by Jim Lobe
Eli has a new blog post on The Nation’s website today that provides additional details about the curious — one is tempted to say incestuous — relationship between the staff of United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) and the corporate interests of billionaire gold and silver investor, Thomas Kaplan. [...]]]>
by Jim Lobe
Eli has a new blog post on The Nation’s website today that provides additional details about the curious — one is tempted to say incestuous — relationship between the staff of United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) and the corporate interests of billionaire gold and silver investor, Thomas Kaplan. It also provides more details about the relationship between UANI and Harvard’s Belfer Center, a major beneficiary of Kaplan’s largesse, which hired UANI’s president, Gary Samore, shortly after he stepped down as a top proliferation adviser to Obama in 2012 (some prominent faculty members also serve on the group’s advisory board). We excerpted Eli’s original Salon piece on UANI’s ties to Kaplan last Friday.
Eli’s latest is based on a recent filing by the plaintiff, Greek shipowner Victor Restis, in his pending defamation case against UANI. It adds new layers of intrigue to the alleged connections between UANI and Kaplan:
[Kaplan] got his start with help from the family of Leon Recanati, a Greek-Israeli entrepreneur whose family owns and still operates Overseas Shipholding Group (“OSG”), a rival shipping company to Enterprises Shipping and Trading. See Exs. 4, 5. OSG operates oil tankers that compete directly with Mr. Restis’ tanker company, Golden Energy Maritime Corp., whose initial public offering had to be abandoned in 2013 when Defendants launched their defamation campaign that is at the heart of this litigation. See Am. Compl. ¶ 97. OSG would stand to profit if Mr. Restis and his companies were no longer able to operate. Kaplan married Leon Recanati’s daughter Dafna Recanati and was introduced to Israeli investor Avi Tiomkin, by Dafna Recanati’s mother.
If this allegation is true — that Kaplan and/or the Recanati family stood to gain a competitive advantage by publicly charging (through UANI) that Restis and his companies were violating sanctions against Iran — then UANI’s failure to publicly disclose any and all of its ties to Kaplan would obviously constitute a serious ethical breach.
(This is not the only example of billionaire financiers allegedly trying to benefit from Iranophobia. As Charles Davis wrote for IPS a year ago, when the fight between Argentina and Paul Singer and other hold-out, or “vulture” bondholders of the country’s debt was getting relatively little media notice, Singer and his fellow-holdouts founded the American Task Force Argentina (ATFA), which has led a lavishly funded public relations and lobbying campaign against the Kirchner government, including a host of full-page ads in national and Capitol Hill newspapers, at least two of which assailed Argentina’s ties to Iran and suggested that Kirchner was engaged in a cover-up of Tehran’s alleged — and highly doubtful — role in the 1994 bombing of the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. One even showed a photo of Kirchner alongside then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with the headline, “A Pact with the Devil?” Singer, who has given millions of dollars to the Likudist Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), stands to make tens of million dollars of dollars in profit if he and his other hedge-fund holdouts prevail in the case.)
In addition to the connections between Kaplan and UANI, which Eli had previously documented in his Salon article, the plaintiff’s filing alleges that UANI operates out of offices at Rockefeller Center. Those offices are provided rent-free by Continental Properties, whose managing director, Mark Fisch, co-funds an NYU fellowship with Kaplan, and whose staff member, Kim Hillman, has served as an UANI director. The filing also notes that UANI’s CEO, Mark Wallace, serves not only as CEO of Kaplan’s Tigris Financial Group as Eli reported last week, but also as an officer and/or director of at least five other Kaplan enterprises, as well. It concludes:
Wallace has not drawn a salary from UANI since 2009, so Wallace appears to be getting his financial benefit indirectly through UANI supporter Kaplan.
Read the rest of Eli’s piece here.
]]>Discussing his outspoken opposition to diplomacy with Iran, Republican Senator Mark Kirk said in a phone briefing for his supporters: “It’s the reason why I ran for the Senate, [it] is all wrapped up in this battle. I am totally dedicated to the survival of the state of Israel in the [...]]]>
Discussing his outspoken opposition to diplomacy with Iran, Republican Senator Mark Kirk said in a phone briefing for his supporters: “It’s the reason why I ran for the Senate, [it] is all wrapped up in this battle. I am totally dedicated to the survival of the state of Israel in the 21st century.” This is an important statement, and one which bears intense scrutiny at a time when the Obama Administration is trying to walk the United States back from a war footing with Iran, against the wishes of Saudi Arabia, the Gulf monarchies and, especially, Israel and its domestic allies.
I hurried to congratulate my colleagues, Ali Gharib and Eli Clifton, for their reporting on Kirk’s private briefing call. I tweeted the following: “Thanks to @AliGharib and @EliClifton, we have Mark Kirk on record stating that he values Israeli interests over US’.” Naturally, I was attacked for “questioning Kirk’s loyalty.” I certainly confess; Twitter is a place for shorthand and bombastic statements, and no doubt, Kirk’s position is more complicated vis a vis US vs. Israeli interests. That’s why the interaction I had with a more sober-minded individual around this, Prof. Brent Sasley of the University of Texas at Arlington, was more probative.
Sasley’s point was that Kirk was more likely echoing the very common view that Israeli and U.S. interests are virtually identical, and that this was at least as plausible an interpretation of what Kirk was quoted as saying. I have known Sasley, online, for a while now, and I know him to be a thoughtful person, and to the extent that people who have never met face to face can call each other friends, I’d like to call him one. I get his point.
But Kirk said what he said. In that sentence, there isn’t a hint of consideration as to whether backing away from war with Iran would be the better move for the United States. Nor does any appear later in the article, as Kirk apparently reiterated his belief that U.S. intelligence could not be trusted if it disagreed with the Israeli version (although both U.S. and Israeli intelligence have generally been in agreement on Iran—it is Israel’s political leadership that has disagreed with both).
One thing that is interesting to note here is the impression one gets from Kirk. He works hand in glove with AIPAC, as he makes absolutely clear in his talk. But I’m not sold that he’s an AIPAC puppet—he comes off a lot more like a true believer, not in a religious sense, but as no less a fanatical disciple of far-right Israeli policies.
MJ Rosenberg, the former AIPAC staffer who has dedicated his work for years now to exposing the Israel lobby’s destructive role in US Middle East policy, as well as to Israel (and, obviously, the Palestinians), said this about Kirk a few years ago: “Why do the PACs love him? It is because Kirk is a pure Israel-firster. For Kirk, Israel can do no wrong. Add to that that he sits on the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Foreign Operations where he brings home the bacon for Israel big time. … I would not categorize him as pro-Israel because that would require supporting an end to the deadly status quo. Mark Kirk is just pro-AIPAC and shaking the trees for all the campaign money he can get by his hate rhetoric about Arabs. Playing like he’s ‘pro-Israel’—and not just pro-lobby—has paid off very very well for him.”
I agree, of course, with MJ’s general characterization. And Jim Lobe suggests that Kirk may be at least partly motivated by the campaign cash he has received from pro-Israel PACs as one among many possibilities to explain Kirk’s radical stance. But Kirk seems to me to be a more interesting man than that. He is perhaps the most radical hawk on the Middle East in the Senate. But he is also a Republican who has been a strong supporter of same-sex marriage and abortion rights. Unlike many neo-conservatives, he has a radically anti-immigration agenda as well, largely informed by anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia.
To me, this gives the impression more of a true believer than of a political opportunist. And that’s what I think Kirk is. I think, for whatever reasons, he’d hold these views on Israel if he never received a dime of AIPAC-directed campaign funds (as a reminder to readers, AIPAC does not actually engage in campaign financing directly, but most pro-Israel PACs and major donors donate based on AIPAC’s guidance). It’s a case where the Lobby comes to him, rather than him going to them.
And this is the basis of Sasley’s and my disagreement. In one (actually, it was split into two) of his tweets to me, Brent said “’Israel lobby’-types like to take a quote or two as proof of their accusations. But if you look at consistent language about US interests, values & Israeli interests, values, they’re seen as same. That’s (the) context in which Kirk’s call should be understood.”
Sasley is making an important point here, although whether that was intentional or not is unclear to me. The “Israel lobby” theme can sometimes obscure key nuances. It is often dominated by two extremes, one which tries to downplay the lobby’s role almost to nothing (this position has become far less tenable in recent years) and considers all other views to be evidence of anti-Semitism; and the other extreme which attributes all the ills of U.S. Middle East policy to the lobby’s malign influence. The debate can never end because ultimately, there’s no way to precisely measure the lobby’s actual influence.
The issue of Iran has brought the lobby’s activities into much clearer view, but not its boundaries. There is, without a doubt, a strong current of support for Israel without AIPAC. It comes largely from a small but active and well-heeled section of the U.S. Jewish community, a theology that has come to be known as “Christian Zionism,” deserved guilt over centuries of anti-Semitism (including some complicity and a lot of indifference toward the Holocaust at the time), the strategic alliance between Israel and the U.S. (especially during the Cold War), and the “David vs. Goliath” mythos around Israel. One can write a book on this stuff, and a good number have. But suffice to say it is a mistake to attribute all of even the myopic support for Israeli policies to the lobby.
So, yes, I think Kirk is a true believer, and that really is the point. Because maybe Brent is right, and Kirk simply believes that U.S. interests are best served by following Israel’s lead. Maybe he believes that the U.S. has a God-given mission to support Israel in all its hawkish and self-destructive extremism.
In the end, it doesn’t matter, because it still amounts to the same thing – subordinating US policy to Israel in a crucial arena. I don’t know whether Brent thinks of me as one of the “Israel Lobby” types, but both John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have known me for years and both are aware that, while I agreed with much of their thesis, I publicly disagreed with their points regarding the war on Iraq and their conflation of neoconservatives and the Israel Lobby. I have also written dozens of articles about the destructive role of the Israel Lobby.
But I don’t really care about Mark Kirk’s patriotism. No one has ever accused me of an over-abundance of national pride. What I do think is important, however, is that people understand what their representatives are doing. Mark Kirk is fighting tooth and nail for an attack on Iran(although he insists he wants a peaceful solution amounting to Iran’s surrender, the same rhetorical trick Benjamin Netanyahu employs) because he believes it is in Israel’s best interests. Even accepting Brent’s argument that his view is that protecting Israel’s interests is vital, in and of itself, to US interests, then this logic needs to be articulated and debated.
Personally, I doubt many US citizens are prepared to accept that the US should engage in another Middle East military adventure for the sake of Israel. Maybe others think differently. But Kirk makes it clear that this is all about Israel, and that is what I was putting out there, perhaps clumsily. That needs to be brought into the light and debated with vigor.
]]>by Jim Lobe
For Taiwan that is. Our alumnus, Eli Clifton, makes a pretty good case below in his piece this week for The Nation, which we reprint with permission of the magazine.
Two quick points about the article:
1) For lack of space, Eli wasn’t able to expand [...]]]>
by Jim Lobe
For Taiwan that is. Our alumnus, Eli Clifton, makes a pretty good case below in his piece this week for The Nation, which we reprint with permission of the magazine.
Two quick points about the article:
1) For lack of space, Eli wasn’t able to expand on Paul Wolfowitz’s status as both a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and as the chairman of the U.S.-Taiwan Business Council since 2008. The Business Council, like AEI, has, of course, been a major proponent of F-16 sales to Taiwan. At the time when I first noted Wolfowitz’s chairmanship of the group, the Council’s president, Rupert Hammond-Chambers, assured me that the Wolfowitz was not receiving any compensation from the Council in his new post. While I have no reason to doubt him, Eli’s investigation suggests that the government of Taiwan may be expressing its appreciation for Wolfowitz’s work in other ways or through other channels. In any event, neither AEI nor Wolfowitz is currently registered under FARA, the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
2) AEI’s advocacy of F-16 sales to Taiwan and the substantial financial support it has received from Taiwan’s unofficial/official embassy here, TECRO, is perhaps a particularly crass example of lobbying activity by a think tank, but AEI is by no means alone among think tanks in accepting funds from foreign governments, as well as, for that matter, U.S.-based corporations that then expect the “scholars” or “fellows” at these institutions to speak out or write in ways that may be favorable to their interests. Indeed, in one recent New Republic article, entitled “Meet the Think Tank Scholars Who Are Also Beltway Lobbyists,” Brooke Williams and the venerable Ken Silverstein offered several notable examples. Read also Ken’s Nation article from last month entitled “The Secret Donors Behind the Center for American Progress and Other Think Tanks.” Not that some valuable research isn’t done at these institutions. But consumers of their work need always to be asking who’s paying the fiddler. And those think tanks that accept funding from foreign interests and then pursue policy work that could be seen as promoting those interests really should be required to register under FARA, just to keep things transparent, a concept which Wolfowitz was, rhetorically at least, promoted heavily during his aborted presidency of the World Bank.
In any event, here’s Eli’s article which was first published by The Nation.
The Secret Foreign Donor Behind the American Enterprise Institute
Eli Clifton | June 25, 2013
The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) has emerged as one of the Beltway’s most consistent advocates for the sale of advanced fighter jets to Taiwan. Previously undisclosed tax filings reveal that while issuing research reports and publishing articles on US-Taiwan relations, AEI received a $550,000 contribution from the government of Taiwan, a source of funding the think tank has never publicly acknowledged.
In 2009, AEI, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization, received the contribution from the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office (TECRO), Taiwan’s equivalent to an embassy.
The think tank couches its hard-nosed advocacy of arms sales and trade agreements with Taiwan as a strategic necessity for the United States. “Withholding needed arms from Taiwan in the present makes a future conflict—and US intervention therein—more likely,” wrote AEI senior research associate Michael Mazza in an October 2011 article [1] in The Diplomat.
But AEI’s undisclosed source of foreign funding raises ethical and legal questions about AEI’s Taiwan-policy work.
“Any organization that’s trying to influence public policy should disclose its donors so the public can know who the money behind these institutions is,” said Bill Allison, a senior fellow at the Sunlight Foundation, a Washington-based organization that advocates for increased transparency and accountability in government. “It’s critical for the public to know this.”
AEI’s “schedule of contributors [2],” a form typically not intended for public disclosure but acquired through a filing error, names TECRO as the organization’s fourth-largest contributor during the 2009 tax year, following Donors Capital Fund ($2,000,000), Paul Singer ($1,100,000) and the Kern Family Foundation ($1,071,912). The US Chamber of Commerce contributed $473,000, making it AEI’s seventh-largest donor.
When asked about the contribution, TECRO spokesperson Lishan Chang acknowledged the transaction and explained that TECRO was helping to facilitate a Taiwanese university’s donation to AEI.
“The contribution was given by the Institute of International Relations of the National Chengchi University to AEI’s Asian Studies Program,” said Chang. “It was therefore an act of scholarly cooperation between the two research organizations with the goal of promoting academic exchanges and research on issues concerning Asia.”
The Institute of International Relations at National Chengchi University, a top public university in Taiwan, did not respond to a request for comment.
What “scholarly cooperation” was undertaken by AEI remains unexplained by either AEI or the university, but Taiwan’s president, Ma Ying-jeou, made no secret of his government’s warm relationship with AEI during a February 2009 meeting with AEI president Arthur Brooks and former AEI president Christopher DeMuth.
“[Ma] noted that the AEI has deep ties with the ROC [Republic of China] and has long supported the various policy stances of the ROC government,” said a TECRO press release [3].
“AEI President Brooks expressed his appreciation to President Ma for taking time out of his busy schedule to meet with him and his predecessor,” the release noted. “He added that the AEI is delighted to maintain relations with Taiwan given the values of democracy, peace and freedom that are shared by the two. He said he looks forward to continuing the friendship in the future and engaging in further cooperation.”
In 2009, the same year in which Ma hosted the delegation from AEI and the think tank reported the $550,000 contribution from TECRO, AEI employees issued a number of written products praising Taiwan’s government and urging the White House to approve arms sales to the island state.
In a November 3, 2009, article [4] for ForeignPolicy.com, AEI resident fellow Daniel Blumenthal, the current director of the think tank’s Asian Studies group, slammed the Obama administration’s Asia policy for “the absence of any agenda on Taiwan.”
Blumenthal accused the White House of failing to uphold an “implicit bargain” in which Ma would “ease tensions with the Mainland” in exchange for Washington’s “strengthen[ing] Ma’s hand by strengthening our ties to Taiwan.”
“The Obama team is not helping Ma,” wrote Blumenthal. “We have not sold any arms to Taiwan even as China has continued its arms buildup across the Strait. And Obama has no plans of yet to deepen economic ties as Taiwan goes forward with a China [free trade agreement].”
In a November 18, 2009, article [5] for ForeignPolicy.com, Blumenthal continued his push for arms sales. “China has built a military capable of destroying the island if America does not assist Taiwan. Though obligated by law, the Obama administration has not sold a single weapon system to Taiwan,” a reference to the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act [6], which requires the United States “to provide Taiwan with arms of a defensive character.”
And Gary Schmitt, an AEI resident fellow, warned about the consequences of the Obama administration’s diplomacy with China (“an approach in which China is seen as a strategic interlocutor with the United States with something approaching equal status”) in an October 2009 AEI “National Security Outlook” paper [7].
“This of course will have an impact on U.S.-Taiwan relations. At a minimum, it will make the diplomatic hurdle of supplying needed, high-quality military systems and supplies—such as F-16s—even more difficult. (Remember, by this time in the Bush administration, the decision had already been made to make available $30 billion worth of arms and services to Taiwan.),” wrote Schmitt.
Even in 2011, after the White House agreed to upgrade the avionics systems of Taiwan’s aging F-16 fleet, the AEI’s Mazza accused the administration of making a “split the baby” decision by refusing to “sell Taiwan the 66 new F-16 C/D aircraft that Taipei has been requesting,” in an October 2011 article [1] in The Diplomat.
When contacted for comment, AEI declined to address questions about the independence of its Taiwan policy analysis or its funding from the Taiwanese government. “We do not discuss details of contributions beyond what is publicly available through our Form 990 and our Annual Report. AEI is an educational, non-partisan, non-profit, and operates in good standing and in compliance to the fullest letter of the law,” wrote Judy Mayka, AEI’s director of media relations.
While AEI insists its actions were lawful, legal and ethical questions still remain about the TECRO funding.
The Foreign Agent Registration Act is a 1938 federal law requiring the agents representing the interests of a foreign country in a “political or quasi-political capacity to make periodic public disclosure of their relationship with the foreign principal.”
“Maybe this money [from TECRO] goes solely toward academic research and none of [the TECRO-funded research] is ever presented to a member of Congress, but for a Washington think tank that would be shocking,” said Allison. “Clearly AEI should disclose the contribution and probably should register under FARA.”
Most FARA registrants are law firms, public relations agencies and lobbyists representing foreign countries. When asked if a nonprofit think tank could have an obligation to register under FARA, Justice Department spokesperson Andrew Ames responded that “it is possible.”
“As with any organization or individual, we would look at the specific elements and facts to determine whether organizations are required to file,” said Ames. “Without all the facts, it is impossible to determine. The department has no record of [AEI] filing with the FARA unit.”
AEI has a track record of providing an institutional base for individuals who are supportive of Taiwan.
Former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz joined AEI as a “visiting scholar” in 2007 and, in 2008, was named chairman of the US-Taiwan Business Council.
James Lilley, the US Ambassador to China from 1989 to 1991, received a fellowship at AEI after his retirement in 1991.
Lilley, who served as director of the American Institute in Taiwan, the unofficial US diplomatic mission in Taiwan, from 1981 to 1984, famously clashed with the State Department when US diplomats attempted to set a cutoff date for arms sales to Taiwan. He died on November 12, 2009.
“[President Ma Ying-jeou] said Ambassador Lilley was a strong supporter of freedom, democracy, prosperity and security throughout his life, and in his diplomatic and scholarly work he was extremely friendly to Taiwan,” said a press release [9] from the Taiwanese president’s office, following a January 2010 meeting with an AEI delegation.
Joseph Sandler, a FARA expert and former Democratic National Committee staff counsel, explained that the legality of AEI’s FARA compliance hinges on whether the think tank’s staff took direction from the government of Taiwan.
“Presumably AEI has been supportive of Taiwan. The question is: To what extent have they consulted with the Taiwanese government?”
Sandler added, “If they in fact were taking some sort of direction or honoring requests in any way on behalf of the Taiwanese government, it would not only raise FARA questions but also questions about the academic integrity of their work.”
Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/article/174980/secret-foreign-donor-behind-american-enterprise-institute
Links:
[1] http://thediplomat.com/china-power/dangerous-imbalance-on-taiwan/
[2] http://thenation.s3.amazonaws.com/pdf/AEI_2009_schedule.pdf
[3] http://www.taiwanembassy.org/US/MKC/fp.asp?xItem=79576&ctNode=2761&mp=47
[4] http://shadow.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/11/03/the_one_year_review_obamas_asia_policies
[5] http://shadow.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/11/18/obamas_asia_trip_a_series_of_unfortunate_events
[6] http://www.taiwandocuments.org/tra01.htm
[7] http://www.aei.org/outlook/foreign-and-defense-policy/regional/asia/the-obama-administrations-approach-to-asia-early-signals/
[9] http://english.president.gov.tw/Default.aspx?tabid=491&itemid=20047
A viral video calling on world leaders to a “set the red line” to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon has garnered over 1.3 million YouTube views thanks to a savvy social media campaign on Facebook and Twitter.
It’s been promoted by conservative bloggers and Washington-based organizations like [...]]]>
A viral video calling on world leaders to a “set the red line” to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon has garnered over 1.3 million YouTube views thanks to a savvy social media campaign on Facebook and Twitter.
It’s been promoted by conservative bloggers and Washington-based organizations like the Republican Jewish Coalition and The Israel Project. But the 15-minute-long film is leading some experts to question the filmmaker’s message.
The video is part of an “independent, not-for-profit project designed to harness the global voice of humanity for the purpose of a peaceful solution to prevent a nuclear Iran,” say the film’s two principals, Banafsheh Zand and Shraga Simmons, on their website, settheredline.com.
Zand, who narrates the film, was born in Iran and fled the country during the Iranian revolution in 1979.
Her father, Iranian journalist Siamak Pourzand, committed suicide in 2011 after having been imprisoned since 2001 for writing articles critical of Iran’s political leaders.
Set The Red Line’s narration offers a list of reasons why Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program must be stopped, including that “Iranian leaders are on a messianic warpath with the ultimate goal of hastening the Mahdi, the messianic Twelfth Imam, to usher in an era of global Islamic domination.”
“Iran has a plan to take over the world, and they view the United States as the ‘Great Satan,’ which must be destroyed,” Zand warns in the film.
“The Iranian regime will push war because that is [their] mandate and they’ve said it everyday and if westerners think that that regime can be deterred … then they will be in for a surprise because that regime has no intention of giving up its nukes,” Zand told The American Independent in an email.
The film endorses ongoing diplomatic efforts to find a peaceful solution to tensions over Iran’s nuclear program but urges viewers to support a “backup solution” should diplomacy fail.
“We must continue and even intensify the various diplomatic methods that world leaders have worked so hard to implement. But the reality is that Iran’s nuclear clock is ticking faster than the diplomatic clock,” says Zand in the film. “So we need an effective and reliable backup solution. It’s called the Red Line.”
Viewers are urged to participate in a social media campaign to push world leaders to lay down the “red line,” defined in the film as “world leaders make a pronouncement outlining a clear and unambiguous set of criteria that will serve as fair warning to Iran that crossing this line will trigger a devastating military response.”
“Pragmatically, the red line puts us in a much better position of going up against a non-nuclear Iran than having to face the certainty of war against a genocidal and nuclear Iran,” says Zand later in the film.
“The red line is specifically and only for the purpose of getting world leaders to pressure the Iranian regime to give up their nuclear weapons. I do not support any external military action on Iran,” Zand told TAI.
“Why would anyone attack a country whose people loath it?” Zand asked TAI. “Why would anyone attack a country with suicide bombers deployed around the world?”
“The Khomeinist regime totally intends to kill Westerners, Israelis, Palestinians and Arabs because they believe that they (the Shia Twelvers) are the ‘anointed’ ones and … they believe that it is the duty of all Muslims to die in the name of the Islamic pole that the Khomeinists have decided to head,” said Zand to TAI. “[T]hat regime openly says that it is Muslim duty to die, as collateral damage and that Sunnis have no say in the matter.”
Simmons told TAI that “military action should only be a last resort, when sanctions, diplomatic isolation and negotiations have failed to stop the regime.”
In interviews with TAI, experts questioned the approach outlined in the film.
“The video is conveniently vague so we never know to whom we’ll leave it to draw this red line. The US? Israel? The United Nations Security Council?” said Iran expert and author Barbara Slavin. “All we’re told is that it has to happen before Iran develops nuclear weapons. If Iran crosses this line it triggers a devastating response, say the filmmakers. This sounds more like an argument for war than an effort to prevent it.”
Matt Duss, a policy analyst at the liberal Center for American Progress, also criticized the film.
“Like most of the most hawkish arguments about Iran it’s plagued by a fundamental contradiction,” said Duss. “One is this claim, which is highly arguable, that Iran’s leaders are determined to destroy the west and this is a non-negotiable element of their extremist Muslim beliefs; and we must set a red line. These two things are contradictory. If Iran’s threat to destroy the west is nonnegotiable then why would they take a red line seriously?”
He added, “There’s this idea that Iran’s leaders are all apocalyptic crazies looking to trigger the return of the Shiite messiah, but there’s little evidence to suggest these beliefs drive Iranian policy.”
Zand, speaking in the film, says that Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Jordan, the UAE, and Iraq “would all fall like dominoes” if faced with an aggressive, nuclear-armed Iran.
But, according to Slavin, “there is absolutely no indication that there would be regime change in any of these places.”
“If Iran got a nuclear weapon the Saudis and all the countries across the Persian Gulf would probably shore up their alliances with the US even more and there would be a vigilant effort to contain Iran,” Slavin went on to add.
Set The Red Line garnered over one million YouTube views thanks to an effective social media campaign, said the film’s director.
“It was very grassroots, which to me is a huge success,” said Simmons. “Thousands of individuals sent the film out to their private email lists and posted on Facebook. We also contacted approximately 1,000 ‘Facebook administrators’ whose groups deal with issues of foreign affairs. I know for certain that a number of very large Facebook groups (with a million followers) promoted it to their lists.”
The Israel Project, “a one-stop source for detailed and accurate information about Israel and the Middle East,” according to its website, promoted the film both on its website andon Twitter.
Twitter accounts belonging to the Republican Jewish Coalition and a Fox News Produceralso promoted the film.
Neither Simmons nor Zand is new to political activism.
Simmons is senior editor of Aish.com, the online outreach arm of the Orthodox Jewish organization Aish HaTorah. His blog posts frequently criticize what he sees as biased reporting by journalists covering Israel.
Simmons accused CBS’s 60 Minutes of “further demonizing Israel and eroding its support in the West” after the show aired a segment examining the treatment of Palestinian Christians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
In a November 18, 2012, post — written during the Israel Defense Forces’ “Operation Pillar of Defense” in the Gaza Strip — Simmons criticized CNN’s Zain Verjee’s “horribly biased” interview of Israeli government spokesperson Mark Regev. Verjee asked about reports of children wounded by Israeli airstrikes and questioned how the IDF’s actions help bring peace to the region.
Verjee “sounds like she’d be more comfortable on Hamas TV,” wrote Simmons.
Simmons emphasized that his work on Set The Red Line was conducted independently from his job at Aish HaTorah.
“It happens that I am employed as an editor at the Aish.com website,” said Simmons. “I knew that the credibility of the message required full independence, so I took a full leave of absence from that position to enable me to make the film independently, without any organizational involvements whatsoever.”
Zand explained to TAI that she and Simmons spoke on Skype about making the film and shortly thereafter she was flown to Israel to narrate the film.
“I don’t even know what Aish HaTorah is,” said Zand. “We both agree Iran is out of order and intends to kills westerners and Israelis. Neither one of us want war.”
Tax disclosures show that from 2005 to 2010, Simmons served as secretary of Honest Reporting, a group that characterizes itself as “monitor[ing] the news for bias, inaccuracy, or other breach of journalistic standards in coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict.”
Honest Reporting apparently participated in the release of Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against The West, a 2005 film that compared the rise of radical Islam to the rise of Nazism in the 1930s.
The film’s website warns, “As we sleep in the comfort of our homes, a new evil rises against us. A new menace is threatening, with all the means at its disposal, to bow Western Civilization under the yoke of its values. That enemy is Radical Islam.”
“[Honest Reporting] now denies any involvement in the production of ‘Obsession.’ But its website promoted it as an Honest Reporting project in 2005, the year it was first released,” reported Sara Posner in a 2008 Jewish Week article.
As Posner reported, an archived version of the Honest Reporting website from June 14, 2006, shows Obsession listed as an “affiliate” project. The site also declared at the time: “HonestReporting’s ‘Obsession’ Wins Award at WorldFest Independent Film Festival.”
The film gained mainstream attention after 28 million DVDs were distributed to swing-state voters via newspaper inserts and bulk mailings before the 2008 U.S. presidential election.
Set The Red Line was Zand’s first collaboration with Simmons but not her first foray into political advocacy.
Her LinkedIn profile states that from February 2010 to October 2012, the month Set The Red Line was released, she worked as a consultant at Iran180, a group that “demand[s] a 180 by the Iranian government on their pursuit of nuclear weapons and the treatment of their citizens,” according to its website. Iran180’s outreach director, Chris DeVito, told TAI that Zand no longer works with the organization.
DeVito declined to offer a detailed opinion on the film but stated, “There are elements of the narrative that are extremely important and entirely valid.”
Following up on LobeLog’s revelation in September that Daniel Pipes’s Middle East Forum (MEF) helped support the defendant in a defamation lawsuit filed by the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), our former colleague Eli Clifton has published new information about the funders of MEF’s Legal Project – among them, [...]]]>
Following up on LobeLog’s revelation in September that Daniel Pipes’s Middle East Forum (MEF) helped support the defendant in a defamation lawsuit filed by the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), our former colleague Eli Clifton has published new information about the funders of MEF’s Legal Project – among them, the Bradley Foundation, which was named one of the top funders in the Center for American Progress “Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America,” and the San Francisco-based Koret Foundation.
Eli shows that the American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Rubin coached the defendant in the case, Seid Hassan Daioleslam, on how to mount an effective attack on NIAC and president Trita Parsi – at one point, advising Daioleslam that anything he wrote for MEF’s “Middle East Quarterly” (of which Rubin was then editor) would have to be “run …past one of our lawyers to make sure that it is written in a way that adheres to libel laws in the United States but, as you know, libel laws in the United States usually allow you to say what you need to say.”
Pipes has also used his MEF to say what he needed to say. Writes Eli:
In recent years, Pipes has written a series of pieces arguing that President Obama “was born and raised a Muslim and retained a Muslim identity until his late 20s.”
“[I]f Obama once was a Muslim, he is now what Islamic law calls a murtadd (apostate), an ex-Muslim converted to another religion who must be executed. Were he elected president of the United States, this status, clearly, would have large potential implications for his relationship with the Muslim world,” wrote Pipes in a January 2008 FrontPageMag column.
Eli’s piece should be read in its entirety but I made a couple of interesting notes. Ironically, Parsi himself was a Bradley Fellow – that is, an indirect beneficiary of the Foundation’s largess. He received a stipend from Bradley as a result of his research work for former neo-con favourite Francis Fukuyama at Johns Hopkins School for International Studies (SAIS). Thus, Bradley helped fund Parsi’s own PhD work, which resulted in his very well-reviewed book on U.S.-Israeli-Iranian relations, “Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States”.
Also, Eli notes that the MEF describes its domestic mission as “combat(ing) lawful Islamism; protects the freed of public speech of anti-Islamist authors, activists, and publishers; and works to improve Middle East studies in North America” — by which I take to mean the group supports Campus Watch to report professors who may at times be critical of Israel for this or that reason. What is interesting about the NIAC lawsuit, however, is that NIAC, insofar as I am aware, is a completely secular organization that has nothing whatever to do with Islamism or the promotion or denigration of any religion.
]]>A new, must-read report by the Center for American Progress titled “Fear, Inc.: The Roots of Islamophobia in America,” exposes the Islam-bashing network in America which has considerable reach in the U.S. news media and has an audience among some well-known politicians such as Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann.
The report includes detailed information about the more than $42 million that has flowed from seven key foundations to the network over 10 years, as well as the key “misinformation experts” who generate the false facts and materials which are then regurgitated by the media and certain politicians and grass-root groups.
Islamophobic misinformation is not only harmful for Muslims inside the U.S. and abroad who continue to be persecuted and isolated for crimes committed in the name of Islam even as the vast majority of Muslims denounce them. If accepted unchallenged, these claims can also lead to misguided and harmful U.S. domestic and foreign policy decisions which can further exacerbate national security threats.
Click here to read the report in full. Jim’s IPS article on the report can be found here.
]]>The showing of the movie in the Rayburn House Office Building will be hosted by the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) and a right-wing D.C. [...]]]>
The showing of the movie in the Rayburn House Office Building will be hosted by the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) and a right-wing D.C. Israel lobby group called the Endowment for Middle East Truth (EMET). The RJC invite makes it a point to give “special thanks to Majority Leader Eric Cantor [R-VA] for making this event possible.”
It’s EMET’s involvement that piqued my interest. EMET — whose acronym, emet, is the Hebrew word for ‘truth’ — has a bit of a history with Clarion involving an exposed lie from EMET president Sarah Stern.
Stern, a right-wing activist who has worked for the American Jewish Committee and the Zionist Organization of America, brags in her EMET bio about her efforts on the Hill — behind the backs of the Israeli and U.S. administrations — to spike the Oslo peace process of the 1990s.
In Sept. 2008, Stern hired flak Ari Morgenstern to help EMET promote the movie “Obsession” during its distribution to tens of millions of ‘swing-state’ homes during the 2008 election. Morgenstern gave an interview to me at the time, describing himself as an EMET spokesperson.
Five days later, EMET pulled out of the “Obsession” distribution project — a $17 million effort we now know was likely funded by major Chicago Republican donor Barre Seid. Stern told JTA at the time that she was hoodwinked by Clarion, and that she’d never talked to Morgenstern.
But she was lying. JTA‘s Eric Fingerhut got the goods (with my emphasis):
[T]he communications strategists for the project, Baron Communications LLC and 30 Point Strategies, shared e-mails and phone records that showed Stern had at least four telephone conversations earlier in the week with Morgenstern. In addition, they produced an e-mail from Sept. 22 which showed Stern approving of a press release and other materials announcing EMET’s participation. Another e-mail a day later from Stern included a lengthy note backing the project’s mission and the sign-off “Soldier On!”
But Stern hadn’t run the project by EMET’s board, so she pulled out.
I was a bit surprised, then, to see two months ago that Stern landed on Clarion’s new hawkish advisory board, which has some overlap with her shop.
Daniel Pipes and CSP chief and “Iranium” star Frank Gaffney are listed on both the EMET and Clarion advisory boards. James Woolsey, who never saw a neocon project he didn’t want to hitch his wagon to, and Iran hawk Kenneth Timmerman, both sit on EMET’s board and are featured prominently in “Iranium.”
Other hardliners among the EMET advisors include CSP fellow and JPost editor Caroline Glick; Hudson and Ariel Center‘s Meyrav Wurmser, the wife of Cheney advisor David and founder of MEMRI; Heritage‘s Ariel Cohen; Gal Luft, a so-called greenocon whose colleague Anne Korin appears in “Iranium”; and a host of other right-wingers.
In fact, there are two fundraising videos on EMET’s website where Stern is praised by Steven Emerson, Gaffney, Pipes, Heritage’s Cohen, Hudson‘s Tevi Troy, and Lori Palatnik, who, along with her husband, works for the ultra-orthodox, Israel-based evangelist group Aish Hatorah, which is intimately tied to Clarion.
Another troubling place where Stern gets support from is the House Foreign Affairs Committee, whose hawkish new chairperson, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), has a long-established relationship with Stern. On an EMET page, Ros-Lehtinen commends Stern’s services:
I am writing in strong support of Sarah Stern, who has worked with my office on matters of legislative importance…. I have known Sarah for many years and find her to be passionate and knowledgeable…
Three of the top-listed EMET advisors are ex-Israeli diplomats associated with the Likud. These are the very figures with whom Stern worked on Capitol Hill to spike Oslo. From a piece on IPS written by myself, Eli and Jim, at the time of the “Obsession” controversy (with my emphasis and added links):
Also among the top names of listed advisers to EMET are three Israeli diplomats. Two of them, Ambassadors Yossi Ben Aharon and Yoram Ettinger, were among the three Israeli ambassadors whom then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin referred to as “the Three Musketeers” when they lobbied Washington in opposition to the Oslo accords. Indeed, Stern began her career at the behest of three unnamed Israeli diplomats who were based in Washington under Rabin’s predecessor, Yitzhak Shamir, according to EMET’s website.
Ettinger was at one time the chairman of special projects and is still listed as a contributing expert at the Ariel Centre for Policy Research, a hard-line Likudist Israeli think tank that opposes the peace process.
Ben Aharon was the director general – effectively the chief of staff – of Shamir’s office.
The third Israeli [diplomat], Lenny Ben-David, was appointed by Likud prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to serve as the deputy chief of mission – second in command – at the Israeli embassy in Washington from 1997 until 2000. Ben-David had also held senior positions at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee for 25 years and is now a consultant and lobbyist.
Just like Clarion, where the producers and writer/director of the “Iranium” film are from the Israeli religious right, here we have, again, the Israeli right pushing policy on Washington.
There are few other ways to accurately describe it: This is the Israeli right directly pushing on Capitol Hill for an escalation with Iran, even pressing for an attack on the Islamic Republic.
These are the people we are supposed to trust about bombing Iran.
]]>It was Eli who first noticed Thomas Joscelyn’s piece on the Weekly Standard website Dec 27 in which he mocked Obama’s claim that Guantanamo was “probably the number one recruitment tool that is used by these jihadist organizations.”
In his post, entitled “Gitmo is Not Al Qaeda’s ‘Number One Recruitment Tool,’ Joscelyn, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), performed a quantitative analysis of key words that appeared in the “translations of 34 messages and interviews dlievered by top al Qaeda leaders operating in Pakistan and Afghanistan, including Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri, since January 2009.” Guantanamo, he found, was “mentioned in only 3 of the 34 messages. The other 31 messages contain no reference to Guantanamo.” Within those three messages, Guantanamo was mentioned a mere seven times, according to Joscelyn’s findings.
To show just how ignorant or misleading Obama was, Joscelyn naturally went on to compare that paltry total with the number of other key words used during the period:
“By way of comparison, all of the following keywords are mentioned far more frequently: Israel/Israeli/Israelis (98 mentions), Jew/Jews (129), Zionist(s) (94), Palestine/Palestinian (200), Gaza (131), and Crusader(s) (322). (Note: Zionist is often paired with Crusader in al Qaeda’s rhetoric.)
“Naturally, al Qaeda’s leaders also focus on the wars in Afghanistan (333 mentions) and Iraq (157). Pakistan (331), which is home to the jihadist hydra, is featured prominently, too. Al Qaeda has designs on each of these three nations and implores willing recruits to fight America and her allies there. Keywords related to other jihadist hotspots also feature more prominently than Gitmo, including Somalia (67 mentions), Yemen (18) and Chechnya (15).”
So compelling were Joscelyn’s little survey and conclusions that Karl Rove gleefully devoted his weekly column in the Wall Street Journal to it — “Gitmo Is Not A Recruiting Tool for Terrorists” on Dec 29. [It was published in the Dec 30 print edition.] Here’s his triumphant conclusion about Joscelyn’s findings:
[T]he president is wrong to assign such importance to Gitmo and, by implication, to suggest it would be a major setback to al Qaeda were he to close it, as he promised but failed to do by the end of his first year in office. Shuttering the facility would not take the wind out of terrorism, in part because it is not, and never has been, its ‘No. 1 recruitment tool.’
So, assuming that Joscelyn’s hypothesis and Rove’s assertion make sense — that there must be some correlation between key words used by al Qaeda leaders (in Afghanistan and Pakistan) in their public pronouncements and what they believe are the issues that are most likely to rally their intended audience behind them (and assuming that Joscelyn’s methodology for data collection and keyword analysis was sound), what can we conclude?
It seems we can safely say that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is seen by al Qaeda leaders as their “number one recruitment tool.” Indeed, taken together, “Israel/Israelis,” “Jew/Jews,” “Zionist(s),” “Palestine/Palestinian,” and “Gaza” account were mentioned an astonishing 652 times in 34 messages: that’s virtually twice as many times as “Afghanistan” or “Pakistan” which, given their geographic proximity to the al Qaeda leaders who are sending these messages, is quite remarkable.
But let’s be more conservative. As Joscelyn noted, “Zionist” was often paired with Crusader in al Qaeda’s rhetoric” and thus may not have anything directly to do with the Israel-Palestinian conflict per se. Similarly, “Jew/Jewish” is not necessarily relevant, either, so let’s delete those two keywords from the data set as well. Nonetheless, even if we confine our count to “Israel/Israelis,” “Palestine/Palestinian,” and “Gaza” — all of which are more likely to refer to the Israel-Palestinian conflict — we come up with 429 mentions, or some 25 percent more than runner-up “Afghanistan”!
Of course, this linkage between Islamist extremism and the Israel-Palestinian conflict is something that real scholars — and the military brass, most famously last March in testimony by Gen. David Petraeus when he was still CENTCOM chief — have long maintained. But it also a linkage that neo-conservatives, in particular, have repeatedly and strenuously denied. Take what Abe Foxman wrote in the Jerusalem Post shortly after Petraeus’ remark last spring as just one of a legion of examples: “The notion that al-Qaida’s hatred of America ….or the ongoing threat of extremist terrorist groups in the region is based on Israel’s announcement of building apartments [in East Jerusalem] is absurd on its face and smacks of scapegoating.”
But let’s go back to the logic behind Rove’s argument that if Gitmo were “the No. 1 recruitment toll” for al Qaeda, “then Al Qaeda leaders would emphasize it in their manifestos, statements and Internet postings, mentioning it early, frequently and at length.” Well, if that doesn’t apply to Gitmo, it seems to apply in spades to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, suggesting — again, using Rove’s logic — that resolving the conflict could “take the wind out of terrorism…”
Of course, Rove doesn’t go down the road, even if his logic points in that direction. Instead, he reverts to a tired neo-conservative mantra: “It is the combination of a fierce, unquenchable hatred for the U.S. and a profound sense of grievance against the modern world that helps Islamists to draw recruits,” he insists. Of course, the notion that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict may contribute importantly to that sense of grievance doesn’t occur to him, despite all of the evidence he recites from Jocelyn’s little study.
]]>My Middle East Channel piece concludes:
Ultimately, ongoing U.S. military support for the LAF will require an understanding of the deeply embedded Hezbollah position in southern Lebanon and a realistic understanding of what stability the LAF is capable of delivering in both the short and long term, as peace initiatives — either Israel-Syria or broader Arab peace agreements — take root. The LAF is unlikely to engage in direct confrontation with Hezbollah, if for no other reason than Hezbollah has succeeded to a considerable extent in depicting itself as Lebanon’s primary defense against Israel. But an LAF which takes on greater security and infrastructure building responsibilities, with a membership which includes Sunnis, Shias and Christians, could serve as an increasingly important stabilizing force in years to come.
The full article can be read here.
]]>Duss agrees with Sadjadpour’s conclusion that the Soviet Union is the best historical model to apply to Iran, but adds something: If [...]]]>
Duss agrees with Sadjadpour’s conclusion that the Soviet Union is the best historical model to apply to Iran, but adds something: If this is the comparison, one must acknowledge the relative minuteness of the Iranian “threat” as compared to the USSR.
Duss concludes (with my emphasis):
I think this makes a lot of sense, but, having established a rough model for predicting Iran’s behavior, it’s necessary to go the next step and recognize that Iran is far, far weaker than the Soviet Union was, and doesn’t pose anything like the global threat to U.S. interests that the Soviet Union once did.
While Iran’s power in the region has clearly increased and the U.S.’s diminished as a result of the invasion of Iraq, the U.S. is still dealing from a position of considerable strength against a far weaker power in Iran, in a geopolitical environment that’s less conducive to the sort of power projection to which Iran seems to aspire. Clearly, Iran represents a challenge to a number of U.S. interests, but there are also areas of mutual interest to explore, such as its recent offer to help stabilize Afghanistan. So it’s important that we not allow ourselves to be talked into believing that the apocalypse is upon us.
]]>To act on these observations will require a far more nuanced Iran policy — one with a horizon of decades instead of months or years. [...] A more visionary policy would look back at the U.S.’s experience in the Cold War and examine the lessons learned from decades of détente with an enemy whose collapse was ultimately self-imposed.