Trump 'Monitoring the Situation in Iran'

"The truth is only President Trump knows what he's going to do and a very, very small team of advisers are read into his thinking on that."

"He continues to closely monitor the situation on the ground in Iran."

"All options remain on the table." 

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt 

 

"President Trump is a man of action, not endless talk like we see at the United Nations."

"He has made it clear all options are on the table to stop the slaughter."

Mike Waltz, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations

At least 52 prisoners were executed in Iran based on prior non-political convictions during a period of nationwide protests and an ongoing internet shutdown.  Iran International

 

Last June Leavitt had read a message to reporters saying it had come "directly from the president". Trump himself would decide, he maintained, whether to strike Iran "within the next two weeks"; this at a time when Israel was carrying out strikes on Iran, and the president was weighing whether he would order the U.S. military to become involved. Before two days elapsed B-2 bombers were ordered to carry out strikes on Iranian nuclear sites. 

 

"It might be that they're delaying things and using the time for getting that posture correct", ventured Jeremy Shapiro, research director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, on the theory that the American president might have been concerned over the current U.S. force posture in the Middle East spurring him to hesitate. No U.S. aircraft carriers, an asset during a military operation in the region were available having been deployed to an operation focused on Venezuela.

 

The perceived shifting tone of U.S. President Donald Trump leaning away from his threats to attack Iran following his continued warning issuing warnings against Tehran for its brutal crackdown on Iranians mounting a countrywide protest against the oppressive Islamist Republic's theocratic regime saw a drop in oil prices as markets reacted to the uncertainty of this mercurial president's changeable sentiments.

 

The intervention of top officials from Egypt, Oman, Saudi Arabia and Qatar warning that an American military intervention would have the effect of destabilizing the global economy as well as shaking an already volatile region moving it close to a total regional war appears to have had an effect on the president's decision-making. This is a Muslim Brotherhood reaction to the potential removal of the Islamist theocracy ruling Iran.  

 

Anti-government protesters demonstrate on January 8, in Tehran.   Getty Images

 

While Oman and Qatar are in full support of Iran, as Muslim Brotherhood-linked states, the Muslim Brotherhood has been officially proscribed in Egypt, where it was formed almost a century ago, as a fundamentalist Islamist group dedicated to strict Sharia and jihad by any means, and in Saudi Arabia as well it is outlawed, though it seems that the severe orthodoxy of totalitarian Islamism dictates the decision making in favour of the Muslim Brotherhood whose agenda the Islamic Republic of Iran represents a living example.

 

Qatar in particular, with its massive oil wealth, has bought respectability and recognition as a 'moderate' Muslim state in the United States. Its persuasive power lies in its massive financial investments there, in its universities where it has been able to influence academia to respect its agenda of portrayals of Islam as benign, not the Western values-destructive totalitarian threat it carries. President Trump admires the trappings of wealth and power and is not immune to appreciating those whose generosity benefits him personally.

 

Iranians took to the streets despite the danger they face from their despotic, oppressive government that has, over almost a half-century persecuted them through force of threats and state punishment from imprisonment, torture and a relentless death penalty. Despite Iran's authorities warning the population that taking part in mass protests against the government would be construed as grounds for capital punishment, Iranians kept turning out in their hundreds of thousands in cities across the nation, facing police violence.

 

Iran International

 

Estimates of the rising death count have reached well over 30,000 people. The wounded have overwhelmed hospitals and now reports emerge that the Basij are entering hospitals to take away and execute those wounded in the protests. As for families frantic to recover the bodies of their loved ones for burial, without the thousands of dollars demanded by the regime to release them, those families that cannot afford the price to redeem the corpses are left disconsolate in their grief. 

 

After having issued vehement threats to the Iranian regime for the rising death count, and promising Iranians that the U.S. military is prepared to rescue them,  Trump's assurances that "help is on its way", while urging Iranians to take over their country's institutions, abruptly declared information had been given him from "very important sources on the other side" that Iran  had put a halt to killing protesters and executions were no longer proceeding. No need, therefore, to intervene.

 

At the same time that Qatar, Oman, Egypt and Saudi Arabia persuaded Trump to stand down from his word to the Iranian people, they urged Iranian officials to end the visible repression of protesters, warning that continued Iranian responses or an action against the U.S. would significantly impact Iran. Through social media Trump repeated the speaking lines of those persuading him not to strike Iran: "This is good news, hopefully, it will continue!", he posted over the commutation of a death sentence for a young Iranian shopkeeper-protester.

 

Iran's response was to once more completely shut down the Internet connections across the nation.  And nor can cellphones be operational. No news in or out of the theocracy, other than what the regime may permit. No guarantees that the hunting down and slaughter of Iranians, disconsolate over their abandonment by the world at large and fearing now to emerge from their homes, is ongoing. This is what is meant by a pact with the devil some might compare to the 'art of the deal'. 

"[Thousands have been killed], some in an inhuman, savage manner."

"Those linked to Israel and the US caused massive damage and killed several thousand."

"We consider the US president criminal for the casualties, damages and slander he inflicted on the Iranian nation."

"[Iran considered President Trump to be a] criminal. [The US must be] held accountable [for recent unrest]."

"America's goal is to swallow Iran."

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei 

Iran's supreme leader has for the first time publicly acknowledged that thousands of people were killed during recent protests, blames the West. Iranian leader press office via Getty Images

 

Samidoun/aka/Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine

 

"We acknowledge that the community was shocked by the phrase ['Death to Canada'], and the burning of the Canadian flag that came after the march was concluded."

"Yet, we at Samidoun stand by this phrase as the call to action, that it is."

"We are not just fighting against the Zionist state, we are fighting against imperialism."

"We see it as our duty to escalate the resistance [Hamas's 'Al-Aqsa Flood when the terrorists slaughtered 1,200 Israelis on October 7, 2023, mass raping and mutilating Israeli girls and women, abducting 240 civilians into Gaza], here."

Samidoun statement

Videos circulated online, the unidentified masked woman led a crowd of hundreds at the Vancouver Art Gallery Monday night in chants of “death to Canada, death to the United States and death to Israel,” while some in the group burned Canadian flags. Photo by Jarryd Jäger/x.com

 

Samidoun has acted with impunity from its headquarters in Vancouver, from where it sends out statements to its regional groups abroad. While in Canada it has been busy organizing protests and violent demonstrations against Israel and threatening Canadian Jews, inciting its supporters to decry the existence of the Jewish State, and to chant 'Intifada', 'Long Live the Resistance'! and 'From the River to the Sea', as well as its involvement in the protest camps set up on university campuses throughout the country.

To all of these violent provocations there has been no response from the federal government, setting the tone for governments and police services throughout the country at every level. While the Jewish community suffered hordes of 'protesters' organizing to march through Jewish areas of the country to harass and threaten them, and Jewish community centres, parochial schools, synagogues and private Jewish-owned businesses have been threatened, graffitied, shot at, firebombed, authorities appear incapable of responding to the unlawful activities.

The Jewish community in Canada has been left to huddle for safety and security through their own devices, finding comfort in the company of others within the community suffering the same insecurity and trepidation over how far they will continue to be isolated, threatened and savaged by antisemitism that has found a comfortable niche in an otherwise-tolerant society. The Liberal government of prime minister Justin Trudeau expresses empathy and commits to no practical response to end the nightmare.

 

A video of Vancouver protesters burning a Canadian flag added to tensions on Parliament Hill as Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre blamed the government for a rise in antisemitism and was silenced in the House for accusing Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly of pandering to Hamas supporters. CBC

 

Samidoun had organized a mass rally in Vancouver on the anniversary of the October 7 bloody slaughter in southern Israel, The purpose, to commemorate the "Al-Aqsa Flood", the operation by thousands of terrorists to pillage, destroy, rape, mutilate and murder Israelis. "We are Hezbollah and we are Hamas", one speaker stated to the cheering crowd following which a chant of "death to Canada, death to the United States and death to Israel", sounded as a collective profanity, in echo of such declarations commonly heard in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Samidoun representatives handed out pamphlets at the rally that detailed the risks and benefits of "complex co-ordinated terrorist attacks" in pursuit of political gains. Following the rally Samidoun issued an official statement laying claim to the chant of 'death to Canada' as a reflection of its goal to destroy the "colonial, capitalist state of Canada". Images of a Vancouver SkyTrain station graffitied with "GLORY 2 AL-AQSA FLOOD" were posted on the Samdoun Hawra Vancouver Instagram account.

A caption honoured the "brave resistance fighters" who committed the October 7 pogrom, with the tribute stating: "autonomous activists in so-called 'Vancouver' took to the streets early this morning, graffitiing on skytrain stations, targeting complicit businesses, to remind residents that despite the lies of the Occupation and its Western allies", their opposition would prevail.

Calls to list Samidoun as a terrorist entity came from various sources, including Conservative Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre, citing the "death to Canada" chant while calling for the federal government to act. On October 10, the Dutch parliament voted to designate Samidoun a terrorist organization. Samidoun's activities organizing extremist anti-Israel events in Europe is performed through its Vancouver headquarters. Germany banned Samidoun last yer after a series of rallies celebrating the October 7 attacks that "showed an absolute lack of regard for human life in an especially abhorrent way". 

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre pointed out that Samidoun serves as a front for a listed Canadian terror group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Khaled Barakat, a top PFLP member founded Samidoun; its social media feeds circulate PFLP propaganda and organizes North American speaking opportunities for members of the PFLP. Samidoun's role since October 7 of last year has been to organize and coordinate hundreds of blockades, boycotts and demonstrations across Canada.

 

Samidoun banner with the slogan ”Long live October 7th." (Source: Telegram)

Now, finally, the federal government issued a statement on Tuesday designating Samidoun as the newest organization to be listed on Canada's terrorist file. Following hard on the heels of the United States making a similar statement of terrorist designation. Since Samidoun also has recognition by Revenue Canada as a legitimate charitable group, it can be assumed that status too will change. The group's headquarters in Vancouver, presumably will be disbanded, its principals exiled, its assets seized, and an investigation launched into the legitimacy status of its followers, quick to take up the chant "death to Canada".

That it was the "death to Canada" sentiments and the outrage of burning a Canadian flag after the torching of an Israeli flag that moved the government to action in the wake of newspaper editorials calling for the group's terror listing, along with that of the leader of the Parliamentary opposition; a one-time occasion revealing Samidoun's total democracy-destabilizing goal, and not its years of agitating against and threatening Jews in Canada, is in and of itself revelatory.

 

Dozens of protesters from the Samidoun organization are gathering in front of the Muelheim train station in Cologne, Germany, on April 15, 2023, to commemorate Palestinian Prisoners' Day (Ying Tang / NurPhoto via Getty Images)

"The listing of Samidoun as a terrorist entity under the Criminal Code sends a strong message that Canada will not tolerate this type of activity, and will do everything in its power to counter the ongoing threat to Canada’s national security and all people in Canada."

Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc 

"In Canada, any bank accounts that Samidoun has, or that organizers have, are almost certainly being frozen, probably closed, reported to FINTRAC, our financial intelligence unit, and there’s probably a flurry of suspicious transaction reports and mandatory reporting going in on anyone associated with this organization."

"This process has not been tested in Canadian courts. A lot of the reason for that is because we are designating, for the most part, foreign entities. This is one of the only cases where I’ve seen a direct Canadian tie and a direct Canadian leader … who will be directly affected by a terrorist listing."

"[No charges have been announced against anyone involved in Samidoun]. In the case of an organization like Samidoun, or really any listed terrorist entity, the question comes down to what the people are doing to support the organization."

"Just being a member of an organization is not a criminal offence in Canada. However, as soon as you cross the line into conducting any kind of support or sort of advancement activities that are fairly concrete, then you come very close to facilitation [of a terrorist activity] and some of those activities."

Jessica Davis, counterterrorism expert, Carleton University

A Slumbering World -- Oblivious to Threatening Conquest

"Following my urgent request, the UN Security Council will finally convene on Wednesday for the first time since the October 7 massacre, to hold an official discussion on the hostages."

"It is a disgrace that it has taken the Council 11 months and the brutal execution of six hostages by Hamas terrorists to finally convene this discussion."

Israeli UN Ambassador Danny Danon

"How we prayed to hug you, to see your smile."

"We hoped to see  you happy, surrounded by family and friends but  you were abandoned, day by day."

Nira Sarusi, mother of 27-year-old Almog, executed by Hamas

 

"We prayed. We wanted to believe this was not true."

"This is not how I imagined your end. I wanted you back alive."

"I apologize that we were not able to save you."

Mother of murdered 24-year-old Eden Yerushalmi

Hamas released a video of slain hostage Eden Yerushalmi before her death, giving a message directed at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. (credit: Screenshot/Hamas Telegram)

The great moral test of our times and the failure of national leaders of the Western democracies to fully wish to understand just who and what is threatening democracy is leading to a decay in civilizational norms. Not only are great numbers of Muslim faithful leaving their countries of origin to settle in North America and throughout Europe; with them is a growing corps of Islamists who inculcate in the Islamic diaspora their necessity to uproot democracy and replace it with Islamic Sharia, replete with Islamic laws and justice.

 

Since Islam is a religion of militant violent usurpation, one that is justified by the Koran and the hadiths to scorn all other religions that the Muslim faithful are duty- and faith-bound destined to overtake and in the process replace with Islam, jihad proceeds with the stealth of physical occupation in great numbers of the faithful infiltrating non-Muslim nations and with their strength of numbers influencing governments to give undue respect to the very ideology and politics of the religion whose paramount function is conquest, as it has been from its very inception.

 

The proxy militias of the Muslim world's greatest exponent of Islamist conquest are well schooled in the other type of jihad; violence in a death creed of domination and terror. The Islamic Republic of Iran has patterned its proxies to reflect Iran's aspiration of world conquest for their brand of Islam. Hamas, Hezbollah and Yemen's Houthis have dominated their own populations and reach out to expunge other religions in favour of their own. Their first target is the nation of Jews.

 

Indigenous to the Middle East and far exceeding the Arab populations surrounding them in authentic origins while vastly pre-dating Islam, Judaic ancestral heritage is indisputably original to the territory in which Israel has re-established itself as a Jewish state. In Islam, it is forbidden that any geographic area once consecrated to Islam through conflict and settlement be permitted to revert to its origins. 

 

Arab nations of the Middle East discovered through a series of wars imposed upon Israel, that it would not be dislodged from the patrimony of its heritage.

While they now are resigned to Israel's permanency and prepared to adjust their hostility accordingly replacing it with a cool cordiality, Islamist terrorist groups never will be prepared to lay away their hatred and their arms along with their barbaric death-cult fixation on the presence of Jews secure in their place of origin. There is simply no method by which reason and reality can replace the psychopathic fixation on destroying Israel and murdering Jews in the minds of those groups of Muslims whose hatred of Jews has been so well entrenched as to rule their lives.

 

A terrorist group that celebrates its death-cult psychosis as one through which pride and honour is achieved is committed to death and destruction; those of their own people, alongside those of the Jewish state, as a worthwhile sacrifice to achieve their ultimate goal. Their belief in the sacred concept of martyrdom for their cause of obliteration of the presence of Jews to be replaced by Muslims for whom Islam is the dominating force in their lives and throughout the world cannot be breached by appeals to the concept of human rights.

 

"On 7 October 2023, Hamas launched a devastating terrorist attack on Israel, killing almost 1,200 Israelis and seizing around 243 hostages. The scale of the attack was off the charts for a small state – the greatest one-day loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust – and the nature of the killings, which included the deliberate killing of children and old people, as well as mass sexual violence, seared itself into Israel’s consciousness.?

"In the months that followed, Israel waged a destructive campaign in Gaza, killing more than 34,000 people, including many children, in an attempt to destroy the terrorist group, putting all Palestinians in Gaza at grave risk of disease and starvation. The campaign continues, albeit at a slower pace than in its initial months."

Daniel Byman,  Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic & International Studies

And so, Hamas, that singular exponent of terror-central, following the sadistic savagery of its operatives committing mass murder of Israeli civilians, mutilation of girls and women in a frenzy of rape and desecration of humanity, abducted Jewish children, the elderly and infirm, girls and women, IDF soldiers, foreign farm workers from farming villages on the border between Israel and Gaza, to inflict on their helpless pawns the horrors of brutality no sane mind could conceive.

 

Embarking on a mission of psychological terror, the Hamas leadership led their operatives on a crazed campaign of inflicting anguish, pain and fear on the hostages, and conveying their plight through videos to their grieving families. Using those families' desperate fears for the recovery of their loved ones to manipulate them into defying their government which committed itself to the total annihilation of the terrorist threat against the state and its people. 

Haunting video posted on Telegram on Monday shows the six doomed Israeli hostages speaking before their murders. X

 

The excruciating infliction of suspense, the withholding of hope, the final contemptible punishment-by-death as a warning that other hostages would be just as expendable, has succeeded in its mission to turn the population of Israel against its government authorities through the split imperative of saving the hostages as opposed to the full commitment of destroying Palestinian terrorist enclaves, their leadership, their followers, their terrorist infrastructure, their weaponry.

And the backdrop of this deadly turmoil is a theocratic nation fully indulged in loyalty to a religion of conquest with the leadership of Iran determined to succeed in its mission of destruction and Islamic conquest, well on its way to producing nuclear arms not only to threaten Israel's existence, but to ensure that its Sunni-Muslim-Arab neighbours accede to Shiite-Muslim Persian dominance.

 

The United Nations has long since been toothless, irrespective of its proud boast of being a global purveyor of peace. Its obvious bias against Israel and alliance with negative powers within its membership have negated its original purpose. Of the permanent members of the UN Security Council, two -- China and Russia -- both engaged in their own visions of world conquest, emasculate the powers of reason and justice. 

 

Members of the UN Security Council vote on a proposal to demand that Israel and Hamas allow aid access to the Gaza Strip, December 22, 2023.

(photo credit: REUTERS/David Dee Delgado)

Canada's Flirtation With Terrorism

"'Palestine' is, as it stands, a porous-bordered, non-contiguous hodgepodge, split governance-wise between two mutually suspicious parties united only by their antipathy toward Israel. It is less a sovereign state than a half-baked idea drawn on a cocktail napkin."

While Melanie Joly is joining the faddish call for Palestinian statehood, she must know deep down that the Palestinian territories look nothing like a state and likely won't any time soon. Her performative virtue signalling only further harms her credibility as Canada's top diplomat."

Rahim Mohamed, journalist, National Post

 

Nothing very 'diplomatic' in tone or expression, much less adherence to recognition of reality and loyalty to a fellow democracy in strained relations between the Trudeau Liberal government in Canada and its behaviour toward Israel under this 'post-national' administration that has embraced DEI-woke-Critical Race Theory full bore as an enlightened 'progressive' government dragging Canada kicking and screaming into a national culture of anything goes, which includes promoting LGBTQ-2 rights beyond reason in its support of transitioning children toward pharmaceuticals and surgeries that deny their biological genders.

 

As for giving credence and support to a fellow democracy located in the Middle East amongst Islamist theocracies, kingdoms, sheikhdoms and terrorism-guided countries loyal to the darkest issues of pure Islamism, that too has been abandoned in favour of leaning toward equating fantasies and slanders issued by terrorist groups on an equal footing with that of a legitimate sovereign government. Canada's Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly's recent declaration of Canada's willingness to support statehood for 'Palestine' a case in point.

 

Palestine, as a combination of the West Bank and Gaza, two territories that comprise 'Palestine' in the minds of outsiders, but not reflected in the aspirations of Fatah and Hamas each of which controls one-half of the Palestinian 'Territories', since they envision Israel off the map and 'Palestine' comprised of the entire region, 'from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean sea'. And they have worked assiduously over the years, since Israel's rebirth to persuade the international community of Israel's illegitimacy as a state on land purloined from the 'Palestinians'.

 

Yet from the authoritative and well-considered wellspring of a mind versed in international law we hear: "Canada is prepared to recognize the State of Palestine at the time most favourable to a lasting peace, not at the last step along the path". Alongside voting against Israel in the United Nations, Canada has now committed itself to full betrayal of international law with one eye cocked on the considerable Muslim voting base in Canada and the other at catering to the elements within the United Nations for which Israel's existence is an abomination.

 

Both the West Bank, administered by Fatah/Mahmoud Abbas and the Gaza Strip, ruled by Hamas -- both illegitimate entities with a pretense at democracy well versed in the values of the West, and appealing to those values by discrediting Israel at every turn as an oppressor intent on perpetrating genocide against Arab Palestinians, while themselves in full practise of virulent Islamism, actually do make an effort at genocide against Jews, mocking the Holocaust they deny occurred, but promising another one -- are ill-prepared to govern.

 

While Mahmoud Abbas spews racial and religious epithets against Jews and Israel, mounting a never-ending campaign of abuse against Palestinians taught from cradle to grave that Jews are mendacious, untrustworthy, violently greedy, intent on looting more territory inscribed by the heavens above for Palestinian statehood, worthy of death brought to fruition by blessed martyrdom, inspiring and spurring children to aspire to become terrorists as a noble future for the faithful, Hamas goes straight to the core of dedicated mass murder to achieve its goal.

 

And this is prime material for statehood? Statehood with no potential responsible, lawful candidates available for administering a state to live in peace with its neighbours? Even other Arab regional states shudder envisioning what a nightmare that would be. Yet the international community is eager to consign Israel to a fate of everlasting, unending feral deadly attacks against its citizens by a neighbour 'state' that cannot govern sufficiently well to create security and prosperity for its citizens, yet conspires to make life hell for its neighbour.

 

On the other hand, if Justin Trudeau and his cabinet of Liberal progressives would agree to go to the new state permanently as its future executive administrators, most Canadians would be in full and total agreement.

 

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Canada's longstanding position that a Palestinian state could only be recognized at the end of a process leading to a two-state solution has changed. "We now recognize that it may happen sooner than at the end of the process".   CBC

 

"Unlike resolutions in the Security Council, there are no vetoes in the 193-member General Assembly. Friday’s resolution required a two-thirds majority of members voting and got significantly more than the 118 vote minimum."

"U.S. allies supported the resolution, including France, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Australia, Estonia and Norway. But European countries were very divided."

"The resolution “determines” that a state of Palestine is qualified for membership — dropping the original language that in the General Assembly’s judgment it is “a peace-loving state.” It therefore recommends that the Security Council reconsider its request “favorably”."

Associated Press