Toronto resident Daniel was not in Iran’s good books even before Israel and the United States showered the country with missiles and bombs last month.
While working as a telecommunications supplier in Iran, he says he deliberately sabotaged schemes to evade sanctions and import equipment for military use, earning the regime’s ire. A member of Iran’s tiny Jewish community, he eventually fled the Islamic Republic and ended up in Canada a decade ago.
In rented rooms in a remote village in eastern Iran, Bamin Bahmani and her husband clutch their two small sons, bags all packed, and wait for a dreaded knock on the door. Every day tens of thousands of Afghans like them are rounded up and sent back to the worst place in the world for a woman.
More than 1.1 million Afghans have been deported from Iran this year, half of these in the past five weeks, making it one of the largest forced expulsions in modern history. The Iranian authorities say they will not stop until they have expelled all undocumented Afghans, an estimated four million.
The recent attack by Israel and the US on parts of Iran’s nuclear project has already been dubbed by some commentators as the Twelve Day War.
However, that cut-off time was chosen by Tehran to back a claim that Iran managed to fight twice as long as Arab states led by Egypt did in the Six Days War of 1967.
In fact, with varying degrees of intensity and a diversity of locations, this war started more than four decades ago when the new revolutionary authorities raided the Israeli diplomatic mission in Tehran and handed it over to PLO leader Yasser Arafat on a visit as special guest of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. A few months later, the new revolutionary regime repeated the exercise by raiding the US Embassy and seizing its diplomats as hostages.
It took decades — across multiple presidencies, wars, and failed negotiations — before the United States finally had a president who understood, with both clarity and conviction, how to confront the Iranian regime and transform the trajectory of the Middle East.
President Donald J. Trump, through a bold and unapologetic foreign policy, has emerged in just a few short months, as the only leader in recent history capable of reshaping the region and challenging Iran’s theocratic dictatorship with real consequences. His actions have already produced historic results — from crippling the regime’s nuclear infrastructure to fostering unprecedented peace deals.
A senior Iranian official has suggested President Trump could be assassinated while he sunbathes at his estate in Florida.
Javad Larijani, an adviser to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued the warning on Iranian state television in the wake of US intervention in Iran’s conflict with Israel.
Iran’s suspension of cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is not a turning point. It is business as usual. Tehran’s decades-long strategy — deny, delay, deceive — continues, and the West still refuses to call it for what it is: a slow-motion march toward nuclear capability. Some commentators are now warning that Iran has suspended cooperation and may finally pursue the bomb, as if that is not already taking place. Iran has been pursuing nuclear weapons for decades. It has never stopped.
Nope.
Do you have an oujia board?
No? Well, I have one and think everyone should also have it. It is a board through which you communicate with the ghosts of the past, even in the deepest recesses of Hades.
The board’s name comes from a mixture of “oui” (yes in French) and “ja” (yes in German) but you could use any of the 6000 languages still in use in our shrinking Tower of Babel.
Tokok, you Morse a name on the board and the ghost you invite responds.
When gays and trans people want to ally with those who hang “infidels,” history laughs at them with tears in its eyes.
The average left-wing intellectual, as the unmatched George Orwell observed, “never condemns violence as such, but only violence used in defence of Western countries.”
India Willoughby announces on X: “I could live in Iran. Better trans rights than in the UK and US.”
India is a trans rights activist. Her earlier tweet (“I never thought I’d say this, but #TeamIran”) triggered author J.K. Rowling, who doesn’t hold back: “India, fan of a regime that hates women and gays? How astonishing!” Rowling even offered to pay for her ticket to Iran.
Thanks to the courageous and unapologetic leadership of US President Donald J. Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, severe and long-overdue blows were dealt to the Iranian regime.
The United States and Israel reminded the world that tyranny can be confronted. Now comes the more difficult and longer-term task: making sure Iran’s regime does not rise again. That means crippling sanctions, backed by military readiness. That means exposing and dismantling Iran’s war machine, propaganda machine and foreign influence operations in Europe, America and Latin America, and preferably the regime itself. Iran is still a revolutionary Islamist state that sees the US as the great Satan, sees Israel as a cancer, and believes that its divine mission is to conquer and export its Islamist revolution to the West.
Donald Trump and anyone else who threatens to kill Iran’s supreme leader are “waging war against God” and should be punished by death, according to a new religious fatwa.
Grand Ayatollah Naser Makarem Shirazi said “any person or regime that threatens the leadership and religious authority” is considered a “mohareb” – one who wages war against God – under Islamic law.
The cleric, speaking in Iran, declared that any co-operation with such individuals or regimes by Muslims or Islamic governments was religiously forbidden and the crime punishable by death.
The United States and Israel have, according to reliable sources, “obliterated” or “severely damaged” Iran’s nuclear installations, but so long as the regime and its terror proxies continue to exist, the mission remains unaccomplished.
“The conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerrilla wins if he does not lose,” Henry Kissinger observed in 1969.
The continuing rule of Iran and its terror proxies remains a major threat to security and stability in the Middle East. Let us not forget that their main goal is to destroy not only Israel (the “Little Satan”), but also the US (the “Great Satan”).
The US must rule out any further strikes on Iran if it wants to resume diplomatic talks, Tehran’s deputy foreign minister has told the BBC.
Majid Takht-Ravanchi said the Trump administration told Iran through mediators that it wanted to return to negotiations this week, but had not made its position clear on the “very important question” of further attacks while talks are taking place.
The US and Iran were involved in talks over Iran’s nuclear programme when Israel struck Iranian nuclear sites and military infrastructure earlier this month and Iran responded with missiles.
“Let us re-arm”
Donald Trump said he is weighing forcing journalists who published leaked details from a US intelligence report assessing the impact of the recent American military strikes on Iran to reveal their sources – and the president also claimed his administration may prosecute those reporters and sources if they don’t comply.
In an interview Sunday with Fox News host Maria Bartiromo, Trump doubled down on his claim that the 21 June airstrikes aimed at certain Iranian facilities successfully crippled Iran’s nuclear program. He insisted the attacks destroyed key enriched uranium stockpiles, despite Iranian assertions that the material had been relocated before the strikes.
According to an adage, the history of any war is written by the victor. This is because the loser is either dead or too wounded to have the energy to write or, in some cases, hopeful of turning the victor into friend.
But for that adage to apply, a war must end with an acknowledged winner. And that poses another problem: no victor could self-anoint and wear the garland unless the adversary acknowledges defeat.
This is the conundrum that Israelis have experienced ever since they fought to put their tiny country on the map.
EARLY IRAN BOMB DAMAGE SPIN FALLS APART. You know the basics of the story. After U.S. bombers hit Iranian nuclear sites, President Donald Trump quickly announced that the raid had “obliterated” the Iranian facilities. At that moment, some of Trump’s opponents in the Democratic Party, plus their allies in the media, said no, no, no. The U.S. bombing didn’t obliterate anything. Instead, it did minimal damage — so minimal that the Iranian program could be up and running again in a “handful of months.”
