The New York Times: Yossi Klein Halevi, a fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute and a contributing editor at The New Republic, writes, “Israelis fear that Egypt will go the way of Iran or Turkey, with Islamists gaining control through violence or gradual co-optation.” Hezbollah’s [...]]]>
The New York Times: Yossi Klein Halevi, a fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute and a contributing editor at The New Republic, writes, “Israelis fear that Egypt will go the way of Iran or Turkey, with Islamists gaining control through violence or gradual co-optation.” Hezbollah’s increasingly strong role in Lebanon, Hamas’s control of the Gaza Strip, and the downturn in Israel-Turkey relations leads Halevi to comment, “[A]n Islamist Egypt could produce the ultimate Israeli nightmare: living in a country surrounded by Iran’s allies or proxies.” While the Egyptian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood has forsworn violence, “it is small comfort to Israelis, who fear that the Brotherhood’s nonviolence has been a tactical maneuver and know that its worldview is rooted in crude anti-Semitism.”
National Review Online: The American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Rubin opines on the developing situation in Egypt and suggests that the Muslim Brotherhood and “anti-Western forces will look to blame Egypt’s problems on the U.S.” “What worries me is this: Today marks the 32nd anniversary of Khomeini’s return to Iran. Most people making dark allusions to Iran forget that more than nine months passed between Khomeini’s return and the seizure of the U.S. Embassy,” says Rubin. “The question then becomes, what grievances can the Muslim Brotherhood or other anti-Western forces manufacture in those nine months to try to appeal beyond their natural constituency of perhaps 25 percent?” Rubin concludes that Obama should avoid making George W. Bush’s mistake of supporting elections in Gaza and “enabl[ing] political groups which maintain militias to claim the mantle of electoral legitimacy.”
Los Angeles Times: Jonah Goldberg, also based at The American Enterprise Institute, warns that the democracy movement in Egypt could turn into “a replay of the Iranian revolution, in which justified popular discontent with an authoritarian ruler was exploited by Islamists who ultimately imposed an even crueler brand of tyranny.” Goldberg goes on to compare political participation of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt to a “contagion.”
]]>If a business thought to be IRGC-related is publicly identified, government agencies can better investigate its identity and operations. This may then lead to a designation by one or more Western governments. Even if a business is not designated as IRGC-affiliated, however, the mere act of identification is useful.
His proposal sounds decidedly biased against Iranian companies and Western companies which do business in Iran. But as Ottolenghi makes abundantly clear, this is of little concern:
If some governments prove reluctant to designate a firm even after its exposure, designation by one government alone could raise the reputational and monetary risk faced by Western companies for associating with IRGC shells.
Ottolenghi outlines how, ideally, his guilty-until-proven-innocent system would work [my emphasis]:
But identifying Iranian entities linked to the IRGC is not easy. Take the Ghomroud water conveyance system, a network of tunnels built earlier in the last decade in the Isfahan mountains to improve nearby water supply. Two European companies — Germany’s Wirth and Italy’s Seli — supplied tunnel-drilling machinery and ventilation equipment. On the surface, the project appeared legitimate. But according to documents that were, until recently, available on Wirth’s Web site, the Iranian building contractor for the project was Gharargahe Sazandegi Ghaem, a subsidiary of Khatam al-Anbiya, the IRGC’s largest company. This means that the Iranians could have later used the technology provided by European companies to construct nuclear and ballistic missile facilities, which are often located underground. Given that prospect, Western governments and companies should err on the side of caution in doing business with IRGC-related firms, avoiding contact entirely rather than unwittingly aiding Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
Other than the tenuous link that nuclear facilities “are often located underground,” this example provides no indication this company participated in any activities that could be construed as “aiding Iran’s nuclear ambitions.” While Ottolenghi doesn’t mind playing fast and loose with blacklisting companies, it’s worth asking how Germany and Italy will respond to U.S. pronouncements that their companies are “unwittingly” assisting the Iranian nuclear program. And, in the process of “error[ing] on the side of caution,” deny improvements to the Iranian water supply for ordinary Iranians.
The point of this campaign, as outlined in the article, is that “Western countries should redouble their efforts and ensure that Iran’s procurement networks and IRGC companies, at home and abroad, are named, shamed, and banished from the polite company of the corporate world.” FDD, which appears to have an in-house project of designating various German, Swiss, Italian, Chinese and Russian companies as IRGC business partners, is quick to call for ever tighter sanctions regimes.
What Ottolenghi and other FDD fellows don’t explain is how falsely accusing companies of being “IRGC shells”–as is nearly certain to happen with the low-burden of proof described in the frequent op-eds by FDD fellows–will help the U.S. maintain its alliances in the UN sanctions regime. Perhaps more importantly, analysts like Ottolenghi don’t address how their proposed sanctions regime will help everyday Iranians see the United States as anything other than an existential enemy that indiscriminately sanctions Iranian companies doing business with Western firms and pressures foreign governments to sever trading relationships with Iran.
]]>I ran a reverse DNS search of obsessionthemovie.com this morning and found that the Clarion Fund, which funded and produced Obsession and The Third Jihad, has registered a new website and made, at this point, a fairly bare-bones site for its new film, Iranium.
Iranium‘s website is http://www.iraniummovie.com.
Here are two of the possible DVD covers for the film. The website is currently running a poll to select which cover will be chosen.
Iranium will be released in September, just in time for mid-term elections in November!
The website offers the following synopsis of Iranium.
Since the inception of the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Iran has displayed hatred for the West. Coupled with an extremist and apocalyptic messianic ideology, this regime has terrorized the world at large for over 30 years.
The 45-minute film will explore the principles of the revolution, and expose the hatred and violence exhibited by Iran’s brutal leadership. The film will document the development of the Iranian nuclear program, the threats posed by such a program, and the West’s inability to recognize the true nature of an extremist Islamic Revolutionary regime that does not represent the worldview of the majority of its citizens.
As highlighted in the Rebutting Obsession project (which, in full disclosure, I contributed to) the Clarion Fund participates in rewriting history to portray Muslims as irrational and suicidal participants in a global movement to destabilize and dominate the west.
The depth of Clarion’s willingness to contribute to Islamophobic hysteria and promote conspiracy theories was made clear in The Third Jihad, a film that bore striking similarities to the antisemitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Our former colleague, Khody Akhavi, did some of the initial research linking Clarion to HonestReporting, and Ali Gharib and I have written about Clarion’s ties to European far-right groups (including one in Belgium that sought amnesty for convicted Nazi collaborators) and Islamophobic networks.
I have no doubt that Iranium will live up to the reputation of Clarion’s previous films, but this time it seems that its agenda is to push the U.S. towards a confrontation with Iran.
Clarion’s list of interview subjects for the film (which can be viewed here) include former CIA director and PNAC letter signatory James Woolsey, Irving Kristol Award recipient Bernard Lewis and Rachel Ehrenfeld.
All three are also members of the neoconservative Committee on the Present Danger.
Harold Rhode is also listed as an interviewee. Rhode, a protege of Bernard Lewis and Richard Perle, is a former Foreign Affairs Specialist in the Office of Net Assessment, Office of the Secretary of Defense.
In their January, 2004, Mother Jones article “The Lie Factory”, Robert Dreyfuss and Jason Vest write:
Called in to help organize the Iraq war-planning team was a longtime Pentagon official, Harold Rhode, a specialist on Islam who speaks Hebrew, Arabic, Turkish, and Persian (Parsi/Farsi). Though Douglas Feith would not be officially confirmed until July 2001, career military and civilian officials in NESA began to watch his office with concern after Rhode set up shop in Feith’s office in early January. Rhode, seen by many veteran staffers as an ideological gadfly, was officially assigned to the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment, an in-house Pentagon think tank headed by fellow neocon Andrew Marshall. Rhode helped Feith lay down the law about the department’s new anti-Iraq, and broadly anti-Arab, orientation. In one telling incident, Rhode accosted and harangued a visiting senior Arab diplomat, telling him that there would be no ‘bartering in the bazaar anymore…. You’re going to have to sit up and pay attention when we say so.’
Rhode refused to be interviewed for this story, saying cryptically, ‘Those who speak, pay.’
In a Jerusalem Post interview on April 9th, Rhode continued to defend the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq but took issue with the decision to use Iraq’s supposed pursuit of WMDs as the justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein.
]]>How would you have wanted it presented?
For what it was… He [Saddam] was clearly involved with these bastards, with al-Qaida and all sorts of other fundamentalists who are out to destroy the West.
Why should Saddam, a secular Sunni, get involved with al-Qaida? What was his motivation?Let’s say say that everybody here is helping everybody else. I help you in ways that are good for you, and you help me in ways that are good for me. I have a money system that can transfer things; you use it. I need weapons transferred to someone that you have connections with. I’m not your leader, you’re not my leader. It’s mutual. They’re all on the same side here… Look, there were times the KGB and the CIA were on the same side and there are times right now that this country [Israel] and Saudi Arabia are on the same side – that’s until the day Iran is taken care of and then that will end.
If he’s secular, why did he write “Allahu akhbar” in his own blood on the flag, why did he supposedly have a Koran written in his blood? Why? I don’t know what secular means. Secular is a nice Western word. The best way you can put that in Arabic is la diniyah. La means no and diniyah is the law. That means you don’t fear God, you don’t fear judgment day. That means you can kill me or I can kill you and I’m not afraid of what God will say.