Free Republic

In life you don’t get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate—or so we’ve read in airline magazines. But if you’re an Iranian mullah and you’re dealing with the Obama Administration, you can get more than you negotiated, and what you never deserved. That’s the lesson we draw from the Obama Administration’s pending decision to give Iranian banks access to U.S. dollars, probably through offshore clearing houses, despite being under no obligation to do so under last year’s nuclear deal. As Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew told the Senate last year, “Iranian banks will not be able to clear U.S....

Iran's new leaders built their state on foundations of violence and corruption, making millions of us refugees Nazenin Ansari / 14 January 2009 Life for me as I had come to understand it ended on 15 November 1977. Standing next to a group of young elementary school children from one of Washington DC's inner-city schools on the Ellipse facing the South Lawn of the White House, I was one of a thousand greeting the visit of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi and his Queen to the United States. The children were waving the US flag and I, a university student, the...

TEHRAN, Iran Ayatollah Ali Meshkini, a founding member of Iran's Islamic regime and leader of an important government assembly, died Monday. He was 85. Meshkini died in a Tehran hospital where he had been receiving treatment since early July, his doctor, Jaffar Aslani, told the official Islamic Republic News Agency. State television said he died of a lung infection. The ayatollah, or top-ranking Shiite Muslim cleric, was the head of the Assembly of Experts. The 86-member government body can in theory reprimand or even dismiss Iran's supreme leader, a position currently held by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In a condolence message...

KUALA LUMPUR -- Iranian leader Mohammad Khatami issued an extraordinary assessment of U.S. foreign policy Monday, accusing the United States of positioning itself as a violent "big brother" driven by "fanatic fundamentalism." The stinging appraisal, delivered at the 116-nation Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) Summit here, followed earlier condemnations of the United States by conference host Mahathir Mohamad, the Malaysian prime minister. "It is unfortunate that the other superpower ... allows itself, self-righteously, to hector others from a position of the 'big brother' -- worse still as the self-appointed 'master of the world'," Khatami said in an address to the NAM assembly....