Last week, Iranians went to the polls to select a replacement for outgoing president Hassan Rouhani, who has served out his two terms in office. The runaway victor of the June 18th contest was judiciary head Ebrahim Raisi, who is estimated to have garnered more than 60 percent of the 28.6 million ballots cast. Raisi's selection was hardly a surprise. It had been clear for some time that the controversial 60-year-old conservative cleric – who has been implicated in the death of nearly 10,000 political prisoners in the late 1980s – was Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei's choice to replace Rouhani, and that the Islamic Republic was working overtime to stack the political deck in his favor. As in past electoral cycles, that tinkering included significant manipulation of the vote by the country's clerical institutions. In the run-up to the election, nearly 600 hopefuls had filed papers to formally run for the Iranian presidency. However, all but seven were disqualified by the Guardian Council, the Islamic Republic's constitutional vetting body, as not being sufficiently ideologically compatible with the regime's revolutionary tenets. In addition to Raisi, approved candidates included Expediency Council secretary Mohsen Rezaei; Saeed Jalili, a former regime nuclear negotiator; Amir Hossein Ghazizadeh Hashemi, the deputy speaker of the majles, Iran's parliament; former vice president Mohsen Mehralizadeh; Central Bank governor Abdolnasser Hemmati; and former parliamentarian Alireza Zakani. By election day, however, three of those had dropped out of the race, making Raisi's election a virtual certainty even before Iranians cast their ballots.

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With the Biden administration, and specifically the Department of Education, openly pushing the teaching of CRT in U.S. public schools, the situation is raising alarm among educators, parents, legislators, and ordinary citizens. As embedding of CRT into Ethnic Studies programs in California and other states became widespread over the last several years, parents increasingly began to realize the malignant nature of what was being taught to their children.

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Time and again, we fail to understand Russia and its rulers. Back in 1939, Churchill acknowledged that, famously describing Russia as "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma."

Nevertheless, three years later, Roosevelt convinced himself that Stalin "likes me," and that he could therefore "handle that old buzzard." He told an advisor: "I have just a hunch that Stalin doesn't want anything but security for his country, and I think that if I give him everything I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won't try to annex anything and will work for a world of democracy and peace."

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It was 40 years ago this month that Israel launched a daring raid to take out the Osirak nuclear reactor that Saddam Hussein was building outside of Baghdad.

The attack shocked the world and underlined the Jewish state's willingness to employ audacious measures to preserve its interests, even at the expense of international opprobrium.

And nowadays?

Our present leadership has been terrified by the prospect of a group of young Jews waving Israeli flags while walking in the heart of Jerusalem lest it cause affront to a gang of terrorists in Gaza.

The contrast in resolve is so stark and worrisome that it raises a disconcerting question.

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The Danish Parliament has passed a new law that will allow the government to deport asylum seekers to countries outside of the European Union to have their cases considered abroad. The legislation is widely seen as a first step toward moving the country's asylum screening process beyond Danish borders.

The law, proposed by the Social Democrat-led government, is aimed at discouraging frivolous asylum applications. It has been greeted with fury by those who favor mass migration, presumably out of fear that other EU countries may now follow Denmark's lead.

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Truth is a rare commodity when it comes to international organizations, all the more so when it comes to the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA), the internationally funded welfare organization for Palestinians. For UNRWA employees, truth-telling can be a career killer, or worse.

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While Hollywood honored the best films of 2021 during its annual Oscar ceremony, a small group of cinema buffs huddled around laptops to watch a movie that cannot be seen in theaters or streamed on major cable outlets in the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and several other democracies. We were not in Russia or China, secretly accessing samizdat—literature and art banned by the state. We were all in the U.S., watching a film by one of the world's finest filmmakers.

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In the wake of a complex property dispute between Jews and Arabs in East Jerusalem, waves of violence rocked Israel in May. The most acute threats came from the relentless Hamas rocket salvos. Israel's remarkable Iron Dome air-defense system neutralized most of the rockets. However, some snuck through, hitting civilian homes, with one projectile striking the strategic Ashkelon gas pipeline. Israel responded by striking key Hamas leaders as well as rocket production and storage facilities. Hamas has an estimated 30,000 rockets in its arsenal, enough to sustain a lengthy conflict. Israeli officials watched nervously as riots spread in towns and cities with large Arab communities.

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THREE THINGS ARE CERTAIN AFTER A presidential-election defeat: infighting, second-guessing, and efforts to create a new think tank.

In 1989, Democrats had just lost a third presidential election by being cast as too far left. In response, party moderates formed the Progressive Policy Institute to come up with more palatable policies. PPI ideas such as reinventing government welfare reform helped Bill Clinton establish centrist credentials and win two terms in the White House.

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