Latest Analysis and Commentary
by Raymond Ibrahim • March 22, 2026 at 5:00 am
"They had the audacity to tell us that we are poor Christians, and we should be thankful that their son had only sodomized the child, 'not raped her'.... Muslims think that they can commit any crime against us, and no one would dare oppose them." — Father of a 6-year-old girl attacked by her tutor, morningstarnews.org, December 17, 2025, Pakistan. On December 30, a young man of "North African" appearance stabbed a priest multiple times in a busy street in broad daylight. Don Rodrigo Grajales Gaviria, 45, was stabbed from behind while walking in Modena's historic center. — December 30, 2025, Italy. On December 15, the Muslim-led MyLahore Group, led by Ishfaq Farooq, renamed Bradford's Christmas Market, of which it is in charge, to "Winter Market"... "Once again, Christmas is the thing being diluted, renamed, and pushed aside – not because it offends everyone, but because it offends a very specific worldview that refuses to integrate." — X, December 15, 2025, United Kingdom. "A Muslim mass besieges the St. Martin's Cathedral, shouting 'Allahu Akbar.'... This is just the trailer. What do you think will happen when they are in the majority?" — X, December 10, 2025, The Netherlands On December 1, a Sri Lankan national, identified only as "YA," successfully appealed the UK Home Office's rejection of his asylum claim. He had been arrested in connection with the 2019 Easter Sunday bombings — Islamic State-claimed suicide attacks on Christian churches and hotels that killed 269 people, including British nationals. The UK is nevertheless considering granting him asylum. — December 1, 2025, United Kingdom.
On December 30, a young man of "North African" appearance stabbed a priest multiple times in a busy street in broad daylight. Don Rodrigo Grajales Gaviria, 45, was stabbed from behind while walking in the historic center of Modena, Italy. Pictured: Modena Cathedral and Ghirlandina Bell Tower at the Piazza Grande, in the center of Modena. (Photo by iStock/Getty Images)
Muslim Rape of Christians in Pakistan On December 10, in Punjab Province, a Muslim man in his early 20s, Muhammad Uzair Riaz Dogar, "sodomized" a 6-year-old Christian girl during a tutoring session at his home. The victim, daughter of impoverished Salvation Army church member Saleem Masih, had been tutored by the suspect's sister for four months. While the female tutor was away, the brother let all Muslim children leave but forcibly took the Christian girl to another room and assaulted her. She was found crying in pain, clothes blood-soaked; hospital examination confirmed sodomy. The perpetrator was eventually arrested, but his family tried to pressure the family to withdraw charges and settle, making derogatory remarks exploiting their Christian poverty. According to the girl's father:
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by Amir Taheri • March 22, 2026 at 4:00 am
The second scenario is for Trump to refocus on Iran's arsenal of missiles by claiming it has been wiped out, thus enabling him to end the war. However, that would mean becoming hostage to fortune. It would be sufficient for Tehran to fire a ballistic missile or launch an attack drone just days after Trump's declaration of victory to show that the leader of the mightiest power in history has thrown in the towel a bit too soon. The third scenario, favored by some in Trump's kitchen cabinet but absolutely hated by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is the Venezuela model: having decapitated the regime, you allow it to squeal and survive under a second tier of leaders. That scenario may not be applicable to Iran for two reasons. First, the Venezuela of Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro did not want to wipe Israel off the map and drive the Yankees out of Latin America. Nor did Venezuela have proxies in the American backyard and sleeping terror cells inside the US.
Pictured: Two F/A-18 jets launch from the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean Sea, in support of U.S. military operations in Iran, on March 3, 2026. (Photo by U.S. Navy via Getty Images)
With the war between the Israel-US duo and the Islamic Republic in Iran entering its third week, two questions are asked in policy circles across the world. The first is: how long will it last?
The answer is: how long is a string?
Which means: because no one knows, no speculation is warranted. The second question may be beyond a journalist's bailiwick. As one of my mentors in journalism taught so many decades ago, we had better leave history to historians and guessing the future to futurologists. However, using a dose of sophistry, one might claim that op-eds represent a hybrid form of journalism that allows a measure of exemption from the mentor's rule through pontification. With that admittedly lame excuse, one could imagine five scenarios in which this war might terminate. The first is for President Donald Trump to do what he has done many times: declare victory and move to something else.
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by Majid Rafizadeh • March 21, 2026 at 5:00 am
The critical question is whether we will stop at weakening the Iranian regime or Hamas or move toward ensuring that they can never again recover as long-term threats to their neighbors or global security. At this moment, leaving those regimes in place – the ruling mullahs in Iran or Hamas in Gaza — is probably the most dangerous option. Authoritarian regimes such as Iran's, and terrorist groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic State and the Taliban, rarely respond to setbacks by abandoning their ambitions. Instead, they pause, regroup, and rebuild. Russia and China, each with its own anti-American calculations, could provide political cover, technological assistance, and indirect support that would allow Iran to resume its nuclear program. China has already been supplying Iran with "almost everything but troops" during this war, and supplying Russia with military materiel for its war against Ukraine. If Iran's regime and Hamas are allowed to recover, their primary strategic objective will likely become to rearm as quickly as possible, and we will be right back at war again. Stopping halfway through such efforts only allows threats to reemerge dangerously in the future. History will judge whether these two opportunities presented today were seized — or allowed to slip away.
If Iran's regime and Hamas are allowed to recover, their primary strategic objective will likely become to rearm as quickly as possible, and we will be right back at war again. Pictured: Iran's then "Supreme Leader" Ayatollah Ali Khamenei meets with Hamas leaders Khaled Mashaal (center) and Mussa Abu Marzuk (left) in Tehran on February 1, 2009. (Photo by AFP via Getty Images)
What has taken place in recent weeks is nothing short of historic. For decades, the Iranian regime and its proxies, including Hamas, have operated with a sense of impunity. For decades, Iran's rulers have expanded their regional influence, armed their proxy militias, threatened their neighbors, and steadily advanced their weapons or mass destruction programs. While various countries imposed sanctions and Israel and the United States occasionally conducted limited military responses, no large-scale effort was ever undertaken to fundamentally weaken the political and military power deep inside Iran. That reality has now changed dramatically. Now, for the first time, both the Iranian regime and Hamas have experienced direct and sustained military campaigns at a scale they had long assumed would never occur.
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by Robert Williams • March 20, 2026 at 11:00 am
In a region too often dominated by arsonists, the United Arab Emirates stands for something rarer and far more valuable: order, courage, legitimacy, and the conviction that peace is not weakness, but strength.
In a region too often dominated by arsonists, the United Arab Emirates stands for something rarer and far more valuable: order, courage, legitimacy, and the conviction that peace is not weakness, but strength. Pictured: The city skyline is pictured in Dubai on March 11, 2026.(Photo by Giuseppe Cacace/ AFP via Getty Images)
At a time when much of the Middle East remains trapped between revolutionary slogans and recurring violence, the United Arab Emirates has chosen a different path: order over chaos, statehood over militias, modernity over ideological ruin. For years, the UAE has worked to build a future-focused nation anchored in innovation, economic dynamism, strategic openness, and institutional strength. It has sought to project the image — and the reality — of an Arab state confident enough to embrace progress, invest in peace, and defend stability. That is precisely why Iran and its proxies find the UAE so intolerable.
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by Uzay Bulut • March 20, 2026 at 5:00 am
Pakistan, included by US President Donald J. Trump in his "Board of Peace" for the Gaza Strip, nevertheless continues to be one of the most dangerous countries for Christians and other non-Muslims. International watchdog organizations continue to rank Pakistan among the most difficult countries for Christians. "The year 2025 was marked by a deepening crisis for religious minorities in Pakistan, characterized by entrenched legal discrimination, rising mob violence, and a climate of near-total impunity for perpetrators." — 2025 report by "Voice of Pakistan Minority." The same day Masih was murdered, United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) thankfully issued its 2026 report, in which it urged the US government to redesignate Pakistan as a "Country of Particular Concern" (CPC), under the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, over systematic and ongoing violations of religious freedom. USCIRF also called for lifting an existing waiver that exempts Pakistan from penalties available with the designation. In addition, USCIRF calls for targeted sanctions on Pakistani officials and government agencies responsible for severe violations of religious freedom by freezing those individuals' assets and/or barring their entry into the US under human rights-related financial and visa authorities, citing specific religious freedom violations. USCIRF additionally called for holding accountable individuals who incite or participate in vigilante violence, targeted killings, forced conversion, and other religiously based crimes. It noted: "The U.S. Congress should incorporate religious freedom concerns into its larger oversight of the U.S.-Pakistan bilateral relationship through hearings, letters, resolutions, and congressional delegations and advocate for the release of FoRB [Freedom of Religion or Belief] prisoners in Pakistan." Pakistan would seem hardly the most helpful member for any real "Board of Peace."
In March 2025, Zohaib Iftikhar, a Muslim, slit the throat of his coworker, Waqas Masih, a 22-year-old Christian, after accusing him of committing blasphemy by touching an Islamic textbook with "unclean hands." Pictured: Thousands of people at a rally in Karachi, demanding the execution of Asia Bibi, on November 21, 2018. Bibi, a Christian woman, spent 8 years on death row because of a false accusation of blasphemy, before being released and exiled. (Photo by Asif Hassan/AFP via Getty Images)
Pakistan, included by US President Donald J. Trump in his "Board of Peace" for the Gaza Strip, nevertheless continues to be one of the most dangerous countries for Christians and other non-Muslims. International watchdog organizations continue to rank Pakistan among the most difficult countries for Christians. On Open Doors' 2026 World Watch List, which assesses persecution faced by Christians worldwide, Pakistan again ranks eighth. The report cited systemic discrimination, mob violence, forced conversions, bonded labor, and gender-based abuses, noting that perpetrators often act with impunity. According to a 2025 report by the organization "Voice of Pakistan Minority": "The year 2025 was marked by a deepening crisis for religious minorities in Pakistan, characterized by entrenched legal discrimination, rising mob violence, and a climate of near-total impunity for perpetrators.
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by Khaled Abu Toameh • March 19, 2026 at 5:00 am
Engagement clearly signals to terrorists that violence is an effective path to power, land, and international recognition. Hamas is a group that is explicitly and fundamentally committed, in both ideology and practice, to "armed resistance" (terrorism). Hamas is not some misunderstood political faction waiting to be coaxed into moderation. It advocates jihad (holy war) as an "individual duty [of all Muslims] for the liberation of Palestine." Article 13 of the Hamas charter says: "There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors." [T]here is no evidence that the terror group intends to fundamentally alter its long-term goals. Talking to Hamas now, without its first adhering to Trump's preconditions, marks a sharp and potentially confusing policy reversal that weakens US credibility globally. Across the region, the Iranian regime and its terror proxies are watching closely. The lesson for them will unmistakably be: hold out, escalate, and eventually the world's most powerful democracy will come to deliver victory to you. Engaging Hamas as if it were a normal governing authority will only demonstrate to other terrorist groups that terrorism works. Launching direct talks with Hamas or other Islamist terror groups absent any fundamental change in their positions is not diplomacy. It is capitulation and surrender dressed up as "realism." Above all, direct engagement of Hamas is a concession to the jihadis, who believe Muslims are in an eternal confrontation with the enemies of Islam and must overthrow secular regimes to restore a "pure" Islamic state.
Hamas is not some misunderstood political faction waiting to be coaxed into moderation. It advocates jihad (holy war) as an "individual duty [of all Muslims] for the liberation of Palestine." Pictured: Hamas terrorists in Jabalia refugee camp, in the Gaza Strip, on December 1, 2025. (Photo by Omar Al-Qataa/AFP via Getty Images)
Envoys from U.S. President Donald J. Trump's "Board of Peace" recently met representatives of Hamas in the Egyptian capital of Cairo in an effort to safeguard the Gaza ceasefire, Reuters reported on March 16. "The weekend meeting is the first publicly reported since the start of the Iran war between the Palestinian militant group and the board, a new international body personally headed by Trump, which has been tasked with overseeing post-war Gaza.... "One of the sources says Trump's board was represented at the talks with Hamas by Aryeh Lightstone, an American aide to Trump's special envoy Steve Witkoff.... Further meetings were expected this week. "
The Trump administration is making a huge mistake by engaging an Islamist terror group.
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by Ahmed Charai • March 19, 2026 at 4:30 am
[CIA Director John] Ratcliffe projected command, seriousness, and strategic clarity. He spoke like a man who understands intelligence not simply as the collection of information, but as the fuel of statecraft. He reaffirmed the administration's rationale for striking Iran, saying that Iran posed a "constant threat to the United States for an extended period of time, and posed an immediate threat at this time." Tulsi Gabbard, by contrast, appeared less at ease in a role that demands steadiness, clarity, and discipline. For years, Tehran has built and expanded an arsenal of ballistic missiles and drones while cultivating a network of coercion that has threatened not only Israel, but also Gulf states such as the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain—countries that chose peace, modernization, and partnership with Israel and the United States. To suggest that America had no obligation to stand with such partners against a regime built on intimidation, blackmail, and ideological expansionism would constitute a shocking abdication. Regimes of this kind [Iran] do not become less dangerous because democracies grow tired of confronting them. On the contrary, in Tehran, democratic fatigue is interpreted as permission. Here, the Abraham Accords offer a strategic approach. They showed that the Middle East need not be organized around permanent grievances, but can be reorganized around commerce, technology, security cooperation, and mutual recognition. Jared Kushner deserves recognition for the role he played in helping bring those accords into being and in working afterward to deepen their promise. Their deeper lesson was not merely that old enemies can sign documents. It was that the future can be built around incentives more powerful than hatred. In the end, the choice was never between war and perfect peace. It was between confronting a regime that had spent decades arming proxies, tightening a ring of fire around Israel, terrorizing America's Arab partners, and extending its reach toward the world's most sensitive maritime corridors—or waiting until that architecture of aggression became even harder, bloodier, and costlier to dismantle. History is rarely kind to powers that confuse delay with prudence. If this moment is to mean anything, it must mean more than having checked Tehran's advance. It must mark the beginning of a different regional horizon: one in which Israel can live in security, Arab states can deepen stability and prosperity, and the Iranian people can finally reclaim a future stolen from them by a regime that made regional chaos its grand strategy.
Pictured: A Fattah ballistic missile is displayed during a military parade in Tehran, on September 22, 2023. (Photo by AFP via Getty Images)
Yesterday's Senate Intelligence Committee's Worldwide Threats demonstrated that in an age of deep polarization and mounting international disorder, the public questioning of intelligence leaders before elected representatives is one of democracy's highest disciplines. Those in power must explain their actions before the nation. Specifically, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard testified before the Senate committee on the Trump administration's decision to launch strikes on Iran on February 28. Their testimonies mattered not because they satisfied partisan ritual, but because they defined to the public how they assess the threats gathering against the United States, its allies, and the strategic order America sustains.
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by Lawrence Kadish • March 19, 2026 at 4:00 am
Pictured: US President Donald Trump in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, DC, on March 16, 2026. (Photo by Annabelle Gordon/AFP via Getty Images)
Israel has for decades understood what the American public is just beginning to appreciate: Iran has been at war with our democracy for nearly half a century. President Donald J. Trump has long recognized the threat, along with the grim reality that Iran's ayatollahs and their Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps have been zealously committed to deploying nuclear weapons that would jeopardize more than the Middle East. Their chants of "Death to America," were not just meant to inflame their citizens but to transmit their strategic intent: truly "Death to America." Without a declaration of war, the Iranian clerics have directed the murder of American servicemen, the assassination of opponents anywhere in the world, funded sleeper cells, and created a ring of terrorist organizations whose mission remains to drive Israelis into the sea. The outrage of October 7, 2023 was just meant to be their curtain-opener.
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by Nils A. Haug • March 18, 2026 at 5:00 am
Erdogan, from his comments, seems to consider himself the rightful leader of the entire Muslim world. In the interim, he evidently sees himself as "the Middle East's next great power broker, claiming leadership while chaos reigns." Now, just as Israel is overcoming its primary enemy, the Iranian regime, which seeks to wipe Israel off the map and then establish a Caliphate under Sharia law in the region -- along comes yet another Muslim extremist of a similar kind, Turkey's Erdogan. In March 2025, Erdogan doubled down on his anti-Israel rhetoric: "[I]n Turkey's largest mosque, he reportedly told a crowd of worshippers: 'May Allah, for the sake of his name, Al-Qahhar'—the Vanquisher—'destroy and devastate Israel.'" Turkey, it seems, will become Iran's successor in continuing venomous anti-Israel threats in the Muslim sphere, with "Death to Israel" voiced even in the Turkish parliament. Perhaps only when Turkey's leader openly declares, "Death to America" will the US realize that the Islamist monster it has naively supported has simply been stringing the West along.
Now, just as Israel is overcoming its primary enemy, the Iranian regime, which seeks to wipe Israel off the map and then establish a Caliphate under Sharia law in the region -- along comes yet another Muslim extremist of a similar kind, Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Pictured: Erdogan meets with Iran's then Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in Tehran, on September 7, 2018. (Photo by the Office of the Supreme Leader of Iran)
Tehran's infamous "doomsday clock" was designed to count down to the annihilation of Israel in the year 2040. Instead, it appears finally to have ceased operating at the 2026 mark, along with many leaders of Iran's extremist Islamic regime. The irony of Iran's rout by its two most-hated enemies -- the "Great Satan" United States and the "Little Satan" Israel -- must be seismic in Iran's major centers, where much of the civilian population openly celebrates, not the end of Israel as intended by Shia clerics, but, instead, the hoped-for final days of an apparently much-hated regime. Israel long sought to destroy the clock's prominence in Tehran's Palestine Square, and has now succeeded in eliminating most of Iran's military and propaganda infrastructure.
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by Pierre Rehov • March 17, 2026 at 5:00 am
Unlike Venezuela's military elite, whose loyalty ultimately depends on financial incentives, Iran's security apparatus has always viewed itself as the armed guardian of a sacred Islamic revolutionary mission. Iran, however, represents a fundamentally different political organism. Confusing the two systems could produce disastrous strategic errors. The Islamic Republic of Iran is not merely an authoritarian government cloaked in ideological language; it is an ideological state whose institutional architecture was deliberately constructed to preserve and expand a revolutionary doctrine. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commands roughly 190,000 personnel plus hundreds of thousands of reservists, controls vast business conglomerates spanning construction, energy and telecommunications, and oversees the Basij militia, a mass organization whose membership has been estimated in the millions and whose purpose is to violently enforce ideological conformity and suppress dissent. This resilience is characteristic of ideological regimes whose institutional design ensures survival beyond any single leader. The Islamic Republic itself endured the death of founding Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989, transitioning smoothly to a new leadership structure under Ayatollah Ali Khamenei while preserving the same revolutionary framework. Applying the Venezuelan model to Iran would not merely fail; it would risk creating a dangerous illusion of success while leaving the underlying ideological infrastructure untouched. Some Western analysts have suggested that once sufficient military pressure weakens Tehran, negotiations could be opened with supposedly pragmatic factions inside the regime, allowing elements of the current political structure to remain in place in exchange for concessions on nuclear weapons development and regional aggression. Such thinking misunderstands the nature of ideological systems, which tend to treat compromise not as a strategic transformation but as a temporary tactic designed to preserve the revolution until circumstances change. Leaving the ideological framework of the Islamic Republic intact would therefore resemble leaving a malignant tumor inside the body after surgery: the symptoms might temporarily subside, but the underlying disease would continue to grow until it inevitably returns. The Venezuelan model succeeded because the regime it confronted was fundamentally pragmatic, corrupt and adaptable. Iran's regime is none of those things. The Islamic Republic was designed to survive leadership crises, economic hardship, and external pressure precisely because its institutions are bound together by religious ideology rather than mere patronage. Any strategy that focuses only on removing individual leaders while preserving the ideological machinery that sustains them will ultimately fail. It is naive, however, and self-defeating if the Trump Administration imagines that unarmed civilians -- with no outside assistance -- can realistically prevail against heavily armed, determined state security forces. The wish may be understandable, but even more civilians than the 40,000 already slaughtered are bound to meet the same fate. The Trump Administration needs to direct and help them. If there is eventually an end to the violent suppression from the IRGC and the Basij, the international community should be prepared to support forces capable of building a new political order that is neither Islamist nor communist. Anything less would allow the same ideological machinery to regenerate under a different name, ensuring that the crisis would return once again — and that we will still be fighting essentially the same regime but with different ayatollahs five or ten years from now.
Once Venezuela's President Nicolás Maduro disappeared, the country's interim leadership and military elite simply recalculated their interests and began cooperating with Washington to preserve their positions. Unlike Venezuela's military elite, whose loyalty ultimately depends on financial incentives, Iran's security apparatus has always viewed itself as the armed guardian of a sacred Islamic revolutionary mission. Applying the Venezuelan model to Iran would not merely fail; it would risk creating a dangerous illusion of success while leaving the underlying ideological infrastructure untouched. Pictured: Maduro, in US custody, on board the USS Iwo Jima in the Caribbean Sea, on January 3, 2026. (Image source: The White House)
The spectacular American military operation that removed Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro from power earlier this year has inevitably inspired comparisons among strategists searching for solutions to the Iran crisis.
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by Khaled Abu Toameh • March 16, 2026 at 5:00 am
According to the Trump peace plan, announced late last year: "Hamas and other factions agree to not have any role in the governance of Gaza, directly, indirectly, or in any form. All military, terror, and offensive infrastructure, including tunnels and weapon production facilities, will be destroyed and not rebuilt. There will be a process of demilitarization of Gaza under the supervision of independent monitors, which will include placing weapons permanently beyond use through an agreed process of decommissioning..." The Trump administration and its newly established "Board of Peace," however, have failed to call out Hamas for its ongoing breach of the terms of the ceasefire plan. Hamas has evidently interpreted this silence as a green light to pursue its effort to rearm, regroup and rebuild its regime by killing, torturing, and economically squeezing the residents of the Gaza Strip. "Hamas governs from within a shattered enclave of two million people. The Board of Peace governs from a conference table in Washington. Hamas collects shekels in taxes on smuggled goods; the Board has no independent revenue stream. Hamas integrates 10,000 police personnel into proposed structures; the Board must still wait for countries to commit personnel to a stabilization force. Hamas appoints governors and mayors; the Board awaits reports." — Ranjan Solomon, Middle East Monitor, March 10, 2026. Hamas is rebuilding its financial machinery by collecting taxes, fees, and customs charges on goods entering the Gaza Strip. The money is not being invested in reconstruction. Instead, it is going toward rebuilding the terrorist group's military capabilities. The people in this photo are just some of many who have been executed, shot, kidnapped, or brutally tortured in recent weeks. The list of atrocities grows by the day, and the sheer sadism on display goes beyond anything comprehensible (even for those of us who were born and raised in Gaza and saw Hamas's brutality up close for years). We thought we had seen the floor of their depravity. There is no floor for those people." — Gaza-born journalist Hamza Howidy, March 13, 2026. "The 'crime' those people committed? Saying their own opinions. What makes this even worse than the suffering of those victims itself is the silence of the people who built entire careers screaming about Palestinian suffering... The Palestinians left to die under Hamas's boots are apparently the wrong kind of Palestinians, too inconvenient, too disruptive to the narrative, and too alive in ways that don't serve 'the cause'" — Hamza Howidy, March 13, 2026. "Hamas's fascist militias tortured my dear friend Ashraf Naser Shallah, who has been in and out of hospitals in Gaza City over the past couple of days. They took his phone, stole his wallet with critical documents, and threatened to kill him if he continued to speak out against their terrorism, the Iranian regime, the fraudulent 'resistance' narrative, the desire for peace with Israelis, and his refusal to be cannon fodder in failed Jihadi ideologies that have destroyed the Palestinian people in Gaza" — Gaza-born political activist Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, March 10, 2026. As long as the world's attention remains focused elsewhere, Hamas will continue to rebuild its authority in the Gaza Strip without facing serious international scrutiny. Hamas seems to believe that time works in its favor. The longer the international community's silence persists, the easier it becomes for the terror group to reestablish itself as the only legitimate power. While some international parties continue searching for diplomatic formulas and peace plans to stabilize the Gaza Strip, Hamas has made one thing abundantly clear: it has no intention of relinquishing terrorism or power. Until that reality changes, no peace plan will have a realistic chance of transforming the future of the Gaza Strip.
Hamas is rebuilding its financial machinery by collecting taxes, fees, and customs charges on goods entering the Gaza Strip. The money is not being invested in reconstruction. Instead, it is going toward rebuilding the terrorist group's military capabilities. Pictured: Masked members of the Hamas-controlled "People's Protection Committees" commandeer a humanitarian aid truck in the southern Gaza Strip on April 3, 2024. (Photo by Said Khatib/AFP via Getty Images)
As international attention is focused on the Iran war, the Palestinian Hamas terror group has stepped up its crackdown on the Palestinian people as part of its effort to reassert its control aggressively over the Gaza Strip. Hamas's measures are in violation of US President Donald J. Trump's plan for ending the Israel-Hamas war, which erupted on October 7, 2023 when the Iran-backed terror group invaded Israel and murdered more than 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals. According to the Trump peace plan, announced late last year:
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by Gordon G. Chang • March 15, 2026 at 5:00 am
Xi has been supremely confident that China will dominate the rest of the century... "Change is coming that hasn't happened in 100 years," the Chinese leader told Vladimir Putin after their 40th in-person chat, in Moscow in March 2023. "And we are driving this change together." Many in Washington and New York policy circles essentially agreed with Xi as they accepted the narrative of America's managed decline. Not President Donald Trump. In a spectacular move, he extracted Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife from Caracas on January 3 and is now in the process of taking down Iran's theocracy.
American and Israeli strikes on Iran are finishing off Xi Jinping's most cherished narrative of the "China Dream" of national rejuvenation and dominance. U.S. President Donald Trump's moves have also triggered in the Chinese capital a reassessment of American power. Pictured: Trump and Xi meet at Gimhae Air Base in Busan, South Korea, on October 30, 2025. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
American and Israeli strikes have severely degraded Iran's ability to wage war. Perhaps more important, they are finishing off Xi Jinping's most cherished narrative of the "China Dream" of national rejuvenation and dominance. In Beijing these days, just about everyone knows China's arrogant leader was wrong about the long-term direction of the United States. Xi has been supremely confident that China will dominate the rest of the century, and he has not been reluctant to express his belief. "Change is coming that hasn't happened in 100 years," the Chinese leader told Vladimir Putin after their 40th in-person chat, in Moscow in March 2023. "And we are driving this change together." Xi's favorite phrase of recent years reflected this view: "The East is rising, and the West is declining." Many in Washington and New York policy circles essentially agreed with Xi as they accepted the narrative of America's managed decline.
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by Amir Taheri • March 15, 2026 at 4:00 am
Many ask whether he is more of a hardliner than his father. The answer is that his father started as a "moderate" compared to the firebrands of the time, like Prime Minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi, but became a hardliner when he realized that one cannot be a moderate in an immoderate system.
Pictured: A billboard featuring Iran's new Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei with military commanders, on March 13, 2026 in Tehran, Iran. (Photo by Majid Saeedi/Getty Images)
"He is injured but alive!" That is the message that authorities in the Islamic Republic of Iran passed on about the newly anointed "Supreme Guide" Mojtaba Khamenei, who survived an Israeli airstrike that claimed the lives of his parents and his wife at the start of the current war. Speculation about Mojtaba succeeding his father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in a new dynastic twist isn't new. It started almost 10 years ago when a campaign was launched to designate Ali Khamenei as "the Imam" rather than a mere ayatollah. That campaign was inspired by the fact that the 12 imams of Twelver Shiism owe their position to their bloodline, unlike traditional Islam that bestows the title of imam on learned theologians regardless of their bloodline.
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by Majid Rafizadeh • March 14, 2026 at 5:00 am
In the end, the greatest danger of this mindset is not simply unfair criticism of a president. The deeper problem is that it weakens the ability of society to confront serious threats. When political hatred becomes so intense that it overrides basic judgment, it becomes difficult to distinguish between legitimate criticism and reflexive opposition. Perception of reality itself is broken. At a moment when the world faces overwhelming security challenges – such as from China – currently developing new deadly pathogens for biowarfare and autonomous robots programmed to kill -- and authoritarian regimes that continue to threaten both their own populations and what they regard as their enemies -- denial and blindness carry serious risks. If political discourse becomes so polarized that people can no longer recognize the nature of regimes that repress their own citizens and openly threaten the United States and the Free World, the problem is far larger than any single president. It becomes a crisis that can only be addressed when people step outside their partisan bubbles and confront reality as it truly is.
Iran's leaders have for decades chanted "Death to America" ("The Great Satan") and "Death to Israel" ("The Little Satan"), slogans that are not merely rhetorical flourishes but actual central elements of the regime's ideological identity. Yet, when Trump confronts this very regime, the focus shifts away from the Iranian regime's actions and instead centers entirely on condemning Trump himself. The atrocities committed by the regime fade into the background. Pictured: Iran's then Supreme Guide Ali Khamenei gives a speech on November 1, 2023, televised on Iran's Channel 1. (Image source: MEMRI)
If one steps back from the daily noise of partisan bickering and looks at the broader picture in the United States today, some media outlets and political figures appear so consumed by hostility toward the current president that they seem incapable of evaluating events rationally. Their reaction to almost anything he does appears automatic and reflexive. This situation, often described as "Trump Derangement Syndrome," has reached such an extreme level that at times these voices appear to be siding — whether intentionally or not — with America's enemies such as the Chinese Communist Party, or the Iranian regime, which, since its inception in 1979, has openly been at war with the United States and for decades has been described by American officials across both political parties as the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism 39 years in a row.
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by Pierre Rehov • March 13, 2026 at 5:00 am
"Spain, as you know, does not have nuclear bombs... We alone cannot stop the Israeli offensive." Critics rightly interpreted the remark as a chilling admission that if Spain did have nuclear bombs, it would have used them against Israel. That a European head of government uttered such a threat against the Middle East's only democracy speaks volumes about the moral rot at the heart of Sánchez's government. Sánchez's posture is hardly accidental. It flows directly from the fragile coalition that props up his Socialist Party government. To remain in office, he depends on the even further-left Podemos, a party born of radical activism... A former high-ranking Venezuelan official cooperating with America's DEA has confirmed that Caracas and Tehran coordinated efforts to fund emerging radical-left forces in Europe, with Podemos as a prime target. The goal: weaken Western alliances from within by nurturing anti-American, anti-Israeli voices. A European government that blocks a vital operation against Iran while maintaining alliances with movements historically tied to Iranian and Venezuelan influence networks has placed itself outside the democratic consensus. When a NATO member obstructs action against a regime sworn to the destruction of America and Israel, the question is no longer whether influence exists. The question is how far it reaches — and how much damage it has already done and is planning to do.
"Spain, as you know, does not have nuclear bombs... We alone cannot stop the Israeli offensive." Critics rightly interpreted Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez's remark as a chilling admission that if Spain did have nuclear bombs, it would have used them against Israel. That a European head of government uttered such a threat against the Middle East's only democracy speaks volumes about the moral rot at the heart of Sánchez's government. Pictured: Sánchez (center) in Palos de la Frontera, Spain on March 6, 2026. (Photo by Cristina Quicler/AFP via Getty Images)
When the United States and Israel launched their joint operation against the Iranian regime this month, the geopolitical map of the Middle East shifted within hours. Iran's leadership, strategic targets, command centers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, ballistic missile launchers and nuclear facilities have been targeted in coordinated strikes aimed at dismantling Tehran's terror machine. Yet there have been unexpected obstacles — not in Tehran, but in Madrid. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez's government flatly refused to authorize the use of Spanish airspace or the joint bases at Rota and Morón for American forces. For decades, these installations have been vital logistical hubs for US military operations in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. This time, Madrid said no.
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