US Government Blunder Outrages Human Rights Organizations
The latest removal of Nigeria as a “Country of Special Concerns” by the US Department of State has sparked outrage among human rights groups around the globe
All the Usual Suspects are there, but Nigeria Sits High and Dry
Secretary of State Anthony Blinken mentioned China, Myanmar, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Tajik, and Turkmenistan as nations of significant concern, prior to his Nov. 18 visit to Nigeria.
The secretary of state identifies a country as a source of serious religious freedom abuses. Algeria, Comoros, Cuba, and Nicaragua were also added to the US shortlist for freedom of religion on Nov. 18 by Blinken.
Nonetheless, on Sept. 26, Muslim extremists were accused of slaughtering 38 Christians in Nigeria’s Madama town, and on Oct. 31, a whole Baptist church was abducted.
In a Nov. 17 announcement on religious liberty classifications, Blinken said, “The obstacles to freedom of religion in the globe today are fundamental, systematic, and firmly ingrained.”
“They demand a long-term worldwide dedication from all who refuse to accept bigotry, intolerance, and oppression as the norm,” he stated. While Blinken’s declaration did not specifically mention Nigeria, religious liberty proponents in Nigeria believe it accurately described the nation’s scenario.
“In far too many areas around the globe, we proceed to see various governments brutalize, arrest, endanger, jail, and kill people simply for trying to seek to live their lives in conformity with the principles.”
Blinken Seems Oblivious
On November 19, Blinken was questioned by Channels TV in Nigeria.
While he acknowledged the subject of police brutality against protestors in Lagos during October, opponents pointed out he didn’t even mention the continuing killings of Christians in northern Nigeria.
In 2020, the Trump administration placed Nigeria on the CPC listing for the first time. The withdrawal from Blinken went against the advice of the US Council on International Freedom of religion (USCIRF), which urged the nation to be put back up.
Blinken’s failure to redesignate Nigeria is “inexplicable.” USCIRF is particularly dissatisfied with Nigeria’s withdrawal from the CPC classification, which it deserved last year, as well as the exclusion of India, Syria, and the Vietnamese.
“USCIRF is unhappy the Department of State did not follow our suggestions in recognizing the nations that violate freedom of religion the most,” Maenza added.
“In August, upwards of 40 religious institutions from around the world signed an appeal calling for Nigeria to be relisted due to escalating religious breaches,” Franklyn Ogbunwezeh, a senior researcher and director for Conflict Prevention in Africa at Christian Unity Worldwide.
Ogbunwezeh sees the action as a win for autocracy as well. “Blinken’s visit has been a tactical triumph for the Buhari administration, and a very unfortunate day for Nigerian civil rights,” Ogbunwezeh remarked on Arise TV on November 19.
And:
Here we have a president characterizing an accused before the fact as Obama did on several occasions.
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Iran has attempted to smuggle explosive material to Palestinian terror groups in Judea and Samaria via UAVs launched from airports in Syria, Defense Minister Benny Gantz revealed in a bombshell statement on Tuesday morning.
During a defense conference at Reichman University in Herzliya, Gantz said that “Iran is not only using unmanned aerial vehicles to attack, but also to carry out weapons transfers to its proxies.”
In 2018, he said, the IDF had intercepted an Iranian drone laden with explosives that departed from the T4 airbase (Althias airport) near Homs, Syria. The UAV was bound for “terrorist elements” in Judea and Samaria, but was successfully neutralized over Beit She’an, Israel, near the Jordanian border.
He added that Iran has launched maritime attacks using UAVs from bases in the Islamic Republic’s south.
“UAVs are an accurate weapon that can reach strategic targets within thousands of kilometers, and thus this capability is already endangering Sunni countries, international forces in the Middle East and also countries in Europe and Africa,” Gantz said.
He noted that Iran also utilizes drones to achieve its goals outside of the region, “transferring oil and weapons to Venezuela, operating….in South America and trying to increase its influence into Afghanistan.”
Gantz said that Iran had been “consistently successful” at using proxy militias to create a major presence along the borders of Israel.
“The Iranians have surrounded the State of Israel with missiles while sitting safely in Tehran,” he said.
The Defense Minister was pessimistic about a possible return to the 2015 nuclear deal, saying that Israel would keep its options open for mitigating the threat of a nuclear Iran.
“In the face of the threat, the world has many tools to act, and it must exercise Plan B for the diplomatic option,” he said.
While acknowledging that “a diplomatic solution is preferable,” Gantz said that the “use of force…is a continuation of diplomacy by other means.”
The most important thing, he emphasized, is preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, and said the Jewish State is not willing to commit to any particular course of action on the matter.
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Bennett is no Bibi and Israel may have no choice but to attack Iran . The same mind set that drove Iran's Islamic Revolution of 1979 still controls and runs the government and anyone who believes Iran can be mollified is a dreamer. Milley is a threat to America's punch bowl.
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Biden’s ‘build back better’ message to Iran, Israel and the Arabs
The administration’s claim that efforts to stop the nuclear threat are counterproductive is a message to both Jerusalem and Arab nations that they’re being dumped to appease Iran.
By JONATHAN S. TOBIN
(November 22, 2021 / JNS) Critics of The New York Times sometimes claim that the newspaper’s biases render it unreadable. But those who avoid it are missing out on one of its key features: the way it serves as a sounding board for Democratic administrations. The Times was an essential part of what Ben Rhodes, former President Barack Obama’s deputy national security advisor, called his media “echo chamber,” which essentially repurposed that administration’s talking points about its efforts to appease Iran as news analysis and reporting. Though the all-too candid Rhodes is not one of the many former Obama aides who have failed upward and assumed even higher positions in the Joe Biden presidency, the Times’ recent coverage of the administration’s posturing on current Iran policy brought to mind that boast from 2015.
In an article published this past Sunday, the Times served as the medium by which the administration sent a clear message to both Israel and the Arab states. As far as Washington is concerned, the boat has sailed on stopping Iran from going nuclear. A “senior American official”—journalistic code for a cabinet-level source—also made it known that the administration doesn’t want Israel to do anything that might interfere with the diplomatic plans of the United States or the nuclear schemes of Iran.
The upshot of the piece was that everyone would be better off if Israel stopped both its highly successful efforts at sabotaging Tehran’s program and threatening to take major military action if they feel the Islamist regime is getting close to a bomb with or without American help.
According to the highly placed source, Israel has been wasting its time trying to hobble the Iranians’ efforts to develop the capacity to make good on their genocidal threats about eliminating the Jewish state. The official said Iran hadn’t really been hindered by the series of successful Israeli operations inside the country, including the assassination of its top nuclear scientist and explosions at four facilities where its centrifuges operated. The Biden official said that Iran has quickly recovered from these setbacks calling it Tehran’s “Build Back Better” plan—a play on the title given to the president’s massive domestic spending bill.
That effort to disabuse its allies of any confidence in the longstanding American commitment to preventing Iran from gaining a nuclear weapon—and one that has even repeatedly been restated by the president and many of his functionaries—was also interestingly timed to coincide with visits to the Gulf states by both Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Robert Malley, the administration’s special envoy for Iran. In theory, Austin’s job was to convince Arab nations that are both deathly afraid of Iran and committed to normalization with Israel, that the United States was, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, not abandoning them to face the Iranians on their own.
Any headway that Austin may have made with the Arab states was almost immediately undermined by a statement from Malley, an inveterate appeaser of terrorist regimes throughout a long career serving three Democratic presidents. At a conference organized by a think tank in the United Arab Emirates last week, Malley told the audience that he believes that the main in the region isn’t the fact that the world’s largest state sponsor of terror has—through the weak diplomacy of the West and its blatant cheating on Obama’s nuclear deal—gotten closer to the nuclear threshold. On the contrary, Malley thinks the problem is “most of the region’s disfunctionings have root in Iran’s exclusion” from the world community as a result of sanctions aimed at stopping the nuclear threat.
These are two themes that are clearly music to the ears of the theocratic tyrants that run Iran.
Much like Obama’s attitude during the negotiations with Iran from 2013 to 2015, the idea that the West has no chance of halting the nuclear threat through covert actions or the use of military force is self-defeating. It’s true that Iran has built back after suffering setbacks; however, think about how much closer it would be to a bomb if the Israelis hadn’t been playing havoc with Tehran’s facilities and putting the fear of God into scientists working on programs designed to facilitate the mass murder of Israeli Jews.
The point about Israel’s efforts harassing the Iranians is that they’ve effectively tied the regime up in knots searching for a network set up by the Jewish state inside the country that has resulted in some epic intelligence coups and overt operations. While Biden officials may downplay the effectiveness of this campaign, the Iranians have no idea where or when the Israelis will strike next or how it will happen, and that means the regime cannot protect its assets or its prized nuclear equipment and uranium stockpiles.
While Iran is too big and its nuclear program too spread out in several highly defensible locations to easily destroy it, what the Israelis have done is to make it plain that no one person or facility in that country is safe from the long reach of Israeli intelligence operatives.
At one point, Israeli and American intelligence agencies were working in tandem against Iran but the message we’re getting now is that Biden wants Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett to declare a ceasefire towards Iran. That’s the complete opposite of the message Israel’s military and intelligence establishment has been telling the world lately. The Israeli Defense Forces have been going out of their way to send a different message to Iran. An example was its very public talk of 2022 being the year that the Israeli Air Force is making dealing with Iran its top priority.
For all of Biden administration officials’ talk of Iran being able to “build back better,” Tehran knows that Israel’s ability to strike them at will in unconventional ways should not be underestimated. Yet, as I’ve previously noted, their confidence in the administration’s complete disinterest in seeking a “plan B” to stop their nuclear quest if diplomacy fails is apparent. And with the Biden team’s latest article planted in the Times indicating that the president’s national security team has lost hope of persuading the Iranians to re-enter a nuclear deal that would have given them a legal path to a bomb inside of eight years, Tehran knows it holds all the cards in the upcoming talks with the West in Vienna.
But despite Washington’s efforts to tame both the Israelis and their new Arab allies, Biden shouldn’t think that even an Israeli government that would love to stay on good terms with him like the one led by Bennett is so weak that it would acquiesce to an existential threat like that of a nuclear Iran.
The outcome of this standoff lies in the contradiction between America’s pre-emptive surrender to Iran and its inability to stop Israel from defending itself despite the very real challenges involved in any undertaking on the part of the Jewish state to take out Tehran’s nuclear program. The ayatollahs should take great comfort in the articles being churned out by the Times that are aimed at assuring them that Biden doesn’t mean business when it comes to stopping their nuclear ambition. They also need to pay closer attention to what the Israelis are saying and understand that the chances that the Jewish state can be prevented from defending itself by American pressure are not greater than zero.
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As has already been pointed out Biden's use of The SPOR is both slick and sick. U.S oil consumption is around 17 million bbls/day. Biden bought some time for over the Thanksgiving Holiday. He remains a cynical fraud.
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Strategic Political Oil Reserve
Biden taps the U.S. emergency supply but prices still rise.
By The Editorial Board
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