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In this mailing:
* Alain Destexhe: Rwanda – Thirty Years after the Genocide, April 7, 1994
* Amir Taheri: Iran and Israel: Is the Denial Game Over?


** Rwanda – Thirty Years after the Genocide, April 7, 1994 ([link removed])
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by Alain Destexhe • April 7, 2024 at 5:00 am
* Many of them had taken refuge in the local church, and others in a plot of land opposite the communal house, where there were several thousand frightened people, thinking that the authorities were going to protect them. Instead, the authorities conveniently decided to kill them on the spot. The soldiers and police, armed with rifles and grenades, and the militiamen with machetes and spiked clubs, surrounded the refugees and began firing into the crowd, throwing grenades and machetes.
* What is certain is that he killed every day for a month... and that he never ran out of ammunition. How did he feel? "At first it was fear," he tells us, "but then the fear disappeared, there was no joy either, it became a habit to kill. It was a job ordered by the authorities and we did our duty." He took orders and obeyed, like Adolf Eichmann and the other Nazi executioners of the Final Solution.

Pictured: Some 90,000 Rwandan refugees wait to get food from the Red Cross on May 20, 1994 in the Benako refugee camp in Tanzania. (Photo by Alexander Joe/AFP via Getty Images)

Brainwashing

In 1994, Jean-Claude, a Hutu policeman later turned "Tutsi hunter," was 26 years old and one of 14 police officers in the commune of Nyamata, an hour outside Kigali, one of the areas worst affected by the genocide.

Four years earlier, the Rwandan Patriotic Front had attacked Rwanda from Uganda. The movement was made up of mainly Tutsis, living in exile since 1959, whom the Rwandan regime had not wanted to let return to the country.

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** Iran and Israel: Is the Denial Game Over? ([link removed])
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by Amir Taheri • April 7, 2024 at 4:00 am
* Soleimani would do everything to avoid a direct clash with either Israel or the US forces in the region.
* If he ["Supreme Guide" Ayatollah Ali Khamenei] does nothing, he could anger his core supporters. If he orders attacks on Israeli and/or Jewish targets, he won't be able to cite plausible deniability. And that, as the Iranian state TV analyst suggests, could give Israel an excuse for attacks on big targets in Tehran itself.

If "Supreme Guide" Ayatollah Ali Khamenei does nothing in response to the recent Israeli airstrike in Syria, he could anger his core supporters. If he orders attacks on Israeli and/or Jewish targets, he won't be able to cite plausible deniability. And that, as the Iranian state TV analyst suggests, could give Israel an excuse for attacks on big targets in Tehran itself. Pictured: Khamenei leaves a polling station in Tehran on March 1, 2024. (Photo by Atta Kenare/AFP via Getty Images)

"Will this time be different?" This is the question that haunts Tehran political circles as more body bags are flown in from Damascus.

The body bags contain the mortal remains of 13 Iranian diplomatic and military officers, including two senior commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), General Muhammad-Reza Zahedi (alias Abu Mahdi) and Gen. Muhammad-Hadi Haj-Rahimi, killed in an Israeli airstrike on what was presented as an Iranian consular building in the Syrian capital.

To be sure, this is not the first time that Israelis have taken out IRGC officers, and Lebanese, Iraqi, Syrian, Pakistani, and Afghan mercenaries in Syria.

The take-out operation started in 2015 and reached a peak in 2020. The last time an Iranian official organ provided figures was in 2018, when the Foundation for Martyrs and Self-Sacrificers put Iran's losses at around 5,000. The figures didn't show how many were Iranian officers or foreign mercenaries.

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