Imprisoned Iranian human rights activist Narges Mohammadi has won the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize.
Announcing the decision, the Norwegian Nobel Committee said Ms Mohammadi, 51, was honoured for her fight against the oppression of women in Iran.
Her struggle has come at a “tremendous personal cost”, committee chairwoman Berit Reiss-Andersen said.
Ms Mohammadi is currently serving a 10-year jail term in Iran’s notorious Evin prison in the capital, Tehran.
The evidence that Iranian officials ran an influence operation that penetrated the State and Defense departments is damning. Not only did Iranian American academics and think tankers meet with Iranian officials, but leaked emails suggest they also took direction from them. Not only financial gain motivates espionage; ideological solidarity motivated some of the most damaging spies in American history.
While the Biden administration seeks to downplay the scandal, more than 30 senators now demand the Pentagon suspend and review the security clearance of Ariane Tabatabai, one of the members of the so-called Iran Experts Initiative, now in a sensitive Pentagon position.
You can’t help but wonder how complicit Ottawa is in this.
Well, this explains a lot.
The Obama and now Biden Iran policies have never made much sense to me.
Iran is the avowed enemy of our allies and partners in the Middle East region, but for some reason, the Obama and Biden Administrations have spent enormous efforts appeasing Iran at the same time that they have been increasingly hostile to countries that have allied themselves with us.
A 16-year-old Iranian schoolgirl has been hospitalized and left in a coma after falling unconscious on Tehran’s underground days ago.
Kurdish-focused rights group Hengaw said on Tuesday that Armita Garawand was assaulted by female officers from the country’s morality police after refusing to wear the Islamic headscarf.
This infiltration includes academic and scientific centers, commercial and financial institutions, religious and Islamic organizations, think tanks, and even media outlets associated with the U.S. government.
In the intricate world of global politics and security, the yearning for insights, foresight, and preparedness stands as an imperative pillar. The U.S. Intelligence Community, during the Biden Presidency in 2021, 2022, and 2023, undeniably predicted the looming influence and intelligence threat posed by Iran. The professionals meticulously and continually warned the White House and the esteemed intelligence committees of the House and Senate, reflecting a proactive approach toward national security.
The Iranian regime has lately been collecting hostages: Topher Richwhite and Bridget Thackwray from New Zealand, detained in July 2022, Johan Floderus, a European diplomat from Sweden detained in April 2022, and Bernard Phelan from France detained in October 2022.
This escalation in hostage-taking of Europeans by Iran’s regime should not come as a surprise: the Belgian government last year proposed and ratified legislation that paved the way to transfer terrorists who have been convicted abroad back to Iran. The so-called treaty between the Belgian government and the Iranian regime was designed to secure the release of Iranian diplomat-terrorist Assadollah Assadi.
Jay Solomon over at Semafor is out with a piece that details how the Iranian Foreign Ministry worked closely with a bunch of American and European academics to help sell the Iran nuclear deal back in 2014 by repeating Tehran’s lines. Members of the group, dubbed the Iran Experts Initiative, were frequent sources for media outlets before and after the deal was signed in 2015.
Not only is the Biden administration turning a blind eye on the growing alliance between Iran, Russia, China and North Korea, and looking the other way on their evasions of sanctions, it is also financing the ruling mullahs of Iran with billions of dollars to put the finishing touches on the country’s nuclear program and for delivering more weapons to Russia with which to attack Ukraine.
Iran’s parliament has passed controversial bill that would increase prison terms and fines for women and girls who break its strict dress code.
Those dressed “inappropriately” face up to 10 years in jail under the bill, for which a three-year “trial” was agreed.
It still needs to be approved by the Guardian Council to become law.
The move comes a year after protests erupted over the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, who was held by morality police for an allegedly improper hijab.
Five Americans jailed for years in Iran and widely regarded as hostages are on their way home to the United States.
The last pieces in a controversial swap mediated by Qatar fell into place when $6bn (£4.8bn) of Iranian funds held in South Korea reached banks in Doha.
It triggered the next step – to allow the four American men and one woman in Tehran, who are also Iranian citizens, to board a flight to Qatar’s capital.
They will be met by senior US officials and then flown to Washington.
Last year, Mahsa Jina Amini, a 22-year-old woman from the town of Saqqez in northwestern Iran, came to visit family in Tehran—a stranger in a strange land.
On September 13, she was exiting a subway station with her brother when she was stopped by the morality police for wearing an “inappropriate hijab.” It’s unclear what she was actually wearing that day—her mother says it was a “long, loose robe”—but she was locked up and beaten for this so-called crime.
Three days later, on September 16, Mahsa Amini was dead.
There seems to be nothing that the Biden administration will not do to appease the ruling mullahs of Iran and their regime, called only a few years ago by the US Department of State the “top state sponsor of terrorism.” Since the Biden administration assumed office, the more it has been appeasing the Iranian regime financially and politically, the more the mullahs, instead of taking reciprocal steps, have become empowered and emboldened. Iran is now holding uranium enrichment at 60% purity, around 10 days away from raising it to the nuclear threshold level of 90%.
In short, the US, instead of stopping Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, is bribing the mullahs not to go to 90% enrichment, at least on the Biden administration’s watch, especially ahead of the November 2024 US presidential election.
A young woman walks down a street in Tehran, her hair uncovered, her jeans ripped, a bit of midriff exposed to the hot Iranian sun. An unmarried couple walk hand in hand. A woman holds her head high when asked by Iran’s once-feared morality police to put a hijab on, and tells them: “Screw you!”
These acts of bold rebellion – described to me by several people in Tehran over the past month – would have been almost unthinkable to Iranians this time last year. But that was before the death in the morality police’s custody of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who had been accused of not wearing her hijab [veil] properly.
Five American citizens being held hostage by Iran will be released in return for the unfreezing of $6 billion held in South Korean banks, the U.S. government announced on Monday – enraging Biden administration critics, particular as the timing coincided with the anniversary of 9/11.
The five U.S. hostages – businessmen Siamak Namazi, 51, and Emad Shargi, 58; environmentalist Morad Tahbaz, 67; and two anonymous individuals – will be freed once the money has been transferred from South Korea to an intermediary, Qatar, and then on to Iran.
Five Iranian citizens held in the U.S. will also be released.
The Biden administration has been accused of secretly bypassing US laws to reach a deal with Iran’s Islamist regime.
On August 10, the Biden administration apparently cut a “deal” excluding Congress and keeping the American people and U.S. regional allies in the dark — even though they are the ones who would be the most directly affected by a “deal.”
The Biden administration, determined, it seems, to continue appeasing the Iranian regime — called by the US State Department the leading state sponsor of terrorism — keeps indefatigably trying to revive then President Barack Obama’s 2015 “nuclear deal,” enabling Iran’s mullahs legitimately to have as many nuclear weapons as they like.
