Iran

A businessman granted asylum in Britain is at the centre of a billion-dollar oil smuggling operation that is helping to finance Iran’s overseas terrorism and domestic repression, according to US officials.

Salim Ahmed Said has been accused by the Trump administration of running a network of companies illicitly trading in Iranian oil by passing it off as a product of neighbouring Iraq.

Profits from the sophisticated smuggling operation are alleged to have been sent to Iran in trucks full of cash, which is used to bankroll the activities of an elite wing of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

Humiliated by the devastation wrought by tiny Israel on Iran during their twelve-day war in June, Iranians have sought other explanations for Israel’s victory. They have found the real explanation for Israel’s victory: it had working for it mysterious non-humans who appear in the Qur’an, and are known as the jinn.

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.

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.

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.

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”).