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Showing posts from November, 2021

Tehran in Meltdown as Israel Decapitates Hamas and Hezbollah

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  By Struan Stevenson Conflagration engulfs the Middle East, with the Israel-Hamas war having gone on for more than a year now, and many Israeli hostages are still being held in deplorable conditions by Hamas terrorists. In Northern Israel, constant missile and rocket attacks by Hezbollah led to the mass evacuation of more than 70,000 Israelis from their homes in 2024 and to the inevitable military retaliation by the Israel Defense Forces, as they crossed the border into Southern Lebanon. Israeli missiles are raining down on key Hezbollah targets in Beirut. The assassination of Hezbollah’s terrorist leader Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut, a seismic event, shattered his close friend and ally Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader and Hezbollah’s main sponsor. Nasrallah’s successor, Hashem Saffieddine, was also killed in an Israeli airstrike in Beirut within hours of being nominated for the Hezbollah leadership role and before the funeral of his predecessor had even taken place. Es...
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At Iran Nuclear Talks, European Negotiator’s Optimism Is Baseless

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 Written by Alejo Vidal Quadras Following the latest round of informal talks in Vienna, European negotiators expressed  optimism  about the prospect of coaxing Iran back into the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. The coordinating envoy for the European Union told reporters on Wednesday that he anticipates the sixth round of talks will be the last. But American officials received that statement with skepticism and said that they, too, anticipate a resolution, but expect it to require much more back-and-forth among the seven parties to the agreement. Prospects for restoring the status quo seemed to emerge last January with the presidential transition in the US, but the US has so far resisted European pressure to simply withdraw all the conditions re-imposed or newly imposed by its predecessor, in absence of new concessions from the Iranian regime. That regime, meanwhile, has insisted upon precisely this outcome and has refused all appeals for a compromise agreement in which some sanc...
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Resuming nuclear deal would betray Iran's people

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By Struan Stevenson Nov. 29 (UPI) — Talks aimed at raising the defunct Iranian nuclear deal from the dead resumed in Vienna on Monday. In a bid to secure his foreign policy presidential legacy,  Barack Obama  pushed through the  Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action  nuclear deal, which was signed by the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, China and Russia in Vienna on July 14, 2015. It was widely promoted by the United States and European Union officials as a foreign policy breakthrough. In fact, the deal was a flagrant act of appeasement of the theocratic regime, lifting sanctions and releasing over $150 billion in frozen assets. Ludicrously, Obama even agreed to a demand that military sites inside Iran would be exempt from routine inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency, despite intelligence that indicated much of the nuclear weapons and missile program was being developed in these top-secret military sites. The JCPOA provided a windfal...
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Full Accounting of Iran’s Worst Crime against Humanity Is More Important than Ever

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 Written by Mahmoud Royaei After narrowly surviving Iran’s massacre of political prisoners in 1988, I spent years investigating the details of those crimes against humanity, and eventually published a series of  five books  detailing its planning, scale, and lasting impact. For all the specific information I acquired from fellow eyewitnesses and leaked documents, my research also revealed that there is a great deal that we do not yet know about the massacre, and might never know until after the regime responsible for it has been overthrown. Most current estimates for the death toll from the 1988 massacre stand at around 30,000. But this must be understood as the floor, not the ceiling of a possible final estimate. Activists arrived at that figure by carefully analyzing prisoner intake and transfer records from the era, and by speaking with survivors as well as with the relatives of many who went missing during the summer of 1988. However, regime authorities deliberately u...
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Letter of World Athletes to the UNSG Regarding the Massacre of Iranian Athletes in 1988

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 Written by Shamsi Saadati In a letter to the United Nations Secretary-General, more than 100 Iranian athletes, including world champions, participants in the Olympics, and national teams in football, wrestling, karate, judo, kung fu, taekwondo, gymnastics, sailing, weightlifting Basketball, marathon, athletics, boxing, volleyball, fencing, shooting, tennis and ping pong, drew his attention to the massacre of over  30,000 political prisoners  in 1988. In their letter, they underlined how the regime targeted Iranian athletes. “Silence and inaction in the face of genocide and crimes against humanity that took place at the end of the twentieth century is an encouragement to continue and intensify the crime,” their letter reads, pointing to the systematic impunity in Iran and calls for an international inquiry into the 1988 massacre. Below is the full text of their letter:    Your Excellency António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations, Thirty-three yea...
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Hamid Noury’s Ineffectual Defense Sets Stage for Prosecution of Iran’s Raisi

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 Written by Shamsi Saadati This past week, a district court in Stockholm held  three sessions  in which Hamid Noury, a former Iranian prison official, spoke in his own defense. Noury was arrested upon traveling to Sweden in 2019 and was later indicted for war crimes and mass murder based on evidence that he participated in a massacre of political prisoners during the  summer of 1988 . Since proceedings in his case  began  in August, the court has heard from more than 20 eyewitnesses to that crime against humanity, including seven who reside in Albania at a compound established by the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran  (PMOI/MEK) .   Prosecutors requested that the trial be  temporarily relocated  to Albania earlier in November, in consideration of that testimony’s importance. The MEK is the leading voice for a democratic alternative to Iran’s theocratic dictatorship, and in 1988 it was the main target of the nationwide mas...
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Cracks appear in Iranian regime’s cover-up of its crimes

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  By Dr. Majid Rafizadeh The chief of the UN’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, this week left Iran without reaching a deal on an inspections regime. But the Islamic Republic is not only covering up its nuclear weapons ambitions — for more than three decades, the extremist theocracy has tried to cover up one of its most serious crimes against humanity. In what became known as the 1988 massacre, the Tehran regime carried out the systematic killing of thousands of dissidents and opposition activists. Ultimately, an estimated 30,000 people lost their lives in the brutal massacre. But a court in Sweden now appears to be ending the regime’s cover-up. In November 2019, the Swedish authorities arrested a man, Hamid Noury, who is believed to have been involved in the 1988 massacre. In July, after 21 months of investigation, prosecutors at Stockholm District Court issued an indictment against him. His trial began the following month and a verdict is expected in Apri...
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