Is Your Gas Station Funding Hezbollah Via Tax Fraud? Convicted MI Station Owner Cousin of Hezbo Chief Nasrallah

A very interesting post from www.debbieschlussel.com about gas stations. This follows this post about a terrorist plot in New York against the Federal Reserve Bank.  This follows this article about American energy independence and preventing money from going to hostile countries such as Iran . For more that you can do to get involved click HERE and read a very interesting book HERE.

Is Your Gas Station Funding Hezbollah Via Tax Fraud? Convicted MI Station Owner Cousin of Hezbo Chief Nasrallah


By Debbie Schlussel



Several years ago, I told you about the Safiedine family (also spelled Safieddine). Shi’ite Muslims from Lebanon, they own gas stations throughout the Detroit area and are related to Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah. They are also related to Hachem Safieddine, who is Iran’s designated successor to Nasrallah and currently heads Hezbollah’s seven-member governing council, the Shurah Al-Karar. This is one of the many reasons I tell readers not to buy gas at Muslim-owned gas stations. You don’t know where the Safiedines are sending their money and you wouldn’t want to support proud relatives of Hezbollah’s leadership, would you? Yesterday, Elsayed Kazem “Tom” Safiedine, one of the owners of many of those gas stations, was sentenced to 21 months in prison for his second tax fraud incident. It’s a light sentence, given that the man did this before in the 1980s.



Hezbollah’s Girlieman Leader Hassan Nasrallah is Related to Michigan Gas Station Tax Defrauder



Nasrallah Girlie Man by (David Lunde/Lundesigns)



Safiedine defrauded the federal government of more than $1 million, by concealing $845,000 in income from Sunoco and $175,000 from a sale of a gas station. It appears, though, that the feds, failed to take into account, Safiedine’s prior similar tax fraud from the 1980s, when he spelled his first name “Kaszam” (Muslims spell their names in several ways to evade U.S. law enforcement authorities–and clearly it worked here).  In that case, in the mid-1980s, Safiedine was convicted of seven counts of tax fraud for under-reporting income at three of his gas stations. He was sentenced to five years probation (11 months of it in jail) at the time, but had the chutzpah to appeal it (and lost). The sentencing memorandum filed by the IRS in his latest conviction, requesting 33 months of imprisonment, failed to mention that. As I noted, Federal Judge Patrick Duggan, yesterday, sentenced Safiedine to just 21 months in the big house.



The amount of money Safiedine defrauded from the government is unknown. This is only what he was actually caught doing. How much money did he siphon off to his relatives in Hezbollah? Of course, Safiedine’s close connections to the top leadership in Hezbollah weren’t even mentioned by the feds. Also of note, Safiedine’s relative, Yousef Safiedine, was charged in 2006 with tax fraud for under-reporting tens of thousands of dollars of rental income, so it runs in the family. But Yousef Safiedine managed to get his indictment dropped by pleading mental illness, with government acquiescence. So mentally ill, yet so cunning. Hezbollah members and their relatives aren’t mentally ill at all. They know exactly what they are doing. How sad that not all of us succeed in figuring that out, especially those in authority. One other thing: another relative, Jim Safiedine, who owns Safiedine Oil and a number of other Michigan gas stations, is a major donor to Michigan Republican Congresswoman Candice Miller. Alhamdillullah [praise allah].



More:



U.S. District Judge Patrick J. Duggan sentenced Elsayed Kazem “Tom” Safiedine to 21 months in prison and Mary Fawaz to 12 months and one day in prison for tax fraud, the Justice Department and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) announced today. Safiedine and Fawaz were convicted by a Detroit jury of conspiring to defraud the United States by impeding and impairing the lawful functions of the IRS.


According to evidence at trial, Safiedine was an officer and member of multiple business entities that operated and leased gasoline stations in the Detroit area. Fawaz was an officer of JSC Corporation, a business operated by Safiendine, and also served as a bookkeeper and office manager for several of Safiedine’s businesses. The evidence established that from 1998 through 2001, Safiedine and Fawaz arranged for third parties to negotiate checks from Sunoco Incorporated made payable to JSC Corporation. The checks from Sunoco, which totaled $845,000, were not properly reported to the accountant for JSC Corporation and as a result, were not included as income on JSC’s corporate tax returns filed with the IRS.



Further evidence presented revealed that Safiedine and Fawaz participated in the sale of a gasoline station owned by one of Safiedine’s businesses, MTK & KLC Partnership, during which Safiedine and Fawaz advised the accountant for MTK & KLC that the gas station sold for $175,000 less than its actual sale price, thus resulting in an understatement of income on the MTK & KLC partnership income tax return.



Is your gas station funding Hezbollah? If you don’t know who owns the gas station, you don’t know where the profits from the pump are going. And odds are good it’s not going to a good place.



Know who owns the gas pump.

The Next Middle East War. Coming soon?

This is an interesting movie review from http://www.carolineglick.com/ about possible rumblings of an imminent war in the Middle East. This follows this post of a movie about this and you can get a free book on this subject here. For more interesting posts like this, please follow by clicking here.

Israel and the next war

A regional war may well be approaching. The actions and statements of Iran and its Syrian, Lebanese and Palestinian proxies over the past week or so indicate that this is what Israel's enemies are gunning for.
In preparing for this growing threat, Israel's leaders need to consider more than just the military challenges it faces. They must consider the political actors at home and abroad that limit the IDF's ability to fight to victory and develop strategies for neutralizing those actors.
The latest developments are menacing. Last Saturday, Iran's unelected president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threatened to open up a new round of hostilities on February 11. Then Wednesday, Iran launched a new missile into space. Israeli and US missile experts claim that the missile launch signals that Iran is developing intercontinental ballistic missiles and building the capacity to launch nuclear warheads on ballistic missiles.
Following the missile launch, Syria's president and foreign minister issued incendiary comments threatening Israel with war. Notably, they did so the same day the US informed Syria of its intention to send an ambassador to Damascus for the first time in five years.
Hamas, for its part, sent barrels of explosives drifting to the Israeli coastline - exposing new ways it can kill us. And Fatah, for its part, decided to kiss Hamas's ring this week. Senior Fatah official Nabil Shaath's obsequious visit to Gaza Wednesday was a graphic demonstration of Hamas's preeminence in Palestinian society.
Then there is Hizbullah. In a speech on January 15, Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah pledged that the next war will "change the face of the region."
This may not be an exaggeration. It isn't simply that under the blind eye of UN peacekeepers Hizbullah has replenished and expanded its arsenal to include long-range missiles. It isn't simply that in the three and half years since the war Hizbullah has taken control over the Lebanese government. Hizbullah has also built up a formidable ground force. In the event of war, these forces may be deployed as an expeditionary force inside northern Israel.
And if the precedent of former MK Azmi Bishara - who fled Israel after learning that he was about to be indicted for serving as a Hizbullah agent in the 2006 war - is any indication of Hizbullah's modus operandi, Israel may also face Israeli Arab fifth columnists assisting Hizbullah forces inside the country.
Assuming for the moment that the IDF and the government are prepared to contend with these mounting military threats, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his colleagues must take the necessary steps to withstand and minimize the effectiveness of the far left's expected political warfare against Israel. As the past decade has made clear, the aim of that warfare is to delegitimize Israel's right to defend itself in order to make it impossible for Israel to pursue the war to military and political victory.
As in the military arena, so in the political arena, Israel's foes have grown from nuisances into strategic threats over the past decade. The UN-sponsored Goldstone Report, which effectively denies Israel's right to defend itself and criminalizes its military efforts to secure its citizenry and its territory, is evidence of the gravity of the threat Israel faces as our leaders plan for the coming war.
ON THIS latter plane, the past week has been an eventful and hopeful one. The latest developments offer guidance for how the government must proceed as the winds of war blow ever stronger. Late last week, the Zionist student movement Im Tirzu published a detailed report demonstrating that 16 anti-Zionist NGOs funded by the post-Zionist New Israel Fund worked hand in glove with the UN Human Rights Council and Richard Goldstone to bring about the establishment of the Goldstone committee and give credibility to its allegations that Israel committed war crimes during Operation Cast Lead. According to the Im Tirtzu report, 92 percent of Israeli allegations that Israel committed war crimes in its campaign against Hamas came from these 16 NIF-funded organizations.
Im Tirtzu's report was prominently covered by Ma'ariv last weekend. The media coverage provoked calls in the Knesset this week to investigate the NIF and its operational arms in Israel, both through regular committee hearings and perhaps through a parliamentary investigative panel.
These calls are extraordinary because they represent the first time in a decade that the legitimacy of these NGOs has been seriously scrutinized.
Since the Palestinians began their terror war against Israel in September 2000, NIF-sponsored groups have worked steadily to intimidate political leaders, law enforcement officials and military commanders to toe their anti-Zionist line. In the wake of the PLO-incited riots in the Israeli Arab sector in October 2000, the overtly anti-Zionist NIF-funded Adalah group agitated for the formation of the Orr Commission. Charged with investigating the police who quelled the rioting rather than the rioters whose violence forced the prolonged closure of major highways to Jewish traffic throughout the country, the Orr Commission had a devastating impact on the police's morale and organizational culture.
Adalah successfully cowed the Barak government into agreeing to rules of inquiry for the commission that denied police officers even minimal rights of due process. They were not allowed to confront or question their accusers. In the aftermath of the commission's public hearings - which amounted to little more than show trials - the careers of several dedicated officers were destroyed. As a consequence, police commanders began curtailing their law enforcement activities in Arab villages. Everything from illegal building to livestock theft to incitement to war against Israel has gone uninvestigated and unpunished.
Furthermore, the Adalah-instigated and orchestrated Orr Commission empowered the most radical voices in Israeli Arab society. Supported by Arab political leaders, Adalah published a manifesto calling for the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state. Bishara's suspected espionage for Hizbullah, and the legal establishment's self-evident fear of prosecuting him for treason, are also the direct consequence of the Orr Commission.
As for the IDF, NIF-funded organizations have played a key role in organizing the weekly riots at flashpoints like Ni'ilin and Bi'ilin and in the recent expansion of these riots to other places in Judea and Samaria like Neveh Tzuf. Supported by anti-Israel activists from Europe and the US, these riots have had a devastating impact on the IDF's morale and its ability to defend Israeli communities.
The NIF-funded pro-Palestinian group B'Tselem provides the rioters with video cameras with which they regularly shoot distorted footage. Their canned films portray Israeli civilians seeking to defend themselves from the rioters as attackers. They portray IDF soldiers trying to keep order and protect Israeli civilians as violent bullies. B'Tselem gives these films to its supporters in the Israel media, which broadcast them as credible footage and demand that the IDF open investigations against its officers for carrying out lawful orders.
On the defensive, the IDF is compelled to curtail its operations and Israeli civilians, now demonized, are viewed as legitimate targets for terror attacks. One recent film of the rioting outside Neveh Tzuf posted on YouTube shows border policemen simply fleeing the scene and leaving the residents of the community to fend for themselves.
Im Tirtzu's offensive against the NIF sparked outraged protest among the NIF's supporters on the far left in Israel and in the US. Everyone from Ma'ariv's in-house anti-Zionist reporters Maya Bengal and Meirav David to J Street have piled on, attacking Im Tirtzu's financial backers and seeking to demonize the organization by referring to it as extremist, far right, racist, fascist, out-of-the-mainstream and all the other routine far-left terms used to demonize Zionists.
What is most encouraging about the aftershocks of the Im Tirtzu report is that the Left's attempts to demonize it have so far failed. Indeed, the loudest voices calling for an investigation of NIF and its sponsored organizations have been MKs from Kadima.
THE HARSH truth is that the main cause of Israel's poor performance in Cast Lead and the Second Lebanon War was the Olmert government's ideological dependence on the far left and its central contention that it is Israel's presence in contested areas rather than our enemies' commitment to Israel's destruction that causes wars. Owing to their allegiance to this falsehood, Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni were unable to prosecute the wars to victory militarily, justify the limited steps they did take to defend Israel diplomatically, or discredit the rising chorus of Israeli NGOs arguing that Israel had no right to defend itself politically.
Since Cast Lead, however, two important things have happened. First Kadima was replaced by the Likud. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu rightly recognized the Goldstone Report as a strategic attack against Israel. If Israel has no right to defend itself; if its moves to do constitute war crimes, then Israel cannot fight, cannot win and will be destroyed. Rather than give credence to the report, Netanyahu has made discrediting it one his primary aims in office. And to counteract its force, among other things, for the first time since the start of the Oslo peace process with the PLO, Israel's government is asserting the Jewish people's right to Judea and Samaria.
Beyond that, Kadima itself has changed its tune. Now in the opposition, Kadima no longer needs to defend its rejected plan to unilaterally withdraw from Judea and Samaria. Mahmoud Abbas's refusal of Olmert's offers to withdraw Israelis civilians and military personnel from nearly all of Judea and Samaria and to cede sovereignty in Jerusalem discredited the notion that it is possible to make peace with the Palestinians. Most importantly, the fact that Goldstone castigates Livni and Olmert as war criminals requires Kadima to fight all forces - including the far left it previously supported - that give credibility to Goldstone.
These developments clear the way for the Netanyahu government to take steps to neutralize the potency of these groups. The government should move swiftly to order the police and the IDF to enforce the law against these groups and their allies. It must also provide the political support to police and military commanders in the field to empower them fulfill their orders without fear that they will be persecuted for doing their jobs.
If the government seizes the opportunity to weaken these subversive groups, not only will it be making it clear that the political open season on Israel is over. It will be clearing the way for any future war to end not only in military victory, but in political victory for Israel as well.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Shi'ite PetroCalypse

I wanted to send this article that talks about some of the events going on in the Middle East and how they could affect Oil Prices over the near term. As it is, Oil prices are rising and that is occuring without any of the major events listed below happening. Anyway, I thought you might find this interesting to read along with our book The Middle East in Bible Prophecy here http://www.ucg.org/booklets/ME/




Now... let me share with you the dire warning we talked about...
A Collaborator Countdown:The 4 Horseman of the Oil Apocalypse
There's a good chance you'd never heard of Sheik Hassan Nasrallah. And least not until very recently, during last year's radical unrest close to the Israeli border. But famous in the U.S. or not, Nasrallah's stock is soaring in the world of Islam.
See, it's Hassan Nasrallah who heads up Hezbollah, the known terrorist organization that dominates the southern half of Lebanon. It was Nasrallah who secretly encouraged his fighters to take on Israel with shoulder rockets. And Nasrallah, too, who more recently tried to overthrow Lebanon's non-Muslim government.

What's behind it all? Nine years ago, Nasrallah's son was killed in a battle with Israelis. He's angry to the core. He's also very powerful.
Here's where it gets complicated.
Lebanon isn't a major oil power. In the late 1960s, it was even known as the "Switzerland of the Middle East." Modern. Moderate. Beirut was a playground for the rich, a beach town dotted with discos and exclusive hotels.
Very different from what you see today.
And a large and very driven group of Muslims want to keep it different. For 16 years, in fact, they fought civil war with Christians and others in their country. It got so rough Syria stepped in to end it.
When Rafik Hariri, a self-made billionaire, became prime minister and tried to rebuild Lebanon into a modern state all over again... this activist group of Muslims did what any voter would do. On Feb. 14, 2005... they blew up his car with 1,000 kg of TNT.
What Does This Matter to the Price of Oil?
Insiders, the CIA and just about everyone else believe that the group behind the murder of the ex-prime minister... and the backers of the Hezbollah terrorist organization... are not Lebanese at all. They're Syrian. And Iranian.
Hariri wanted Lebanon for Lebanon.
Both Iran and Syria want to use Lebanon, and especially Hezbollah, to stir up fights with Israel.
When Israel fights, the Middle East gets hot.
And oil prices go up.
Iran sends over $100 million a year in secret financing to Hezbollah. Along with guns and shoulder rockets and other sophisticated weapons. And most of these get shipped secretly through Syria, one of Iran's few real allies in the Middle East.
The bigger Hezbollah gets, the further Iran's reach across the region.
Tel Aviv wants to send missiles into Tehran? Go ahead. Iran will unleash Hezbollah on northern Israel. Just like it did that summer. And in propaganda terms, it was a huge success.
Hezbollah doubled its victory by handing out bags of money to fellow Muslims whose houses were destroyed by the bombing. Today, that's made Hezbollah even more popular across the Middle East than al-Qaida. Hezbollah's gaining strength. And that's the problem.
Edward Walker is a Middle East expert. He heads up the Middle East Institute and was once ambassador to both Egypt and to Israel. "Hezbollah," he says, "is more popular than sliced bread." All the "wrong guys" are getting a boost from the current situation.
Keep in mind, before Sept. 11, the FBI considered Hezbollah an even bigger terror risk to the U.S. than al-Qaida.
Today, Hezbollah has taken terror mainstream. Imagine al-Qaida, but with seats in Congress. Hezbollah has done almost that. It's recently won seats in Lebanon's parliament... it's now hugely popular with a certain, large group of Lebanese... only the biggest danger about Hezbollah is that it doesn't really work for Lebanon at all.
No, it serves a much bigger, more dangerous master...
The Middleman:Playing a Most Dangerous Game

While almost nobody on the international scene pays attention, Syria -- next to Lebanon --?plays a dangerous game. To understand, you need to know Syria's young president, Bashar al-Assad.
His family has ruled Syria for more than 30 years. They hold "elections." They win with 99.99% of the vote every time.
Bashar was an eye doctor, trained in the U.K. At age 34, his dictator father died. He took over and pretended to be a moderate. But he quickly changed his tune.
Syria also has no real stake in the Middle East.
What it does have, however, is a long-lasting friendship with all the wrong kind of people. In 1985, Syria helped finance the terrorists who hijacked the Achille Lauro cruiseliner.
In 1983, Syria helped pay to bomb a military bunker in Beirut, killing 241 U.S. Marines. Again in 1985, it also funded the hijackers of TWA Flight 847.
Syrian backing is even linked to the Munich Olympic massacre in 1972. And investigators say they can directly link Syria to killing Rafik Hariri in February 2005. Though of course, Syria denies it.
Why?
Syria wants the Golan Heights.
The Golan is a key fresh water source in the parched Middle East. It's also a perfect lookout into Damascus. And Syria doesn't want anybody but itself to own that advantage. But it lost the Golan to Israel in 1967 and 1973. Iran has promised to help Syria get it back, even if that means throwing its military might in a future war with Israel.
In fact, days after Hariri was killed in Lebanon, Iran's foreign minister flew to Damascus and forged a "united front" with Syria, including military support.
What does Iran get in exchange?
Syria lets Iran use Syrian territory as a land bridge over the border into Lebanon... so Iran can keep Hezbollah fully armed. As another part of its role in the new Middle East alliance, Syria also feeds support to new resistance fighters in Iraq...
The Radical:Why We'll Never Gain Access to Iraqi Oil
Democracy rarely happens overnight. The U.S. Civil War came along 85 years after the nation got started.

How's democracy taking hold in Iraq? Not too well. Meet Moztada al-Sadr, son-in-law of a grand ayatollah.
He's young. But he can trace his family lineage directly back to the prophet Muhammad. That gets him a lot of credibility.
al-Sadr heads the Mahdi Army. It's not an official army. It's a band of 10,000 Shiite militiamen, vying for control of Iraq.
His followers battle coalition troops in Baghdad. They've taken control of cities in the south. They run police stations, holy sites and political offices.
His own father, two brothers and father-in-law were all murdered by Hussein's secret police.
In a U.S.-run poll in Iraq, al-Sadr ranked more popular than Iraq's "elected" prime minister.
Then you've got the "Badr Brigade." The Brigade is also Shia. It's the armed wing, in fact, of SCIRI, the party of Shia Muslims who dominate the newly elected Iraqi Parliament.
Shia Muslims - or Shiites - are a sect of Islam. Around the world, there aren't many of them. But in the Middle East, the 140 million Shia Muslims make up more than half the population of the entire region.
The other half is Sunni Muslim. Shiites and Sunnis hate each other. They have been at war in Iraq ever since Saddam fell. They have been at war across the Middle East for the last 1,374 years.
The 40% of people supporting Hezbollah in Lebanon are also Shia. President Assad in Syria is Alawi, which is a Shia subgroup. The new president of Iraq is Shia. In fact, 60% of the Iraqi population is Shia.
Sadr City, Karbala and Najaf, Iraq... they're all jammed with Shia Muslims. The oppressed Shiites partied in the streets when Saddam fell. Today, they terrorize the coalition troops and take potshots at their Sunni neighbors.
They call it the "Balance of Terror" - a cycle of violence and counterviolence between Sunnis and Shias across the region - that's supposed to keep Shia populations from being marginalized ever again.
This virtually guarantees the Iraqi civil war will happen. In fact, even though Washington says we don't have to worry, our own top generals, CIA insiders and Middle East experts all say it's already begun.
Gen. John Abizaid was our top U.S. military commander in the Middle East. Here's what he had to say recently: "I believe that sectarian violence is probably as bad as I have ever seen it."
And William Patey, the U.K. ambassador to Iraq who just retired, says, "The prospect of a low intensity civil war and a de facto division of Iraq is probably more likely at this stage than a successful and substantial transition to a stable democracy."
Bush and his?advisors have turned a deaf ear. They're in denial.
But that doesn't mean you should ignore the writing on the wall.
Think about it. Shias dominate the new Iraqi government. This is a "New Middle East" all right. Just not the one anyone ever hoped for.
The Iraqi Highway Patrol, run mostly by Shias, doubles as a not-so-secret Sunni Arab death squad. When Sunni's bombed the Shias' Golden Mosque, Shias bombed eight Sunni mosques and killed over 50 Sunni Arabs in retaliation.
Gunmen spraying worshippers with automatic fire during morning prayers... blasts in a crowded marketplace... over 1,000 Shia dead in a stampede, on rumors of a Sunni suicide bomber.
The last time Shia militias threatened to blow up oil fields in southern Iraq, they shut down - cutting off 90% of Baghdad's oil revenue. This is the seat of world oil wealth on edge, worse than at any other time in history!
And behind it all...
The Mastermind: How a Blacksmith's Son Just Engineered the End of Cheap Oil
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the son of a blacksmith.

He's smart. With a PHD in engineering. He's also ruthless.
In the late 1970s, he graduated as one of the top students from Iran's version of MIT. He joined the Revolutionary Guard.
During the Iran-Iraq war, Ahmadinejad trained 12-year-old boys to march into mine fields, sacrificing their own lives, to make way for the Iranian army.
After his election, he said in his speech, "Thanks to the blood of the martyrs, a new Islamic revolution is arisen..." He's doing everything possible to make sure he's right.
Take Iraq.
The Iran-Iraq war was one of the bloodiest battles of the 20th century. Iraq was run by Sunni Muslims then. Now it's run by Shiites. And Iran, also nearly 91% Shiite, is sending electricity to Iraq. It's sending wheat. It's sending $1 billion in foreign aid.
Ahmadinejad knows what he's doing.
Iran just offered to pay for three pipelines running across Shia territory in Iraq. Iran has offered to open its ports, so war-torn Iraq can use them for shipping. And every day, Iraq will ship 150,000 barrels of light crude direct to Iran, for refining. Remember, Iran also funds Hezbollah in Lebanon. And it's busily buying influence in Syria.
Don't look now, but...

Iran Just Pulled the Persian Rug out From Under Our Feet!
You've seen, so far, how much of a chip Iran has on its shoulder. The British sailors... the rebuffed U.N. inspections... the direct verbal challenges to the authority of the West.
What happens once Iran gets the bomb?
Everything changes. Shias unite across the region, behind the new dominant power in Tehran. The Sunni House of Saud... Saudi Arabia's ruling family... collapses. Along with any remaining alliance with the U.S. More radical fundamentalists step in to take charge.
Inside the region, the Sunnis get isolated - away from most of the oil. Now it's the Shiites who get to call the shots. And with the backing of the Iranian oil bourse, they're not afraid to price oil through the ceiling.
Here's what our own government says, through the U.S. Council on Foreign Affairs:
"Tehran sees itself as a regional power and the center of a Persian and Shiite zone of influence stretching from Mesopotamia to Central Asia. Freed from the menace of the Taliban in Afghanistan and of Saddam in Iraq, Iran is riding the crest of the wave of Shiite revival, aggressively pursuing nuclear power and demanding international recognition of its interests."
Oil markets hate uncertainty.

The "Open Oil War" of 2008

Take a look at this map...
What you see is a "Shia tide" or "crescent" cutting a swath across the Middle East.
Iran's Shiites... along with Shiites in Pakistan and Afghanistan... the Shia majority in Iraq... the Shia-friendly government in Syria... and Hezbollah and the large Shia movement in Lebanon... add up to a total 140 million people.
That has Washington worried. It has Saudi Arabia even more worried.
Saudi Arabia is mostly Sunni. In Saudi schools, they teach Sunni kids that Shiites aren't real Muslims. And that it would be better to marry a Christian or a Jew than to marry into the Shia sect.
Here's the thing...
Nearly 20% of Saudi Arabia is also Shia. But the land the Shia occupy happens to include virtually all of Saudi Arabia's biggest and most important oil fields. It's only a matter of time before the Shia movement in the north... reaches the Shia communities across the major Middle Eastern countries to the south.
Already, Saudi Arabia is feeling like a second-class power.
The House of Saud is in trouble. Its stubborn alliance with the U.S. has destroyed local credibility. Many of its 5,000 princes live decadent lives that don't square with Wahhabism, Saudi Arabia's especially strict form of Sunni Islam. And new geological research shows Saudi Arabia's oil fields may be drying up.
Meanwhile, Iran's economy is bigger than Saudi Arabia's. Iran is mineral rich, it's people are highly educated and its army is powerful and well rested. And by forging an alliance with the Shia majority in Iraq, it's now combining two of the largest oil deposits in the world.
For decades, Iran has hung back in the shadows.
With the growing Shia alliance across the Middle East, that's changing radically.
Iran's current super-nationalist, hostile government is like Japan in the 1930s. Not just overconfident, but ready to assert its place in the world. With nuclear weapons. With support of terrorists. With missile threats. And with tentacles of subversive ideological support reaching from Pakistan to Lebanon.
Is it any wonder other energy investors are watching closely?
In a report from Barclays Capital, energy analysts Paul Horsnell and Kevin Norrish wrote, "Iran's external relations remain the key wild card in the oil market."
We agree.
A violent new revolution is headed for the Middle East. An "open war" that spreads across borders. In the crossfire, over 696 BILLION barrels of valuable oil are at risk. At exactly the time when the world can't afford a constricted oil supply.
As this powder keg implodes, the impact will be enormous.
Consider, the world's spare oil capacity is much less than 2 million barrels per day. The loss of Iran's 2.5 million barrels in daily exports ALONE would breach that limit instantly... almost certainly sending the oil price to $100 a barrel overnight... and much higher over the months that follow.
And if Iran shuts down tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, an Iran-controlled waterway through which 80% of Persian Gulf oil passes... prices could rocket quickly past $125 per barrel... even as high as $150 per barrel... propelling the world economy and markets into a nose dive. http://www.isecureonline.com/Reports/OST/EOSTGA28/Default.cfm?o=1491777&u=11032080&l=796709&PAGE=2&PCODE=EOSTGA28&ALIAS=SCOW