Ori Nir, at Americans for Peace Now, has a good analysis of Maj. Gen. Yaakov Amidror, who is apparently Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu’s new national security adviser. Replacing another ultra-hawk, Uzi Arad, Amidror seems to be a big-time hawk on [...]]]> It’s hard to know for sure, but he certainly doesn’t keep pleasant company.

Ori Nir, at Americans for Peace Now, has a good analysis of Maj. Gen. Yaakov Amidror, who is apparently Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu’s new national security adviser. Replacing another ultra-hawk, Uzi Arad, Amidror seems to be a big-time hawk on Palestinian issues. But what about Iran?

In Israel, Noam Sheizaf has been addressing this question with a deft touch — there is a split right now in the Israeli security establishment. Sheizaf long ago exploded Jeffrey Goldberg‘s notion of a “consensus,” but the combination of upheaval both in the region and in Bibi’s cabinet are forcing constant re-evaluation.

I saw Amidror speak in December at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ conference on Iran. The hard-line neocon think tank put the aged and bearded reservist general on its ‘bomb Iran’ panel, moderated by FDD honcho Cliff May. The panel featured Goldberg, the disingenuous Reuel Marc Gerecht, and Ken Pollack, the lone dissenter from the notion that a military strike in Iran could achieve any of its ostensible aims. As you can imagine, the panel was a lot of laughs (literally: the transcript lists 28 breaks for “LAUGHTER”).

At the FDD conference, Amidror’s stance on Iran basically boiled down to this: ‘Attacking Iran is a last resort that we will almost definitely have to use, so we are getting ready.’ Here’s his key comments, with my emphasis:

I believe that attacking Iran is a very bad situation, but there is something worse, that Iran will have a nuclear capability.

But we are not running to attack Iran. We want to postpone it as much as possible because we want to give the world, the Americans, everyone who is ready to help, to stop Iran without using military forces.

So it – it is not just an option. We prepare all of this very thoroughly, investing a lot of it, but we are not running to use it and we hope that someone will find another solution.

If you ask me as an expert for assessment that what I did 25 years, what is my assessment, my assessment is it is almost impossible to stop Iran without military force, but we should not run to use it before we be sure 100 percent and more that there is no other alternative.

It seems that, while Amidror pays lip service to the “last resort” of an attack, he is already gearing up to do it.

Amidror seems to have a ridiculously flawed understanding of the concept of “deterrence.” He thinks the Lebanon War in 2006 was a good example of Israel establishing such a deterrence. But, you know, that’s kind of funny, because deterrence is only a useful concept until force is unleashed — Damocles kept his head, after all. Nonetheless, here’s Amidror:

Deterrence includes two elements: the first is the determination to use your capability and the second is to have this capability. I think it was very important that Israel made the decision to go to war and sustained the war for more than a month, despite extensive Hizballah rocket attacks across northern Israel.

The determination of Israel’s government to respond and to retaliate is a very important factor in restoring deterrence. …As a small country, we cannot allow ourselves the luxury of reacting proportionally. Israel’s military action sent a very important message to the people around us.

I wonder what the Israeli hawks and neocon allies would say if you asked them today: “Why are you so worried about the Muslim Brotherhood?” Don’t they remember Lebanon 2006? (I’m sure that they would answer with something akin to the five-year-version of the Ledeen Doctrine.)

Nir has a primer on Amidror’s politics:

Amidror is associated with the ultra-right national-religions party “The Jewish Home.” In 2008, he headed a commission tasked with composing the party’s list for the general elections. The party, which is dominated by former National Religious Party (NRP) politicians, supports a “greater Israel” ideology and is considered the most authentic political representative of the ideological messianic settlers in the West Bank.

He adds that Amidror’s most recent opinion article is headlined: “Security is Preferable to Peace,” as if one has nothing to do with the other.

All of this is no surprise: Amidror is a such a close ally of the religious settler movement that he spoke at a 2006 event supporting one such settlement, Beit El, and its chief accomplishment: the Arutz Sheva conspiracy website. Also speaking at the event was then-Arutz Sheva personality Alex Traiman, a Beit El resident. Traiman wrote and directed Clarion Fund‘s latest propaganda film, “Iranium,” which aims to raise public support for attacking Iran.

So let’s see: Yaakov Amidror is in bed with the uber-hawks at FDD and with the religious settlers at Clarion who are all pushing hard (in concert) for an attack on Iran, and he thinks that a good deterrence policy is to attack. This does not bode well. I’ll toss this to Sheizaf for his informed thoughts…

But if the Iranians were paying attention, they would see that BBC Persian has an excellent report on another piece of [...]]]> Due to recent protests in Iran, authorities are reportedly jamming the BBC Persian satellite broadcast. Iran’s leaders regard the channel as a propaganda outlet for the Brits’ nefarious aim of regime change.

But if the Iranians were paying attention, they would see that BBC Persian has an excellent report on another piece of propaganda: the neoconservative-dominated “Iranium” documentary from the Clarion Fund.

The BBC Persian piece notes that the film’s writer and director, Alex Traiman, is an ideological Israeli settler who lives in the West Bank; it is critical of many of the facts and figures in the film.

The movie’s narrator, Academy Award-winning Iranian actor Shoreh Aghdashloo, answered some tough questions. Aghdashloo said she is against a war — which organizers of a premiere event said was Traiman’s goal — but can tolerate opposing or critical views. She said that some of the comments about “executions” may be exaggerated, but this film reveals the true appearance of the regime.

That tracks closely with Traiman’s own comments. At the Heritage Foundation premiere, the West Bank settler more or less admitted that the movie presents an alarmist account.

Aghdashloo, having admitted some exaggerations, goes on to praise the film as a detailed historical account. The point, she said, is the Iran can’t be trusted with a bomb. “Can you trust a regime that does not respect its own people/children to have such a destructive weapon?” she asks in the interview.

So, if she’s against war, and Iran doesn’t relent in its alleged nuclear weapons program, what does she suggest doing?

This problem is the same one which Clifford May, a star of “Iranium” and the head of the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies, faced when quizzed on television about it. May and other neocons call for sanctions and “credible military threats,” though they think neither tack is likely to succeed. Some former Iraq hawks, like Ken Pollack, have softened their stance on Iran — calling for a policy of eventual military containment because launching a war would be disastrous. May, on the other hand, thinks that should pressure fail, bombing would be the next U.S. move.

Reuel Marc Gerecht, another expert from FDD interviewed for “Iranium,” is an unabashed Iran hawk, who manages to squeeze in jokes about how much he has written about advocating an attack on the country.

It seems that, unlike Pollack, some hawks have not learned their lessons from Iraq. This should give pause to Aghdashloo, as she opposes a war. Those who painted a worst-case scenario for Iraq — as “Iranium” does for Iran — were wrong. Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction. Yet those who ignore these lessons are exactly the people with whom Aghdashloo has joined forces.

Columbia Professor Hamid Dabashi also appeared in the BBC Persian report. While Aghdashloo said she lent her voice to the film to speak the truth, Dabashi claimed that her voice doesn’t give the film any credibility. In fact, he said, her presence in the movie only undermines her own credibility.

More then Aghdashloo, what worries me is how quickly those involved in this film seem to acknowledge and dismiss its exaggerations. The choice to use violent force in international affairs is one of the gravest decisions a government — whether in the U.S. or Israel — can undertake. That these critics of Iran are so sloppy when trying to present the public with a series of casus belli is disconcerting.

At the screening, hosted [...]]]> The Clarion Fund has been careful to promote their latest film, “Iranium,” as an attempt to educate the public and “sound an alarm” about Iran. The film’s director, Alex Traiman, told an audience at the film’s Washington, D.C. premiere that it was designed to further public discourse.

At the screening, hosted by the Heritage Foundation, Traiman said:

We’ve gotta show support for the right side of this debate, which is the Iranians, the Iranians that risked their lives in June 2009 to fight for freedom of speech, to fight for free elections, to fight for democracy. We’ve got to support them. If we would come out with simple statements — in June 2009, if we would have said we support the Iranian people’s rights to free and fair elections, and their rights to protest in the streets, we might have already gotten through these problems.

But, after the New York premiere of the film last night, the reaction from audience members, which was actively encouraged by the moderator of the post-screening’s Q&A, suggested that “Iranium” was an attempt to build support for a military strike on Iran.

The post-screening Q&A, hosted by Traiman and Fuel For Truth’s president Todd Ingwer (see Kiera Feldman and Josh Nathan-Kazis’s exposé on the group), had a strikingly hawkish tone.

Ingwer kicked things off by asking, “What can we do as regular people? What can we do?”

The first person to answer suggested that “we need a tea party,” which was largely met with derisive laughter from the audience.

The second answer was more to the point, it would seem, of what Fuel For Truth and the Clarion Fund were hoping to evoke from the audience.

Audience Member: It’s very serious. We need to strike hard in the heart of Iran and destroy all of its tentacles. Not another word needs to be said. The staggering amount of evidence over thirty years and the lack of action by leadership all over the free world– it’s a disgrace. What are they there for? What is the purpose of the free world? What do we send all these taxes to Washington for? The UN is a pathetic joke.

*audience applause*

Ingwer: I agree with you. And Alex, I think you hit your mark.

Alex Traiman did not indicate that this comment was out of line or missing the “mark” of what his film is trying to convey.

He did, however, do his part to stoke fears and made some rather bizarre claims about Meir Dagan’s and Hillary Clinton’s motivations:

Statements that came out of the mouths of Secretary Clinton as well as even the Israeli outgoing Mossad chief Meir Dagan which stated that we have in fact set back Iran’s nuclear program three to five years– those statements are extremely dangerous. And I think that those statements are being made to lull the American people as well as the rest of the free world into a sense of security that I don’t think exists.

I raised my hand to ask what information Traiman had access to that would run counter to the messages conveyed by Clinton and Dagan. Furthermore, I would have liked to know why Clinton and Dagan would seek to “lull the American people as well as the rest of the free world” into a false sense of security. Unfortunately, I was not called upon to pose these questions.

Traiman, an ideological settler in the West Bank, told the crowd he made “Iranium” (which Eli and I reviewed) [...]]]> At the Heritage Foundation screening of the ‘bomb Iran’ scare documentary released by the Clarion Fund, writer and director Alex Traiman rambled extemporaneously about why the U.S. needs to “do something” about Iran.

Traiman, an ideological settler in the West Bank, told the crowd he made “Iranium” (which Eli and I reviewed) to “sound an alarm” about Iran.

“People told us: perhaps you’re telling this message a little too strongly,” he said.

“I’d rather the alarm go off on this screen and in this room today than to have air raid sirens going off in an American city or Israel or Saudi Arabia or wherever else.”

After the public Q and A, I asked Traiman about whether he lives in the ideological West Bank settlement of Beit El (he does) and chatted with him about his movie.

“I think it’s all right for a documentary to have a view point,” he told me, casting doubt on the sincerity of a statement he’d made during the presentation that a documentary was meant to further public discourse (with admitted alarmism?).

Since Traiman more or less admitted that his movie is a piece of propaganda unconcerned with accuracy, it’s worth asking about the motivation behind such a deliberately tendentious effort.

Eli Clifton and I wrote in our review of “Iranium” that the film is clearly aimed at making a case for escalating measures against Iran, especially the military option. We also noted that the movie took a lot of political shots at Democrats and featured neoconservative pundits associated with Republican-leaning publications, institutions, and policies.

Like the film itself, Traiman took some unjustified shots at U.S. President Barack Obama’s positions during the “Iranium” screening at Heritage.

Traiman said (with my emphasis):

We’ve gotta show support for the right side of this debate, which is the Iranians, the Iranians that risked their lives in June 2009 to fight for freedom of speech, to fight for free elections, to fight for democracy. We’ve got to support them. If we would come out with simple statements — in June 2009, if we would have said we support the Iranian people’s rights to free and fair elections, and their rights to protest in the streets, we might have already gotten through these problems.

Compare that to this June 20, 2009, statement from Obama (my emphasis again):

We call on the Iranian government to stop all violent and unjust actions against its own people. The universal rights to assembly and free speech must be respected, and the United States stands with all who seek to exercise those rights.

Right, so we don’t need to engage in hypotheticals. What do you reckon Traiman’s recommendation will be if the tack of releasing statements doesn’t work (which it already didn’t)?

The shot against Obama’s treatment of the June 2009 crisis is patently obvious here, especially when one compares Traiman’s statement at the same briefing about the unfolding events in Egypt:

[D]evelopments in each country are unique. We have to understand that while we’ve pushed very strongly for democracy in Iraq and elsewhere, demcoracy is not always the end-all be-all. In the Middle East, these are countries that are not accustomed to democracy…

I’m guessing here, judging from the example Traiman gives of the U.S. “push[ing] very strongly for democracy in Iraq,” that this mode of operation — not his hesitancy on Egypt — is what he has in mind for Iran. You might call it the Iraq option.

I guess “Iranium” can be both settler propaganda and a partisan shot.

May, the president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), which has five other experts who appear in the film, called Iran “radical.” But [...]]]> Cliff May appeared in a five-minute interview on Fox News promoting the fear-mongering settler propaganda movie “Iranium,” a production of the Clarion Fund in which May appears.

May, the president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), which has five other experts who appear in the film, called Iran “radical.” But May refuses to answer whether he knew that the movie he starred in was written and produced by Alex Traiman, a member of another ideological religious movement: the Israeli settlers in the West Bank. (More below.)

With a history of hawkish pro-Israel advocacy and a past career as the spokesman for the Republican National Committee, we do know that May fits well into the film, which waffles between the usual Clarion Fund calls to action against the Muslim menace and a partisan flair of attacks on Barack Obama and the Democratic Party.

May offered hints of hawkishness in his Fox interview, delivering a thinly-veiled call for escalated actions to halt Iran’s nuclear program.

“The Western community needs to make up its mind that this regime must not get nuclear weapons,” May said, “and they must decide to take accelerated steps to achieve that goal.”

When I asked May when he knew — if at all — that Traiman was an ideological Israeli settler, he responded by e-mail, writing:

I hope that people will see the film and decide for themselves what conclusions to draw. I know there are those who would prefer people not see the film – that’s why there were threats against those screening it in Canada – and that’s why there are those who will engage in character assassination against the film-makers.

I explained to May that pointing out Trainman’s status as a West Bank settler only counts as character assassination if you make the value judgement that settlements are bad, and repeated that I was curious about his and FDD’s stance on the illegal Israeli civilan outposts in occupied territory.

Moreover, I made clear to May that my primary question was a factual one about when he knew Traiman lived in a settlement: “Did you know — when solicited to do an interview for, when you did the interview for, and when you promoted “Iranium” — that the film was written and directed by Alex Traiman, an Israeli West Bank settler?”

May replied: “I’ve given you my answer,” and repeated a claim he’d made at FDD’s Iran conference in December that what I do “bears little resemblance to legitimate journalism.” (I hasten to note that, other than that one outburst, May has never been anything but polite. He even answered my questions that same night after the conference for the Foreign Policy piece I wrote about the proceedings.)

I wrote back to May again:

Anytime you want to talk about FDD’s or your personal stance on settlements, I’m happy to do so. Ditto with my specific factual question about the timeframe in which you knew Alex Traiman, Iranium’s writer and director, was an ideological West Bank settler.

My offer, of course, still stands.

The drama never stops unfolding around the Clarion Fund, the operation behind a string of movies dubbed “anti-Muslim” by critics.

The group’s latest salvo is an hour-long documentary called “Iranium”, which more or less gives airtime to a gaggle of neoconservatives and their [...]]]> This article originally appeared on AlterNet.

The drama never stops unfolding around the Clarion Fund, the operation behind a string of movies dubbed “anti-Muslim” by critics.

The group’s latest salvo is an hour-long documentary called “Iranium”, which more or less gives airtime to a gaggle of neoconservatives and their allies on the Israeli right to advocate for a hawkish posture against the Islamic Republic of Iran.

While warning of an ideologically-driven, religiously-inspired Iran, however, the filmmaker behind the movie himself comes from among the religious extremes of another Middle Eastern state.

The writer and director of “Iranium”, Alex Traiman, hails from the Israeli West Bank settlement of Beit El, one of the ideological religious Jewish outposts in occupied Palestinian territory bedeviling U.S.-Israel relations.

I spoke to Traiman, who sported a black kippah and a bright red tie, after a screening of “Iranium” at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, where neoconservative don Richard Perle introduced the film.

“That’s where I live,” Traiman told me, after a deep breath, when I asked him if he lived in Beit El. “I just live there.”

Traiman worked for four years for the Beit El-based Arutz Sheva, or Channel Seven, also known as Israel National News, a former pirate radio station aligned with Israel’s religious settlers. He has in the past referred to Beit El as “a Jewish settlement… located in the Biblical province of Samaria, commonly referred to today as the West Bank.” Settlers refer to the West Bank by the Biblical “Judea and Samaria.”

On Tuesday at Heritage, Traiman, who has also written for a U.S.-based conspiracy website, called the World Net Daily, and presumably other occupied Palestinian territories, as “disputed territories in Israel.”

Beit El is a religious nationalist settlement near Ramallah in the West Bank, where some 5,500 settlers live, Founded in 1977, the settlement is built in land seized in 1970 by the military on what Israeli courts, according to Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar, later deemed to be bogus security justifications.

Unlike their secular counterparts, who usually move into settlements to take advantage of government housing subsidies, the enclave of Beit El is a religious-nationalist settlement where residents think that God gave them the land that Palestinians lived on.

Palestinians view settlements as gobbling up land on which they hope to eventually build their state. In a peace deal, the border between Israel and Palestine would likely be doctored to include large settlement blocks in Israel.

But at a recent Washington Institute forum on potential maps for a peace deal, Washington Post columnist Jackson Diehl, a Middle East hawk, said Israeli annexation of Beit El is not realistic in a final peace deal: “Beit El dominates the road between the two major Palestinian towns of Ramallah and Nablus… This type of scenario is unacceptable to Palestinians.”

Last fall, a diplomatic row erupted when Israel refused a U.S. request for a three-month extension of a settlement construction freeze. The freeze extension was aimed at rescuing peace talks, and when Israel refused, with Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu in the thrall of his pro-settler coalition members, the U.S.-sponsored talks collapsed.

The crumbling of the settlement freeze was celebrated in Israel’s settlements, whese construction boomed.

Other characters in and around “Iranium” come from the hardest of the hard-line ‘pro-Israel’ camp and the Israeli right, those who have long opposed Israel relinquishing control of the West Bank in any peace deal.

Not surprisingly, the Capitol Hill premiere in February is being hosted by a group, EMET, whose president and advisors worked together in the 1990s, behind the backs of Israeli and American leadership, to spike the Oslo process. Indeed, EMET’s Hill activism for a Greater Israel seems to be matched only by the efforts of key people from the Clarion Fund.

Ties between Clarion and Aish Hatorah, an evangelist Israeli ultra-orthodox group, are well know and long-established through Clarion’s founder and executive producer of its movies, Canadian-Israeli Raphael Shore, not to mention a host of registration and tax documents that make Clarion appear to be little more than an Aish off-shoot.

But Traiman, a former radio host and PR flak brought on board by Clarion to write and direct “Iranium,” appears is literally on the frontiers of the Israeli right.

According to social networking websites, Traiman worked at Arutz Sheva for four years, editing, writing, hosting a show, and acting as marketing director. In 2006, Traiman did a fundraising junket for the channel that brought him to New York and New Jersey, where he went to high school. (Arutz Sheva also raises money from U.S. Christian Zionists.)

Just two months before that trip, Traiman wrote an article for the U.S.-based conspiracy website World Net Daily (WND), where he gave space and sympathetic coverage to several Rabbis who theorized that the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war — then still raging — was caused by a gay pride parade in Jerusalem. At the end of the article, Traiman was listed as a writer for the Jerusalem bureau of WND, which has published articles about how Al Qaeda has 40 nukes (some already in the U.S.) and how “soy is making kids ‘gay’.”

The current chief WND‘s Jerusalem bureau is Aaron Klein, a birther and the New York Times best-selling author of “The Manchurian President: Barack Obama’s Ties to Communists, Socialists and Other Anti-American Extremists”. (Klein also conducted the interview where Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf refused to condemn Hamas.)

Klein and Traiman co-edited their college paper when they were both at New York City’s Yeshiva University. “Following his completely secular education, Traiman decided to pursue a Jewish education at the only first tier university that could provide one,” says an article from the paper of the modern-orthodox Jewish university. If and how long Klein and Traiman worked together at WND is not clear.

Leaving WND aside, Arutz Sheva, where Traiman hosted a show, wrote and edited, and directed marketing efforts, has some conspiracy theory issues of its own. Last year, to celebrate the anniversary of the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the “settler news organization,” as the New York Times labeled it, held a contest to find the best conspiracy theory providing a version of events different from the accepted history.

The accepted history, of course, is that religious Zionist Yigal Amir killed Rabin at a peace rally in 1995. In their 2009 book, “Jewish Terrorism in Israel”, Professors Ami Pedahzur and Arie Perliger wrote that Amir would have been inspired by the religious edicts from rabbis in West Bank settlements declaring Rabin din rodef, or a Jew who was willing to harm other Jews, a judgement punishable by death according to Jewish law. The professors also drop this nugget while recalling Amir’s machinations: “Only a fellow law school student, Margalit Har-Shefi—resident of one of the most prestige settlements, Beit El, and daughter of settler nobility—was let in on the finer details of the plan.” Har-Shefi even tried to break into the Beit El armory to get a weapon for the plot.

Arutz Sheva was founded by, according to various sources, either Beit El-based extremist Rabbi Zalman Melmand or Yaakov Katz, a politician from Israel’s National Union party, which has been accused of having ties to Israel’s banned extremist Kahanist political faction. Rabbi Meir Kahane was thought to be the “spiritual guide of those who allegedly conspired to kill Rabin.”

“There is a clear irony in having Israeli settler religious extremists urging the U.S. to bomb religious extremists in Iran,” said Lara Friedman, an expert on settlements and U.S. policy in the Middle East with American’s for Peace Now, in an interview.

Ali Gharib is a freelance writer based in Brooklyn, NY. He’s a regular contributor to the LobeLog.