[Jpost] There are several key areas that are important to focus on regarding Iran’s influence in South America and this trip specifically, with Iran hoping to boost ties in the region.
Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi traveled to Venezuela this week as part of a tour of South America.
Raisi is seeking to cement Iran’s ties to Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and the region in general. This is partly aimed at getting around US sanctions and showcasing Iran’s ability to maneuver on the global stage. It is also about increasing Tehran’s influence.
This has ramifications for Israel because some of the countries that are being visited are hostile to Israel or critical of Israel. In addition, this could increase Iran’s trade and lead to more drone sales or other opportunities for Tehran.
There are several key areas that are important to focus on regarding Iran’s influence in South America and this trip specifically. According to pro-government media in Iran, the trip highlights the strategic ties with Venezuela. The Maduro regime in Venezuela had appeared isolated several years ago but now it appears to be making new inroads in the Middle East.
Iran’s ties with Caracas are part of that story, but so are Iran and Venezuela’s outreach to Turkey and Saudi Arabia.
THE IMPORTANCE OF TRADE IN THE IRAN-VENEZUELA DIPLOMATIC RELATIONSHIP
Trade is one feature of the Venezuela-Iran relationship. This includes energy deals and also potential defense deals.
Iran has sought more markets for its drones. It already supplies drones to Russia. Venezuela may not need missiles or other technology from Iran and Iran may not have much more to offer, but every client for the drone program matters.
Recent reports in the Wall Street Journal say Iran has sought Chinese technology for the drones and also a report in the Jewish Chronicle showed it had also sought to exploit universities in the UK.
It's also known that Iranian proxies have a role in South America. Hezbollah in particular has sought to recruit and infiltrate the region.
In Venezuela, Iran also seeks to sign various new deals relating to “communications and information technology, energy, insurance, maritime transport, higher education, agriculture, medicine and medicine, cultural exchanges, as well as the development of mineral cooperation…oil, defense and support of the armed forces, healthcare and culture,” Iran’s Fars News said.
It is less clear what Iran’s leader will do in Cuba or Nicaragua, however, the same issues of trade and influence peddling are important to focus on. Iran may also be seeking to expand its sphere of influence to include Brazil or other countries. Considering how important this region is to the US and also Israel, any new initiative by Iran is an important and concerning trend.
In addition in regard to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, some countries such as Brazil have not always agreed with the wider Western consensus, meaning Iran may be able to try to make inroads there.
#3
Does the phrase "World's Largest Cruise Ship" mean anything? How about loaded with people when operating?
This is like going to a hotel, and being surprised that there are other people about.
Posted by: ed in texas ||
06/13/2023 9:08 Comments ||
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#4
Cruises are good if you consider Golden Corral to be an enjoyable dining experience.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
06/13/2023 9:30 Comments ||
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#9
My wife and I went on a cruise to celebrate the 30th anniversary. It was just like being in Grand Central Station, only on water. We haven't been on one since.
Posted by: Tom ||
06/13/2023 11:35 Comments ||
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#10
The wife and I discovered we like cruising. A different port everyday and no unpacking your suitcase every day. We rarely eat in the buffet and rather enjoy being waited on in the dining room, where the food is good and the service is better.
Posted by: Bobby ||
06/13/2023 12:27 Comments ||
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#11
My wife and I are currently on a cruise from LA to Hawaii. So far we've really enjoyed ourselves. Yes, there are a lot of people - the ship can carry 3000+ passengers. But if you adjust to that, it's not bad.
Sounds like the author expected to have a personal boat ride on someone's yacht.
Posted by: Rambler in Virginia ||
06/13/2023 15:49 Comments ||
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#12
We found the best cruise value for us is cruising and area we had not been to- First the Med, then the Baltics and then Greek Isles and decide if we would ever like to come back to a port city for a more extended stay. Returned to Italy and the South of France a couple times now and found the Balkins to be "see it once and check the box" ports of call.
I find cruises to the Carribean and Mexico to be pointless and repetitive.
[Kunstler] If you’re wondering why our country is lost in lunatic raptures of lawless Lawfare and futile MAGAry, it’s because our economy has already collapsed, and our culture and politics with it downstream have also collapsed into spectacular degeneracy. It has already happened. Maybe you don’t know it.
The business model is broken. We’re a shadow of the industrial economy that won a great war and enjoyed a boisterous peace. You can’t replace ball bearing factories with theme parks and hedge funds. Sorry. The full faith and credit of the USA is not embodied in those frivolities, so our money is losing its mojo fast.
But get this: we will go on. This is not the end of the world or the end of history. It is the end of an era. Believe it or not, the economy will fix itself, it just won’t be what it was in 1957. It won’t be what the techno-supremacists think, either. (You need a dependable electric grid to run all those server farms and the apps they serve, and the AI supposedly looming.) It will fix itself because when things fail, as they are doing now, a lot of opportunities will open up to do things differently, even very differently.
When the chain stores fail along with their twelve-thousand-mile supply lines, Americans will figure out how to find stuff, make stuff, move stuff, and sell stuff at a smaller scale, maybe back on your Main Street (if it’s still there). There will be a lot less stuff, of course. But it may be enough stuff, and some of you will be busy making stuff of some kind. Imagine an economy where practically everybody has a useful role to play. Do you know how much more important it is to lead a purposeful, active life than to be lost in leisure and anomie with more stuff than you know what to do with? Which is where we’re at now, even for many who are statistically "poor."
When the Happy Motoring colossus tweaks out, we’ll spend less time moving around and more time doing useful things, staying put around the places where we live. We’d be lucky if we could keep some railroads going, but the prospects are not great for that now. Sorry, we blew it. Should have re-started that project in 1970 when the handwriting was on the wall. (We made a lot of bad choices.) Cars and trains require elaborate networks of many interdependent technologies all integrated smoothly at the giant scale — oil, steel, plastics, electronics — and all of that is disintegrating. Pretty soon, you can forget about airplanes, too. That leaves... what? Yes, boats and horses. I know... it sounds inconceivable. Wait for it.
When our grotesque medical racketeering matrix fails, doctors will practice medicine at smaller scale, probably without advanced pharmaceuticals and techno-diagnostics. They’ll open small local clinics while zombies squat in the broken mega-hospitals. You’ll have to pay in cash, whatever form that comes in. You’ll have to take care of yourself, too, but there will be a whole lot less enticing, engineered, toxic crap available to stuff into your body — Froot Loops, Hot Pockets — and the food markets won’t be all that super. There will certainly be less food altogether, but there will be fewer of us to feed, and more of that fewer-of-us will be busy producing that food, one way or another.
#3
We had railroads before electricity. An indirect effect of that period was Standard Time, as routes had to be coordinated to avoid unfortunate meetings somewhere on the tracks. Railroads will still provide mass transportation of goods and, if necessary, people.
#4
If you remember the opening pages of Atlas Shrugged, it was infrastructure collapse, (a telephone line going down) as a result by gummint / industry misfeasance that started the whole story rolling.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
06/13/2023 8:04 Comments ||
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#5
I think Knunstler might be assuming the level of collapse is uniform and world-wide. If not, a whole host of potential colonial powers might find the natural resources and farmland of North America of great interest. Like the Gallic Wars, it will be messy, but if they know how to use the classic Roman tactic of selective alliances to balkanize Nebraska against Illinois, it might make a great future version of De Bellico Gallia?
(it might look like this: 高卢战争)
[Gateway] Lt. General Michael Flynn took to Twitter and wrote "Yes, the storm has arrived" in response to a video of Senator Chuck Grassley revealing a foreign national who allegedly bribed Joe and Hunter Biden has over 17 audio recordings of both Joe and Hunter Biden.
General Flynn: "Yes, the storm has arrived.
Now it’s between competing clouds of those who are woke in the USG, the media, and the corporate world (all losing by the way) and those who think they are taking Donald Trump down through this fake, false indictment and additional persecution (the WH). They are making him even more appealing.
The RINO establishment wants us all to move past Trump and get on with their lame attempts to govern the nation—that hasn’t worked for well over half a century. The Uniparty has yielded to the takeover of the communist left globalists.
#WeThePeople need to rise to the occasion and start to participate in every action and election going on in our communities."
#2
Joe gets up early. I guess he doesn’t live in Newark.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
06/13/2023 6:41 Comments ||
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#3
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
#5
personally I'd like to drag out the discovery of Joe's mega corruption for many months
it's more satisfying to watch the libs embarrassed week after week after week
Posted by: lord garth ||
06/13/2023 20:42 Comments ||
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#6
It will have to be ground in some to peal away the Senators. If the money is easily traceable into Joe’s hands even the Dem bozos will have issues with their constituents. You would think that he would be good at laundering, but all the SARS report binders indicate not. My impression is that he has been dirty and stupid for a long time and that the Feds were/are aware and just buried everything because Dem.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
06/13/2023 21:16 Comments ||
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[Shafaq News] None of the leaders of the Iraqi armed factions ever took Falih al-Fayyadh's statements seriously. The head of the Popular Mobilisation Authority (PMA) paramilitary umbrella organization is far from known for issuing embarrassing public challenges. He tends to solve problems through the quiet consensus-building of a tribal leader rather than an influential official or commander of the third-largest combat force in Iraq. So his fiery ...a single two-syllable word carrying connotations of both incoherence and viciousness. A fiery delivery implies an audience of rubes and yokels, preferably forming up into a mob... and confrontational public broadside last month took everyone by surprise.
[Jpost] Arab Israeli leaders decried a new plan to insert the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) into the fight to combat violence in Arab communities, warning of a dangerous level of police surveillance that could strip innocent civilians of their rights.
“[Arab leaders] represent the Palestinian Authority more than they represent Arab society in Israel,” Zoabi said. “This is why it is not good that they blame the police for their problems.”
“I’m afraid that the government and the prime minister still don’t have the real political will to deal with the [criminal] organizations and secure the Palestinian citizens of Israel,” said Arab Israeli MK Aida Touma-Sliman (Hadash-Ta’al).
The government is “still trying to use our fear and being victims of crime to pass very bad suggestions that are meant to threaten the basis of the community’s civil rights,” she said.
Touma-Sliman spoke just a day after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu unveiled his plan, following a bloody weekend in which eight Israeli Arabs were murdered, five of them in a car-wash shootout in the northern town of Yafia.
MURDER IN THE ARAB SECTOR
Over 100 Israelis in the Arab sector have been murdered since the start of 2023.
...in Arab-on-Arab violence within their communities. This has nothing to do with the Israeli government or interactions with the majority Jewish population. In fact it’s only being noticed because Arab-Israeli politicians loudly demanded the Israeli government intervene to create the same safety through active policing in Arab-Israeli communities that they do in Jewish communities, then have been complaining ever since of “racist” police brutality...
At this time last year, the community had only lost only a third of that amount, according to the nonprofit Abraham Initiatives group, an organization that tracks Arab Israeli crime rates in the Jewish state.
The fatal crime spike has led many Arab community leaders to blame Netanyahu and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir (Otzma Yehudit) for their inaction.
Yet many of these leaders fear the Shin Bet’s involvement, calling it undemocratic and dangerous. Touma-Sliman also pointed the blame directly at Ben-Gvir, calling him a “racist” who supported “terrorist, fascist organizations” and doomed the security of Arab Israelis from the start.
The Shin Bet is Israel’s primary security agency, its internal security service tasked with investigating and targeting terrorists. Though it has previously been involved in domestic cases that could be considered terrorism, leaders within the agency itself have protested deeper involvement in domestic matters. However, on Sunday evening, Netanyahu doubled down on his plan, noting that the recent crime wave in Arab communities makes the matter urgent.
Human and civil rights organizations criticized the agency’s involvement even further. Suhad Bishara, legal director of the human rights legal aid organization Adalah, wrote that Netanyahu’s plan was “particularly alarming” given that it “further threatens the basic rights of a group that is already systematically targeted and oppressed by the police.
“Moreover, if the government promotes legislation to expand the powers of the Shin Bet for this purpose, we would oppose it on the grounds that it intended to establish an enforcement system specifically for one ethnic and national group, and thereby entrench two separate legal systems – one for Palestinian citizens of Israel, and the other for Jewish-Israeli citizens – and is therefore blatantly racist,” she wrote.
Gadeer Nicola, director of the Arab Society Department at the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, agreed with Bishara, noting that the Shin Bet’s involvement would “blur the boundaries between crime and terrorism – both in practice and in public mentality.”
WHY ARE ARABS REJECTING SHIN BET INVOLVEMENT?
Meisa Irshad, a founder of Women Against Weapons and legal adviser to the anti-gun advocacy organization Gun Free Kitchen Tables, emphasized that Arab Israelis were afraid of further surveillance.
“Our biggest fear is that the Shabak [Shin Bet] will use illegal methods of investigation, and obviously invade human rights and suspects’ rights in terms of criminal process,” she said.
Irshad said that this potential illegality was why top agency officials objected to its involvement in Arab community violence. She also pointed to the Shin Bet’s history of collaborating with Palestinian criminals, giving them weapons and influence.
“The Shabak is part of the problem; it is not a solution in this case,” she said.
Nadira abu Dbai Saadi, a project manager at Women Against Violence, added that the Shin Bet’s imposition would be “very dangerous. The issue is the violence, the issue is the criminality, the issue is that the police are not doing what they should be doing.”
Saadi doesn’t think that “the Shabak will be our savior,” stressing that the Shin Bet was already involved in Arab activist communities in their investigations. She did not want this invasive behavior to become normalized.
“They will go into your privacy, hear your calls, look after your phones and the internet and everything; it’s kind of a dictatorship, it’s North Korea: to know you are all the time on the focus of the security system,” she said.
However, Nael Zoabi, an Arab Israeli and former elementary school principal in the northern town of Nein near Nazareth, supported the Shin Bet’s imposition, calling it a “very high-quality organization, successful and skilled.”
He said that the agency would restore democracy in Arab communities that he believes currently have no leader.
“[Arab leaders] represent the Palestinian Authority more than they represent Arab society in Israel,” Zoabi said. “This is why it is not good that they blame the police for their problems.”
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
