Free Republic

Leaked spy cables reveal how Iran came to dominate the political and military spheres in Iraq. Here’s what the hundreds of documents tell us. -excerpt- The leak exposed Iran’s vast influence in Iraq, detailing the painstaking efforts of Iranian spies to co-opt Iraqi leaders and infiltrate every aspect of political life. The trove consists of roughly 700 pages of reports and cables written mainly in 2014 and 2015 by officers in Iran’s version of the C.I.A. who were based in Iraq. -excerpt- Many of the files show that as senior American diplomats met behind closed doors with their Iraqi counterparts...

Americans may have been spared having her as president, but Hillary Clinton still remains a powerful force for progressive globalism behind the scenes. We are going to examine here three global feminist organizations founded by Hillary and track how their tentacles extend to major brand corporations and even a leading Republican establishment organization. Once again, powerful elites who supposedly represent a wide array of business and political perspectives are remarkably walking in rigid lockstep to promote new world order values. Vital Voices Global Partnership touts itself as a “leader in the women’s empowerment space for 20 years.” The first name...

For the first time in 25 years, the International Republican Institute will have a new leader. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who is battling brain cancer, has decided to step down from his role as chairman of the board of the organization, which for decades he has helped to fight for democracy, freedom, civil society, the rule of law and human rights around the world. McCain’s handoff to IRI’s next chairman, Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska), is not a signal that McCain’s health is declining. In fact, several McCain associates say his condition hasn’t changed in recent months and he remains actively...

Anti-government protests have erupted in cities across Iran, including the capital, Tehran, with reports of arrests as riot police were deployed to disperse the demonstrations. BBC Persian reported that protests, which decried deteriorating economic conditions and corruption in the Islamic Republic, also were held in the cities of Isfahan, Kermanshah, Rasht, Qom, Sari and Hamedan. In Kermanshah, where the largest demonstrations took place on the second day, protesters shouted slogans against Iranian leader Ayatollah Khamenei, and in other cities they shouted “death to the dictator” and called for an end to ongoing Iranian involvement in regional conflicts in Iraq and...

The Mullahs Humiliate America -- Again and Again Obama's appeasement bears its catastrophic fruit. January 14, 2016 Joseph Klein On January 12th, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard seized two U.S. naval patrol boats with ten sailors aboard. The vessels had evidently strayed a little over a mile into Iranian territorial waters. Iran released the sailors a day later, but not before trying to reap as much propaganda value from the incident as possible. The semiofficial Fars news agency claimed "the American ships were 'snooping' around in Iranian waters." The captors photographed the sailors after they were evidently forced to their...

Siamak Namazi, an Iranian-American citizen who helped establish a pro-Tehran lobbying group in America, has been arrested in Iran and imprisoned indefinitely. -excerpt- Namazi has been described as one of the “intellectual architects” of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), a Washington, D.C.-based lobbying group that has been accused of working in support of the regime in Tehran. He and NIAC Director Trita Parsi founded the organization as a way to continuously lobby for the removal of sanctions against Iran and to promote Iran’s foreign policy, while combating the pro-Israel sentiment in America, according to documents from a Cyprus convention...

Since the interim deal was announced in April, the government in Tehran has proven to the world what its people were trying to convey in 2009: they cannot be trusted. Six years ago today, round-the-clock coverage of Iran’s Green Revolution suffered a fate all too common in today’s media world – it came to a complete halt, in this case upon breaking news that Michael Jackson had died. Up until those moments, the people of Iran, taking it upon themselves to become brave citizen journalists in a censored and suffocated political environment, posted updates and vivid videos on social media...

Claim White House ignoring human rights, working with murderous regime A group of Iranian dissidents and political prisoners have lashed out at the Obama administration, lambasting its ongoing diplomacy with Iran, according to two open letters sent to the White House in recent days. In each letter, the dissidents—most of whom are currently political prisoners in Iran—criticize the White House for ignoring the issues of human rights and democracy in Iran as they push to finalize a deal with a regime that the dissidents says is murderous and untrustworthy. Iranian reformers and those seeking a change in the country’s leadership...

Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has cancer. After him are men even less likely to comply with a nuclear deal. ********************** Negotiators from Iran and the P5+1 powers led by the U.S. are racing against a March 31 deadline to conclude a nuclear deal in Lausanne, Switzerland. Secretary of State John Kerry told reporters on Saturday that negotiators had made “genuine progress” but that “important gaps remain.” Yet what happens if the Iranian leadership that the U.S. and others are dealing with now is not in place to implement any agreement? Two recent developments suggest that the Islamic Republic may be...

Iraq’s Grand Mufti accuses IRGC, Iraqi government, Shiite militias of genocide and rape of Sunnis they 'liberated' from ISIS In an explosive TV interview aired last week, Iraq’s Grand Mufti Rafi Al-Rifa’i, the highest Sunni authority in the country, accused the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the Iraqi government, and Iraqi Shiite militias of mass genocidal killings and rape of Sunni men and women from Iraqi towns and villages “liberated” from ISIS (Islamic State). Mufti Al-Rifa’i posed the unanswerable question, “Why should we fight ISIS? So the Iranian IRGC can take over? The same Iranian IRGC that is running operations...

“Chastity patrols”, created by an Iranian paramilitary group, are patrolling the streets of Iran to force women to go “well covered” in public. At the beginning of summer, trendy Iranian women started wearing lighter clothes, more transparent veils to cover their hair and slightly shortened sleeves that still end below the elbow. That tendency prompted the more conservative sectors to demand imposition of “good hijab” in accordance with a much stricter interpretation of the Islamic dress code. But the Ansar-e-Hezbollah group has gone further and organised street patrols in Tehran “to control morality in women”, especially young women, who are...

-excerpt- On September 9, as reported by the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran (ICHRI), seven young Iranians went on trial. Their supposed crime? Producing a dance video of the Pharrell Williams’s pop hit “Happy” and uploading it to YouTube. You might think Iran’s rulers would be pleased at expressions of felicity by their citizens. In Tehran, however, cheerful enthusiasm outside a narrow religious context is illegal. -excerpt- ...(they) were detained on May 19 of this year and held for two days at the Vozara Complex of the Tehran Morality Police, until they posted bail of $10,000-$16,600 each. "While...

Abulghasem Salavati, who heads Branch 15 of the Revolutionary Court in Tehran, is known as one of Iran’s “hanging judges.” ...an Iranian opposition advocate now living in Norway, described Salavati ordering half a dozen death sentences against protestors in the reformist “Green movement” of 2009. More than 100 participants in the “Green movement” were charged in a mass show trial held in Tehran that year, over which Salavati presided. ... Mohammad Moghiseh, has meanwhile sentenced eight Iranian Facebook users—six men and two women—to a total of 127 years in prison. ... such verdicts “go beyond what Iran’s own laws dictate.”...

IRGC and the spiritual vacuum of Latin American leftists The following is a glimpse of the kind of thing I often see while researching the activities of the IRGC (writ large) in Latin America. Communism fails to provide for the spiritual needs of leftwing political activists, and the Islamic Republic of Iran seems to have done a pretty good job of inserting themselves and the Khomeinist version of Shiism into that void. (Either that or the IRI is throwing lots of money around and the leftists are whores, which is certainly possible, but for the moment I'll take the more...

Though the Obama administration believes that they have scored a victory by reaching out to the radical Iranian government of Hassan Rouhani, along with the famous phone call between Obama and Rouhani on mending economic, diplomatic, and political ties with the West, the actual facts on the ground and the nuances of the situation in Iran have revealed a different picture. Despite Obama’s efforts to reach out to the new president of Iran, and despite the current hope in mending political, economic, and diplomatic ties between the United States and Iran, as soon as President Hassan Rouhani reached Tehran, Islamic...

Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird and the Honourable Jason Kenney, Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism, today issued the following statement: “We wish to extend Canada’s deepest sympathies and condolences to the families of the thousands of innocents who have fallen victim to the Iranian regime, from the first days of the Islamic Revolution to the present. Canada grieves alongside all those whose loved ones suffered on the orders of Iran’s past and present rulers. “Canada has not forgotten that the roots of today’s appalling situation extend back to the origins of this hollow regime. The persecution of dissident voices...

This, of course, was a much more sophisticated theory than you’d get from lunatics like Michele Bachmann. Sit down for this, because I know it’s hard to believe anyone could spout such nutter stuff, but Bachmann actually opposed U.S. intervention in Libya. She claimed — stop cackling! — that many of McCain’s heroes might actually be jihadists ideologically hostile to the U.S. and linked to groups such as al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), the terror enterprise’s North African franchise. She even thought — yeah, I know, crazy — that if Qaddafi were deposed, the heroes would get their hands...

"IRI recruitment and support activities in Latin America - the Uruguay connection" SNIPPET: "You can add Uruguay to the countries in Latin America where the Islamic Republic of Iran is well-represented by indigenous supporters. What brings these folks to my attention in the first place is their support for Suhail Assad, the IRI's point man in Latin America, and their connection to the IRI's recruiter in Peru, Edwar "Hussein" Quiroga Vargas. I'll get back to that, but first, the websites."

SNIPPET: "Social media is no longer simply a fun way to share updates on the harmless idiosyncrasies of our lives. It can undermine national security, and there ought to be a more robust discussion between the Bay Area technology world and Washington on what to do about it. Cyber-terrorism, especially the potential for electronic tampering with U.S. industrial or military installations, is a paramount national security threat that Washington is working to forestall. We're all working to protect our accounts from hackers. But the cyber-threat getting far less public attention involves the social media networks we use every day and the...

  "German Islamists Target Youth on the Internet" By Christoph Sydow 11/01/2012 "Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan." PHOTO CAPTION: "A growing community of German-speaking Islamists has developed on the Internet. Aiming to find new recruits, they glorify jihad and call for attacks on Germany. A new study warns that such online propaganda might foster a new generation of terrorists." SNIPPET: "International terrorist groups like al-Qaida recognized the importance of the Internet for recruiting new supporters early on." SNIPPET: "Intelligence services can also take advantage of the anonymity of Internet forums to deliberately plant false information or obtain insider...