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Iran tested ballistic missiles last week in defiance of an agreement made with President Barack Obama's administration, prompting a sharp rebuke from President Donald Trump. (Reuters photo)
Report: Iranian Missiles Can Strike Tel Aviv in Just 7 Minutes
According to a recent report from Iran's state-operated Fars News Agency, a new ballistic missile just tested by the Islamic Republic can strike Tel Aviv, the seat of Israel's government, with just seven minutes' notice.
Mojtaba Zonour, a former adviser to the Iranian Supreme Leader's Representative at the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps, made the claim as the war of words between Tehran and Washington was ramped up over the weekend. He also threatened a U.S. military installation in Bahrain.
"The US army's fifth fleet has occupied a part of Bahrain, and the enemy's farthest military base is in the Indian Ocean, but these points are all within the range of Iran's missile systems, and they will be razed to the ground if the enemy makes a mistake," he said. "And only 7 minutes is needed for the Iranian missile to hit Tel Aviv."
President Donald Trump responded to the threats and additional ballistic missile tests with the following comment on Twitter:
Iran is playing with fire—they don't appreciate how "kind" President Obama was to them. Not me!
Commander of the IRGC Aerospace Force Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh claims the systems being tested are defensive, not offensive, in nature in an attempt to play down U.S. officials' allegations. But in the same statement, he warned the U.S. against taking any "hostile action."
"If the enemy makes a mistake, our roaring missiles will hit their targets," he said. "Knowing the capabilities of our armed forces, I am to ensure you [sic] that foreign threats cannot do us any harm."
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A divided Senate voted to confirm Betsy DeVos as the nation’s new secretary of education, with Vice President Mike Pence breaking a 50-50 tie.
The news comes after senators in opposition to DeVos staged an all-night speaking marathon against her, hoping to draw out at least one more opposition vote after two Republican senators announced that they would oppose DeVos.
Critics have also risen up on social media, with #holdthefloor and #NoOnDeVos hashtags abounding. A chief concern -- that DeVos, a billionaire philanthropist and product of private education, has no experience with or interest in supporting public education. It's a charge her supporters fiercely deny.
In the midst of this political battle, many believers have noticed that DeVos is a committed Christian who prioritizes her faith.
Rev. Robert Sirico, the founder of the Grand Rapids-based Acton Institute and a long-time DeVos family friend, describes her as a "solid evangelical Christian" who is active in her church and "orthodox in her beliefs and personal commitment to Jesus Christ."
John Booy, another long-time friend, told CBN News that DeVos integrates her faith into all areas of her life and that it's led her to a "deep sensitivtiy to those who have not had the privilege she's grown up with."
DeVos and her husband Dick DeVos spoke at a 2001 Christian philanthropic gathering about their faith. She described a desire to be active in education to influence the culture and help "advance God's kingdom."
Dick DeVos spoke about wanting to drive better performance across all education. "Our Christian worldview, which for us comes from a Calvinist tradition, which is to be very much a part of the world and to provide for a greater opportunity, a more expanded opportunity someday for all parents to be able to educate their children in a school that reflects their worldview," he said.
Booy is principal at the Potter's House, a Christian K-12 school in Grand Rapids. DeVos has actively supported the school for years and Booy says she became passionate about reforming education while meeting parents there. The school opened in 1981 to provide a choice for families in the low-income neighborhood surrounding it. At the time, their public school ranked third-lowest in the state.
"I think that until you actually meet people who will tear up and cry when they tell you how desperate they were for their child to go to a safe school where they would be loved and cared for and be nurtured and would be taught to their highest potential--when she began to ehar those kinds of stories from the mouths of mothers and grandmothers, that's pretty compelling," said Booy.
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Seizing on an Iranian missile test, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and new U.S. President Donald Trump are nearing common ground on a tougher U.S. policy towards Tehran ahead of their first face-to-face talks at the White House.
But people familiar with the Trump administration's thinking say its evolving strategy is likely to be aimed not at "dismantling" Iran's July 2015 nuclear deal with six world powers—as presidential candidate Trump sometimes advocated—but tightening its enforcement and pressuring the Islamic Republic into renegotiating key provisions.
Options, they say, would include wider scrutiny of Iran's compliance by the U.N. nuclear watchdog (IAEA), including access to Iranian military sites, and removing "sunset" terms that allow some curbs on Iranian nuclear activity to start expiring in 10 years and lift other limits after 15 years.
In a shift of position for Netanyahu, all signs in Israel point to him being on board with the emerging U.S. plan. Two years ago, he infuriated the Obama White House by addressing the U.S. Congress to rally hawkish opposition to a budding Iran pact he condemned as a "historic mistake" that should be torn up.
As Trump and Netanyahu prepare for their Feb. 15 meeting, focus has shifted to Iran's ballistic missile test last week.
The White House said the missile launch was not a direct breach of the nuclear deal but "violates the spirit of that." Trump responded by slapping fresh sanctions on individuals and entities, some of them linked to Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards (IRGC).
A U.N. Security Council resolution underpinning the nuclear pact urges Iran to refrain from testing missiles designed to be able to carry nuclear warheads, but imposes no obligation.
However, Trump tweeted, "Iran is playing with fire" and "they don't appreciate how 'kind' President Obama was to them. Not me!" Trump's national security adviser, Michael Flynn, said Washington was putting Tehran on notice over its "destabilizing activity." Netanyahu "appreciated" the comments.
Tehran bristled, warning that "roaring missiles" would fall on its enemies if its security is threatened. It also said its military would never initiate a war.
Meeting of Minds Over Missile Test
Beyond the rhetoric, the missile test gave the new Republican president and the conservative Israeli leader—who had an often acrimonious relationship with Trump's Democratic predecessor Barack Obama—an early chance to show they are on the same page in seeking to restrain Iranian military ambitions.
Netanyahu wrote on Facebook last week: "At my upcoming meeting with President Trump in Washington, I intend to raise the renewal of sanctions against Iran in this context and in other contexts. Iranian aggression must not go unanswered."
In London for talks with British Prime Minister Theresa May on Monday, Netanyahu said "responsible" nations should follow Trump's imposition of new sanctions as Iran remained a deadly menace to Israel and "threatens the world."
Netanyahu also said Washington should lead the way, with Israel and Britain, in "setting clear boundaries" for Tehran.
But he stopped short of any call to cancel the nuclear accord. Israeli officials privately acknowledged that he would not advocate ripping up a deal that has been emphatically reaffirmed by the other big power signatories—Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China—since Trump's election victory.
Russia said on Monday it disagreed with Trump's assessment of Iran as "the number one terrorist state" and a Russian diplomat said any move to rework the nuclear pact would inflame Middle East tensions. "Don't try to fix what is not broken," Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said.
Iran has ruled out reworking the deal, and Trump's stance could weaken the hand of pragmatists in Tehran who have been willing to negotiate a detente with the West after decades of volatile confrontation, a former senior Iranian official said.
Under the accord, Tehran received relief from global economic sanctions and in return committed to capping its uranium enrichment well below the level needed for bomb-grade material, cutting the number of its centrifuge enrichment machines by two-thirds, reducing its enriched uranium stockpile and submitting to a more intrusive IAEA inspections regime.
Diplomats close to the IAEA consider the deal a success so far, voicing little concern with overall Iranian compliance—despite Netanyahu's insistence that it will only pave the Islamic Republic's path towards nuclear weapons once major restrictions expire 15 years after its signing.
Pressure Points Other Than Scrapping Deal
With German, French and British firms busy cultivating new business with Iran, Washington's peers in the six-power group almost surely would rebuff any U.S. thrust to reopen the deal.
Daniel Shapiro, who recently ended his tenure as U.S. ambassador to Israel under Obama, told Reuters he would be surprised if Trump and Netanyahu "determined so early in the time working together that they would rather scrap that agreement than try to enforce it in a tough manner and put other pressures unrelated to that deal on the Iranians."
Some foreign policy experts say U.S. efforts to tighten the screws on Iran could seek to goad it into ditching the nuclear accord in hopes that Tehran—and not Washington—would then have to shoulder international blame for its collapse.
According to Israel's Haaretz newspaper, an Israeli intelligence assessment recently presented to Netanyahu said revoking the pact would be an error, causing a chasm between Washington and other signatories like Russia and China.
Amos Yadlin, former head of Israeli military intelligence, said there were many areas outside the deal where pressure could be applied on Iran to change what he called its negative behavior of "subversiveness, supporting terrorism."
But beyond new sanctions and sharpened rhetoric, analysts say, it is unclear how far Trump could go. Arguments for restraint would include the risk of military escalation in the Gulf, out of which 40 percent of the world's seaborne crude oil is shipped, and strong European support for the nuclear deal.
Though the new U.S. strategy is in the early stages of development, the Trump administration, the sources say, is considering a range of measures, including seeking "zero tolerance" for any Iranian violations.
Trump's aides accused the Obama administration of turning a blind eye to some alleged Iranian infractions to avoid anything that would undermine confidence in the integrity of the deal. Obama administration officials denied being "soft" on Iran.
Other U.S. strategy options, the sources say, include sanctioning Iranian industries that aid missile development and designating as a terrorist group the Revolutionary Guards, accused by U.S. officials of fueling Middle East proxy wars. That designation could also dissuade foreign investment in Iran because the Guards oversee a sprawling business empire there.
The administration, one source said, is counting on the Europeans to eventually get on board since their companies might think twice about closing major deals in Iran for fear new "secondary" U.S. sanctions would penalize them too.
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Verse 18 contains the pivotal maxim: “Love your neighbor as yourself”. In a speech given in 1944 to a gathering of youth groups in Haifa, Prime Minister David Ben Gurion referred to these words as an example of how Judaism serves as a paradigm of a society built on morality, peace and love: “Ours was a tiny nation inhabiting a small country, and there have been many tiny nations and many small countries, but ours was a tiny nation possessed of a great spirit, an inspired people that believed in its pioneering mission to all men, in the mission that had been preached by the prophets of Israel. This people gave the world great and eternal moral truths and commandments. This people rose to prophetic visions of the unity of the Creator with His creation, of the dignity and infinite worth of the individual (because every man is created in the divine image), of social justice, universal peace, and love- “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” This people was the first to prophesy about “The End of Days,” the first to see the vision of a new human society.” Fulfill this Biblical commandment by loving your Israeli neighbor in need of daily sustenance to complete their Godly mission on earth.
You don’t need to speak Hebrew to understand the pride and emotion behind this Holocaust survivor’s speech introducing his grandson – the first IDF soldier to ever appear in the UN in uniform.
Meir Panim, a charity organization which provides food and services to Israel’s poor, is about to embark on one of its most important projects to date: The organization was just awarded a government-funded program called “Food Security Initiative” which will begin this month in the southern Israel town of Dimona.
Discover The Israel Bible, the only Bible to highlight and focus on the God of Israel, the Land of Israel and the People of Israel. This innovative Bible offers Hebrew and English, along with select transliterated verses and Israel-focused commentary. A must for every home!
Rabbi Tuly Weisz speaks to Holocaust survivors at a Meir Panim branch in Jerusalem. Approximately 390,000 hot meals are served annually throughout Meir Panim's free 'restaurants' across Israel.
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