The regional threat posed by Iran is growing, Mossad chief Yossi Cohen told Israeli cabinet ministers on Sunday, according to media reports.
The Middle East is "changing for the worse," the Hebrew news site Walla quoted Cohen as saying. "Israel is identifying a presence not only of Iran and Hezbollah, but also of Shiite forces, that are not Iranian, from all over the world that are making their way to the region, and our number one mission is to stop this."
The remarks, Walla reported, were made during a periodic briefing provided by the head of the Mossad to the cabinet. One senior official who attended the meeting told Walla that Iran topped the agenda.
Referring to the ceasefire deal brokered by the US and Russia last month regarding southern Syria, Cohen reportedly said that Israel's demand that Iranian and other Shiite forces leave the area had not been accepted.
Diplomatic efforts on the matter were continuing, he added, but "Israel's aspirations have not yet been internalized by the American side."
In a statement about Cohen's briefing, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office said the Mossad chief "emphasized that the main process taking place in the Middle East today is Iran's expansion" -- via its own forces and local proxies -- in countries such as Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen.
"In places where the presence of ISIS is decreasing, Iran is working to fill the void," Netanyahu's office quoted Cohen as saying.
Cohen also informed ministers that Iran had not abandoned its goal of becoming a nuclear-threshold state and that the Iranian economy had been growing since the July 2015 nuclear deal agreed to by the Tehran regime and six world powers.
This, Netanyahu's office said, was "clear proof that the basic assumptions of the deal with Iran were wrong from the start."
Israel, Netanyahu's office continued, was not obligated by international agreements signed by Iran and would continue to act "in a variety of ways" to protect itself from the threats it faces.
The North Korean case entails 25 years of failed negotiations. The country has been a nuclear state for at least a decade and now has demonstrated the ability to reach the US with an intercontinental ballistic missile.
Landau also expressed concern about military collaboration between North Korea and Iran in both the missile and nuclear spheres. This activity needs to be closely monitored by intelligence agencies, she said, explaining that North Korea "will sell anything to anyone for hard cash, and Iran can pay."
Michael Rubin -- a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Pentagon official, whose major research areas include the Middle East, Iran and diplomacy -- said the current dilemmas with Iran and North Korea relate to how both nuclear deals were negotiated.
"American diplomats in both cases were so afraid talks would fail that they would agree to a bad deal, and ignore backsliding and cheating just to keep hope alive," Rubin told JNS.org.
While the Iranian and North Korean ideologies may be different, their hatred of the West brings them together, according to Rubin.
"Add into the mix that Iran wants technology and North Korea wants cash, and it's a match made in hell -- one could even say it's an axis of evil," he said.
The Middle East is watching North Korea
Shay said failure to thwart North Korea "may be a prelude to a more challenging threat from Tehran." The Americans should use a combination of military and political threats while recruiting China and Russia to defuse the tensions and prevent North Korea from going nuclear, he advised.
"So far, Iran is responding to the US sanctions with further provocations," he said. "Iran's parliament voted Sunday to allocate $520 million to develop its missile program to fight Washington's 'adventurism' and sanctions, and to boost the foreign operations of the country's Revolutionary Guard."
Christianity is spreading in North Korea as fewer citizens in the hermit state consider dictator Kim Jong-Un a god, the Telegraphhas learned from an anonymous defector.
Using figures found in the latest International Religious Freedom Report authored by the U.S. State Department, Breitbart News has determined that the Christian population in North Korea has increased dramatically—at least five-fold—from about 37,000 known practicing Christians in 2012 to between 200,000 and 400,000 now.
The State Department, which gleaned the Christian population figures from data maintained by the United Nations and the Cornerstone Ministries International (CMI), acknowledged the number of Christians in North Korea may be higher.
State learned from CMI that an estimated “10-45 percent” of people imprisoned in North Koreans detention camps are Christians.
“An estimated 80,000 to 120,000 political prisoners, some imprisoned for religious reasons, were believed to be held in the political prison camp system in remote areas under horrific conditions,” points out State in its report. “CSW [Christian Solidarity Worldwide] said a policy of guilt by association was often applied in cases of detentions of Christians, meaning that the relatives of Christians were also detained regardless of their beliefs.”
An unnamed North Korean defector confirmed the significant increase in North Korea’s Christian population.
“In the past, the people were told to worship the Kim family as their god, but many North Koreans no longer respect Kim Jong-Un”, the defector, now a member of the Seoul-based Worldwide Coalition to Stop Genocide in North Korea, told the Telegraph. “That means they are looking for something else to sustain their faith.”
“In some places, that has led to the emergence of shamans, but the Christian church is also growing and deepening its roots there”, he also said, adding, “Even though people know they could be sent to prison—or worse—they are still choosing to worship, and that means that more cracks are appearing in the regime and the system.”
North Koreans who practice any form of religion can face jail, torture, or even execution in the communist country, reveals the International Religious Freedom Report for 2016.
“The government continued to deal harshly with those who engaged in almost any religious practices through executions, torture, beatings, and arrests,” stresses the report.
The History Channel in an article about the fall of the Roman Empire listed 8 reasons as to why the empire fell in 476 A.D., all of which the American Empire is facing now and more
The first point listed is the invasion by barbarian hordes. This is something America is experiencing right now in the form of illegal immigration and Muslim migration. Both of these groups refuse to obey the Constitutional laws that bind our society together.
The second point was Economic Troubles. The U.S. government is drowning in a whooping $19 Trillion dollars worth of debt, and that figure doesn't include the civilian debt. A former U.S. comptroller general recently went on the record to say the U.S. debt is really at $65 Trillion (The Hill). This is without question an unsustainable debt burden that alone can destroy this country through insolvency.
The third point cited was the split and rise of the Eastern Empire. It was the Emperor Diocletian who divided the Empire into two halves. The Western half ruled from Milan, while the Eastern half ruled from Constantinople. This can be represented here in America in two ways. The divided political paradigm in the form of Republicans and Democrats without question has torn this country asunder, pitting free Americans against one another over issues of political ideology.
The fourth point stated is the overextension of military power and control throughout the world. The cost of wars and empire expansion ultimately become too costly and does more to weaken the infrastructure and power-base of the empire rather than strengthen it
The fifth stated reason Rome fell was Government corruption. The Declaration of Independence noted that governments must operate with the consent of the governed. This means the civilian body must feel at all times that the government body represents the will of the people. As soon as the people feel that they are not adequately being represented, the political bonds that tie us all together begin to erode.
The sixth point is the arrival of the Barbarian tribes. Though we can again talk about illegal's and Muslims here, I want to instead draw your attention to the clashes we see in the streets by Communist Black Bloc Anarchists and White Supremacists. These two groups see the oncoming collapse and are looking to utilize violence to secure themselves as the new leaders of a new order as the American empire collapses.
The seventh point made in the article spoke about the loss of traditional values among the people. America was established on Biblical and Natural Law principles. This is a fact. A Bible verse can be applied to every single one of our Bill of Rights (Chuck Baldwin Live). The common morality of the people is the glue that keeps us civil to one another, it is also the basis in which we subject ourselves to the law itself, seeing we agree with said laws because they are based on a common understanding and belief. When America removed God, prayer, the Bible, church life, and its principles from civil society it removed with it the underpinnings of both society and government itself.
The eighth point made is the weakening of the Roman legions, which was described in the article as the meshing of Roman soldiers with that of Barbarian mercenaries that had little allegiance to the empire. Now without question the American empire has its fair share of mercenaries at work. Corporate mercenaries used by the American empire comes from companies like Dyncorp, Blackwater, or Craft that extort billions from taxpayers for their "services" overseas.
The similarities between both the American empire and the Roman empire are uncanny. Almost all of the same issues that resulted in the destruction and decay of the Roman empire are present in the modern American Empire. This is not something that can just be reversed. The moral decay, the greed, the corruption took many decades to infest our systems and institutions, it would take equally as long or longer to reverse this trend. There simply is to many forces at work that seek the ultimate destruction of the greatest nation the world has ever seen. What we see on the news, in our jobs, on our TV's, in our institutions and in the streets is just the tip of a larger iceberg that spells out certain destruction.
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