Those involved in these foreign-policy drives honestly believe that to be American or Israeli is the existential Gold Standard. Lowly humanity is a pilgrim en route to the Promised Land, whether they know it or not—sometimes by hook or crook. Ultimately, the lives of all The Others, (Iranians in this instance) being roused to revolt are just not worth much until they ‘arrive’ at the desired state-of-being. ~ilana

I’ll stifle the impulse not to say the obvious, and say it: An Israeli-American regime-change operation is underway in Iran.

It’s “right out of the US-Israel playbook” for such operations, notes Professor John Merisheimer, a scrupulous scholar of “great-power politics,” or, more precisely, of naked imperial power.

First, the US “wrecked the country’s economy through crippling sanctions, making the populace profoundly unhappy, poor, desperate, hungry.” Next, cheek-by-jowl with Israel, massive protests were fomented, confirmation for which came in a December 29, Jerusalem Post article, the headline to which read as follows:

“Mossad spurs Iran protests, say agents with [the] demonstrators, in [a] Farsi message: As protests grow across Iran, the Mossad posted an unusual Farsi message urging demonstrators to act, saying it is with them in the streets, amid rising economic pressure and public unrest.”

To Israel, the United States of America offers service and subservience.

Thus, comments from Trump on Truth Social  and Mike Pompeo, more openly, backed the fact of an orchestrated, malevolent intervention, in what were initially organic, peaceful protests that stemmed from ruthless economic warfare (American) against the Islamic Republic.

Duly, on January 2, 2026, Pompeo, former U.S. Secretary of state and CIA director, wrote: “Happy New Year to every Iranian in the streets. Also, to every Mossad agent walking beside them….”

As reported by the Times of Israel, on January 16, “Channel 14, seen as close to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,” initially said that “‘foreign actors’ are arming the protesters in Iran with live firearms, which is the reason for the hundreds of regime personnel killed.” A little later, a typically oleaginous Israeli source quipped: “Everyone is free to guess who is behind it.”

Oh, we know who it is. As Candace Owens likes to say, “We don’t know, but we know-know.”

We’ve sensed as much. The Iranian January 2026 protesters are acting out-of-character. More like Israelis than ordinary Iranians. These protesters appear thoroughly Isralized—it is certainly unusual historically for the generally demure, respectful Iranians to burn down and desecrate their own holy sites; acts that conform, however, to the rules and customs of Israeli “transnational terrorism.”

Historically, Iranians-in-protest have targeted government symbols, but not national and religious symbols.

And, Lo: These Iranian protesters had enjoyed access to 40,000 StarLink Internet terminals, a news tidbit confirmed by the Times of Israel and  Fox News, in bursts of good cheer and cheerleading. The “live” firearms provided were in keeping with Israel’s terror-state tactics. Recall that, in June of 2025, in connivance with the CIA, Mossad, MI5 and Trump—Israelis had smuggled needed materiel into Iran for their war of aggression. Trump had done his part in the subterfuge by pursuing “diplomacy-as-deception” with his trusting Iranian interlocutors, thus distracting and deceiving them.

The third stage in the “four-part regime change playbook” of the “US-Israel Axis,” avers Mearsheimer, is the disinformation campaign.

Before their respective, well-coordinated air forces and armies alight on their Iranian victims in targeted attacks and assassinations—the “transnational terrorists” of the “US-Israel Axis” have a trifling task: Convince the most-propagandized minds in the world, we in the West, that this grotesque burlesque of a regime-change farce is a naturally occurring thing.

In other words, that America’s color-coded, plant-based “democratic” revolutions, you know the kind—“Purple” in Iraq, “Blue” in Kuwait, “Cotton” in Uzbekistan, “Grape” in Moldova, “Orange” in the Ukraine, “Rose” in Georgia, “Tulip” in Kyrgyzstan, “Cedar” in Lebanon, “Jasmine” in Tunisia, “Green” in Iran, still un-christened in Russia and Syria—these are but natural uprisings, led by noble patriots, who just happen, all-too frequently, to be aligned with and sponsored by Foreign Policy Inc., the clubby DC foreign-policy establishment and its Israeli offshoots and operatives.

Iran has and will continue to endure this devilry for decades to come.

For although Mearsheimer appears to imply that the stages of regime change are consecutive, or sequential; I would argue that, as in all formulaic stage theories—the stages of regime change, in this case, overlap, run into each other, reoccur and repeat.

Over and above regime change, Israel, by Mearsheimer’s careful estimation, has a “deep-seated interest” in “wrecking Iran,” in breaking the Islamic Republic apart, and fracturing the surrounding nations.

“At bottom,” I posited during the 12-day war on Iran, “If Israel wanted to enjoy its neighborhood; it would not perennially reduce it to a primordial, pre-civilization stage, as in Gaza, by wiping out knowledge, experience, strength; smarts, beauty and goodness. … These Israeli atavists—who during the 2025 offensive in Iran murdered nearly 900 Palestinians in Gaza—don’t want educated, erudite neighbors; equals with whom to make magic in the region; they want subjects they can sanction and slaughter into submission.”(“IRAN: Everything You Need To Know But Were Too Afraid Of The Israel Lobby To Ask,” July 3, 2025.”)

I should revise that: According to the twinned belief-systems of Jewish supremacy and American exceptionalism; all ‘good,’ ‘happy’ human beings are either those who are like Americans or like Israelis, or en route to becoming clones of the one or the other.

Those involved in these foreign-policy drives honestly believe that to be American or Israeli is the existential Gold Standard. Lowly humanity is a pilgrim en route to the Promised Land, whether they know it or not—sometimes by hook or crook. Ultimately, the lives of all The Others, (Iranians in this instance) being roused to revolt are just not worth much until they “arrive” at the desired state-of-being.

As to their deep involvement in inciting regime-change riots in Iran: News tidbits to that effect have come to us directly via the Israelis themselves.

By now you know that Israel is “amoral,” it acts outside the laws of both man and God. By now you know that bursts of pride accompany Israeli barbarity. As is often the case, Israelis and their media openly report their crimes. And they are especially proud to be inciting regime-change in Iran. On the ground.

Take the X account titled “Mossad Farsi.” So nauseatingly audacious in content is it, that I doubted its authenticity.

In sickeningly sugared tweets, “Official Mossad in Farsi” and its bots (the programmed, online Artificial Intelligence responders or Israel’s paid lickspittles) profess the love Israelis have for the largely pro-Palestinian Iranians.

These are the same Israelis, still mid-murder in Gaza and the West bank, who were posting and celebrating imagery of murdered Palestinians with the flesh hanging on their bones in ribbons. That amoral Israel is now “loving on” the Iranians, a people who have generally resisted for Palestine.

Filled with The Love, “Mossad Farsi” has been loud and proud about its role in attempting to break the Islamic Republic. Here is the Mossad Farsi tweet that got world attention. Dated December 29, it reads as follows: “Let’s come out to the streets together. The time has come. We are with you. Not just from afar and verbally, we are with you in the field as well.”

https://x.com/MossadSpokesman/status/2005649986504237381

Speaking in unison, Israeli media—Channel 14,  i24, Israel Hayom, and others, no doubt—confirmed the authenticity and impetus of this account. In identically scripted messages, all outlets announced that a “Mossad X account in Farsi urges Iranians to protest as unrest sweeps the country.”

The criminal Svengali Bibi tips the nose toward Iran (allegedly), in a December 29 meeting at Mar-a-Lago, and Trump runs. “Fetch,” says Netanyahu to a pack of dreadful American curs, and they fetch. (Apologies, again, to animals for using them as the source of metaphor for things stupid and evil. It’s a regrettable feature of the English language.)

What might I add to the information provided by Mearsheimer (and reported by Max Blumenthal) in hashing out the finer points of the Israeli scheme? I can provide a translation from the Hebrew of the motto embedded by Mossad Farsi in its X account’s graphic. It reads as follows:

“Without connivance [as in scheming], a nation will fall”:

באין תחבולות יפול עם

Mossad Farsi’s motto is The Message. Israel’s message.

VIDEO: Introducing Mossad Farsi, The [Hebrew] Motto And The Methods:

***

COMMENT HERE: https://barelyablog.com/new-essay-introducing-mossad-farsi-the-motto-and-the-methods-comment-here/#comments

**

Ilana Mercer, paleolibertarian author, essayist and theorist, has been writing up an anti-war, anti-woke storm since 1998, starting in Canada. On arriving in the US, in 2002, her weekly column was right away syndicated. Mercer’s national syndication fell through shortly after due to writing in strident opposition to the war in Iraq. ILANA is described as “a system-builder. Distilled, her modus operandi has been to methodically apply first principles to the day’s events.” She’s Jewish, grew up in Israel ages five to nineteen, and left, at 19, never to return. She had refused to serve in the IDF, Israel’s compulsory military. Ilana’s focus since October of 2023 has been the genocide. A war against civilians is a war on civilization

©2026 ILANA MERCER
The Unz Review, January 21

The post Introducing Mossad Farsi, The [Hebrew] Motto And The Methods + VIDEO appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

Israel’s ‘strategic perspective’ requires everywhere and always an enemy. This designated enemy will be tarnished by a blood libel, an abstraction: he, she or they will be said to be antisemitic, baying for Jewish blood. This blood libel ignores the truth, because when facts and reality are scrutinized, it’s Arabs who are being exterminated daily en masse, with western grants of government privilege, not Israelis. You have to hand it to Israel. It has positioned itself as the world’s cross, a curse that every individual not Jewish-Israeli is born into and must carry like an albatross. ~ilana

The costs of Israel’s warmongering have pyramided. Is it not time to look this particular gift horse in the mouth? ~ilana

IT’S ABOUT PALESTINE. Of all the known facts about Israel’s war of aggression against Iran, now nominally suspended by Trump, this is the most important. Incisively put by Craig Mokhiber, “Iran is the last, independent, frontline state that refuses to submit, to normalize the crimes against the Palestinian people.” Quite simply, “Iran was being punished for its support for the Palestinians.” If you are free of the prefrontal lobotomy that comes with subscriptions to the Murdoch or Adelson Media; you will grasp this.

Israel’s unprovoked, illegal war against Iran was not in anticipatory self-defense by any stretch, explains Mokhiber—prominent and principled scholar on the international law (always bringing it back to its natural-law elements). It was old-fashioned aggression, Normalized by Israel and its sponsors, wars of aggression are considered the “supreme crime” in international law (the natural law and libertarian law are agreed).

Israel’s trademark terrorism was aimed at sundering Iranian sovereignty. Before the Iranian Revolution, locus of control over Iranian affairs resided in Washington, D.C., a synonym, we can now all agree, for Tel Aviv. The 1979 Revolution took decision-making away from Tel-Aviv and returned it to Teheran. What the 1979 Iranian Revolution militated against; Israel seeks to reinstate.

For its part, the United States of America, Israel’s lickspittle co-belligerent, is now viewed, certainly in West Asia, as a mulish military power that doesn’t know Shiite from Shinola.

Trump, you’ll recall, stumped our county—the president has forgotten at whose pleasure he serves—promising peace. He delivered war. Commentators Chas Freeman and Scott Ritter, both in-the-know, had divulged early on that the president had been engaged in “diplomacy-as-deception” with Iran. Having connived with Israel, Trump knew in advance of Israel’s impending “surprise” attack. He had engaged in fake negotiations with the Islamic Republic. With the help of the CIA, Mossad and MI5—the Israeli terrorists then smuggled the needed materiel into Iran. A con-man, concluded Dr. Foad Izadi, an Iranian academic.

Not that Israel needs a reason to war—but more so than a war of aggression for regime change, Israel’s June 13 sneak attack on Iran was meant to eliminate Iran as we know it.

Professor John Mearsheimer, one of America’s most distinguished scholars of international relations, offers a description of Israeli aims in terms that contradict the defunct, deceptively Panglossian ideas of a “two-state solution” and a “peace process.” Over and above regime change, Israel, in Mearsheimer’s always-careful estimation, has a “deep-seated interest” in breaking apart—in fracturing—the surrounding nations.

Iran’s ‘Rogue’ Status 

Israel’s gestalt is annihilatory. As shown during two years of genocide and ongoing destruction in neighboring countries, Israel is an “annihilatory state.” The Hebrew verb lechasel (לחסל), to eliminate, is used quite promiscuously by the pedestrian minds on the piss-poor TV panels, on the street and in the Knesset.

There exists in Israel a condition that is as much a part of the nation’s collective “soul,” as it is the “souls” of individual Israelis. The mindset is Jewish supremacy; the shared endeavor emanating from it is regional, military supremacy.

Commensurate with this pathology; Israel does not seek to live alongside its Arab and Persian neighbors as an equal. Rather, it aims to maintain hegemony across the Middle East. Wherever and whenever the pro-liberation, pro-Palestinian axis of resistance surfaces, Israel will move—not to negotiate with or resolve “conflicts” with it, but to eliminate it and restore Israeli hegemony. 

To wit, notice how Israel, methodically and spitefully, picks off peace negotiators. The “genocidal entity” made an attempt on Ali Shamkhani’s life. He was lead negotiator on nuclear talks with the United States, before June 13. The illegal and immoral assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas chief diplomat, falls into this category of elimination (chisul/חסול). There were others. Against the laws of war, Iranian scientists and non-combatant elite military personnel were targeted in their family homes—and will continue to be eliminated at a pace, in line with Israel’s predatory, cannibalizing nature.

This annihilatory impetus, the core of Israel, accounts for why, as has been observed, documented and anatomized over 20 months, Israel revels in wiping out Arab (and Persian) human capital—intellectuals, men and women of the arts, in the applied and theoretical sciences, reporters, activists, healers and humanitarians. If you wanted to enjoy your neighborhood; you would not perennially reduce it to a primordial, pre-civilization stage, as in Gaza, by wiping out knowledge, experience, strength; smarts, beauty and goodness.

This eliminatory core of Israeli society, as I emphasized in March of 2024, accounts for why Israel targets “the very fabric of a society—immeasurable human capital—including otherwise- indissoluble, extended family networks, the kind of generational bonds we in the West can only dream of, whittled down and depleted in numbers and in their native energy.”

At bottom, these Israeli atavists—during the offensive in Iran, they murdered nearly 900 Palestinians in Gaza—don’t want educated, erudite neighbors, equals with whom to make magic in the region; they want subjects they can sanction and slaughter into submission. All the better to bring them to their knees, where they now languish, Iran, Yemen and Palestine excepted.

As Israel sees it, the Arab Peninsula and the Levant must bow not toward Mecca and Medinah but to the Mad Dog Medinah (מְדִינָה is country in Hebrew). Regional submission is achieved by reducing the region to rubble, on any pretense and at every turn, and making it utterly dependent financially on America, which itself is, as we now know, in thrall to Israel. With a coopted Arab world, the US can assume the status of dictator as well as benefactor. 

On the facts, then, which is the rogue state, Israel or Iran?

Israel launches wars of aggression on its neighbors. Iran does not. Israel, not Iran, is a promiscuous proliferator of nuclear weapons. It is believed to possess “90 plutonium-based nuclear warheads and has produced enough plutonium for 100-200 [more] weapons.” Iran is a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Israel is not. Unlike Iran, so far, Israel has rejected any IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) oversight, any inspections and safeguards. In marked contrast, Israel, not Iran, is a genocidal entity. Israel, not Iran, had begun this war, is conducting air raids on neighboring nations, and committing mass murder daily.

Iran & Terrorism

And unlike Israel, Iran doesn’t practice state terrorism; it reluctantly and ably defended the realm.

Warnings, stateside, of “a heightened threat environment in the United States” from Iran have been issued by the US National-Terrorism-Industrial-Complex. These generally portend a false-flag operation. The “country of origin for the largest number of foreign-born terrorists” is Ameri-Israel’s good friend Saudi Arabia. Between 1975 and 2024, the Saudis were responsible for 2,354 murders on American soil; Iranians for … none… not one.

To change that, FBI entrapment operations, dubbed sting operations or counterterrorism, are routinely launched—and are likely underway right now. Beware! These stings are governed not by laws passed by Congress, but by creative handles. A vintage FBI entrapment method is when some needy simpleton is enticed by FBI agents into committing a crime he or she had no intention of committing until approached.

Bum joke, perhaps, but we all need a laugh. As a likely example of entrapment, I give you the case of Masih Alinejad, an inconsequential Iranian-American regime-change “journalist.” The woman, with her mad-hatter, tumbleweed hair, mouths the kind of cliched ideas of which we have an abundance in America.

Ms. Alinejad had alleged that she had been the target of a kidnapping plot by the Iranian mullahs. She also said “the Federal Bureau of Investigation had approached her eight months prior with photographs taken by the plotters.” Nudge-nudge, wink-wink, say no more.

Come off it, Ms. Alinejad. In rebuttal, I’d say that I don’t believe that the Iranian supreme leader (whose life the grubby Israelis have recently threatened) wants her back. I don’t believe the mullahs think Masih is a keeper. If anything, theirs was a desperate plea: America, please keep Iranian regime-change agitators like Masih Alinejad away.

IRAN & WMD

The current status of Iran’s nuclear capability has never been the issue, although the “genocidal entity,” Israel, is pursuing, and will pursue, “wars to preserve its own nuclear monopoly” in the region.

Before she turned tail (to wag the dog for Trump), Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence (DNI), “delivered the U.S. Intelligence Community’s (IC) collective conclusions covering a broad swath of national security issues and geographic areas—including the threat posed by Iran and its possible development of a nuclear weapon.” “The IC continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003,” reported Gabbard, who “was echoing an assessment that U.S. intelligence agencies have been making since 2007.”

Not unrelated to the manufacture of Israel’s casus belli is that the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) appears to no longer act impartially, as it did in the build up to war on Iraq, under the leadership of Dr. Mohammed ElBaradei. The utterances of Rafael Grossi, the IAEA’s mercurial director general, had helped justify kinetic action against Iran.

Prior to Israel’s unprovoked war of choice on Iran, the vainglorious Grossi had been roaming the region, raising alarm about the Islamic Republic. Distilled, Grossi’s May 31, 2025 report, “Verification and monitoring in the Republic of Iran in light of United Nations Security Council resolution 2231 (2015),” very plainly equates his annoyance with Iran with weapons-grade enrichment by Iran.

Rafael Grossi’s hornet’s nest is in the IAEA’s use of Palantir necro-software. According to Wikipedia, Grossi’s hokum WMD report was generated for the IAEA by Palantir Artificial Intelligence software.  Palantir makes a tidy sum in the necro-industry, peddling software for mass surveillance (and attendant, “alleged” executions). In Gaza, Palantir software is “alleged” to have enabled Israel’s Unit 8200 in the algorithmic generation of kill lists.

Without evidence other than “a mosaic of AI storytelling,” Grossi had continued to cook up stories against Iran. Following the June 22 American aerial and amphibian strikes on that heavily sanctioned nation; Grossi took to blabbering about amounts, down to the kilogram, of uranium enriched and secreted away in Iran. Sometimes it was 400 kilograms, other times 900. Post haste, the agency’s WMD sightings have since been walked back. “We did not have any proof of a systematic effort to move into a nuclear weapon,” Grossi sheepishly told CNN’s Christian Amanpour on June 17.

The costs of Israel’s warmongering have pyramided. Is it not time to look this particular gift horse in the mouth?

Back To Beginnings: Palestine 

What is the basic cause for this trouble in the greater Middle East, asks Dr. John Mearsheimer, speaking to the Notre Dame International Security Center. Who is responsible for the offensives begun, after October 7, by Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and assorted militia in Syria and Iraq, against which the United States elects to wage low-grade wars?

There are two dueling opinions. The genocidal regime and its partners—they had planned, before October 7, to drop the Palestinians out of history—all blame Iran. Iran is said to form the gravitational pull; is the “master puppeteer” of Hamas, Hezbollah, even the plucky Yemeni Ansar Allah movement.

These Israel-centric asininities are enforced by the West’s obedient “terrorist” designations—and by discussions so riddled with cliches as to be devoid of meaning. A favorite reductionism, for example, is the “proxy” word, disgorged by the clubby DC foreign-policy establishment and Israel’s sub-intelligent ruling elite. By Foreign Policy Inc’s telling, these complex and variegated regional Arab communities—the Resistance—are engaged in an unprofitable, punishing enterprise spanning decades, because commanded by Iran. Never mind what the principals themselves say.

In its deeply rooted intellectual mendacity, the Western foreign-policy establishment does not believe that patriotism, nationalism, and fellow-feeling exist among groups outside the Occident. (I’m being cynical.) Unchallenged, the national security and foreign policy conglomerate contends that the Houthis’ valiant military intervention on behalf of the Palestinians, massacred daily with Western imprimatur, is no more than the protest of marionettes manipulated by their Iranian masters. As this mindset goes, only Anglo-Ameri-Israeli “soldiers” act in solidarity with their people.

The countervailing theory, “the alternative scenario,” argues Dr. Mearsheimer, is that Israel is responsible.” That “it is largely a result of Israel’s occupation that the Palestinians attacked Israel on October the 7th. Having assessed the evidence for the theory of Iranian hegemony over resistance militias, Mearsheimer, a scrupulous scholar of “great-power politics” (and a patriot who served in the US Air Force for five years), has found there to be “little evidence that Iran is responsible for all these conflicts in the Middle East.” For the longest time, Dr. Mearsheimer has argued that on the evidence, “Israel is principally responsible for the conflict in the Middle East. Israel and its barbaric Occupation of the Palestinians.”

Israel’s baleful presence in the de facto annexed territories is why every American president has understood the imperative of a solution to the Palestinian plight, without which Intifadas—one, two, three, ad infinitum—would culminate in events like October 7.

The “blame-Iran, change-the-Iranian-regime” tedious cant was begun by Israel in the 1970s and is at the behest of Israel, seconds Dr. Stephan Walt. It was during the 1990s, that the US acceded to Israel and began excluding Iran. In 1994, confirms Ali M. Ansari, professor of Iranian History at the University of St. Andrews, “In line with Israel’s budding rapprochement with the Arab world” and the signing of “a peace treaty with Jordan”—Israel “switched its strategic perspective from one that cast Iran as a [regional] balancer to one that saw Iran as the enemy. Henceforth, the United States would be encouraged by Israel to ostracize and isolate the Islamic Republic.” (“The Shallow Roots of Iran’s War With Israel,” Foreign Affairs, May 29, 2024.)

What Dr. Ansari cannot say, I will: Israel’s “strategic perspective” requires everywhere and always an enemy. This designated enemy will be tarnished by a blood libel, an abstraction: he, she or they will be said to be antisemitic, baying for Jewish blood. This blood libel ignores the truth, because when facts and reality are scrutinized, it’s Arabs who are being exterminated daily en masse, with western grants of government privilege, not Israelis.

You have to hand it to Israel. It has positioned itself as the world’s cross, a curse that every individual not Jewish-Israeli is born into and must carry like an albatross.

**

Ilana Mercer, paleolibertarian author, essayist and theorist, has been writing up an anti-war, anti-woke storm since 1999, starting in Canada. On arriving in the US, in 2002, her weekly column was right away syndicated. Mercer’s national syndication fell through shortly after due to writing in strident opposition to the war in Iraq. ILANA is described as “a system-builder. Distilled, her modus operandi has been to methodically apply first principles to the day’s events.” She’s Jewish, grew up in Israel ages five to nineteen, and left, at 19, never to return. She had refused to serve in the IDF, Israel’s compulsory military. Ilana’s focus since October of 2023 has been the genocide. A war against civilians is a war on civilization.

Image credit.

©2025 ILANA MERCER
The Unz Review, July 1
LewRockwell.com, July 3
Mises Institute, Power & Market, July 9

The post IRAN: Everything You Need To Know But Were Too Afraid Of The Israel Lobby To Ask appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

In “Iran Tries To Restore Regional Balance; Israel Continues To Murder And Get Away With Murder,” a HARD TRUTH podcast, David Vance and myself have a heated discussion about Iran’s response, on April 13 and 14, to Israel’s murder of senior commanders in Damascus, on April 1. Six other Iranian nationals and six Syrian citizens were assassinated. In all, Israel murdered 13 people in its April 1 strike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus.

I detail Israel’s lengthy, illegal, immoral and extra-judicial assassination program against Iranian civilians and military ongoing for decades, coupled as it is with Israeli cyberterrorism directed at Iran’s infrastructure and state apparatus.

All things considered, I think Iran’s restraint was quite commendable in launching what was a theatrical, victimless, precision attack on Israeli military targets alone. This was the first time Teheran has directly struck Israel proper. Israel, conversely, regularly strikes on Iranian soil.

All the more so is Teheran’s restraint commendable considering that its attempt to make a point, as it deescalated a conflict begun by Israel in Damascus, occurs against the backdrop of a US-led crippling program of sanctions and embargoes directed at the Iranian people, and an Israeli, American-backed and sponsored mass killing and land-confiscation program underway in Gaza and the West Bank.

Both your columnist and David Vance agree that the Israel First neocons have always aimed at regime change in Iran. David, however, pushes back: He sees even greater forces at work in creating global chaos.

WATCH:

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RELATED READING:

https://www.ilanamercer.com/2024/03/israel-violation-gods-law-natural-justice-laws-war-customary-international-humanitarian-law/

https://www.ilanamercer.com/2020/01/u-s-globes-judge-jury-executioner/

https://www.ilanamercer.com/2012/03/onward-to-iran/

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To listen to U.S. government officials there is only an upside to the punitive sanctions imposed on Iran by the United States and a reluctant European Union. Consequently, the emphasis is forever on how to toughen the punishment; never on whether to lift economic sanctions on the long-suffering people of Iran.

But what about the effects of trade boycotts on American businesses?

Chris Harmer of The Institute for the Study of War estimates that the Boeing Company alone forfeits a minimum of $25 billion in business every year because of U.S.-imposed sanctions on Iran, a niche market that is filled by the Russians. Overall, Harmer puts the value to U.S. business of trade lost due to the economic embargo on Iran at approximately $50 billion per annum.

For example, Iran imports $1.5 billion worth of cars a year, the beneficiaries of which are companies like Nissan, Toyota and Peugeot (when they might have been General Motors and Chrysler). Peugeot does an added half a billion dollars’ worth of commerce with Iran just in car parts. The Iranian economy, moreover, has diversified and is adapting to life without the U.S. The rest of the world—pockets in Europe and most of Asia—has not isolated Iran, with the result that the country has many trading partners other than the U.S. And while Iran has lost petroleum revenue due to sanctions, the trend will not endure. China, Japan and South Korea are hungry for the country’s crude.

Not to be overlooked are the costs to Americans of sanction enforcement, avers Harmer. In addition to the opportunity costs—the missed business aforementioned—there are “direct costs.” The Office of Foreign Asset Control in the U.S. Treasury Department squanders around $1 billion a year in developing lists of “financial institutions that are subject to sanctions,” and then infringing on the rights of individuals and companies to freely exchange privately owned property.

“Indirect costs” are incurred in the course of cultivating a massive U.S. intelligent infrastructure—a veritable alphabet soup of agencies—upon which the Treasury draws in enforcing a regimen of sanctions.

So, too, are the “deterrent costs” borne by the American taxpayer who pays for patrolling the Persian Gulf, the Northern Arabian Sea and the Strait of Hormuz.

Ultimately, trade, not democracy, is the best antidote to war with Iran. The more economically intertwined countries become, the less likely they are to go to war. More than boycotts, barter with Iran is bound to promote good will and reduce belligerence on both sides. As a general rule, state-enforced boycotts harm honest, hard-working Americans who use the economic means to earn their keep. They benefit servants of Uncle Sam—the political class and its media and think-tank hangers-on. For they deploy the political means to advance their ends and grow their sphere of influence. As libertarian economist Murray Rothbard once observed, these “are two mutually exclusive ways of acquiring wealth”—the economic means is honest and productive, the political means is dishonest and predatory.

As always, it’s us against them: the state versus the people who labor outside it and in spite of it.

For now, Obama’s eager response to Iranian overtures has sidelined Syria. Before Syria recedes in memory—to be replaced by demands for action against Iran—it’s worth considering one constant quantity: the media guttersnipes and their motivation.

The bobbingheads of TV have been complaining in the most unctuous terms that Russia and Syria have pulled one over us. The U.S., they lament, has been weakened, evidently, because someone halted the momentum of war.

You see, the chattering and political classes cannot conceive of greatness outside the state because they are part of the state apparatus and depend on it for status and income. Conversely, individual Americans—who have nothing to gain and only losses to sustain from war—should never conflate their interests with those of the government and its emissaries, who have everything to gain from the great theater that is war.

More than anyone, who benefits when America goes to war? Those who “function within the nimbus of great power” in D.C. and around it—the media-military-congressional-industrial complex.

Thus did Charles Krauthammer ridiculously equate the failure to go to war against Syria with “Russia supplanting America as regional hegemon.” Krauthammer was joined by others, not least of them Bill O’Reilly and his sidekick Dennis the Menace. How diminished will the bluster of both media mouths be if the U.S. is no longer dictating the terms of war (lots of it) and peace (too little of it) in the world? Their immense egos will suffer. Maybe even their incomes, eventually.

But not you, the everyday American.

Putin stopped a war in Syria. This is not the same as “supplanting” American power. Rather, the Russians replaced bully power with a balance of power, and this is good for ordinary Americans.

He who saves you from war is better than he who sends you to war. The proof is in the Putin.

©2013 By ILANA MERCER
WND, Economic Policy Journal, American Daily Herald
& Praag.org.
September 27

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©2011 By ILANA MERCER
WorldNetDaily.com
October 14

The post Is A-Jad (Ahmadinejad) The Fall Guy For The AG (Attorney General)? appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

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The post Energy Independence Idiocy appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

The Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad recently referred to Israel as “the occupying regime of Al-Quds [Jerusalem],” describing it as a “disgraceful blot” that ought to be “wiped off the map.” He was officiating at a “World Without Zionism” university conference, a forum duplicated like viral RNA on campuses the world over.

The UN, which has underwritten similar conferences, convened an emergency tea and crumpets session. Did members of the Security Council expel Iran for threatening genocide against a member state? Don’t be silly—they simply condemned Ahmadinejad. As did the European Parliament. For their part, Ahmadinejad’s Iranian supporters blamed the Jews for daring to deflect attention from the plight of the Palestinians to their own threatened demise. As for the Palestinians, they’ve already wiped Israel off their maps, cartographically at least.

The wickedly stupid online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, expressed confidence in the Islamic Republic’s “constitutional” separation of powers: Ahmadinejad hasn’t the authority to declare war on Israel; only Iran’s Supreme Leader has. However, before warning all Arab countries against recognizing Israel’s right to exist, this gabbing gorgon assured coreligionists that his prescription for Israel bore the imprimatur of Iran’s first Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini.

It’s unlikely Khomeini’s cankered successor (Ali) would diverge. In any event, to prosecute an illegal and unjust war, George Bush overcame the obstacles American democracy placed in his path. Ahmadinejad, no doubt, has the will to find a way around the Iranian theocracy’s “checks and balances.”

Muslims don’t disguise their finer feelings about Jews—no more than the Institute for Historical Review and its various patrons, Ahmadinejad included, do. Speak to Muslims from Baghdad to Birmingham to Bellingham and you’ll likely hear the kind of “crude anti-Semitic propaganda unheard since Streicher,” to quote Serge Trifkovic. That notorious anti-Semitic Tsarist forgery, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” is a best seller across Arabia. Holocaust denial is as popular.

Neither is Ahmadinejad the first Iranian ruler to promise atomic retribution against Israel. According to William Sweet, writing in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineer’s Spectrum Magazine, the former Iranian president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani said this:

“If one day…the world of Islam is mutually equipped with the kind of weapons Israel presently possesses, the world’s arrogant strategy will then come to a dead end, because the use of an atomic bomb on Israel won’t leave anything; however in the world of Islam [use of a bomb] will just cause harm, and this scenario is not far fetched.”

To destroy the Jewish state, he’s willing to dispatch Arabs with the same clinical detachment. Clearly, the problem with Mad Mahmoud and his predecessors isn’t their fondness for pseudo-history, but their love of authentic (nuclear) science.

As Sweet has reported—and as Mohamed ElBaradei, Director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), has confirmed in a number of subsequent reports—the country with “the world’s largest reserves of fossil fuels” is assembling the nuclear wherewithal with a speed and determination not seen since the heyday of Iraq’s infamous nuclear weapons program of the 1980s.”

The IAEA, which “operates the world’s most elaborate tripwire system,” is scared stiff, warning of a pattern and scope of violations hitherto unseen in the agency’s experience. ElBaradei, you will recall, was right all along about Iraq. On Feb. 14, 2003, he stated categorically that there was no evidence of ongoing prohibited nuclear or nuclear related activities in that country.

This cautious man is now sounding the alarm about an Iranian nuclear program which “consists of practically everything needed to fuel a reactor or in effect to produce materials for bombs, including uranium mining and milling, conversion, enrichment, fuel fabrication, and heavy water production.”

“[Iran’s]assets, at Natanz, include a centrifuge pilot plant capable of churning out about 12 kilograms of bomb-grade material a year…as well as a large, commercial-scale plant still under construction. The larger plant, to be situated in a hardened bunker 20 meters underground, could produce as much as half a ton to a ton of weapons-grade material a year. Iran is also known to have operated a more technologically sophisticated laser-enrichment pilot plant a few years ago, producing small amounts of lightly enriched uranium.”

These activities are not all illegal under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty; secrecy about them is. Last month, DEBKAfile reported that “Iran’s hard-line Guardian Council, the real power in the land… ratified a parliamentary decision to block UN inspections should the Islamic republic’s nuclear activities be referred to the UN Security Council for sanctions. In August, uranium conversion was resumed.”

Robert Einhorn, top proliferation specialist in the Clinton administration, agrees: Iran has a nuclear weapons program. Her supporters disagree. They say Ahmadinejad is only “playing to the base.” His bellicose threats they treat as mere exotic idiosyncrasies. And they draw moral equivalence between Israel and Iran: “Israel has nuclear weapons. Why not Iran?”

Other apologists have framed Iran’s nuclear belligerence as the “ultimate safeguard against an attack.” The reference is, presumably, to Iran’s legitimate quest to defend against an American army that advanced on a neighbor—Iraq—and conquered it in the absence of provocation.

That Iran fears an out-of-control, aggressive U.S. is likely—and understandable. However, Iran’s Majnun-in-Chief hasn’t threatened the United States; he has threatened Israel. Yet Iranophiles seldom depict Israel’s nuclear program as an equally legitimate, last-ditch defense. Instead, they contort like Cirque du Soleil contortionists to downplay the threat Iran poses to Israel.

To their credit, Muslims make no bones about the need to solve the Jewish Question for once and for all. (In case you’re a public school graduate, this is code for liquidation.) It’s time Iran’s dissembling defenders were as honest.

© 2006 By Ilana Mercer

    WorldNetDaily.com

    January 6

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There’s blood in the water and the neoconservatives in and around the administration are thrashing about like sharks. They’ve thrown Donald Rumsfeld over the side, and to many, their treachery is evidence that Rumsfeld can’t possibly be one of them, a neoconservative.

The iconic Robert Novak has been particularly vocal in his attack on the secretary of defense’s neoconservative credentials. In Rumsfeld’s defense, I’ll say this: his resistance to sending more troops to Iraq notwithstanding, his conduct during two years of war has never led me to doubt his dedication to the death and destruction that have accompanied the administration’s democratic crusade in Iraq.

I do question, however, the motives of assorted Republican hacks desperately invested in distinguishing one administration lackey from the next. Their aim? To saddle some with all the blame for the actions of a commander in chief who, “with unidirectional, God-inspired gusto,” lied the nation to war. If Bush, Rumsfeld, and Rice are indeed recovering neoconservatives, the signs are sure to reveal themselves sometime soon (a possibility that doesn’t diminish their culpability in the illegal, immoral, and idiotic invasion of Iraq).

The first of such signs might be the cancellation of the White House’s Weekly Standard subscription. Before, one hopes, this intellectually degraded publication greases the skids for an American assault on Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities.

Proliferation experts from the U.S. State Department, France, Israel, and the IAEA all agree that, in secrecy and in violation of treaty commitments, the Iranians have been, as the IEEE’s Spectrum reported in June 2004, “assembling the nuclear wherewithal with a speed and determination not seen since the heyday of Iraq’s infamous nuclear weapons program of the 1980s.” With “some of the world’s largest reserves of fossil fuels,” Iran’s energy needs are not the cause of the urgency. The specter of an American army advancing on – and conquering – Iraq is.

In what reads like a remarkably unsophisticated policy paper, Reuel Marc Gerecht counsels in the Standard against any peaceful solutions to Iran’s growing nuclear capabilities, for no real reason but that negotiations and inspections indicate a defensive “pre-9/11 mindset,” while Gerecht prefers the purity of preemption.

Iran‘s burgeoning nuclear enhancement program is indeed worrisome, which is precisely why the “insights” of neoconservatives such as Gerecht must be avoided at all costs. Their failure to predict the shape Iraqi nationalism would take in response to an American invasion hasn’t humbled them in the least. In fact, their prognostications about Iranian patriotism evince the same grandiose but out-of-focus “vision” they’ve imposed on Iraq, with calamitous consequences.

Duly, our neoconservative Nostradamus Gerecht predicts a favorable outcome in the event the U.S. decides to launch a missile attack on Iranian nuclear facilities. “Iranians are not nationalist automatons – they are among the most profound, cynical patriots imaginable,” he patronizes. Americans can carpet bomb Iran’s nuclear plants to their heart’s content. There’s no danger this will dissolve the average Iranian’s detestation for the mullahs and spur an insurgency against the U.S.

The psychological and political savvy! The sweep of ideas….

Has Gerecht ever considered that loathing both the clerics and the carpet bombers are not mutually exclusive sentiments? Naturally not. Our neoconservative doesn’t draw his analysis from objective reality, but from a countervailing narrative he has concocted. A filament of this faith, for example, is that it is impossible to hate Saddam Hussein and, simultaneously, fight the American forces. Thus, neoconservatives insist that the growing, pan-Islamic guerrilla insurgency in Iraq is Sunni dominated – manned chiefly by disgruntled Ba’athists.

This neat but nutty bifurcation has allowed Gerecht to conclude that Iranians, due to their general disdain for the ruling ayatollahs, will not oppose an American strike. Or that Iran’s Shi’ite Muslims – also a religious majority – will never put aside their theological differences and make common cause with their Iraqi Shi’ite brethren against the U.S.

“What a preemptive attack would certainly do is provoke another debate [in Iran] about the competence of a ruling clergy who led the nation into a head-on collision with the United States,” Gerecht maintains.

Let’s see if I’ve grasped this last neoconservative plot line: After we’ve “preemptively” pulverized their installations, Iranians, who already “have a very jaundiced view of the United States,” will turn on their own rather than on us.

If these fantasies seem too deranged to be true, if it appears I’ve exaggerated neoconservative cretinism, I apologize. I didn’t mean to suggest there has been no neocon learning curve. Gerecht has allowed for a corrective course of action: even if Iranians do embrace “vulgar” nationalism rather than deracinated democratic internationalism, we Americans can always … crush them.

Now, Gerecht’s neocon credentials are beyond doubt, while Rumsfeld’s depend on who you talk to. But so what? As Dr. Johnson said, “There is no settling the point of precedency between a louse and a flea.” Neocon or not, louse or flea, a pest is a pest.

©By ILANA MERCER
December 29, 2004
Antiwar.com

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