💡 SPOTLIGHT
Bolsheviks with a keffiyeh: the Islamist-Leftist alliance targeting the West
A confounding alliance between leftists, wokism and Islamic fanatics is the perfect smokescreen for an insidious enemy targeting the West's liberal values, writes Siavash Pendar in Persian-language media Kayhan-London.
Around 60 years ago when the last Shah of Iran, Mohammadreza Pahlavi, warned of a "red and black" alliance of Marxists and Islamists, many in Iran and the West laughed it off.
They scoffed at the idea of Communists and religious fanatics joining forces as a superficial, contradictory proposition. And some of those laughing were in charge of thinking up policies for the White House, like the idea of a "Green Crescent" — or a Muslim safety cordon — to contain Soviet Communism.
But in the decades since the fall of the Iranian monarchy in 1979, the West has come to see how its calculations were misguided and far less accurate than the late Shah's warnings about the revolutionaries (and their Western publicists) who will stop at nothing to try to take down the West, secularism and liberal democracy.
With the West dizzied by the fall of the Soviet Union, which it interpreted as the victory of liberalism and capitalism, socialist and Communist elements began to transform and even mutate to the point of becoming unrecognizable — though without ever losing their destructive instinct. [...]
— Read the full article by Siavash Pendar for Kayhan-London, translated into English by Worldcrunch.
🗞️ FRONT PAGE
Barcelona-based daily newspaper El Periódico features leader of the Catalan Socialist Party (PSC) Salvador Illa as he celebrates a clear win in Catalonia’s regional elections. With 99% of votes counted PSC has won 42 seats, beating Catalan nationalist parties including Catalan Republican Left and meaning that nationalist parties no longer control Catalonia’s regional parliament. Support for Catalan independence has dropped to 42%, from 49% in 2017.
🌎 7 THINGS TO KNOW RIGHT NOW
• Israel is fighting on two fronts in Gaza. Israeli forces pushed into northern Gaza to recapture an area it had claimed to have pushed out Hamas several months ago. This comes as Israeli tanks and troops pushed across a highway into Rafah, the southern Gaza city where more than one million Palestinians are seeking shelter. Here’s a story Worldcrunch translated from Arabic-language media Daraj about the families in Gaza who choose to split up to avoid the absolute worst-case scenario: annihilation.
• Vladimir Putin has removed Sergei Shoigu as defense minister. The 68-year-old, who had been in the nation’s top military role since 2012, is to be appointed secretary of Russia's Security Council. Shoigu will be replaced by economist and Deputy Prime Minister Andrei Belousov. Meanwhile, Russia said it had captured four more villages in Ukraine's Kharkiv region, as thousands of residents were evacuated from an area where Russian troops were repelled in 2022.
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