Iran

Iranian soccer official coming to Canada attended party with man sought by FBI over kidnap plot

The head of the Iranian national soccer team coming to Vancouver next month for a controversial exhibition game recently attended a party with a man wanted by the FBI in relation to a plot to kidnap international targets, including three people in Canada.

The April 8 birthday party in Tehran was captured on camera and photographs were posted online. At the time, a warrant had been out for the arrest of the alleged Iranian intelligence informant for almost a year.

Team manager Hamid Estili appears in the photos with Mahmoud Khazein. Khazein is facing criminal charges in the U.S. which include conspiracy to kidnap, conspiracy to commit bank and wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

Why is he coming to Canada? Why won’t Trudeau simply bar entry to the Iranian team?

Political football: How the Iranian government intervenes in sports

… The motives of the IRGC are not purely financial. The Guards see sports as a form of social control to be exploited in pursuit of domestic policy objectives. The country’s two most popular sports, wrestling and football, attract a young male demographic, often from poor socio-economic backgrounds, that needs to be managed and directed. Furthermore, sports have a symbolic value, as policies applied to the athletic domain project ideals for society at large. Gender discrimination, for example, is reinforced through the ban against women attending football stadiums and limiting women sports.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Islamophobia", Canada, Iran

Was an American narco-terror operation against Hezbollah halted to advance the Iran nuclear deal?

Israeli filmmaker Duki Dror’s new documentary, “The Cassandra Prophecy,” retells the story of “Project Cassandra,” an eight-year operation led by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency with the assistance of the Israeli Mossad, targeting a six-continent drug-trafficking and money-laundering enterprise that financed Hezbollah’s terrorist activities in Israel, the United States and elsewhere. American agents, with the help of Israeli intelligence, conducted drug raids, confiscated billions of dollars, arrested senior Hezbollah officials and severely damaged the terror organization’s pipeline of laundered cases. It was a successful model for economic warfare repeated elsewhere to this day. Then, it all just stopped.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inHezbollah, Iran, USA

Iran Trying to Force the US to Meet All Its Demands

As the European Union is trying to revive the stalled talks on restoring Iran’s nuclear deal with world powers, many Arabs are again warning the Biden administration against rushing to strike a deal with the mullahs, saying this could jeopardize Washington’s relations with its Arab allies in the Middle East.

The Arabs are saying that they cannot understand why Biden is prepared to allow Iran’s mullahs to “humiliate” the US by setting their own conditions for restoring the nuclear agreement, including the demand to remove the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) from the list of terrorist organizations.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inIran

Will Trudeau cancel soccer match with Iran scheduled for Vancouver?

Trudeau says inviting Iran to Vancouver soccer friendly is not ‘a very good idea’

ST. JOHN’S, N.L. – Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says a soccer friendly between Canada and Iran next month in Vancouver is ill-advised.

“This was a choice by Soccer Canada,” Trudeau said Tuesday in St. John’s, when asked about the match. “I think it wasn’t a very good idea to invite the Iranian soccer team here to Canada. But that’s something that the organizers are going to have to explain.”

Whole lotta of stupid goin on.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCanada, Iran, WTF?

Biden’s Unwise Attempts to Save the Iran Deal

The utter futility of the Biden administration’s obsession with reviving the Iran nuclear deal has been laid bare by the latest damning assessment by the head of the UN’s nuclear watchdog.

US President Joe Biden has indicated to Tehran that he is willing to rejoin the deal so long as Iran agrees to fall back into compliance with the terms of the original Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) negotiated by the former Obama administration in 2015.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inIran, USA

Stephen Harper: Why it’s time to stop negotiating with Iran

In the shadow of Russia’s appalling war against its peaceful neighbour, misguided efforts to revive the U.S.-Iran nuclear deal have continued. The dangerous naiveté among Western leaders that left Ukraine outside NATO also underlies efforts to make deals with Tehran. We should hope that negotiators do not return to Vienna and that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) process with Iran is abandoned for good.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCanada, Iran

Iran Mullahs Escalate Threats Against Jews, Biden Administration Appeases Mullahs Even More

When it to comes to the Iranian regime, all the Biden administration seems to care about is appeasing the ruling mullahs, reaching a weak nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic, and enhancing the global legitimacy of a country that the US itself called “the world’s worst state sponsor of terrorism.”

These US rewards to Iran for terrorism, destabilizing the region, treating its own people with brutality and cheating on 2015 nuclear deal would significantly increase Iran’s revenues; these, in turn, will doubtless be funneled into the pockets of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the Quds Force and their militia and terror groups including Hamas, the Houthis and Hezbollah for still more expansionism and terror.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inIran

Giving Carrots to Iran Will Not Alter Its Brutal, Expansionist Plan

The Biden administration and the European Union might do well to understand that revolutionary and authoritarian regimes such as the Islamic Republic — as we are seeing now with Vladimir Putin’s Russian invasion if Ukraine — do not alter their malign policies through appeasement and concessions. If anything –as there are no negative consequences for unneighborly behavior, and sometimes there are even rewards — they regard appeasement and concessions as green lights and double down, go twice as bad.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inIran

Don’t Make Concessions on Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps

The debate over whether to delist Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO) has evolved. President Joe Biden appears to have ruled out an unconditional delisting of the IRGC in whole. The deliberations now are over whether Washington and Tehran will be prepared for a middle ground solution, that involves retaining the IRGC’s extraterritorial arm, the Quds Force, while removing the rest of the IRGC’s units from the FTO list in exchange for undefined concessions. But this kind of arrangement would invent an artificial distinction in the IRGC that does not exist.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Islamophobia", Iran, Islam, Islam and violence

Why Is the Biden Administration Determined to Help Terrorist Iran Get a Bomb?

Why would any administration in its right mind permit an official state sponsor of terrorism, the Islamic Republic of Iran, to have nuclear weapons, as well as billions of dollars that will assuredly not be used for a “GI Bill for returning members of the Revolutionary Guard”?

Just this week, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan called Iran, a “sponsor of terrorism.”

Don’t bother asking Joe.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inIran, USA

Tackling the Iranian Regime’s Nuclear Threat

If we closely examine the Iranian regime’s nuclear file, it reveals that no deal will stop the ruling mullahs of Iran from pursuing their nuclear ambitions.

A few years after the 1979 revolution, the Islamic Republic appeared to make the advancement of a nuclear program a top item on its agenda after consolidating power in 1984. In the decade after, the Islamic Republic began its nuclear program with the help of some intermediaries such as Russia, China and Pakistan.

At the time, the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, Gholamreza Aghazadeh, acknowledged that Pakistan assisted Tehran. He pointed out “I do have information that some years ago, through intermediaries, we received pieces for centrifuges”. According to the United States intelligence, A.Q. Khan, who was known as “the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb”, sold expertise and equipment to North Korea, Libya and Iran, and made more than $50 million.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inIran

Iranian ‘Ghost Armada’ Ferries $22 Billion Worth of Illicit Oil to China

Iran’s fleet of “ghost ships” has ferried at least $22 billion worth of illicit oil to China since 2021, providing the hardline regime with a major source of revenue and raising questions about the Biden administration’s lax enforcement of sanctions.

In the first three months of 2022 alone, Iran shipped an average of 829,260 barrels of oil per day to China, according to new figures published by United Against a Nuclear Iran (UANI), an advocacy group that closely tracks Tehran’s fleet of illegal tankers. A total of 337,882,520 illegal barrels—worth approximately $22 billion—have made their way to Beijing since President Joe Biden took office.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"China - Communist Slave State", Iran

How Iran Built Hezbollah Into a Top Cyber Power

Since the Stuxnet attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, Tehran has focused on expanding its cyber operations and digital surveillance capabilities. Iran sees its ally, Hezbollah, as a key part of its enhanced cyber program. The Iranian government has provided cyber training and technology to Hezbollah operatives and recently helped the Lebanese-based Shia terrorist group build its own counterintelligence cyber unit. This is a new development: in 2018, a Carnegie Endowment for Peace report noted how “there has been little prior evidence of direct sharing of [cyber] tools” between Iran and Hezbollah. After the collapse of the Islamic State caliphate, Hezbollah has taken on the mantle of being the most sophisticated and influential Middle Eastern terrorist organization in cyberspace.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCyber Jihad, Hezbollah, Iran

Russia ‘using weapons smuggled by Iran from Iraq against Ukraine’

Russia is receiving munitions and military hardware sourced from Iraq for its war effort in Ukraine with the help of Iranian weapons smuggling networks, according to members of Iranian-backed Iraqi militias and regional intelligence services with knowledge of the process.

RPGs and anti-tank missiles, as well as Brazilian-designed rocket launcher systems, have been dispatched to Russia from Iraq as Moscow’s campaign has faltered in the last month, the Guardian has learned.

An Iranian-made Bavar 373 missile system, similar to the Russian S-300, has also been donated to Moscow by the authorities in Tehran, who also returned an S-300, according to a source who helped organise the transport.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Ukraine - Russia", Iran, WTF?