Merry Christmas to you all! Hope you had a great time opening presents and sitting around the dinner table with your families. It’s really a great time of the year to catch up with people and to celebrate to have each other. A shame that that this holiday has become so commercial. I think the best gift I got/gave was to call my guest mother in Switzerland. We were both so happy to hear from each other. It should really be the small things in life that matter, not a new laptop or a new pair of shoes. Who really cares if you can buy those same things at any other given point in the year?
This week I’m going to focus on two stories that weren’t really featured across all the new websites I use as sources here. Even though they could be described as ‘fringe’ stories they are nonetheless important. Both of the stories relate to (who would have guessed) Iran.
Appeasement
Iran will hold military exercises in international waters around the Strait of Hormuz to show its defense capabilities during a time in which it has received much criticism from around the world for its nuclear program. With the US 5th fleet based in the Persian Gulf which can only be accessed through the Strait of Hormuz the exercise can be seen as an act of defiance against US sanctions that aim to cripple the state of Iran and its Revolutionary Guards which have been directly linked to the nuclear program of the country. To top everything off, the Strait of Hormuz sees a third of the worlds oil supply travel through it on a yearly basis.
I used to think that liking Ahmadinejad and Iran to Hitler and the Third Reich was a very morbid and stupid comparison. The former had done nothing comparable to the latter (yet) and Iran certainly did not show the same behavior that Germany did during the mid-1930s. Well, with the war games and military exercises that clearly seem to tell the US “hey, look at us, we don’t care about your griefing,” Iran has done the deed and shown the US the international “bring it on” on a whole other level. Appeasement like it happened in the 1930s is not an option to the US and Israel. Yet what are they going to do? Maybe support domestic uprisings against the Ayatollah and his regime? Or rather accept Iran for what it is and stop giving it the attention it clearly tries to get internationally?
Connecting the dots
The Lebanese-Canadian Bank has been linked to money laundering funds for Hezbollah. Allegedly, the bank launders money that is earned from South American drug sales, blood diamonds, and used car sales that mostly go trough Africa to reach both the American and European markets. The investigation by the United States started in 2006 after the Lebanon War that aimed to weaken Hezbollah’s influence in the border region.
This story is nothing but a wake-up call for those who believed that all the illegal activity that takes place around the globe is regional. Illegal business, just like legal business, is very much globalized and has to care even less about regulations set by states due to its very nature. The funding of radical organizations like Hezbollah is just another reason to put an end to the drug violence taking place in Middle and South America, and to ensure the blood diamonds are no longer bought by diamond traders that service the developed world.
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