Iran: Mullahs Celebrate What They Hope Will Be the Return To Their Nuclear Bomb
At the beginning, U.S. President Donald J. Trump pulled the US out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), commonly known as the Iran nuclear deal, which Iran never signed and which paves the way for Iran to have nuclear weapons.Tehran's diminishing resources have also caused Iranian leaders to cut funds to the Palestinian terror group Hamas and the Lebanese militant group, Hezbollah. Hamas was forced to introduce "austerity plans" while Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Iran's proxy, Hezbollah, has also called on his group's fundraising arm "to provide the opportunity for jihad with money and also to help with this ongoing battle."
Iran's President Hassan Rouhani has already called for restoring the nuclear deal. It could well be a loss for continuing peace in the region and for finally restoring the violated Iranian people's hoped-for human rights.
The Iranian regime has excitingly announced former U.S. Vice-President Joe Biden's possible victory in the US presidential elections and is celebrating that the next US administration will, they hope, be from the Democrat Party.
Iranian authorities view the chance that Biden might take over the White House as a definite win for Tehran. Hesameddin Ashena, an advisor to Iran's President Hassan Rouhani, tweeted that Iranians "stood their ground bravely until that coward's time [Donald Trump] came to leave". Headlines in the state-controlled newspapers, which celebrated the news, included, "World without Trump!" (Aftabe Yazd newspaper), "Mr Withdrawal is Close to Being Kicked Out of White House", "Go to Hell You Gambler!" (Sobhe Now newspaper) "Trump's Card No Longer Valid for Media!" (Aftabe Yazd newspaper), "The Bankrupt US President Got Humiliated" (Mardom Salari newspaper), and "Trump Must Leave" (Donyaye Eghtesad newspaper).
The last three years has indeed been a nightmare for the Iranian regime and its proxies. No US administration before the current one has imposed such a draconian pressure on the mullahs, their rogue state and their allies.
At the beginning, President Donald J. Trump pulled the US out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), commonly known as the Iran nuclear deal, which Iran never signed and which paves the way for Iran to have nuclear weapons. Then, the Trump administration re-imposed primary and secondary sanctions on Iran's energy, banking and shipping sectors. During the last two years, several other Iranian entities were added to the sanction list. The killing of General Qassem Soleimani was also a huge blow to Iran's regime, particularly the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its proxies across the Middle East.
The sanctions, in fact, have imposed significant pressure on the Iranian government -- to such an extent that the Iranian leaders have had to cut their funding to their allies, militia and terror groups.
A year into the pressure, the state-controlled Syrian newspaper Al-Watan reported that Iran halted its credit line to the Syrian government. Some of Iran's authorities publicly announced that they also do not have money to pay their mercenaries abroad. In an interview with the state-run Ofogh Television Network, for instance, Parviz Fattah, the current head of the Foundation for the Underprivileged (Mostazafan Foundation) stated:
"I was at the IRGC Cooperative Foundation. Haj Qassem [Soleimani, commander of the IRGC Quds Force who was killed by a US drone strike] came and told me he did not have money to pay the salaries of the Fatemiyoun [Afghan mercenaries]. He said that these are our Afghan brothers, and he asked for help from people like us."
Tehran's diminishing resources have also caused Iranian leaders to cut funds to the Palestinian terror group Hamas and the Lebanese militant group, Hezbollah. Hamas was forced to introduce "austerity plans" while Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Iran's proxy, Hezbollah, has also called on his group's fundraising arm "to provide the opportunity for jihad with money and also to help with this ongoing battle."
The country's economic situation became so dire that the Iranian President Hassan Rouhani admitted that the Islamic Republic is encountering the worst economic crisis since its establishment in 1979. The political deputy of the province of Bushehr, Governor Majid Khorshidi, told a gathering on July 14 that they should not ignore US sanctions: "We used to see this approach [of ignoring US sanctions] from the previous [Ahmadinejad] administration and unfortunately it still continues," he added. "But I have to say that sanctions have broken the economy's back".
Thanks to the current administration's pressure, Iran's currency, the rial, has been in free fall in the last three years. As of November 7, 2020, a US dollar is worth approximately 250,000 rials. Before the current US administration imposed a "maximum pressure" policy against Tehran, a US dollar had equaled nearly 30,000 rials. During the last year, Iran's oil exports also sank to a record low. The country's budget heavily relies on selling oil.
As pressure kept mounting against the regime, Tehran also faced several widespread protests in the country, which endangered the hold on power of the ruling clerics. Now, the regime feels that all of the current administration's pressures will be lifted soon and the golden days will be back again.
It is unfortunate that Iran's ruling mullahs view a possible victory of the Democrat Party in US elections as a win for the Tehran regime, its proxies and militia groups. President Rouhani has already called for restoring the nuclear deal. It could well be a loss for continuing peace in the region and for finally restoring the violated Iranian people's hoped-for human rights.
Dr. Majid Rafizadeh is a business strategist and advisor, Harvard-educated scholar, political scientist, board member of Harvard International Review, and president of the International American Council on the Middle East. He has authored several books on Islam and US foreign policy. He can be reached at Dr.Rafizadeh@Post.Harvard.Edu
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Is Warnock the equivalent of a southern Rev.Wright?
Where might Trump voters have got the idea that a president
By William McGurn
“Let this grim era of demonization in America begin to end.” So spoke Joe Biden Saturday night in a speech that was as much a call for unity as a celebration of victory.
If Mr. Biden means it, he will need to show it. He might start by stating that there’s no place in his administration for anyone who joins in Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s call for a de facto blacklist of Trump supporters. This might upset some of Mr. Biden’s supporters, but that’s leadership. It’s essential even if Mr. Trump and some of his supporters make it no easier by insisting, after the litigation is exhausted and the results certified, that Mr. Biden hasn’t been legitimately elected.
Here’s Hillary Clinton from September 2019, nearly three years after her defeat: “He knows he’s an illegitimate president. I believe he understands that the many varying tactics they used, from voter suppression and voter purging to hacking to the false stories, he knows that there were just a bunch of different reasons why the election turned out like it did.”
Or Jimmy Carter in June 2019. “There’s no doubt that the Russians did interfere in the election. And I think the interference, although not yet quantified, if fully investigated would show that Trump didn’t actually win the election in 2016. He lost the election and he was put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf.” Asked if that meant he regarded Mr. Trump as an “illegitimate president,” Mr. Carter said yes.
In January 2017, Rep. Jerrold Nadler said he was boycotting Mr. Trump’s inauguration (along with one-third of his fellow House Democrats) because, though the president was “legally elected,” he wasn’t “legitimate.” During impeachment, another effort to reject the 2016 election, Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the House had no choice but to act because Mr. Trump was “trying to corrupt, once again, the election for his benefit.” Not to mention the ridiculous attempts to paint a candidate who attracted more minority votes than any Republican in recent history as a champion of white supremacy.
Mr. Biden piled on with the rest of them. In the first debate he called Mr. Trump a “racist,” building on his earlier claim that Mr. Trump was America’s first racist president. During a May 2019 campaign stop in New Hampshire, a woman came up to Mr. Biden and said Mr. Trump was “an illegitimate president in my mind.” Mr. Biden’s response? “I absolutely agree.”
These aren’t MSNBC hosts or activists. They are Democratic Party leaders. Frankly, it would be difficult to find a prominent Democrat who didn’t accuse Mr. Trump of being an illegitimately elected president. It’s no coincidence the president’s critics styled themselves “the resistance.”
Those Trump supporters who are sure this election has been stolen—are they any different from the 33% of Hillary Clinton voters who, according to a poll taken immediately after Election Day 2016, said they didn’t believe Mr. Trump was legitimately elected? And might Trump voters be a little skeptical about demands for evidence from the same people who spent years accusing Mr. Trump of being a Russian agent without any evidence whatsoever?
But what fate has in store for Mr. Trump is less important for America’s future than what it holds for his voters. More Americans cast their votes for Mr. Trump than for any presidential candidate in American history—except Mr. Biden. Over the past four years, this half of America has been treated as the deplorables that Mrs. Clinton called them, with MAGA hats regarded as the 21st-century equivalent of white hoods.
It isn’t over, either. At the same moment Mr. Biden is being applauded for his Lincolnesque call to come together, Michelle Obama, in her own congratulatory message, reminded Mr. Biden that millions of Trump voters chose to support “lies, hate, chaos, and division.” Mrs. Obama appears not to have got the memo about not demonizing people on the other side.
Mr. Biden’s words on Saturday were exactly what the country needed to hear. But if the 71 million Americans who voted for Mr. Trump are to be reconciled, they will need to be persuaded. And for this to happen, Mr. Biden will at some point need to acknowledge the seeds he and his supporters sowed to help bring us to this bitter harvest.
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b)Good Riddance to the ‘Resistance’
Jubilant crowds danced for joy in front of stores that were boarded up in case their side lost.
It’s a time to heal, Joe Biden told the nation on Saturday night.
“To make progress, we must stop treating our opponents as our enemy. We are not enemies. We are Americans.”
Mr. Biden, as we well know, is of good Irish Catholic stock, his speeches sprinkled with the emerald argot of his heritage, a lush, hibernian wordscape of shenanigans and malarkey. But he’s an ecumenical sort too, so I know he’ll forgive a little cultural dissonance when I say that this may be one of the finest examples of chutzpah in modern political rhetoric.
For four years the bulk of his Democratic Party, a good deal of the permanent government and almost the entire cultural establishment of the country has treated the Trump presidency as an occupying enemy. Donald Trump’s election four years ago was not greeted with civic deference to the urgent primacy of national unity that is now demanded of him and his supporters. It was greeted with the formation of a “resistance,” a political insurgency that refused in practice, if not in formal fact, to accept the outcome of an election its candidate had lost.
The members of this resistance spent four years using every lever at their disposal—bureaucracy, law enforcement, Congress, news media—to thwart, disrupt and try to bring down the duly elected president.
In the past six months, the country descended into an abyss of pandemic-driven misery and social unrest. Like any good revolutionary movement, the resistance seized its moment. It launched a sustained, rolling campaign of disruptive demonstration and street violence, all dutifully enabled by Democrat-controlled city governments and all conveyed helpfully by a cooperative media as “peaceful protest.”
If there’s a single image that captures the hollow hypocrisy of these pleas for unity and healing, it was one I witnessed on the streets of Manhattan on Saturday in the minutes after the television networks had anointed Mr. Biden president-elect: jubilant crowds dancing joyfully in front of stores that had been boarded up in advance of the election in case the result went the other way.
It was a neat little tableau of the protection-racket ethos that has defined American politics for the last four years: Vote for us so we can dance and celebrate. Vote against us and we’ll burn down your business and steal your property.
Given all this—the rank hypocrisy, the antidemocratic, extraconstitutional campaign waged against the Republicans—it’s understandable that they should be disinclined to take up Mr. Biden’s generous offer of national conciliation. It’s entirely understandable that Mr. Trump should feel cheated, inclined to fight on, to cast doubt and discredit on the election and the corrupted establishment that helped produce it.
But they shouldn’t, and he shouldn’t.
There are always good grounds for concern about the outcome of a close election.
This year that concern is heightened by what can politely be described as the novel circumstances of the voting. It seems that Democratic officials and Democratic-appointed judges in the critical states used the pandemic as an opportunity to bend rules and decades-long norms of voting procedures to maximize turnout in ways that doubtless favored their party.
But it’s one thing to harbor suspicions. It is another to prove to a legal standard fraud or malpractice on a scale that would overturn enough votes to wipe out a margin in the tens of thousands.
Denouncing the official election results in all-caps tweets or throwing out unsubstantiated accusations at news conferences is not the way to respond to a defeat.
There’s another reason Republicans, even Mr. Trump, should resist the natural temptation to resist.
They don’t need to.
Assuming Republicans can snag at least one of the runoff elections in Georgia, a first-term president has been elected with a Senate controlled by the opposing party—only the third time that’s happened since voters began electing senators in 1914. Republicans also made substantial gains in the House and state legislatures.
The election was a clear repudiation of the progressive agenda for which Democrats had sought affirmation. At the same time it showed the contours of a new Republican coalition, built on widening support among diverse demographic groups and lined up in support of a new populist conservatism pioneered by Mr. Trump. If the president wants to, he could be back again to lead it.
President-elect Biden’s success seems mainly to have been the result of dissatisfaction with the president’s performance, especially on the pandemic. Voters did not regard Mr. Trump as illegitimate, and they didn’t reward the “resistance” by punishing Republicans down the ballot. That should be a lesson for Mr. Trump, his understandably disgruntled supporters, and all Americans.
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Did Democrats purposely take advantage of the pandemic to push for legislation that changed voting rules and then used technology to manipulate votes in order to steal the election? Hillary, we know, got a law firm to pay for a contrived dossier which was used to obtain false warrants. We also know Biden, at some point, was apprised of what was going on just as he knw about his son's nefarious activities.
Finally, we also know the (m)ass media shills refused to probe/investigate/pursue and do their job so Biden could keep hiding in the basement.
If the facts I have written were done by Trump against Biden - you know the rest.
Some further observations:
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