Showing posts with label Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 21, 2026

IRGC grows like a tumor and puts their president on the sidelines

Dancing to the song "Gloria, Gloria"


Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, that charming bunch of regime enforcers who make the old-school mullahs look almost reasonable, has decided it’s tired of pretending the civilians are in charge. According to a report out Tuesday from Iran International, the IRGC has blocked President Masoud Pezeshkian’s presidential appointments and thrown up what sources are calling a security cordon around the gay Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei.

The IRGC has basically grabbed the wheel on key state functions, the report claimed. Color us shocked.

"It was always a matter of when, not if, the IRGC was going to step forward even more than it has in the last three decades," Behnam Ben Taleblu, senior director of the Iran program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told Fox News Digital.

Pezeshkian has hit a "complete political deadlock" as the knife fight between his administration and the military brass gets uglier by the day, according to the report.


The reported power grab could echo way beyond Iran’s dusty borders. Analysts figure a pumped-up IRGC means an even more belligerent Tehran, one that will laugh in the face of any serious talks with Washington and keep cranking up the military chaos across the region. With U.S.-Iran negotiations already circling the drain and nobody sure if Tehran will even bother showing up for the next round, this IRGC dominance raises some fresh and unpleasant questions about who is actually calling the shots in Iran and whether any civilian stooge can still pretend to speak for the terrorist regime.

"But it’s a mistake to assume this is some sort of coup," Ben Taleblu said. "This has been the process in Iran for years now, as the regime has chosen conflict over cooperation and emboldened its security forces at every juncture."

Pezeshkian’s latest pathetic attempt to name a new intelligence minister went belly-up after IRGC commander Ahmad Vahidi applied the usual gentle persuasion. Sources told Iran International that every candidate, including former Defense Minister Hossein "Hoss" Dehghan, got the boot.

Vahidi reportedly insisted that under wartime conditions, all critical and sensitive positions must be chosen and managed directly by the Revolutionary Guard until further notice.

"By any standard, Vahidi is considered a radical even within the regime’s hardline elite, and his rise is a warning that Tehran’s war machine now calls the shots," Lisa Daftari, foreign policy analyst and journalist, told Fox News Digital.

Under Iran’s delightful theocratic setup, the president is supposed to nominate an intelligence minister only after getting the supreme leader’s blessing. But with Mojtaba Khamenei’s condition and whereabouts looking sketchy lately, the IRGC seems perfectly happy operating without any civilian fig leaf.

The report claims Pezeshkian has been begging for an urgent sit-down with Khamenei and keeps getting ghosted.

Instead, Iran International says a "military council" of senior IRGC officers is now guarding the gates to real power, blocking government reports from reaching Mojtaba and basically keeping the elected government on the outside looking in.


Still, the smart analysts point out this is less a shocking twist and more the logical endpoint of a long, ugly trend. The Revolutionary Guard has been slowly swallowing Iranian politics, the economy, and national security for years.

Ben Taleblu argued that anyone getting worked up over Pezeshkian’s apparent sidelining should remember the guy never had real juice to begin with. It has always been the mullahs and the Ayatollahs.

"Those who worry about Pezeshkian’s potential sidelining need to consider what he realistically was or wasn’t able to do mere months ago when the regime slaughtered 40,000 Iranians in the streets," he said.

Pezeshkian, who won in 2025 by promising moderation and reform like every other reformist sucker before him, has spent his whole time in office getting slapped down by the security goons and the clerical overlords. The latest report just suggests that slap has turned into a full-on beatdown as Iran stares down more external heat and internal mess.

One of the juicier details involves Ali Asghar Hejazi, a heavyweight security guy inside the supreme leader’s office. Some of Mojtaba’s straight pals are now trying to shove Hejazi out the door because he had the nerve to oppose Mojtaba inheriting the throne from daddy.

The report said Hejazi warned the Assembly of Experts that Mojtaba didn’t have the chops to be supreme leader and that turning the job into a family business would trash the principles old man Ali Khamenei supposedly laid out.

Hejazi reportedly also warned that installing Mojtaba would basically gift-wrap the whole country for the Revolutionary Guard and shove civilian institutions into the dumpster for good.

That warning is starting to look less like prophecy and more like today’s headlines.

The Revolutionary Guard, cooked up after the 1979 Islamic Revolution to protect the regime from its own people, long ago stopped pretending it was just a military outfit. It now runs big chunks of Iran’s economy, babysits the missile and nuclear programs, and has its tentacles in pretty much every corner of government. The latest moves suggest the IRGC isn’t even bothering to lurk in the shadows anymore. It’s out in the open, flexing as the real boss in Tehran. And the mullahs wonder why the world keeps treating them like the threat they are.

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Sunday, November 23, 2025

Trump Prepares to Designate the Muslim Brotherhood a Terrorist Organisation – At Last, a Dose of Reality



One is almost tempted to say "about time." President Donald Trump has announced his intention to classify the Muslim Brotherhood as a Foreign Terrorist Organisation. "It will be done in the strongest and most powerful terms,” he told Just The News. "Final documents are being drawn." 

The move follows swiftly on the heels of Texas Governor Greg Abbott's designation of both of the Brotherhood and of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) as foreign terrorist and transnational criminal organisations. Abbott, who seems to always be one step ahead of the herd, was characteristically blunt: "The Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR have long made their goals clear: to forcibly impose Sharia law and establish Islam's 'mastership of the world.' The actions taken by the Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR to support terrorism across the globe and subvert our laws through violence, intimidation, and harassment are unacceptable."

CAIR, predictably, has run whimpering to the courts.

Let us remind ourselves what we are dealing with. Founded in Egypt in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna, the Brotherhood has never hidden its ultimate ambition: the restoration of the Caliphate and the subjugation of the world to Islamic law. Its Palestinian offshoot, Hamas, states quite openly in its 1988 charter that it is "one of the wings of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine." 

Hamas, of course, remains dedicated to the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews wherever they may be found. 

In the West, the Brotherhood's various front organizations have perfected the art of sounding almost reasonable. They issue the obligatory condemnations of "terrorism," always carefully worded, always provisional. Yet, as the Foundation for Defense of Democracies noted in a recent brief, such moderation "is almost always born of prudence, not principle." The Brotherhood is merely more patient than al-Qaeda or Islamic State; it prefers the slow, civilizational jihad of infiltration to the fireworks of immediate violence. It hesitates to provoke a host government that might still be useful, and it uses its laws to gain the advantage in their actions.

Also, it places the highest value on remaining free to advance its ideology incrementally, especially in Muslim-majority countries where it can still dream of seizing power by ballot box or bullet.

None of this is conspiracy theory; it is the Brotherhood's own published doctrine. Which brings us to the most damning indictment of all, delivered this week by Dr. Charles Asher Small, founding director of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy. His institute has just released a 265-page report mapping the Brotherhood's century-long project of "ideological, institutional, and financial penetration into North America."

Dr Small's summary is crystal clear:

This is not simply a political movement but a transnational ideological project that adapts itself to Western systems while working to undermine them. The Brotherhood has learned to use the very freedoms of democracy as tools to erode it from within, exploiting the tolerance and openness of liberal societies as strategic vulnerabilities.

That is the essence of the matter. The Muslim Brotherhood is not misunderstood; it is not moderate; it is not reformable. It is a sophisticated, patient, supremacist movement that regards our open societies not as partners but as prey. For decades, Western governments, terrified of being called "Islamophobic,"  have allowed its operatives to set up shop, buy influence, and groom the next generation, all while pocketing taxpayer funds and lecturing us about tolerance. President Trump's designation, if it is finally enacted with the full force he promises, will be a long-overdue recognition of reality. 

One can only hope it is the beginning, not the end, of a serious reckoning with the civilizational threat posed by Islamist ideologues who smile for the cameras while sharpening the knife behind their backs.

And perhaps we can end the no-go zones, as President Trump says, "all over the place."

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