Iran Lobby

Exposing the Activities of the lobbies and appeasers of the Mullah's Dictatorship ruling Iran

Human Rights in Iran Matter to the World

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Human Rights in Iran Matter to the World

Human Rights in Iran Matter to the World

This Thursday marks International Human Rights Day, which marks the day in 1948 when the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which lays out a broad range of political, civil, social, cultural and economic rights that eventually formed the foundation of human rights principles binding the UN in its work and through the work of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.

In 1948, the world was still picking up the pieces from World War II and the early battle lines of the Cold War were being drawn in a world largely divided between old Soviet-era Warsaw Pact and U.S.-led NATO alliance.

That world is gone and today we are increasingly finding a world divided along secular and sectarian lines as terror has become a tool of statecraft for nations such as Iran and Syria, while other nations such as Afghanistan, Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq are being fought over in what they pretend to be a religious and ideological battle.

In this new world of global terror, human rights have all but vanished in these disputed regions, but whereas the fall of the Iron Curtain and Berlin Wall came after an arms race the Soviet Union could not win and the seeds of democracy flourished in places like Gdansk in Poland, the hegemony of Islamic extremists is growing and sinking deeper roots as the West struggles to formulate a coherent strategy to stem the growth of groups such as ISIS, Al-Qaeda and Boko Haram.

Central to that any successful strategy though will be how to address the crushing suppression of human rights by the Iran regime against its own people. As one of only three state sponsors of terror left on the U.S. State Department terrorism list, the Iran regime sits in the middle of most – if not all – of the crises occurring throughout the Middle East.

Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY) pointed out during a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing last week that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has been fueling turmoil throughout the Middle East even with strict economic sanctions in place.

“Iran is the leading state sponsor of terrorism, and in the past several years when Iran had no money, it still found money to be the leading state sponsor of terrorism,” Engel said.

“Under the [nuclear] deal negotiated with Iran, they will be awash in cash, they will have lots of money, and imagine how much destruction they can do in support of terrorist activities and terrorism. That is very deeply troubling for me.”

The mullahs support of Hezbollah and the Assad regime in Syria has fostered the birth of ISIS and other splintered Al-Qaeda groups, while its mishandling of Iraq’s government collapsed a coalition government driving Sunni tribes out and into the arms of ISIS which soon become a nation-state in its own right with the takeover of Mosul of most of northern Iraq.

Their support of Houthi rebels in Yemen, toppled the government and drove Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States into a shooting war that threatens the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf.

Beyond the foreign policy conundrums the mullahs in Tehran have fomented, it is their treatment of the Iranian people that has caused the most problems because the complete suppression of dissent has enabled the mullahs to keep their hands on power and accomplish their goals of exporting their extremist philosophy around the world.

Without dissent, without a free press and without due process and fair trials, the Iran regime has managed to turn Iran into a virtual police state that would give a Stalinist-era Soviet Union a run for its money in cruelty. That cruelty is not necessarily confined to just political dissent as the Iran regime seeks to impose its punishments on all facets of Iranian life.

Amnesty International noted this in a blistering statement condemning death sentences placed on two Iranian children.

“This ruling lays bare the Iranian authorities’ contempt for the human rights of children, coupled with their appetite for the death penalty – a toxic combination that leaves numerous juvenile offenders facing execution,” said Said Boumedouha, deputy director of Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa Program.

“Iran’s continued use of the death penalty against persons convicted of crimes committed while they were under 18 years of age is cruel, inhumane and blatantly unlawful. The death sentences of both these men, and all other juvenile offenders on death row in Iran, must be commuted immediately.”

As noted by Amnesty International, Iran is a state party to the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, both of which prohibit the imposition of the death penalty against persons who were below 18 years of age at the time of the crime, without exceptions. However, Iran continues to impose the death penalty against juvenile offenders and frequently defer the execution until after they pass the age of 18, which illustrates the regime’s approach to most international treaties and agreements it signs.

That same contempt has been applied to nuclear agreements the regime has signed, including the most recent one negotiated last July, which it violated through the test firing of new ballistic missiles.

But the regime is facing consequences of its crackdowns as evidenced by the rising tide of protests and demonstrations being mounted within Iran – often at personal risk to the protestors – such as a protest of students expressing frustration over the continuing repression in Iran and demanding for the release of political prisoners, at a ceremony marking Students Day (December 7) in Iran.

But criticism of government officials, and especially of the regime’s top mullah Ali Khomeini, comes at a high cost. Indeed the angry speeches and slogans at the Students Day event were partly sparked by the recent wave of arrests carried out by the Revolutionary Guards Intelligence Organization against journalists, reformists, poets, and artists. Last month four journalists, were among the latest detainees, while many other peaceful activists, such as Bahareh Hedayat, Narges Mohammadi, Atena Faraghdani, and Atena Daemi are still behind bars in Iran.

The protests come on the heels of an announcement that the regime’s revolutionary courts sentenced the managing editor of a state daily newspaper claiming he violated prohibitions on coverage of Mohammad Khatami, a former regime president now described as a seditionist.

The indictment was also notable because the editor, Mahmoud Doaei, of the Ettelaat, one of Iran’s oldest newspapers, was an early figure in the 1979 Revolution. He was a member of the inner circle around Ruhollah Khomeini, the regime’s previous supreme leader who gave birth to the deadly ideology of Islamic extremism, and was considered somewhat protected in the factional feuding that has increasingly marked Iran’s opaque political hierarchy.

All of which points to an almost bipolar exhibition of policy decisions by the regime that have left many Western observers baffled, but to experienced Iranian dissidents, the actions of the regime have been all too typical of past history.

At a meeting sponsored by the Union of Iranian Associations in Europe in Paris the other day, Mrs. Maryam Rajavi, leader of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, drew attention to the efforts of the Iran regime to save the Assad regime in Syria.

She called on Western governments to revise their policy which has so far reinforced the Iranian regime that causes instability in the region and is the main threat to global peace and security, and to make their relations with the Iranian regime contingent on end to executions and torture, and freedom of political prisoners.

“This calls for Western governments to adopt a policy that supports the desires of the innocent people of Syria for a speedy overthrow of Bashar Assad, gives substantial backing to the Free Army of Syria in its struggle against the regime, and insists on the eviction of foreign troops, specifically the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps from Syria and Iraq,” Mrs. Rajavi said.

Only by reforming Iran and bringing about a sectarian, democratic government can the Middle East ever hope to find peace and stability and the first step towards that goal is making human rights a top priority again in Iran.

By Michael Tomlinson

Iran Regime Thumbs Nose at World with New Missile Launch

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Iran Regime Thumbs Nose at World with New Missile Launch

Iran Regime Thumbs Nose at World with New Missile Launch

The old saying goes “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome.”

If the world expects the Iranian regime to change its ways in the wake of a completed nuclear deal last July, the answer it is getting from the mullahs in Tehran is depressingly the same as evidenced by yet another test launch of a new ballistic missile design in violation of United Nations sanctions against the testing of ballistic missiles capable of carrying a nuclear warhead.

According to Fox News, western intelligence sources say the test was held Nov. 21 near Chabahar, a port city in southeast Iran’s Sistan and Baluchestan Province near the border with Pakistan. The launch took place from a known missile test site along the Gulf of Oman.

The missile, known as a Ghadr-110, has a range of 1,800 – 2000 km, or 1200 miles, and is capable of carrying a nuclear warhead. The missile fired in November is an improved version of the Shahab 3, and is similar to the precision guided missile tested by the regime on Oct. 10, which elicited strong condemnation from members of the U.N. Security Council.

“The United States is deeply concerned about Iran’s recent ballistic missile launch,” Samantha Power, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., said in a statement after the last Iranian ballistic missile test in October.

The regime appears to be in a race against the clock to improve the accuracy of its ballistic missile arsenal in the wake of the nuclear agreement signed in July.

The Security Council is still debating how to respond to the regime’s last test in October and therein lays the problem. While the world debates what to do in responding to the regime’s provocations, the regime continues on blissfully uninterrupted in its preparations.

The same scenario plays out in regards to the regime’s new offensive in Syria and its crackdown at home in an alarming rise in human rights abuses; all of which has been met by mostly silence and hand wringing in the rest of the world.

The regime’s new-found militancy has included a buying binge with Russia for new arms as a top aide to Russian president Vladimir Putin confirmed.

“When all the restrictions are removed and all the sanctions are lifted we will have quite a serious development in the field of military-industrial cooperation. It is already taking place in fields that are not covered by sanctions, and in future we are expecting to enter very large projects,” Vladimir Kozhin, a top military-industrial cooperation aide said in an interview with Izvestia daily.

The official added that Iran has shown great interest in cooperation with Russian weapons companies because practically all of its military forces require a major overhaul.

“Considering the fact that this is a large country with large military forces, we are talking very big contracts, worth billions,” Kozhin noted.

And now that the regime is due to receive a $100 billion payout as early as January because of the nuclear deal and a rushed incomplete investigation by the International Atomic Energy Agency that rubberstamped the regime’s compliance, the mullahs are due to get a huge payday.

The continued lack of action in the face of regime’s actions covers the large-scale such as military weapons to the small issues affecting individuals and their families as Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian continues to languish in a regime prison on trumped up espionage charges; his incarceration now passing 500 days in captivity.

Even more disturbing is a report from cybersecurity firm Symantec which claims that regime hackers are using malware to spy on individuals including Iranian dissidents and activists.

The attacks aren’t particularly sophisticated, but the hackers have had access to their targets’ computers for more than a year, Symantec said, which means they may have gained access to “an enormous amount of sensitive information.”

Two groups of hackers, named Cadelle and Chafer, distributed malware that steals information from PCs and servers, including from airlines and telcos in the region, Symantec said.

“Reports have shown that many Iranians avail of these services to access sites that are blocked by the government’s Internet censorship,” Symantec wrote. “Dissidents, activists, and researchers in the region may use these proxies in an attempt to keep their online activities private.”

All of which means the regime is stepping up its efforts to identify specific and individual activists and dissidents, especially those living within Iran who may be communicating with outside dissident groups, as a means of tracking them down and arresting them.

It is a bitter irony that International Human Rights Day is approaching this week in light of this increased activity by the Iranian regime and highlights that no matter how the international community might buy the propaganda being spewed by regime lobbyists such as the National Iranian American Council; the reality has been much different.

If the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino do not wake up those who still refuse to believe that the rising tide of Islamic extremism is flowing from radical safe havens such as Syria and Iran is an imminent threat, then the Iranian regime’s actions in firing another missile in direct violation of sanctions should be an urgent alarm bell

By Michael Tomlinson

With Rising Extremism Hillary Clinton Hardens Iran Regime Stand

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With Rising Extremism Hillary Clinton Hardens Iran Regime Stand

With Rising Extremism Hillary Clinton Hardens Iran Regime Stand

In the wake of the Paris and San Bernardino attacks, the world is coming to grips with the new face of terror on so-called “soft” targets of opportunity by native-born residents who become radicalized under the siren call of extremists emanating from terror groups such as ISIS and Al-Qaeda and sponsors of terror such Syria and the Iranian regime.

As the federal investigation uncovers more about the history and background of the husband and wife terrorist team in San Bernardino, facts about how they were radicalized and where they learned their deadly skills in bomb making and planning will undoubtedly emerge.

But what these attacks do point to is an unmistakable strain of extremist belief snaking its way around the world through social media, blogs and videos perpetuating a mythology that has its roots in the apocalyptic beliefs formed out of the Iranian revolution taken over by extremist mullahs who have since controlled Iran and turned it into an perpetual terror factory.

The fact that since the negotiations that yield a nuclear agreement last July purportedly helping support “moderate” elements in the regime’s government, the evidence to the contrary has flooded out of Iran as the mullahs in Tehran launched a massive offensive in Syria, cracked down with broad arrests of journalists and dissidents, went on a military hardware buying binge and doubled down on incendiary and extremist messages broadcast through a sophisticated online and PR effort.

The reaction of the regime since the nuclear deal was completed has alarmed virtually everyone in the U.S. and Europe and led to a broad hardening of stump speeches and policy positions from virtually all the main contenders in the U.S. presidential campaign.

Most notable has been the former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who promised the U.S. would “act decisively” if the regime sought to violate the nuclear agreement in a speech at the Saban Forum, a conference on Middle East policy at the Brookings Institute think tank.

“Iran will test our resolve. They have already started to do so with a ballistic missile test and other provocative behavior. We have to respond to these provocations including with further sanction designations as necessary,” Clinton said.

She threatened to use military force for incursions on the deal. “Our approach must be distrust and verify. There can be no doubt in Tehran that if we see any indication that Iran’s leaders are violating their commitments in the deal not to seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons, we will stop them. And we will make sure the Iranians and the world understand that the United States will act decisively if necessary, including taking military action,” Clinton said.

The tougher stance was reflective of the national mood in the U.S. turned fearful by the San Bernardino attacks, but also the seeming spread of extremism by the simple preaching of it from strongholds and bully pulpits such as Syria and Iran.

Just as Al-Qaeda was able to plan and mount the 9/11 attacks from the relative safety and comfort of a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, there is a growing sense that the security of Syria and Iran offer extremists a safe haven to recruit and cultivate potential jihadists around the world.

As FBI Director James Comey has warned, the “outsourcing” of terrorism represents an alarming and hard to control new threat the world has not seen before.

It is also a logical explanation as to why the Iran lobby has not voiced any criticism not only of the Iranian regime, but the rise in terror attacks themselves, which is frankly inexplicable given the chorus of voices coming out of the American-Muslim community calling on a new frank and open dialogue about combatting the rise of extremism.

One such forum was sponsored by the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC where a collection of Muslim groups denounced extremism and called for an unfiltered national discussion to combat the propaganda being offered by terror groups and nations such as the Iranian regime.

The leaders announced the formation of a new initiative called the Muslim Reform Movement, focusing on confronting extremist segments of the religion. According to the Washington Examiner, the group quickly released:

“…a declaration of principles calling on Muslims to reject violent jihad and endorse religious freedom for all and secular government, and saying they will call out those who reject it.”

It’s a similar call previously made by leading Iranian dissident leaders such as Mrs. Maryam Rajavi of the National Council of Resistance of Iran who has long advocated for a return to secular, democratic government in Iran.

Notably, Iran lobby group, the National Iranian American Council, was absent and silent on the topic.

While the PC crowd may dither with the terminology of calling these extremists plain old “terrorists” or “Islamic extremists,” what is not in dispute is the threat they pose and the encouragement and support they receive from places like Tehran where mullahs lay out a theological justification for violence and murder. What they actually practice unabated on their own Muslim population.

The world will soon have to make the hard, but necessary choice of whether or not to put a finger in the dike of the rising tide of extremism, or address the source of it in places like Syria and Iran.

By Michael Tomlinson

Iranian Exile’s Life Cut Short in San Bernardino by Extremism

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Iranian Exile’s Life Cut Short in San Bernardino by Extremism

Iranian Exile’s Life Cut Short in San Bernardino by Extremism

Bennetta Betbadal was born in Iran in 1969 and fled to the U.S. when she was a young 18-year-old to “escape Islamic extremism and the persecution of Christians that followed the Iranian Revolution,” her family said in a statement.

She settled in New York City and eventually moved to California where she married and eventually settled in Rialto to raise her family of three boys and a girl now aged 10, 12 and 15 years old.

Her husband worked as a police officer at local community college and she went to school to earn a degree in chemistry, eventually taking a job as an inspector with the San Bernardino County Health Department in 2006.

She went to work Wednesday morning filled with optimism about a presentation she was due to give to co-workers and had just finished decorating the family Christmas tree.

Shortly after 11 am that day, she, and 13 of other people, was killed at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino in what is quickly becoming a case of terrorism by a couple that may have been radicalized and had links to Islamic extremist groups.

The morning massacre apparently carried out by a Syed Farook, 28, and his 27-year-old Pakistani wife Tashfeen Malik had many of the same hallmarks of the recent terror attacks in Paris. Both attacks appeared to be well-planned, involving more than a lone gunman, and included significant technical skills in creating explosive devices.

Both attacks involved native-born young men who appeared to have been radicalized by similar extremist Islamic messages that power most of the world’s terror groups such as ISIS, Hezbollah, Boko Haram, Al-Qaeda and Shiite militias.

In the statement issued to the news media, the family said: “It is the ultimate irony that her life would be stolen from her that day by what appears to be the same type of extremism that she fled so many years ago.”

The tragedy of Betbadal is a reminder to the world that Islamic extremism is a real, prevalent and growing threat to the civilized world and the first battle in confronting comes by calling it for what it is and naming the sources of it.

It’s a necessity that the Iran lobby has fought hard to prevent from happening because in the world today, there is only one nation state that is a theocratic exporter of terror and extremism and that is the Iranian regime. In fact, the regime is just one of three nations on the planet still on the U.S. State Department’s list of state sponsors of terror.

In the weeks and months to follow there will be more details revealed from the shooters’ lives and we’ll know more conclusively of the links they may have had to terror groups, but the intial evidence is worrisome and damning.

It has also been well documented that the regime has served as the “spiritual godfather” of Islamic extremism as its leaders, especially its current top mullah Ali Khamenei, have preached a hardened vision of Islam that is both apocalyptic and nihilistic. It’s specific brand of Shia sectarian belief has been used to justify everything from public executions and brutal torture to suppression of women’s rights and the virtual destruction of Iran’s environment and rape of natural resources.

The attacks in Paris and San Bernardino and previously in Sydney, the Charlie Hebdo attacks and others all can be traced back to a view point that violence in the name of religion is justified to achieve goals, which was given birth to by the mullahs after the 1979 revolution.

It’s also no surprise that regime supporters such as the National Iranian American Council have again been reduced to mute silence in the face of another act of Islamic extremism. In fact, the Twitter feed for NIAC head Trita Parsi spit out more tweets about gun control and denouncing Saudi Arabia than in expressing any sympathy for the 14 people killed and 21 people wounded in the attacks.

Ironically enough, Parsi did send out one tweet making fun of the fear people have about the rise of terror attacks, saying “Scary map of all Islamic terror attacks in the U.S. Just kidding, its just all mass shootings since Sandy Hook #gunsense”

Parsi might have instead tweeted out this time-lapse mapping of all terror attacks worldwide over last 15 years. He would find that the number of killings, bombings, shootings and attacks dwarf what Parsi points too.

But that may be asking too much of Parsi and his colleagues at NIAC who have devoted themselves to serving as political cover for the regime whenever Islamic extremism rears its ugly head, even all the way to a quiet suburb in Southern California.

By Michael Tomlinson

Iran Lobby Glosses Over IAEA Report on Iran Nuclear Work

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Iran Lobby Glosses Over IAEA Report on Iran Nuclear Work

Iran Lobby Glosses Over IAEA Report on Iran Nuclear Work

The International Atomic Energy Agency released its long-awaited report detailing the military dimensions of the Iranian regime’s nuclear program and unveiled disturbing new details that have left the Iran lobby, especially the National Iranian American Council, scrambling to cover up.

In the report, Iran was actively designing a nuclear weapon until at least 2009, far later than virtually all intelligence agencies had believed and proving the regime’s ability to conceal its design activities while under intense scrutiny and even spying from various nations.

The report, which according to the New York Times, was compiled largely based on partial answers provided by Iran after completing nuclear talks last July, concluded that the regime was “conducting computer modeling of a nuclear explosive device” before 2004 and continued those efforts right through President Obama’s first term in office.

The IAEA detailed a long list of experiments conducted by the regime “relevant to a nuclear explosive device” directly contradicting claims made by the Iran lobby and the mullahs that Iranian regime’s nuclear program was only for civilian and peaceful purposes.

We now know through Iranian regime’s own admission, it was trying to build nuclear weapons at a feverish pace.

But the IAEA concluded that substantial gaps existed because the regime refused to provide answers to several key questions, restricted the ability to interview key scientific personnel and limited sampling of sites and facilities only after they had been scrubbed.

The nuclear deal negotiated with the Iranian regime mandated limiting Iran’s ability to build a bomb for at least 15 years, but the inability to paint a complete picture and the revelation that Tehran had been conducting work unbeknownst to the rest of the world leaves significant doubt as even that goal is attainable.

According to the Times, Tehran gave no substantive answers to one quarter of the dozen specific questions or documents it was asked about, leaving open the question of how much progress it had made.

At Iran’s Parchin complex, where the agency thought there had been nuclear experimental work in 2000, “extensive activities undertaken by Iran” to alter the site “seriously undermined” the agency’s ability to come to conclusions about past activities, the report said.

The response from Capitol Hill was swift and bipartisan.

“I think we’re getting off to a very, very poor start,” Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) told reporters after a roughly two-hour top-secret committee hearing.

“These are exactly the things that we talked about during the hearing process that raised concerns and they’re being validated right now,” he added.

“It just sets a very bad precedent that if Iran thinks it can violate the world’s will, as expressed by Security Council resolutions, and in essence face no consequence for it,” said Sen. Robert Menendez (N.J.), one of the four Democrats who voted against the deal in September.

The defense offered by the NIAC’s Trita Parsi through a press release was tepid and paper thin as he focused on the issue of complying with the terms of the agreement in releasing the report, but not in the report’s findings themselves, praising the IAEA’s “assessment of coordinated ‘activities relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device,’ in Iran prior to 2003, and that there have been no credible indications of such relevant activities since 2009.”

Parsi of course does not mention the fact the work conducted through 2009 was denied by Tehran and by Parsi himself and that the refusal by the mullahs to answer specific questions left the report, at best incomplete, and at worst a whitewash.

The Iran lobby is now finding it harder and harder to cover for the regime because its own promises and arguments are now all coming to be uncovered as falsehoods and outright deceptions. The fortunate thing about the internet is you can always search and look back at the statements people like Parsi have made and in the context of what is happening now, realize just how really wrong they were.

With the IAEA report, it’s just another blow to any shred of credibility the Iran lobby had.

By Michael Tomlinson

Tying Terrorism to the Environment Doesn’t Excuse Iran Regime

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Tying Terrorism to the Environment Doesn’t Excuse Iran Regime

Tying Terrorism to the Environment Doesn’t Excuse Iran Regime

As world leaders gathered this week in a Paris still suffering from the after effects on a series of bloody terrorist attacks for a global summit on climate change, one of the more controversial side topics to erupt from it was the claim of a linkage between the planet’s extreme weather changes and the rise in extremist terror around the world.

The world’s news media have been filled with analysis and debate, which has filtered over into the U.S. presidential campaign as well. Evan Halper in the Los Angeles Times recaps some of that debate as the issue has been promoted by luminaries such as Britain’s Prince Charles and denounced by Rupert Murdoch’s Sun newspaper.

The linkage from proponents comes from the idea that global warming has shifted weather patterns to such an extent that crop failures and long-term drought have led to deprivation of impacted regions of the globe that have lent themselves to the spawning of extremist groups initially intent on acquiring limited resources such as food, water and arable land to curry the favor and recruitment of desperate people.

One case in point has been the building debate over root causes of the Syrian civil war, which some climate activists have claimed had its start in a decade-long drought that caused the mass migration of some 1.5 million people out of farming areas and into refugee status and provided a fertile recruiting group for extremist groups.

The complexity of such a debate must also take into account issues of religion, politics, economics and even personal graft and greed; all issues of pressing relevance throughout the Middle East and developing world.

But the Iran lobby and the Iran regime have been quick to latch onto this theory as an alternative rise in Islamic extremism and put some distance between the mullahs in Tehran to terror groups and terrorist activities they have historically supported such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria and the Houthis in Yemen.

The regime was so intent on fostering this idea that it sent Masoumeh Ebtekar, head of its Department of Environment, to Paris to speak on the sidelines of the global climate summit and gave her remarks broad play in state-run media.

But even when the topic is rising temperatures, the mullahs could not miss out on any opportunity to voice their time worn demand for the immediate lifting of all sanctions against it by having Ebtekar make the promise that the regime would cut its greenhouse emissions by 4 percent and increase those cuts to 12 percent if sanctions are fully lifted.

“I wish to urge the UN system to initiate an assessment on the carbon footprints of war, conflicts, security and terrorism,” Ebtekar said. “Those perpetuating conflicts are in fact accomplices of the global warming process.”

It’s an interesting statement to make from the regime’s leadership considering that their gross mismanagement has turned what was once called the cradle of civilization into what is arguably now one of the greatest environmental disasters on the planet.

Tehran has been rated one of the most polluted cities in the world with cars and buses using mostly leaded gasoline, which is heavily subsidized by the regime in order to quell a restive population, but which has the unfortunate side effect at negating any effort to conserve and leads to profligate and highly inefficient traffic patterns.

Its traffic management systems are virtually non-existent with little to no vehicle inspection, mobile emission testing or controls and a government bureaucracy so corrupted by the mullahs nepotism and favoritism that the wealthy children of mullahs and those aligned with the Revolutionary Guards Corps are often seen tooling around in gas guzzling Lamborghinis and Ferraris.

The rural parts of Iran suffer from large-scale overgrazing and growing desertification and deforestation turning large swathes of the country into desert dunes, while industrial and urban wastewater runoff has contaminated most rivers, coastal areas and underground aquifers.

The World Bank estimates that losses inflicted on the regime economy as a result of deaths coming from air pollution alone reach $640 million or 0.57 of total gross domestic product for the entire nation, while the UN Environment Program ranked Iran 117th among 133 countries in terms of environmental indexes.

One example of the environmental mismanagement of the regime is the drying up of Lake Urmia in the northwest of Iran, which has shrunk a stunning 70 percent and is in danger of permanently disappearing after being the sixth largest saltwater lake in the world.

Things are so bad that Iran generates an estimated 50,000 tons of trash every day with only 70 percent of it disposed of safely and an even smaller amount redirected into reuse and recycling. The rest of the garbage finds its way into the country’s waterways and forests. Iran ranked worst in the world for soil erosion as well in 2011.

The degradation of Iran’s environment has led to mass discontent throughout the nation as the country’s environmental activists have taken to protesting the mullahs’ mismanagement much in the same way Iranian dissidents protested human rights violations.

The failure of Hassan Rouhani to live up to campaign promises to clean up the environment have led to top mullah Ali Khamenei to issue his own 15-point list of policy directives to staunch some of these problems. In reading the policy directive, one could almost envision it being a verbatim policy paper written by the Obama administration’s Environmental Protection Agency as it calls for lofty goals such as “bilateral, multilateral, regional and international partnerships and targeted cooperation in the environmental field.”

But no matter how many “laterals” the regime undertakes, what is abundantly apparent is that the regime is more concerned about practical political and military matters than environmental ones as it spends much of its treasury on supporting terror groups and the proxy wars in Syria, Iraq and Yemen.

If President Obama is correct and extremist terrorism is given its birthplace out of the degraded environments of regions plagued by drought and famine, then Iranian regime’s dismal environmental management has certainly produced bumper harvests of terrorists and violence.

By Laura Carnahan

 

Reasons To Be Thankful This Past Weekend

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Reasons To Be Thankful This Past Weekend

Reasons To Be Thankful This Past Weekend

This past weekend, across the U.S., families sat down together to celebrate family and give thanks for all what they have, including secularism in government, freedom of speech and the practice of religion, support for the rights of women and minorities, protection for a free and active press and the guarantee of due process and a presumption of innocence in criminal cases.

All those things and more have formed the bedrock of American civil society for 239 years, but are virtually non-existent in the one country that has steadily called for the destruction of the American way of life since 1979: the Iranian regime.

The past few months of 2015 have certainly caused significant concern and alarm among Americans and throughout most parts of the world. We have seen terror attacks spring up literally around the world, most recently in the horrific attacks in Paris – first with the Charlie Hebdo attacks and then the bombings – and in the wave of atrocities perpetuated by Al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, Hezbollah and Shiite militias.

Couple that with the spread of sectarian conflicts – most fueled by the Iranian regime – in Syria, Iraq and Yemen, and you begin to get a pretty good idea of how chaotic the year has become in spite of the promises made by the Iran lobby that things would settle down after a deal was struck with the mullahs in Tehran over a new nuclear deal.

How wrong people like Trita Parsi of the National Iranian American Council were.

But for most Americans, their Thanksgiving wishes and victories were much smaller and personal. For them, most Americans could be thankful that this past weekend:

  • No more Americans were arrested and held hostage in Iran, except for the five currently held captive by the Iranian regime;
  • No new terror attacks were launched against Americans at home or abroad; and
  • The Iranian regime didn’t launch any new ballistic missiles like it did last month violating United Nations arms embargoes.

But for the Iranian regime, this past weekend wasn’t nearly a peaceful or good one for the mullahs as setbacks continue to dog the regime and stymie each of its efforts to expand its vision for a greater Islamic sphere of influence controlled from Tehran.

Among the news coming from media sources this weekend include:

  • Reports that Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani was seriously injured in Syria while supervising Iranian regime forces fighting rebels on behalf of the Assad regime. This follows previous news of deaths of other top Iranian military commanders in Syria;
  • The Washington Post reported that findings by the International Atomic Energy Agency can be expected to spark another round of intense scrutiny over the Iran regime’s claims its previously undisclosed nuclear program did not have any military components to it;
  • In anticipation of the IAEA report, the regime denounced the ongoing investigation and warned that Iran would not follow through on the nuclear deal unless the IAEA closed its investigation no later than Dec. 15;
  • Kenyan security forces have arrested two Kenyan men with links to the Iranian regime’s Quds Forces on suspicion of planning attacks in the East African nation, the Interior Ministry said on Saturday. It said their targets included “hotels in Nairobi frequented by Western tourists and diplomats;”
  • A flurry of reports in the Iran regime’s official and semi­official news outlets that have flooded out about more combat deaths suffered by Iranian forces in Syria have surprised analysts who monitor the country’s tightly controlled media. The reports, they say, indicate that at least 67 Iranians have been killed in Syria since the beginning of October, in a move some have described as an attempt by the mullahs to grab headlines back from Russia in an effort to burnish the image of regime forces fighting in Syria.

And to top off the weekend, top mullah Ali Khamenei went on his usual Sunday rant denouncing the U.S. and promising to keep the regime’s policies aimed squarely at preserving the Islamic revolution and spreading it throughout the region.

As reported in the Washington Times, Khamenei’s message was the subject of an analysis in a report by the U.S. Army Foreign Military Studies Office at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

“To encourage perpetual revolution might mean to foment continuous crisis,” the report said. “This, in turn, suggests greater regional instability and Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps provocations toward U.S. forces and others.”

In other words, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the nuclear deal on which the Obama administration gambled for a more moderate Iran, has not tempered Khamenei’s fiery outcry.

“Khamenei’s endorsement of an expansive and perhaps even growing IRGC role confirms the group’s position as the chief obstacle to any political and economic reform in the Islamic Republic, and also suggests that the IRGC may win disproportionate advantage from any unfrozen assets or foreign direct investment entering the Iranian economy,” the report added.

All of which points out that while Americans celebrated values of family, peace, forgiveness and charity on Thanksgiving, the Iranian regime was busy deepening a conflict that has displaced half of Syria’s population, creating the largest refugee crisis in Europe since the end of World War II and spreading a radicalized form of extremist Islam manifesting itself in various terrorist groups around the world.

We can only hope the mullahs don’t get their holiday wishes granted next month.

By Michael Tomlinson

Iran Lobby Weighs in On Hillary Clinton as Nuclear Agreement Draws Scrutiny

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Iran Lobby Weighs in On Hillary Clinton as Nuclear Agreement Draws Scrutiny

Iran Lobby Weighs in On Hillary Clinton as Nuclear Agreement Draws Scrutiny

If there is any silver lining in the wave of terrorist attacks, sectarian wars being waged and ominous threats and provocative actions coming out of the Iranian regime, it is that virtually all of the candidates running for president in 2016 are united in their collective wariness of the mullahs in Tehran.

That lack of desire among the presidential candidates ranges from outright hostility to the regime to a recognition that the mullahs are committed to an agenda that does not support moderation or regional peace hopes, but that certainly has not stopped the Iran lobby from attempting to influence those campaigns or the American voting public.

The lobby’s chief advocate has long been the National Iranian American Council and its newly created lobbying arm, NIAC Action, which has been urging its supporters to sign and send in petitions and letters to the various campaigns urging them to support the nuclear deal and a broadened dialogue with the regime should they win the White House.

Judging by the lack of enthusiasm from the various campaigns, we can assume that the petition drive by NIAC is being received with less than stellar applause, which might explain by Reza Marashi of NIAC took to Huffington Post with an editorial criticizing Hillary Clinton for taking a harder line against the Iran regime and Islamic extremism in some of her stump speeches.

Marashi took exception to a speech Clinton delivered the Council of Foreign Relations where she said:

“We cannot view Iran and ISIS as separate challenges. Regional politics are too interwoven,” she said. “Raising the confidence of our Arab partners and raising the cost to Iran for bad behavior will contribute more effectively to the fight against ISIS.”

Her views that Iran’s Arab neighbors could become more effective partners in the fight against rising Islamic extremism only if the Iranian regime was held accountable for its actions, such as the recent attempt to overthrow the government in Yemen and the effort to take over the Iraqi government, is both a prudent and smart foreign policy declaration for someone who could very well be sitting in the Oval Office in 2017.

The fact that Marashi takes the well-worn Iranian regime talking point blaming its Arab neighbors for the supporting these terror groups is evidence of how paltry and bereft of substance the arguments are from the Iran lobby. The NIAC and other regime supporters have opted to try and shift blame for the rise in terror, including the bloody attacks in Paris on anyone else but the Iranian regime.

But Secretary Clinton recognizes a key point that Marashi and his ilk are desperate to cover up, which is Iran, as a theocratic state, uses its status as a country to support and prop up many terror groups around the world and engage actively in proxy wars that have threaten to draw the rest of the world into bloody conflict. While the flow of funds to some terror groups may be traced back to donations from individual donors, Iranian regime is the only nation-state that has devoted its treasury, military, economy and political influence in supporting groups such as Hezbollah and the Houthis, as well as provided safe harbor and shelter for members of Al-Qaeda and ISIS in the past.

The one true statement Marashi makes is when he says “the more options America has, the greater its leverage becomes.”

In this he is correct, but not in the way he intended because in agreeing to the nuclear deal with Iranian mullahs, the U.S. has unwittingly hampered itself by taking a whole host of tools off the table ranging from continued sanctions to restrictions on the flow of cash coming from the Iranian regime and into the coffers of various terror groups.

But what is even more surprising are the revelations in a recent National Review story that pointed out that the nuclear agreement had not even been signed by the regime and in effect has no legal standing.

“The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) is not a treaty or an executive agreement, and is not a signed document,” wrote Julia Frifield, the State Department assistant secretary for legislative affairs, in a November 19 letter written in response to an inquiry sent to Secretary of State John Kerry by Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.).

Regime leader Hassan Rouhani discouraged his nation’s parliament from voting on the nuclear deal in order to avoid placing legal burdens on the regime, saying “If the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action is sent to [and passed by] parliament, it will create an obligation for the government. It will mean the president, who has not signed it so far, will have to sign it,” Rouhani said in August. “Why should we place an unnecessary legal restriction on the Iranian people?”

That statement has led to rampant speculation on Capitol Hill that the nuclear deal is already null and void, which explains why most of the presidential candidates have already staked out policy positions visibly diverging from what the Obama administration negotiated with regime.

As more journalists point out this inconvenient truth, such as Michael Ledeen writing of the lack of any signatures in Forbes, we can expect an even more desperate attempt by the Iran lobby and Marashi to try and shift more attention away and onto another false canard. Maybe they can blame El Nino on too much methane coming from cows next.

By Michael Tomlinson

 

Iran Regime Serves as Center of Terrorism Now

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Iran Regime Serves as Center of Terrorism Now

Iran Regime Serves as Center of Terrorism Now

There are 196 countries on the planet and they all have their issues with their neighbors. They squabble, they fight, they complain, they protest, they even spy on one another and in a few cases they openly make war.

Some of those countries are vast and powerful such as the U.S., Russia or China, while others are small to the point of being insignificant on the world stage such as Monaco, Tuvalu or San Marino.

But there are only three countries that share a unique and disturbing distinction. There are only three countries remaining on the U.S. State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism:

  • Syria
  • Iran
  • Sudan

It’s a pretty exclusive club, one that used to have as its members Libya, Iraq, South Yemen, Cuba and North Korea.

To be placed on this list, countries are alleged to have “repeatedly provided support for acts of international terrorism.”

In order to get off the list, countries have to demonstrate:

  • Fundamental change in the leadership and policies of the government of the country concerned;
  • Not supporting acts of international terrorism, and
  • The government has provided assurances that it will not support acts of international terrorism in the future.

It doesn’t seem like an unreasonable set of criteria to follow, especially if a country wants to be part of the international community. But in Syria and Sudan’s cases, it’s understandable considering the civil wars they are embroiled in and inability of any central government to eliminate any safe havens for terrorist groups to operate in.

The Iranian regime stands out as the only government not undergoing any turmoil that actively and aggressively supports terrorism around the world; and does so with religious fervor.

The State Department terrorism report describes the Iranian regime polices this way:

“While its main effort focused on supporting goals in the Middle East, particularly in Syria, Iran and its proxies also continued subtle efforts at growing influence elsewhere including in Africa, Asia, and, to a lesser extent, Latin America. Iran used the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Qods Force (IRGC-QF) to implement foreign policy goals, provide cover for intelligence operations, and create instability in the Middle East. The IRGC-QF is the regime’s primary mechanism for cultivating and supporting terrorists abroad.”

The mullahs in Tehran are using all of the available levers of state power to further their support of terrorism whether it is providing safe havens for terrorist leaders, financing of operations, supplying fighters and manpower, equipping them with arms and ammunition, providing transportation and intelligence or actively directing them in attacks.

In many ways, the Iran regime resembles the fictional Hydra organization in the Marvel Cinematic Universe as its tentacles stretch across the world seeking influence in Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas. Unfortunately, in our universe, we don’t have Captain America or Iron Man to rely on.

That propagation of terrorism has served as a template for extremist groups such as ISIS and affiliated Al-Qaeda groups to spring up everywhere and launch attacks to the extent that the U.S. State Department issued a global travel advisory for only the fourth time in history and most ominously the alert extends through the busy holiday travel season through February 2016.

The general degeneration of global peace and stability can be traced in many ways back to the Iranian regime, including its support of the Assad regime in Syria’s civil war, the collapse of the Sunni-Shiite coalition government of Nouri al-Maliki in Iraq, the overthrow of the Yemen government by Iran-backed Houthi rebels and the recruitment of Hezbollah and Afghan fighters across Syria and Iraq.

All of which puts a harsh spotlight on the rosy claims made by the Iran lobby and backers of the regime by a variety of groups and analysts such as the National Iranian American Council and Paul R. Pillar and Ali Gharib that approval of a landmark nuclear deal would usher in a new era of moderation and cooperation.

That naïve sentiment was again proven wrong as news reports came out revealing a surge in sophisticated computer espionage by the Iran regime resulting in serious cyberattacks against State Department officials over the past month.

According to the New York Times, “over the past month, Iranian hackers identified individual State Department officials who focus on Iran and the Middle East, and broke into their email and social media accounts, according to diplomatic and law enforcement officials familiar with the investigation. The State Department became aware of the compromises only after Facebook told the victims that state-sponsored hackers had compromised their accounts.”

“It was very carefully designed and showed the degree to which they understood which of our staff was working on Iran issues now that the nuclear deal is done,” said one senior American official who oversees much of that operation and who requested anonymity to discuss a continuing investigation. “It was subtle.”

It is clear now that the Iranian regime is not only the center of state-sponsored terrorism in the world, it is its living heart.

By Michael Tomlinson

Iran Regime Sympathizers Downplay Paris Attacks

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Iran Regime Sympathizers Downplay Paris Attacks

Iran Regime Sympathizers Downplay Paris Attacks

In what has to be one of more astounding editorials written about the Paris attacks, Paul R. Pillar, a frequent supporter of the Iranian regime, penned a piece in the National Interest in which he actually tried to make the argument that the attacks were an example of “amateurish” tactics and that the outsized response from governments and media bordered on hysteria and ISIS did not warrant much respect.

“It is a mistake to regard the ISIS entity as a font of critical skills needed to kill people,” Pillar writes.

Let’s think about that statement for a moment. Pillar actually makes the claim that ISIS lacks the skills to kill people. That absurd statement ranks right up there with his previous editorials arguing vociferously for the nuclear agreement with the Iranian regime and his claims that doing so would usher in a new and peaceful phase in Middle East tensions.

Well, we certainly know how that worked out.

Pillar’s piece was reprinted faithfully in Lobelog.com, another loyal member of the Iran lobbying effort alongside the National Iranian American Council and Ploughshares Fund just to name a few; all of whom have recently made efforts to divert attention away from the bloody carnage in Paris and now Mali, and instead try to shift the discussion onto discrimination of Syrian refugees or warning of an overreaction in cracking down on civil liberties.

All of the members of the Iran lobby neglect to mention that the center and source of all of these problems starts and ends with the Iranian regime’s fanatical support of the Assad regime in Syria which started the conflict in the first place and helped spawn ISIS in the sectarian fight that sprang up when the mullahs in Tehran sent in thousands of Hezbollah fighters from Lebanon, Shiite Militias from Iraq and mercenaries from Afghanistan added to milliards of dollars to help keep its proxy in power in Syria.

The fact that Pillar attempts to gloss over the planning and execution necessary for the Paris attacks is unfathomable, other than he is trying hard to minimize the import of what the attacks mean for the West. He argues:

“Some organizational aptitude was needed to put together an operation that involved simultaneous dispatch of multiple attack teams, but this did not require organizing any more people than would be needed to put together a neighborhood soccer team,” Pillar said.

Most rational people would not think their local neighborhood soccer team could build eight suicide bomb vests, acquire and equip three teams with automatic weapons, arrange timetables, scout locations, determine how to funnel panicked people fleeing a bombed sports stadium into a kill zone and communicate via text messaging on disposable cell phones while arranging the attack via encrypted communications evading virtually all national intelligence agencies.

But Pillar exhibits the singular trait that afflicts all supporters of the Iranian regime; the desire to absolve it of any responsibility for spreading and fostering the kind of extremist Islamic belief that is now shaking the world with widespread, multiple and frequent attacks.

Pillar also neglects to mention another key facet of these attacks that is significantly more disturbing than the actual loss of human life; it’s the fact these attacks are not supported with any public demands.

There are no calls to release political prisoners or comrades. No demands for ransom or payments. No negotiations over territorial claims or grievances.

These attacks are based solely on the nihilistic extremist beliefs that also power and drive the mullahs in Tehran.

“The death toll for all of the Paris attacks, as shocking as it understandably was, nonetheless was much less than a more skillfully conducted operation involving a comparable number of attackers would have inflicted,” Pillar writes. “The attack team that went after the most target-rich location—a sports arena with tens of thousands of people—managed to kill only one other person besides themselves.”

I’m sure the families of those slain would disagree with Pillar on the skill level involved in murdering their loved ones, but his comments reflect the almost callous disregard the Iran lobby has for human suffering. Very similar to the Iranian regime’s initial condemnation of the attack but its consequent show of happiness by shamefully putting the blame on the French authorities in its state wide papers and media.

At key points in the travesty that is the human rights record of the Iranian regime, Pillar and his cohorts including Trita Parsi and Reza Marashi of NIAC, Jim Lobe of Lobelog.com and others have been struck deaf and mute when it comes to protesting the abhorrent human rights abuses of the mullahs in Tehran either in their comments to news media or in their own social media posts.

Americans held hostage, journalists rounded up, religious minorities imprisoned, social media administrators tossed in jail, dissidents executed, all these actions and more and warranted hardly a murmur of protest and yet Pillar deigns to call terror attacks in Paris as “amateurish.”

The only real amateurish act in this tragedy is the effort by the Iran lobby to whitewash the blood off the streets of Paris.

By Michael Tomlinson