An Islamic Republic

Iran calls itself an Islamic Republic, which means that it's people live under Islamic, or sharia, law. To help us see what that entails, Matt Tardio has compiled a list of twenty laws to which the Iranian people are subject, and which devout Muslims aspire to impose on everyone, everywhere:

1. Apostasy (Leaving Islam): Punishable by death, especially for men who publicly renounce Islam. Women can face life in prison.
2. Homosexuality: Gay men can be executed; lesbians face 100 lashes. Even suspicion can result in arrest or forced confessions.
3. Blasphemy: Insulting the Prophet or sacred Islamic figures is punishable by death. This includes online posts, art, or speech.
4. Adultery (Sex outside marriage): Married offenders can be stoned to death. Unmarried receive 100 lashes. Applies to men and women.
5. “Corruption on Earth”: A vague charge used against dissenters, protesters, or activists. Often results in the death penalty.
6. Alcohol Consumption: Muslims caught drinking get 80 lashes per offense. 4-time offenders risk execution.
7. Female Hijab Law: Mandatory for all women. Punishment is imprisonment up to 10 years, flogging, fines, surveillance.
8. Criticism of the Supreme Leader: Even memes can lead to arrest. Public dissent brings 1–10 years in prison.
9. Same-sex relationships (non-penetrative): Still criminal. Punishable by lashes, prison, or worse.
10. Public Affection (Unmarried couples): Holding hands or kissing in public can get up to 74 lashes.
11. Women Need Husband’s Permission to Travel: Even for passports or leaving the country.
12. Child Marriage Legal age: Girls 13 or younger with father's or court approval.
13. Compulsory Military Service (Men only): Failure to serve results in being banned from travel, jobs, and university.
14. Cybercrime & Online Dissent: Criticizing Islam or the regime online is punishable by imprisonment, asset seizure, surveillance.
15. Western Music & Clothing: "Immoral" music, films, and fashion are banned with fines, confiscation, or arrest for disobeying.
16. Women Banned from Stadiums: Women are largely prohibited from attending men’s sports. Defiance results in arrest.
17. Public Singing or Dancing (Women): Illegal to sing solo or dance in public. Punishable by fines or jail.
18. Gender Segregation: Schools, buses, and workplaces are often segregated by law. Violations result in fines or expulsion.
19. Dog Ownership: Dogs are "unclean." Walking one in public could cost you jail time or seizure of your pet.
20. Baha’i Persecution: Adherents of the Baha’i religion can't hold government jobs, attend university, or practice freely.

Young men executed in Iran for homosexuality

What Jews Have Contributed to the World

The above title of this post should not be understood to imply that the following exhausts Jewish (or Muslim) contributions to humanity, but it's certainly an impressive statistic. Nor do I vouch for the accuracy of these claims, but anyone who's skeptical should be able to check them out easily enough.

The post points out the disparity between the world's population of Muslims and Jews along with an indicator of their relative achievements:

The Global Islamic population is approximately 1,200,000,000; that is one billion two hundred million or 20% of the world's population.

They have received the following Nobel Prizes:

Literature:1988 - Najib Mahfooz

Peace:1978 - Mohamed Anwar El-Sadat, 1990 - Elias James Corey, 1994 - Yaser Arafat, 1999 - Ahmed Zewai

Economics:(none)

Physics:(none)

Medicine:1960 - Peter Brian Medawar, 1998 - Ferid Mourad

TOTAL: 7

The Global Jewish population is approximately 14,000,000; that is fourteen million or about 0.02% of the world's population.

They have received the following Nobel Prizes:

Literature:1910 - Paul Heyse, 1927 - Henri Bergson, 1958 - Boris Pasternak, 1966 - Shmuel Yosef Agnon, 1966 - Nelly Sachs, 1976 - Saul Bellow, 1978 - Isaac Bashevis Singer, 1981 - Elias Canetti, 1987 - Joseph Brodsky, 1991 - Nadine Gordimer World

Peace:1911 - Alfred Fried, 1911 - Tobias Michael Carel Asser, 1968 - Rene Cassin, 1973 - Henry Kissinger, 1978 - Menachem Begin, 1986 - Elie Wiesel, 1994 - Shimon Peres, 1994 - Yitzhak Rabin

Physics:1905 - Adolph Von Baeyer, 1906 - Henri Moissan, 1907 - Albert Abraham Michelson, 1908 - Gabriel Lippmann, 1910 - Otto Wallach, 1915 - Richard Willstaetter, 1918 - Fritz Haber, 1921 - Albert Einstein, 1922 - Niels Bohr, 1925 - James Franck, 1925 - Gustav Hertz, 1943 - Gustav Stern, 1943 - George Charles de Hevesy, 1944 - Isidor Issac Rabi, 1952 - Felix Bloch, 1954 - Max Born, 1958 - Igor Tamm, 1959 - Emilio Segre, 1960 - Donald A. Glaser, 1961 - Robert Hofstadter, 1961 - Melvin Calvin, 1962 - Lev Davidovich Landau, 1962 - Max Ferdinand Perutz, 1965 - Richard Phillips Feynman, 1965 - Julian Schwinger, 1969 - Murray Gell-Mann, 1971 - Dennis Gabor, 1972 - William Howard Stein, 1973 - Brian David Josephson, 1975 - Benjamin Mottleson, 1976 - Burton Richter, 1977 - Ilya Prigogine, 1978 - Arno Allan Penzias, 1978 - Peter L Kapitza, 1979 - Stephen Weinberg, 1979 - Sheldon Glashow, 1979 - Herbert Charles Brown, 1980 - Paul Berg, 1980 - Walter Gilbert, 1981 - Roald Hoffmann, 1982 - Aaron Klug, 1985 - Albert A. Hauptman, 1985 - Jerome Karle, 1986 - Dudley R. Herschbach, 1988 - Robert Huber, 1988 - Leon Lehman, 1988 - Melvin Schwartz, 1988 - Jack Steinberger, 1989 - Sidney Altman, 1990 - Jerome Friedman, 1992 - Rudolph Marcus, 1995 - Martin Perl, 2000 - Alan J. Heeger

Economics:1970 - Paul Anthony Samuelson, 1971 - Simon Kuznets, 1972 - Kenneth Joseph Arrow, 1975 - Leonid Kantorovich, 1976 - Milton Friedman, 1978 - Herbert A. Simon, 1980 - Lawrence Robert Klein, 1985 - Franco Modigliani, 1987 - Robert M. Solow, 1990 - Harry Markowitz, 1990 - Merton Miller, 1992 - Gary Becker, 1993 - Robert Fogel

Medicine:1908 - Elie Metchnikoff, 1908 - Paul Erlich, 1914 - Robert Barany, 1922 - Otto Meyerhof, 1930 - Karl Landsteiner, 1931 - Otto Warburg, 1936 - Otto Loewi, 1944 - Joseph Erlanger, 1944 - Herbert Spencer Gasser, 1945 - Ernst Boris Chain, 1946 - Hermann Joseph Muller, 1950 - Tadeus Reichstein, 1952 - Selman Abraham Waksman, 1953 - Hans Krebs, 1953 - Fritz Albert Lipmann, 1958 - Joshua Lederberg, 1959 - Arthur Kornberg, 1964 - Konrad Bloch, 1965 - Francois Jacob, 1965 - Andre Lwoff, 1967 - George Wald, 1968 - Marshall W. Nirenberg, 1969 - Salvador Luria, 1970 - Julius Axelrod, 1970 - Sir Bernard Katz, 1972 - Gerald Maurice Edelman, 1975 - Howard Martin Temin, 1976 - Baruch S. Blumberg, 1977 - Roselyn Sussman Yalow, 1978 - Daniel Nathans, 1980 - Baruj Benacerraf, 1984 - Cesar Milstein, 1985 - Michael Stuart Brown, 1985 - Joseph L. Goldstein, 1986 - Stanley Cohen [& Rita Levi-Montalcini], 1988 - Gertrude Elion, 1989 - Harold Varmus, 1991 - Erwin Neher, 1991 - Bert Sakmann, 1993 - Richard J. Roberts, 1993 - Phillip Sharp, 1994 - Alfred Gilman, 1995 - Edward B. Lewis, 1996 - Lu Rose Iacovino

TOTAL: 129!

The author goes on to note that,

The Jews are NOT promoting brainwashing children in military training camps, teaching them how to blow themselves up and cause maximum deaths of Jews and other non-Muslims.

The Jews don't hijack planes, nor kill athletes at the Olympics, nor blow themselves up in German restaurants.

There is not one single Jew who has destroyed a church.

There is not a single Jew who protests by killing people. The Jews don't traffic slaves, nor do they have leaders calling for Jihad and death to all the Infidels.

Perhaps the world's Muslims should consider investing more in standard education and less in blaming the Jews for all their problems.

Muslims must ask 'what can they do for humankind' before they demand that humankind respects them.

Whether one agrees with the foregoing or not one has to wonder if there's not a connection between the last few sentences and what preceded them.

A Just Conclusion to Israel's War

Discussing the Israelis' end game in Iran, First Things' editor R.R. Reno notes that since the end of WWII, most wars have ended very unsatisfactorily. Indeed, I can't think of any war since 1945 that's ended in unconditional surrender. Here's Reno:

War seldom ends according to a satisfying script. Unconditional surrender—the banner headline of 1945—is a historical rarity, the exception, not the rule. More often hostilities conclude in the gray zone of ceasefires, armistices, and grudging diplomatic arrangements.

Israel stands in that gray zone now. Its defensive campaign against Iran and the Iranian proxy network seems to have primarily met its battlefield objectives. From a military standpoint, Iran appears to be defeated.

The harder task is to translate that success into a durable peace—without stumbling into George W. Bush 2.0, the grandiose dream of regime change by force.

Hopefully, he's correct that Iran is defeated and doesn't have a military ace up its sleeve. Though if it did, it'd be very puzzling why it wouldn't have played it before now. Anyway, after recounting Israeli successes against Iranian proxies, Reno adds this:

The just war tradition demands prudence at the end of war as well as at the start. As I see it, a settlement, whether by formal treaty or tacit modus vivendi, must impose three conditions:

• No nuclear pathway. Centrifuges disabled, inspections enforced.
• No ballistic missile expansion. Delivery systems are inseparable from warheads.
• No proxy rearmament. Hezbollah and Hamas must remain shells of their former selves.

These conditions are not maximalist fantasies. They are the foundation on which Israeli security—and regional peace—can be built. The peace will not be celebrated widely in the region. It is likely to be grudgingly accepted. But it can be achieved.

Reno is correct that these three conditions are necessary for achieving a durable peace, but they're not sufficient. As long as the mullahs and their brutally oppressive apparatus is left in place, then all of what Israel has accomplished in the last week will amount to little more than kicking the can down the road.

Any deal that Israel and the U.S. agree to must ensure that the Iranian people have a fair chance to establish on their own a much freer society, a society in which people are able to speak, write, worship, and dress as they please without fear of imprisonment, torture, and execution. A society whose wealth is used to raise the quality of Iranian life and not to buy missiles, guns, and nuclear weapons to wage war against Israel and perpetrate acts of murder and terrorism against Americans.

It won't be easy, but as Reno states,

Because Iran’s theocrats may spurn any compromise that forecloses their revolutionary aspirations, the “deal” Israel seeks may be no deal at all, but rather something imposed by realities on the ground. Even so, diplomacy must finish the work that airstrikes began: reassure nervous Arab capitals, institutionalize new alignments, and clarify redlines that make further aggression too costly for Iran to contemplate.

We'll see over the coming months whether such a peace is achieveable.

A Side Benefit of Israel's War

Beege Welborn at HotAir.com notes that one side benefit of the Israeli destruction of the Iranian muslim theocracy is that it might bring some relief to the most persecuted people in the world, Nigerian Christians.

Welborn writes:

There has been one place where Iran-backed proxies have run amok pretty much unhindered and ignored for years. In Nigeria they have slaughtered thousands of Christians with impunity. I can't even say the world yawned.

Save for some groups desperately trying to draw attention to it, the world hasn't even noticed.

She cites an article in the journal Global Christian Relief which says this:

Sadly, Nigeria has become known as the world’s center of Christian martyrs. In any given year, the number of Christians killed by extremist groups is rarely less than 4,000—often more than in the rest of the world combined.

Violence against the Nigerian Christian population is significantly localized in the north, where twelve Muslim-majority states declared sharia law in 1999, resulting in huge numbers of Christians experiencing daily discrimination. But it was the rise of an extremist movement called Boko Haram, which first started its murderous attacks in 2009, that resulted in Christians experiencing unprecedented violence.

According to an April 2023 report by the International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law, at least 52,250 persecuted Christians have been killed in the past fourteen years, simply for the crime of being Christian. In the past five years, violence has spread southwards to the middle belt of Nigeria, with radicalized Fulani herdsmen killing Christians to steal their land.

Boko Haram has now been joined by another extremist group operative in the area, called the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), and both seek the eradication of Christianity from the northern states.

The violence has resulted in refugees now numbering over four million, mostly Christian farmers. The government of Nigeria has proved unwilling to condemn the levels of violence, which some call genocidal, or inept in its attempts to engage and neutralize extremist movements.

At the beginning of the month, Muslim terrorists, who often arrive in the little Christian communities on motorbikes out of the blue, ran from house to house and through the village, slaughtering people in the town as they fled.

It's a scene repeated over and over again. The barbaric and sadistic Islamic murderers very much enjoy it when they can trap worshippers in a church on Sunday.

The latest brutal murders occurred this past weekend. Close to 200 souls, many of whom were already refugees seeking shelter from the violence, were viciously slaughtered by Fulani Islamic terrorists.

Welborn has more at the link. She concludes with this:

If the Israelis have managed to cut off the head of the snake, and the funds flowing to pay for weapons, ammo, machetes, and motorbike fuel these satellite proxies need in far-flung locales to rampage, what will happen in Nigeria? Surely, there might be some relief in sight.

Israel really is doing the entire Judeo-Christian world, and much of the Muslim Middle East, a huge favor by killing the Islamist snake.

China Is the World's Moral Authority?

Minnesota governor and Kamala Harris's 2024 running mate Tim Walz has demonstrated one more reason why we can be relieved that his bid to become our vice president failed. When asked whether he thought the U.S. could broker peace between Israel and Iran, he gave this response:

Now, who is the voice in the world that can negotiate some type of agreement in this? Who holds the moral authority? Who holds the ability to do that? Because we are not seen as a neutral actor, and we maybe never were.

I don’t want to tell anybody that. I think there’s a lot of people who say you always lean one way in this, but I think there was at least an attempt to be somewhat of the arbitrator in this. We saw President Carter do it with [Menachem] Begin and [Anwar] Sadat.

We’ve had certain wins along the way that were actually mutually beneficial both ways,” Walz continued. “Now I ask who that is. I mean, consistently over and over again, we’re going to have to face the reality, it might be the Chinese.

If Walz believes China has any moral authority at all then he's stunningly ignorant. If he doesn't believe it but said it anyway, then he's dangerously dishonest.

China has lied about, among other things, the origins and deadliness of the Wuhan virus, they've cheated on their World Trade Organization commitments, they've stolen our technology, fraudulently interfered on behalf of Biden in the 2020 election, persecuted and oppressed Christians, imprisoned, tortured, and harvested the organs of Falun Gong and Uyghurs who languish today in concentration camps, and facilitated the deaths of thousands of Americans by providing drug cartels with the precursors of fentanyl.

Moreover, they slaughtered as many as 8 million Chinese in their 1949 revolution and as many as 2 million more in their "cultural revolution" (1966-1976). They killed several thousand pro-democracy demonstrators in 1989, threatened to precipitate a war with the U.S. by invading Taiwan, deliberately addicted our kids on apps that turn their minds to jelly, deprived their own people of basic freedoms, and aided Russia in their slaughter of Ukrainians. And there's probably more.

Like all communist regimes the Chinese communists are totalitarian, oppressive, and evil. They're among the last of nations to have any moral authority in this world, and if Tim Walz thinks otherwise then he has no business being in state or national politics.

Life and Platonic Forms

As difficult as it may be for modern minds to accept, a lot of scientists are beginning to believe that Plato was right. Plato taught that there existed in some transcendent realm what he called the forms or ideals of things.

There is, for example, an ideal of a perfect tree, a perfect circle, a perfect chair, etc. and all the trees, circles, and chairs we see in the world have the properties they do because they derive them from their ideal form. All trees, for instance, have the property of treeness by which we recognize a given tree as a tree.

According to Plato the highest forms were the forms of the Good, the Beautiful, and the True. Early Christians incorporated these into their concept of God who was seen as perfect goodness, perfect beauty, and absolute truth.

An article by a physicist and engineer named Brian Miller at Evolution News explains why the Platonic concept of transcendent forms is beginning to gain traction among scientists.

The hypothesis has been presented in a book by David Klinghoffer titled Plato's Revenge. Klinghoffer's book is very readable and gives a good overview of this new Platonism by focusing on the work of one of it's seminal thinkers, a scientist named Richard Sternberg.

Miller discusses Sternberg's work in his article. He points out that a developing human embryo requires far more information than can be accounted for in the cells of the embryo. So, where does the rest of the required information come from?

Miller runs through the calculations in the main part of his article which I'll let you work through on your own, but here's his conclusion:

If the zygote cannot contain the information directing development, then that information must reside in a logical and mathematical structure that stems from or is tantamount to a Platonic form, as Sternberg has inferred and as Plato’s Revenge describes.

If one does not wish to embrace such a radical conclusion, one must accept that developmental algorithms display an efficiency and ingenuity that vastly surpass human knowledge. They could only have arisen from a mind far superior to our own.

In addition, any undirected evolutionary framework must be abandoned. Every fetal region employs a set of operations that include a map of subsequent stages in development and the instructions to direct the current stage to the next. They must also possess contingency plans for countless perturbed starting states.

Any major evolutionary transition would need to simultaneously alter the algorithms in every region at every stage instantly. If mutations only redirected a few regions at a few stages toward a new organism, the subsequent stages would return the fetal trajectory back toward the original target.

If the redirection efforts failed, the individual would experience deformations or death. Only a designer could simultaneously alter every algorithm to guide development toward a new outcome coherently.

It's fascinating that the more scientists learn about biology and cosmology, the more improbable becomes the dogma that it's all an astonishing accident, and the more rational it becomes to believe that there's an astonishing Mind as the cause of it all.

Does the Right Have an Antisemitism Problem?

The answer to the title question is that it evidently does, although certainly not on the scale of the antisemitism of the Left. Even so, it's not insignificant. The characters discussed below would no doubt insist that they're not antisemitic, just anti-Israel, but this is, for most practical purposes, a distinction without a difference.

In any event, readers can judge for themselves the rhetoric coming from these ladies and gentlemen.

Haley Strack at National Review writes:

Since October 7 some of America’s most popular podcasters have congratulated themselves on their ability to “just ask questions” about Israel’s war aims that the legacy media will not; in the process of doing so, they have given platforms to revisionist historians, Holocaust distorters, and Christian antisemites to, they say, provide counter-narratives to the Israeli lobby that has so desperately tried to engage the U.S. in “forever war.”

Israel attacked Iran last night. As expected, the same people who were “just asking questions” revolted against Israel in support of America’s enemies.

Darryl Cooper, whom Tucker Carlson lauded on his show as “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States,” said on Thursday that America should “commence airstrikes on Tel Aviv immediately.” Dave Smith, Joe Rogan’s favorite comedian-turned-foreign-policy expert, accused Israel of launching “a dangerous, preemptive war of aggression” that “should be condemned by the US government and US citizens alike.” Smith also denied claims that Cooper was an antisemite; Cooper just had “nuanced” views, Smith said.

It may be easy to disregard such online-right opinions as fringe, but their millions of followers and the billions of views they receive suggest otherwise. Nick Fuentes said “this is the final battle in Israel’s 50 year reign of terror to destabilize & destroy every country that resists their rule.”

Candace Owens called Israel’s “bloodlust” demonic. Matt Stoller doesn’t think Israel’s “bloodthirsty insanity” should be “our problem.” Crisis magazine’s Eric Sammons doesn’t think Catholics can support Israel’s attack on Iran.

UFC fighter and podcaster Jake Shields is “sick and tired of paying for and fighting Jewish wars” and demanded the destruction of Israel.

Dan Bilzerian said, “These jews just can’t help themselves, they attack Iran unprovoked, and they’ll be crying about how they don’t feel safe by morning,” adding, “If I was the president, I would round up every politician supporting Israel and have them all tried for treason.” These are just a few.

On Wednesday night, Matt Continetti and Ruth Wisse joined National Review on a Tikvah panel in celebration of Bill Buckley’s 100th birthday. The event was about antisemitism, and, specifically, Buckley’s efforts to purge it from the right. A question that came up was: Does the conservative movement have an antisemitism problem?

Maybe (we hope) not among policymakers or in the Trump administration. But there’s no doubt that antisemites — whom popular pundits have shamelessly platformed as good-faith, question-asking, honest intellectuals — have become online heroes for some alarmingly populated factions on the new right.

The most prominent of these voices on the Right is that of Tucker Carlson. It might be wrong to say that Carlson is antisemitic but he is a libertarian and an extreme isolationist who thinks we should disentangle ourselves from both Israel and Ukraine.

According to Jewish Insider:

Talk show host Tucker Carlson broke with President Donald Trump on Iran on Friday, writing in a scathing commentary in his daily newsletter that the United States should “drop Israel” and “let them fight their own wars.”

“If Israel wants to wage this war, it has every right to do so. It is a sovereign country, and it can do as it pleases,” Carlson wrote of Israel’s preemptive strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. “But not with America’s backing.”

In recent days, Carlson has argued that fears of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon in the near future are unfounded and said that a war with the Islamic Republic would not only result in “thousands” of American casualties in the Middle East but “amount to a profound betrayal of” Trump’s base and effectively “end his presidency.”

Carlson reiterated that claim in his newsletter, accusing Trump of “being complicit in the act of war” through “years of funding and sending weapons to Israel.”

Direct U.S. involvement in a war with Iran, he said, “would be a middle finger in the faces of the millions of voters who cast their ballots in hopes of creating a government that would finally put the United States first.”

“What happens next will define Donald Trump’s presidency,” he concluded.

Well, the Trump administration has given no indication that we would get directly involved in the Israeli-Iran war, but why we would not provide Israel with material and intelligence assistance, why we should not shoot down Iranian missiles, outside Iranian airspace, targeting Israeli civilians, I don't understand.

Nor do I understand how some on the right could think that Israel (or Ukraine) is the aggressor in this war.

Nor do I think there's any practical difference bewteen those who hate the Jews and want to see Israel exterminated and those who claim to not hate Jews but don't care whether Israel is exterminated or not. The latter are like someone who says, "I don't despise blacks (or whites), but if somebody wants to kill them, that's their problem."

Here is a fact that I think should be beyond dispute, but apparently isn't. Israel was confronted with a choice, either fight a conventional war with Iran now or risk nuclear annihilation later. Iran refused President Trump's attempts to persuade them to choose peace. They were determined to produce a bomb, and may already have done so. They have said repeatedly that they will wipe Israel off the map as soon as they are able.

If they developed a nuclear weapon every country in the region would scramble to buy their own and the weapons would almost certainly be used at some point.

Given those facts and given that choice, I ask the gentlemen and lady referred to above, what should the Israelis have done? And why should we have refused to do exactly what we have done to help them?

Whenever a nation goes to war there's always the risk of calamitous unforeseen and unforeseeable consequences. Even so, what reasonable alternative did the Israelis, or the U.S., have?

Thanks to Powerlineblog for the links.