Iran – The Importance of Ideology in the Issues of our Times
Everything You Need to Know about the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Supreme Leader of Iran – Fox News June 19, 2025
"Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s rule has been marked by unrelenting brutality and repression, both within Iran and beyond its borders. Under his direct command, the regime has executed hundreds of prisoners in just the past year, including women, and continues to hold the world record for executions and torture.”
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What Comes Next for Iran? David Frum – The Atlantic
On this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum urges an end to wishful thinking about Iran, and a focus instead on the regime’s threatening words and murderous actions.
Then David is joined by the Carnegie Endowment scholar Karim Sadjadpour for an urgent conversation about the internal decay of Iran’s theocracy. They discuss the survival instincts of Supreme Leader Ali Ayatollah Khamenei, the regime’s obsession with martyrdom and repression, the true cost of the Islamic Republic’s nuclear ambitions, and the disconnect between the revolutionary slogans of the state and the aspirations of Iranian society.
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In On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization, Douglas Murray documents the atrocities of Hamas at the time of the October 7, 2023 invasion of Israel. The following are excerpts from a recent book review by Peter Berkowiz.
On Oct. 8, 2023, Murray attended a hastily arranged demonstration in New York City’s Times Square. “But it was not a protest against the horrors of the previous day,” writes Murray. “It was not a protest against the terrorists of Hamas. It was instead a protest of the State of Israel and the citizens of the world’s only Jewish state.” He encountered banners and signs adorned with slogans – subsequently made familiar by student encampments at America’s elite campuses – affirming Hamas’ genocidal intentions and extending the war against Israel to the West: “From the River to the Sea,” “Resistance Is Justified,” “Resistance Is Not Terrorism,” “Fight White Supremacy,” “Long Live the Intifada,” and “By Any Means Necessary.”
In Hamas, Murray observes, Israel faces a distinctively evil enemy. The jihadists’ atrocities were “something uncommon even in the long history of violence,” he argues. Whereas the Nazis hid their extermination of the Jews, “the terrorists of October 7 did what they did with such relish,” writes Murray. “Not just the endless shouting of their war cries. Or the visible glee you could see in their faces and hear in their voices. It was the fact that all of this gave them such intense joy. And that they were proud of their actions.”
New York, where the British-born Murray makes his home, was not an exception. In numerous European cities huge crowds celebrated the mass slaughter of Jews. Yet, he ruefully notes, “there was not a single major protest against Hamas in any Western city.”
In his book Murray also notes that “the governments of all these countries had been funding the Palestinians in Gaza for years. They had given billions of dollars in foreign aid direct to the Hamas government there, through the UN organizations and many others. This money had been used by Hamas’s leaders to enrich themselves (the group’s leaders became billionaires) or to build the infrastructure of terror inside Gaza that allowed the group to carry out the October 7 attack, steal Israelis, and hold them hostage inside Gaza.”
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Rubio Should Build on the Commission on Unalienable Rights. Real Clear Politics – Peter Berkowitz on the Commission for Human Rights
The work of the Commission on Unalienable Rights, which then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo created in 2019, provides the Trump administration and Secretary of State Marco Rubio in particular an excellent opportunity to reaffirm the traditional American understanding of universal rights. Moreover, the commission’s 2020 breakthrough with Indonesia’s Nahdlatul Ulama, the world’s largest independent Muslim organization with a membership of some 100 million, offers a model for orienting U.S. partnerships and friendships around a shared commitment to the basic rights and fundamental freedoms that give expression to the dignity of the individual. Too little known in the West, NU promotes a form of Islam that embraces toleration and abjures the use of religion as a pretext for violence. The organization remains eager to work with the United States in defense of the rights shared by all human beings.