This week on Fox News, anchors Bill O’Reilly and John Stossel discussed former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean’s advocacy for the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK), an exiled Iranian opposition group designated as a “foreign terror organization” by the State Department. The leadership of the group is [...]]]>
This week on Fox News, anchors Bill O’Reilly and John Stossel discussed former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean’s advocacy for the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK), an exiled Iranian opposition group designated as a “foreign terror organization” by the State Department. The leadership of the group is based in Paris, while more than 3,000 former fighters linger in Camp Ashraf — a base set up outside Baghdad in the 1980s when the group allied with Saddam Hussein against Iran — where they face violent harassment by the Iraqi authorities.
O’Reilly and Stossel went through some background about the group and Dean’s history of paid speeches advocating for their removal from the terror rolls and U.S. recognition of the group’s leader, Maryam Rajavi, as the president of Iran.
Their history is shoddy. For example, Stossel blames the group’s U.S. designation solely on acts committed in the 1970s, which he says were carried out by a “nasty fringe” and occurred “30, 40 years ago.” But the MEK only renounced violence in 2001 and fighters were separated from their tanks in Camp Ashraf only in 2003. The U.S. government actually directly accuses the MEK of carrying out terrorist acts as recently as the late 1990s.
But the really staggering ignorance on the part of Stossel is his misunderstanding of the statutes that criminalize material support for groups designated as terrorists. Stossel compares Dean’s paid speeches advocating for the MEK to speeches on behalf of medical industry groups and Stossel’s own paid speeches. O’Reilly, to his credit, pushes back:
STOSSEL: We don’t know that he’s lobbying for them. He’s made speeches for them, but so has Rudy Giuliani.
O’REILLY: Come on. Why would these guys do that unless they were getting paid?
STOSSEL: Because they say, “Oh, we have Howard Dean speaking here in Belgium. Come over and meet Howard Dean.”
O’REILLY: That’s right. And Dean wouldn’t do that unless they were greasing him.
STOSSEL: Right. They’re greasing him.
O’REILLY: Yes, so he’s getting money from these people.
STOSSEL: So? I make speeches for money.
O’REILLY: Yes.
STOSSEL: If he checked them out and he believes…
O’REILLY: You do the chamber of commerce in Toledo. Not the Muhajadeen.
STOSSEL: If I believed in their cause, as he says he does.
O’REILLY: Oh, yes, he believes in their cause. Socialized medicine people? That’s what he believes in.
STOSSEL: He’s also taken money to change the patent rules for pharmaceutical companies. I don’t blame him for doing that.
O’REILLY: Dean is a lobbyist now, that’s what he does. And he gets paid by MSNBC.
Watch the whole exchange:
Stossel’s defense closely mirrors that of Rudy Giuliani, Tom Ridge, and Fran Townsend (a paid CNN contributor), who argued after they were accused of material support for terrorism that they didn’t consider the MEK to be a terror group.
That Dean was paid by the group — or more accurately, American supporters of the group (if that’s indeed the case) — is less important than whether or not he made what is considered speech that was “coordinated” with the group. Having spoken to actual MEK rallies in Europe alongside Rajavi, that is a difficult defense for Dean and other paid or unpaid advocates to make. (This is not to say one shouldn’t be able to speak in favor of delisting the MEK, or that they do not deserve today to be delisted, but simply that until they are delisted, the laws on the matter are clear.)
But one does not simply get to choose which laws they follow and which designations they recognize. In a nation where the rule of law matters, it needs to be applied equally to all violators, irrespective of what they or others feel about it. That’s why the false comparison between the MEK and the Toledo Chamber of Commerce is so staggering.
]]>In an interview with Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney attacked President Obama’s foreign policy record. Obama’s “failures internationally will have perhaps even longer- lasting implications for America and the world than even his failures domestically,” said Romney. Pressed by O’Reilly to name [...]]]>
In an interview with Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney attacked President Obama’s foreign policy record. Obama’s “failures internationally will have perhaps even longer- lasting implications for America and the world than even his failures domestically,” said Romney. Pressed by O’Reilly to name specific failures, Romney brought up Iran’s nuclear program, which he called “probably the greatest threat to the security of the world.”
“[T]he president had an opportunity to really put pressure on Iran,” said Romney. “Had he gotten Russia to agree to impose tough, crippling sanctions on Iran, we could have put a lot more pressure on Iran.”
In June 2010, Russia voted for U.N. Security Council Resolution 1929, which imposed a fourth round of sanctions — the toughest yet — on Iran because of it’s failure to comply with earlier resolutions demanding an end to nuclear enrichment. In May, a U.N. experts panel on the sanctions concluded that the new measures “are constraining Iran’s procurement of items related to prohibited nuclear and ballistic missile activity and thus slowing development of these programs.”
Romney then discussed what he would do about Iran:
ROMNEY: Well, several years ago I spoke at the Herzliya conference in Tel Aviv and laid out seven steps. I’ll try and be brief. But No. 1 was making sure that we put in place crippling sanctions.
No. 2 was communicating on the ground in Iran what the cost means to them of becoming a nuclear nation. They would be in a circle of suspects if either nuclear device were being tested or to be applied anywhere in the world. Number — I’ll get to the last one. No. 7 is you have to have a credible military threat. … You have to have credible options that Iran has to know that, if they pursue nuclear folly, that there is the potential that there will be an effort on the part of the United States to remove that threat. [...]
[Obama] hasn’t put together the kind of military credibility in terms of planning or communications that would suggest to them that it’s anything but a hollow threat.
Watch the whole exchange:
It’s true that Russia and China blocked more harsh economic sanctions in the Security Council, but the U.S. continued to impose strict economic and human rights sanctions on companies and individuals, which the administration continues to augment with a long string of executive orders. These sanctions are extraterritorial, meaning that international companies and individuals working with Iranian sanctioned companies and individuals can be punished by the U.S.
What’s more, as far as military “planning,” Obama has pledged to keep all options all the table. At his confirmation hearing before the Senate to be Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta said such planning was actually going on: “In line with the president’s statement that we should keep all options on the table, that would obviously require appropriate planning.”
And that doesn’t even begin to account for the covert actions taken by the U.S. to thwart the Iranian nuclear program. What we know — that the U.S. and Israel worked together to develop and deploy the Stuxnet computer virus that crippled Iran’s nuclear centrifuges — is likely only the tip of the iceberg.
The Obama administration, in other words, is doing exactly the things Romney says it is not. As for the public bluster about all of it, Iranian dissidents have praised Obama for setting that rhetoric aside, crediting the move with creating the political space that allowed for the rise of the Green opposition movement. One wonders what the Green Movement might think of Romney, whose foreign policy adviser has advocated for the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK), a group considered terrorists by the U.S. and hated by the the Greens.
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Tangential to this tiff was a discussion of the dangers of reporting in Iran. But both Milbank and O’Reilly are completely off base about what it means for Westerners to report from Iran. It’s high demonization, and the way they bandy about these falsehoods is rather reckless — considering the ramped-up campaign for war with Iran — and disrespectful to those Iranian reporters whose brave reporting puts them at risk from their own government.
While I have no problem with a little humorous sniping — especially at Bill O’Reilly’s expense — one should be aware of what they are talking about. I’ve written before about how making fun of Iran can have the effect of demonizing the country , by placing Iranians in the camp of “the other.” Or as Harvard professor and Foreign Policy blogger Stephen Walt put it, mainstreaming war.
But first the background: On his show, O’Reilly joked about beheading Milbank. After getting a viewer complaint about the crassness of such a joke, O’Reilly responded by saying:
Well, let me break this to you gently, Heidi [the complainer]. If Dana Milbank did in Iran what he does in Washington, he’d be hummus.
Milbank rightfully responded to O’Reilly in a column on Wednesday, putting the latter’s crassness and hypocrisy on hilarious display. But he backed up O’Reilly’s baseless charge about Iran:
O’Reilly is partly right about that. As an American and a Jew, I probably wouldn’t last long in Iran. And criticizing the government there, as I do here, wouldn’t add to my life expectancy. But what was he trying to say? That America would be better if it were more like Iran?
This is hogwash. “As an American,” Milbank would be fine reporting in Iran. Even as a Jew. Even if he criticized the government. Just as another American Jew did: Roger Cohen, the New York Times columnist who broke the rules for foreign reporters, went out on the streets in the middle of the post election turmoil, braved the regime’s brutal crackdown, and reported back for everyone in the West to see what was happening. No one mashed up this particular chic pea. Hummus isn’t even an Iranian dish (far be it for Bill O’Reilly to make distinctions — gastronomical or otherwise — between Muslims in Arab countries and Muslims in Iran).
Cohen, of course, was deported from Iran. But he showed a partisan flair in his reporting and, as I said, violated the terms of his press visa. Other Western journalists who operate within the government’s regulations seem to stay in Iran without much trouble or harassment.
But Cohen’s fate pales in comparison to that of Iranian nationals who blog and report on Iran. Take a look at the Committee to Protect Journalists page for Iran and review the fate of these reporters. It belittles their sacrifice for their country, and for journalism ,when O’Reilly and Milbank make flippant remarks.
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