If Europe and the United States get serious about sanctions enforcement, the Iranian regime could find itself without the energy know-how to keep its critical oil and natural gas sectors running. …

The Iranian regime claims it can withstand energy sanctions even though it imports 30 percent of its gasoline. But its much-ballyhooed countermeasures, including the expansion of its refinery capacity, and the introduction of flex-fuel cars, are exaggerated. The regime also plans to cut gasoline subsidies which could double or triple already high inflation rates. …

مقالات متعلقة :

• Hamas and Iran Are Responsible for the Blood of the Victims in Gaza
• From the Arab invasion to the Arab spring
• The Two Futures of the Arab World
• Le Hamas et l'Iran sont responsables du sang des victimes à Gaza
• The Struggle of Abbasids against Arab Tribes in Egypt
• The Interview of Dr. A. S. Mansour with Al-Arab Newspaper
• My speech in the University (UEA) 25/11/2016
• My Speech in city council in Norwich on 13/09
• The Ability to Renounce: You Either Worship God Alone or Be a Slave to your Fancies

What should be particularly troubling for Tehran are two changes that occurred during the conference committee: the first, Congress eliminated one sentence in the Iran Sanctions Act which for fourteen years permitted companies providing technology, goods and services to the Iranian oil and natural gas sectors to escape U.S. sanctions; and the second, Congress added additional language to the legislation which could bar foreign companies that do business with the U.S. from entering into joint ventures, partnerships and investments with the Iranian regime for foreign energy projects outside Iran.

With these tweaks to the bill, U.S. sanctions laws could now strike a blow at the heart of Iran’s energy wealth.

The world's most open secret is that the Arab countries of the Middle East fear a nuclear Iran as much, and perhaps more, than Israel does. The surprise is when an official dares to speak this truth in public, which is why the comments this week by United Arab Emirates Ambassador to the U.S. Yousef Al-Otaiba are worth noting. …

"There are many countries in the region who, if they lack the assurance the U.S. is willing to confront Iran, they will start running for cover towards Iran." He also tossed some skepticism at the idea, fashionable in Washington, that Iran can be deterred or contained if it gets a bomb. That's hardly credible if the West fails to stop Iran from becoming a nuclear power after so many declarations that such an outcome was unacceptable.

[T]he U.A.E. foreign ministry dismissed as "inaccurate" a report by the Washington Times that Mr. Otaiba had gone further on the sidelines of the same gabfest and said he preferred a resort to military action to "living with a nuclear Iran." That comment may have been too blunt for the U.A.E. to admit to …

But Mr. Otaiba's other comments leave no doubt what he and most Arab officials think about the prospect of a nuclear revolutionary Shiite state. They desperately want someone, and that means the U.S. or Israel, to stop it, using force if need be.

for dismissing UN sanctions and urged the government to brief people about the impact of the measures.

"To say that this resolution is like a 'used hankie' will not ease the hardships arising from demagogic policies, as it is clear to me that this resolution will affect our nation's security and economy," Mousavi said in a direct attack on Ahmadinejad. …

Meanwhile, atomic chief Ali Akbar Salehi acknowledged on Wednesday for the first time that the sanctions "may slow down" Tehran's nuclear programme and could pose difficulties for its main uranium enrichment work.

"One can't say sanctions are ineffective," ISNA news agency quoted Salehi as saying.

expose Tehran’s nuclear network, impede Iran’s energy supply chain, lay groundwork for future U.S. and international sanctions, and provide Europe with key data to hinder Iran’s drive for nuclear weapons.

slamming the Jewish state for its interception of a flotilla heading for Gaza in open violation of Israel’s naval blockade. …

The Bundestag resolution is the first post-Holocaust legislative act in the Federal Republic to apply disparate treatment to Israel, and it comes at a time when Iran and its subsidiaries Hamas and Hezbollah are determined to obliterate the Jewish state. Given the so-called German-Israeli special relationship based on Israel's security needs being integral to the interests of the Federal Republic, a detached, objective observer could interpret the resolution as a brazen act of betraying Israel's national security.

German parliamentary resolutions targeting Hamas rocket fire (to date, over 8000 have been shot into Israel) in recent years are conspicuously missing from the orders of business list. Predictably, the German parliament has not issued a resolution condemning the rearming of Hezbollah, and its accumulation of an arsenal of over 40,000 rockets and missiles since the end of the second war in Lebanon in 2006. Wasn't Germany supposed to block the delivery of weapons to Hezbollah as part of the cease-fire agreement and its participation in the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon?

It's good to see Mr. Obama finally treating a key American ally as something other than a pariah. The President even went one better, calling America's bond with Israel "unbreakable," cautioning Palestinians to avoid seeking "opportunities to embarrass Israel," and rejecting suggestions that there had ever been any strain in his relationship with his Israeli counterpart. …

But it's difficult to see what progress can be made so long as Palestinians continue to insist on the "right of return" for Palestinian refugees to Israel, which contravenes the point of a two-state solution and would mean the demographic annihilation of the Jewish state. Mr. Obama could help if he continues to make it clear as President -- as he did as a candidate -- that there is no such right.

Overhanging all of this is the threat of a nuclear Iran, a country sworn to Israel's destruction if it can acquire the means to accomplish it. We find it hard to imagine how Israel could live alongside a Palestinian state if that state were destined to become, under the leadership of Hamas, the tip of an Iranian nuclear spear. …

Following Mr. Netanyahu's disastrous meeting with Mr. Obama earlier this year, we noted the Administration's habit of squeezing America's friends while coddling its enemies. It's good to see at least one of those friends no longer getting the squeeze. Now Mr. Obama has to get serious about the enemies.

warm reception, the two leaders have two different agendas that may clash in the months ahead.

Israel cannot return to the peace process as it is currently configured. The Israelis have been down that road before, and they have paid for misfired U.S. diplomacy in blood.

“After six Israeli prime ministers and three U.S. presidents failed at the peace process,” Gold says, “you’d think people would stop and say, ‘Let’s think about this, maybe a reassessment is needed.’ ” Instead, he continues, the default reaction is to pick up the shattered relics of Oslo, an approach that tends to ignore the Second Intifada and what he has noted was a 500-percent increase in rocket attacks from Gaza after Israel’s 2005 withdrawal. “In think-tank circles it’s said that we all know what the final settlement looks like,” he says. “But this is binding Israel to a legacy of failed negotiations.

she Tweeted some positive comments about Hezbollah's favorite cleric, Mohammed Hossein Fadlallah.

Did anyone have any doubts about Ms. Nasr's sympathies?

The Western press delights in rattling the bourgeois sensibilities of its audience by showing the multifaceted aspects of Hezbollah -- it’s not just a militia with an appetite for slaughtering Jews, it’s also a social welfare outfit that provides educational opportunities! -- and even collaborates with the Party of God by publishing doctored photographs of Israeli “war crimes.” The op-ed pages of America’s dailies are replete with articles promoting Hezbollah’s “pragmatism” and “moderation” (which also happens to be the position of the president’s counter-terrorism czar John Brennan, and a recent CENTCOM analytical exercise), while reported pieces from Lebanon pass along Party of God press releases as objective analysis. If every U.S. journalist who quoted Hezbollah mouthpiece Amal Saad Ghorayeb as a respected “scholar” was fired, the bars of East Beirut would lose 25 percent of their business.

In Beirut, it’s well understood that the U.S. press corps is at least deftly managed by Hezbollah and its pro-Syrian lapdogs, if not actively in the party’s corner. … The only people who don’t understand how the game is played in Lebanon are American media consumers, because the foreign desk editors back in the U.S. surely know what’s up. …

This infatuation with Hezbollah has been going on for years, and it’s not just because the party established a formidable style of press criticism by kidnapping journalists back in the ’80s. The U.S. media actually likes Hezbollah -- it is an impressive thing, after all, to be able to kill your enemies -- whether they are Jews or fellow Lebanese -- whereas liberalism, non-violent resistance, rule of law, and opposition to political murder lacks sex appeal. …

Who knows that Octavia Nasr really thinks about Fadlallah, but it’s hard to escape the conclusion that she fell prey to minority politics, twice over. As a Christian journalist working in a Muslim majority region, she imagined her profession of respect for a theorist of terror would win her bona fides as an “objective” reporter. And as an Arab she’s taking the fall for a conviction held by virtually all of her Western professional peers.

In a condolence telegram quoted in the official [Palestinian Authority] daily newspaper, Abbas referred to Muhammad Daoud Oudeh, who died Saturday, as "a wonderful brother, companion, tough and stubborn, relentless fighter," and described him as "one of the prominent leaders of the Fatah movement." …

On Sept. 5, 1972, eight members of the Palestinian terror organization Black September broke into the athletes' village at the Munich Olympics. They kidnapped and ultimately murdered 11 Israeli athletes and coaches. Oudeh, also known as Abu Daoud, planned the attack. He never expressed remorse for his killings. …

The pride that PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and the Fatah movement take in Palestinian terrorists who have killed Israeli civilians is part of a pattern. Palestinian Media Watch has reported that Abbas himself has expressed pride in training Hezbollah terrorists, sent greetings to some of the worst Palestinian terrorists in Israeli prisons and funded a computer center named after Dalal Mughrabi, who led the worst terror attack in Israel's history, in which 37 civilians were killed. See these examples and others with link to PMW's website below.

missile defense, our protection from nuclear-proliferating rogue states such as Iran and North Korea. Its preamble links strategic defense with strategic arsenal. It explicitly forbids the United States from converting intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) silos into missile defense sites. And Russia has expressly reserved the right to walk away from the treaty if it believes that the United States has significantly increased its missile defense capability. …

New START does something the American public would never countenance and the Senate should never permit: It jeopardizes our missile defense system. …

Whatever the reason for the treaty's failings, it must not be ratified: The security of the United States is at stake. The only responsible course is for the Senate to demand and scrutinize the full diplomatic record underlying the treaty. Then it must insist that any linkage between the treaty and our missile defense system be eliminated. In a world where nuclear weapons are proliferating, America's missile defense shield must not be compromised. As currently drafted, New START is a non-starter.

the treaty's verification provisions are adequate. Second, the treaty's failure to take into account Russia's enormous tactical nuclear weapons arsenal (more than 10 times larger than that of the U.S.) and the limitations it places on U.S. conventional global strike capabilities are serious flaws. Third, the treaty links missile defense to strategic arms reduction -- a linkage that had been wisely broken by the Bush administration.

The administration accepted treaty language that will help the Russians argue that the U.S. should cut back development of defenses against ballistic missiles. This is worrisome less because of the explicit limitations on missile defense than because Mr. Obama has repeatedly shown weak support for U.S. missile defense. For this reason and others, senators have asked the administration to open up the negotiating record. They rightly want to understand what concessions the administration made and received.

to pass a new constitution. A controversy has broken out about whether it should contain a provision recognizing Islamic courts. …

[A] Washington Post piece notes that

Christian leaders say they fear that if the courts are enshrined in the constitution, "sooner or later, you will find an enclave where they will say we are predominantly Muslim and Islamic laws rule here," said Oliver Kisaka, deputy general secretary of the National Council of Churches of Kenya. "You have created space for the creation of a nation within a nation."

As evidence, the Christian leaders point to an incident in April in which a group of Muslim clerics in the northeastern town of Mandera, near the Somalia border, imposed a ban on public broadcasts of films and soccer ahead of the World Cup.

the courts would stem Islamic radicalism in Kenya. Judges, not mosque imams, would regulate the uses of sharia law. Muslims would feel a deeper sense of national identity.

Kadhis courts are an entity that binds "Muslims to the Kenyan state," said Hassan Ole Naado, head of the Kenyan Muslim Youth Alliance. "It is for the best interests of Kenya to have such courts."

a 2,500-strong student union that supports Sweden's leading Moderate Party … showed Israel some welcome support by offering to load and unload Israeli cargo [that the Swedish dockworkers union would not]. The students slammed the longshoremen in a press release and declared that "It is Hamas's fault that people are suffering in Gaza, not Israel's." …

Their statement contains more clarity on Palestinian-Israeli relations than most anything we've heard lately from Europe's grown-ups. Stockholm has been particularly vociferous in denouncing Israel's efforts to defend itself, with Swedish Foreign Minister and Moderate Party elder statesman Carl Bildt having called for an investigation into Israel, and telling the Swedish press that Israel's Palestinian policy is "catastrophic" and "leads to one problem after another." All of which is pro-Israel compared to statements from Mr. Bildt's colleagues on the left. ...

Gustaf Dymov, 24, who chairs the contrarian student union, …[says that] what outrages him the most: "It's very obvious [the dockworkers] did this not out of a will to support the Palestinians but to show hatred toward Israel." …

So Mr. Dymov and his compatriots decided to show the love: "We view this as a conflict between Israel, a democratic and free country that deserves our support; and Hamas, a terror organization that has an explicit aim to destroy and kill other people," he tells us.

You are not supposed to point out that Nazi inspirations have visibly taken root among present-day Islamists, notably in regard to the demonic nature of Jewish conspiracies and the virtues of genocide.

And you are not supposed to mention that, by inducing a variety of journalists and intellectuals to maintain a discreet and respectful silence on these awkward matters, the Islamist preachers and ideologues have succeeded in imposing on the rest of us their own categories of analysis.