Category: International

BOOM: White House Blows Up as Israel Hits Iran

There’s an old joke about how the New York Times would announce the end of the world. “World to End Tomorrow; Women and Minorities Affected Most.” I’m here to tell you today that the real victims of Israel’s Thursday night airstrikes on Iran are in the Biden White House — and just two miles away in Washington’s exclusive Kalorama neighborhood.
I’ll get to that last part in a moment.

PJ Media’s own Paula Bolyard stayed up late last night to give you the up-to-the-minute coverage but, now that the dust has had a little while to settle, I’ve taken the zero-dark-thirty shift (Mountain Time) to serve up a little perspective with your morning coffee.

Please notice that Iran launched an unprecedentedly large drone and missile strike on Israel Saturday but everything they had either malfunctioned or was shot down. Israel seems to have hit Iran with impunity and, according to my friend and colleague Jennifer van Laar’s source, Israeli Air Force (IAF) warplanes simply did not show up on Iranian or Russian radar. Ponder for just a moment what that might have meant in the Russo-Ukraine War, had the West gotten serious from the start about arming Ukraine.

But I digress.

This one is a real stumper for the Biden administration. While there are no indications yet that the IAF hit any sites related to Iran’s mostly peaceful nuclear weapons program, it’s safe to say that the Obama-Biden Iran nuclear deal got “blowed up real good” last night.

Jen’s source also claims that the strike was “expected to be hypertargeted to eliminate IRN nuclear program and kill key personnel, eliminate known and suspected launch facilities” but nobody has admitted that’s what actually happened. “Iranian state press has reported that Tehran’s atomic facilities were left unharmed,” for whatever that’s worth.

Taking their cue from Barack Obama’s disastrous Middle East foreign policy, the White House has spent the last three years giving Tehran almost anything they wanted — relaxed sanctions, pallets of cash, treating Hamas with kid gloves, etc. — in exchange for pretending to do a somewhat better job of hiding their nuclear weapons program.

Whether or not Israel struck Iran’s nuclear sites, the IAF has proven that they can hit anything in Iran and there isn’t a damn thing Tehran can do to stop them. I’m not saying that Iran can’t strike back, because they surely will. Although I suspect that, after last night, Tehran might go back to using their proxies in Syria, Gaza, Yemen, etc instead of attacking Israel directly again. Whatever the case, the point remains that Iran’s air defenses cannot stop, hinder, or even see Israeli warplanes.

Biden’s Middle East foreign policy is in tatters, blown up along with whatever else Israel hit last night. Barack Obama, the architect of Biden’s Iran deals (and so much else), has failed this country — and the world — yet again, seven years after leaving office. The Arab-Israeli peace that Donald Trump’s team of SecState Mike Pompeo and Jared Kushner had worked so hard to create was tossed aside by Biden-Obama in 2021 in favor of making Iran the dominant regional power.

Now there’s no peace anywhere to be found. This is the inevitable result of making one of the world’s worst actors the cornerstone of your regional peace efforts.

Or maybe war was what they wanted all along.

‘You got a win. Take the win’: Joe Biden tells Netanyahu

Joe Biden reportedly warned Benjamin Netanyahu that the US will not participate in any Israeli counter-attacks against Iran.

The US president and his senior advisers are highly concerned that an Israeli response to Iran’s attack would lead to a regional war with catastrophic consequences, US officials told Axios.

On Saturday evening, Iran launched its first-ever direct attack on Israel, involving more than 300 drones and missiles. The attack came in retaliation to an airstrike in Syria on April 1 that killed seven of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – Israel has neither confirmed nor denied responsibility.

Mr Biden said the US and Israel had shot down “nearly all” of the drones and missiles launched by Tehran overnight, aided also by Britain, France and Jordan. Israel said 99 per cent were intercepted without hitting their targets and that “very little damage” had been caused.

American forces intercepted 70 drones and at least three ballistic missiles, according to CNN, while Mr Biden also said that US support for Israel was “ironclad”.

“You got a win. Take the win,” Mr Biden reportedly told Mr Netanyahu, adding that the US will not participate in any offensive operations. Mr Netanyahu reportedly said that he understands the US’s position.

Iran has said the attacks “achieved all its objectives” and that it is not planning any further operations. It warned Israel against taking any “reckless” actions, and said it would not hesitate to retaliate with a “much stronger response”.

However, Israel has said the “campaign is not over yet”.

Lloyd Austin, the US secretary of defence, has asked that Israel notify the US ahead of any response against Iran.

World leaders have condemned Iran’s attack, with regional powers Saudi Arabia and Egypt calling for restraint. Leaders from the G7 will hold a video conference later on Sunday to discuss the Iranian strikes and coordinate a united diplomatic response.

THE DEEP MEANING OF “DON’T:”

Would that President Biden had not warned the Iranian regime not to attack Israel with his pitiful “don’t” yesterday. In Bidenspeak, “don’t” is an invitation. It something like the shout-out for contestants to “come on down” on The Price Is Right.

 

Q.E.D.

 

Israeli Air Strike Punches Senior Iranian Revolutionary Guards Commander’s Ticket

On Monday, a senior commander in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps was deleted from the rolls of the living by an Israeli air strike. The strike hit the Iranian consulate in Damascus, Syria, killing Mohammad Reza Zahedi along with (reportedly) several Iranian diplomats.

An Israeli airstrike launched at the Iranian consulate in Damascus, Syria on Monday has killed Mohammad Reza Zahedi, a senior commander in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps, a Lebanese security source has told Reuters.

In 2010, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Zahedi, describing him as playing a key role in Iran’s support of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.

Reuters is reporting that its journalists at the scene in the Syrian capital saw smoke rising from the rubble of a building that was flattened in the airstrike. Israel has not confirmed its involvement.

“We do not comment on reports in the foreign media,” an Israeli military spokesperson told Reuters when asked about the matter.

One has to appreciate the wisdom of Israel not commenting on this at all; in taking out Zahedi, they determined to let a missile do their talking for them, and that would seem to be sufficient to make their point. Zahedi was not in Syria to play tiddlywinks; the Revolutionary Guard Corps commander was known to be a conduit to funnel Iranian weapons to Hezbollah and acted as a liaison between Iran, Hezbollah, and Syria. He was a guy who manifestly deserved to be removed from the game.

The U.S. Treasury said in 2010 that Zahedi “has also acted as a liaison to Hezbollah and Syrian intelligence services and is reportedly charged with guaranteeing weapons shipments to Hezbollah.”

 

This isn’t the first Iranian commander that Israel has un-alived in recent months.

Israel said in February that it killed a senior Hezbollah commander in a strike carried out in Lebanon.

The Israel Defense Forces had announced at the time that an overnight airstrike targeting a “Hezbollah military structure” in Nabatieh killed Ali Muhammad Aldbas, a senior commander of the Radwan forces. His deputy commander, Ibrahim Issa, and an additional terrorist were killed in the attack, according to the IDF.

It’s important to note that then the U.S. Treasury Department “sanctioned” Zahedi all the way back in 2010, it clearly seems to have had little to no effect on his actions. Israel’s sanction, delivered at several times the speed of sound, would appear to have been much more effective. The Israeli military has time and again proven their skill at making bad terrorists into good terrorists, and since the Oct 7th atrocities, they have picked up the pace.

US Embassy Warned Russia of Terrorist Attack and Putin Ignored It

Friday evening, Moscow time, four or five armed men strolled into the Crocus Concert Hall in northwest Moscow and opened fire on the crowd. Before departing the area they had killed at least 40 people and wounded over 100 more.

BACKGROUND: (UPDATED): Terror Attack in Moscow Concert Hall – Multiple Fatalities Reported

My colleague, Ward Clark, has some good observations; the only one I’d add is that at least two of the attackers had trouble managing magazine changes.

While Dmitry Medvedev, deputy head of the Russian Security Council, hinted that Ukraine had been behind the attack and threatened to commit atrocities that the Russians have failed to commit so far should Ukraine be involved, ISIS quickly claimed responsibility.

This is not a huge shock. Russia has a counterinsurgency operation underway in two North Caucasus areas of the Russian Federation: Dagestan and Ingushetia. On March 3, a Russian commando operation (or what the Russians think of as a commando operation) killed six Islamic fighters in Ingushetia.

This insurgency and the fact that Moscow has the largest Muslim population of any European (to the extent that Russia is a European nation) capital nearly preordained a strike in the capital. This would not be the first time. In 2002, Chechens took over the Dubrovka Theater and when the Spetsnaz were finished, 132 hostages were killed and over 700 wounded, in addition to 40 Chechen fighters.

What makes the whole story more interesting is that on March 7, the US Embassy in Moscow issued a public warning that a terrorist attack on a concert venue was imminent.

The US warning was joined by similar warnings from multiple foreign embassies in Russia.

Reacting to that intelligence, the FSB rolled up an ISIS cell in a Moscow suburb.

On March 9, Kazakhstan’s National Security Committee (KNB) confirmed media reports that two Kazakh citizens had been killed by law enforcement in Russia.

Two days earlier, on March 7, the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) said it had stopped an Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP) cell from carrying out a terrorist attack targeting a synagogue.

“On the territory of the Kaluga Region, a stop was put to the activity of Wilayat Khorasan, a cell of the Afghan branch of the international terrorist organization Islamic State, which is banned in Russia, whose members were planning to commit a terrorist act against one of the Jewish religious institutions in Moscow,” the FSB said in a statement to the state-run TASS news agency.

The Russian expat Telegram news channel Meduza points out that US warnings were not welcome.

Telegraph channel Meduza has highlighted that on March 19, Vladimir Putin dismissed alerts from U.S. diplomats regarding a potential terrorist attack on a densely populated venue in Moscow. The Russian leader denounced the American cautionary advice as “blackmail” from the West, aiming to “intimidate and destabilize our society”.

If this is true, it shows that there were persistent reports of an attack on a concert venue that did not end with the destruction of the ISIS cell on March 7 that were ignored by Russian authorities starting at the top. The fact that the concert attacked on Friday had no security, when it clearly met the description of the target in the warnings, shows that the threat was ignored.

Reports: Ongoing Terrorist Shootout at Moscow Concert Hall Leaves at Least 100 Casualties

A terrorist attack on the Crocus City concert hall and mall in Moscow, Russia, on Friday night that has reportedly not concluded at press time has left “over 100 casualties,” the Russian outlet RT reported.

Update 4:08PM ET: The Russian FSB security service announced it had documented at least 40 killed and over 100 injured in the attack.

The fire is so large that the Russian government has deployed a water-discharging helicopter to end it and has prepared two more to fly in, according to RIA Novosti.

Videos on social media shared by Russian news outlets – such as RT, Ria Novosti, Sputnik, and others – show panicked concertgoers attempting to hide under seats and the sound of gunfire. Reports indicated that one of the assailants detonated a grenade, causing the ongoing fire.

 

Amid crime surge, vendors in Bogota turn to hired guns

On the streets of a Bogota neighborhood where a businessman was killed for refusing to pay protection money, retired soldiers sporting weapons and camouflage gear keep a watchful eye on every movement.

Similar “self-defense” groups have sprung up all over Colombia’s capital, a city of some eight million people that has experienced a surge in robberies and killings since the beginning of the year.

As fear has risen in step with crime, residents and business owners are taking matters into their own hands in a country with low levels of trust in the authorities.

“We are taking care of security. There are armed people here, but within the law. We are not illegal, we are military pensioners and the traders are paying us,” one of the sentinels told AFP in Bogota’s 7 de Agosto neighborhood, a bustle of autoparts shops.

Wearing ski masks and military-style boots, the men refused to give their names. Some said they were paid by shop owners — several of whom confirmed to AFP they were relying on hired guns to protect their lives and possessions.

Other patrolling guards claimed they work with the “Gaula” — official law enforcement divisions created in the police and military to combat kidnapping and extortion — a still all-too prevalent crime in Colombia as in other countries with a presence of drug gangs.

But Gaula officials told AFP the non-uniformed sentries have nothing to do with them.

“Civilians have no place” in the fight against extortion, insisted Colonel Cristian Caballero, commander of the Military Gaula in Bogota.

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You say floating dock, I say sitting duck

My expertise in life is rather limited.

In fact, the only things I’m really well versed in are dental care, raising a family, and pouring a beer just so into a frozen mug resulting in a perfect, frothy one-inch head.

That being said, you’ve got to be out of your freakin’ mind to consider building a floating dock into Gaza for the purpose of delivering humanitarian aid.

Of course, our practically petrified puppet in the White House is out of his freakin’ mind as his senile dementia proceeds apace.

But my point is, if you build it — the floating dock, not a practically petrified puppet — a certain number of Americans are going to die.

And they’ll die in the service of a population that hates America and Israel in equal measure, and whose Hamas brethren would like nothing better than to do to U.S. soldiers what they just did to more than a thousand innocent Jews.

Even if we created a temporary military base, complete with an airfield, on the land side of the dock, some Americans would still die (see Kabul Airport, bombing and U.S. Cole, bombing). I mean, they don’t call Hamas ‘terrorists’ for nothing.

But as that well-meaning, elderly man with a bad memory yelled out during his State of the Union harangue, there will be no American boots on the ground!

The poor souls tapped to serve this mission will be the very definition of sitting ducks. And their Navy and Air Force protectors will be, as Sleepy Joe’s puppet master might say, leading from behind. They will get involved only after missiles, RPGs, drones, and God knows what else, rain down death and destruction upon our servicemen and servicewomen.

Can you imagine Hamas dragging American corpses around the Strip for the edification of their Gazan supporters? Or Hamas sending out videos of female American soldiers being gang-raped, tortured, and killed?

I can.

And after this past October 7, most sentient beings — which precludes the dried-up turnip in the White House — also can.

How best to relieve the suffering of the Gazan civilians, I don’t know. But this cockamamie floating dock idea, created simply to assuage Muslim voters in Michigan, is just about the stupidest and most dangerous idea I’ve ever heard.

If implemented, it’s bound to end in U.S. blood and tears. That, sadly, I do know

Joe Biden Slammed for Evacuating ‘Four Embassies’ During Presidency.

Representative Mary Miller, an Illinois Republican, slammed President Joe Biden on Sunday for evacuating “four embassies” since he took office.

Miller specifically referred to the U.S. embassy evacuation in Sudan that happened on Saturday when the Biden administration decided to suspend operations at its embassy amid the ongoing fight between rival Sudanese leaders on the ground.

The ongoing conflict has broken out between two military forces, including one led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the other led by his former deputy, General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, the leader of a paramilitary group called the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The dispute centers around a proposed move to a civilian-led government and how the RSF would integrate into the national army. The RSF wants to delay the integration for 10 years, but the army said it should take place in 2 years.

Sudan has been controlled by generals since both military factions participated in a joint effort to oust President Omar Hassan al-Bashir in 2019.

“Joe Biden has had to evacuate FOUR embassies in less than 3 years. The media said Biden & Blinken were ‘experts’ and ‘the adults are back in charge.’ The world has been on FIRE since their disaster in Afghanistan. Pray for our country & the 16,000 Americans Biden left in Sudan,” Miller wrote on Twitter on Sunday.

In addition to Sudan, the United States has also suspended embassy operations in Afghanistan after withdrawing its troops in August 2021 and in Ukraine when Russia invaded the Eastern European country last February. However, the embassy in Ukraine reopened last May. The U.S. has also suspended operations in Belarus—whose President Alexander Lukashenko is a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin—due to “security and safety issues stemming from the unprovoked and unjustified attack.”

Meanwhile, Undersecretary of State for Management John Bass said on Saturday that temporarily shutting down the embassy in Sudan was “the only really feasible option for us in this case,” according to CNN.

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On Finland’s new ranges, Puukko knives and Sisu

When Soviet Red Army troops poured across the Finnish frontier three months after the outbreak of World War II, Simo Häyhä, a farmer and member of Finland’s Civil Guard, laid down his pitchfork, picked up his M28-30 Mosin Nagant, jammed his Puukko knife in his belt and calmly went out to kill communists.

Häyhä shot more than 540 Red Army troops in just three months — most using iron sights — becoming the most successful sniper in history. Häyhä survived the Winter War, died at the age of 96 and remains one of Finland’s most celebrated national heroes.

Finnish sniper Simo Häyhä is credited with killing more than 540 Soviet troops during the Winter War of 1939-1940.

Today, Finland maintains a tradition of arms seldom seen outside of the United States. There are approximately 1.5 million registered firearms, but it is estimated there are about the same number of unregistered firearms, which were secretly cached after World War II and the Winter War. The Finns cannot afford to be disarmed, which even their government understands. Their country of 5.6 million people shares an 830-mile border with Russia, which has a population of 143 million, so the Finns can never stop preparing to fight the Russian Bear.

Tensions escalated last year after Finland joined NATO. Russian saw this as a threat and vowed to retaliate. The government in Helsinki took this very seriously. Unlike the Biden-Harris administration, which views law-abiding American gun owners as a threat, Finland incorporates armed civilians into its national defense strategy, so they decided to boost civilian firearm training to help counter the latest Russian threat.

According to the Guardian, the Finnish Defense Forces started by building 300 additional shooting ranges to “encourage more citizens to take up the hobby in the interest of national defense.”

“The present government aims to increase the amount of shooting ranges in Finland from roughly 600-700 up to 1,000. This is because of our defense model, which benefits from people having and developing their shooting skills on their own,” Jukka Kopra, a Minister of Parliament who chairs the country’s defense committee told the British newspaper. A government spokesman added that the new construction will include “rifle” and “tactical” ranges.

Takeaways

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UNRWA is the The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. So, another anti-semitic, pro-terrorist UN agency

Israel finds 6 drones amid UNRWA donations that entered West Bank this week
Israeli border inspectors busted the attempted smuggling from Jordan to the West Bank

UNRWA donations that entered into the West Bank from Jordan through the Allenby Bridge earlier this week contained six military drones, i24NEWS’ military correspondent Matthias Inbar has learned from Israeli security sources. The drones have been confiscated by Israeli security forces.

The age of glorifying Greta Thunberg is over
‘We are here in solidarity with those who are resisting this project,’ said Thunberg with her now familiar keffiyeh around her neck

Greta Thunberg spent her weekend in France supporting two environmental campaigns. On Sunday she appeared at a rally in Bordeaux against an oil drilling project; twenty-four hours earlier the twenty-one-year-old Swede was further east, adding her voice to those activists opposed to the construction of a new stretch of motorway between Toulouse and Castres. “We are here in solidarity with those who are resisting this project and this madness,” said Thunberg in English, her now familiar keffiyeh around her neck.

Some French media described Thunberg as an “anti-global warming icon” and the “figurehead in the fight to protect the planet.” She might have been once.

Now, however, in her ubiquitous keffiyeh, appearing to chant “Crush Zionism” or endorsing slogans such as “Palestine will be free” she has become — perhaps unwittingly — the figurehead for what conservative commentators in France call “the green alliance.”

Three years ago Jean Messiha, the spokesman for Éric Zemmour during his 2022 presidential campaign, wrote of this strange coalition between Islamists and ecologists: “They share one color: green. But not only that. They also share a totalitarian approach to society.”

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Mastermind of Mexico Lawsuit Against Gun Makers Admits It’s a Backdoor Route to Gun Control

Gun control activists are thrilled that a federal appeals court has allowed the government of Mexico’s lawsuit against several major U.S. gun makers to proceed, at least for the time being, because they’re hoping that the litigation will lead to the obliteration of the firearms industry.

A new op-ed in Newsweek from Jonathan Lowy, head of Global Action Against Violence, makes that clear. Lowy, who was formerly the general counsel and vice president of Brady’s legal team, is the architect of Mexico’s lawsuit, though you have scroll all the way to the bottom of his op-ed to discover his role in the litigation.

From the outset of his piece, however, Lowy makes his hopes for the lawsuit clear: a way to impose all kinds of new gun control restrictions without a vote in Congress or even unconstitutional executive actions by

Joe Biden.

U.S. gun laws are broken. Even when states muster the political will to enact reasonable restrictions, for example as California did recently, they get blocked in federal court. With federal and state action on guns stymied, the gun violence epidemic can seem hopeless.

But now there’s finally some hope, and it’s coming from outside the United States. A federal appeals court just issued the most significant opinion ever to go against the gun industry, ruling that Mexico has the right to sue manufacturers to hold them accountable for gun trafficking and gun violence.

It’s always amusing to me when anti-gunners like Lowy use the phrase “reasonable restriction”, which implies there’s some gun control law that he would find unreasonable. I’ve been covering Lowy’s anti-2A efforts for two decades now, and I can’t recall him ever concluding that a gun control bill goes too far. Lowy has described the Heller decision as a “radical expansion of prior precedent limiting the Second Amendment to well-regulated militias—that is, today’s National Guard”, and warned ahead of the Bruen decision that striking down “may issue” licensing regimes “would have stark—and deadly—consequences in the real world”; a prediction not borne out by reality.

Lowy’s hope, in other words, isn’t that the courts will decide that gun makers and sellers have to jump through additional hoops before they can lawfully transfer a firearm. He’s aiming for the eradication of the firearms industry, and he’s using Mexico’s unwillingness to confront cartel violence head-on to do it, even as he promises that gun owners wouldn’t feel any impact if the courts ultimately accept his arguments.

Mexico has done what the U.S. failed to do: bring an effective lawsuit that could change the way guns are sold in this country and trafficked to others. It’s part of a promising new movement, led by my organization, Global Action on Gun Violence, to bring international pressure on the U.S. gun industry and policymakers to crack down on the illegal gun market like the rest of the world does. While the U.S. has abundantly demonstrated it can’t or won’t take effective action on guns, international actors, unconstrained by our gun-friendly politics, can and will.

The resulting reforms will not prevent law-abiding people from buying guns, but they will stop the supply of guns to straw buyers, traffickers, and other criminals. The U.S. stands to benefit as much or more than Mexico.

All you have to do is read Mexico’s initial complaint, which Lowy helped to create, to know what a lie that is.

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