The Trillion Dollar Campaign to Conquer the West

The Islamists are playing the longest civilizational war game in the world 

Melanie Phillips 

 

 

More and more information is surfacing to reveal that the Islamic holy war against the West isn’t just being waged on the battleground of the Middle East.

Even more significantly, it’s also being waged through a trillion-dollar influence campaign to colonise and subvert the Western mind, organised by extremists from the Islamic world.

These have tunnelled into the West through a vast civic infrastructure whose real purpose and sources of funding have been as well concealed, and in their own way are just as deadly, as the subterranean genocide factories in Gaza and Lebanon.

To those with eyes to see, it was obvious from the start that the hate marches springing into existence after October 7, 2023 — even while the Hamas-led atrocities were still going on — weren’t spontaneous protests against Israel.

They were instead a globally co-ordinated campaign to turn gullible Westerners into the unwitting army of Islamic jihad through support for the Palestinian cause.

An important new report by NGO Monitor shows that this post-October 7 protest infrastructure in Britain has used the signature liberal causes of humanitarianism and human rights to launder the Islamic jihad against the West.

The report found that, through a series of concentric circles, just six groups have been involved in more than 80 per cent of the major protests.

In the innermost circle sit the states hostile to the West: Iran, China, Russia and Qatar; terrorist organisations such as Hamas, Hezbollah and al Qaeda; and extremist religious-political movements like the Muslim Brotherhood.

Lapping around them are charities, campaign groups, protest movements and advocacy organisations that provide legitimacy for these hostile forces, amplify their propaganda and transmit extremism to society.

Out of 40 organisations mapped in the report, at least 11 have links to extremist groups or officials who have co-operated with Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Muslim Brotherhood.

US-based progressive foundations and far-left activist groups, such as the Open Society Foundation, Action Network, Cultures of Resistance and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, are providing significant funding and support, facilitating donations and strengthening the British protests.

Some of these groups have helped inspire violence in the United States. Last month, US prosecutors indicted eight current and former students at the University of Michigan for conspiring to threaten university leaders, law enforcement, businesses and the Jewish Federation.

The indictment stated that one of the internet websites used by the defendants to spread their demands belonged to Palestine Action, the UK group that continues to attract passionate support from otherwise respectable, middle-class Brits despite having been proscribed by the government as a terrorist outfit.

Well-meaning, if ignorant, people continue to support such organisations on the naive assumption that they help the oppressed.

The Islamist programme to subvert the Western mind has relentlessly focused for years on universities and schools. The Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy has just published another vitally important report, Institutional Capture, which documents how anti-West, Islamist Qatar has reshaped American education in a devastating programme of cultural infiltration.

Over the past 16 years, according to the report, Qatar Foundation International (QFI), the US member of the Doha-based Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development, has conducted a systematic campaign to embed itself within American educational institutions.

Deploying at least $65.3 million across 220 documented initiatives between 2009 and 2025, it has been a “manipulator of thought” in social studies, science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics, as well as in youth engagement, professional development and social activism initiatives.

Through corporate restructuring and strategic partnerships, it has leveraged the reputation of host organisations to embed the Qatari viewpoint on the Middle East in educational materials served up to students in both universities and K-12 schools.

At national conferences for social studies educators, it has stacked the proceedings with presenters trained by QFI to present Qatari talking points.

The result has been an educational echo chamber that “casts doubt on Israel’s very existence, rejects curriculum that teaches students about the efforts to normalise relations between Israel and Arab states, and normalises and relativizes terrorism”.

This is the template for the Muslim Brotherhood’s long-term strategy for civilisational jihad against Western society, turning educational institutions into a weapon of war by shaping, producing and normalising ideological positions that fit the agenda of conquering the West for Islam.

It’s scant wonder, therefore, that the West has fallen victim to a psychotic madness about Israel’s fictitious perfidies — a malevolent narrative of demonisation that is in turn a Trojan horse for suicidal anti-Western loathing and contempt among the elites. Millions of people are being manipulated on a staggering scale.

America is beginning to grapple with this. In March, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce released nearly 900 pages of documents detailing two major American university partnerships in Qatar.

As the Jewish Institute for National Security of America observed in its own analysis of these documents last month, they showed that Qatar has “used complex funding contracts with American universities to acquire access to intellectual property, governance deliberation, academic credentialing and institutional reputation, which it has used to help support Islamist movements hostile to the United States and its allies”.

The release of those documents galvanised the introduction last month of legislation to ban federal funding to colleges that operate branch campuses in adversarial countries, or accept research funding for sensitive fields like artificial intelligence, biotech and quantum computing.

That’s a welcome development, but acute concerns still remain. This process of jihadi infiltration has been going on for decades. Successive British governments and US administrations have refused to acknowledge the civilisational threat that it poses.

In large measure, this is because the West can’t understand Islamic religious fanaticism. It assumes that everyone in the world is, like itself, governed by self-interest. So it simply can’t get its collective head around the fact that Islamists are apocalyptic and messianic, and believe they have a divine command to conquer Israel, America and the West for Islam.

US President Donald Trump seems to make the same mistake. True, none of us can know what’s in his mind. Maybe he really does understand the Islamists’ mindset and is playing a long game to reel them in.

But maybe he believes that the Iranian regime and other Islamists are driven by the same self-interest as in his own world, and that therefore he can end all such conflict through his supposedly unmatched “art of the deal”.

Such concerns are exacerbated by the extremely troubling financial links between members of Trump’s circle and Qatar. Rather than treating it as the enemy of the civilisation that it is, Trump has used Qatar as a trusted interlocutor in talks with Hamas, the Taliban and Iran. His apparently unshakeable belief in the universality of venal self-interest presumably explains his disbelief that the Iranian regime won’t accept that its devastating military losses mean it’s lost the war.

It explains his view that Gaza’s Islamist lions would obviously be turned into lambs by the prospect of the Strip’s transformation into a property developer’s Riviera paradise.

And it may explain his support for Turkey’s menacing Islamist president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. According to Trump, Erdoğan almost entered the war in support of Iran and against America, but the US president talked him out of it. Now, Trump reportedly intends to reward him for this by selling him F-35 warplanes.

Taking his words at their face value (which may always be a mistake), this suggests that narcissistic fantasies prevent this American president from understanding what being an Islamist means.

So as Trump continues to give us all political whiplash by his on-off-on Iran war, and as the West allows its mouth to be stuffed with Qatari gold, the Islamists fight on — as they’ve done ever since the seventh century — playing the longest civilisational war game in the world.

 

 

 

 China’s Strategic Yuan Internationalization

China liberalizes Yuan as a trade settlement alternative, but keeps guardrails to protect its domestic economy 

Einar Tangen 

 

 

China’s Strategic Yuan Internationalization

China is redesigning the financial architecture that supports the use of the Yuan as a trade settlement option. The objective is not to replace the US dollar or fully liberalize China’s capital account. The objective is to make the yuan easier, cheaper and safer to use for trade, investment and reserve management,

while preserving Beijing’s control over domestic financial markets.

The reforms announced by People’s Bank of China Governor Pan Gongsheng at the 2026 Lujiazui Forum represent institutional change rather than technical adjustment. China is building the infrastructure required for a global currency without accepting the risks associated with unrestricted capital flows. Financial stability remains the overriding priority.

For decades the yuan has functioned as a trade settlement currency, but it lacked one of the defining characteristics of an international reserve currency: liquidity. Foreign investors could purchase Chinese government bonds, yet accessing cash often required selling those assets. The result was higher transaction costs, reduced flexibility and less incentive to hold yuan-denominated securities.

China’s solution is to separate liquidity from liquidation. Instead of forcing investors to sell assets, Beijing is creating mechanisms that allow them to borrow against them. That single institutional change materially increases the attractiveness of holding yuan reserves.

Three reforms illustrate the strategy.

The first is the FIMA Repo Facility. Foreign central banks can obtain yuan liquidity by pledging Chinese government bonds and other approved assets as collateral. During periods of market stress they no longer need to liquidate their portfolios. The facility strengthens confidence in yuan assets by providing a permanent liquidity backstop.

The second is Shanghai’s offshore foreign-exchange trading pilot. Six of China’s largest commercial banks can now conduct offshore yuan trading through the China Foreign Exchange Trade System. Closer integration between the onshore and offshore markets improves price discovery, narrows exchange-rate differences and reduces currency risk for international users.

The third is Shanghai’s long-term offshore financial development plan. Rather than opening the capital account, Beijing has adopted a phased strategy extending through 2027, 2030 and 2035. The objective is to develop deep offshore yuan markets while maintaining regulatory control over domestic capital flows.

Together these reforms transform the yuan from a settlement currency into a more complete financial currency. China is no longer promoting the renminbi simply as a means of payment. It is constructing the institutions that allow governments, banks and investors to hold, finance and deploy yuan assets with greater confidence.

The Middle East demonstrates how this strategy is expanding China’s financial network. China is now the Gulf’s largest trading partner, creating the commercial foundation for wider yuan use. The United Arab Emirates has emerged as the region’s principal offshore renminbi hub, handling most Middle Eastern yuan settlements while developing clearing, financing and investment services around the Chinese currency. The UAE is not replacing the dollar. It is adding yuan infrastructure alongside the existing dollar system, giving governments and businesses greater flexibility in managing trade and investment.

This network is beginning to reinforce itself. Energy exports can be settled in yuan. Those yuan can then be invested in Chinese government bonds, policy bank securities or yuan-denominated corporate debt. Chinese capital, in turn, finances Gulf borrowers through dim sum bonds and other renminbi instruments, including ADNOC’s proposed offshore bond issuance. Trade generates investment, investment generates liquidity and liquidity generates further demand for yuan assets. Each transaction strengthens the network.

This is the strategic significance of China’s reforms. Beijing is creating a self-reinforcing financial ecosystem rather than attempting to overthrow the existing one. Shanghai supplies the financial infrastructure. The Gulf supplies commercial demand. The UAE provides the regional financial hub linking trade, investment and capital markets into a single yuan-based network.

The recent Iran conflict has accelerated this process by increasing demand for payment systems that reduce exposure to geopolitical risk. It has created opportunity, but not the strategy itself. China’s financial reforms were already underway because the underlying drivers are structural. As China’s trade relationships deepen, the financial infrastructure supporting them must expand as well.

The constraints remain deliberate. China has not adopted full capital account convertibility and has no intention of doing so in the foreseeable future. Beijing continues to regard unrestricted capital flows as a threat to financial stability. Internationalisation therefore proceeds through controlled institutional expansion rather than wholesale liberalisation.

The United States also retains overwhelming structural advantages. The dollar continues to dominate global reserves, trade finance and international capital markets. Gulf sovereign wealth funds still invest the overwhelming majority of their assets in dollar-denominated markets, while the UAE continues to balance its growing economic partnership with China against its long-standing security relationship with Washington.

China’s objective is therefore evolutionary rather than revolutionary. It is enlarging the international role of the yuan by making it increasingly useful, increasingly liquid and increasingly difficult to ignore. Every new institution expands the network. Every new participant strengthens it. Every new transaction increases its commercial value.

The result will not be the end of dollar dominance. It will be the emergence of a more diversified international financial system in which the yuan occupies a significantly larger role. China is not replacing the existing order. It is methodically constructing an alternative financial architecture alongside it.

 

 Ukraine's Watershed

Diane Francis 

 

 

 

This month’s NATO Summit provided a global platform for Donald Trump, who mixed his usual bravado with bluster but made significant announcements about the two major wars that are underway. Trump dealt a devastating blow against Iran, then pledged badly-needed Patriot missiles for Ukraine to help repel Russia’s air attacks against civilians. NATO is not directly involved in either war and has operated for years like a dysfunctional family, not a united front against Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran. But Trump’s tantrums have pushed members to spend more and support Ukraine militarily; then this week Trump claimed there was “love and unity” among leaders at the summit. The gathering was organized by NATO chief Mark Rutte, an unabashed Trump fan, who said: “I just like the man. I think what he is doing for NATO is great news… because of the Russians’ threat, and we see what the Russians are doing in Ukraine.”

Like him or not, Trump forced Europe to do what it should have done for decades, which is to militarize to defend itself against Moscow. If that had been done years ago, Russia would not have invaded Ukraine. Instead, European negligence has caused years of brutal warfare. These days Rutte likes to describe NATO as the defender of 1 billion people “against the Russian threat, the massive Chinese build-up, and the fact that Russia, China, North Korea, Iran work together.” But, in fact, Ukraine is the defender of Europe as well as NATO against the Russian threat, and finally Donald Trump understands that.

This is why Trump agreed to license America’s Patriot anti-ballistic missile defense system to Kyiv — a deal which is a game-changer, especially in tandem with Ukraine’s plan to unleash its own, hugely powerful ballistic missiles against targets inside Russia in the coming weeks. Putin, in the lead-up to this summit, has purposely pummeled Kyiv and other cities with his powerful ballistic missiles targeted at civilians and cultural sites. Only Patriots can impede such missiles, and these defense systems are now in short supply due to long production times, costs, and the fact that inventories have been used up by Ukraine, Israel, allies, and the Pentagon to protect against Russian and Iranian ballistic missiles.

  

 Why the War on Iran Isn’t About Nukes

I would like to propose a theory regarding Israel’s strikes in Iran that diverges sharply from the mainstream media narrative 

WeissWord 

 

 

On June 14, 2025, Israel launched a strike, likely via drone, targeting a gas processing facility linked to the South Pars field in the Kangan region of Bushehr province. The Iranian “South Pars” field is, in fact, the exact same underground gas reservoir that Qatar sits on. The Iranians call it South Pars; the Qataris call it the North Field.

The raw gas extracted from the Qatari side flows directly into the pipelines of the Ras Laffan coastal complex for liquefaction and export. Iran did not attack any Arab nation. It did, however, launch a strike toward the Bazan refineries in Haifa the following day, forcing the facility to temporarily shut down all operations. In March 2026, Israel struck the South Pars gas field again. Iran retaliated within hours by launching a strike toward Bazan in Haifa.

Immediately following the Israeli strike, Qatar issued an official condemnation against Israel, calling the bombardment of the shared field a “dangerous and irresponsible step threatening global energy security.” Yet, according to media reports, Iran launched strikes toward the shared Pars field with Qatar, hitting Ras Laffan—the very gas field that produces LNG for global markets and... helium used in the Asian computer industry. This impacts not just Taiwanese fabs, but Chinese ones as well. Chip wars? Think again.

The Invisible Hand of U.S. National Security

The line of reasoning surrounding the back-and-forth strikes between Iran and Qatar offered a logical theory: Iran sought to deter Gulf states from providing logistical support to the U.S., and by hitting Qatar, it drives up global LNG prices. Through more expensive LNG, it hoped to pressure the U.S. to halt the ongoing fighting against it.

However, LNG is a core pillar of U.S. foreign policy and a central pillar of its national security strategy. Any significant competition to American LNG exports—whether from Russia, the Middle East, or anywhere else—is viewed as a direct threat to U.S. interests. Consider the precedents:

• Continuous and fierce opposition to the Nord Stream 2 project.

• Extensive sanctions and restrictions on new Russian LNG projects.

• The sabotage of Nord Stream 1 in September 2022.

• The complete cessation of Russian natural gas transit to Europe via Ukrainian pipelines at the end of 2025.

For decades, the unwritten American red line in the Middle East was simple: you don’t touch the oil and gas. The fear of a global energy spike and market crash prevented such strikes in the past. Yet, when the U.S. approved Israel’s strike on South Pars, policymakers in Washington knew exactly how Tehran’s retaliatory doctrine looked. Iran routinely retaliates against the energy infrastructure of its Gulf neighbors. An Iranian strike on Qatar’s Ras Laffan successfully achieved for the U.S. the neutralization of its biggest competitor in the European market, without a single American soldier firing a shot—and without Washington taking the blame for direct sabotage.

The Helium Monopoly: Choking Asia’s Fabs

Now, let us examine a more critical angle. Unlike LNG, which Asia can temporarily substitute with coal, oil, or nuclear energy, liquid helium has no substitute. It is absolutely critical to two highly sensitive sectors in Asia:

1. Semiconductor Manufacturing: Giants like TSMC in Taiwan, Samsung and SK Hynix in South Korea, and foundries in Japan require massive volumes of helium to cool superconducting magnets and flush the vacuum chambers of ASML’s EUV lithography machines.

2. Medical Imaging (MRI): Hospitals across East Asia have already entered a strict rationing regime for liquid helium, which is essential for cooling the superconducting magnets in MRI machines.

The global helium market is built as a triangle: the U.S., Qatar, and Russia. Russia was slated to be the player to balance the market, but its Amur complex faces severe operational challenges and Western sanctions designed to block exports—sanctions led by the U.S. With Qatar neutralized, the explosion at Ras Laffan leaves the United States as a near-total monopoly provider of helium to Western nations and its Asian allies.

 

 

This is the most sophisticated part of the strategy: Washington now holds the choke valve on the economic oxygen of Taiwan and South Korea. The extreme helium shortage forces Asian tech companies to sign exorbitant, long-term supply contracts with American distributors, granting Washington unprecedented leverage over global semiconductor policy.

If Taiwan or South Korea consider violating U.S. restrictions on technology exports to China, Washington can quietly hint that due to complex market constraints, there are difficulties in helium supply. Trump placed a top priority on bringing semiconductor manufacturing back to the United States rather than relying on Asian supply chains, viewing these sectors as critical to the future economy.

Given that approximately 35% of global helium exports transit through the Strait of Hormuz—mostly bound for Asia—the chain reaction initiated by the South Pars bombing allowed the U.S. to push Qatar and Russia out of the European energy market while tightening its grip on Asia’s advanced tech supply chain. Recognizing that the U.S. remains almost the sole monopoly in the market, TSMC recently signed strategic supply agreements directly with American gas giants Air Products and Linde. The most telling financial move occurred in May 2026, when TSMC’s board approved a capital injection of up to $20 billion into the TSMC Arizona Corporation, alongside similar helium supply agreements signed by Samsung and SK Hynix.

The Grand Strategy

Turning back to Qatar: just over two weeks ago, as facility workers attempted to restart operations at the secondary Barzan facility to recover part of the production capacity, a severe gas explosion occurred. The incident claimed the lives of 13 workers and injured dozens. Qatari authorities characterized the event as a “technical failure” resulting from a complex restart process rather than a fresh act of deliberate sabotage.

In November 2025, the U.S. published its National Security Strategy document. The text explicitly defines the U.S. energy sector not just as a tool for domestic independence, but as “one of America’s premier export industries in its own right.” The strategy dictates leveraging these resources to neutralize competing suppliers and align global energy flows with Washington’s geopolitical objectives. Furthermore, the 2025 strategy document explicitly calls for ensuring that leading technologies like AI and quantum computing remain under American custody, citing the “Reindustrialization” of the economy as a top national priority to control technology supply chains.

 

 

The war against Iran is fundamentally not about nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, or regime dissidents. It is designed for an entirely different, grander objective. The operation against Iran and the resulting disruption in the Strait of Hormuz have yielded massive strategic dividends for the United States—dividends that will last for decades. While the U.S. has felt some economic friction from the crisis, Washington views it as a minor, short-term pain in exchange for generational, long-term dominance.

The accompanying data clearly demonstrates the long-term structural shift the U.S. has engineered in the global energy market for years to come.

 

 

 

 Ridley: The Most Important Thing to Happen in 1776

We have the Revolution Backwards 

Matt Ridley 

 

 

Happy Independence Day, rational optimist. As we celebrate America’s 250th birthday, Matt Ridley reflects on the 1776 innovation that made it possible for democracy and free enterprise to flourish... Enjoy.

The Declaration of Independence, written 250 years ago this week, was a bright torch of the Enlightenment. So was Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, also published 250 years ago this year. But for me the most momentous happening in 1776 was the inauguration of James Watt’s first practical steam engine.

We have the industrial revolution backwards. We tend to think that clever people in powdered wigs came up with ideas – democracy, free enterprise, stock markets, science, intellectual property – that enabled men with dirty fingernails to set about changing the world. But I think it was more that the fingernail fellows made the wig wearers possible. Smith’s division of labour and Jefferson’s democracy were all very well. But Thomas Newcomen and Watt mattered more. Thermodynamics – the science of heat and work – was invented to explain steam engines, not vice versa.

Hear me out. Before the steam engine, there were two distinct forms of energy in the world: heat and work. Heat came from wood and coal. Work came from people, horses, oxen, wind and water. Nobody had an inkling they were both forms of “energy”.

The energy return on energy invested in work was a dismally low ratio. Plough a field, grow some oats, feed them to horses, put the horses to work – mostly ploughing a field. You needed a lot of land to generate a tiny surplus of work energy for transport, manufacture, construction and everything else.

Then along came a device that turned heat into work and suddenly you were pumping out 57 feet of water from a pit in less than an hour by burning a small heap of stored sunlight from a petrified 300-million-year-old swamp forest. Coal was on hand to push a piston, turn a crank, drive a pile.

Once heat was doing work, it could be used to make machines that harnessed heat to do even more work: the mineral economy became a self-reinforcing phenomenon quite unlike the organic economy that preceded it. Diminishing returns gave way to increasing returns. The ratio of energy return on energy invested shot up: in 1850 coal miners produced about 100 times as much energy per head as farm labourers.

As the historian Robert Allen has argued, “the cheap energy economy was the foundation of Britain’s economic success”. Better still, the more coal that miners produced, the more the price of coal fell - unlike the cost of water mills or horses or wood. The great flywheel of positive feedback began delivering higher living standards not just for the rich but for the poor too. Previous civilisations in ancient India, China, Greece, Rome, Arabia, Italy, the Netherlands, had made the rich richer but had done little to help the poorest. This one was different - thanks almost entirely to coal, then oil and gas. As John Constable, the energy analyst, puts it, the economy is a thermodynamic machine: it takes random arrangements of atoms and turns them into improbable, useful forms.

But here’s the bad news. If hydrocarbon energy was vital to Britain’s pioneering rise in living standards through industrialisation, the war on hydrocarbons is the chief cause of Britain’s pioneering stagnation through de-industrialisation. The first country into the industrial revolution is now the first deliberately to drop out of it.

Our deceleration is accelerating. Britons are now consuming just 61 per cent as much energy per capita as they did in 2001 - almost halving the practical work we can do. China is consuming twice as much as us per head, or 350 per cent as much as it did in 2001. One by one, we have closed most of our productive industries: oil and gas, aluminium, steel, heavy engineering, mining, cement, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, fertiliser, ceramics. Now even artificial intelligence is leaving or shunning our shores.

The worst part of this is that we have done it deliberately. We set out to pretend we are reducing emissions of carbon dioxide when all we are doing is exporting them. We ban shale gas - but import shale gas from America at much higher cost and much higher carbon footprint. We ban North Sea oil exploration - but import North Sea oil from Norway. We subsidise wood burning at Drax power station - but don’t count the emissions because the wood comes from North Carolina. We load emissions trading taxes on to oil refineries, then wonder why two out of six closed last year and we must import most of our jet fuel, diesel, ethylene and fertiliser.

To generate electricity, we heavily subsidise the high-cost, low-ratio, low-density, unreliable, medieval technology of wind – and then pay again to connect it to the grid, back it up on still days and compensate it when the wind is too strong. As a direct result we now have the most expensive electricity in the developed world for industrial users and the second most expensive for domestic users. Since 2002 we have sluiced £227.7 billion from energy bill payers to crony capitalists in the unreliables sector who are laughing all the way to the pub.

In the fifteen years between 2009 and 2024, Britain increased its total electricity-generating capacity by 21 per cent but generated 24 per cent less electricity: a 37 per cent drop in the productivity of our electricity grid. That’s bad enough for the economy’s productivity, but the point of energy is to consume it, not produce it, and we are driving up its cost in every way we can.

Britain’s pursuit of high energy costs is a reckless catastrophe. Watt must be spinning so fast in his grave you could turn him into a dynamo.

 

 Batteries Will Not Replace Gas to Firm Up Wind and Solar

South Australian wind turbines were pretty much AWOL during the week ending 26th June, 2026. What did this week reveal? 

Geoff Russell 

 

 

Context

The record heat waves in Europe and the beginning of a possibly record-level El Niño are a reminder that fossil fuels need to be removed from our energy and industrial infrastructure. Even though Trump’s war shows how deeply dependent the world still is. Mind you, Australia got off relatively lightly with the Global South taking the big hits from fuel and material shortages. The billion-dollar question for Australia, as one of the last countries trying to do without the most eco-friendly energy source on the planet (nuclear power), is whether batteries can really replace gas to firm up wind turbines and solar panels. No other country is running the experiment. As I write this (June 30, 16:38), there isn’t much wind in Germany, where it is 9 am, so it is importing plenty of French nuclear power. It’s also importing from Switzerland, which also has nuclear power, complementing a tonne of hydro-power. Following Spain’s nationwide blackout in 2025, the very next day the grid operator switched to Reinforced Operations, meaning they required plenty of synchronous generators (nuclear, gas, hydro) to be running at all times to keep grid inertia high. Claims about that blackout not being due to renewables are exactly the same as those about South Australia’s 2016 statewide blackout not being due to renewables. Ignore what everybody says, and just watch what they do! In SA, they ordered the installation of 4 large synchronous condensers. In Spain, they just made sure plenty of such equipment was running all th the time to strengthen the grid. If you don’t know what synchronous generators and inertia are, then read this explanation.

Now let’s consider the South Australian grid during the week ending on the 26th of June, 2026.

The SA Wind Drought

The week ending on the 26th of June was a shocker for the South Australian electricity supply. Here’s the OpenElectricity graph showing where our electricity came from.

 

 

The green in the graph represents electricity from wind power. The 3 shades of pale orange below that are types of gas turbines and the purple represents imports from across the border in Victoria to keep our supermarket freezers and sewage pumps running.

Check the table on the right. Expand the image if you need to, it shows that we got just 35% of our electricity from wind, plus solar, plus batteries (WSB) during this week. During the past 3 years, the percentage of electricity from renewables has been levelling off. And there are good structural reasons to think it won’t climb much more.

 

 

Every winter, we get enough of these weeks to prevent the annual average from rising, despite having enough solar panels to supply 100% of our electricity during the day and similarly for wind.

An ABC article on the 28th of June quoted engineer Geoff Eldridge as saying batteries were not the answer to multiday wind lulls. The journalists also consulted SA Energy Minister Koutsantonis who replied as follows:

“[Koutsantonis] said the amount of large-scale battery capacity in the state would more than double to 2.5 gigawatts, or 2,500 megawatts, which would be able to power about 300,000 homes for eight hours.”

He’s clearly trying to suggest batteries would be sufficient if only we had enough of them.

Did the journalists bother to fact-check the statement?

School children learn the difference between power and energy as young teenagers. The webpage I just linked has it tagged as suitable for grades 6-8. It’s a US webpage, so the age of students learning this is about 11-13. Gemini tells me it’s similar in Australia, with the equations given to 15-17 year olds. Koutsantonis has either been misquoted or forgotten whatever he learned about this critical difference as a child. I wonder if Koutsantonis or the journalists were nodding off in Science classes thinking “Who on earth will ever need this stuff?”

So here’s a refresher. A watt is a unit of power; a gigawatt is just a bigger unit of power; it’s a billion watts. If one electric kettle is 1000 watts and another is 2000 watts, then the second will boil a litre of water twice as fast as the first. It’s of little use knowing the power of a battery without knowing how long it can provide that power.

You can have a 2.5 gigawatt battery that lasts for 5 minutes or 5 hours; big difference. A 2.5 gigawatt battery that lasts for 8 hours is 96 times bigger. So batteries are typically defined by two numbers: 1) the power and 2) either the length of time the battery will last or the amount of energy it holds, which will make the length of time obvious. Energy is measured not in watts but in watt-hours, the length of time the power will last. A 2.5 gigawatt battery lasting 8 hours needs 2.5 x 8 = 20 gigawatt-hours of energy. It would be called a 2.5GW/20GWh battery by anybody in the industry.

The current battery capacity in SA is 1.1 gigawatts for about 2 hours, or 2.2 gigawatt-hours (1.1GW/2.2GWh). So getting 2.5 gigawatts for 8 hours isn’t a doubling of our current storage; it’s about a 10-fold increase in the number of battery packs installed.

But what about the 300,000 homes?

We have about 808,000 homes in SA (Google it).

So let’s finish fact-checking Koutsantonis’s claim.

We used 15,000 gigawatt-hours of energy in 2025. Divide that by 808000, and then by 365 and then by 24. That’s the energy per hour per home, and then multiply by 8. You get about 17,000 watt-hours on average to supply electricity to a home for 8 hours.

Lastly, let’s take Koutsantonis at his word and assume we will have batteries that can supply 2.5 gigawatts for 8 hours. Such a collection of batteries would provide 17,000 watt-hours to about 1.2 million homes. So it looks like Koutsantonis intended to say 2.5 gigawatt-hours of batteries. Which means he is specifying the energy available without the power. This amount of energy would run about 147,000 houses for 8 hours. The maximum power required would be about 312 megawatts.

All of which is pretty confusing. It would be really nice if journalists and politicians spoke more precisely. You can’t fact-check people who just mangle the facts.

But it gets worse

But that’s being a bit picky, really.

The much bigger deception is to presume that this battery expansion will be a big step on the path to solving our wind drought problems.

So let’s do the math. Let’s double Koutsantonis’s battery promise and see what impact it would have had on this low-wind week.

So let’s pretend we have 5 gigawatt-hours of batteries. We’ll also assume they are magic batteries that can supply 10 gigawatts of power for 30 minutes or 5 gigawatts for 1 hour. Theoretically, building such batteries should be possible.

Let’s also assume that we build 50% more wind farms and increase our solar power by 50%.

That’s a huge increase in the state’s power supply. More wind, more solar, and more batteries; a lot more.

Will it be enough to cover the week ending the 26th of June?

I can’t use OpenElectricity for this exercise, but I have downloaded the data and written code to work out what would happen.

It’s conceptually simple. Just multiply the current wind and solar output by 1.5, assume 5 gigawatts of batteries and assume the same demand.

I’ll also ignore the needs of wind farms and batteries to make money.

So my model just assumes that any leftover wind and solar energy gets stored in the batteries, unless full. It also assumes that any electricity shortfall comes from the batteries if they have the energy, regardless of the power required or the price. In the real world, you can’t always get energy from a battery in one part of the state to a shortage in another because of network constraints. I’ll ignore that also.

Here’s the result.

 

 

The number to focus on is the “Shortfall” … that’s the sum of the difference between supply and demand.

We added 5 gigawatt-hours, a doubling of what Koutsantonis promised, and we added 50% more wind and solar generation, but we are still 135 gigawatt-hours short over the week. That monster supply of batteries was flattened during the first night and never recovered!

Here are some critical results in a table.

 

 

The 5 gigawatt-hours of batteries only supplied 11.58 GWh … because they were flat for most of the time and there was no excess wind or solar power to charge them. The maximum shortfall over an 8 hour period was 14.9 GWh. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but once your batteries are flat, they are useless.

Batteries and gas

The bottom line is that 5 gigawatt-hours of batteries shifted the proportion of WSB electricity from 35.5% to 36.7%. How accurate is my model? It uses the available batteries a little more than in the real world. I know this from the model estimate of curtailment to the actual curtailment figures reported by OpenElectricity. What about adding 16 gigawatt-hours of batteries, which is what the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) suggested as possible in their 2024 Integrated System Plan (ISP)? That will increase the WSB share to 40.4% of demand.

So more batteries have a negligible impact on the WSB share on a low-wind winter week. And it’s these low wind weeks that pull down our annual average and prevent us ever getting to 100% renewables (or even 80% renewables).

The Australian Financial Review (AFR) (June 30) contained an interesting story with the headline “Gas power forecasts drop 39pc amid battery boom”. It’s pure clickbait, but it worked; I read it. It shows gas use under the AEMO ISP, comparing the recent 2026 ISP with the previous 2024 ISP. Here’s the AFR rendering of the chart.

 

 

The 2026 modelling has gas dropping to almost nothing by 2032. That’s just obviously wrong. Who thought this a credible prediction? Then it shows gas increasing until, by 2050, it’s back pretty much exactly to where it is now.

Who looked at these graphs and suggested that attention grabbing headline?

SA has more batteries relative to its electricity demand than any other state, and it’s pretty clear that doubling or tripling that storage makes little impact on the gas used on low-wind days. So it’s hard to see why any credible battery increases will significantly reduce gas use.

SA’s “firming tender”

On May 29, RenewEconomy reported on the tender in South Australia for technology that could “demonstrate at least eight hours of storage”. It was open to both gas plants and batteries. The successful bidders were five battery projects that committed to providing half a gigawatt for about 8 hours (just over 4 gigawatt-hours of storage).

“The tender – officially known as the Firm Energy Reliability Mechanism – was designed specifically to ensure supply was available to the market at times of system stress as it reached and moved beyond its target of reaching 100 per cent net renewable by the end of 2027.”

If 16 gigawatt-hours of magic batteries won’t deal with the “system stress” at the end of June, then 4 gigawatt-hours certainly won’t cut it. For that event, all the batteries would be flat well before the end of the first night of low wind, and SA would continue to be sucking on Victorian fossil fuels to keep the lights on. Consult the table at the start of this article and think about how likely we are to get to 80% renewables by the end of 2027, let alone 100%.

Making money and building batteries

Now go back to the first image in this article and look at the average prices/MWh for the various technologies.

Gas attracts a premium price in our market-driven system because it’s dispatchable. When the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining, the laws of supply and demand determine the price. Most of the gas is combined-cycle gas turbine (CCGT) (Combined cycle), with a price of $436/MWh (43 cents/kwh); this is the most efficient form of gas turbine. Batteries came in at $434/MWh (43 cents/kwh). This is the wholesale price; the retail price will be about double because network costs always dominate the price of electricity. After all, that’s the hard and complex part of delivering electricity. Generation is the easy bit. Calling something “easy” when it’s the product of millions of person-hours of scientific effort is perhaps annoying, but that’s what we do with miracle technologies: take them for granted.

Why is electricity from batteries so expensive? There are two costs. First, you have to build (import) your battery, then you have to pay to charge it. Paying to charge it during a period of excess is pretty cheap. When rooftop solar is booming in SA. Everything else is excess. Nobody can sell anything. So batteries are cheap to charge. But during a lull in the winter wind, there is little to no excess. The batteries are paying top dollar to charge and need to recoup that, as well as the repayments on their capital costs.

If you actually want to make a difference to the use of gas for covering renewable gaps, then you stick a baseload source on the grid and slash the size and duration of the gaps. The obvious clean baseload source is nuclear. You also need to remove the assumption of markets being the only way to manage electricity. The market volatility in today’s broken electricity market just breeds hedge players and traders. Here’s a chart showing the change in prices in SA between 2009 and 2026. You can see the remarkable rise in volatility.

 

  

When something is broken, fix it.

 America Is Harboring a War Criminal Who Executed Seven Professors - And Let Him Become a Vice President of One of America's Largest Muslim Organizations, ICNA

RAIR Foundation USA 

 

 

Ashrafuzzaman Khan, a former top official of the Islamic Circle of North America in Queens, New York, personally slaughtered seven university professors as the chief executioner of Jamaat-e-Islami’s Al Badr death squads during the 1971 Bangladesh massacre. Despite being convicted in absentia of war crimes, he helped build one of America’s largest Muslim organizations and continues to live freely in the United States.

By Renee Nal

The United States federal government must immediately open denaturalization proceedings against Ashrafuzzaman Khan and send this convicted war criminal to Bangladesh to face his death sentence without further delay. Contact your elected officials today and demand they pressure the DOJ to act. Share this article far and wide until Ashrafuzzaman Khan is on a plane to Dhaka!

• Ashrafuzzaman Khan, as “chief executioner”, personally slaughtered seven university professors for the violent Islamic Jamaat-e-Islami’s Al Badr death squads during the 1971 Bangladesh intellectual massacre.

• The Al Badr militia, backed by Pakistan and Jamaat-e-Islami, slaughtered hundreds of professors, doctors, and journalists in the final days of the war to cripple the new nation.

• Despite his execution in Bangladesh for war crimes, Motiur Rahman Nizami’s (founder and commander of Al Badr) sons continue the family’s influence – one son Nazibur Rahman Momen as a Jamaat-e-Islami parliamentarian in Bangladesh who worked for many years as a barrister and former lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London, and the other son Mohammad Nakibur Rahman as a University of North Carolina professor, spokesperson for Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh and Treasurer of the Muslim Brotherhood-aligned US Council of Muslim Organizations in America (USCMO).

• Convicted in absentia and sentenced to death by Bangladesh’s war crimes tribunal in 2013, Ashrafuzzaman Khan fled to the US and rose to become Vice President and a key builder of the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), one of America’s largest Muslim organizations.

• ICNA defended Khan as a “model citizen,” then quietly scrubbed his name from its site after the conviction became public.

• Abul Ala Maududi, the founder of Jamaat-e-Islami whose works are promoted by ICNA, declared in his 1939 speech “Jihad in Islam” that Islam must destroy all non-Islamic governments. Abul Ala Maududi’s own family embedded itself in American institutions: Maududi’s son Dr. Syed Ahmad Farooq helped found the Islamic Circle of North America, one granddaughter Sophia Farooq serves as a Republican official in Georgia, and another granddaughter Saira Farooq works as a statistician at the Department of Homeland Security’s Citizenship and Immigration Services.

• Khan’s associate, another convicted Al Badr killer Chowdhury Mueen-Uddin, fled to London, where he became a senior figure in the Muslim community. He received 225,000 pounds from the UK government after suing for libel over his documented crimes.

• Despite DOJ probes into his past, US authorities have done nothing to rid America of convicted war criminal Ashrafuzzaman Khan. No deportation, no denaturalization. Khan remains free.

There’s an Islamic leader living openly in Queens, New York, who played a central role in building one of the most prominent Muslim organizations in the United States from its earliest days. He held top leadership positions across national Islamic groups, mentored generations in his community, and even pushed local authorities to change parking rules so Muslims could pray without tickets during Eid celebrations.

He also personally executed seven university professors at gunpoint.

And he is still living freely in America.

This is the story of Ashrafuzzaman Khan and the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) – the account of a convicted mass murderer living openly as an Islamic leader in Queens, as the federal government opts to ignore his heinous war crimes to this day.

Following his involvement in the organized targeting and murder of intellectuals during the 1971 Bangladesh War of Independence, Ashrafuzzaman Khan emigrated to the United States, where he subsequently became a Vice President of ICNA.

 

 

Ironically, Khan addressed an “anti-war” protest on April 9, 2011 sponsored by the United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC), which is dominated by the “hardcore Marxist” Workers World Party. The coalition was endorsed by a mixture of Islamic and far-left organizations, yet another example of the Red/Green Axis, a convergence of Marxism and Islam.

 

  

 At the time of this writing, this rare video of Khan is still available on the ICNA YouTube page. The description explicitly notes that the video was “provided by UNACpeace.org”.

Consider the irony of a convicted war criminal addressing an antiwar protest. This is not at all unusual, however. For the far left and for Islam, “peace” has never meant peace. It means submission.

The Intellectual Massacre That Crippled a Nation

In 1971, as Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) fought for independence from Pakistan, 23-year-old Ashrafuzzaman Khan served as a commander in the notorious Al Badr militia. Formed by the Islamic political party Jamaat-e-Islami with direct support from the Pakistani army, Al Badr’s mission was to crush the independence movement by any means necessary. Founded by Abul Ala Maududi, Jamaat-e-Islami advocates for an Islamic state governed by sharia.

The structural “mastermind” behind the terror campaign was Major General Rao Farman Ali, the military adviser to the governor, whose handwritten notebook directly coordinated the systematic elimination of the Bengali intelligentsia.

As Pakistani forces faced defeat in December 1971, Al Badr launched a calculated extermination campaign. Between December 10 and 14 – just days before Bangladesh’s victory – they compiled a hit list of the country’s brightest minds: university professors, doctors, journalists, and writers. Armed squads stormed homes at night, dragged victims away at gunpoint, murdered them using bayonets and shooting them at close range (see page 219-220), and dumped their bodies in mass graves and swamps outside Dhaka. The goal was clear: decapitate the intellectual class so the new nation could never rebuild.

Prosecutors later identified Khan as the “chief executioner” of this operation. See page 4 of the Bangladesh indictment, courtesy of the IPT:

Download: prosecutors-refer-to-ashrafuzzaman-khan-as-chief-executioner

Eyewitness testimony was damning: a driver recounted transporting victims to execution sites where Khan personally shot seven university professors. A survivor described seeing Khan issuing orders during the abductions and killings. Investigators even recovered a diary from a safe house linked to Khan containing the names and addresses of the targeted professors – scheduled for death within days.

Bangladesh declared independence on December 16, 1971. Following the war, Ashrafuzzaman Khan fled to Pakistan, where he worked for the state radio service, before eventually relocating to the United States. His associate, Chowdhury Mueen-Uddin, settled in London. Both individuals – Ashrafuzzaman Khan and Chowdhury Mueen-Uddin – were later tried and convicted in absentia by Bangladesh’s International Crimes Tribunal for their roles in the 1971 atrocities.

To date, neither has been returned to Bangladesh to face justice.

UK Taxpayers Fork Out £225,000 to Convicted War Criminal Who Butchered Bengali Intellectuals

Ashrafuzzaman Khan’s associate, convicted war criminal Chowdhury Mueen-Uddin, also slaughtered Bengali intellectuals in 1971 as a leader of the Al Badr death squads. Bangladesh’s International Crimes Tribunal-2 convicted him in 2013 on multiple charges of crimes against humanity for his role in abducting, torturing, and murdering 18 prominent professors, journalists, and doctors in the final days of the 1971 Bangladesh War of Independence.

He was sentenced to death by hanging.

He fled to Britain shortly after the war, secured British citizenship in 1984, and has lived openly in London ever since as a senior figure in the Muslim community. He has been a “campaigner against Salman Rushdie“, served as Director of Muslim Spiritual Care Provision in the National Health Service, chairman of Muslim Aid, vice-chairman of the East London Mosque, and helped establish the Muslim Council of Great Britain.

 

 In 2019, the UK Home Office published an official report that correctly identified Mueen-Uddin as one of those responsible for the 1971 war crimes. He sued the British government for libel. The UK Supreme Court ruled in his favor in 2024, and on 25 November 2025 the Home Secretary and Home Office stood in open court, issued a groveling apology, and paid him £225,000 in damages plus his legal costs for repeating the documented facts of his conviction.

This verdict, and the very fact that Chowdhury Mueen-Uddin lives free in England, is a slap in the face to the families of the victims of the massacres in Bangladesh.

ICNA Fights Back; Says Khan is a ‘Model Citizen’

Founded in 1968, the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) is a U.S.-based organization ideologically influenced by Jamaat-e-Islami. Then-president of ICNA Naeem Baig defended Ashrafuzzaman Khan, declaring that he is a “model citizen”. “His service to the Muslim community and his relationship with people of all faiths and backgrounds is very well known in the community,” Baig said. “He’s a man who dedicated his life to the community. That’s what we know of Imam Khan,” he continued.

Still, the pressure to distance themselves from Khan must have been too great, as ICNA scrubbed him from their website.

As an aside, Naeem Baig was leading the organization when ICNA became a founding member of the US Council of Muslim Organizations, a coalition of Islamic groups “comprised almost solely of elements of the US Muslim Brotherhood”.

It is no surprise, then, that ICNA maintains deep, longstanding ties to the global Muslim Brotherhood network. It is explicitly listed as one of the Brotherhood’s “organizations and the organizations of our friends” in the 1991 “Explanatory Memorandum” – the internal Brotherhood document that outlined a “civilizational jihad” to undermine Western society from within (see page 15):

Download: Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America

ICNA’s Deep Connection to Jamaat-e-Islami Founder and Jihadi Thought Leader Abul A’la Maududi

ICNA’s “reading list emphasizes works by the late Jamaat-e-Islami founder Sayyid Abul ‘Ala Maududi.” While Maududi is not a household name in the West, he “created the ideological template for the modern Islamic state”. Maududi heavily influenced “Milestones” author Sayyid Qutb, who believed that any social or political order not based strictly on Sharia is illegitimate.

Maududi also produced one of the most influential and widely respected English translations of the Quran, accompanied by his own extensive tafsirs (detailed commentaries and legal interpretations of the verses). The work, titled Towards Understanding the Quran, is regarded by many as a definitive modern reference. The translation and commentary make clear that Maududi viewed the Quran as a comprehensive blueprint for Islamic revival and global dominance-an explicit manual for what can be described as Islamic manifest destiny.

A Chicago Tribune article from 2004 described Sayyid Qutb’s “In the Shade of the Koran” and “Milestones” as books that “urge jihad, martyrdom and the creation of Islamic states.”

In 1939, Maududi delivered a revealing speech titled “Jihad in Islam” at Lahore’s Town Hall, where he openly called for the destruction of all non-Islamic governments worldwide and the establishment of global Islamic rule through jihad. Speaking amid rising international tensions on the eve of World War II, Maududi made clear that Islam is a revolutionary ideology that cannot coexist with other systems. He declared that jihad’s objective is to eliminate un-Islamic rule everywhere and impose Sharia universally, rejecting any permanent peace with non-Muslim sovereignty.

Deeply reminiscent of philosophy prescribed by the Muslim Brotherhood’s “Project”, Maududi’s speech laid out the ideological blueprint for civilization jihad:

“Islam wishes to destroy all States and Governments anywhere on the face of the earth which are opposed to the ideology and programme of Islam, regardless of the country or the Nation which rules it… It must be evident to you from this discussion that the objective of Islamic ‘jihād’ is to eliminate the rule of an un-Islamic system and establish in its stead an Islamic system of state rule. Islam does not intend to confine this revolution to a single State or a few countries; the aim of Islam is to bring about a universal revolution.”

Read the entire speech here:

Download: Maududi’s ‘Jihad in Islam’

Maududi has preached that Islam was not like other religions because it offers a “system encompassing all fields of living” including politics, economics, and legislation.

He wrote:

“[Muslims] must strive to change the wrong basis of government, and seize all powers to the rule and make laws from those who do not fear Allah.”

ICNA honors Sayyid Abul ‘Ala Maududi to this day.