Iran’s nuclear chief said Monday that “terrorists and saboteurs” might have infiltrated the International Atomic Energy Agency in an effort to derail his nation’s atomic program. He also said his country’s nuclear facilities could now survive enemy attack.
In an unprecedentedly harsh attack on the integrity of the UN organization and its probe of allegations that Tehran is striving to make nuclear arms, Fereydoun Abbasi spoke of a recent explosion at a particularly sensitive Iranian enrichment facility.
US Energy Secretary Stephen Chu accused Tehran of continuing “a decade-long pattern of evasion regarding questions over the nature of its nuclear program, including those related to possible military dimensions of its nuclear activities.”
A European Union statement warned of “deep concerns about possible military dimensions” to Iran’s nuclear program
The United States and 25 allies were in the midst of a massive 12-day navy drill Tuesday in strategic Middle East waterways. This year’s war games are believed to be the largest ever undertaken in the region.
The annual drill comes amid amid threats of war between Israel and Iran over the Islamic regime’s nuclear program.
The exercises, IMCMEX-12, focused on clearing mines that Tehran, or guerrilla groups, may deploy to disrupt oil tanker traffic in the Strait of Hormuz. The drill, according to participants, underlines their determination to keep oil shipping lanes open in case of regional turmoil.
“Planning was completed last week for the exercise that will focus on a hypothetical threat to mine the international strategic waterways of the Middle East, including the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, the Gulf of Oman, and the Persian Gulf,” the US Central Command said in a statement, Bloomberg reported.
The leader of Hezbollah made a rare public appearance Monday at a rally in Beirut, calling for sustained protests against an anti-Islam film that already has provoked a week of unrest in Muslim countries worldwide.
Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah has rarely been seen in public since his Shiite Muslim group battled Israel in a month-long war in 2006, fearing Israeli assassination. Since then, he has communicated with his followers and gives news conferences mostly via satellite link.
On Monday, Nasrallah spoke for about 15 minutes before tens of thousands of cheering supporters, many of them with green and yellow headbands around their foreheads — the colors of Hezbollah — and the words “at your service God’s prophet” written on them.Police officials estimated the crowd at around 500,000 — an exceptionally large turnout even by standards of the Hezbollah group whose rallies normally draw huge numbers.“This is the start of a serious movement that must continue all over the Muslim world in defense of the prophet of God,” Nasrallah said to roars of support. “As long as there’s blood in us, we will not remain silent over insults against our prophet.”
The crowd chanted “Death to Israel” and “Death to the Great Satan America,” reported Israel Radio.
A report by two U.S.-based religious freedom groups says anti-Christian persecution is on the rise in America.
The joint report by Texas-based Liberty Institute and Washington-based Family Research Council says groups like the American Civil Liberties Union aren’t the only culprits. The report says government agencies around the U.S. are trying to push Christian expression out the door.
“It is dramatic,” says Liberty Institute Founder Kelly Shackleford, of the recent hike in reported incidents of persecution. “I have been doing these types of cases for almost 25 years now. I have never seen the levels of attacks like these and how quickly they are now proliferating.”
Shackleford says government, from schools to social programs, is the ringleader.
Among the violations listed in the joint report:
- A federal judge threatened “incarceration” to a high school valedictorian unless she removed references to Jesus from her graduation speech.
- City officials prohibited senior citizens from praying over their meals, listening to religious messages or singing gospel songs at a senior activities center.
- A public school official physically lifted an elementary school student from his seat and reprimanded him in front of his classmates for praying over his lunch.
- Following U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ policies, a federal government official sought to censor a pastor’s prayer, eliminating references to Jesus, during a Memorial Day ceremony honoring veterans at a national cemetery.
- Public school officials prohibited students from handing out gifts because they contained religious messages.
- A public school official prevented a student from handing out flyers inviting her classmates to an event at her church.
- A public university’s law school banned a Christian organization because it required its officers to adhere to a statement of faith that the university disagreed with.
- The U.S. Department of Justice argued before the Supreme Court that the federal government can tell churches and synagogues which pastors and rabbis it can hire and fire.
- The State of Texas sought to approve and regulate what religious seminaries can teach.
- Through the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, the federal government is forcing religious organizations to provide insurance for birth control and abortion-inducing drugs in direct violation of their religious beliefs.
- The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs banned the mention of God from veterans’ funerals, overriding the wishes of the deceased’s families.
- A federal judge held that prayers before a state House of Representatives could be to Allah but not to Jesus.
A Florida family is facing fines for hosting a weekly Bible study in their home – an act that city officials argue violates zoning codes.
Shane and Marlen Roessiger, of Venice, Fla. are facing a $250 per day fine for hosting Friday night prayer and Bible study gatherings that are attended by as many as 10 people.
“It is difficult to understand how it is illegal to have a prayer meeting on Friday night with a half dozen people but it is alright if I invited the same group on Monday evening to watch Monday night Football,” Roessiger said.
The Roessigers are also facing a fine for putting a small sign in their front yard that reads: “Need Prayer (941) 484-4915.”
“It’s a weekly Bible study,” said Brad Dacus, president of the Pacific Justice Institute. “It’s the same kind of Bible study that occurs in households across America.”
The Pacific Justice Institute is representing the Roessigers as they fight back against the city’s attacks. Dacus said they are hearing of a number of assaults on home Bible studies across the nation.
“They are having a specific problem with this family solely because they are having family and friends over to read the bible and pray,” Dacus told Fox News. “That may be fine in some tyrannical parts of the world. That is not okay in the United States of America.”
As the liberal American press and ultra-liberal bloggers inundate the Internet and newsprints with criticisms of what Mitt Romney, the GOP presidential challenger to President Barack Obama, said about Obama during the Libyan attacks and murders, throngs of foreign press and few American outlets tell the real story involved with the White House’s role in the incidents that we now know could have been preventedAfter the American media grabbed and held the pro-Obama headlines against Romney’s comments and took Obama’s “Romney shoots first and aims second” quote to iconic proportions, the rest of the world is reporting that the Obama administration knew about the planned-attack on the Benghazi, Libya Embassy where four Americans, including United States Ambassador Christopher Steven was murdered.While the movie trailer of “Innocence of Muslims” may have added fuel to the venom’s fire regarding the protests throughout the Middle East, the murderous attack on the U.S. Embassy and its American occupants in Benghazi, Libya was no accidentReports from a number of knowledgeable sources are being widely-circulated regarding the United States State Department’s having received knowledge of the attack in Benghazi as early as September 9 – two days before the four Americans were killed. That’s “the story”. There were also similar reports that the attack in Cairo was revealed prior to its occurrence.
Jim Hoft, new media blogger at The Gateway Pundit, posted last Saturday that on Sept. 12, bloggerSpeak With Authority discovered that five days before 9/11, the U.S. State Department sent out a memo announcing no credible security threats against the United States on the anniversary of 9/11.“The Overseas Security Advisory Council, who posted the memo, is part of the Bureau of Diplomatic Security under the U.S. Department of State,” Hoft wrote.
Hoft posted a screengrab of the memo at the OSAC website.
The OSAC memo read: “Terrorism and Important Dates – Global – 9/6/2012 – OSAC currently has no credible information to suggest that al-Qa’ida or any other terrorist group is plotting any kind of attack overseas to coincide with the upcoming anniversary of September 11. However, constituents often have concerns around important dates, holidays, and major events, Often times, these concerns are the result of increased media attention to the issue, rather than credible evidence of a terrorist plot.”
Hoft reports that now it’s gone, leading him to conclude that the State Department scrubbed the letter from its OSAC website. He added that blogger Dan Riehl has more.
On tonight’s episode of “The Glenn Beck Program” on TheBlazeTV, Beck stated that he believes, based on his research and analysis, U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens was murdered not as a result of a spontaneous riot over an anti-Muslim YouTube clip but rather as part of a coordinated and planned attack using the protests as a cover.
“You’re being set up, America. Your freedom of speech is being set up and it’s being set up all over the world,” Beck said. “If you say somebody on YouTube can’t make a video that is offensive to somebody else, you stop everything, free speech is dead, the First Amendment is over. That’s what this is really all about.”
Beck went on to analyze the U.S. consulate attack in Benghazi in depth, going point-by-point comparing the U.S. government’s explanation to what reality suggests.
Watch the segment via TheBlazeTV here:
Diplomats at the US Embassy in Beirut have started to destroy classified material as a security precaution amid anti-American protests in Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa.
A State Department status report obtained Monday by The Associated Press said the Beirut embassy had “reviewed its emergency procedures and is beginning to destroy classified holdings.” It also said that local Lebanese employees were sent home early due to protests by the militant Shiite group Hezbollah over an anti-Muslim film produced in the US.
Earlier Monday, the State Department renewed its warning to US citizens to “avoid all travel to Lebanon because of current safety and security concerns. ” It said US citizens “living and working in Lebanon should understand that they accept risks in remaining and should carefully consider those risks.”The new alert, which superseded a May 8 warning, said the potential for a “spontaneous upsurge in violence remains” in Lebanon and that Lebanese authorities are not able to guarantee protection if violence erupts quickly.
In August, a Syrian Foreign Ministry spokesman, Jihad Makdissi, said the Damascus government would never use chemical arms against its people, but he warned that it would unleash the weapons against what he called foreign invaders. He said the military was guarding the stockpile.Syria’s weapons, predominantly deadly nerve agents that can be delivered by artillery rockets, shells and aircraft munitions, were developed for use in a war against Israel.The Syrian regime transferred chemical weapons from a storage base near Damascus to the port city of Tartus last month, sparking American and European concerns that the weapons could fall into the hands of Hezbollah in Lebanon or other extremist organizations inside Syria, against Israel. Nasrallah’s reference to chemical weapons may have followed pressure from Syria’s ally, Russia. Lebanese daily Al-Nahar reported Sunday that a Russian envoy recently arrived in Beirut and warned Nasrallah against accepting chemical weapons from Syria.Iraq’s Baath Party had a ready ally in Syria’s Baath Party to shift its stockpiles to. Syria has fewer options. There are no other Baath parties and no ruling Alawites. That leaves it with no other choice but to go with Shiite ties.Hezbollah would not be the smartest choice, but it may be the only practical one. No one is about to let Syria ship chemical weapons to Iran. But Syria has other options. A port city would allow it to move weapons almost anywhere as cargo. And networks of Shiite businessmen around the world play a major role in international trade. Shipping the weapons to somewhere in Africa where there is little law enforcement and a high degree of corruptibility might be one scenario.The problem with turning over the weapons to Iran or Hezbollah is that getting them back would become difficult. The Assads have learned enough from Saddam not to repeat his mistakes. That means they would be more likely to leave the country and run the resistance from a safe haven and the weapons would be a trump card or a cash source. Moving them to a port may be one of the steps before the rats leave the sinking Syria.
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