COMMENTARY / OPINION
Caught on Camera: Syrian Forces Execute Doctor in Hospital in Al Suwayda [48:30] Mansur Ashkar
August 10, 2025
Pirates TIERNEY’S REAL NEWS
AUG 10, 2025
There are LOTS of Islamo-Communist “pirates” in America right now – and some are more obvious than others.
Here’s a gang of so-called poor “refugees” in Minnesota who stole tens of millions of dollars worth of funds meant to feed hungry AMERICAN children. Aren’t they a fine looking bunch of thieves?
I guarantee these Islamo-Communist “pirates” are controlled by CAIR, the US front for the Muslim Brotherhood – just like Hamas!
Trust me, this is the same food stealing scam that Hamas runs in Gaza for the Muslim Brotherhood out of Qatar. Hamas steals the food from their own people, and pockets the money for the food for themselves, and then they blame Israel and America – and trot out pictures of starving children to deflect attention away from themselves – so you’ll feel sorry for Hamas.
Hamas is the front for the Muslim Brotherhood in Israel just like CAIR is in America. On June 24, 2025, a bill called the “Designate CAIR as a Terrorist Organization Act” was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives and perhaps that fact will finally be codified.
Abdiaziz Farah, one of the ringleaders in the food scheme, was found guilty of stealing over $47 MILLION of Federal funds intended to feed poor American children – part of a larger scam that took $400 MILLION! Farah used the money to buy luxury vehicles and overseas real estate—including properties in Kenya outside the reach of U.S. authorities. He was sentenced to 28 years in prison.
Using the taxpayer money meant for needy kids, Farah purchased five luxury vehicles for himself in about six months, including over $300,000 for a Porsche, a GMC truck, and a Tesla. Farah purchased real estate throughout the Twin Cities and in Kentucky, which included buying two lakefront lots with the aim of building himself a multi-million-dollar home.
No wonder these “refugees” all drive around in new fancy vehicles in Minneapolis!
Farah further sent the taxpayer money he stole overseas, purchasing real estate in Kenya and a high-rise apartment building in Nairobi. Farah laundered the fraud proceeds through Communist China. This is proof of Islamo-Communist ties. This overseas money is beyond the reach of American law enforcement—neither these funds nor Farah’s international real estate holdings have been, or can be, seized or forfeited.
Farah and his associates made fraudulent claims about the number of meals served, fabricated invoices and documents, and created fake children’s identities to obtain government funds. Farah and others attempted to bribe a juror with $120,000 in cash in exchange for a not guilty verdict.
At least 73 people have been charged so far and 51 found guilty so far in the scam.
These are the folks that Ilhan Omar brought to America from Somalia to enable their fraudulent activity. They pull this trojan horse crap all over the world. If you want to know more about the Islamo-Commie welfare racket – including daycare fraud and other schemes involving the VOLAGS and NGOs – read this:
Khamenei TERRIFIED; Body Language Expert Reveals CHILLING Details [14:58] Yair Pinto
Aug 9, 2025 TBN Israel – TBN Israel’s Yair Pinto reports on the Israel-Hamas War. Yair Pinto visits the Statue of Liberty and Columbia University on July 4th — a symbolic journey through America’s ideals of freedom and justice. But beneath the celebrations lies a deeper truth: radical ideologies are threatening those very values, from Hamas propaganda to antisemitic unrest on elite U.S. campuses. This episode of My State takes you from Ground Zero to the front lines of the information war, exposing the lies, tracing the roots of hatred, and showing how Israel and America are standing together against a common enemy. Stay up-to-date with the latest developments here on TBN Israel.
Israel Can’t Win Without Beating the Muslim Brotherhood BY DANIEL GREENFIELD
AUG 9, 2025 1:00 PM Jihad Watch
Why can’t the United States of America or Israel ever seem to win their ‘endless wars’? Because they have yet to fight the real enemy. Israel’s air strikes on Iran at least targeted the actual IRGC backers of Oct 7, while the U.S. has yet to deal with the Saudi, Qatari and Pakistani governments behind 9/11. But there is a hidden enemy that can’t just be droned.
What did Osama bin Laden and Hamas have in common? Both were part of the Muslim Brotherhood. Even more than Iran or any government, it’s the Muslim Brotherhood that binds together worldwide terrorist threats with political domestic pressure campaigns. The spectrum of Brotherhood influence combines together not only armed Jihadis, but Qatar’s Al Jazeera and other media influence operations, CAIR and other internal Democrat pressure groups and a majority of the mosques operating inside the United States. And that’s only the beginning.
Created in Egypt in the first half of the century with Nazi funding, the Brotherhood is a political Jihadist movement operating through both terrorist armies and front groups to seize power. The Muslim Brotherhood’s many arms are as comfortable setting off bombs on buses as they are meeting with members of Congress, preaching murder and pretending to be moderates.
The Brotherhood, which was strongest at universities in Egypt and parts of the Middle East, now also controls most elite campuses in America, and most Muslim organizations in America. In Israel, the Brotherhood maintains multiple front groups, including some that serve in Israel’s Knesset parliament, that run mosques across the country and effectively run all of Gaza.
After Oct 7, Hamas pulled back into its tunnels with its hostages and put up a limited fight even as its ‘civilian’ or as the media calls it ‘political arm’ continued running hospitals, the police, aid groups, local and regional media, which it used to fake a torrent of ‘atrocities’ by Israel.
Western diplomats, leaders and ‘experts’ have claimed that Israel won the war on Hamas, and should retreat and make some sort of deal, but as long as Hamas is, as the international community refers to them, the “de facto authorities’ on the ground, then nothing has been won.
After Israel reclaimed Gaza in the Six Day War, the Muslim Brotherhood, which had worked hand-in-glove with the Egyptian government to use Gaza as a base for crossing the border and carrying out massacres in Israel, pretended that it had changed and was now peaceful. It used its control over Gaza mosques and social service groups to indoctrinate the Muslim population into waging a Jihad even while the Israelis, like our governments, hoped that the Muslim Brotherhood had moderated and was willing to live and let live.
Then when the time was right, the mosques turned out to be full of weapons, the imams provided bombmaking instructions and the Brotherhood’s Mujama al-Islamiya, or the Islamic Center, became Hamas. When Hamas loses battles, it folds back and hides out in mosques.
That’s why all the talk of a ceasefire in which Hamas ‘disarms’ (that the Muslim Brotherhood terrorist group has rejected) would be meaningless because it would mean Hamas turning over its weapons to its own ‘Gaza police’ or some other political facade. And even if the weapons were turned over, as long as Hamas controls daily life in Gaza, it can organize, train, prepare, bring in more weapons and launch a new war any time it’s ready. Even if it takes years
America after 9/11 and Israel after Oct 7 focused on Jihad as ‘terrorism’ or a military conflict rather than a religious duty to kill and subjugate infidels imposed by the Koran on every devout Muslim. No matter how much money, how many soldiers or how many wars we fought against Jihadist forces, we never touched the core of their political organizations in local mosques.
Counterterrorism experts who knew better claimed that they could trick Muslims into moderating by recruiting mosques and Imams to teach them, which every Muslim child with even the lightest grounding in Islam knows better than to believe, that terrorism is against Islam.
The moderate Muslim gambit failed, but by then our counterterrorism ranks had been purged by Democrats and Republicans in thrall to Muslim Brotherhood front groups and no longer knew any better. The War on Terror became a ‘whack-a-mole’ game of taking out certain high-value Jihadists even as American cities were filled with mosques preaching Jihad against us.
The ‘experts’ pretended that the constant pace of Islamic terror attacks was the work of ‘lone wolves’ who, no matter how often they launched terror attacks and quoted the same verses, had just ‘misunderstood’ Islam and things would get better if we worked more closely with the Brotherhood’s mosques to teach the terrorists the true meaning of being moderate Muslims.
Beginning with Obama, the Israelis had negotiated a series of deals with Hamas which included, among other things, included giving the terror group economic rewards in exchange for quiet. The latest of these temporary agreements had been negotiated right before the Oct 7 attacks, and depended on the premise that the Muslim Brotherhood’s ‘civilian leadership’ was willing to moderate for economic reasons and would avoid further violence to get more money.
The catastrophic mistake led to the worst war in Israel’s modern history. And it won’t end until the Brotherhood is no longer able to operate in Israel’s territory. Just as our wars on terror won’t end until the Brotherhood and other Islamist groups are no longer able to operate in America.
Israelis are asking what the exit strategy for Gaza is. There isn’t one. Gaza is located next door to Israel. Oct 7 showed the folly of the ‘disengagement’ from Gaza and the forcible eviction of Jewish ‘settlers’ from their communities in Gaza. The only way to control territory is to physically control it. There are no shortcuts, no nation building or how to win hearts and minds with ‘three cups of tea’. Islamic terrorism does not emerge from anything except Islam. And while there are no ‘moderate’ forms of Islam, the Muslim Brotherhood is by far the most successful and dangerous Islamist operation in the world. Allowing it to exist is a suicide pact for any country.
That’s why even Arab Muslim countries have begun banning the Muslim Brotherhood, but America and Israel have yet to definitively ban and suppress all Brotherhood organizations.
To win in Gaza and eventually the West Bank, Israel has to detain and drive out every member of terrorist and terrorist adjacent groups. It’s not a new idea. In the early 90s, the Israelis deported most of the Hamas leadership to Jordan. The terrorists set up a tent camp demanding to be let back in. The UN, the Red Cross and the Bush and Clinton administrations rallied to advocate for Hamas and then demanded that Israel take Hamas leaders back. And Israel did.
The Oct 7 war should have already taught the Israelis that no matter how much they bend over backward to avoid harming ‘civilians’, they’ll still be charged with genocide. Likewise the Bush nation building efforts were smeared as a racist campaign to kill Muslims. America and Israel need to do the right thing to keep their people safe from the Brotherhood regardless of who screams about it, because going easy on the Jihadi ‘civilians’ has never worked anyway.
America and Israel should begin by outlawing the Brotherhood, all constituent groups, all groups that appeared in the documents seized in the post-9/11 raids and all groups whose leadership include Brotherhood members and past as well as present members of Brotherhood groups.
Membership in any Brotherhood group should be considered a basis for deportation for non-citizens and denaturalization followed by deportation if they’re citizens. America has these laws on the books, we’ve chosen not to use them. Israel certainly has the legal authority to do it, but a hostile radical leftist judiciary in both countries colluded to protect Brotherhood members (that is part of what the pre-Oct 7 leftist riots were about in Israel) and must be sidelined.
Israel must not just clean out terrorists in tunnels, but Brotherhood members in mosques, in aid groups, in hospitals, working for the UN and Al Jazeera, and the entire so-called ‘civilian’ government that controls Gaza. Those are the minimum conditions for any victory over Hamas, because the only way to defeat Hamas is to eliminate its Muslim Brotherhood parent group.
Unless they all go, the endless war will never end.
Israel is the world’s favorite double standard. NACHUM KAPLAN
From the “day after” scam to disputing Israel’s capital city, the Jewish state faces a playbook of hypocrisy written for it and it alone.
AUG 09, 2025 Future of Jewish
This is a guest essay by Nachum Kaplan, who writes the newsletter, “Moral Clarity.”
Israel is the only country expected to fight terrorism with one hand tied behind its back, blindfolded, and standing on one leg like a flamingo, while a panel of yobbo hecklers looks on yelling nonsense about “war crimes.”
Holding Israel to a double standard, along with delegitimization and dehumanization, is one of the three Ds of antisemitism. Everyone knows this double standard is as common as modern-day Nazis in Gaza, but few appreciate how many of these double standards have infected our discourse.
Let’s take a further look:
The Right to Exist
Israel is the only country asked to demonstrate that it has a right to exist. This is as perverse as it sounds. One might take issue with Russian, Chinese, or Jordanian policy, but no one argues that those states have no right to exist. That is reserved solely for Israel.
International Law
Israel is expected to adhere to the laws of war, while no such demand or expectation is placed upon Hamas. Every Palestinian civilian death is treated as an atrocity, regardless of circumstance, while the fact that Hamas operatives routinely use humans as shields, embed themselves in hospitals, and target civilians in violation of the laws of war goes virtually unremarked.
When Israel destroys the weapons, it gets accused of targeting hospitals and schools. When Israel calls ahead to evacuate civilians, the world calls it ethnic cleansing. When ISIS did this in Mosul from 2016 to 2017, U.S. airstrikes killed thousands. There was no outrage, no protests, no “war crimes” allegations. The world allows jihadists to use human shields, but demands miracles from Jews in combating this tactic.
Effects-Based Condemnation
Every military is judged by its intentions, context, and legal frameworks. Except Israel. When Israel fights Hamas, foreign leaders, the United Nations, and much of the mainstream news media judge Israel by the body count alone.
Israel makes extraordinary efforts to avoid civilian casualties — warning civilians with leaflets, texts, phone calls, roof knocks, and drone fly-bys — yet it still gets condemned for alleged indiscriminate bombing. Hamas, meanwhile, hides beneath civilians and laughs as accusations of war crimes are leveled against Israel.
Terrorists versus Government
The world treats Hamas, a genocidal terrorist group whose founding charter calls for the annihilation of Jews, as a legitimate political actor, while questioning the democratic State of Israel’s legitimacy. This makes Israel the only country to be equated with a terrorist organization.
Proportionality
This is a misunderstood term. While there may have been some justification for that misunderstanding when the war began, almost two years on there can be no such excuse; misusing the word is deliberate and malicious.
Proportionality in warfare means civilian harm must be proportionate to the military advantage gained. It has nothing to do with relative casualty numbers. That makes it complex and highly subjective.
It is also something that applies at the commander level, who must weigh whether any attack is proportionate. The Israel Defense Forces takes this requirement so seriously that it has lawyers — who are outside any military chain of command — overseeing commanders’ target acquisition and strikes.
When people cite the questionable Hamas figure that 60,000 people have been killed in the war and then argue that it is disproportionate, they are showing you that they have no idea what they are talking about. The idea that proportionality means Israel must match Hamas rocket for rocket and corpse for corpse is absurd and macabre.
Proportionality comes up only in wars that Israel fights. America toppled regimes after 9/11, yet Israel is told that it is too much even to defend its borders. That is a double standard, for sure.
Western Hypocrisy
Bashar al-Assad kills 500,000 in Syria? Silence. China puts a million Uyghurs into concentration camps? Yawn. Hamas slaughters Jews? Within 24 hours, there are protests on Western streets and campuses against Israel, the victim of the attacks. When Arabs kill Arabs, the West shrugs. When Jews defend themselves, it is a global moral crisis.
The ‘Day After’ Scam
When the Allies invaded Germany in World War Two, no one demanded a post-Hitler reconstruction plan before the D-Day landings had even commenced. When America toppled Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, nobody said: “Wait, who will be mayor of Fallujah?” Yet Israel is required to have a complete governance plan for Gaza before the IDF has even finished clearing Hamas bunkers and tunnels.
Aid your enemies, or else…
Israel, alone in the history of warfare, is expected to supply electricity, water, and humanitarian aid to its enemies — during battle, no less. The U.S. dropped bombs on Fallujah in 2004, not aid packages. The Allies did not send diesel to Dresden in 1944. Yet, if Israel cuts off fuel to Hamas bunkers, it stands accused of collective punishment.
When Israeli ministers make the obvious point that providing aid to Gaza is prolonging the war and suffering, and that it is absurd to be supporting the enemy’s war effort, they are branded as monsters.
You cannot use that weapon.
Israel uses 900-kilogram (2,000-pound) bombs against Hamas tunnel shafts dug under civilian areas. These tunnels are deep, meaning using large ordnance is a military necessity (and legal under the laws of armed conflict).
When the U.S. used such weapons in Mosul and Raqqa, it was urban warfare. When NATO did it in Belgrade in 1999, it was deemed precision targeting. When Israel does it, the cries of war crimes and massacre ring out.
It also happens when Israel uses white phosphorus, which the U.S. also uses, or when it uses cluster munitions (in Lebanon, not Gaza), which the U.S. happily exported to Ukraine to help it defend against Russia’s attack. Apparently, Jewish munitions have special properties that make them evil.
Every country is free to choose its capital city, except Israel. Even Israel’s greatest ally, the United States, only recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in 2017, and many countries still refuse to do so. No one tells the UK that London is not its capital. No Jews, you see.
Thou shalt not displace civilians fleeing war.
The Geneva Convention requires that civilians be allowed to flee war zones, which is why Ukrainians could flee to Poland, Syrians to Turkey, and Afghans to anywhere that was not Afghanistan.
Yet, when Israel urges Gazan civilians to evacuate — warning them early and giving them maps of where to go — the Jewish state is accused of ethnic cleansing and genocide.
While Israel gets castigated, neighboring Egypt gets a free pass for violating international humanitarian law by not letting Palestinians in to seek refuge. Imagine a house on fire, the back door locked from outside, and you blaming the firefighter — and you will have the idea.
Solve everything, right now.
Hamas attacks Israel, the Jewish state fights back, and the world demands Israel solve the entire Israeli-Palestinian conflict while it is at it. Oh, yes, and make peace with the Palestinian Authority, even though it has not held an election in about a billion years.
No one demanded that Ukraine negotiate with Russia while dodging missiles. Only Israel is asked to engage in war, diplomacy, post-conflict rebuilding, and adhere to biased UN resolutions all at once.
Self-Defense
Every country has a right to self-defense and a responsibility to protect its citizens. Foreign leaders maintain this is true of Israel, but they do not act like it — and there is no evidence that they believe it. Only when Israel defends itself does the international community start measuring civilian casualties, questioning its intentions, and demanding restraint.
When France kills terrorists in Mali, it is self-defense, and civilian casualties are collateral damage. When Israel hits Hamas in Gaza, that collateral damage is now called genocide.
The United Nations of Jew-Haters
Only one country is a permanent agenda item at the UN Human Rights Council, and you win nothing for guessing correctly that it is Israel — because, well, of course it is. It is called “Agenda Item 7,” which is the UN technical term for “Agenda: Destroy Israel.”
Between 2015 and 2020, Israel was condemned 112 times. Bashar al-Assad’s now deposed regime in Syria gassed his own people at the time and was condemned only eight times. Apparently, if you are a democracy, hold elections, and have a free press — but are Jewish — you are worse than Assad, who led the vilest of regimes.
Meanwhile, the UN General Assembly is an anti-Israel resolution factory. In 2022, it passed 15 resolutions against Israel, versus just 13 for all other countries combined.
Israel, a tiny nation of no more than 10 million people, attracted more ire from the UN than China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela combined. That is more than a double standard; it is a witch trial.
The Weaponization of International Institutions
The UN is not the only international body that is anti-Israel and, let us not kid ourselves, antisemitic. The UN’s kangaroo court, the International Criminal Court, issues arrest warrants for Israel’s leaders, but not for the leaders of regimes such as China or Iran.
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International publish one-sided reports built entirely on unverifiable or Hamas-fed data. When Jews are in the dock, the burden of proof becomes incredibly low.
Ceasefire now! So Hamas can regroup.
No nation in history has been asked to absorb a pogrom, watch its babies be burned alive, and then implement a ceasefire three days later. After 9/11, America went to war for two decades. After October 7th, Israel was told to stop after 72 hours (more or less). Western lawmakers who say they oppose terrorism demand that Israel let Hamas live to fight another day. That is abject surrender and moral cowardice.
Millions of refugees were resettled after World War Two relatively smoothly, while 750,000 Palestinian refugees got their own agency: the terror-infested United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). The Palestinians alone inherit refugee status for four generations in a logical, legal, and moral absurdity. The world has solved every other refugee crisis, except this one.
The reason for this is that stateless Palestinians are a useful weapon to wield against Israel. It keeps an 80-year-old grievance alive and allows Israel’s enemies to blame Israel for existing.
Peace is exclusively Israel’s responsibility.
It is axiomatic that it takes at least two parties to fight a war, and that therefore all sides bear some responsibility for bringing peace. Yet, when the world demands a ceasefire and does not get one, Israel gets the blame. It is almost as if the Hamas psychopaths are not holding hostages and did not start this war.
Excusing terrorism against Israel.
It is impossible to fathom, but even Hamas beheading babies, raping women, and burning families alive is not enough to get more than a few mealy-mouthed statements about the “cycle of violence” out of the so-called “pro-Palestinian” mob. Some even called it “resistance,” which speaks to their deep depravity.
No one said the Bataclan massacre was “contextual,” or that 9/11 was “complex.” These dismissals are reserved only for when Israelis are murdered in cold blood, when the world starts talking gibberish about “root causes.”
The Media Propagandists
The international media quotes Hamas data in 97 percent of coverage and Israeli data in just three percent of stories, according to The Henry Jackson Society think tank. As far as the media is concerned, Israel is guilty until proven innocent — and when that proof of innocence comes, the news media have moved on to reporting and legitimizing the next lie.
I am a career journalist and have held every job in a newsroom from copy boy to editor-in-chief, so I can say with confidence that anyone who believes most of the reporting on the Israel-Hamas war is a fool.
Boycotts, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS)
China interning millions of Muslims and Iran hanging gays do not spark a social movement to boycott everything from their goods to their academics and to divest from any investments. Yet, if Israel builds houses in Judea and Samaria (also known as the West Bank), suddenly every “progressive” in the Sociology Department starts demanding sanctions against Israel. Palestinians blowing things up is fine; Israel building things is not.
The BDS movement has nothing to do with justice; it is just an expression of the world’s pathological obsession with the Jewish state. There are no movements to boycott India over disputed Kashmir. It is a privilege reserved for Jews.
Religious and Ethical Double Standards
Israel is condemned for being an “ethnostate,” while no one demands Saudi Arabia stop being a Muslim state or India stop being a Hindu-majority one. Israel is accused of “apartheid” for having laws that preserve its Jewish character, while 22 Arab countries exist as ethnically and religiously defined states, many of which criminalize conversion to any other religion.
Settlement versus Occupation
Jewish settlements in the biblical heartland of Judea and Samaria loom in antisemites’ minds like something terrible, despite them merely being villages. There is no outrage about Turkish settlers in Northern Cyprus, Moroccan settlers in Western Sahara, or Chinese settlers in Tibet. Only Jewish homes are the problem.
Censorship and Campus Hysteria
Criticizing China’s internment of Uyghurs or Iran’s public executions can get you in trouble with the Left. However, criticizing Hamas or defending Israel is grounds for doxxing, harassment, and cancellation at major universities. Every ideology is allowed expression, except Zionism, which is treated as hate speech.
Israel, the Jew Among Nations, is judged not by the standards of war, or law, or morality, but by the standard of exception. Its self-defense is suspect. Its existence is conditional. Its victories are crimes. Its pain is downplayed. Its enemies are victims. It is antisemitism with a human-rights face to hide its true face, which is more like the face in Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.”
Remove the double standards and the fog clears. Israel is a nation like any other, with the same rights to defend itself, define itself, and exist in peace.
Iran’s Regime Is Plotting Its Comeback — Do Not Let It Happen by Majid Rafizadeh
August 9, 2025
- Iran’s regime is built on the belief that it must export its revolutionary Islamist vision, overthrow secular governments, and unify the Muslim world under a single Shiite Islamist state. This project is its purpose. It is what gives the Islamic Republic of Iran its identity. Its constitution enshrines that vision, and its institutions — from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to its intelligence services — are structured around advancing this goal.
- A regime built on these foundations does not abandon its mission when it suffers setbacks. It adapts, regroups and strikes again when the world is distracted or divided. It is important not misread its current weakness as evidence of defeat.
- This danger is not limited to the Middle East. It is now reaching deep into Europe and North America. Recently, the United States, joined by thirteen NATO members and Austria, issued a joint statement accusing Iran of carrying out a growing number of plots on Western soil…. The goal is clear: to silence critics, spread fear and expand Iran’s ability to operate with impunity on foreign soil.
- Iran is not a normal country acting in pursuit of its people’s national interest. It is a fundamentalist theocratic regime committed to conquest. It thrives on conflict. Every dollar that flows into its coffers is a dollar that funds terrorism. Every embassy it maintains abroad is a potential command post for espionage and assassination. Every day the West relaxes its vigilance is a day the Iranian regime uses to regroup and retaliate. That is why the international community must stay united and focused — not just on holding Iran to account for past behavior, but on thwarting its future plots.
- Iran must not be allowed to rearm under this regime. It must not be allowed to continue its campaign of terror. This objective means keeping “maximum pressure” in place. It means cutting off Iran’s oil exports. It means denying it access to the global economy. It means shutting down its diplomatic outposts, which serve as centers of espionage. It means reimposing UN sanctions and enforcing them without compromise.
- The world cannot afford another mirage of Iranian “reform” or “moderation.” Iran is rebuilding its war machine. The mission to stop it must continue, relentlessly and without apology.
Iran’s regime is built on the belief that it must export its revolutionary Islamist vision, overthrow secular governments, and unify the Muslim world under a single Shiite Islamist state. Its constitution enshrines that vision, and its institutions are structured around advancing this goal. Pictured: Khamenei gives a speech on November 1, 2023, televised on Iran’s Channel 1. (Image source: MEMRI)
The Iranian regime does not think in terms of four-year election cycles or short-term political wins. It thinks in decades and acts on long-term strategic objectives. Its leadership, unelected, is essentially permanent. Iran is ruled by a Supreme Leader, who occupies the office for life, and by a military and clerical elite who are driven not by pragmatism but by an Islamist revolutionary ideology.
Over the past 46 years, the Islamic Republic of Iran has become a primary source of instability in the Middle East, a hub of global terrorism, and a headache for Western democracies. The Iranian regime’s survival has been the result of relentless ideological focus, brutal repression, and an ability to exploit the weaknesses and short-term thinking of its adversaries.
Recently, the regime suffered a significant blow. Israeli and American strikes hit Iran’s nuclear infrastructure and proxy leadership networks with devastating precision. Iran’s leadership is bruised and its capabilities degraded, but this circumstance should not lull us into a false sense of security.
The damage, while significant, is not permanent. The West must resist the temptation to see this as the beginning of the end for Iran’s radical regime. Rather than force the mullahs into submission, the damage is likely to fuel a desire for revenge. The regime responds to perceived humiliations with long-term, carefully-planned vengeance. This revenge may not come tomorrow or next month — it will be calculated, methodical and likely deadlier than anything seen before, including the murderous October 7, 2023 Hamas invasion of Israel, the downing of civilian airliners, or the murder of hundreds of U.S. soldiers by Iran-backed militias in Lebanon, Syria or Iraq.
To believe that the Iranian regime has learned its lesson is to engage in wishful thinking — just a Western psychological projection that mistakes tactical restraint for ideological reform. Iran’s regime is built on the belief that it must export its revolutionary Islamist vision, overthrow secular governments, and unify the Muslim world under a single Shiite Islamist state. This project is its purpose. It is what gives the Islamic Republic of Iran its identity. Its constitution enshrines that vision, and its institutions — from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to its intelligence services — are structured around advancing this goal.
A regime built on these foundations does not abandon its mission when it suffers setbacks. It adapts, regroups and strikes again when the world is distracted or divided. It is important not misread its current weakness as evidence of defeat. It is more likely a prelude to escalation.
This danger is not limited to the Middle East. It is now reaching deep into Europe and North America. Recently, the United States, joined by thirteen NATO members and Austria, issued a joint statement accusing Iran of carrying out a growing number of plots on Western soil. The statement condemned Iran’s intelligence agencies for attempting to kill, kidnap and harass individuals in Europe and North America, in direct violation of national sovereignty. The statement warned that Iranian operatives are cooperating with transnational criminal organizations to carry out acts of violence and intimidation. The targets are not only Iranian dissidents and exiled political activists, but also journalists, Jewish citizens, and even former and current officials. The goal is clear: to silence critics, spread fear and expand Iran’s ability to operate with impunity on foreign soil.
The Iranian regime’s growing campaign of terror is a sharp reminder that it does not recognize limits — not national borders, not international law, and not diplomacy. The regime continues to run its embassies and consulates abroad like outposts for intelligence operations. Its diplomats, in many instances, are nothing more than agents facilitating the regime’s foreign operations. Those undoubtedly include tracking and monitoring dissidents, plotting assassinations, and organizing campaigns of propaganda and money-laundering. Western intelligence agencies have already thwarted countless plots in countries such as France. Each successful disruption, however, is also a signal of the scale of the threat. If even a fraction of these plots were to succeed, the consequences would be devastating. This is no time to become complacent.
In response to the growing threat, under the leadership of President Donald J. Trump, the United States has rightly reimposed and expanded its “maximum pressure” campaign: sweeping new sanctions aimed at crippling the Iran’s financial and military capabilities. One of the most significant moves came on July 30, 2025, when the U.S. Treasury imposed the largest single package of sanctions against Iran since 2018. This round of sanctions targeted more than 115 vessels, companies and individuals, involved in an elaborate oil-smuggling network run by Mohammad Hossein Shamkhani, a senior regime insider. That network has played a key role in exporting oil to China and laundering billions of dollars back to Tehran— funds that are then used to fund the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and other terrorists and proxy militias across the region.
The effort to bring Iran’s oil exports down to zero must continue with full force. The regime’s lifeline is oil; China remains its most important customer. While it may be difficult to get Beijing to cooperate fully, targeted diplomatic and economic pressure on Chinese firms and shipping companies, and especially secondary sanctions on countries that do business with them, can significantly curtail the flow of Iranian crude. The Trump administration proved during its first term that when sanctions are enforced strictly and secondary sanctions used effectively, even countries such as China will reduce their purchases. What is needed now is the political will to deny Iran access to global energy markets, seize illicit oil shipments, and penalize any country or company that facilitates Iran’s oil exports.
Europe, too, has a critical role to play. European countries have long maintained diplomatic and economic relations with Iran, which uses its embassies as command centers for espionage and terrorism. If Europe is serious about defending its citizens and its sovereignty, it needs finally to take decisive action. This means suspending diplomatic relations, expelling Iranian diplomats, and shutting down all front organizations tied to the Iran. It also means ending trade: it only benefits Iran’s military and intelligence sectors.
One of the most important tools for the international community is the United Nations mechanism of “snapback” sanctions. That provision, embedded in the original 2015 “nuclear deal” (JCPOA), allows for the automatic reimposition of all UN sanctions if Iran is found to be in violation of its commitments. This mechanism is set to expire on October 18, 2025, and Iran is racing to outlast the deadline. If snapback sanctions are not reimposed now, Iran will have succeeded in outmaneuvering the international community once again. European powers must act by triggering the mechanism.
Iran is not a normal country acting in pursuit of its people’s national interest. It is a fundamentalist theocratic regime committed to conquest. It thrives on conflict. Every dollar that flows into its coffers is a dollar that funds terrorism. Every embassy it maintains abroad is a potential command post for espionage and assassination. Every day the West relaxes its vigilance is a day the Iranian regime uses to regroup and retaliate. That is why the international community must stay united and focused — not just on holding Iran to account for past behavior, but on thwarting its future plots.
Iran must not be allowed to rearm under this regime. It must not be allowed to continue its campaign of terror. This objective means keeping “maximum pressure” in place. It means cutting off Iran’s oil exports. It means denying it access to the global economy. It means shutting down its diplomatic outposts, which serve as centers of espionage. It means reimposing UN sanctions and enforcing them without compromise.
The world cannot afford another mirage of Iranian “reform” or “moderation.” Iran is rebuilding its war machine. The mission to stop it must continue, relentlessly and without apology.
Dr. Majid Rafizadeh, is a political scientist, Harvard-educated analyst, and board member of Harvard International Review. He has authored several books on the US foreign policy. He can be reached at dr.rafizadeh@post.harvard.edu
