Only 4% of American films are made by women. In Iran it’s 25%.
Pollak tweeted the picture, adding that the ad was “truly outrageous.”
The [...]]]>
Only 4% of American films are made by women. In Iran it’s 25%.
Pollak tweeted the picture, adding that the ad was “truly outrageous.”
The ad was quickly picked up by a writer at the neoconservative flagship Commentary and then by Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin. Since then, Rubin has been on a crusade against HSBC. But her rhetoric against the bank has been over-heated, occasionally veering off towards misrepresentation of facts.
Rubin has come to be known for her dishonesty. When she called blogger and think tanker Steve Clemons an “Israel-basher” recently, he said it was an “insidious character attack,” a “sliming” that insinuated anti-Semitism. She’s left critical context out of stories, and has been caught publishing misleading distortions of answers from an interview with an Obama administration official.
In the case of HSBC, she has relied on an admittedly long list of circumstantial evidence to support her arguments. The problem is not that she raises this evidence to ask questions, but rather that she offers definitive assessments without backing them up.
Take, for example, Rubin’s admission that she had no specific knowledge about HSBC’s operations inside Iran. “It is not clear precisely what business activity HSBC continues to conduct in Iran,” she wrote. “What we do know from SEC filings is that the bank maintains an office in Iran.”
By the end of her article, however, Rubin addressed HSBC’s business in Iran with searing certainty, writing that the bank “continu[es] to do business with a murderous regime.” Nonetheless, the story, built on her own conjecture, was shortened and published in the print edition of the Washington Post. Worst of all: in the shorter version, Rubin’s conjecture was presented as fact.
Rubin did make a case, using many hints of malfeasance — though none provided concrete evidence of either HSBC misconduct or of the bank doing business with the Iranian regime.
The first examples Rubin points to are that the Justice Department initiated an investigation into HSBC and that the bank had hired Deloitte to look into transactions. She went on, in the web version of the article, to mention actions taken by regulators against HSBC:
And the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency issued a “cease and desist” order to HSBC’s North American unit in October, ordering the bank to enhance its risk management procedures.
Rubin didn’t acknowledge that the hiring of Deloitte, according to the Financial Times article she links to, was exactly the result of the very regulatory moves she’s referring to.
The two “cease and desist” orders (contra Rubin, there were two, issued concurrently and in coordination) didn’t actually state a case or present any definitive evidence. Rubin quotes the order (PDF) from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) like this:
Regulators found that the bank’s compliance program was ineffective and created “significant potential” for money laundering and terrorist financing. This opened HSBC to the possibility that it was conducting transactions on behalf of sanctioned entities.
The first sentence here is close: The order says that the bank’s lax risk assessments created “significant potential for unreported money laundering or terrorist financing.” But the second sentence seems to be pure extrapolation on Rubin’s part, though it becomes the crux of her evidence for making the “business with a murderous regime” accusation.
In the print edition of the paper, the accusation went from being extrapolation to fact — that the OCC was making accusations specifically about “sanctioned entities.” The story, on page A15 of the December 27 Post, read, with my emphasis:
And the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency issued a “cease and desist” order to HSBC’s North American unit in October, having found that there was “significant potential” the bank was conducting transactions on behalf of sanctioned entities.
In reality, neither order mentions Iran or sanctions, let alone lays out any evidence about business with “sanctioned entities.” The OCC order does, however, mention inadequate monitoring of associates of “politically-exposed persons (PEPs),” which usually indicates foreign officials but has been expanded in the OCC order to include “former senior foreign political figures, their families, and their close associates.” But, once again, inadequately monitoring is not the same as “continuing to do business” with someone.
I asked a spokesperson at the OCC if the order implied that HSBC had conducted such business with the Iranian regime. “Under the law, we’re required to make public enforcement orders,” the spokesperson, Kevin Mukri, told me. “But we can’t comment on anything further than that, which puts us in a bind. The order has to be self-explanatory.”
Mukri referred me to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, the Treasury Department’s liaison to law enforcement, which declined to offer comment for this story.
I asked Mukri if he or, to his knowledge, anyone from OCC had spoken to Rubin on background, or deep background, which would have allowed her to make such accusations without referring to sources. At first, Mukri said that, even if he had spoken to Rubin, he wouldn’t tell me, but then quickly denied having done so or knowing of anyone who had. He explained that speaking about the orders, beyond their content, would be a violation of laws governing the office’s conduct. “It’s something we don’t do as an agency,” he told me. “I’ve been here for 14 years and don’t know anyone who’s done that, ever.”
Rubin also mentions that two members of Congress recently sent letters about regulations relating to sanctions on Iran:
Moreover, Rep. Frank Pallone (D.-N.J.) recently wrote to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke calling for increased enforcement of prohibitions on banks and other financial institutions doing business with Iran, and citing HSBC as an example of part of the problem. Rep. Joe Baca (D.-Calif.) sent a similar letter.
I was curious about the mention of HSBC in the letter by Rep. Frank Pallone (D-NJ) to Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke, but his office did not supply the text of the letter following repeated inquiries. Pallone does mention HSBC in the press release for the letter.
The link Rubin supplies for the Pallone letter, however, is from Grendel Report, a blog dedicated to “cutting-edge open source information on terrorism and the Islamic threat” (note the absence of the word ‘radical’ there). The Grendel story, in turn, is attributed to Geostrategy-Direct, a newsletter operated by the World Tribune, a website that says it “tend[s] to reinforce the Judeo-Christian values” and brags about a mention from right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh for definitively connecting Iraq and al Qaeda and proving the existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. (One must excuse me for being skeptical of these sources.)
The office of Rep. Joe Baca, the other member of Congress mentioned by Rubin, similarly declined to supply me with a copy of his letter, and no press release exists. So Rubin’s word that it was a “similar letter” will have to stand on its own. The reader is unable to know if the letter mentioned HSBC.
In the print edition, however, the two examples are conflated. Baca’s letter is no longer “similar,” but now also definitively cites HSBC:
Two members of Congress have written to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke urging stronger controls on back activities citing HSBC as an example.
The online version of the piece by Rubin contained one more distortion. This one came to Rubin via e-mail from former AIPAC spokesperson Josh Block. Block wrote to her that “the regime in Tehran is the leading human rights violator and state sponsor of terror in the world.” The second bit, on terror, is the same pro-forma language that the State Department uses. But the first part — that Iran “is the leading human rights violator… in the world” — is a tough assertion to back up. I e-mailed and called Block several times for comment, suggesting that he soften the statement by saying Iran is ‘one of the leading…’. Block never responded.
The charge, nonetheless, was a particularly troubling one coming from advocates of Israel who constantly say that the Jewish state is being singled out. And even more troubling coming from Block, whose business partner Lanny Davis was, at the time Block made his comment, working for the Ivorian dictator responsible for the killing of more people in post-election violence than Iran’s leaders were during its own election aftermath (according to the UN).
But Rubin’s eagerness to paint all involved with Iran as a force for evil is not surprising. A U.S. attack on Iran has long been a priority for Rubin, who wrote from her former home at Commentary last September that such a move was the “best of disagreeable options.”
What is surprising, though, is that the Washington Post allows reports to go to print with serious allegations that seem to be based on little more than the combination of circumstantial evidence and conjecture.
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Today in the New York Times, WINEP fellow Martin Kramer is quoted warning against the dangers of the reemergence of Tunisia’s Islamist party, Al-Nahda, widely regarded as one of the most progressive versions of Islamism on the planet:
Martin Kramer, a researcher at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who had long criticized Mr. Ghannouchi of Al-Nahda, argued that the party’s professions of pluralism could not be trusted. “Islamists become the more moderate and tolerant of pluralism the further away from power they are,” he said.
For Kramer, this is little more than the latest campaign in a decades-long crusade against Islamism. After Sept. 11, 2001, he went so far as to say that all Islamism breeds terrorism, holding up Lebanon as an example where democratic inclusion has wrought stumbling blocks, but also citing problems with radical Islamism in U.S.-backed dictatorships like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
Kramer has been denouncing the Tunisian Islamist movement since the early 1990s, when the main party’s now-exiled founder called for attacking U.S. interests in response to the first Gulf War. But those sorts of views have been moderated in the ensuing two decades. In the Times profile of Al-Nahda’s leader inside Tunisia, he says women should choose to wear veils (and called for political quotas “until they get their voices”), and doesn’t even have a problem with bikinis and sipping wine.
But Kramer doesn’t care for these subtleties, espousing that Islam can play no role in politics at all, ever. Naturally, Kramer is an unflinching supporter of an ethnocratic Israel, though, to be fair, Kramer is consistent — he has flirted openly, elsewhere in the Middle East, with anti-democratic “minority rule”:
In Iraq’s Sunni triangle, they like their tribes and they might want a tough-minded sheikh to keep order among them; in the Shi’ite south, they might wish to venerate a white-bearded recluse in a turban, and have him resolve all their disputes; and so on. What they crave is not democracy, but sub-national self-determination…
(Tell them what they want, Dr. Kramer…)
America cannot revive the Ottoman empire, but it might take a lesson from its legacy: that empire is most effective when it is invisible, that there are things worse than minority rule.
I don’t know what Kramer thinks of Iraq today, but I do know what Rubin thinks of it. It’s Bush’s gift that keeps on giving! Here’s her description of the Iraqi state, emphasized by me:
The left blogosphere seems to have wigged out over the suggestion that George W. Bush and the successful emergence of a secular, democratic Iraq has anything to do with all this.
(While Kramer opposes some Middle East autocrats, he doesn’t note that fervent Islamism, as in Iran’s 1979 revolution and establishment of an Islamic Republic, is often a reaction to U.S. support for these autocrats, as with the CIA toppling of a secular, democratic coup to re-install the Shah in 1953.)
Yet, in a world where Kramer and Rubin warn and warn and warn about Islamism — even in moderated forms — here are the first words of the constitution (PDF) of this “secular, democratic Iraq”:
The Preamble
In the name of God, the Most merciful, the Most compassionate
The document continues in Section One:
Article 2:
First: Islam is the official religion of the State and is a foundation source of legislation:
A. No law may be enacted that contradicts the established provisions of Islam.
B. No law may be enacted that contradicts the principles of democracy.
C. No law may be enacted that contradicts the rights and basic freedoms stipulated in this Constitution.
Second: This Constitution guarantees the Islamic identity of the majority of the Iraqi people and guarantees the full religious rights to freedom of religious belief and practice of all individuals such as Christians, Yazidis, and Mandean Sabeans.
Article 3:
Iraq is a country of multiple nationalities, religions, and sects. It is a founding and active member in the Arab League and is committed to its charter, and it is part of the Islamic world.
Iraq is not so secular, after all.
Will Kramer denounce the government of Islamic Iraq? Will Rubin admit that, since she holds up the example of Islamic democracy in Iraq (not secular, though with minority protections), perhaps her “real concern” for any “specific sign of an Islamist presence” may not be so sound?
I doubt it. Neocons like Rubin will simply go on ignoring the Islamic character of Iraq when it is convenient to use the country as example of what can be accomplished by going to war.
Take, for example, Iran’s Green Movement, which Rubin and her ideological comrades like Reuel Marc Gerecht claim to support (all the while calling for an attack on Iran that will likely blunt the movement’s chances of success).
Undoubtedly, the Green Movement has an element that pushes for the end of the Islamic Republic, but this is not a monolithic view among the movement’s supporters. Many of its adherents want a reformed Islamic Republic, as with the opposition leadership inside Iran. If one prefers to think of the Green Movement as leaderless, he still cannot deny that figures like Mir Hossein Moussavi and his wife, Mohammad Khatami, and Mehdi Karroubi, do not constitute an important place within the movement.
Neocons, nonetheless, unabashedly call for regime change by any means in Iran, ignoring the fact that the only viable opposition movement there is divided on the issue of maintaining the Islamic Republic.
The notion that moderate, democratic strains of Islamism exist — as with most ideologies — and should be allowed to enter political discourse is blasphemy to these rigid ideologues. (Neoconservatism, for its part, seems not to have a moderate strain.) Kramer insists that his call for blanket exclusion of Islamism “has nothing to do with Islam per se”– but one has to wonder.
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