Who would have thought that the decisive factor in the 2024 United States presidential election would be a squirrel? Yes, the October surprise came in November, and involves the convoluted […]

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Arvin Nathaniel Ghahremani. Photo: Screenshot

JNS.org — Authorities in Iran on Monday executed a Jewish man, Arvin Nathaniel Ghahremani, who had been sentenced to death for murder, Iranian media reported.

“The sentence of retribution was executed this morning,” said Hamidreza Karimi, the prosecutor for Kermanshah in western Iran, according to the Mehr news agency.

According to one version of events, in November 2022, seven men, including Amir Shokri, a non-Jewish man who owed money to Ghahremani, then 18, ambushed him at a gym. Shokri pulled a knife on Ghahremani and an altercation ensued, resulting in Shokri’s death.

Karimi offered a different account. He told Mehr that, “according to the eyewitness, no one else was present at the scene of the murder except for Arvin Ghahremani and the victim.”

Under Iranian law, relatives of murder victims may choose to accept a cash settlement and spare the killer’s life. Shokri’s family declined the cash offer and insisted on the sentence being carried out, Mehr reported.

Ghahremani’s family had said during his trial that “key errors in the case were intentionally ignored” and that his actions to save the victim were not taken into account, according to the Oslo-based group Iran Human Rights (IHR).

The man’s relatives also said that Ghahremani was not adequately represented by his defense lawyer.

Ghahremani’s execution had been set for May, but he received a last-minute stay of execution.

The Islamic Republic executed 853 people in 2023 — the most since 2015, London-based Amnesty International said last month.

Earlier this year, Deborah Lipstadt, the US special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, expressed concerns that Ghahremani was not receiving a fair trial because he was Jewish.

“We note with concern that Iranian authorities often subject Jewish citizens to different standards when it comes to determining judgments in cases of this nature,” she said.

The post Iran Executes Jewish Man for Fatal Stabbing first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

A view of a house that was hit, following a projectiles attack from Lebanon towards Israel, amid cross-border hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel, in the central Israeli town of Tira, November 2, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Rami Amichay

On Thursday, White House officials returned from a visit to Israel, in a last-ditch effort to broker a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah, which now looks unlikely to happen before this week’s presidential election. After the election, for any diplomatic path to be viable, the world first needs to see Lebanon establish a new anti-Hezbollah government that demands Hezbollah surrender its arms to the Lebanese Armed Forces.

The first obstacle to that happening is the virtual non-existence of the Lebanese state. The country’s presidency, reserved for a Christian Maronite, has been vacant since the tenure of Michel Aoun ended in 2022. Without a president, the cabinet of Prime Minister Najib Mikati, a Sunni Muslim, has served in an interim capacity. The only state official serving his term is Speaker Nabih Berri, a Shia Muslim allied with Hezbollah, who was re-elected in 2022 for a fifth consecutive four-year term.

Lacking the votes for Hezbollah’s preferred candidate, Berri has shut down Lebanon’s parliament to prevent a presidential election and the formation of a cabinet. Berri did this once before, in 2014, keeping parliament closed for two years until Hezbollah got its man, Aoun, elected president.

Hezbollah remains adamant on installing loyalists to run the Lebanese government, because the terror group’s existence is politically untenable without state approval. If the Lebanese ever managed to build a coalition that demanded Hezbollah to surrender its arms to the Lebanese military, the terror militia would become an outlaw.

Something like that happened in 2004, when a sweeping Lebanese coalition forced Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to withdraw his troops from Lebanon after 28 years of occupation. The next year, Lebanon’s former prime minister was assassinated.

Despite Israel unilaterally withdrawing from southern Lebanon in 2000, Hezbollah — in coordination with Assad — claimed that a sliver of territory that Israel had taken from Syria in the 1967 Six-Day War was Lebanese, establishing a false pretext for the group’s continued armament.

Then-Prime Minister Rafic Hariri, who planned to turn his country into a services hub at peace with its neighbors, revolted — along with a coterie of oligarchs. Washington and Paris rushed to their support in 2004, passing UN Security Council Resolution 1559, which demanded that Assad withdraw and Hezbollah disarm.

Despite threats, Hariri stood his ground and was assassinated in February 2005. The crime backfired: It solidified Lebanon’s national consensus, forcing the Syrian dictator to pull out in April.

To deflect Lebanese pressure, Hezbollah triggered a war with Israel in 2006 that ended with UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which not only reaffirmed 1559, but instructed a 10,000-strong UN peacekeeping force, UNIFIL, to help keep Lebanon militia-free south of the Litani River.

But Hezbollah sent “villagers” hurling rocks at peacekeepers, and burned tires to stop the UN force from inspecting suspected Hezbollah arms depots. The villagers even killed some UNIFIL personnel.

Hezbollah built massive fortifications, at times tens of yards away from UNIFIL’s observation towers. Those bunkers were to serve as launchpads for invading northern Israel, like Hamas’s October 7 attack that killed 1,200 people.

The 20-year anniversary of Resolution 1559 has come and gone. Iran spent two decades building up Hezbollah’s capabilities and cemented its control of the Lebanese state, driving Lebanon’s economy into the ground in the process. The US, France, and the UN all failed to change this trajectory.

But something has happened over the last few weeks. In response to a year of non-stop attacks on northern Israel, the Israel Defense Forces decimated Hezbollah’s leadership and degraded its capabilities to such an extent that Lebanon has a window to replicate the consensus that ejected Assad.

The White House is now pushing a framework where Israel would halt its military operations in southern Lebanon, and the Lebanese military would oversee Hezbollah’s withdrawal to north of the Litani River. But if the Lebanese state remains politically controlled by Hezbollah, the agreement will end the same way as Resolutions 1559 and 1701: Non-enforcement and Hezbollah’s resurgence.

If the United States wants to find a viable diplomatic path in Lebanon, it needs to work with willing Lebanese leaders to reclaim Lebanon’s sovereignty from Hezbollah and free Beirut from Tehran’s yoke. That starts with the election of a new anti-Hezbollah Lebanese president.

Hussain Abdul-Hussain is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies where Mr. Goldberg is a senior adviser.

The post A Message for America: A Free Lebanon Is the Only Path to Truly Stopping Hezbollah first appeared on Algemeiner.com.