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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; negotiations</title>
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		<title>Biden Spins Fantasies, Middle East Heats Up</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/davidhornik/biden-spins-fantasies-middle-east-heats-up/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=biden-spins-fantasies-middle-east-heats-up</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 09 Dec 2014 05:22:36 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[P. David Hornik]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[biden]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iran]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[negotiations]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Saban Forum]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Syria]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247031</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Reports: Israel hits targets in Syria.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/628x471.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-247032" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/628x471-450x321.jpg" alt="628x471" width="374" height="267" /></a>Speaking to the Saban Forum in Washington on Saturday, Vice-President Joe Biden <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/12/07/remarks-vice-president-joe-biden-2014-saban-forum"><span style="color: #0433ff;">said</span></a> that the talks with Iran, which began about a year ago and recently were extended for another seven months, had “brought significant benefits” and slowed down Iran’s nuclear program.</p>
<p>Biden added that the talks were providing time to “see if it’s possible to reach a comprehensive agreement that can peacefully ensure that Iran will not develop a nuclear weapon,” and that “all of this was accomplished with very modest sanctions relief.”</p>
<p>The speech also included very positive words about Israel and the U.S.-Israeli alliance. Israel, however, needs more than words.</p>
<p>On Sunday, one day later, Israeli national security adviser Yossi Cohen gave a briefing to the Israeli cabinet that <a href="http://www.jpost.com/israel-news/politics-and-diplomacy/iran-retains-its-nuclear-capabilities-as-sanctions-regime-eroding-nsc-chief-says-383899"><span style="color: #0433ff;">contradicted Biden on every point</span></a>.</p>
<p>In a statement that later was issued by the office of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Cohen said that Iran was continuing to pursue a nuclear weapon, that the extension of the talks was enabling it to maintain and even strengthen its nuclear capabilities, and that the sanctions are “in danger of collapse. This is something that could lead to a regional nuclear arms race in the Middle East.”</p>
<p>Cohen also said Israel had played an important role in ensuring that the U.S.-led P5+1 countries did not reach a “bad” agreement with Iran last month, but that meanwhile Iran was continuing a huge military buildup and masterminding terrorism all over the globe.</p>
<p>That was Sunday morning. On Sunday afternoon two sites near Damascus were bombed from the air. Although Israeli officials are not saying a word about the incident, reports outside of Israel, as well as statements from Syria, Iran, and Hezbollah, say Israel was responsible.</p>
<p>In a <a href="http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,l-4600771,00.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">commentary</span></a>, Israeli military analyst Ron Ben-Yishai said Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps was</p>
<blockquote><p><i>continu[ing] to play with fire by equipping Hezbollah with arms that have the capability to cause widespread losses and destruction in Israel…. It is widely believed that shipments of missiles and other arms destined for Hezbollah land in Iranian cargo jets at the airport in Damascus, then [are] transferred to a Syrian military storage site, until they are sent over the border to Lebanon.</i></p></blockquote>
<p>On Monday, Arab media <a href="http://www.jpost.com/israel-news/politics-and-diplomacy/report-two-hezbollah-operatives-killed-in-sundays-alleged-iaf-strikes-in-syria-384003"><span style="color: #0433ff;">were cited as reporting</span></a> that</p>
<blockquote><p><i>the airstrikes destroyed a storage facility housing anti-aircraft missiles and drones belonging to Hezbollah, and cut off the power supply from Damascus International Airport.</i></p></blockquote>
<p>It was also reported that “two Hezbollah militants were killed” during the strikes, one of them a “senior military official.”</p>
<p>According to reports outside of Israel, never officially confirmed by Jerusalem, in 2013 Israeli planes struck at least five weapons consignments in Syria that were on their way to Hezbollah, and earlier this year struck a Hezbollah base within Lebanon.</p>
<p>Although in most of these cases Hezbollah and the Syrian regime, both of them embroiled in the fighting in Syria, have refrained from retaliating, accounts say that in this latest case Israeli forces have been on high alert for a possible counterstrike.</p>
<p>Meanwhile it was also <a href="http://www.jpost.com/middle-east/russia-wants-israeli-explanation-for-aggressive-actions-in-syria-383986"><span style="color: #0433ff;">reported</span></a> on Monday that Russia was “demand[ing] an explanation” for Israel’s “aggressive action” in Syria and was “deeply worried by this dangerous development.”</p>
<p>And finally, a <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/12/07/us-iran-economy-iduskbn0jl0h320141207?feedtype=rss&amp;feedname=topnews"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Reuters report</span></a> bears out the words of the Israeli national security adviser and belies the cheerful words of Vice-President Biden:</p>
<blockquote><p><i>Iranian President Hassan Rouhani will hike military spending by more than a third in the next fiscal year despite presenting a “cautious, tight” budget to parliament on Sunday in response to falling oil prices…. [D]efense expenditure will rise 33.5 percent to about 282 trillion rials, most of which will be assigned to the elite Revolutionary Guards…. Iran is stockpiling rockets, missiles and other conventional weapons…. Nuclear talks between Iran and six powers have been extended until June. In the meantime, Iran can still access $700 million per month of frozen oil revenue held abroad. </i></p></blockquote>
<p>In other words: thanks to the talks Iran can keep funding its needs.</p>
<p>This confluence of events gives rise to two points.</p>
<p>One is that a belligerent, confident Iran, a belligerent, intrusive, and threatening Russia, is how the Middle East looks at a time of feckless U.S. policy based—at best—on self-delusion.</p>
<p>The other is that, even though Netanyahu’s government now faces an election campaign and is in a lame-duck status, no one should think it will take its eye off the ball.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>A Victory For the Ruling Clerics</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/majid-rafizadeh/a-victory-for-the-ruling-clerics/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-victory-for-the-ruling-clerics</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 08 Dec 2014 05:00:19 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Majid Rafizadeh]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[clerics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iran]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mullahs]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=246718</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[More time to secure the bomb. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Irans-supreme-leader-Ayat-007.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-246719" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Irans-supreme-leader-Ayat-007.jpg" alt="Irans-supreme-leader-Ayat-007" width="259" height="211" /></a>While the Obama administration formerly stated that extending the nuclear talks is out of equation, nevertheless, President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry raised the option of an extension a day before the November 24th deadline. Iran’s foreign minister, Javad Zarif, definitely welcomed the idea.</p>
<p>After over a year of negotiations, which have traveled across the globe from Vienna, to Oman, and to New York, the negotiators (the Islamic Republic and the P5+1: China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) planned to <a href="http://english.alarabiya.net/en/News/middle-east/2014/11/23/Iran-reaching-nuke-deal-on-Nov-24-impossible-.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">extend</span></a> the nuclear talks for another seven months in order to finalize the preliminary deal reached last year in Geneva. Accordingly, the nuclear negotiations will continue through the end of June.</p>
<p>The obscure objectives are to achieve a “headline” agreement by March 1st and seal the complete technical details of the <a href="http://english.alarabiya.net/en/News/middle-east/2014/11/23/Iran-reaching-nuke-deal-on-Nov-24-impossible-.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">headline </span></a>agreement by July 1st. Details and nuances of the nuclear talks, with regards to agreements and gaps, have yet to be released, but some diplomats stated the repeatedly-heard phrase that “<a href="http://english.alarabiya.net/en/News/middle-east/2014/11/23/Iran-reaching-nuke-deal-on-Nov-24-impossible-.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">progress</span></a> has been made.&#8221;</p>
<p>The nuclear extension definitely lacks any clear key terms upon which prospective nuclear talks would be anchored or that give any idea how a final nuclear deal could be reached.</p>
<p>But what is clear is that the Islamic Republic, particularly the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and senior cadre of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), have gained considerable amount of geopolitical, geostrategic and economic advantages from this offer by the Obama administration. The Supreme Leader’s strategies to buy time, regain full recovery in the economy, pursue his regional hegemonic and ideological ambitions,  and reinitiate his government’s nuclear program have been fulfilled.</p>
<p>Based on the extension offered by the Obama administration, the Islamic Republic will continue receiving <a href="http://english.alarabiya.net/en/News/middle-east/2014/11/23/Iran-reaching-nuke-deal-on-Nov-24-impossible-.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">$700<b> </b></span></a>million per month in frozen assets during the extended seven month period. Secondly, Iran will further consolidate its economy through increased sales in oil, particularly to Asian countries, heighten business deals with some Western companies, regain the value of its currency, and enjoy the removed sanctions on some of its industries. As a result, Iran will attempt to address the economic challenges which were threatening the hold on power of the ruling politicians.</p>
<p>From the economic perspective, the $700 million in sanctions relief will boost Iran’s economy as it is an equivalence of approximately 350,000 more oil barrels a day, based on the current market price.</p>
<p>The Islamic Republic exports roughly one <a href="http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/11/iran-oil-economy-falling-prices-crude-exports-market-reacts.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">million</span></a> barrels of crude oil in a day. The sanctions relief would be equivalent to a 30 percent increase in oil sale.  In the next few months, Tehran will attempt to push for additional sanctions relief as well as ratchet up its economic deals, such export of gas and other goods, to some European and Eastern countries including France, Germany, Russia, Japan, and China.</p>
<p>Some European countries&#8217; exports to Iran have already ratcheted up due to the prospects of the nuclear negotiations. Tehran Times, the Islamic Republic’s state newspaper, stated that Germany was Iran’s leading trade <a href="http://www.jpost.com/International/Analysis-Its-business-as-usual-as-some-of-Israels-friends-in-Europe-increase-trade-with-Iran-374622"><span style="color: #0433ff;">partner</span></a> “The European country (Germany) exported €207 million of goods to Iran in June 2014, an 88 percent rise compared to June 2013.” Nevertheless, Tehran needs the complete lifting of economic sanctions in order to gain the optimal potentials of its economy and gain full recovery.</p>
<p>Third, the extension of the nuclear negotiations will ensure to the Iranian leaders that the international community, specifically the West, will not make efforts in further isolating Iran and pressuring it economically or politically.</p>
<p>In addition, the extension of nuclear talks offered to the Islamic Republic is not going to alter Iran’s stand on its nuclear program. Iran will continue holding the position that their demands for the following issues to be met: maintaining a specific number (tens of thousands of) fast-spinning centrifuge machines, Tehran should have the capacity to produce nuclear fuel in the future, and maintain specific level of enriching uranium. In the next few months, the Islamic Republic is not going to give up its capacity to produce plutonium which can be utilized for weapons at its heavy water reactor in the city of Arak. Iran is less likely to provide more evidence proving that it did not carry out secret tests on the development of atomic weapons in Parchin or other military complexes. The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency recently pointed out that the Islamic Republic continues to deny the IAEA access to sensitive military site which are suspected to be used for nuclear activities.</p>
<p>Finally, the Islamic Republic’s antagonistic stance towards the United States and the West will remain the same as well. This week, while Khamenei officially granted his blessing to Rouhani to continue with the game of nuclear negotiations, he also called the West “<span style="color: #0433ff;"><a href="http://www.jpost.com/Breaking-News/Khamenei-Arrogant-world-powers-failed-to-bring-Iran-to-its-knees-382776">arrogant</a>.</span>” Earlier, he published a &#8220;9-step plan&#8221; to eliminate Israel. After the extension of the nuclear talks, President Rouhani <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/afp/article-2848810/Iran-wont-brought-knees-nuclear-issue-Khamenei.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">pointed out</span></a> on state television that &#8220;I promise the Iranian nation that those centrifuges will never stop working.&#8221; The extension not only will not alter the Islamic Republic’s position on its nuclear program, but will give the ruling clerics the opportunity to be further empowered, making them more determined to pursue their regional hegemonic ambitions.</p>
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		<title>Obama’s Surrender to Iran</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joseph-klein/obamas-surrender-to-iran/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-surrender-to-iran</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 28 Nov 2014 05:17:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Klein]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iran]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[negotiations]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nuclear Weapons]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=246196</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Islamic Republic moves one step closer to the bomb. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Obama_Iran.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-246197" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Obama_Iran-450x305.jpg" alt="Obama_Iran" width="388" height="263" /></a>The commander of the Iranian Revolution Guards Corps, Iran’s top military force aligned with Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, openly mocked the United States for having “clearly surrendered to Iran’s might,” according to a report quoted by the <i>Washington Free Beacon</i>.  “Despite the military embargo on the Islamic Republic, there is no weapon that our military is not able to manufacture,” he added.</p>
<p>The commander, Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari, was commenting on the Obama administration’s agreement to a further seven-month extension in the talks with Iran over its nuclear program, which were supposed to have expired on November 24<sup>th</sup>. Sadly, Iran’s top military thug is right. The extension gave the Iranians what they have most wanted out of the talks all along – more time within which to further develop their nuclear arms technologies while still gaining some relief from the economic sanctions. Indeed, Iran will continue to get its hands on $700 million per month in frozen assets under the terms of the nuclear negotiation extension.</p>
<p>Secretary of State John Kerry told reporters that “we would be fools to walk away.” As usual, Kerry was being played for a fool. And once again, the United States looks weak under President Obama&#8217;s failed leadership.</p>
<p>Iran’s leaders are out to prove to the world that Iran can be counted on to stand up to the “arrogant powers,” as Iranian leaders like to refer to the U.S. and its allies. So far, they are succeeding.</p>
<p>“In the nuclear issue, America and colonial European countries got together and did their best to bring the Islamic Republic to its knees, but they could not do so – and they will not do so,” said Ayatollah Khamenei on November 25<sup>th</sup> according to his personal website.</p>
<p>The year-long negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program have been going nowhere, even as the Obama administration was reportedly willing to allow Iran to maintain its own nuclear enrichment program. Dismantlement of large parts of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, presumably an original goal of the negotiations for the so-called P-5 countries (the United States, United Kingdom, France, Russia, China and Germany), is no longer on the table, if it ever really was.  Iran’s missile program never was on the table. Nor were its possible imports of any nuclear materials, technologies and weapons delivery system components from North Korea.</p>
<p>Yet, the Iranians were still not satisfied with the offers they received during the negotiations. Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani boasted in a television interview following the announcement of the talks extension that his country’s “centrifuges will never stop.”  He added that “Today we have a victory much greater than what happened in the negotiation. This victory is that our circumstances are not like previous years. Today we are at a point that nobody in the world [in which no one says] sanctions must be increased in order that Iran accept P5+1 demands. No one says to reach agreement we must increase pressure on Iran.”</p>
<p>Rouhani has a history of using negotiations as a delay tactic to achieve by stealth Iran’s strategic objectives. This time, Iran set out, in the words of its Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, to reach a final deal that will result in “a serious and not a token Iranian enrichment program coupled with removal of sanctions. This is the objective that we’re working on and this is the objective we will achieve.”</p>
<p>What additional evidence does the Obama administration need to demonstrate that Iran’s strategic objective is irreconcilable with a deal that would truly protect the world against Iran’s emergence as a nuclear-armed power? Apparently, they have learned nothing from the disastrous results of negotiations with North Korea. Instead of walking away from the talks after a year of futility and immediately reinstituting the full array of economic sanctions that have been melting away over the last year, the Obama administration buckled.</p>
<p>During the next seven months, the Obama administration will be deluding itself and sacrificing the security of the American people if it thinks that Iran will simply stand still and freeze all of its vast nuclear technology and production programs in place. According to Greg Jones, a senior research and nuclear analyst at the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, “They have a stockpile now that’ll probably support the production of about four nuclear weapons, and that’s slowly increasing over the course. It’ll probably gain another nuclear weapons worth by the end of June 2015 when this agreement runs out. So certainly that’s been continuing.”</p>
<p>John Kerry remarked that the Obama administration has “earned the benefit of the doubt” in agreeing to the further extension of talks, even though he conceded that “significant points of disagreement” remain. To the contrary, the administration has run out of excuses. Its quixotic quest for an elusive deal with a rogue state that continues to refuse the International Atomic Energy Agency access to all of its sites does nothing but raise more doubts about the administration’s intentions and competence.</p>
<p>For example, Iran has persistently refused to allow international inspectors to visit Parchin, Iran’s military facility where the agency seeks to probe for itself evidence that Iran may have been conducting experiments on nuclear detonators. Just days ago, the agency’s director Yukiya Amano complained that Iran was not cooperating “concerning issues with possible military dimensions.” Mr. Amano also warned that his agency, while able to assess Iran’s compliance with the interim agreement regarding its declared nuclear materials, was “not in a position to provide credible assurance about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran, and therefore to conclude that all nuclear material in Iran is in peaceful activities.”</p>
<p>Yet Kerry’s message to Congress is to hold off on re-imposing or adding any sanctions at this time. Some members of Congress in both parties are understandably frustrated by the lack of concrete results. They believe that preserving the threat of increased sanctions if an acceptable, verifiable deal is not reached by a date certain is the most realistic strategy.</p>
<p>“The cycle of negotiations, followed by an extension, coupled with sanctions relief for Iran has not succeeded,” the outgoing Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) said in response to the latest extension. “I continue to believe that the two-track approach of diplomacy and economic pressure that brought Iran to the negotiating table is also the best path forward to achieve a breakthrough.”</p>
<p>Senator Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), whom has co-authored a sanctions bill with Senator Menendez, said it was now “critical that Congress enacts sanctions that give Iran’s mullahs no choice but to dismantle their illicit nuclear program.”</p>
<p>The chances for Congressional passage of a sanctions bill will improve next year when the Republicans take control of the Senate. However, President Obama is likely to veto such a bill. If the current extension runs out in June 2015 with no final deal concluded, expect the Obama administration to once again plead for more time so that it can kick the can down the road for the next president to handle – if it is not too late by then. Even worse, in a rush to try and improve his tarnished foreign policy legacy, President Obama may end up accepting just about any bone Iran offers him in a deal that he can spin as a positive achievement. The lethal consequences will be for the next president to worry about while the world becomes much less safe.</p>
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		<title>Iran&#8217;s No China</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/irans-no-china/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=irans-no-china</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/irans-no-china/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 25 Nov 2014 05:50:01 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Appeasement]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iran]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[negotiations]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nuclear Weapons]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[The Obama administration will never abandon its courtship of Iran. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/iranian-protestors-burn-us-flag-during-protest-tehran.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-245973" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/iranian-protestors-burn-us-flag-during-protest-tehran-450x337.jpg" alt="iranian-protestors-burn-us-flag-during-protest-tehran" width="322" height="241" /></a>Originally published by the <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Our-World-Irans-no-China-382727">Jerusalem Post</a>. </em></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">The Obama administration will never abandon its courtship of Iran. On the eve of the extended deadline in the US-led six-party talks with Iran regarding Teheran’s illicit nuclear weapons program, the one thing that is absolutely clear is that courting Iran is the centerpiece of US President Barack Obama’s Middle East policy. Come what may in Geneva, this will not change.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">To be clear, Obama does not seek to check Iran’s rise to regional hegemony by appeasing it. None of the actions he has taken to date with regard to Iran can be construed as efforts to check or contain Iran.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Their goal is to cultivate a US alliance with Iran. As Obama sees things, Iran for him is what China was for then US president Richard Nixon. Nixon didn’t normalize US relations with the People’s Republic of China in order to harm the Chinese Communists. And Obama isn’t wooing Iran’s Islamic revolutionaries in order to harm them.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Unfortunately for the world, China is not a relevant analogy for Iran. Nixon sought to develop ties with Beijing because he wanted to pry the Chinese out of the Soviet orbit. Courting China meant harming Moscow, and Moscow as the US’s greatest foe.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">There is no Moscow that will be weakened by the US’s empowerment of Tehran. The only parties directly and immediately harmed by Obama’s policy of courting Iran are America’s allies in the Middle East. The Allies’ appeasement deal with the Nazis in 1938 had three victims: Czechoslovakia, the rest of Europe, and the rest of the world.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Obama’s policy of courting Iran also has three victims: Israel, the Sunni Arab states, and the rest of the world.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Obama’s initiation of the six-power nuclear talks with Iran harms Israel because the talks facilitate Iran’s nuclear program. That is, Obama is enabling Iran to develop the means to attack Israel with nuclear weapons.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">According to press reports of the content of the negotiations, the US has already abandoned its major red lines. It has abandoned its demand that Iran dismantle its centrifuges. Late last week the US was reportedly about to abandon its demand for Iranian transparency to the International Atomic Energy Agency regarding its past work on atomic bomb development.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In other words, the deal the US was hoping to conclude this week with Iran, and will now continue negotiating next month, involves taking no serious action to curtail Iran’s progress in developing nuclear weapons.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And in exchange for taking no action to curtail its nuclear progress, Iran demands and will likely receive a complete abrogation of binding UN Security Council economic sanctions against it. Those sanctions were passed in response to Iran’s illicit nuclear progress. The deal the US is now willing to sign renders Iran’s nuclear program legitimate.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Then there are the rest of the states in the region. The Saudis and their Sunni brethren are not the Czechs. They are Poland, Belgium France and Holland. Like the Nazis and the European states in late 1938, Iran threatens all Sunni states in the region.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As the Americans have engaged in obsessive-compulsive nuclear negotiations with Iran, the Iranians have divided their attention between nuclear development and regional expansion. In September they took over Yemen.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Houthi militia from northern Yemen took over Yemen’s capital city Sana’a that month. The Houthi are Shi’ite, and are to Yemen what Iran’s Lebanese Shi’ite proxy Hezbollah is to Lebanon. The Houthis, who are already a major force in the US-trained Yemeni armed forces, are demanding control over them.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In addition to its proxy’s takeover of Yemen, as Middle East analyst Tony Badran reported earlier this month, the Iranian leadership is orchestrating a major information campaign to present itself as the regional hegemon to regional actors.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps Commander Qassem Soleimani has had his picture taken with Kurdish peshmerga in Iraq as well as with Iraqi regular military forces. Iranian security chief Ali Shamkhani went to Lebanon in late September and offered to arm the Lebanese Armed Forces.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Iran, these photo-ops and visits signal – is the new boss of the region. Yemen shares a 1,700 km border with Saudi Arabia.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The Houthis already fought a border war with Saudi Arabia in 2009. The Iranian proxy’s control over much of the border today is a clear threat to Saudi sovereignty. In light of the close ties the Houthis have spent the past decade cultivating with Saudi Arabia’s Shi’ite minority, it is also a threat to the internal political stability of the kingdom.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As the Obama administration has erased red line after red line in the nuclear talks, and sided with Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and other Iranian Sunni allies against US allies, Iran’s leaders have gloated that their hegemony over Yemen raises to four the number of Arab states under their dominion, that list including Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Iran’s control over Yemen is a direct threat to the world economy. Before the Houthis marched on Sana’a, Iran was able to threaten global oil markets with its sovereignty over the Straits of Hormuz that controls naval traffic between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. With the Port of Aden, Iran will also control maritime traffic between the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">It is true that massive increases in US oil sales due to its shale oil development will reduce some of the Middle East’s power to dictate oil prices. But Middle Eastern oil sales still constitute 40 percent of the world market and will continue to be a massive force in the global economy in the coming years. As the force controlling the flow of that oil, Iran will exert massive influence over the global economy.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Add to that the fact that Iran’s Hezbollah has sleeper cells in every major city in Europe and in several hubs in North America, and that Iran has strategic alliances with Venezuela and Nicaragua, a nuclear- armed Iran exerting hegemonic control over the Middle East and its oil exports will become a strategic danger to the global economy and global security.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">One of the many eyebrow raising aspects of Obama’s courtship of Iran is that it isn’t tied to a US retreat from the region. The US isn’t retreating.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Obama has ordered hundreds of air strikes on Islamic State targets to date, and more will undoubtedly follow. The US participated in the NATO overthrow of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. US power remains a major factor in regional affairs, and Obama has not shied away from using it during his tenure in office.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The problem is that in all cases, his use of US power has helped Iran more than it has helped US allies. And in the case of Libya, US power has directly threatened US allies and empowered al-Qaida and it associates.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">With the rise of China today, some US analysts question the wisdom of Nixon’s opening to Beijing.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">But there is little argument that his China gambit caused strategic damage to the Soviet Union and contributed to the US victory in the Cold War.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Not only will Obama’s Iran opening not redound to the US’s benefit in the short term. Its inevitable result will be a decade or more of major and minor regional wars and chronic instability, with the nuclear-armed Iran threatening the survival of all of America’s regional allies. It will also lead to shocks in the global economy and massively expand Iran’s direct coercive power over the word as a whole.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Not only is Obama no Nixon, compared to him, Neville Chamberlain looks like a minor, almost insignificant failure.</span></p>
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		<title>Obama Helps Terror Go Nuclear</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/noah-beck/obama-helps-terror-go-nuclear/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obama-helps-terror-go-nuclear</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/noah-beck/obama-helps-terror-go-nuclear/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 21 Nov 2014 05:10:49 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Noah Beck]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[deal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iran]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=245719</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The president's desperate drive to achieve a deal with Iran at any price. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #232323;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/hi-obama-iran-852-03932845.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-245720" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/hi-obama-iran-852-03932845.jpg" alt="hi-obama-iran-852-03932845" width="354" height="286" /></a>Last Tuesday’s terror attack on a Jerusalem synagogue killed five people: four rabbis (including three born in the USA) and a Druze police officer. Two Palestinians entered during morning prayers and attacked worshipers with knives, meat cleavers, and a handgun. <a href="http://www.timesofisrael.com/in-washington-terror-attack-focuses-lens-on-pa-incitement/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">Congress showed moral clarity when blaming the horrors on Hamas and Palestinian Authority incitement</span></a>, but Obama’s statements were perfunctorily “balanced.” <a href="http://www.c-span.org/video/?322810-2/president-obama-remarks-jerusalem-synagogue-attack-ebola"><span style="color: #1255cc;">Obama warned of a “spiral” of violence</span></a> – an obtuse refrain of those suggesting <a href="http://www.wnd.com/2014/11/dershowitz-rips-obama-on-synagogue-slaughter/">moral equivalency</a> between terrorism and the fight against it. Obama also misleadingly claimed that “President Abbas&#8230;strongly condemned the attacks” omitting that <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Arab-Israeli-Conflict/Analysis-Abbas-forced-by-Kerry-condemns-attack-382225"><span style="color: #1255cc;">Abbas did so only after pressure from the administration and with equivocation</span></a> (Abbas suggested a link between recent terrorism and visits by Jews to the Temple Mount, as if to justify the attacks). It’s also worth noting that <a href="http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=21571"><span style="color: #1255cc;">Palestinians celebrated the massacre</span></a> (as they did <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/ari-lieberman/palestinians-cheer-while-america-mourns/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">after the 2013 Boston bombing</span></a> and <a href="http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=7&amp;x_issue=17&amp;x_article=265"><span style="color: #1255cc;">the 9/11 attacks</span></a>).</p>
<p style="color: #323333;">Obama’s weak reaction is consistent with his mostly <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2014/10/president_obama_s_campaign_against_isis_lacks_a_strategy_the_united_states.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">impotent response to ISIS terrorists who behead Americans</span></a> and <a href="http://www.christianpost.com/news/isis-beheads-7-men-and-3-women-in-syria-us-led-airstrikes-hit-stronghold-127367/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">Mideast Christians</span></a> and grow their Islamist empire by the day. Frighteningly, his approach to Iranian nukes follows the same meek pattern, but the stakes are exponentially higher, because when Iran goes nuclear, so does terrorism.</p>
<p style="color: #323333;"><span style="color: #1255cc;"><a href="http://www.clarionproject.org/sites/default/files/Iranian-Support-For-Terrorism.pdf">Iran is already the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism</a></span>, without nuclear weapons. <a href="http://nypost.com/2014/07/10/day-of-bombardment-in-israel-nears-nuclear-reactor/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">Iran-supported Hamas has already tried to commit nuclear terror</span></a>: last summer, Hamas launched rockets at Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor. How much more dangerous will Iran become when it has nukes? Even if Iran doesn’t directly commit nuclear terrorism, an Iranian nuclear umbrella will embolden the regime and the terrorist organizations it sponsors.</p>
<p style="color: #323333;">Obama has a long record of weakness towards Iran. In 2009, when Iran’s Basij paramilitary force brutalized demonstrators protesting Iran’s fraudulent presidential election, <a href="http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/nilegardiner/10063438/the_iranian_election_barack_obamaas_cowardly_silence/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">Obama kept his response irrelevantly mild</span></a> for the sake of “engaging” Iran. That surely helped Iranian voters understand the risks of protesting the “free” election of 2012 (<a href="http://www.newrepublic.com/article/113324/iran-elections-2013-khameneis-engineered-elections-become-reality"><span style="color: #1255cc;">involving eight regime-picked candidates</span></a>). It was indeed a very orderly rubberstamp.</p>
<p style="color: #323333;">In 2011, when a U.S. <a href="http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2011/12/13/iran-mocks-obama-after-he-asks-for-downed-drone-back-says-he-begs-to-give-him-back-his-toy-plane/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">drone went down on Iranian soil</span></a>, Obama cordially requested it back. The regime recently scoffed at such impotence by <span style="color: #1255cc;"><a href="http://abcnews.go.com/International/iran-claims-video-shows-reverse-engineered-us-drone/story?id=26858830">showcasing its knock-off based on that drone</a> <span style="color: #222222;"><span style="color: #333333;">and some <a style="color: #1155cc;" href="http://news.yahoo.com/iran-firm-displays-us-made-helicopters-103647430.html" target="_blank">U.S.-made helicopters that it purchased</a>, highlighting just how useless sanctions have become</span></span></span>.</p>
<p style="color: #323333;">President Hassan Rouhani’s election vastly improved the public face of Iran’s nuclear program, and Obama was charmed too. Obama has <a href="http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2013/11/08/obama-is-lying-about-iran-sanctions/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">been unilaterally weakening the sanctions against Iran</span></a> by not enforcing them. He has threatened to thwart any Congressional attempt to limit his nuclear generosity by <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/20/us/politics/obama-sees-an-iran-deal-that-could-avoid-congress-.html?_r=0"><span style="color: #1255cc;">simply lifting sanctions without Congressional approval</span></a>. Yet despite these concessions and Rouhani&#8217;s smiles, <a href="http://www.npr.org/2014/11/02/360775656/after-acid-attacks-and-execution-iran-defends-human-rights-record"><span style="color: #1255cc;">human rights abuses in Iran have actually worsened.</span></a></p>
<p style="color: #323333;">Obama declared in 2012 (while running for reelection) that <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/obama-to-iran-and-israel-as-president-of-the-united-states-i-dont-bluff/253875/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">he doesn’t bluff when it comes to stopping Iranian nukes</span></a>, and that containment was not an option, unlike military force. But the credibility of that statement collapsed after Obama shrunk away from his “red line” against Syrian chemical weapons use. In 2013, Basher Assad gassed his own people and Obama took no military action. So if Obama cowers against a disintegrating state, what are the chances that he’ll militarily prevent Iranian nukes?</p>
<p style="color: #323333;">And Obama has dangerously undermined the only military threat to Iranian nukes that anyone still takes seriously: Israel. On the Iranian nuclear issue, Obama has <a href="http://www.timesofisrael.com/jerusalem-denies-israel-and-us-disagree-on-iran-bomb-timeline/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">isolated Israel on how close Iran is to a nuclear capability</span></a> with estimates that are far laxer. And as long as Obama continues negotiating (even if Iran is clearly playing for time as <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/09/20/gop-rejects-obama-s-creative-iran-nuclear-compromises.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">the U.S. offers ever more desperate proposals</span></a>) or reaches a deal allowing Iran to become a threshold nuclear weapons state, an Israeli military option to defang Iranian nukes appears less legitimate.</p>
<p style="color: #323333;"><span style="color: #1255cc;"><a href="http://tabletmag.com/scroll/185121/former-ap-reporter-confirms-matti-friedman-account">The media’s anti-Israel bias</a></span> is well known (they <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/A-Dose-of-Nuance-Can-we-please-stop-talking-about-hasbara-381004"><span style="color: #1255cc;">can’t even get a simple story about vehicular terrorism against Israelis correct</span></a> (compare how <i>The Guardian</i> writes accurate headlines when <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/21/canada-soldier-convert-islam-hit-and-run-quebec"><span style="color: #1255cc;">Canada suffers an Islamist car attack</span></a> but <a href="http://honestreporting.com/the-guardians-car-crash-headline/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">not when Israel does</span></a>). So if Obama accepts Iran’s nuclear program and Israel then attacks it, the media will be even harsher on Israel (even though the world will be silently relieved, if Israeli courage succeeds at neutralizing what scared everyone else).</p>
<p style="color: #323333;">Downgrading US-Israel relations seems to be part of Obama’s détente with Iran. Iran’s Supreme Leader Khamenei recently <a href="http://www.timesofisrael.com/iran-supreme-leader-touts-9-point-plan-to-destroy-israel/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">tweeted his plan for destroying Israel</span></a>, but Obama grows even more determined to reach an accord that legitimizes Iran’s nuclear program. And the Obama administration’s diplomatic abuse of America’s closest Mideast ally is unprecedented – from <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/03/25/president-allegedly-dumps-israeli-prime-minister-dinner/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">his humiliation of Prime Minister Netanyahu in 2010</span></a>, to Secretary of State <a href="http://www.timesofisrael.com/john-kerry-the-betrayal/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">John Kerry’s betrayal of Israel during Operation Protective Edge</span></a>, to <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2014/10/29/weinstein-5-takeaways-from-top-obama-official-calling-netanyahu-chickenst/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">calling Netanyahu a “chickenshit”</span></a> a few weeks ago, <a href="http://www.algemeiner.com/2014/10/29/white-house-distances-itself-from-chickenshit-insult-leveled-at-netanyahu-stops-short-of-apology/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">without even apologizing later</span></a> (note the irony of calling Netanyahu a coward anonymously). Obama seems far more concerned by <a href="http://www.timesofisrael.com/us-rejects-netanyahus-dismissal-of-e-jerusalem-housing-criticism/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">Israeli construction of apartments in Jerusalem</span></a> than a nuclear Iran. And he has been pressuring Israel to retreat from more disputed territory, effectively rewarding Palestinians for launching the third missile war against Israel from Gaza in five years last summer and now <a href="http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/11/third-intifada-jerusalem-violence-temple-mount-religious-war.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">the third Intifidah inside Israel</span></a> in 17 years. That puts Obama just behind <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/1.626383"><span style="color: #1255cc;">the European appeasers who think Palestinian bellicosity merits statehood</span></a>. They all naively think &#8212; at Israel&#8217;s peril &#8212; that peace is possible with <a style="color: #1155cc;" href="http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-11-19/jerusalems-new-holy-war" target="_blank">raw hatred</a>.</p>
<p style="color: #323333;">Obama indeed appears desperate to get a nuclear accord with Iran at any price. He has written <a href="http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/11/13/iran-responds-to-barack-obamas-letter-about-fight-against-isis-and-tehrans-nuclear-ambitions/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">letters</span></a> asking for Iran’s help against ISIS after they <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/09/26/iran-hints-at-interest-in-nuclear-trade-off-for-isis-help/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">hinted at an ISIS-for-nukes exchange</span></a>, and has pursued an agreement at all costs. Obama’s top aide, <a href="http://freebeacon.com/columns/the-coming-detente-with-iran/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">Ben Rhodes, was caught saying how a nuclear accord is as important to Obama as “healthcare”</span></a>; at least there’s a fitting slogan to sell the deal to Americans: “If you like your nukes, you can keep them.”</p>
<p style="color: #323333;">Russia, the serial spoiler, suggested extending <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/11/13/us-russia-iran-nuclear-idUSKCN0IX1H420141113"><span style="color: #1255cc;">nuclear talks past the November 24th deadline</span></a>. Iran will undoubtedly agree to more enrichment time (while it keeps <a href="http://www.thetower.org/1097oc-western-officials-iran-stonewalling-iaea-investigation-endangering-talks/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">stonewalling the IAEA’s investigations into it nukes</span></a>), as it did last July. For Obama, a bad agreement or an extension looks far better than concluding that talks have failed and issuing more empty threats to stop Iran militarily. And so U.S. foreign policy will continue its freefall, as the world’s bad actors will want to see what they can extort from a leader even weaker than President Carter. While Carter permitted Iran to hold 52 American diplomats and citizens hostage for 444 days, Obama may allow Iran to hold the world hostage with nuclear terrorism. It&#8217;s now dreadfully obvious: without massive public pressure, Obama will help Iran get nukes; anyone concerned about nuclear terrorism should sign this petition: <a href="http://www.nobombforiran.com/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">http://www.nobombforiran.com</span></a></p>
<p style="color: #323333;"><b>Noah Beck is the author of </b><a href="http://thelastisraelis.com/buy-the-book/"><span style="color: #0433ff;"><b><i>The Last Israelis</i></b></span></a><b>, an apocalyptic novel about Iranian nukes and other geopolitical issues in the Middle East.</b></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Obama&#8217;s Generous Deal With the Mullahs</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/majid-rafizadeh/obamas-generous-deal-with-the-mullahs/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-generous-deal-with-the-mullahs</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 21 Nov 2014 05:00:17 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Majid Rafizadeh]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[deadline]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iran]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kerry]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Winner: Islamic Republic.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Rouhani_1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-245717" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Rouhani_1-431x350.jpg" alt="Rouhani_1" width="337" height="274" /></a>There are two issues which have become crystal clear about the nuclear talks with Iran. First of all, the Obama administration wants to reach a final nuclear deal regardless of how flimsy and weak the comprehensive nuclear deal might be and regardless of whether the ultimate nuclear deal will leave the Islamic Republic with a path to obtain nuclear capabilities and lift economic and political sanctions.</p>
<p>Secondly, the Iranian leaders have masterfully captured the weakness of the Obama administration and its desperation to strike a final nuclear deal. As a result, Iran’s foreign minister, Javad Zarif, has been playing with the naiveté of the Obama administration by taking a tough stand and pointing out that Tehran will resist the “excessive demands” over its nuclear program. In other words, Iranian leaders are looking for a diluted, flimsy and sweet nuclear deal that would allow them to pursue their path to become a nuclear state and would help them phase out the economic and political sanctions as quickly as possible.</p>
<p>In the intense final few days of nuclear talks, the destiny of a historic nuclear deal and the outcome of the concentrated international negotiations over the future of Iran’s nuclear program will be determined. The deadline for nuclear talks between Iran and the P5+1 (China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) is approaching a deadline of 24 November.</p>
<p>There are some crucial hurdles which are still unresolved. These barriers are the process and phases through which sanction will be lifted as well as limitation on uranium enrichment, reducing the stockpile of already-enriched uranium, and the number of centrifuges that the Islamic Republic can retain. The Islamic Republic currently holds approximately 19,000 centrifuges. However, the Obama administration appears to be willing to ignore these gaps in order to save face by striking a deal and in order to add to his questionable and superficial records of Middle East achievements.</p>
<p>Although many scholars, politicians and policy analysts thought that the interim nuclear deal was far off and out of reach last year, the Obama administration, which desperately needed the interim nuclear deal, gave a significant amount of concessions and “closed the gaps” in the eleventh hours in order to persuade the Islamic Republic to sign the short term deal and reach an accord. This might occur again in the face of the final nuclear deal.</p>
<p>President Obama and Secretary of the State John Kerry will robustly push for any kind of final nuclear deal in order to avoid the post-failure consequences of the comprehensive nuclear deal and years of negotiations. The Obama administration has long been reluctant to carry out particular robust foreign policies such as ratcheting up political and economic sanctions on Iran and further isolating the Islamic Republic for  its nuclear defiance.</p>
<p>In addition, the other reason for the White House&#8217;s weak and desperate position to reach a final nuclear deal, is that the Obama administration&#8217;s attempts to create a narrative domestically that the spending of a considerable amount of political capital, months of negotiations, release of billions of dollars to the Iranian government, and diplomacy have “worked.” As a result, in order to avert any criticism, President Obama and John Kerry are willing to jeopardize the security threat that a nuclear state of Iran might pose to the Middle East.</p>
<p>On the other hand, whether the nuclear talks fail or succeed, the Islamic Republic will come out of this game as a winner. The major winner of the success or failure of nuclear talks will be Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamnenei. Shrewdly and masterfully, Khamenei placed himself in a position to not lose his legitimacy and credibility whether the nuclear talks succeed or scuttle. On the one hand, Khamenei has been arguing that he does not trust the United States and these nuclear negotiations, while he has been willing to give his blessing and a chance to President Rouhani, Foreign Minister Javad Zarif and their technocrat team to pursue their objectives with these nuclear talks. As a result, if nuclear talks fail, the Supreme Leader will argue that he told them so from the beginning, and if the nuclear talks succeed, he will get credit for being flexible and giving the president a chance. In addition, the Supreme leader has reached his economic, hegemonic, and political objectives in the meantime.</p>
<p>In case of failure, the Iranian leaders have already received billions of dollars, they bought more time to stabilize their economy, regain the value of their currency, reduce inflation, and further consolidate the hold on power of the ruling clerics. In addition Russia, China and some other Asian countries, and European companies have ratcheted up their economic and business deals with the Islamic Republic, particularly in the oil sector due to the prospects of these nuclear talks in the last year. In either ways, the ruling politicians of the Islamic republic will emerge as the winners.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Iran: &#8216;The Great Satan&#8217; Still Our &#8216;Number One Enemy&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/majid-rafizadeh/iran-the-great-satan-still-our-number-one-enemy/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=iran-the-great-satan-still-our-number-one-enemy</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 14 Nov 2014 05:20:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Majid Rafizadeh]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[The deadline for nuclear negotiations draws near -- and the Islamic Republic isn't backing down. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Hassan-Rouhani.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-245076" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Hassan-Rouhani-450x299.jpg" alt="Hassan-Rouhani" width="324" height="215" /></a>The deadline for a final and comprehensive nuclear deal between the Iranian leaders and the six world powers (the P5+1: China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) is approaching in less than two weeks on November 24<sup>th </sup>.</p>
<p>It seems that the White House is also investing in the notion that after a final nuclear deal is struck between Tehran and the P5+1, and after economic sanctions against the Islamic Republic are removed, Iranian leaders will alter their foreign policies and regional hegemonic ambitions. This argument is anchored in unrealistic and naïve expectations. If we closely analyze the Islamic Republic’s political and power structures, as well as its major sources of legitimacy, it becomes evident that a major and fundamental change in Iranian leaders’ political calculations is completely unlikely.</p>
<p>Domestically speaking, for over thirty years, by blaming and pointing fingers to the United States and Israel for almost every social and political challenge that the Islamic Republic encounters, the government has been capable of deflecting attention from the high unemployment rate among the youth, high inflation, corruption, nepotism, social injustice, lack of freedoms (speech, press, assembly, etc.), and lack of equal opportunity. The fundamental and underlying tenets of the Islamic Republic are anchored in opposing the United States and Israel and their foreign policies in the Middle East.</p>
<p>Secondly, from the Iranian leaders&#8217; perspective, in order to be capable of legally oppressing and cracking down on domestic opposition, the regime must maintain an anti-American posture. Normally, any individual that criticizes the structure and legitimacy of the Iranian government, ruling clerics and the Supreme Leader, is characterized as a US agent, conspirator and traitor. These charges allow the government to use its judiciary system to oppress opposition and maintain its power.</p>
<p>Recently, in the midst of the international tensions and negotiations regarding Iran’s contentious nuclear program, Iran&#8217;s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) released a statement to Iran’s semi-official Fars News Agency pointing out that the United States, “the Great Satan,” remains the Islamic Republic’s &#8220;number one enemy.&#8221; The IRGC’s statement <a href="http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/joseph-perticone/35-years-after-takeover-embassy-tehran-us-still-great-satan-iran"><span style="color: #0433ff;">read</span></a>, “The U.S. is still the great Satan and the number one enemy of the (Islamic) revolution and the Islamic Republic and the Iranian nation.”</p>
<p>Also recently, thousands of pro-government Iranians gathered around the US embassy to mark the 35<sup>th</sup> anniversary of the capture of the U.S. embassy and fifty-two Americans in Tehran by militant students. Demonstrators <a href="http://cdn.defenseone.com/defenseone/interstitial.html?v=2.1.1&amp;rf=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.defenseone.com%2Fthreats%2F2014%2F11%2Firanians-mark-35th-anniversary-hostage-crisis-protests%2F98165%2F"><span style="color: #0433ff;">chanted</span></a>  “Death to America,” “ Death to the Great Satan,” “Death to the United Kingdom” and “Death to Israel.”</p>
<p>Even if a comprehensive nuclear deal is reached between the Islamic Republic and the six world powers by November 24th, Iranian leaders’ position towards the United States, Western allies and Israel will not be altered for the following ideological reasons.</p>
<p>Having the largest Shiite population in the region, the Islamic Republic views itself as the major epicenter of Shiite revivalism across the region. Iran’s support for its proxies, Shiite militant political groups in the region (such Hezbollah in Lebanon, Liwa al-Imam al-Husayn in Syria, Asaib Ahl al-Haqq in Iraq, etc.), will remain to define Tehran’s foreign policy.<b> </b>Establishing itself as the front runner and leader of Shiism has been at the fundamental core of Iran’s foreign policy and regional hegemonic ambitions since 1979. This foreign policy objective will continue to define the Islamic Republic’s identity as long as the Ayatollahs are in power.</p>
<p>In addition, Iranian leaders have been investing in the Syrian regime, economically and politically, for over three decades. It is totally unrealistic to argue that if a final nuclear deal is sealed and if economic sanctions against the Islamic Republic are removed, Tehran will alter its unrelenting military, financial, advisory, and intelligence support to the Alawite-based government of al-Assad.</p>
<p>Without a doubt, some minor changes might occur if a final nuclear is struck. For example, Iran would be more incorporated in international organizations, particularly economically, and it would gradually open up its market to foreign and Western investors. It follows that the Islamic Republic will have to embed some international financial standards into its economic system. Nevertheless, the office of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and IRGC will remain the key economic generators with a monopoly over major industries and will be reluctant to allow equal opportunity and redistribution of wealth to the lower classes.</p>
<p>Furthermore, being incorporated more into world economic systems does not necessarily indicate that more political freedom, as well as civil liberties, will be granted to ordinary Iranian citizens. Historical evidence reveals that economic prosperity for some states can result in implementation of robust policies to tighten control over the population and further centralize power. In other words, similar to other authoritarian governments, economic liberalization will not go hand in hand with political liberalizations in the Islamic Republic.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>It’s Not the Centrifuges &#8212;- It’s the Warhead</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/edwin-black/its-not-the-centrifuges-its-the-warhead/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=its-not-the-centrifuges-its-the-warhead</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 12 Nov 2014 05:40:09 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Edwin Black]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[The Mullahs' design is nearly perfected.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/iran-nuclear.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-245086" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/iran-nuclear.jpg" alt="iran-nuclear" width="250" height="170" /></a>November 24, 2014 is a looming deadline for Iran, Israel, the United States and the world over its nuclear weapons program. Just days ago, the International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA] released a report summarized by its conclusion:</p>
<blockquote><p>The Agency is not in a position to provide credible assurances about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran, and therefore to conclude that all nuclear material in Iran is in peaceful activities. Iran has not provided any explanations that enable the Agency to clarify the outstanding practical measures, nor has it proposed any new practical measures in the next step of the Framework for cooperation.</p></blockquote>
<p>Under Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, leading the international negotiations, has described the back and forth as “a forest of distrust.” At the same time, she declares, “Our bottom line is unambiguous … Iran will not, shall not obtain a nuclear weapon.”</p>
<p>In the background, media revelations recently disclosed secret correspondence between the Obama White House to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — kept even from congressional leaders and America’s closest allies, including Israel. Washington is struggling to enlist Tehran in the faltering campaign against the Islamic State. This process has juggled agreed numbers of centrifuges — a limit of 4,000 … or is it 10,000 … or is it something in between? Centrifuges are a critical component because each vertical cylinder slowly but steadily distills uranium into a highly enriched weapon-ready state.</p>
<p>However, as the world ponders Iran’s dash to enrich more kilograms of uranium, the underlying concern is not so much about the enrichment process itself, but the end product: a nuclear warhead. Iran has been developing its warhead for some sixteen years. That design is nearly perfected.</p>
<p>Compare the process to gunpowder. To use gunpowder, you need load it into a cartridge, load the cartridge and a bullet into a rifle, and then find a marksman. Iran has nearly mastered all those steps — but in nuclear terms.</p>
<p>Four technological achievements are key to completing Tehran’s nuclear weapon:</p>
<p>1) accretion of enough nuclear materials, highly enriched to weapons-grade or 90 percent; 2) machining that material into metal for a spheroid warhead so it can fit into a missile nosecone; 3) developing a trigger mechanism to initiate the atomic explosion at a precise moment during missile reentry; and, of course, 4) a reliable delivery system.</p>
<p>Start with the nuclear material. Experts estimate that a single bomb would require approximately 25 kilograms of Highly Enriched Uranium, or HEU, with a U-235 concentration of at least 90 percent. Much of Iran’s nuclear enrichment remains at 3.5 and 20 percent levels. But the numbers are deceiving. Enriching to 3.5 percent is 75 percent of the task of reaching weapons-grade. Once Iran has reached 20 percent, it has gone 90 percent of the distance. Indeed, Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani delivered a 2005 speech in his capacity as National Security Advisor in which he declared, “a country that possesses fuel cycle technology can enrich uranium —and the country that can enrich uranium to about 3.5 percent will also have the capability to enrich it to about 90 percent.” Today, Iran possesses enough nuclear material for a fast “break-out” that would finish the job, creating enough for five or ten bombs, in about six weeks.</p>
<p>Second, that HEU must be metalized and shaped into a dense spheroid compact enough to fit into a missile nosecone. Iran has mastered the metallurgical techniques using other high-density metals such as tungsten, which have been test-detonated in a special chamber to measure their explosive character.</p>
<p>Third, the spheroid must be detonated. Iran’s warhead design employs a R265 shock generator hemisphere drilled with 5mm boreholes that are filled with PETN—pentaerythritol tetranitrate, an organic high explosive favored by terrorists. When triggered with precision, the PETN array can cause a massive synchronized implosion. That will fire an internal exploding bridgewire which will in turn actuate an embedded neutron initiator to detonate the atomic reaction—and the mushroom cloud. This sequence of devices has been assembled and tested. Iran has some 500 exploding bridgewires.</p>
<p>Fourth, the warhead must be delivered. The Shabab-3 missile nosecone is large enough to accommodate the warhead. The outer radius of the R265 shock generator-encased warhead is 550 millimeters, less than the estimated payload chamber diameter of about 600 millimeters. Most of all, the Iranian military has selected the Shabab-3 not only because it possesses a range of 1200 kilometers, but because it can be detonated in an airburst some 600 meters off the ground on re-entry. The height of 600 meters was used in the Nagasaki explosion. Such a weapon cannot be crashed into the ground. It must be detonated while still airborne. Iran has a small fleet of Shahab-3 missiles.</p>
<p>Hence, Iran’s metronomic accretion of nuclear material is not just an ambiguous physics undertaking that should worry the West. It is part and parcel of a nuclear attack plan that the international community is determined to address.</p>
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		<title>Reyhaneh Jabbari&#8217;s Execution Shows Emboldened Iran</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/majid-rafizadeh/reyhaneh-jabbaris-execution-shows-emboldened-iran/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=reyhaneh-jabbaris-execution-shows-emboldened-iran</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 06 Nov 2014 05:30:55 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Majid Rafizadeh]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[How the weakness of the U.S. is creating more victims inside the Islamic Republic. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/1412068835096_wps_19_A_picture_taken_on_July_8.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-244656" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/1412068835096_wps_19_A_picture_taken_on_July_8-409x350.jpg" alt="1412068835096_wps_19_A_picture_taken_on_July_8" width="290" height="248" /></a>Despite the surge in executions and human rights violations in the Islamic Republic, the mainstream media and some Western politicians still depict the Iranian president Hassan Rouhani and his governmental technocrat team as moderate or reformist.</p>
<p>Recently, a 26-year-old Iranian woman, Reyhaneh Jabbari, was executed in Iran’s prison for allegedly killing the man who raped her. Morteza Abdolali Sarbandi, the alleged rapist, was a former employee in Iran’s intelligence ministry. The trial of Jabbari lacked fair and due process.</p>
<p>The intriguing issue is that this execution led to a considerable amount of international outcry from human rights groups. Many requested that the Islamic Republic’s president, Hassan Rouhani, rescind the death sentence against Jabbari.</p>
<p>Normally, when there is significant international pressure, the Islamic Republic has tended to shift the death sentence or postpone it. But the fact that the Iranian government went ahead and executed this women highlights the increasing empowerment and emboldened sentiments of the Iranian regime as it defies, as well as disregards, the international condemnation.</p>
<p>Several crucial factors, including President Obama’s projection of weak foreign policy, leadership, as well as his administration’s appeasement policies toward the Islamic Republic’s domestic and foreign policy, play crucial roles in emboldening and empowering the Islamic Republic.</p>
<p>In addition, the new wave of acid attacks against Iranian women appear not to raise any concerns in the Iranian government with regards to its  global and regional image.</p>
<p>A new report by a United Nations Human Rights investigator further highlights the surge in executions and human rights violations, and it underlines the fallacy of the narrative that President Hassan Rouhani is distinct from other Iranian politicians, such as his predecessor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.</p>
<p>The new report was provided by a United Nations human rights investigator, Ahmad Shaheed, who was a former diplomat from the Maldives and currently special rapporteur on human rights issues in the Islamic Republic.</p>
<p>Shaheed, who has been denied to entry into the Islamic Republic, conducted his report by amassing hundreds of interviews and substantiated records of human rights abuses, including those executions officially reported by the Iranian government. Although he did not directly blame Rouhani, Shaheed recently addressed and briefed the United Nations General Assembly on Iran’s human rights record, which corresponds with the timing that Rouhani had been in office.</p>
<p>The surge in human rights abuses appear to have been carried out on several crucial platforms. First of all, there is an alarming increase in the number of prison and public executions in comparison to the prior year.</p>
<p>In 2012, under the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the recorded number of executions was 580 people. This indicates that there has been an increase of approximately 45 percent in executions under Rouhani. In 2013, 687 people were executed.</p>
<p>In addition, the range of charges for executing Iranian citizens appears to have been widened. The legal reasons behind executions include political, economic, human rights activism, and drug trafficking. Addressing a General Assembly human rights committee this week, Ahmad Shaheed pointed out this &#8220;surge in executions in the country over the past 12-15 months.&#8221; Shaheed added, &#8220;At least 852 individuals were executed in the period since June of last year, including eight juveniles.&#8221;</p>
<p>The second manner of human rights violation is targeted at those who are engaged in freedom of information, particularly journalists. In addition, other reporters and posters, such as bloggers, Facebook users, and people who are active on social media, have been restricted as well. The number of journalists who have been detained in the Islamic Republic have also ratcheted up. According to Shaheed, there are currently 35 journalists under detention in Iran.</p>
<p>The third phenomenon appears to represent the concerns regarding the persecution of religious minorities, including the Christians, Sunnis, Dervishes, and Baha&#8217;i community. Currently, 120 people of the Baha&#8217;i community, as well as 49 Christians, have been documented to be in prison in Iran solely for religious practices.  Some members of the Arab community, characterized as “cultural rights activists,” as well as juveniles, have also been put to death sentence.</p>
<p>The fourth category of human rights abuses is linked to the restrictions on and deterioration of women&#8217;s rights in the Islamic Republic. For example, the Iranian government has also imposed a quota on the admission of Iranian girls to universities. According the UN human rights reports, the number of Iranian women being enrolled at universities has come down to 48 percent.</p>
<p>President Rouhani was elected by the majority of Iranian people as a moderate candidate who would potentially promote civil liberties, social justice, and individual freedoms (including freedom of speech, assembly and press).</p>
<p>Instead of taking a more robust position towards the Islamic Republic when it comes to dealing with the Islamic Republic, President Obama will more likely disregard the recent surge in egregious and appalling human rights abuses due to the administration&#8217;s extreme focus on striking a final nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic. The comprehensive nuclear deal would ultimately remove political and economic sanctions against the Islamic Republic. The United States should concentrate more on human rights violations in Iran by incorporating this issue with the country’s nuclear defiance.</p>
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		<title>Indyk&#8217;s Yom Kippur War on Israel</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/moshe-phillips-and-benyamin-korn/indyks-yom-kippur-war-on-israel/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=indyks-yom-kippur-war-on-israel</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 15 Oct 2014 04:10:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Moshe Phillips and Benyamin Korn]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[disrespect]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Martin Indyk]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[negotiations]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama Administration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Palestinian]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=243069</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The former U.S. envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations shows what side he's really on. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #232323;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/martin-indyk.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-243073" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/martin-indyk-450x314.jpg" alt="Martin Indyk" width="325" height="227" /></a>As Yom Kippur sermons go, Martin Indyk&#8217;s was a doozy. Speaking at the Adas Israel synagogue in Washington, D.C. on the holiest day of the Jewish year, the former U.S. envoy to the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations accused Israel of showing &#8220;total disrespect&#8221; for the Obama administration.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Indyk said many things in his Yom Kippur address with which one might take issue, but one analogy in particular stands out as especially disturbing.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">He said that he “discovered” in the most recent round of failed negotiations &#8220;that we would crack the whip, but no one was responding to our whip cracks. That&#8217;s a change.&#8221;</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">How disappointing for Indyk. Those who recall his days as U.S. ambassador to Israel no doubt feel a sense of deja vu when they hear Indyk talking about whips. Here is how he described his role in Israel to the Washington Post back on February 24, 1997:  &#8220;The image that comes to mind is a circus master. All these players in the ring. We crack the whip and get them to move around in an orderly fashion.&#8221;</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Ironic, isn&#8217;t it? The ex-diplomat who accuses Israel of being &#8220;disrespectful&#8221; has repeatedly compared the Israelis to circus animals who need to have some sense whipped into them. And when the dumb brutes don&#8217;t respond, Indyk the circus master is outraged and lashes out at his victims.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The irony goes further. Indyk served a president who has made almost a hobby of being disrespectful to Israel&#8217;s prime minister. Nobody can forget the time that President Obama deliberately left Prime Minister Netanyahu waiting for an hour and a half, while he went off to have dinner with Michelle and the kids. Or the infamous photo that the White House released of President Obama with his feet on his desk as he spoke by phone with Netanyahu.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Not to mention just last week, when Mr. Obama repeatedly referred to Netanyahu as &#8220;Bibi,&#8221; while Netanyahu, by contrast, appropriately referred to Obama as &#8220;Mr. President.&#8221; In an earlier era, perhaps someone could complain that it was difficult for an American president to pronounce a name such as &#8220;Menachem.&#8221; But how hard would it have been for President Obama to pronounce the name &#8220;Benjamin&#8221; ?</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">If the U.S.-Israel relationship is indeed &#8220;in trouble,&#8221; as Ambassador Indyk claimed in his Adas Israel speech, the reason is not that Israelis are being &#8220;disrespectful,&#8221; which Indyk claims to be &#8220;really, really disturbed by.&#8221;</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The reason is that the Obama Administration&#8217;s policymakers, starting with the president and going all the way down the line to envoys such as Indyk, automatically blame Israel for everything and the Palestinians for nothing.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">They denounce Israel for construction within existing Jewish towns in Judea-Samaria, but never criticize the Palestinian Authority for building entire new Arab cities there. They denounce Israel for building homes in Jerusalem, yet they never say anything about the widespread illegal Arab construction in Jerusalem.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Nor do they ever say a word about the truly &#8220;disrespectful&#8221; actions by the PA toward the United States, such as paying salaries to imprisoned terrorists who have murdered Americans, or naming streets, parks and soccer tournaments after killers of Americans &#8212; including the killer of the niece of the late U.S. Senator Abraham Ribicoff.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Just two weeks ago, both PA cabinet minister Yusuf Ida&#8217;is and the official PA news agency &#8220;WAFA&#8221; praised the killers of the three Israeli teenagers &#8211;one of whom was an American&#8211; as &#8220;Shahids,&#8221; or &#8220;martyrs.&#8221; And just a few weeks before that, the official PA daily newspaper Al-Hayat Al-Jadida published no less than five articles in a six-day period acusing the United States of creating ISIS in order to destabilize the Middle East.  (For details, see <a href="http://www.palwatch.org/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">www.palwatch.org</span></a>)</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">It is precisely this Obama-Indyk attitude, which ignores the disrespectful actions of the PA, and accuses Israel of being &#8220;disrespectful&#8221; if it fails to respond to &#8220;whip cracks,&#8221; which threatens U.S.-Israel relations.</p>
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		<title>Obama Secretly Giving In to Iran&#8217;s Nuke Demands</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/majid-rafizadeh/obama-secretly-giving-in-to-irans-nuke-demands/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obama-secretly-giving-in-to-irans-nuke-demands</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 09 Oct 2014 04:20:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Majid Rafizadeh]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iran]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islamic  Republic]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[negotiations]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nuclear Weapons]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=242395</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The president's unprecedented concessions to the Islamic Republic. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Iran-nuclear-weapons-program-IAEA-report.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-242397" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Iran-nuclear-weapons-program-IAEA-report-408x350.jpg" alt="Iran-nuclear-weapons-program-IAEA-report" width="321" height="275" /></a>For several reasons, President Obama appears to be desperate to seal a final nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic, even if the comprehensive nuclear pact would leave the Iranian leaders with the nuclear infrastructure and required centrifuges to build an atomic bomb. Based on the latest developments, it is clear the Obama administration has steadily become much more lenient and compromising, giving unprecedented concessions to the Islamic Republic, some of which have been kept <a href="http://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-white-house-iran-20140920-story.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">clandestine</span></a>.</p>
<p>As the nuclear talks continue between Iranian leaders and representatives from the P5+1 (China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States), the nuclear negotiations have turned primarily into a show between the United States and the Islamic Republic. Increasingly, Iranian and American politicians from both sides have been holding bilateral talks in order to strike a nuclear deal by the extended deadline of November 24.</p>
<p>The US and Iran appear to be the two major players in the nuclear talks, as the White House began reshaping the nuclear negotiations which fall right into the interests of Iranian politicians.</p>
<p>First of all, the main demand of the United States and other world powers was that the Islamic Republic had to dismantle its nuclear infrastructure for the United Nations Security Council to remove the four rounds of economic and political sanctions on Iran. Dismantlement of the major nuclear facilities would give the international community a considerable amount of relief from Iran’s potential to develop an atomic bomb anytime soon.</p>
<p>In the past months, the nuclear talks became stagnant due to the fact that Iranian leaders, particularly Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the senior cadre of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, suggested that they will not give an inch or dismantle their nuclear infrastructure.</p>
<p>How did President Obama respond to Iranian leaders’ zero sum political game and uncompromising standpoint? Intriguingly, President Obama made a decision to secretly lower the international community&#8217;s demands to satisfy the Iranian nuclear team’s demands. It is key to point out that the decision he made highlights a significant shift in nuclear negotiations. The White House proposed that the Islamic Republic disconnect rather than dismantle its centrifuges, which can be used to enrich uranium and obtain a nuclear bomb. This is a critical shift in the American position towards Iran’s nuclear defiance.</p>
<p>President Obama’s proposal to the Islamic Republic would in fact leave Iranian leaders with all their nuclear infrastructure they have so far developed. Iranian leaders would also be capable of secretly continuing to enrich uranium through bypassing the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)’s rules. In addition, since the nuclear infrastructure and centrifuges would remain almost intact, the Islamic Republic would be capable of resuming its nuclear activities anytime they desire in the future; this can occur potentially after economic sanctions were removed and Iran’s objective achieved.</p>
<p>President Obama’s offer to the Iranian leaders was kept secret from the public and US Congress as well. The proposal was disclosed by the Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif who held private conversations with U.S. experts in New York.</p>
<p>After President Obama’s proposal was revealed, Congress understandably raised a series of concerns. Senator Mark Steven Kirk (R-Ill.) initiated a letter, which included thirty other Senators, to Secretary of State John Kerry, <a href="http://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-white-house-iran-20140920-story.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">pointing out</span></a> that the Obama administration “may now be offering troubling nuclear concessions to Iran in the hopes of rapidly concluding negotiations for a &#8216;deal.&#8217;”</p>
<p>President Obama will be in office for a few more years, but if the final nuclear deal is signed based on President Obama’s proposal, it will pose an unprecedented danger and an irresolvable global issue with regard to the Islamic Republic’s nuclear threat as well as Tehran’s ideological and hegemonic ambitions.</p>
<p>Numerous reasons may be behind President Obama’s leniency, priority changes and determination to strike a final nuclear deal with Iran. First of all, Obama cannot run for reelection. As a result, a flimsy nuclear deal &#8212; which would leave the Islamic Republic with a path to develop a nuclear bomb &#8212; would not affect his political career. Secondly, President Obama can add another achievement to his political career and history for being the first US President to seal a final nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran.</p>
<p>Third, President Obama’s leadership has always been weak when it comes to dealing with Iran’s Supreme Leader and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps. Iranian leaders have masterfully taken advantage of his leaderless personality. The Islamic Republic is even attempting to get more concessions from the White House by linking its fight against the Islamic State with the nuclear negations as a trade off. Apparently, all odds are in favor of the Iranian leaders so far as they are cognizant of that fact that they are facing a lenient and weak US President and as they are increasingly and steadily increasing their leverage over the US.</p>
<p>President Obama’s proposal and leniency would grant Ayatollah Khamenei what he desires: removal of economic sanctions as well as maintaining the right the enrich uranium; build an atomic bomb.</p>
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		<title>Rouhani&#8217;s One-Year Anniversary</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/majid-rafizadeh/rouhanis-one-year-anniversary/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=rouhanis-one-year-anniversary</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 15 Aug 2014 04:20:22 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Majid Rafizadeh]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[anniversary]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iran]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islamic  Republic]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Moderate]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=238643</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A good year for the rogue Islamic Republic. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Rouhani.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-238675" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Rouhani-433x350.jpg" alt="Rouhani" width="288" height="233" /></a>At this time last year, Hassan Rouhani, the Iranian regime insider, assumed the office of presidency in the Islamic Republic. Rouhani was approved to run by the constitutionally-mandated and appointed 12 members of the Islamist and hardline Guardian Council, and after he gave empty promises of bringing &#8220;<a href="http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/06/13/shoulder_to_shoulder_canada_foreign_minister_iran_rouhani_human_rights"><span style="color: #0433ff;">dignity</span></a>” to the nation,  freeing political prisoners, promoting civil rights, normalcy, reintegrating Iran in the world economically and politically.</p>
<p>Other crucial reasons behind his election included his <a href="http://archive.thedailystar.net/beta2/news/hassan-rouhani-reformer-or-loyalist/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">loyalty</span></a> to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Iran’s Islamist revolutionary principles, his background profile as a government insider and chief nuclear negotiator, the blessings of Supreme Leaders for him, and the low standards that the hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad set.</p>
<p>The purpose of having Rouhani as the president was evident from the beginning: for the first time, Ayatollah Khamenei and the senior cadre of the Islamic Republic’s Revolutionary Guards Corps deeply felt that their hold on power was being threatened. This was due to international economic and political sanctions, Iran’s nuclear defiance, along with disenfranchisement and discontent of Iranian youth (for reasons such as unemployment, human rights violations, suppression of freedom of press, expression, assembly, high inflation).</p>
<p>How has Rouhani served his regime? Under the first year of his presidency, Rouhani and his nuclear technocrat team were unprecedentedly and unexpectedly successful at reaching the regime’s objectives. He was capable of achieving the ideological, economic, and geopolitical goals of the Islamist agenda of the ruling clerics.</p>
<p>It is crucial to point out that, in the first year, Rouhani&#8217;s goal was to merge the Islamic Republic’s ideological and Islamist principles with its economic, strategic and geopolitical interests. Rouhani wanted to ensure the survival of the Islamist regime.</p>
<p>The game that Rouhani and his team played with the West and particularly the United States was anchored in utilizing softer tones while exploiting the fragile and weak position of the Obama administration.</p>
<p>First, by striking the nuclear interim deal with the P5+1 (the United States, Russia, France, China, the United Kingdom, plus Germany), Rouhani and his technocrat nuclear team were successful in obtaining sanctions relief&#8211; <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-20/iran-hails-long-day-as-it-starts-curbing-nuclear-work.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">worth</span></a> between $6 and $7 billion – and suspending certain sanctions on some Iranian industries including the automotive sector, gold and precious metals trade, and petrochemical exports.</p>
<p>On the other hand, currently, the Islamic Republic’s economy has been stabilized according to the <a href="http://english.farsnews.com/newstext.aspx?nn=13930120000786"><span style="color: #0433ff;">International Monetary Fund</span></a>, and oil exports have increased by approximately <a href="http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/07/31/uk-asia-iran-crude-idUKKBN0G00C320140731"><span style="color: #0433ff;">25 percent</span></a>, specifically to Asian countries, in the first six months of the year 2014.</p>
<p>While Rouhani has spent a considerable amount of his political capital on the international arena, nuclear talks, attempting to empower the Islamic Republic in the world affairs and economy, and removing economic sanctions, Iran’s fundamental foreign policies in the region, internationally and domestically remain ideological and intact.</p>
<p>For example, President Hassan Rouhani <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/irans-new-president-hassan-rouhani-vows-to-support-syrian-regime-as-president-assad-vows-to-crush-rebels-with-iron-fist-8745857.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">voiced</span></a> his support for the Syrian government, as Iran’s <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/irans-new-president-hassan-rouhani-vows-to-support-syrian-regime-as-president-assad-vows-to-crush-rebels-with-iron-fist-8745857.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">support</span></a> for the Syrian government financially, militarily, politically and advisory continues. Even after the use of chemical weapons against the civilians in Syria, Rouhani’s administration has not shifted its support and policies towards President Bashar Al Assad.</p>
<p>In addition, under Rouhani’s administration, the Islamic Republic continues to support non state actors such as Hezbollah and Hamas. In addition, the Islamic Republic’s <a href="http://forward.com/articles/184240/iranian-president-hassan-rouhani-criticizes-israel/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">foreign policies</span></a> towards Israel remain intact as well.</p>
<p>On the other hand, billions of dollars gained by the ruling cleric, are tightly distributed among the top officials. Millions of ordinary Iranian people still encounter hardship economically. In addition, the unemployment rate remains to be in <a href="http://carnegieendowment.org/2014/08/06/ineffective-economic-stewardship/hk2b?reloadFlag=1"><span style="color: #0433ff;">double digit</span></a><span style="color: #0433ff;">s</span> for millions of Iranian people.</p>
<p>When it comes to human rights and freedoms (assembly, press and speech),  Rouhani has supported the status quo of repression. According to the Human Rights Watch, there has been <a href="http://www.hrw.org/world-report/2014/country-chapters/iran?page=3"><span style="color: #0433ff;">“no sign of improvement”</span></a> and the Islamic Republic continues to violate human rights under Rouhani.</p>
<p>On March 11, Ahmed Shaheed, the United Nations special rapporteur on the human rights conditions in the Islamic Republic of Iran, released his <a href="http://www.hrw.org/world-report/2014/country-chapters/iran?page=3"><span style="color: #0433ff;">second annual report</span></a> to the UN Human Rights Council (HRC), pointing out that there exists an “apparent increase in the degree of seriousness of human rights violations” and he expressed his concern at the “rate of executions in the country, especially for crimes that do not meet serious crimes standards.”</p>
<p>In addition, in October, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon released his annual report expressing concerns with regards to the continuing human rights violations in the Islamic Republic under Rouhani. Human Rights Watch <a href="http://www.hrw.org/world-report/2014/country-chapters/iran?page=3"><span style="color: #0433ff;">points out</span></a> that “The government continued to block access to Shaheed and to experts with other UN rights bodies.”</p>
<p>It is an illusion to believe that any political figure in the Islamic Republic, who rises to power, will shift the Islamist, radical, and ideological perspective of this regime. Loyalty to the Islamist principles, antagonism towards Israel, and supporting Hezbollah, Hamas, or other Islamists groups, are the underlying and basic rules that each Iranian politician believes in and has to pursue, in order to survive and rise the political ladder in Iran. The higher an Iranian politician is in his political life and position, the more loyal he is to the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the more he voices his antagonism towards the state of Israel publicly or covertly, and the more he views the United States as a Great Satan. This underlying rule is the political formula for survival and promotion under the Islamist and ideological regime of the Islamic Republic.</p>
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		<title>A Game Changer in Gaza</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/a-game-changer-in-gaza/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-game-changer-in-gaza</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 11 Jul 2014 04:55:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=236065</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Terrorism is a game. Either you win or you lose.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/abbas_meshaal.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-236066" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/abbas_meshaal-450x337.jpg" alt="abbas_meshaal" width="262" height="196" /></a>Terrorism is a game. The rules are simple. You have three choices. 1. Destroy the terrorists. 2. Live with terrorism. 3. Give in to the terrorists.</p>
<p>There are no other choices.</p>
<p>The first choice comes from the right. The third choice comes from the left. The second choice is what politicians choose when they don’t want to make a decision that will change the status quo.</p>
<p>Despite all the explosions in Gaza, Israel is still stuck on the second choice. The air strikes aren’t meant to destroy Hamas. They are being carried out to degrade its military capabilities which will buy a year or two of relative peace. And that will be followed by more of the same in the summer of 2016 when Hamas will have deadlier Iranian and Syrian weapons that will terrorize more of the country.</p>
<p>That doesn’t sound like much of a deal, but these kinds of wars have bought more peace than the peace process ever did. The peace process led to wars. The wars lead to a temporary peace.</p>
<p>This status quo became the mainstream choice ever since Israelis figured out that the peace process wasn’t going to work and that their leaders weren’t about to defy the UN, the US, the UK and all the other U’s by actually destroying the terrorists.</p>
<p>When Netanyahu first ran against Peres, the difference between the center-right and the center-left was that he campaigned on security first and appeasement second, while Peres campaigned on appeasement first and security second. The center-right has dominated Israeli politics because most Israelis accepted Likud’s security first as a more reasonable position than Labor’s appeasement first.</p>
<p>Living with terrorism was a viable choice in the 80s. It stopped being a viable choice after Israel allowed terrorist states to be set up under the peace process. It’s one thing to manage terrorism in territories that you control. It’s another thing to deal with entire terrorist states inside your borders. Even physical separation isn’t enough. Not when terrorist groups can shell all your major cities.</p>
<p>Israel responds to that threat with light air strikes which damage Hamas’ military capabilities. Hamas loses a few commanders, fighters and rockets, but scores a PR victory. Israel buys two years of peace while encouraging its enemies to attack it as a bunch of racist baby killers. Then Hamas replaces the rockets and fighters and launches a new operation and the whole thing begins again.</p>
<p>The left’s argument, framed by <i>Washington Post</i> pundits, Israeli leftists, Obama, assorted diplomats, retired security chiefs, activist busybodies funded by radical billionaires and the entire gang of foreign and domestic enemies, is that Israel has no choice except to default back to choice three; appeasement.</p>
<p>Israel has to gamble on appeasement because its situation is constantly worsening, they argue. What they neglect to mention is that the situation is worsening as part of their pressure on Israel to appease terrorists even though the current problems exist because of earlier appeasement.</p>
<p>“Drink this poison,” the doctors of diplomacy say. “It’ll cure you of all the aches and pains you’re suffering from the last time we told you to drink poison.”</p>
<p>“If you don’t drink more poison, you’ll get sicker and die,” they say. And if you do get sicker after drinking more poison, they’ll say it’s your own fault for not drinking enough poison. If only you had given away all of Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, the terrorists wouldn’t be attacking you again.</p>
<p>Israel has been caught between choices two and three, either live with terrorism or make concessions to terrorists, and it has been bouncing between these choices.</p>
<p>People and politicians choose the option that causes the least pain at any given time. Israel chooses appeasement in response to international pressure. And when appeasement leads to terrorism, it does enough damage to Hamas to serve as a temporary deterrent, without leading to too much international outrage, again choosing the least painful option.</p>
<p>This is the true cycle that Israel is caught in. It’s not a cycle of violence. It’s a cycle of expediency.</p>
<p>The first choice, destroying the terrorists, is the most painful option in the short term, but the least painful option in the long term. The third choice, appeasing the terrorists, causes the least pain in the short term, but the most pain in the long term and the medium term. The second choice, living with terrorism, is slightly more painful in the short term, less painful in the medium term, but still quite painful in the long term.</p>
<p>Israelis have accepted short term and long term pain in exchange for a certain amount of relief in the immediate future. The occasional terrorist attack and the more ominous escalating conflict, an example of which we are seeing now, is accepted in exchange for a year or two of relative quiet.</p>
<p>It’s easy to criticize Israel for not finishing off Hamas, but let’s look at what is really standing in its way.</p>
<p>Israeli Prime Minister Rabin deported 400 Hamas terrorists, including many Hamas leaders. In a Knesset speech he warned that, “We call on all nations and all people to devote their attention to the great danger inherent in Islamic fundamentalism. That is the real and serious danger which threatens the peace of the world in the forthcoming years.”</p>
<p>Instead the international community decided that the peace of the world was threatened by deporting Hamas terrorists. The media spent months covering the “suffering” of the deported Hamas terrorists.  <a href="http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2010/07/how-media-un-and-diplomats-saved-hamas.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">The United States voted</span></a> for a UN resolution condemning Israel and ordering it to “insure the safe and immediate return of all those deported.”</p>
<p>The United States Ambassador to the United Nations said that deporting Hamas terrorists does &#8220;not contribute to current efforts for peace.&#8221;</p>
<p>In 1988, Israel had deported a handful of Hamas and PLO terrorists.</p>
<p>One of them, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1988/01/17/world/un-aide-in-middle-as-israelis-shoot.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Jibril Mahmoud Rajub,</span></a> vowed that if Israel didn’t let them back in that they would “infiltrate in as human bombs with explosives belted around our waists.”</p>
<p>Deputy Secretary of State John C. Whitehead <a href="http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1988-08-25/news/8802190245_1_deportation-israeli-embassy-shamir"><span style="color: #0433ff;">warned Israel that if it didn&#8217;t reconsider</span></a> the deportations &#8220;damage to our bilateral relations will occur.&#8221;</p>
<p>If that was the reaction by the Reagan and Bush administrations to deporting a few terrorists, imagine the reaction by Obama and the EU to a comprehensive effort to force Hamas and the PLO out of Israel.</p>
<p>And yet the inevitable can’t be postponed forever.</p>
<p>If Israel had not folded in the peace process, it might have been able to maintain the status quo of the intifada. But the second choice is no longer a viable long term option. The attacks have long since passed the point of mere terrorism and are taking place on a military scale.</p>
<p>Tolerating terrorism has ceased to be a long term strategy. That is something that both the left and the right agree on. The attacks are pushing Israel into choosing either large scale conflict or large scale appeasement. Appeasing terrorists has failed every time. Only destroying them can work.</p>
<p>Israel has a left that is eager to embrace the destructive policies of appeasement without regard to the consequences. It needs a right that is equally heedless of consequences when it comes to war to overcome that pain threshold which prevents it from doing the right thing and reclaiming the future.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Hamas’s (and Iran’s) Fail-Safe Strategy</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/hamass-and-irans-fail-safe-strategy/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=hamass-and-irans-fail-safe-strategy</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 11 Jul 2014 04:45:45 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[The terrorist organization knows it can't defeat Israel -- so why is it fighting? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/hamas-fighters-420-112212060441.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-236056" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/hamas-fighters-420-112212060441.jpg" alt="PALESTINIAN-ISAREL-CONFLICT-GAZA" width="271" height="198" /></a>Originally published by the <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Column-One-Hamass-and-Irans-fail-safe-strategy-362322">Jerusalem Post</a>. </em></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">What is Hamas doing? Hamas isn’t going to defeat Israel.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">It isn’t going to gain any territory. Israel isn’t going to withdraw from Ashkelon or Sderot under a hail of rockets.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">So if Hamas can’t win, why is it fighting? Why rain down destruction and misery on millions of Israelis with your Iranian missiles and your Syrian rockets and invite a counter-assault on your headquarters and weapons warehouses, which you have conveniently placed in the middle of the Palestinian people on whose behalf you are allegedly fighting? Hamas is in a precarious position. When the terror group took over Gaza seven years ago, things were different.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">It had a relatively friendly regime in Cairo that was willing to turn a blind eye to all the missiles Iran, Syria and Hezbollah were sending over to Gaza through Sinai.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Hamas’s leaders were comfortably ensconced in Damascus and enjoyed warm relations with Saudi Arabia and Iran.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">International funds flowed freely into Hamas bank accounts from Fatah’s donor-financed Palestinian Authority budget, through the Arab Bank, headquartered in Jordan, through the UN, and when necessary through suitcases of cash transferred to Gaza by couriers from Egypt.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Hamas used these conditions to build up the arsenal of a terror state, and to keep the trains running on time. Schools were open. Government employees were paid. Israel was bombed. All was good.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Today, Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, faces an Egyptian regime that is locked into a life-and-death struggle with the Brotherhood. To harm Hamas, for the past year the Egyptians have been blocking Hamas’s land-based weapons shipments and destroying its smuggling-dependent economy by sealing off the cross-border tunnels.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Syria and Hamas parted ways at the outset of the Syrian civil war when Hamas, a Sunni jihadist group, was unable to openly support Bashar Assad’s massacre of Sunnis.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Fatah has lately been refusing to transfer payments to Hamas due to congressional pressure to cut off the now-illegal flow of aid to the joint Fatah-Hamas unity government.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As for Hamas’s banker, stung by terror victim lawsuits, the Arab Bank now refuses to transfer monies to Hamas from third parties. The UN is also hard-pressed to finance the terror group’s bureaucracy.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In Gaza itself, al-Qaida affiliates including ISIS (now renamed the Islamic State) have seeded themselves along with the Iranian proxy Islamic Jihad. These groups challenge Hamas’s claim to power. Lacking the ability to pay government employee salaries, Hamas is hard-pressed to keep its rivals down.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Given these circumstances, it was just a matter of time before Hamas opened a full-on assault against Israel.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Jew-hatred is endemic in the Muslim world. Going to war against Israel is a tried and true method of garnering sympathy and support from the Muslim world. At a minimum it earns you the forbearance, if not the support of the US and Europe. And you get all of these things whether you win or lose.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">When Saddam Hussein shot 39 Scud missiles at Israel during the 1991 Gulf War, he didn’t attack because he thought doing so would destroy Israel. He attacked Israel because he was trying to convince the Arab members of the US-led international coalition to abandon the war against him.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Moreover, when Saddam launched the Scuds against Israel, he knew that Israel wouldn’t be able to retaliate. He knew that the US would force Israel to stand down in order to maintain the support of his Jew-hating fellow Arabs in its coalition.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">So attacking Israel was a freebie that he only stood to gain from.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Hezbollah’s leaders also never deluded themselves into believing their group can conquer Israel. But by attacking the hated Jews, they were able to present themselves and their Iranian bosses as the guardians of the Muslims worldwide.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Then there was the US’s response.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As it protected Saddam from Israel in 1991, so in 2006, the US gave Hezbollah the upper hand in the war. Then-secretary of state Condoleezza Rice forced Israel to accept a cease-fire with Hezbollah that placed the illegal terror group on equal legal and moral footing with Israel.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">This US legitimization of Hezbollah enabled the Iranian proxy to intimidate its Sunni and Christian compatriots in Lebanon and coerce them into accepting effective Hezbollah control over the entire state.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As for Hamas, from the outset of Hamas’s previous missile campaigns in 2009 and 2012, the Obama administration made it clear to Israel that it would not tolerate Israeli strikes that were sufficiently comprehensive to wipe out Hamas’s capacity to continue attacking Israel. In other words, President Barack Obama chose to protect Hamas – an illegal terrorist organization, waging a war of indiscriminate, criminal missile strikes against Israeli civilians – from Israel.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Today, Hamas has every reason to take heart from the responses it has received from its current offensive.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In the internal Palestinian arena, Fatah, Hamas’s partner in the Palestinian Authority unity government, is standing shoulder to shoulder with Hamas.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As</span><em style="color: #000000;"> The Jerusalem Post</em><span style="color: #000000;">’s Khaled Abu Toameh reported, Fatah militias in Gaza are actively participating in the Hamas-led missile campaign against Israel. Fatah terrorists have boasted shooting dozens of rockets and mortar shells at Ashkelon and Sderot.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">On Wednesday, Palestinian Media Watch reported that Fatah posted a placard proclaiming that the military wings of Fatah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad are “brothers in arms” united by “one God, one homeland, one enemy and one goal.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Fatah chief Mahmoud Abbas is Hamas’s diplomatic champion. Indeed, his wild accusations against Israel have moved from the realm of exaggeration to rank incitement that raises concern he is planning to open a second front against Israel from Judea and Samaria.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Although Egypt has still not indicated any willingness to support Hamas, the longer Hamas continues attacking Israel, the more difficult it will become for Egypt to seal off the border between Gaza and Sinai. Hamas’s war strengthens the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Then there is the Obama administration.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Obama administration spokesmen have been issuing prepared statements blaming the hostilities on Hamas and mouthing support for Israel while praising its restraint. But at the same time, they have been transmitting messages which indicate that Obama is more intent than ever to give Hamas a victory even as it continues to rain down terror on Israel.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As Tel Aviv, Hadera and Jerusalem absorbed their first missile salvos from Gaza on Tuesday, Obama’s Middle East envoy Philip Gordon spoke at Haaretz’s “peace” conference.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">It was a jaw dropping performance.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Gordon blamed Israel for the failure for the administration’s efforts to broker a peace deal between Israel and the PLO while effusively praising Fatah leader and Hamas partner Abbas.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And it only went down from there.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">After insisting Israel is inadequately committed to peace, Gordon threatened to withdraw US support for Israel at the UN and open the door to the criminalization of Israel by the corrupt international body.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">“How will we prevent other states from supporting Palestinian efforts in international bodies, if Israel is not seen as committed to peace?” he asked rhetorically.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Gordon’s remarks were not disputed by the State Department.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And State Department spokespersons themselves have continued to insist – absurdly – that Hamas is not a member of the Fatah-Hamas unity government.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">From Hamas’s perspective, the Obama administration’s response to its aggression is an invitation to keep going. Gordon’s speech allayed any concerns they may have had how the US would respond.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Hamas now knows that the US will coerce Israel into standing down while Hamas is still standing, and so enable the jihadists to claim victory and place Egypt in a bind.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And as with Hamas, so with Hamas’s Iranian sponsors.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">On July 20, the US and its partners are supposed to conclude a nuclear deal with Iran.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Many Western experts and even some Israeli ones insist that Iran’s nuclear weapon program is not a serious threat to Israel because Iran’s primary aspirations have little to do with Israel.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Iran, they say, wants nuclear weapons in order to dominate the Persian Gulf, and through it, the Muslim world as a whole. Iran’s targets, it is argued, are Mecca and Medina, not Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">While this is probably true, it is certainly irrelevant for Israel’s strategic assessment.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The same dynamics that inform Hamas’s decision to launch its offensives against Israel inform Iran’s thinking about how it will use a nuclear arsenal. Iran would not attack Israel with nuclear weapons because it wishes to conquer Israel per se. Iran would attack Israel with nuclear weapons because doing so would give it a massive public relations boost in its campaign to dominate the Persian Gulf generally, and Saudi Arabia in particular.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In other words, far from being a hindrance to accomplishing its central goal, Iran views attacking Israel as a means of advancing it.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Unfortunately for Israel, just as the US has made clear that it opposes Israel taking any offensive steps to destroy Hamas’s capacity to rain terror on its citizens, so the Obama administration, through word and deed, has made clear that it will defend Iran and Iran’s nuclear weapons program from Israel.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The talks that are set to conclude next week can only bring about bad or worse results for Israel. In recent days and weeks, Iranian leaders have said that the only deal they will sign is one that will facilitate their nuclear weapons program by giving international license to their massive uranium enrichment activities. So if a deal is concluded, it will give the imprimatur of the US, the UN and the EU to a nuclear-armed Iran.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">If no deal is concluded, the Obama administration will undoubtedly continue to protect Iran’s nuclear installations from Israel in the hopes of concluding an agreement with Iran at a later date, perhaps after the congressional elections in November.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In an op-ed in Haaretz published this week, Obama wrote, “While walls and missile defense systems can help protect against some threats, true safety will only come with a comprehensive negotiated settlement. Reaching a peace agreement with the Palestinians would also help turn the tide of international sentiment and sideline violent extremists, further bolstering Israel’s security.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Unfortunately, Obama misses the point completely. As the dozen agreements Israel already signed with the Palestinians show, pieces of paper are meaningless if they don’t reflect the underlying sentiments of the populations concerned.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Peace can only come to Israel and its neighbors when the Muslim world liberates itself from its hatred of Jews. Until that happens, everyone from Hamas to Hezbollah to Fatah to al-Qaida to Iran and beyond will continue to view attacking Israel as the best way to make a name for themselves in the world, and the best way to get the attention – and support – of the West.</span></p>
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		<title>Kerry Admits: Iran Negotiations Not Working</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/majid-rafizadeh/kerry-admits-iran-negotiations-not-working/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=kerry-admits-iran-negotiations-not-working</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 10 Jul 2014 04:35:39 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Majid Rafizadeh]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[G5+1]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iran]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[The subtext of the Secretary of State's recent op-ed. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/75971004_451204022.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-235952" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/75971004_451204022.jpg" alt="_75971004_451204022" width="283" height="239" /></a>In less than two week, the interim nuclear deal will expire, most likely without a final deal being struck between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the G5+1 (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Germany).</p>
<p>The Islamic Republic has been given years to come clean and halt its ideological and regional hegemonic ambitions of obtaining nuclear weapons. Nevertheless, the Obama administration believes that we need to give the Islamic Republic another chance, trusting the ruling clerics and the theocracy.</p>
<p>The Ayatollah and Mullahs were given that chance, six months of negotiations, and sanctions relief in oil, metal, and financial sectors— including the flow of billions of dollars to their regime.</p>
<p>Secretary of State John Kerry wrote an op-ed in <i>The Washington Post</i> on Tuesday, pointing out that Iranian leaders have not yet made serious decisions although they have been engaged in the negotiations. Kerry wrote, “What will Iran choose? Despite many months of discussion, we don’t know yet. We do know that substantial gaps still exist between what Iran’s negotiators say they are willing to do and what they must do to achieve a comprehensive agreement. We also know that their public optimism about the potential outcome of these negotiations has not been matched, to date, by the positions they have articulated behind closed doors.”</p>
<p>What Kerry is saying is simple: Iran has been buying time and fooling us. It would have been much more sincere if Kerry would have made a straightforward statement, admitting that the Obama administration’s policies towards Iran’s nuclear defiance have failed. Kerry should have frankly said: The Islamic Republic of Iran is buying time to reach breakout nuclear capacity and obtain nuclear bombs, and they have been tricking us for decades.</p>
<p>Kerry appears to be pleading with the Islamic Republic to reach a final nuclear deal while attempting to give the nation a plentitude of incentives. For instance, Kerry wrote:</p>
<blockquote><p>If Iran is able to make these choices, there will be positive outcomes for the Iranian people and for their economy. Iran will be able to use its significant scientific know-how for international civil nuclear cooperation. Businesses could return to Iran, bringing much needed investment, jobs and many additional goods and services. Iran could have greater access to the international financial system. The result would be an Iranian economy that begins to grow at a significant and sustainable pace, boosting the standard of living among the Iranian population.</p></blockquote>
<p>In case a final nuclear deal is reached, why would the Secretary of State desire that a theocratic Islamist state— which is ranked the top in human rights abuses, gender discrimination, corruption, dictatorship, lack of freedom of speech, press, and assemble, oppressiveness, and the list goes— join the global economy and “have greater access to the international financial system”? Where are our values of respecting democracy, human rights, freedom of speech, press and civil liberties? Why would the Obama administration desire to strengthen the Islamic Republic— the ruthless cleric leaders, the Revolutionary Guard Corps, Shiite militia groups like the Basij, and subsequently Hezbollah, Hamas— by boosting their economy? How will he respond to millions of Iranian women and young people who are fighting against this Islamist theocracy? While many Iranian people view the United States as a model for democracy, what kind of message is John Kerry sending to these citizens? That we do not care about you?</p>
<p>What should the United States do if the negotiations failed? What policies should the Obama administration carry out in order to protects US citizens, preserve its national, strategic, geopolitical and economic interests as well as to support its regional allies, primarily Israel, from an Islamist state armed with nuclear weapons?</p>
<p>In his op-ed, Kerry answered this question: “If Iran is not ready to do so, international sanctions will tighten and Iran’s isolation will deepen.”</p>
<p>But is Kerry serious about this message? Absolutely not.</p>
<p>Based on the Obama administration’s policies, here is what is going to occur: If the negotiations between the Islamic Republic and the G5+1 failed, the Obama administration is going to push the international community to extend the interim nuclear deal. This means that the Mullahs and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei will score a victory. In other words, they will have more time to buy with more worthless negotiations, and they will have the required time to obtain the nuclear bomb.</p>
<p>Finally, thanks to Kerry and President Obama, whether a final nuclear deal is reached or not, the Islamist clerics and Iranian leaders come out as winners. If a final nuclear deal is reached, the deal is going to be a flimsy one that will leave a path for the Islamic Republic to obtain nuclear weapons, and Iran will be able to join the international economic system, pushing for their ideological and regional hegemonic power. If a final nuclear deal is not reached, the Islamic Republic will be able to buy more time through the extension and achieve its objectives as well.</p>
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		<title>Iran’s Path to the Bomb</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/charles-bybelezer/irans-path-to-the-bomb/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=irans-path-to-the-bomb</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 09 Jul 2014 04:30:40 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Charles Bybelezer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bomb]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Inspections]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iran]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[And how Washington is enabling it. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/76114095_3c03127b-b8dc-47c0-af9c-66715d0adff4.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-235875" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/76114095_3c03127b-b8dc-47c0-af9c-66715d0adff4.jpg" alt="_76114095_3c03127b-b8dc-47c0-af9c-66715d0adff4" width="256" height="193" /></a>As nuclear negotiations resume between Iran and world powers, it is becoming increasingly clear that any deal signed will be considered negatively by Israel as “ill-conceived.”</p>
<p>According to most estimations, the focus of the talks has shifted from dismantling Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, as demanded by Jerusalem, to creating a verification network that would, ideally, grant inspectors unfettered access to Iranian sites to ensure the peaceful nature of its nuclear operations.</p>
<p>In “Inspections: The Weak Link in a Nuclear Agreement with Iran,” Dore Gold, a former Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations and currently an advisor to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, questions “the advisability of erecting a comprehensive agreement with Iran that is so highly dependent upon the efficacy of its inspection system and the willingness of Iran to agree to what some analysts call unprecedented levels of transparency.”</p>
<p>The drawbacks should be evident, especially when considering Iran’s ongoing refusal to grant the IAEA access to its Parchin facility, where the UN nuclear watchdog believes Tehran has conducted military research into the development of atomic weapons. That the underground Fordow nuclear plant remained unknown to the West for years casts further doubt on both the Islamic Republic’s trustworthiness and the ability of monitors to keep tabs on the whole of its nuclear activities.</p>
<p>The fact that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry recently revealed that Iran’s breakout capacity stands at a mere two months should alone obviate any such deal, as this window is surely too close for comfort.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, it appears as though the prospects of reversing the Islamic Republic’s nuclear progress by significantly reducing the number of its centrifuges is off the table.</p>
<p>In the prescient words of Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif, the “talks are not about nuclear capability…they are about Iranian integrity and dignity.”</p>
<p>But the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism is undeserving of respect.</p>
<p>Iran continues to fuel the debauchery in Syria, and now has boots on the ground in Iraq; with the aim there, in conjunction with local Shiite fighters, almost certainly to carve out an Iranian protectorate.</p>
<p>Moreover, the widely held belief that Iran opposes the Sunni terror group ISIS, which is active in both Iraq and Syria, is tenuous at best, with recent reports suggesting the organization may well have been spawn by Tehran.</p>
<p>As the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs’ Pinhas Inbari recently pointed out, “the more time passes, the more this notion of a link between ISIS, Syrian and Iranian intelligence has become fixed in the minds of leading Arab analysts.”</p>
<p>To support this claim, Inbari highlights a February 2012 U.S. Treasury Department document which states that ISIS’ precursor, “al-Qaeda in Iraq,” was provided with money and weapons by Iran. He also raises the intriguing possibility that Iran facilitated ISIS’ advances in Iraq in order to force the U.S. to deepen its coordination with Tehran.</p>
<p>As journalist Melanie Phillips recently noted in the <i>Jerusalem Post</i>, “the Iranian leadership [has] suggested the price of its ‘help’ in ‘stabilizing’ Iraq would be a deal over its nuclear program.”</p>
<p>And this is the key point: The road to an Iranian bomb is paved with instability.</p>
<p>Iran’s carefully crafted plan is two-tiered; first, to foment widespread regional unrest, thereby removing the focus on is illicit nuclear work while, concurrently, convincing the West, which shuns chaos in favor of stability, that the only solution is to engage, rather than defeat, Iran.</p>
<p>And it has worked.</p>
<p>The West has misunderstood, or otherwise turned a blind eye to, Iran’s strategy, devised to buy time while Tehran becomes a nuclear power, which, in turn, will allow it to pursue its ultimate ambition of spreading its Islamic “revolution” throughout the world.</p>
<p>The ramifications of an expansionist, nuclear-armed Iran would be devastating.</p>
<p>Even without the bomb, in the near future Iran will effectively control territory spanning from eastern Iraq to southern Lebanon. The so-called Shi’ite crescent warned of years ago by Jordan&#8217;s King Abdullah is, for all intents and purposes, a <i>fait accompli</i>.</p>
<p>An Iran with atomic bombs can be expected to set its sights on Sunni Gulf states, including Kuwait and Bahrain, where its meddling during the Arab Spring prompted Saudi Arabia to deploy troops to the country.</p>
<p>In fact, Tehran appears to be on a collision course with Riyadh (which, parenthetically, is alleged to have pre-paid atomic weapons waiting for it in Pakistan).</p>
<p>Were tensions to explode between the Mullahs and the House of Saud, the entire region could be drawn into a bloody conflict; not unlike the Sunni-Shiite proxy war currently being waged in Syria, although the effects of a direct clash between the leading purveyors of these competing forms of Islam would, almost inconceivably, be much worse.</p>
<p>Like it or not, such a prospect would force the hand of the United States, which could not sit idly by as its allies, as well as the global oil economy, became endangered.</p>
<p>It is possible that an emboldened Russia would likewise become involved, at the very least as an arms supplier, and perhaps even ascendant China if to protect its growing interests in the region.</p>
<p>Israel, undoubtedly, would be targeted by its enemies and thus dragged into the fighting.</p>
<p>This is but a snapshot of the bleak picture facing the Middle East if Iran goes nuclear, and the Obama administration in particular is seemingly oblivious.</p>
<p>While the U.S. president reiterated last month—this time to his outgoing Israeli counterpart—that he remains committed to preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, Obama’s words are no longer trusted by many in Jerusalem given his willingness (eagerness) to treat a rogue regime, ideologically committed to the West’s destruction, as a friend.</p>
<p>Hence the recent dispatch to Washington of Israeli National Security Adviser Yossi Cohen and Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz, in order to spell out the Jewish state’s positions perhaps for the last time.</p>
<p>Speaking to prior to his departure, Steinitz made clear that a good deal “will not allow the Iranians to remain a nuclear threshold state&#8230;. Our position is that an agreement needs to be based not only on supervision and verification, but on dismantling infrastructure,” he affirmed.</p>
<p>Netanyahu likewise weighed in last week, granting interviews to major television networks in each of the P5+1 countries.</p>
<p>“Inspectors can be deceived,” he warned, before advocating for an agreement along the lines of the Syrian one, which “remove[s] what’s not destroyed.”</p>
<p>But given Obama’s ongoing rapprochement with Iran, Israel&#8217;s expectations are surely being tempered. In fact, it would be surprising if the government was not already intensifying covert preparations for “plan-B.”</p>
<p>What this entails could be revealed as early as July 21st, the day after the deadline for a nuclear agreement is set to expire.</p>
<p>Only then will it become known whether Netanyahu is serious about preventing an Iranian bomb—and the lengths to which he is willing to go in order to do so.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>The End of Obama&#8217;s Bad Deal with Iran &#8212; What&#8217;s Next?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/adam-turner/the-end-of-obamas-bad-deal-with-iran-whats-next/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-end-of-obamas-bad-deal-with-iran-whats-next</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 17 Jun 2014 04:35:53 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Adam Turner]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[More Obama "smart diplomacy" for the Mullahs?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/357455_Iran-Hassan-Rouhani.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-234204" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/357455_Iran-Hassan-Rouhani-450x338.jpg" alt="357455_Iran-Hassan-Rouhani" width="309" height="232" /></a>Israel’s Strategic Affairs Minister Yuval Steinitz <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Iranian-Threat/News/WATCH-LIVE-Steinitz-to-discuss-Iranian-threat-at-Herzliya-Conference-355732"><span style="color: #0463c1;">expressed</span></a> his hope that the U.S. would not make a “bad” deal with Iran regarding the nuclear negotiations.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, there can be no doubt about what is going to happen.  The Obama Administration released five senior Talibani terrorists – and perhaps some additional <a href="http://freebeacon.com/national-security/state-department-still-wont-say-if-bergdahl-ransom-was-paid/"><span style="color: #0463c1;">ransom money</span></a> – to the Taliban/Haqqani Network in return for one captured American serviceman, who may have been a deserter.  Any nuclear deal between the U.S. (and others) and Iran, including an extension of the current one, produced by President Obama and his team of “<a href="http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/020714-689345-obama-names-series-of-incompetents-to-key-diplomatic-posts.htm"><span style="color: #0463c1;">smart diplomats</span></a><span style="color: #0463c1;">,</span>” will <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/article/379920/mocking-obama-tehran-mona-charen"><span style="color: #0463c1;">inevitably be bad</span></a>.</p>
<p>This is <a href="http://www.americanthinker.com/article/2013/08/embracing_the_costanza_doctrine.html"><span style="color: #0463c1;">President Costanza</span></a> we are talking about, after all.</p>
<p>On July 20, 2014, the P5 + 1 nations’ Joint Plan of Action (JPA) with Iran officially ends.  The JPA was the bad deal promoted by President Obama that <a href="http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/an-israeli-assessment-of-the-iran-deal"><span style="color: #0463c1;">recognized</span></a> Iran’s right to enrich nuclear material and <a href="http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/02/president_costanza_and_the_nuclear_deal_with_iran.html"><span style="color: #0463c1;">gave</span></a> it relief from crippling economic sanctions in return for almost nothing of any real significance to restrict Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.  Under the JPA, Iran was allowed to keep every one of its 19,000 plus centrifuges spinning, and was even able to continue to construct more.  Some limited caps were placed on Iran’s ability to enrich, but nothing was done to prevent it from expanding its stockpile of uranium.  Meanwhile, the JPA gave the Iranian regime an economic windfall of well over $20 billion.</p>
<p>It must be understood that the JPA was not just a bad deal, but it was, in fact, an exceptionally bad deal from the perspective of the U.S., Israel, the Arab states, and the Western World democracies.</p>
<p>• According to The Tower, “Iran is now mathematically certain to have <a href="http://www.thetower.org/0461oc-amid-new-evidence-of-sanctions-busting-congress-moves-for-greater-role-on-iran/"><span style="color: #0463c1;">busted</span></a> through the caps on energy exports set by the interim Joint Plan of Action (JPA), which had eroded the sanctions regime, despite months of promises and ongoing declarations from administration officials insisting that violations of the remaining sanctions would not be tolerated.”</p>
<p>•While the Iranian concessions <a href="http://www.thetower.org/top-iran-negotiator-iranian-nuke-concessions-reversible-one-day/"><span style="color: #0463c1;">are</span></a> easily reversible, the Western concessions in the JPA are likely irreversible, meaning the existing sanctions regime was gutted with no realistic prospect of restoring those sanctions to previous levels.</p>
<p>•The JPA promised Iran the right to nuclear enrichment simply for good conduct over a relatively small period of time, ignoring the fact that the Iranian regime is inherently aggressive and dangerous.</p>
<p>•The JPA deal <a href="http://makeadifference.cufi.org/?m=20131203"><span style="color: #0463c1;">did</span></a> nothing to stop Iran from using its new installments of cash and time to advance the weakest parts of its nuclear program &#8212; bomb technology and the ballistic missiles needed to deliver such bombs to Israel, Europe or the U.S.</p>
<p>•The JPA deal was in <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2014/01/14/Iran-Celebrates-American-Surrender-Obama-Says-Give-Peace-a-Chance"><span style="color: #0463c1;">direct contravention</span></a> of six U.N. resolutions, all of which stated that Iran had no right to nuclear enrichment and required that Iran dismantle its vast nuclear infrastructure.</p>
<p>•The JPA deal actually <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/rosiegray/text-of-iran-implementation-agreement-sent-to-congress"><span style="color: #0463c1;">included</span></a> a provision allowing the Iranians to veto reports of their own violations of the interim agreement.</p>
<p>•The JPA <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/01/13/us-iran-nuclear-iaea-idUSBREA0C11C20140113"><span style="color: #0463c1;">increased</span></a> the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)’s access in Iran to monitor the agreement, but not enough.  It still falls short of what the IAEA says it needs, and it is less than the wide-ranging inspection powers the IAEA had in Iraq in the 1990’s.</p>
<p>•The JPA <a href="http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/06/congress-wont-budge-iran-sanctions-nuclear-program.html"><span style="color: #0463c1;">did not</span></a> allow the West access to such places like the Parchin military base in Iran, which is believed to be used as a covert nuclear weapons development site.</p>
<p>•Soon after the JPA’s announcement, Iranian President Rouhani – a <a href="http://politichicks.tv/column/guest-writer-sarah-n-stern-geneva-betrayal/"><span style="color: #0463c1;">supposed</span></a> moderate – gloated on <a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/irans-rouhani-world-powers-surrendered-iranian-nations-will_774616.html"><span style="color: #0463c1;">Twitter</span></a> (later <a href="http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/iranian-president-rouhani-deletes-wests-surrender-boast-twitter-feed-1432434"><span style="color: #0463c1;">removed</span></a>) and <a href="http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=14757"><span style="color: #0463c1;">video</span></a> about the world powers capitulating to Iran.</p>
<p>Now the question becomes, what will replace the JPA? <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/06/09/us-iran-nuclear-idUSKBN0EK1LL20140609"><span style="color: #0463c1;">According</span></a> to the press, the negotiations to craft a more permanent agreement between Iran and the P5 + 1 are going nowhere, fast.  Bilateral talks are <a href="http://www.thetower.org/0498oc-worries-grow-of-divide-and-conquer-tactics-as-iran-announces-bilateral-talks-with-u-s-russia-france/"><span style="color: #0463c1;">springing up</span></a> to complicate the negotiations.  Many observers <a href="http://in.mobile.reuters.com/article/idINKBN0EF0BK20140604?irpc=932"><span style="color: #0463c1;">expect</span></a> that the President and his team will simply agree to an extension of the interim agreement for another six months, as is provided for in the JPA.</p>
<p>In other words, these observers believe that the JPA will be replaced by the JPA.  The same bad agreement currently in existence.</p>
<p>The Obama Administration will eagerly sign onto an extension, so as to prevent yet another obvious foreign policy fiasco on their watch.  After all, they currently face <a href="http://hotair.com/archives/2014/06/11/al-qaeda-rebels-take-tikrit-force-500000-to-flee-mosul/"><span style="color: #0463c1;">Iraq</span></a>, where a jihadist group too violent for al-Qaeda is carving out its own state and the U.S. can do nothing about it, because all of the American troops were removed by President Obama.  They face <a href="http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2014/05/20/if-presidential-candidates-records-mattered-this-would-destroy-hillary-clintons-chances/"><span style="color: #0463c1;">Libya</span></a>, where the U.S. “led from behind” to oust the dictator Gaddafi, which resulted in the collapse of the Libyan nation, the <a href="http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/06/obama-foreign-policy-successes-not-libya.php"><span style="color: #0463c1;">spread</span></a> of U.S. weapons to jihadists groups throughout the Middle East, the seizure of parts of Mali by jihadist groups armed with American weapons that prompted French intervention, and the death of the U.S. Ambassador by elements of al-Qaeda on the anniversary of 9/11.  They face <a href="http://www.the-american-interest.com/blog/2014/05/14/assad-races-across-obamas-red-line/"><span style="color: #0463c1;">Syria</span></a>, where the Administration blustered with its red line against the use of chemical weapons before caving, and the dictator Assad continues to use those weapons against civilians in the bloody civil war.   And there are so many more foreign policy disasters under the current Administration.</p>
<p>Perhaps even more importantly, the Obama Administration will sign onto an extension of the JPA as a way to <a href="http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/06/obama-seeks-to-leverage-his-iraq-debacle-into-rapprochement-with-iran.php"><span style="color: #0463c1;">facilitate</span></a> plans to “open direct talks with Iran on how the two longtime foes can counter the insurgents” in Iraq. (More “smart diplomacy” in action.)</p>
<p>The Mullahs in Iran will also probably agree to an extension of the JPA.   As we know, they are giving up almost nothing regarding their nuclear research, and getting huge benefits in time and money in return.  Plus,  the JPA does not seriously infringe, in any way, with the Iranian leaderships’ ability to threaten the <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2639812/Jihad-end-society-rid-America-Irans-supreme-leader-Ayatollah-Khamenei-chilling-threat-U-S.html?ITO=1490&amp;ns_mchannel=rss&amp;ns_campaign=1490"><span style="color: #0463c1;">U.S.</span></a> and <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2097252/Kill-Jews-annihilate-Israel-Irans-supreme-leader-lays-legal-religious-justification-attack.html"><span style="color: #0463c1;">Jews</span></a>, support <a href="http://www.state.gov/j/ct/rls/crt/2013/225328.htm"><span style="color: #0463c1;">terrorists</span></a> and/or wars of aggression in <a href="http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/hezbollah-threatened-iran%E2%80%99s-financial-woes"><span style="color: #0463c1;">Lebanon</span></a>, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/raghida-dergham/syria-a-bargaining-chip-i_b_5456720.html"><span style="color: #0463c1;">Syria</span></a>, <a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4343/iran-egypt"><span style="color: #0463c1;">Egypt</span></a>, <a href="http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2014-03-31/news/sns-rt-us-yemen-iran-20140330_1_last-month-hadi-abd-rabbu-mansour-hadi-yemen-president"><span style="color: #0463c1;">Yemen</span></a> etc. and/or <a href="http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/12-ways-rouhani-is-no-human-rights-moderate/"><span style="color: #0463c1;">oppress</span></a> its own people.</p>
<p>So why would the Iranians not take advantage of President Obama, if they can?  Every other bad actor is doing it.</p>
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		<title>Hamas Gains Ground &#8212;- And Washington Approves</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/davidhornik/hamas-gains-ground-and-washington-approves/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=hamas-gains-ground-and-washington-approves</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 06 Jun 2014 04:50:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[P. David Hornik]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Hamas]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[What’s behind it?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><i><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/hamas.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-233397" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/hamas-450x298.jpg" alt="MIDEAST ISRAEL PALESTINIANS" width="307" height="203" /></a>Buzzfeed</i> <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/sheerafrenkel/the-us-has-been-speaking-to-hamas-through-backchannels-for-o"><span style="color: #0433ff;">reports</span></a> that during the six-month run-up to this week’s announcement of a Fatah-Hamas unity government, Obama-administration officials were holding “secret back-channel talks with Hamas” to discuss its role in this government.</p>
<p><i>Buzzfeed</i> quotes a “U.S. official familiar with the talks” as saying: “Our administration needed to hear from them that this unity government would move toward democratic elections, and toward a more peaceful resolution with the entire region.”</p>
<p>State Department deputy spokesman Marie Harf told <i>Buzzfeed</i>: “These assertions are completely untrue. There is no such back channel. Our position on Hamas has not changed.”</p>
<p>In any case, very soon after the new Palestinian government <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/palestinians-form-new-unity-government-including-hamas/2014/06/02/c681d5c6-ea46-11e3-9f5c-9075d5508f0a_story.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">was announced</span></a> on Monday, Secretary of State John Kerry <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/03/world/middleeast/abbas-swears-in-a-new-palestinian-government.html?_r=1"><span style="color: #0433ff;">told</span></a> Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu that the administration would “work with the new Palestinian government while continuing to watch it closely.”</p>
<p>Israel <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/1.596839"><span style="color: #0433ff;">expressed</span></a> “deep disappointment.” Its ambassador to the U.S., Ron Dermer, noted that Hamas is “a terrorist organization responsible for the murder of many hundreds of Israelis, which has fired thousands of rockets at Israeli cities, and which remains committed to Israel’s destruction.” Netanyahu <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymghp73i5ca"><span style="color: #0433ff;">recorded a statement</span></a> saying he was “deeply troubled” by the U.S. decision.</p>
<p>In a <a href="http://www.rubio.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?id=e7771ddd-d26f-481e-81f3-19ec3ff1c80f"><span style="color: #0433ff;">letter to Kerry</span></a>, Republican senators Marco Rubio and Mark Kirk noted that: “Current U.S. law is clear—any government over which an unreformed Hamas exercises undue influence and which emerges from a Fatah/Hamas deal is not an appropriate recipient of U.S. assistance.”</p>
<p>For a few reasons—despite the State Department’s denial—the <i>Buzzfeed</i> report of secret U.S.-Hamas talks has considerable plausibility.</p>
<p>First, there is the alacrity with which Kerry announced the U.S. intention to “work with” the new government. Not even a day or two for deliberations before reaching a decision.</p>
<p>Second is the fact that Hamas is an offshoot of the Egyptian-based Muslim Brotherhood, and the administration’s sympathy for that body is well known. The administration favored its takeover of Egypt from the deposed Mubarak regime, supported it during the year it was in power, and sharply objected to its removal by the Egyptian army backed by a massive popular revolt.</p>
<p>And third, the new Fatah-Hamas government appears carefully crafted to, as Rubio and Kirk put it, make an “end run around” U.S. law. It’s composed of 18 “technocratic” ministers with no explicit Hamas affiliation, and Mahmoud Abbas, leader of Fatah and the West Bank Palestinian Authority, announced that this government would uphold principles of recognizing Israel and avoiding violence.</p>
<p>Even so, as Lee Smith <a href="http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/174994/palestinian-authority-hamas"><span style="color: #0433ff;">notes</span></a>, U.S. acceptance of this government</p>
<blockquote><p><i>is against the letter of U.S. law—indeed, a number of U.S. laws. The 2006 </i><a href="https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/109/s2370/text"><span style="color: #0433ff;"><i>Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act</i></span></a><i>, for instance, prohibits any U.S. funds from going to Hamas, Hamas-controlled entities, or a power-sharing PA government that includes Hamas as a member, or results from an agreement with Hamas. Most recently, the 2014 Consolidated Appropriations Act prohibits “assistance to Hamas or any entity effectively controlled by Hamas, any power-sharing government of which Hamas is member, or that results from an agreement with Hamas and over which Hamas exercises undue influence.”</i></p></blockquote>
<p>For the Obama administration, though, these may just be legal niceties. The new government is, indeed—as the “official” mentioned to <i>Buzzfeed</i>—supposed to hold democratic elections in both the West Bank and Gaza in six months, enabling both Fatah and Hamas to participate.</p>
<p>Neither the Obama administration nor the European Union—which, of course, also lost no time <a href="http://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/news.aspx/181362#.U5CMAHaWmSo"><span style="color: #0433ff;">welcoming</span></a> the new government—is likely, then, to heed a <a href="http://www.timesofisrael.com/hamas-opts-for-the-hezbollah-model/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">warning</span></a> about it by veteran Israeli Arab-affairs analyst Ehud Yaari. Yaari’s warning carries special weight since he knows the turf well and is in no way a member of the Israeli right or a partisan of the Netanyahu government.</p>
<p>Yaari reports that</p>
<blockquote><p><i>Hamas leaders held a number of meetings in recent weeks with Iranian officials in Tehran and Hezbollah leaders in Beirut. There, the group’s representatives were advised to adopt a more ambitious plan than merely defending Gaza, namely, by contesting Fatah in its own West Bank territory instead. Hezbollah’s modus operandi in Lebanon—which can be summed up as “add ballots to your bullets” —was pushed as a model to be emulated.</i></p></blockquote>
<p>Yaari warns that this could lead to</p>
<blockquote><p><i>[t]he emergence of a Hezbollah model in the Palestinian Authority…. If the current electoral and transitional timetable holds, by this time next year Hamas could have not only an intact military force and terrorist agenda in Gaza, but also a solid foothold in the West Bank and at least a say in—if not veto power over—[PA] decisions. In that case, a new system would take shape in the Palestinian territories in which an armed-to-the-teeth political party gradually overshadows the central government and begins to take over numerous institutions.</i></p></blockquote>
<p>We may still be quite a way from that point; first, unlike all previous attempts at Fatah-Hamas “unity,” the current arrangement would have to hold water, leading up to the successful conduct of elections. But already at this stage, Yaari asserts,</p>
<blockquote><p><i>Western countries quick to endorse the Hamas-Fatah reconciliation should be aware of what is really happening here: Instead of the PA regaining its “southern provinces” in Gaza, it is in fact Hamas reentering the “northern provinces” in the West Bank.</i></p></blockquote>
<p>The questions Israel needs to confront are whether that development really troubles “Western countries,” and how it can go about handling the crisis without Western support.</p>
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		<title>Believing Obama on Iran</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/believing-obama-on-iran/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=believing-obama-on-iran</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 14 May 2014 04:50:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Why Israeli anxieties are mounting.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Obama_Iran.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-225457" alt="Obama_Iran" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Obama_Iran-450x305.jpg" width="315" height="214" /></a>Originally published by the <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Our-world-Believing-Obama-on-Iran-352173">Jerusalem Post</a>. </em></p>
<p>Brig. Gen. (ret.) Uzi Eilam is an octogenarian who served as the director general of Israel’s Atomic Energy Commission from 1976 until 1985.</p>
<p>Last Friday Eilam gave a head-scratching interview to Yediot Aharonot’s Ronen Bergman in which he claimed that Iran’s nuclear weapons program is a decade from completion. He said it is far from clear that the Iranians even want a nuclear arsenal. He accused Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu of cynically exaggerating the threat from Iran in order to strengthen himself politically.</p>
<p>Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Eilam’s interview was his absolute certainty in his judgment.</p>
<p>Eilam, who hasn’t had any inside knowledge of nuclear issues since 1985, would have us believe that he knows better than active duty Israeli intelligence chiefs and US intelligence directors about the status of Iran’s nuclear weapons program. He even thinks he knows better than the UN’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency.</p>
<p>Israel assesses that Iran already has sufficient quantities of enriched uranium to produce five atomic bombs. As Netanyahu has said, the interim nuclear deal the US and its allies signed with Iran last November only delays Iran’s bomb making capacity by six weeks.</p>
<p>In January, James Clapper, the director of US national intelligence, agreed with Israel’s assessment. In testimony before the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence Clapper said that Iran is already a nuclear breakout state. In his words, “Tehran has made technical progress in a number of areas – including uranium enrichment, nuclear reactors and ballistic missiles – from which it could draw if it decided to build missile- deliverable nuclear weapons.”</p>
<p>Clapper argued that this doesn’t matter because the US’s monitoring capabilities are so trustworthy and advanced that Iran wouldn’t be able to put nuclear weapons together without the US noticing.</p>
<p>Unfortunately there is no reason to believe Clapper is right. Indeed, Netanyahu said as much to US National Security Advisor Susan Rice when she repeated Clapper’s claim during her visit to Israel last week.</p>
<p>And the UN agrees with Netanyahu.</p>
<p>In two reports released in recent days, UN officials have stated that Iran has developed an advanced capacity to hide its importation of components of its nuclear program. According to a Reuters report, this includes hiding titanium tubs in steel pipes and using its petrochemical industry as a cover to obtain valves and other items for its heavy-water nuclear reactor.</p>
<p>According to an AP report, the IAEA is also concerned because Iran is not cooperating with the watchdog group in revealing information about possible military applications of its nuclear program, or allowing the IAEA unfettered access to all nuclear sites.</p>
<p>Iran’s lack of transparency puts paid to the US’s claim that it can monitor all of Iran’s activities. It is far from clear that the US is even aware of all of Iran’s nuclear sites. So even if the US is capable of perfectly monitoring the known sites, it cannot know what it doesn’t know, and so may very well be monitoring the wrong sites.</p>
<p>And yet, despite US’s acknowledgment that Iran already has breakout capacity, and despite the UN’s conclusion that the Iranians are cheating on their international commitments and bypassing sanctions through smuggling activities, Brig. Gen. Eilam, who left the nuclear business 28 years ago, feels comfortable accusing Netanyahu of deliberately misleading the public and the world community.</p>
<p>What gives? It is hard to escape the feeling that there may be a connection between Eilam’s unhinged broadside against Netanyahu and the US’s assault on the credibility of Israel’s nuclear warnings.</p>
<p>On Sunday Iran’s dictator Ayatollah Ali Khamenei visited a Revolutionary Guards Corps base. There he was shown what the IRGC claims is a reverse-engineered clone of an advanced US espionage drone that Iran captured in 2011. According to Fox News, after the RAQ-170 Sentinel drone landed in Iran in 2011, the Pentagon presented US President Barack Obama with three different plans to destroy or retrieve the drone.</p>
<p>Obama rejected all of them because “he didn’t want to do anything that could be perceived as an act of war.”</p>
<p>During the same visit, to the IRGC base on Sunday, Khamenei told the commanders to begin mass producing ballistic missiles to use against the US.</p>
<p>In his words, the Americans “expect us to limit our missile program while they constantly threaten Iran with military action. So this is a stupid, idiotic expectation.</p>
<p>The Revolutionary Guards should definitely carry out their program and not be satisfied with the present level. They should mass produce. This is a main duty of all military officials.”</p>
<p>In other words, on Sunday, a declared enemy of the US, that the director of national intelligence acknowledges already has the independent capability to produce nuclear weapons, humiliated and threatened the US.</p>
<p>At a minimum Iran’s capture of the US drone indicates that the US capacity to monitor Iran’s nuclear capabilities is vulnerable and imperfect.</p>
<p>As for the ballistic missiles, they should be of utmost concern to the Europeans and the Americans. Iran doesn’t need ballistic missiles to attack Israel with nuclear weapons.</p>
<p>It can use artillery, not to mention a human being playing the role of Enola Gay.</p>
<p>But rather than condemn Iranian espionage and aggression, over the past week, Obama administration officials have launched a full court press against Israel.</p>
<p>In back-to-back articles in Newsweek, unnamed US former intelligence officials and congressional staffers presented an utterly false and deeply malicious portrait of alleged Israeli spying on the US. The reports were presumptively targeting Israel’s attempts to end State Department discrimination against Israeli tourists in the US and allow Israel to join the US visa waiver program.</p>
<p>But it is hard to ignore the timing of the unbridled, untrue and hysterical allegations of “rampant” Israeli spying.</p>
<p>The stories were released in the lead-up to this week’s newest round of nuclear talks between the US, the other permanent members of the Security Council and Germany, and Iran. Those talks were billed as a diplomatic means of preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear arsenal. Indeed, after Rice’s meeting with Netanyahu last week the White House released a statement claiming that “the US delegation reaffirmed our commitment to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.”</p>
<p>But the terms of the deal that is being negotiated with Iran advance the opposite of its stated goal. The deal on the table will enable Iran to develop nuclear weapons, virtually unopposed, and allow Iran to develop delivery systems for its nuclear arsenal entirely unopposed.</p>
<p>Israeli officials have been outspoken in their opposition to the agreement and the terms the US and its partners are offering Iran. Over and over, Netanyahu and his colleagues warn that the terms will not prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.</p>
<p>The White House knows what it is doing, and it wants to continue on course. Consequently, for the administration to sell a deal that enables Iran to acquire nuclear weapons, it needs to discredit Israel among sufficient swaths of the general public to enable Obama to move forward with Iran against Israel.</p>
<p>In this context, the administration’s willingness to turn a blind eye to Iran’s brazen threats and acts of contempt while sending out anonymous sources to castigate Israel as a US enemy whose actions are hostile and antithetical to the US makes sense.</p>
<p>The malevolent slander of Israel’s actions and intentions is of course only the opening act in this new administration campaign to discredit Israel ahead of a nuclear deal with Iran. Speaking to The Washington Free Beacon, former Bush administration deputy national security advisor Elliott Abrams said he believes the administration will frame the issue “saying that it’s this deal or war.”</p>
<p>He’s doubtlessly correct. After all that what the administration did in November when it signed the interim deal and when it forced the Senate to mothball its sanctions bill against Iran.</p>
<p>The truth is that the choice isn’t between war and an agreement. It is between doing something to stop Iran from becoming a nuclear power, or doing nothing to prevent that from happening. The administration has opted to do nothing. Unfortunately for the world, the price for doing nothing to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons is exponentially higher – in the cost of lives that would otherwise be saved – than the price of doing something.</p>
<p>But hey, at least an 80-year-old who led Israel’s Atomic Energy Commission nearly 40 years ago is willing to take Obama at his word.</p>
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		<title>Failed Negotiations With Iran</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/majid-rafizadeh/the-islamic-republic-human-rights-should-be-a-priority/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-islamic-republic-human-rights-should-be-a-priority</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 09 May 2014 04:20:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Majid Rafizadeh]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[G5+1]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iran]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[negotiations]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nuclear]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Rouhani]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[How a hasty nuclear deal will exacerbate human rights abuses in the Islamic Republic. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/wor_hassan-rouhani_12314_539_332_c1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-225076" alt="wor_hassan-rouhani_12314_539_332_c1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/wor_hassan-rouhani_12314_539_332_c1-450x277.jpg" width="315" height="194" /></a>While the Obama administration and five other world powers (</span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://uk.reuters.com/places/france?lc=int_mb_1001">France</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://uk.reuters.com/places/germany?lc=int_mb_1001">Germany</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, Britain, </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://uk.reuters.com/places/china">China</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> and </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://uk.reuters.com/places/russia?lc=int_mb_1001">Russia</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">) are rushing into a comprehensive nuclear deal without seriously and adequately taking the required safeguards, the G5+1 have failed to press the Islamic Republic of Iran on its recent egregious record of human rights violations. </span></p>
<p>One of the most effective and timely potential strategies, with regards to the ruling Ayatollah and Mullahs, is to incorporate political pressure on the Iranian regime for its unprecedented level of human rights abuses under the presidency of Hassan Rouhani. This topic has yet to be a key point in any of negotiations between the G5+1 and the Islamic Republic.</p>
<p>The major reason lies behind the fact that the six world powers seem to be hurrying to strike a final nuclear deal and have their governments be recorded as the ones to have reached this historic deal. In addition, there is a convergence of political interests between the six world powers and the Iranian regime. This approach does not take into consideration the threatening and dangerous repercussions that such a hasty comprehensive nuclear deal would bear.</p>
<p>This week, U.N. atomic agency officials held talks with Iranian authorities to negotiate the process through which the Islamic Republic is supposed to provide transparency on its nuclear research program by conducting a series of steps. The six world powers and Iranian authorities, led by prime minister Javid Zarif, will also meet in the Austrian capital of Vienna on May 13 for the next crucial round of high-level nuclear negotiations.</p>
<p>The four Western members of the G5+1 (the United States, <a href="http://uk.reuters.com/places/france?lc=int_mb_1001">France</a>, <a href="http://uk.reuters.com/places/germany?lc=int_mb_1001">Germany</a>, Britain) have ignored recent statements by U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who pointed out that so-called reformist and moderate president of the Islamic Republic Rouhani has failed to fulfill his promises of improving the human rights conditions in Iran.</p>
<p>The diplomats and politicians resuming nuclear talks in New York with Iranian authorities have expressed gratitude and have been optimistic about the Islamic Republic complying with the seven measures reached in February 2014.</p>
<p>Six out of the seven steps, fundamentally and generally, focus on the notion that Iranian authorities are required to provide some information about the nation’s nuclear enrichment and to permit access to nuclear sites, particularly Fordow.</p>
<p>One of the critical measures is linked to Iran’s efforts to develop explosive detonators. Almost three years ago, a report by the U.N. atomic agency indicated that Iran has secretly pursued nuclear research, advancing technology with constrained civilian purposes. According to the IAEA, the research and technology possessed &#8220;limited civilian and conventional military applications… given their possible application in a nuclear explosive device&#8230; Iran development of such detonators and equipment is a matter of concern.&#8221;</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">So far, the measures set by the six world powers and UN Atomic agency and IAEA, have been easy for Iran to follow. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Iranian leaders, led by Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, have also joined the Western leaders, Russian and Chinese authorities to express their content that the nuclear negotiations have gone smoothly. </span></p>
<p>Iranian leaders are confident that they have fulfilled the seven agreed-to measures, which were reached between Iran and the IAEA, before the May 15<sup>th</sup> deadline.  Behrouz Kamalvandi, spokesman of Iran&#8217;s atomic department, pointed out &#8220;Following the visit, Iran will be able to say that the seven-agreed measures between Iran and the agency have [been] fulfilled,&#8221; adding, &#8220;Already six steps have been taken.&#8221;</p>
<p>If Iranian leaders are not pressured to address the egregious human rights abuses now, while reaching their desirable nuclear deal, it will be much more difficult or impossible in the future to push the Iranian regime to respect women’s rights, gender equality, and human rights.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Last week, Iranian leaders had blatantly criticized human rights watch groups and the United Nations for claiming that there are human rights abuses in the Islamic Republic. Spokesman for Iran’s UN mission in New York Hamid Babaei, stated last week that “Iran categorically rejects baseless accusations raised in the statement of (Washington’s UN envoy Samantha Power) regarding status of human rights and civil liberties in the Islamic Republic of Iran and finds these assertions both unconstructive, obstructive and against the spirit of cooperation between sovereign member states.”</span></p>
<p>Some of the crucial threats and shortcomings of rushing into a comprehensive nuclear deal come down to the following:</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The final nuclear deal will require the international community to remove economic sanctions that have accumulated due to Iran’s decades long nuclear defiance. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">A weak and flimsy final nuclear deal will empower the Iranian regime, including hardliners, reformists, and moderates in the Islamic Republic, to more powerfully suppress women’s rights, political prisoners, human rights activists and surge the level of executions, public hangings, and tortures. </span></p>
<p>In addition, while the West is rushing into a comprehensive nuclear deal before the July 20<sup>th</sup> deadline, the West, Russia, and China are ignoring the required the safeguards. The most effective policies that the West, particularly the Obama administration, should look into are providing a key platform for the IAEA inspectors to carry out intrusive inspections. IAEA inspectors should be allowed to be present in the Islamic Republic on a regular basis, and be capable of visiting different nuclear and heavy water nuclear sites and reactors. Moreover, there should be a mechanism for re-imposing sanctions in case the Islamic Republic defies IAEA standards in future. The Ayatollahs and Iranian leaders have a history of secrecy and defiance of IAEA standards after reaching deals.</p>
<p>The West needs to implement the best political and diplomatic approach to extend the temporary nuclear deal rather than rushing into a premature comprehensive one and hurriedly removing all sanctions without the necessary safeguards taken into consideration. Unfortunately, all of these safeguards are being ignored for the sake of reaching any sort of weak comprehensive nuclear deal.</p>
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