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Irans defiance of the norms of international law and its subversion of the West continues with no relenting in its intensity and scope. Now, Iran once again sparks tension in the Persian Gulf by embarking on state-sponsored piracy, while its enrichment of uranium is reaching the dangerous weapons-level grade.

On May 27, the notorious Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), in cooperation with the Iranian Navy, launched a helicopter raid to seize two Greek oil tankers in the Persian Gulf. The Prudent Warrior and Delta Poseidon were sailing in international waters, 22 nautical miles off the coast of Iran. The Greek Foreign Ministry condemned Irans actions as tantamount to acts of piracy.

This incident happened just days after Athens announced that it would abide by US sanctions on Russia by handing over a reported 700,000 barrels of Iranian crude oil from the Russian-flagged tanker Lana. The ship is owned by Russias Promsvyazbank, a bank critical to Russias defense sector. The US Treasury designated the bank on Feb. 22 just two days before the Russian invasion of Ukraine for operating or having operated in the defense and related materiel and financial services sectors of the Russian Federation economy.

The Lana created a two-for-one sanctions case, as a Russian-flagged ship was carrying Iranian oil. The US confiscated the Iranian oil from the ship. The Russian tanker remains anchored off Karystos, in the central part of the Aegean Sea.

For all his flaws, Thomas Jefferson was one of the most accomplished political thinkers and leaders of the post-enlightenment era....

The two Greek ships and their crews are still in Iranian custody. For Iranian propaganda, this act of piracy is legitimate retribution for the Lana incident.

Nour News, a website close to Irans Supreme National Security Council and the de facto information branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, announced that Iran would take punitive action after the two tankers were seized. Nour News justified the action as a legal and proportionate response to the Greek governments action against Irans interests. It also accused Greece and the United States of economic terrorism against Iran.

On June 4, during a ceremony marking the death anniversary of his predecessor and late founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Irans Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei acknowledged that Iran took the two Greek oil tankers. They stole our oil on Greek shores, Khamenei said in his 80-minute speech. Then, our self-sacrificing and valiant soldiers made up for it and confiscated the enemys ship carrying oil. Then, the enemy accused Iran of theft via his comprehensive propaganda and media empire.

Khomeini defended the hijacking of the Greek tankers as an act of reprisal. Who is a thief? he asked. You stole our oil and we took it back from you! Taking back stolen property is not theft! It is you who are thieves! The Americans order the Greek government and they obey by stealing our oil.

The Quds Force is an IRGC military intelligence division. The United States has designated the Quds Force as a terrorist group for providing material support to the Taliban and other terrorist organizations. This act of piracy is but another incident in a pattern of illegal acts by Iranian authorities undermining international movement in the seas. In 2019, Iranian forces assumed a series of limpet mine attacks in the Persian Gulf that left many tankers damaged. In July 2021, an Israeli-linked oil tanker was attacked by a military Iranian drone in an incident that left two European crew members dead. Just a week later, Iranian paramilitary forces also briefly seized a Panama-flagged asphalt tanker off the United Arab Emirates.

The piracy campaign and other violent provocations should be considered as the United States and others continue negotiations aimed at restoring the 2015 nuclear deal.

According to a June 16 New York Times report, Iran is constructing an extended new network of underground tunnels at its Natanz nuclear site, its primary enrichment facility. This underground network appears to be intended to provide safe facilities for an enrichment facility, providing relative immunity to cyberattacks and bombing.

Although Iran has no obligation to provide outsourced information, it has notified the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] since the start of construction work to relocate the Karaj TESA plant around the Natanz site, Behrouz Kamalvandi, the spokesman of Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, told Nour News. He went on to attack Israel once again: Considering the full transparency of our countrys actions, there is no doubt that the atmosphere created by the media affiliated with the Zionist current will not lead to ambiguity and political abuses.

In another Nour News article, Iranian sources admit that the nuclear program is in full development: Today, even Irans enemies acknowledge the fact that, despite the imposition of oppressive sanctions, Irans peaceful nuclear program is advancing at a remarkable pace, and sanctions have failed to have the slightest mitigating effect on the peaceful programs that Westerners mistakenly express concern about it.

The IAEA which despite repeated warnings by Israel and the United States was disregarding Irans unilateral actions, now seems aware of the realities on the ground. The IAEA cannot confirm the correctness and completeness of Irans declarations under its Comprehensive Safeguards Agreement, Director General Rafael Grossi told the IAEAs Board of Governors on June 6.

According to Grossi, Iran has not provided explanations that are technically credible in relation to the Agencys findings at three undeclared locations in Iran. Iran has also not informed the IAEA of the current location, or locations, of the nuclear material and/or of the equipment contaminated with nuclear material, that was moved from Turquzabad in 2018. Such a statement reveals the failure of the IAEAs bureaucratic approach.

Earlier this month, Tehran announced the removal of 27 tamper-proof surveillance cameras at nuclear sites previously installed by experts and functioning as IAEAs monitoring system. This action severely impairs the IAEAS ability to observe and evaluate the Iranian nuclear program.

As a response, the Biden administration announced new sanctions against Irans petrochemical industry June 16, with the aim of compelling Iran to comply with the JCPOA. Still, despite all these brazen violations of any security guarantees on its nuclear program and Congressional opposition, the Biden administration continues to declare its commitment to the general framework of the JCPOA negotiations. Now, a bipartisan majority in Congress wants a renegotiation of the original deal.

On Sunday, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Bill Russo told the Saudi newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat that it was still possible to return to some form of an agreement. We believe that the nuclear deal is possible, but it depends on Iran, Russo said.

The indications that Iran is adopting an even more hard-line stance are mounting. On June 18, the former editor of radical daily Kayhan, Mehdi Nasiri, wrote that Iran is moving toward a war: Evidence including the suspension of nuclear negotiations in Vienna and the escalation of tensions between Tehran and the IAEA might indicate that the Islamic Republic is interested in war and such a war is likely to start.

As Joe Biden prepares to make his first Middle East visit as president, it would be wise to bear in mind the repeated violations of agreements and the Iranian regimes aggression. Iran continues to support terrorist groups including Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Irans cyberwar capabilities have been considerably upgraded with Russian help, enabling it to perform repeat attacks against the US and other Western targets.

Despite all the sanctions imposed by the United States, Iran is moving ever closer to obtaining nuclear weapons. Reports indicate that Iran simply doesnt want a deal.

The question for the United States, therefore, is what happens next? The status quo means Iran produces nuclear weapons. Failure to find new ways to dissuade the regime costs the US its credibility vis--vis its rivals, imperils its allies in the Middle East, and encourages further disruptive actions by Iran.

Ioannis E. Kotoulas (Ph.D. in History, Ph.D. in Geopolitics) is Adjunct Lecturer in Geopolitics at the University of Athens, Greece. A version of this article was originally published by The Investigative Project on Terrorism.

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Iran Descends Into Outright Piracy and Confrontation With the West - Algemeiner

Obviously, I was not able to get that carnage out of my head, nor do I think I will ever be able to despite living in Spain. That's simply because that culture of weapons is already part of me. It has shaped my personality, molding me through fear and desolation (also in criticism), which has happened to many in the "land of freedom." There is damage in that daily violence that pierces you inside and it takes a lot to heal; I speak from that damage, the one that still eats me from inside as I write.

Not even two weeks had passed since Uvalde when the media announced yet another massacre, this time in an Oklahoma hospital: five dead, including the presumed murderer. Minutes later, some newspapers spoke of a "triple simultaneous shooting." Since, similar incidents were added: one in a school in California and the other in a supermarket in Pennsylvania. The headline, as spectacular as it is worrying, was, however, false, since some of us know perfectly well that shootings are daily events and not an extraordinary event.

Due to their frequency, only the most serious "incidents" are reported. It depends on the number of deaths, age, race, area: life value keeps its hierarchies. However, only in Philadelphia, the city where I lived until a few days ago, the historical record for homicides was broken last year: 562, most by firearms.

Together with the increase in other types of crimes, this is why I recently changed my habits completely: not going to festivals or concerts, generally avoiding crowds. If I met someone in a bar, I immediately located the emergency exit; sometimes, I would ask my companions "do you also think about it?," and the answer was always yes.

Given the numerous notices I received from the university, warning of some danger on campus, like "robbery with a pistol on X street, police in the area," I increased the hours of teleworking. In the end, I was confined to my house more often than I wanted to, breathing a kind of a ubiquitous alarm, close to panic but not there yet every time I crossed the threshold and ventured out into the street. That was a daily occurrence, and I'm not exaggerating. The perception of inhabiting a constant tension, like the rubber band of a slingshot that is about to be released. A war. And still, I strived to build a minimal sense of normality.

The United States, with some 330 million inhabitants, has 400 million weapons in the hands of civilians alone, a figure that has increased greatly since the pandemic began. This is a phenomenon exclusive to this country, as is its dubious honor of having the biggest incarcerated population and the fact that it has the most expensive healthcare system in the world.

To understand the permissiveness when it comes to carrying and using weapons military weapons in many cases it is necessary to take into account how crime contributes to the lucrative work of private prisons, and how the health business conglomerate benefits from the destruction of bodies. In fact, it is not uncommon to find online campaigns of those injured in these "incidents" begging for donations that allow them to pay their medical bills.

This systemic problem, from which it follows that death is a big business, is inherent to the socio-political functioning of the United States. In other countries, life is worth something, and even money: A state that has to bear the health costs of its sick population will invest in disease prevention, but the United States is governed by "necropolitics," where a ruling class gets to decide who lives and dies. An example of this is also the more than 100,000 fatalities in 2021 caused by the opioid crisis, from which Purdue Pharma has particularly benefited.

If these causes explain the underlying scenario, it is necessary to resort to the omnipresence of the National Rifle Association (NRA) in the financing of the different electoral campaigns to understand the aberrant statements of many politicians who advocate these days for arming even more the population, including teachers. Supposedly, with the objective of defending themselves from the "bad guys," as Trump claimed.

That former president has received almost 16 million dollars out of the total of 148 that, according to an investigation by The Boston Globe, has been disbursed by this powerful lobby since 2010 almost exclusively in favor of Republican representatives. It goes without saying that nothing will change while Congress still needs a large majority to pass any legislation restricting gun ownership and one of the two parties is bought by the NRA.

Finally, over the decades, the Supreme Court has updated the collective right to bear arms in the context of a militia that protects the states, included in the Second Amendment of the Constitution, until it has become an individual right.

In the miraculous case that some federal regulation was implemented to put limits on the ease to acquire weapons, the highest judicial authority would knock it down. Hence the absurdity of speaking of the "weapons debate." (The latest decision on Thursday established the Constitutional right to carry weapons in public.)

There is no such debate; there are, though, offerings and laments, putrid flowers that lie on the altars dedicated to avoidable victims, disjointed prayers and a lot of sensationalism, attempts at political profitability and a rise in arms sales with each massacre, but there is not a debate.

Life only acquires value the closer it comes to death it's the market, my friends! Out of fear of a bullet, I grabbed my things and escaped from that nightmare. I, who can still tell the tale. I, who can still say that in Spain children are not taught how to deal with bullet shots, to seek refuge from the constant threat. As in a nursery in the U.S., where not so long ago these words could be read on the blackboard:

Alert, alert!

Close the door.

Turn off the light,

don't say a word.

Under the desk,

to your hiding place!

Alert, alert!

Open the door.

There's no danger now,

you can go play!*

*Translation of a song used in a shooting drill in a nursery school in the United States. It is included in my book "Ao 9. Crnicas catastrficas en la era Trump" (Year 9: Chronicles of Disaster in the Trump Era).

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Why The West Is Finally Taking A Harder Line On Iran - Worldcrunch

More than most countries in the Middle East and West Asia, international attention is gravitating toward Iran, which has become one of the crucial news hotspots of the world. Iran is not garnering interest because of all the fancy things typically associated with it: windcatchers and Persian gardens, millennia-old castles, saffron, carpets, or poetry; rather, it is at the heart of some of the most difficult conversations around nuclear security, terrorism, and human rights.

In a 2013 study, Elad Segev, an associate professor of international communication at Tel Aviv University, found that the centrality of Iran coverage in the media organizations worldwide is hugemaybe even outsized. On global news websites, Iran came after the United States, China, Palestine, Britain, and France as the sixth most frequently talked-about nation. On U.S. websites, Irans rank was even higher by then, trailing behind China and Britain as the third country receiving the most coverage.

Indeed, the research is nine years old, and trends have inevitably shifted ever since, but even if there have been fluctuations, they are arguably in favor of catapulting Iran into augmented salience and visibility. There has been the vaunted Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that remodeled Irans relations with the international community, and the subsequent withdrawal of the United States from the deal under Donald Trump in 2018 which flung the world into a maelstrom of instability and put the spotlight on Tehran once more.

Irans omnipresence in the global media is not simply catalyzed by its importance as a nation or the singularity of events unfolding within its boundaries that dont happen elsewhere. That said, rather than the reasons the Islamic Republic doesnt slip from the news, it is the fashion in which those news packages are wrapped and purveyed that unmasks the broad contours of a chronic anomaly in reporting on the country: disinformation and misinformation.

Those who have followed Iranian affairs independently can testify there are acute flaws when it comes to portrayals of the nation. These are not negligible instances of inaccurate reporting but, in the preponderance of cases, deliberate attempts to churn out disinformation and misinformation to kowtow to sundry agendas. These deformities are so overwhelming that they alter the ways the global public perceives Iran, blight the Iranian publics self-awareness, derail the calculations of the Iranian leadership on different matters, and hoodwink the international community into understanding and reacting to Iran misguidedly.

If you tune in to Irans state media to gauge the pulse of the nation, you will be fed an utterly propagandistic account of the status quo that hovers around familiar nationalistic tropes, namely that the country is making huge technological and economic strides, astonishing other countries with its indigenous achievements, fascinating more countries with its revolutionary grandeur, and the like. There is also the reproduction of this xenophobic discourse cultivated by the establishment that major powers are bent on undermining the nations security, which necessitates further restrictions on the internet and greater insulation and isolation. This breeds fear among the populace.

Take Press TV, the external face of the Tehran-based media as a 24/7 English-language broadcaster, which has prostrated itself to become a PR newsletter, not even for the government but catering to a hardline minority, with high-octane anti-Semitic propensities in its programming. It is busy grinding out substantive quantities of content about Irans presumed victory in a hypothetical ideological war with the West, the inefficiency of the international sanctions regime, a thriving economy and foreign trade as well as the Islamic Republics righteousness in its involvement in proxy wars across the Middle East.

Not least for the fact that most satellite operators have taken down Press TV for its propagation of false information and breach of the codes of ethics in reporting, exposure to the stations programs affords the viewers a rather quixotic and illusory understanding of Iranian affairs: a welfare state in which nothing goes wrong, is dominating the world, and has the happiest people. A broadcaster that once had such distinguished hosts as Derek Conway, Andrew Gilligan, Ken Livingstone, and Nick Ferrari and was gaining momentum as a progressive station has now degenerated into a conspiracy theory platform whose depiction of Iran is often met with eye rolls and disregard.

The governments ironclad grip on the media means the number of independent press outlets with pro-reform leanings that are prepared to countenance the costs of investigations and critical reporting is shrinking, and many imperative details about the state of life in Iran and the nuances of the countrys social, political, and economic dynamics are falling through the cracks, concealed from the global eyes.

But the glitch is not all about what the Iran-based media are not getting right.

The Persian-language broadcasters headquartered overseas, which are mostly affiliated with Irans kaleidoscopic opposition groups in exile, are doing a similar disservice to journalism. In their chronicles of Iran, there is a country that is on the cusp of disintegration, a popular uprising toppling the mullahs is looming imminentlyas has been the case for the past four decadespeoples lives are strewn with immeasurable misery and torment, and the youths have no reason to be happy, even over the most basic forms of entertainment.

Iran International, a London-based TV station funded by Saudi Arabia, trots out vignettes of information about the country often based on statements taken out of context, unsourced and unsubstantiated revelations, spurious statistics, and sensationalized narrations with little resonance of serious journalism. From these reports, every viewer would believe Iran is an active conflict zone where the last vestiges of normal life have long vanished, and the country is a concentration camp with 85 million inmates. Its lack of professionalism is mirrored by separatists championing enigmatic ethnic agendas about the territorial integrity of Iran being regularly plugged as its correspondents and experts.

And then, there are the international media whose usually skewed coverage, often steered by Iran experts, perpetuates the dominance of disinformation and misinformation. The Iranian government, quite shortsightedly, refuses to license many foreign correspondents to operate in the country, which means professional reporters access to events and resources is gravely circumscribed. Also, many of those reporters and experts covering Iran from abroad are handicapped by their lack of familiarity with the language, sometimes their personal biases, and that they havent been to Iran altogether, which means they never retained a compelling vantage point to analyze what is happening there.

The upshot of these demerits is that while the scale of reporting on Iran is sizable, there is accordingly a bonanza of false, misleading information around the country that continues to be available to decisionmakers worldwide as library materials when they wish to chart their Iran policy, and to Iranian leadership as it evaluates global perceptions of its actions. The impairments spawned by constantly inaccurate reporting run the gamut from the heightened likelihood of miscalculation resulting in dangerous decisions to the closure of avenues for dialogue and understanding.

But there is an additional latent effect that is taking its toll on ordinary Iranians: the hypodermic impact of propaganda being unleashed on a civilian population daily by a media that feel unbound by principled, ethical journalistic paradigms. Scholars have been talking about this hypodermic effect which translates into audiences being victimized by media that retain the ability to manipulate our emotions by tapping into our fears or insecurities.

According to a Harvard scientist, an executive control network is embedded in our brain and tasked with higher-level functioning, including critical thinking. Fear instilled through propaganda is one of the ways analytical functioning is hampered. A case in point is how the psychological well-being of the Iranian people, targeted by relentless campaigns of persuasion and manipulation from every corner, typically bereft of any semblance of honest, professional journalism, is at stake.

Kourosh Ziabari is an award-winning Iranian journalist and reporter. He is a correspondent with Asia Times and a contributor to Fair Observer. He is the recipient of a Chevening Award from the Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office. He is also an American Middle Eastern Network for Dialogue at Stanford (AMENDS) Fellowand theEast-West Center's Senior Journalists Seminar fellow. Kouroshs writings have appeared in The Huffington Post, openDemocracy, Al-Monitor, Middle East Eye, Responsible Statecraft, Al-Arabiya, International Policy Digest, and BBC Persian.He tweets at@KZiabari.

Image: Reuters.

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On Iran, Disinformation Has Become the Norm - The National Interest Online

The men were sentenced to have four fingers on their right hands completely cut off so that only the palms of their hands and their thumbs are left.

OHCHR is deeply concerned that the amputations are imminent.

Of the eight prisoners, seven were identified as Hadi Rostami, Mehdi Sharafian, Mehdi Shahivand, Amir Shirmard, Morteza Jalili, Ebrahim Rafiei, Yaghoub and Fazeli Koushki.

Seven are currently being held at the Greater Tehran Central Prison, and the whereabouts of Mr. Rostami are unknown after he was transferred from the prison on 12 June.

All of them are likely to be transferred to Tehrans Evin Prison, where reports indicate a finger-cutting guillotine was recently installed and reportedly used on 31 May to amputate the fingers of one other prisoner, said Ms. Shamdasani.

A first attempt to transfer the men took place on 11 June but was halted due to resistance from fellow prisoners, she added.

Iranian civil society organizations report that at least 237 people, mostly from poorer segments of society, were sentenced to amputations between 1 January 2000 and 24 September 2020.

Sentences have been carried out in at least 129 cases.

We also call on Iran to urgently revise its criminal penalties to do away with any form of corporal punishment, including amputations, flogging and stoning, in line with its obligations under international human rights law and consistent with recommendations of UN human rights mechanisms, said Ms. Shamdasani said.

She recalled that the country is party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which prohibits torture, or other cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment.

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Iran urged to halt imminent finger amputation of eight prisoners - UN News

Photograph courtesy of MARKA/Alamy.

I first heard him in the early 80s when I was living in the Islamic Republic of Iran. A group of friends had dinner meetings where we would talk about everything from philosophy to politics to arts. This woman was in love with Freddie Mercury, so she would be talking to me about him and I would be talking to her about the Doors, and that became one way of connecting. You have to know that musical cassettes were forbidden in Iran. You could go to jail. But we all had the underground cassettes, the underground videosalso the underground vodka.

When I watched Freddie Mercury, he was like a snake, as if he had no bones. That was one of the things that mesmerized me, that he sang with his body. It seemed as if he had sprouted out of the earth. You know his song Im Going Slightly Mad? It was the way he said it: Im going slightly mad. But the tone was definitely not just slightly, and I felt that way so much in the Islamic Republic. There were so many reasons to be going slightly mad, to try to evade the reality that was worse than madness.

Imagination has been my way of survival. I learned from childhood, especially when I was sent to England at the age of 13, that everything that life gives you can be taken away. Look at Ukraine. Ukraine is very obvious, but a tornado or an earthquake can take away everything you call home. I realized that I need something that will not be taken away from me, no matter where I live.

That is how we connected to the world in Iranthrough forbidden music, art, books. These imaginative spaces gave us room to breathe. So to let Freddie Mercurys music take over me was a way of not feeling that that claustrophobic reality was all that I had. It was a way out to another world.

I mention in [my book] Reading Lolita in Tehran a concert we went to, the Gipsy Kings, where two men would come onstage, and every time the audience tried to move with the music, they would tell them to sit down and not react. The musicians could not have any expressionsthey had to just sing. The audience would get excited, and these men would come and say, Sit down, sit down. You can imagine what that would do to Freddie Mercury.

This article appears in theJune 2022issue of Washingtonian.

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Senior Managing Editor

Bill OSullivan is senior managing editor; from 1999 to 2007, he was a features editor. In another lifetime, he was assistant managing editor. Somewhere in the middle, he was managing editor of Common Boundary magazine and senior editor at the Center for Public Integrity. His personal essays have been cited three times among the notable essays of the year in The Best American Essays. He teaches at the Writers Center in Bethesda.

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Azar Nafisi on How Freddie Mercury Helped Her Survive Life in Iran - Washingtonian