Tehran Times Editorial

Dr. Ali Larijani was a distinguished philosopher–statesman of the Islamic Republic of Iran whose intellectual depth, political experience, and strategic vision shaped the country’s policies over his decades of public service.

Throughout his career he served in a wide range of influential positions—within the military, the media establishment, the legislature, and the highest levels of national security decision‑making—playing an important role in guiding the Islamic Republic through numerous political, diplomatic, and strategic challenges.

His long career reflected both the effectiveness of the Islamic Republic’s governing system and the importance of individuals capable of navigating its many institutions while remaining committed to the principles of the Islamic Revolution.

Early life and family background | Ali Larijani was born in 1958 in the holy city of Najaf in Iraq, a city that has long been one of the most important centers of Shiite religious scholarship. He was born into a respected Iranian religious family whose scholarly roots extended deeply into the intellectual traditions of Shiite Islam.

His father, Ayatollah Mirza Hashem Amoli, was a distinguished cleric who had moved to Najaf in 1931 after facing persecution under the secularizing policies of the Pahlavi regime ruler Reza Shah. Like many Iranian religious scholars of that era, Ayatollah Amoli continued his scholarly work in exile while maintaining strong ties with religious institutions in Iran.

In 1961, when Ali Larijani was three years old, the family returned to Iran, where his father resumed his religious and academic activities. Growing up in such an environment exposed Larijani from an early age to religious scholarship, intellectual debate, and political awareness.

Strategic Culture Foundation (Editorial)
Strategic Culture Foundation

Humanity has to realize, and is realizing, that for the world to survive in peace, the United States and its Empire of Lies must be defeated.

The orgy of violence and war crimes being inflicted on Iran over the past week is truly shocking. Yet it is not surprising. This is what an empire that repeatedly commits genocide does.

The U.S.-backed Israeli genocide that has been going on constantly for more than two years in Gaza is now expanding to Iran. The Trump administration is openly talking about destroying Iran and its people. Tehran and other cities across Iran are enduring carpet bombing. “It is not only a war against Iran – it is a war against the UN Charter, against all of us, against civilization,” commented the renowned international legal expert Alfred de Zayas. His voice has resonated with the anger and disgust of billions of people worldwide, including many U.S. citizens. This is an abomination, an affront to humanity.

Bruna Frascolla
Strategic Culture Foundation

The entire current scientific establishment probably rests on cohesive dogmas of a metaphysical nature.

Amid the avalanche of noteworthy things relating to Jeffrey Epstein, I wanted to draw attention to a very atypical combination: rigorous religiosity and militant atheism.

The religiosity appears in its most extravagant form with Epstein’s idea of funding the development of a cloven-hoofed pig – a genetically modified kosher pig – so that he could eat bacon. The attempt to circumvent divine prohibitions is far from exceptional in Talmudic Judaism (the most prosaic example is the use of wigs to cover women’s hair). It causes some amazement that a terrible criminal could be a very religious person, since we are faced with the possibility that his religion is more concerned with dietary restrictions than with moral restrictions. But this is also old news. Since virtually no one knows the Talmud without being a religious Jew capable of reading Hebrew, I recommend reading the indispensable Jewish History, Jewish Religion, by Israel Shahak, which exposes the immorality and racial supremacism intrinsic to the Talmud. It does not follow from this that every religious Jew is a bad person, but rather that, if he is a good person, it is by natural inclination and influence of the culture in which he is embedded, not by the Talmud (of which Epstein displayed dozens of volumes on his bookshelf).

As for militant atheism, a photo was released showing Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Steven Pinker together in the Lolita Express. That is, two of the “four horsemen of neo-atheism” (Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens, who died in 2011), plus the Harvard atheist Jew Steven Pinker, who weaves scientific praises to the moral progress of our times. Furthermore, information was released that a club of atheists who consider themselves genius scientists (of which Sam Harris is a member) relied on Epstein’s philanthropy. The club is called Edge.org. A religious person funding atheists who are certain that people who believe in God are stupid? How strange!

Strategic Culture Foundation (Editorial)
Strategic Culture Foundation

Agent Rutte should be in a modern-day dock. He and his masters want to push the world into catastrophe.

NATO chief Mark Rutte declared in a high-profile address to the Ukrainian parliament this week that alliance troops would be deployed in Ukraine immediately on signing any peace deal with Russia.

He asserted that the NATO forces would be British and French, deployed “on the land, in the air, and at sea.” He added that the coalition would have the “crucial backstop” of a U.S. security guarantee if “Russia tried to subjugate Ukraine again.”

It seems more than a coincidence that three days after Rutte spoke in the Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada (parliament), there was an assassination attempt in Moscow on a top Russian general. Lieutenant General Vladimir Alekseev, the deputy commander of Russian military intelligence (GRU), was shot several times in the back by a gunman.

This was while delicate negotiations were being conducted in Abu Dhabi to find a peace settlement to the nearly four-year war in Ukraine. Russian delegates met with American and Ukrainian counterparts for a second round of talks this week.

Rutte’s speech in Kiev and the assassination attack in Moscow appear to be calculated moves to sabotage the negotiation efforts that the Trump administration has been pushing.

Strategic Culture Foundation (Editorial)
Strategic Culture Foundation

Speaking yesterday at the World Government Summit in Dubai, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez criticized social media, calling it an uncontrolled territory “where lawlessness reigns.” The Spanish prime minister emphasized,

Sonja van den Ende
Strategic Culture Foundation

Kaja Kallas, Ursula Von der Leyen & Antonio Costa

Europe is trying to save face now that America has become a country beyond repair and unreliable.

President Putin of Russia is currently the EU’s greatest geopolitical enemy. Until recently, the EU’s worldview was aligned with that of the US—that is, until Trump became the US’s new colonial MAGA ruler and ushered in the new MAGA America. The “love” between the two brothers, America and Europe, is thus over. Europeans now live on a self-imposed island of isolation, where the appearance of a good life and democracy is maintained by politically funded media.

EU countries are creating countless enemies to mask their incompetence on the world stage, following America’s example. Now, practically everyone is an enemy—including their shining example and “Atlantic brother” since 1945, America, which some, especially many Germans (former GDR citizens), consider an occupier of Europe. We can now say that America, Donald Trump, along with Putin (Russia), is the newest and greatest enemy of the European Union, especially of the Western European and Baltic countries.

So, for these deranged EU politicians, everyone is an enemy—from Putin to Trump. They call Maduro, who was brutally kidnapped, the enemy; Khamenei the enemy; Putin the enemy; Xi a dictator; and China a dangerous country with a social credit system (which the EU itself wants to implement). On this issue, they slavishly follow the madman Trump’s policy of a world without rules, while, according to the same politicians and media, Trump—along with Putin—is by far the greatest enemy of those same liberal EU politicians. Are you still following?

George Samuelson
Strategic Culture Foundation

If Mrs. Good was a “domestic terrorist,” then the United States is a breeding ground of all those millions of “terrorists” who drive around town with their families inside of SUVs.

Americans took to the streets over the weekend in over 1,000 protests across the country to demand justice for a mother who was shot dead by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)

Renee Nicole Good was your typical suburban American. She was the mother of three children and liked to write poetry. But on January 7, her life was cut tragically short when she was shot in the head by an ICE agent, yet another tragedy that has sharply divided the nation. The protesters insist that Good was unjustly killed, and the visual evidence of the incident strongly supports that argument.

Good was seen on video blocking a neighborhood street with her SUV. While that is certainly grounds for law enforcement to arrive on the scene, what happened in the course of action defies logic. As two ICE agents approach the vehicle, no attempt to calmly converse with Good was seen. Instead, one of the agents grabs the door handle and aggressively demanded that Good exit the vehicle. Obviously scared by the encounter, Good made a fatal decision as she attempted to flee the scene. This caused the second officer, who was standing off to the left in front of the vehicle, to open fire at the windshield with three bullets, hitting Good in the head and killing her instantly.

Stephen Karganovic
Strategic Culture Foundation

The vicious treatment allotted to the distinguished German lawyer Dr. Reiner Fuellmich is comparable to the persecution of figures like Giordano Bruno.

Alongside the powers that be everywhere, Google’s still anonymous AI is also a pious believer in the virtues of free expression. It proclaims boldly and for all the right reasons that free speech is vital to democracy, in which it also claims to believe. It reminds us also, which is good to know, that freedom of expression promotes an informed citizenry and self-governance and ensures government accountability. Furthermore, that open dialogue and debate facilitate the “marketplace of ideas,” which is a vital condition for social progress and provides society with a much-needed “safety valve.” And finally, that the unhindered right to express one’s thoughts, beliefs, and values without fear is a fundamental aspect of human dignity and self-fulfilment. Amen, amen, amen.

In theory, all would heartily salute those noble sentiments. And that includes even some of their most ruthless violators, such as the German government.

For over a year after kidnapping him abroad, the German government kept prominent German lawyer Dr. Reiner Fuellmich in prison on contrived charges and under extraordinarily harsh and inhuman conditions, which were seemingly designed just to torment him. In Germany, for Dr. Fuellmich at least, the right to express one’s thoughts with dignity (never mind self-fulfilment) in the manner so movingly preached by Google’s AI avatar went out the window many moons ago.

Martin Jay
Strategic Culture Foundation

Britain, a country which practically invented the tenets of free speech, is now the most repressive, backward country of the West.

Britain, a country which practically invented the tenets of free speech, is now the most repressive, backward country of the West which is ridiculed on a daily basis by the very same countries that it regaled for its human rights record. There are just too many cases to rattle off which have at least made the news – social media, at least – but the mother who had police officers come into her house while she was in the bath to arrest her for calling an ex-boyfriend a ‘faggot’ has shocked many, given that the boyfriend in question beat her up and the message was not even sent to him. Elizabeth Kinney escaped jail but received a sentence involving community service and a considerable fine. Kinney was just one of around 12,000 people each year in the UK who are arrested and charged for giving their views about a given subject which the state deems could hurt someone, or in the case of politics, if it simply challenges a narrative. This farce would appear to have gotten out of hand when the long arm of the law even arrested and questioned right-wing hack Katie Holmes, who, during a stand-up comedy routine called herself a “spazza” and was subsequently detained for hours by UK police for the “offence”.

Yet while Britain sinks to an all-time low with the state strangling its citizens right to express thoughts, or even think in the case of an anti-abortion activist who was arrested for having a quiet prayer in her head what is remarkable is the lack of hue and cry by the masses who are very well versed on history and what they believe their ancestors were fighting for in two world wars. Often older people, who are very lucid in their ideas about why the British don’t carry identity cards, unlike Europeans, will not really have a strong reaction to the wave of absurd and worrying arrests for those who wish to practice free speech, around 30 a day.

Perhaps what is more remarkable though is how the world is watching this every day and commenting on how Britain is literally crumbling. A recent interview by Tucker Carlson on Piers Morgan involved the American polemicist goading the British commentator to say a rude word during the interview, claiming that Morgan would probably be arrested at a later point for merely uttering the vulgar word.

Strategic Culture Foundation (Editorial)
Strategic Culture Foundation

The criminal, irresponsible Euro elites like von der Leyen, Kallas, Merz, Macron, and NATO’s Rutte, are tethering the EU financially to a sinking ship.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is pushing ahead with a reckless plan to confiscate over €200 billion in Russia’s sovereign wealth for the purpose of propping up the corrupt NeoNazi Kiev regime and prolonging a futile proxy war.

It is hard to imagine a crasser course of action. Yet the so-called European leadership around Von der Leyen is zealously steering towards disaster. At least the hapless captain of the Titanic tried to avert a collision with an iceberg. The Euro captains are heading full steam ahead.

Von der Leyen’s proposed scheme is fancifully called a “reparations loan” and pretends, through legalistic rhetoric, not to be a confiscation of Russia’s assets. But it boils down to theft. Theft to continue the bloodiest war in Europe since the Second World War, which marked the defeat of Nazi Germany.

Von der Leyen, a former German defense minister, is supported by other obsessively Russophobic Euro elites. The EU’s foreign minister, Kaja Kallas, a former Estonian prime minister, asserts that the seizure of Russian money and pumping it into the Kiev regime is aimed at forcing Moscow to negotiate a peaceful end to the nearly four-year conflict. Such twisted logic is an Orwellian distortion of reality.

Belgium and other European states are extremely wary of the unprecedented and audacious move. Belgium, which holds the majority of frozen Russian wealth – some €185 bn – in its Euroclear depository, is anxious that it will be financially ruined if Moscow holds the EU liable for illegal seizure of wealth. Other EU members, like Hungary and Slovakia, are concerned that the Russophobic leadership is undermining any diplomatic initiatives by the U.S. Trump administration and the Kremlin to negotiate a peace settlement.