Iran Archive

For years Israelis have worried that the international community would give up its efforts to contain the threat from Iran’s militant regime and leave Israel to confront it alone. Israelis, who say muscular diplomatic sanctions are the best route, have maintained that despite Iran’s specific taunts and threats against Israel, the danger posed by the Islamic Republic extends not only to the entire Middle East but far beyond. Just when it looked like Israel was about to fail in its efforts to convince the world about the dangers posed by Iran, the Iranian regime itself stepped in to help Israel […]

As part of the ongoing propaganda battle between the United States and Iran over a Jan. 6 incident in which two alleged Iranian speed boats approached some U.S. Navy ships in the Straits of Hormuz, the U.S. military held a press conference Jan. 13 in Bahrain. The commanders of the two U.S. ships involved in the incident, the U.S.S. Port Royal and U.S.S. Hopper, explained their versions of the incident. Here’s video of that press conference: And here’s the complete Defense Department’s video of the incident (all 45 minutes of it): Meanwhile, on Sunday, a new theory emerged about the […]

TAYLOR TRIAL RESUMES — At the Hague Jan. 7, prosecutors began presenting their case against former Liberian President Charles Taylor. A Canadian “blood diamond” expert was called as the first of 144 expected witnesses for the prosecution. Taylor faces 11 charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity for his alleged role trading weapons for diamonds in the brutal 1991-2002 Sierra Leone war. Additionally, the prosecution alleges that the diamond trade through Liberia that earned the Revolutionary United Front — which was responsible for much of the war’s violence — $125 million a year could not have happened without the […]

A Wednesday report in the German economic daily Handelsblatt makes clear that German-Iranian trade continued to boom in 2007 despite existing U.N. sanctions and international calls to isolate Iran economically. According to statistics cited in a report by Germany’s Federal Trade Agency (BFAI), German exports to Iran are supposed to have declined by 15 percent to around €3.5 billion. However, in what the paper calls a “surprising development,” German imports from Iran actually increased by 50 percent to some €580 million. It should be noted, moreover, that both figures are said to be based on statistical data running only through […]

Some 20 years after its founding, the Palestinian organization Hamas remains little understood in the West. Although it is invoked nearly daily in the media, it has been the subject of only a very small number of serious studies. The most common error made by observers in considering contemporary Islamist movements — and notably, Hamas — is that of attempting to grasp them in terms of concepts and modes of thought that are proper to the West. Most western analyses of the phenomenon of Islamism tend to underestimate or even obscure a fundamental element that is common to all the […]