From Tehran to New York’s iconic Gracie Mansion, where there were dueling protests this weekend—one anti-Muslim and one pro-ISIS (!), it’s been an unquiet world.
Whether Iran’s despotic regime will fall soon is the question on everybody’s mind. The Free Press early this morning was leading with a possible energy crisis triggered by Iran.
Not surprisingly, Iran “projected defiance” by picking Mojtaba Khamenei, 56, son of the late Ayatollah, as Supreme Leader. President Trump finds the new Khamanei just bad as the other one.
Meanwhile, a U.K. Telegraph opinion column headline proclaims that Iran’s malevolent new Ayatollah shows the regime has learnt nothing. Tehran is fighting with jets dating back to the Vietnam era. War Secretary Pete Hegseth tells CBS that the U.S. will do whatever it takes to topple Iran’s regime:
“We’re willing to go as far as we need in order to be successful,” Hegseth told CBS News’s Major Garrett during a “60 Minutes” sit-down interview that aired Sunday night.
“We reserve the right. We would be completely unwise if we did not reserve the right to take any particular option, whether it included boots on the ground or not boots on the ground.”
There is a media divide over whether to support President Trump’s Iran intervention. The American Conservative [TAC] opposes the intervention and warns against arming the Kurds to fight in Iran (it is “madness” and will achieve nothing but instability and carnage”). The Wall Street Journal, whose opinion pages have supported the intervention, states the “risks” of arming the Kurds in an editorial:.
The greatest risk is that a Kurdish military front inside Iran could let the regime play to latent Iranian nationalism. So far the Iranian public hasn’t rallied to defend the regime even under relentless U.S. and Israeli bombing.
Allyssia Finley, also of the Wall Street Journal, writes that the United States’ oil and gas dominance has weakened Iran. The piece most supportive of the Trump administration’s Iran intervention this morning comes from Joshua Muravchik, also writing for the WSJ:
For years since the U.S. stumbled in Iraq and Afghanistan, we have been on our back foot, and the forces of anti-Americanism have been gaining strength and confidence. Iran and Cuba present Mr. Trump a chance to reverse that trend. It would be a valuable prize for the country and for him, an honor far nobler than the Nobel
Also an optimistic view, Israeli historian Benny Morris proposes that “the war with Iran is reshaping the entire Middle East from the Gulf States to Lebanon with surprising speed.” The Wall Street Journal’s Elliott Kaufman had a weekend interview with historian Ali M. Ansari who says that the Iranian regime is facing a crisis like never before in the current situation. What if the reactionary Iranian regime was being consumed by its own pathologies even before the Trump intervention? An intriguing notion, explored by Tim Black at Spiked On-line. Jonathan Rosen explores the fatwa—the Iranian weapon stronger than bombs—that might remain with us even if the regime falls.
Iran isn’t the only place having an issue with bombing this weekend. “Devil’s Work” scream the New York Post front-page headline.
Seem that demonstrators hurled an explosive known as the “Mother of Satan” in front of Gracie Mansion, the official residence of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
It was a confusing double protest in front of Gracie Mansion: a protest against Muslim influence in New York followed by a pro-Muslim protest. Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal attributed the explosive hurling to the wrong protest group:
Hoylman-Sigal issued a statement on X Saturday claiming, in part, “White Christian Nationalists led a roaming trail of Islamophobia and antisemitism today on Manhattan’s Upper East Side at Gracie Mansion where they targeted our mayor with an incendiary device.”
The borough president took down the statement before it was publicly revealed Sunday that two pro-Muslim demonstrators, identified as Emir Balat and Ibrahim Kayumi, were arrested in the incident. Federal authorities are working with the NYPD on the case.
The “Mother of Satan” hurlers are described as self-radicalized ISIS protesters. The original, anti-Muslim protest was lead by a right-wing agitator Jake Lang, reportedly a pardoned January 6 protestor. Miranda Devine argues in an impassioned column arguing that the New York Mayor’s response was telling:
Mayor Zohran Mamdani showed his true colors over the weekend when he responded to the attempted ISIS-inspired bombing of an anti-Muslim protest by first condemning “white supremacy” before getting around to saying “violence at a protest is never acceptable.”
That’s one way of putting it.
It took NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch to issue her own statement for the full gravity of the attack to be officially acknowledged.
Indeed, the Mayor seems to have plumb forgotten the ISIS guys in his response. Adding to the heady mix—or maybe not adding to the mix because of social media shielding, the Mayor’s wife, Rama Duwaji’s apparent enthusiasm for the October 7 massacre of Israelis has come to light.
The mind-boggling, multi-billion-dollar welfare fraud in Minnesota appears to be just the beginning. A Wall Street Journal editorial on the “Medicaid Autism Racket” lays out just how easy it is to defraud government programs with vague behavioral therapy diagnoses:
Behavioral therapy is an especially ripe target for people looking to game Medicaid. Diagnostic standards can be elastic, and states provide little oversight of providers and pay claims without requiring verification of treatment or benefits. While insurers that administer Medicaid benefits have an incentive to police fraud, autism treatment has become a fee-for-service free-for-all.
Minnesota is a case study. According to a federal complaint, 27-year-old Abdinajib Hassan Yussuf set up a fly-by-night autism center claiming to provide one-on-one therapy for autistic children. He allegedly worked with medical professionals to have children diagnosed with autism and paid kickbacks to parents to enroll them in his center. … Prosecutors last fall brought charges against a 28-year-old Minnesotan woman in a similar scheme that included bilking the government for meals and transportation….
The welfare-state fraud story is turning out to be enormous. As the evidence emerges, keep in mind that the root problem isn’t fraudsters, who are always with us. It’s the programs that make it so easy for criminals to scam.
More on the American taxpayer spigot. Fox Digital has a report that non-U.S. citizens will no longer be able to access SBA loans. Ms. Must’s first reaction—you mean to tell me that non-citizens were receiving SBA loans?
New York Times “conservative” columnist David French has lost his heart to Texas senatorial aspirant James Talarico, the Democratic nominee and the Presbyterian seminarian who says that God is “non-binary” and there are six genders. More like Mr. French has lost his mind, writes The Federalist’s Chris Bray:
In a moment we should have seen coming, New York Times columnist David French has just gushed out a shameless celebration of Talarico’s insane nonsense, every word of which should qualify the worst op-ed prostitute in America for urgent psychiatric intervention. Here’s a whole paragraph: “Or, to put it another way, Talarico is one of the few openly Christian politicians in the United States who acts like a Christian, and by acting like a Christian he reveals a profound contrast with so many members of the MAGA Christian movement that’s dominated American political life for 10 years.”
Speaking of Mr. Talarico… you remember his clever high jinks with Stephen Colbert, when the two claimed that incorrectly Talarico was being censored. Talarico was originally being denied airtime because of the intricacies of the “Equal Time” rule. An op-ed in the Wall Street Journal addresses the Talarico ruse and goes on to explain that the “Equal Time” rule is obsolete and should be ditched.