In a April 24, 2022 interview with Iran's ISCA News, as reported by the Middle East Media Research Institute, Iranian Majles member Ali Motaheri said the quiet part out loud. Although no longer serving in the Iranian parliament and currently a private Iranian citizen, it is hard to believe Motaheri would have spoken so openly without at least tacit regime acquiescence.

What exactly did Motaheri say?

He told the interviewer that Iran's goal from the beginning of its nuclear program was in fact to build a nuclear bomb. He added that Iran's failure was to keep that purpose secret until it was ready to openly test a nuclear device.

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In an ominous warning to Israel and regional Sunni countries, Major General Hossein Salami, the commander of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), on Wednesday threatened those nations that have "established political and security relations with the Zionist regime," a reference to the Jewish State of Israel.

He added, "We explicitly declare and warn that the continuation of such relations is not acceptable at all."

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Aside from all the other perfectly good reasons to keep Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) on the United States (U.S.) Department of State Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO) List, there is one more that it seems no one wants to mention.

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Observers seeing a brutal, thuggish war criminal trying to crush the will of a neighboring people to live independent and free of domination are at least partly right. Vladimir Putin is indeed a throwback to Russian rulers past, whose identity was tied up with glorification of conquest, empire, and a twisted spiritual quest inspired by Russian Orthodox Christianity. But it's more than that today: for Putin and those of his inner circle who keep him in power, the prospect that the people of Ukraine (whose very name connotes "borderlands" or "outskirts" . . . of the Russian Empire) would choose not only to break away from Mother Russia, but to edge ever closer to the West, is unthinkable and intolerable. It's not about any imagined military threat from NATO (although that's the misunderstood excuse): It's about the very real fear that Ukraine is breaking free of its Russian roots to build the democratic structures of a Westward-looking nation state.

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In the wake of the turbulence surrounding the 15 January 2022 Texas synagogue attack, it may be useful to take a step backward to review those events from a broader strategic perspective. John Guandolo at Understanding the Threat has done an excellent job explaining how this attack fits into the overall Islamic Movement jihad campaign against Western Civilization and the United States Constitutional Republic and the Jewish people in particular. Here, though, let us focus on the particular involvement of two international aspects: the Tablighi Jama'at Islamic revivalist/missionary organization and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency.

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