Tibetan exiles and supporters of Tibetan freedom gathered outside Chinese embassies, Olympic headquarters, and NBC studios to protest the Beijing Winter Olympics, derided by critics as the “Genocide Games” because the event risks validating Communist China’s brutal suppression of minorities like the Tibetans and Uyghur Muslims.
The New York Times published an embarrassing look at what went on behind the scenes during the long, long months of “nuclear negotiations” with Iran. Apparently, it involved a good deal of Iran shouting at the hapless U.S. team and declaring its demands non-negotiable, while Team Obama threw in one towel after another.
When world powers reached a provisional deal with Iran in Lausanne, Switzerland, the Obama White House released a “fact sheet” to sell the deal to the American public. Iran disputed the details at the time, and indeed the final deal is significantly worse than Obama advertised.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued an angry warning Sunday about an impending nuclear deal between the world’s major powers and Iran, as negotiators drew close to a final agreement on Sunday. “We will not pay the price for this,” Netanyahu said, in a statement recalling the manner in which the West had abandoned Czechoslovakia to the Nazi regime at the Munich negotiations in 1938.
The Obama administration has caved on demands that Iran disclose the details of its past nuclear work, without which verification of its compliance with a future deal is impossible.
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif gave a genial interview to Der Spiegel this week, with the German magazine describing him as “relaxed and cheerful” throughout. In his relaxed and cheerful way, Zarif continued Iran’s practice of making the Obama administration look foolish, rewriting the so-called “nuclear deal” on the fly and scoffing at the administration’s talking points.
Russia announced Monday that it will sell Iran advanced S-300 surface-to-air missiles. The decision, which ends an embargo dating back to 2010, shows that President Barack Obama is rapidly losing control of the international consensus on Iran.
Last week, legendary former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George P. Shultz wrote a scathing Wall Street Journal op-ed critical of the Obama Administration’s nuclear dealmaking with Iran. The Obama State Department has responded, not with criticisms of the detailed argument in the piece, but by dismissing it as “a lot of big words and big thoughts.”
On Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made public suggestions as to how a “bad deal” on Iran’s nuclear program could be improved. He suggested shutting down all of Iran’s underground facilities, and lifting sanctions only when Iran stops carrying out terror and aggression in the region. It was at least the fourth time Netanyahu had proposed clear alternatives to the Iran deal–though U.S. President Barack Obama persists in pretending he has never proposed any.
In an exclusive interview with Breitbart News, real estate mogul and business icon Donald Trump expounded upon his belief that America’s failure to properly negotiate a framework deal with Iran could very well lead to widespread nuclear proliferation and even further sectarian hostilities in the Middle East.
The sanctions on Iran have not technically been removed – in fact, we learned today that even the timing of their removal under the Lausanne framework is a matter of great dispute between Iran’s Supreme Leader and the Obama Administration. But Senator Mark Kirk (R-IL) is already talking about passing a bill to keep them in place, effectively killing whatever remains of Obama’s deal.
The worst thing about this farce, assuming it ends with sanctions restored and Obama babbling about how the Iranians messed up his beautiful deal, is that it always involved conceding precious legitimacy to the terror state. Iran wasn’t required to make any concessions on its fanaticism, embrace of terrorism, hatred of Israel, or even hatred of America. They were put on a glide path to nuclear weapons in 10 years or less, without agreeing to anything that would contradict the silly story they’ve been peddling for years about how they just want peaceful nuclear energy for civilian consumption.
The very thin fiction of Obama’s “historic” agreement with Iran is unraveling with amazing speed. It’s notable that the Iranians never felt any urge to play along with Obama, not even for a few hours. They were loudly announcing his spin on the deal was false before the sun set on the day the agreement was announced.
President Barack Obama has granted an interview to National Public Radio in an attempt to sell the Iran “framework” to a skeptical public. In the process, he compares the agreement to a real-estate deal–a poor analogy for a man who called his own last property purchase deal “boneheaded” after involving indicted (now convicted) bag Chicago man Tony Rezko. Obama also provided at least five big reasons that Congress–whose opposition is growing–should reject the Iran deal.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with his cabinet on Friday, who unanimously opposed the framework Iran deal reached Thursday in Lausanne, Switzerland, and said that any final deal must include Iran’s recognition of Israel.
In the wake of the Iran “framework” agreement Thursday, President Barack Obama celebrated–but the Iranian regime pushed for more concessions, disputing the White House’s “fact sheet” on the deal and insisting the parties had agreed to end sanctions immediately. Iran’s reaction was a clear sign that between now and the end of June, an already-bad deal is going to get worse as the Iranians see just how much Obama wants an agreement, and use that to make new demands.
Once, Robert Malley was too radical for the Obama campaign, or for the White House. The Middle East scholar, widely seen as anti-Israel, reportedly met with the terrorist group Hamas and encouraged the United States to do the same. Then, in February, President Barack Obama appointed Malley as a senior director at the National Security Council. Today, Malley is advising Secretary of State John Kerry in Lausanne, Switzerland as he negotiates with Iran over a nuclear deal.
The nuclear talks with Iran in Lausanne, Switzerland, dissolved into a confusing mess as the Tuesday deadline passed, with everyone simultaneously saying they agree on everything important while still unable to come to an agreement.
Once again, the Iran deal confirmed by diplomats in Lausanne, Switzerland has failed to materialize. And the only thing more pathetic than the repeated collapse of the talks is the spectacle of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry staying on, even after diplomats from China, Russia, France and Germany have packed their bags and gone home. He is simply unwilling to admit failure. But the Iranian regime is happy to entertain his illusions, and so their delegation has stayed behind, too.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blasted the emerging Iran deal on Wednesday, calling it “unconscionable” that world powers were about to sign an agreement with the “murderous” regime even as it continued to vow to destroy Israel.
After a marathon negotiating session that stretched into the wee hours of Wednesday morning, April 1–hours after the official deadline–the parties gathered in Lausanne, Switzerland reached a tentative deal on Iran’s nuclear program.
Diplomats meeting Tuesday in Lausanne, Switzerland to hammer out the framework agreement for a deal on Iran’s nuclear program missed their deadline of March 31, and resolved to continue their negotiations for an additional day, expecting to complete an agreement on April 1st, otherwise known as April Fool’s Day.
Different sources have provided a variety of opinions on the status of Iranian nuclear negotiations over the past twenty-four hours.
Negotiations toward a nuclear deal between Iran and the P+5 nations (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, plus Germany) will continue through June, according to reports from Lausanne, Switzerland on Tuesday. The announcement was made to satisfy the self-imposed deadline of March 31 for a provisional agreement, with “technical” details to be agreed by July 1. However, major differences appear to have been redefined as “technical” to keep talks going.
The news agency Agence France-Presse reports from Lausanne, Switzerland that Iran and the P5+1 powers (the five UN Security Council permanent members, plus Germany) have reached “provisional agreement” on the terms of nuclear deal.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned Sunday that an emerging nuclear deal with Iran was “even worse” than Israel had feared, warning of a new Iranian “axis” that was “dangerous for all of humanity and which much be stopped.”
The Iranian regime apparently believes it can extract additional concessions from world powers as the deadline for a March 31 deal approaches, according to a report by Bloomberg News from Lausanne, Switzerland. Iran wants UN sanctions to be lifted up front–not kept in place for several years while international monitors measure Iranian compliance, as the U.S. and other powers (Russia, China, France, the United Kingdom, and Germany) have said was a non-negotiable provision.
Travel schedules of Secretary of State John Kerry, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, and Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif suggest that the parties may gather for a “signing” ceremony on Sunday, March 29 in Lausanne, Switzerland.
