Iran is the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism, props up the Assad regime in Syria, and has made war against American forces in Lebanon and Iraq. As the November 24 deadline nears for a deal that might allow Iran to progress toward nuclear weapons, some in the media are trying to portray the Islamic Republic as a friendly place. The New York Times has led the way by promoting a trip to Iran accompanied by Times journalists. Ron Radosh has some advice for would-be tourists:

Just ignore public hangings of gays that might be taking place while you’re in a major city like Tehran. Ignore the political prisoners tortured in the city’s jails, and the religious police who see to it that young people dancing to the hit tune “Happy” are thrown into jail, just as yesterday, a young woman received one year in prison for daring to go to a soccer game in Tehran’s stadium. Sports events, after all, are only for men to view. One has to ignore all this, since Persia was “the birthplace of civilization,” and remember that often Iran simply rejects our ways. We can’t be ethnocentric, after all. And the Times also informs us that “conservative elders uphold the traditions of the country’s past while the young and fashionable find ways to celebrate in a country that bans alcohol.”

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].