Iran is the terrorist powerhouse of the world—made all the more dangerous by the disastrous "nuclear deal" that restricts Iran's nuclear ambitions hardly at all.
The Iranian government is an open enemy of the United States—and of anyone who dissents from Shia Islam.
Iran confronts U.S. Navy ships in the Persian Gulf "on a near daily basis."
It executes more of its citizens than any other nation.
It is a country torn by hypocrisy—lectured by mullahs, and with brutally enforced Islamic religious laws, but rife with alcoholism.
Once America's ally, Iran now claims leadership of the global jihad, and the ayatollahs' aim is nothing less than world conquest for Islam.
In his extraordinary new book, The Complete Infidel's Guide to Iran , New York Times bestselling author Robert Spencer
The Islamic Republic is already at war with America. If we refuse to recognize that fact, we are only falling prey to the mullahs' campaign of duplicity.
The Complete Infidel's Guide to Iran exposes the true nature of the threat, lays out what America must do to defeat it, and gives you all the information you need about America's least understood yet potentially most lethal foe.
ROBERT SPENCER is the director of Jihad Watch, a program of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and the author of seventeen books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His latest book is The Complete Infidel’s Guide to Free Speech (and Its Enemies). Coming in November 2017 is Confessions of an Islamophobe (Bombardier Books).
Spencer has led seminars on Islam and jihad for the FBI, the United States Central Command, United States Army Command and General Staff College, the U.S. Army’s Asymmetric Warfare Group, the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF), the Justice Department’s Anti-Terrorism Advisory Council and the U.S. intelligence community. He has discussed jihad, Islam, and terrorism at a workshop sponsored by the U.S. State Department and the German Foreign Ministry. He is a consultant with the Center for Security Policy.
Spencer is a weekly columnist for PJ Media and FrontPage Magazine, and has written many hundreds of articles about jihad and Islamic terrorism. His articles on Islam and other topics have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Examiner, the New York Post, the Washington Times, the Dallas Morning News, Fox News Opinion, National Review, The Hill, the Detroit News, TownHall.com, Real Clear Religion, the Daily Caller, the New Criterion, the Journal of International Security Affairs, the UK’s Guardian, Canada’s National Post, Middle East Quarterly, WorldNet Daily, First Things, Insight in the News, Aleteia, and many other journals. For nearly ten years Spencer wrote the weekly Jihad Watch column at Human Events. He has also served as a contributing writer to the Investigative Project on Terrorism and as an Adjunct Fellow with the Free Congress Foundation.
Spencer has appeared on the BBC, ABC News, CNN, FoxNews’s Tucker Carlson Show, the O’Reilly Factor, Megyn Kelly’s The Kelly File, the Sean Hannity Show, Geraldo Rivera Reports, the Glenn Beck Show, Fox and Friends, America’s News HQ and many other Fox programs, PBS, MSNBC, CNBC, C-Span, CTV News, Bill O’Reilly’s No Spin News, France24, Voice of Russia and Croatia National Television (HTV), as well as on numerous radio programs including The Sean Hannity Show, Bill O’Reilly’s Radio Factor, The Mark Levin Show, The Laura Ingraham Show, The Herman Cain Show, The Joe Piscopo Show, The Howie Carr Show, The Curt Schilling Show, Bill Bennett’s Morning in America, Michael Savage’s Savage Nation, The Alan Colmes Show, The G. Gordon Liddy Show, The Neal Boortz Show, The Michael Medved Show, The Michael Reagan Show, The Rusty Humphries Show, The Larry Elder Show, The Peter Boyles Show, Vatican Radio, and many others.
Robert Spencer has been a featured speaker across the country and around the world and authored 17 books. Spencer’s books have been translated into many languages, including Spanish, Italian, German, Finnish, Korean, Polish and Bahasa Indonesia. His Qur’an commentary at Jihad Watch, Blogging the Qur’an, has been translated into Czech, Danish, German, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.
Spencer (MA, Religious Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) has been studying Islamic theology, law, and history in depth since 1980. His work has aroused the ire of the foes of freedom and their dupes: in October 2011, Muslim Brotherhood-linked groups wrote to Homeland Security Advisor (and current CIA director) John Brennan, demanding that Spencer be removed as a trainer for the FBI and military groups, which he taught about the belief system of Islamic jihadists; Brennan immediately complied as counter-terror training materials were scrubbed of all mention of Islam and jihad. Spencer has been banned by the British government from entering the United Kingdom for pointing out accurately that Islam has doctrines of violence against unbelievers. He has been invited by name to convert to Islam by a senior member of al-Qaeda.
I see lots of high ratings and I'm not sure why. This book was hot garbage. One minute in and you can tell the author is completely biased. His constant "ostrich alerts" are particularly annoying. Many good nuanced book on Iran that are worth reading; this one is not. I suggest Children of Paradise, All The Shah's Men, or Vanguard of the Imam. Don't bother with this one.
This is more like a University Thesis than a simple book on Iran. Robert Spencer writes in a clear, fully referenced style that covers Iran (Persia) from the ancient days through to modern times cutting through the usual fluffy US rhetoric with cold hard facts.
Some key elements such as the latest Nuclear deal, the Green Movement and how people like President Carter and later then Secretary of State Clinton contributed to the regime that exists in Iran today are all covered.
I rarely give a book 5 stars but if you are interested in Persia and modern Iran and what really goes on there then this is the book for you.
Complete garbage book, written by an author that thinks because he leans conservative that he's edgy. This book will not teach you anything about Iran, please read a real history textbook without the agenda of mocking the "Iran Deal."
This book feels like your conservative uncle ranting straight off what he hears on Fox News. I couldn't get past the first chapter, which just complains about Obama and the Iran Deal. I have to imagine the rest of the book is completely biased to the right and honestly just garbage. The timeline in the beginning was accurate I guess.
A PROMINENT CRITIC OF ISLAM LOOKS IN SOME DETAIL AT IRAN
Robert Bruce Spencer (born 1962) is an American author and one of the key figures of the ‘counter-jihad’ movement. His website, ‘Jihad Watch,’ reports on purported ‘Islamic extremism.’ (He is also a Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and has written several politically conservative books.)
He wrote in the Introduction to this 2016 book, “[This book] explains why, of all the adversaries of America and rogue states in the world, Iran is the most lethal---and yet it is simultaneously the least well understood, even as it shares a place in the global rogue’s gallery within the Islamic State (ISIS…) and the murderous comic-opera personality cult of North Korea… The Islamic Republic of Iran is simultaneously the modern exponent of one of the oldest and greatest civilizations on the planet… and a closed, suspicious authoritarian, paranoid, confrontational regime whose leaders (and people) regularly chant ‘Death to America.’ … I will explain how Iran came to be both of those things… I’ll illuminate the Islamic doctrines that form the foundation of Iran’s fanatical hatred of the United States and Israel and the funding of some of our most bloodthirsty enemies… and the astonishing apocalyptic fantasies that lead Iranian mullahs to believe that they can press ahead with an avowedly genocidal nuclear program that could result in a war that would cause the deaths of tens of millions of Iranians.”
He enters into an 80-page recounting of recent events in Iran. He observes, “As far back as 2004, King Abdullah II of Jordan was warning that Iran was trying to establish a ‘Shi’ite crescent’ across the Middle East stretching from Iran through Iraq to Syria and Lebanon… there was considerable evidence that Iran was indeed attempting to assert hegemony in a ‘Shi’ite crescent.’… Iran had been working for years to promote that hegemony through a series of allies, clients, and proxies across the Middle East. The assembly of the ‘Shi’ite crescent began in Lebanon. Chief among Iran’s Middle East proxies is the Lebanese Shi’ite jihad terror group Hizballah… which rose to prominence during the Lebanese civil war of the early 1980s.” (Pg. 84)
He asserts, “In their ambitions to lead the Islamic world, however, the Iranians knew they needed Sunni support, and they angled for it by sing the one issue that most closely united all Muslims: hatred for Israel.” (Pg. 106)
He notes, “The primary obstacle to Iran’s regional hegemony in the middle of the 2010s was not the United States, but the upstart Sunni caliphate, the Islamic State, that occupied much of Iraq and Syria and threatened Iran’s client regimes in both Bagdhad and Damascus. As the Islamic State issued detailed and repeated calls for violence against non-Muslims inside the United States and other infidel powers, those powers were caught on the horns of a dilemma: if they destroyed the Islamic State utterly, the region’s chief beneficiary would be Iran. Even after the nuclear deal, no one outside of Tehran wanted to see that.” (Pg. 109)
He recounts, “Since he became the Islamic Republic’s Supreme Leader in 1989, the Ayatollah Khameini has repeatedly reiterated the necessity of utterly destroying Israel… Jews could still live in Palestine, though, if they accepted Islamic rule, which for them would mean second-class status as dhimmis, the ‘protected people’ of the Islamic state…” (Pg. 120-121)
He records, “In August 1953, the British and their American allies… initiated an action to remove [Iranian prime minister Mohammad] Mossadegh… directed by the CIA and the British spy service M16… The Shah was reluctant to go along, in light of Mossadegh’s popularity, but when [Kermit] Roosevelt told him that Mossadegh was going to be removed whether he approved of it or not he acquiesced … The CIA/M16 action against Mossadegh is commonly called a ‘coup,’ but under the Iranian constitution of the time, the Shah was completely within his rights to dismiss the prime minister and name another…” (Pg. 167)
He notes, “Up until the Iranian nuclear deal, the Islamic republic of Iran and the United States had maintained a relationship of almost unremitting hostility, with a few notable exceptions. The most notorious of those exceptions is… the Iran-Contra Affair. It started when Hizballah kidnapped and murdered CIA agent William Buckley… What followed was a clandestine deal to circumvent the embargo on selling arms to Iran in order to facilitate the release of American hostages held by Hizballah. Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North… developed a plan whereby the U.S. would secretly sell arms to Iran in exchange for the release of the hostages, with some of the proceeds going to the Nicaraguan anti-Communist guerillas, the Contras---clandestinely also, since Congress had prohibiting funding them…” (Pg. 200)
He observes, “The strict enforcement of Islamic orthodoxy in Iran has led to a culture of hypocrisy. Nothing is what it seems to be in Iran because the Islamic Republic was imposed upon a people who had lived under secular law for decades, during which time many Iranians developed a taste for numerous freedoms that were not available to them under the strictures of Shi’ite Islam. As in all authoritarian regimes, rather than become virtuous, many Iranians instead outwardly conformed to the mullah’s rules but then retreated into areas where they thought it safe to indulge in vices that could get them jail terms or worse if discovered.” (Pg. 244)
He summarizes, “There are two ways that decades-long hostility between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States of America could be ended: 1. War. 2. The reestablishment of friendly relations. A third possibility, that the tense relationship that has prevailed now for over forty years between Iran and the U.S. will continue indefinitely, is extraordinarily unlikely given Iran’s ongoing bellicosity, repeated declarations of wanting war with the United States, and escalating nuclear program… the Iranian population has been fed a steady diet of virulent anti-Americanism since 1979, and anti-Western sentiment was the focus of discontent with the Shah’s regime before then. Nowadays, many Iranians who hate the Islamic regime love America out of a spirit of defiance, but it would be unwise in the extreme for any American analysts to assume that U.S. troops would be welcomed into Iran as liberators.” (Pg. 291-292)
He proposes, “a serious president who wants to defend the United States and its allies, and preserve the world in peace as much as possible will follow a different path: 1. Negotiate if you must, but understand with whom you’re dealing… 2. Respond to provocations with strength… 3. Fight the ideological war… 4. Support Iranian dissidents… 5. Undermine the Islamic republic in other non-military ways…” (Pg. 293-295)
This book will be of interest to critics of Iran in particular, and Islam in general.
The Complete Infidel's Guide to Iran is a clearly written and informative book about the Islamic Republic of Iran and the threat that it poses to world peace and security. The focus of the book is on the Iranian government and the dynamics of the current political situation in Iran (since the 1979 Islamic revolution), but some broader history is included in order to provide context and background to the present situation. Spencer makes a strong case that Iran is the most dangerous rogue state in the world, due to its extensive involvement in state-sponsored terrorism across the world, its official objectives to destroy Israel and America and to extend Islam throughout the world through jihad, and its escalating nuclear program. He also sets out his views about what the US and other like-minded countries can best do to address the threat, and he is highly critical of the Obama administration's nuclear deal with Iran. While I feel the book could have benefited from better organisation and more detail in certain places, this is generally a quality book that provides a good understanding of the Islamic Republic of Iran and why it is so dangerous.
I am appalled because of robert spencer’s slanderings. Then, Iran, nevertheless ,has manged to become un unorthodox Enemy to Us, the Arabs. That is beside our enemy ISRAEL.
Interesting and seemingly full indictment of Iran and terrorism all in one place. I think we have heard bits and pieces of this information, but not in one place at one time. Better to get it at once as I don't remember from month to month what is attributed to them.