bombs with a remote detonator were in the truck, as well as others placed in the French Quarter. The FBI told reporters that it doesn’t think the driver, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, acted alone.

The Airbnb where he stayed and where bomb-making materials were found, also caught fire.

Later that same morning, a Tesla Cybertruck exploded outside the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas.

In a post on X, Elon Musk wrote that “We have now confirmed that the explosion was caused by very large fireworks and/or a bomb carried in the bed of the rented Cybertruck and is unrelated to the vehicle itself.”

As it happens, both the pickup used in the New Orleans attack and the Cybertruck had been rented through the Turo app, which calls itself “world’s largest car sharing marketplace,” and lets users rent cars from “trusted hosts.”

Is this the beginning of a wave of terror attacks inside the U.S.?

There’s reason to worry.

How ‘Pro-Palestinian’ Protestors Actually Harm Palestinians by Khaled Abu Toameh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21269/pro-palestinian-protestors

Is there a free media in “Palestine?” No. Is there a functioning parliament? No. Are there general elections? No. Are there no consequences for protesting against the leaders’ abuses?

The “pro-Palestinian” activists just keep showing that all they have to offer is hatred for Jews and Israel. The real “pro-Palestinian” advocates are those who want to see a good life for the Palestinians, not those who encourage them to embrace a brutal and corrupt Hamas. Would they encourage the Iranian people to submit to the Ayatollahs, or the Uyghurs to embrace the Communist Chinese Party?

Instead of sitting in a comfortable campus where no one will arrest, torture or kill them for speaking out, these activists should be urging Hamas to release the 100 Israeli hostages it has been holding in the Gaza Strip since the atrocities of October 7, 2023. That would be the best and fastest way to end the current war in the Gaza Strip. The real message is: if you do not want your people killed, do not start a war.

If these protestors in the West really want to help Palestinians, instead of offering messages of hate, they could offer good salaries and jobs.

Sadly, “pro-Palestinian” protests have shown themselves to be nothing more than a backdoor way of spreading hate, delegitimizing Israel and demonizing Jews.

The organizers and leaders of the anti-Israel protests in the US and Canada, including on university campuses, continue to ignore the real suffering of the Palestinians living under the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank and the Iran-backed Islamist group Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

These Palestinians are living under two corrupt dictatorships, both of which place the interests of their leaders above those of the people.

We never hear the voices of these protesters when the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Hamas commit human rights violations against their own citizens.

Multiculturalism, Human Rights and the West by Nils A. Haug

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21268/multiculturalism-human-rights

The moral laws of each tradition — that of the Torah and Sharia – when applied — result in different outcomes. Most of the punishments specified in the Torah are no longer practiced. According to Sharia, however, punishments such as amputations or stoning to death for adultery, “especially women” – which can include pre-marital sex or having been raped — as well as death for blasphemy or for choosing to leave the religion, are in force to this day.

“If they [Muslims] had gotten rid of the punishment [often death] for apostasy, Islam would not exist today,” the late Sunni religious leader, Yusuf al Qaradawi, speculated on Egyptian television.

Nonie Darwish responded: “The most striking thing about his statement, however, was that it was not an apology; it was a logical, proud justification for preserving the death penalty as a punishment for apostasy.”

Divinely sanctioned treatment by Muslims of non-Muslims still includes rape, slavery and death.

“So, when you meet those who disbelieve [in battle], strike [their] necks until, when you have inflicted slaughter upon them, then secure their bonds, and either [confer] favor afterwards or ransom [them] until the war lays down its burdens. That [is the command]. And if Allah had willed, He could have taken vengeance upon them [Himself], but [He ordered armed struggle] to test some of you by means of others. And those who are killed in the cause of Allah – never will He waste their deeds.” — Quran 47:4 (Sahih Translation).

As the visions of holy war and martyrdom are underpinned by Sharia, Islamic jihadists appear to believe that they are doctrinally permitted to sow terror, death and destruction among non-Muslims wherever they are.

One unsurprising reason for the “wilful blindness” of the US and other major Western powers towards religious extremists is that politicians look for votes.

[I]t is the tiny nation of Israel that has found itself largely alone in the desperate fight to preserve the West’s Judeo-Christian ideals. It would be to the West’s advantage if its other nations would join Israel in this noble task.

The laws of the Torah, which became known to the world as Moses’ Ten Commandments, founded the West’s moral and ethical precepts on which its laws and judicial concepts such as justice and mercy are based. This development is reflected in the United States’ founding documents, as well as England’s Magna Carta of 1215, among others.

The opening paragraph of America’s 1776 Declaration of Independence, for instance, refers to “the laws of nature” and “nature’s God.” From this assertion, the imperative of a sound ethical, moral and religious foundation for America’s values was established. According to America’s founding fathers, the laws of Moses – those moral codes sometimes collectively referred to as the “natural law” – underpin the value-based Western order, or civilization as distinguished from barbarism. In terms of religion, people in the West generally value the underlying importance of these Judeo-Christian values to their community.

The NGOs Driving Antisemitism in Europe Part II: The UK by Robert Williams

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21238/ngos-antisemitism-europe

The Labour government apparently does not care about Hamas terrorists promoting Hamas in London. What they do seem to care about is shutting down all criticism of Hamas. One elderly pensioner – who expressed his disappointment that Palestinian flags were being flown all over Bethnal Green Road in East London – learned he was arrested for it.

Then there are the mosques, where hatred and violence are preached. At Birmingham’s Green Lane Mosque, for instance, the imams give lectures on how to properly stone a woman – you first bury her up to her waist – and how to kill homosexuals and apostates. Evidently, that did not bother the British government one bit . Last year, it awarded the mosque a £2.2 million ($2.8 million) grant towards “youth services” to fund “mentors and role models” such as “trusted adults found in youth centers.”

So, while ordinary Britons are serving prison sentences of up to several years for posting relatively bland statements on social media, the people behind these charities and mosques continue to run their businesses as usual.

Where does that leave the Jews and everyone else? In beautiful downtown Upyoursville.

European authorities, as usual, refuse to fight the violence running rampant in their streets. Most recently, Amsterdam’s mayor, Femke Halsema, banned a rally against antisemitism at the central Dam Square; she said out of concern for Jewish citizens.

After the Amsterdam attacks against Jews and Israelis, during which the police stood by and did nothing, Halsema publicly regretted calling the event a pogrom. Such terms, she said, were “propaganda”:

“If I had known that it would be used politically in this way, and also as propaganda… I want nothing to do with that. The Israeli government spoke of a ‘Palestinian pogrom on the streets of Amsterdam,’ and in The Hague, the words were used to discriminate against Moroccan Amsterdammers – Muslims. That is not what I meant or what I wanted.”

In Berlin, Germany, Police Chief Barbara Slowik recently advised gays and Jews to conceal those aspects of their identities in neighborhoods with large Arab populations.

“There are areas of the city, we need to be perfectly honest here, where I would advise people who wear a kippah or are openly gay to be more careful,” she said. “There are certain neighbourhoods where the majority of people of Arab origin live, who also have sympathies for terrorist groups,” and are “openly hostile towards Jews”.

In London, antisemitic violent crime is rampant: Between October 2023 and October 2024, 2,383 antisemitic hate crimes occurred, compared to 550 in 2022 and 845 in 2021. The city actually created a special bus route for Jews to make them “feel safe.”.

“Jewish Londoners have felt scared to leave their homes,” London Mayor Sadiq Khan said earlier this year.

“So, this direct bus link between these two significant communities [Stamford Hill in Hackney and Golders Green in Barnet,] means you can travel on the 310, not need to change, and be safe and feel safer. I hope that will lead to more Londoners from these communities using public transport safely.”

Syria and the Changing Global Calculus By Joshua Muravchik

https://quillette.com/2024/12/31/syria-and-the-changing-global-calculus-iran-russia-lebanon-israel/?ref=quillette-weekly-newsletter

Iran and Russia have suffered serious setbacks over the past year, but grave dangers remain.

It was not quite as quick as the Six Day War, nor is it likely to be as consequential as the “Ten Days that Shook the World,” when Lenin’s Bolsheviks seized power in Russia. But it took only twelve days from the moment an Islamist band struck out from their redoubt in Idlib until they overran the presidential palace in Damascus, chasing President Bashar al-Assad into exile. And if it proves to be less momentous than the birth of communism in 1917, it has still shaken the Middle East, with reverberations that are likely to be felt around the globe.

Initially, Russia and Iran had acted to defend the regime of President Assad. A reported 4,000 Iranian Revolutionary Guards were stationed in Syria, boosted by a contingent of Lebanese Hezbollah fighters. As the rebels advanced, Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi flew to Baghdad, seeking to add forces from the Shi’ite-dominated government there. But when he was turned down, Iran ordered the IRGC to hasten home from Syria, and Hezbollah dispatched some officers from Lebanon to bring its fighters home. Russia, whose critical military support of Assad had always consisted primarily of airpower, flew a few sorties against the rebels in the first days of their campaign. These claimed some lives, but they didn’t slow the rebel advance, and the airstrikes soon petered out.

Humiliated by the sudden fall of their client, Moscow and Tehran issued almost identical explanations. One Russian analyst said of Assad’s forces: “It’s not possible to help an army that’s running.” Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei said: “Voluntary forces from elsewhere can only fight alongside the army of that country. If the local army shows weakness, the [outsiders] cannot do anything.” But Russia and Iran had come to Syria in the first place because its army was hardly fighting.

That was during the previous decade. In 2011, the year of the “Arab Spring,” peaceful protests began in Syria as in many nearby countries. The regime sought to repress them violently, and soldiers began to defect. Some of the deserters reappeared as armed escorts defending the protest marches. As violence mounted, nonviolent protests gave way to full-scale civil war. A rebel force was formed largely from defectors, calling itself the Free Syrian Army. Sunni Arab states, Turkey, and Western countries provided the rebels with arms and training. On the other side, Russia, Iran, and Iran’s instrument, Hezbollah, rallied to support the regime. But Syrian soldiers continued to defect or perform desultorily and lost ground.