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PLEASE SEE THE CIJR CALENDAR OF IRAN NUCLEAR “DEAL” EVENTS AT THE END OF TODAY’S DAILY BRIEFING—ED.
Massive Rally Planned to Protest Iran Deal and ISIS Genocide of Yezidis: Doris Strub Epstein, CIJR, Sept. 1, 2015 — "ISIS and Iran are two sides of the same coin"
Democrats and the Ayatollahs: Wall Street Journal, Sept. 2, 2015— Maryland’s Barbara Mikulski on Wednesday became the 34th Senate Democrat to announce her support for President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, enough to sustain a veto on a resolution of disapproval.
The Truth About Congressional Pro-Israel Theater: Daniel Greenfield, Sultan Knish, Sept. 1, 2015 — Here is how the pro-Israel theater works. Every other country has its American embassy in its capital. Except Israel.
Canada is Watching Syria Die: Terry Glavin, National Post, Sept. 2, 2015 — “The worst part of it is the feeling that we don’t have any allies,” Montreal’s Faisal Alazem, the tireless 32-year-old campaigner for the Syrian-Canadian Council, told me the other day. “That is what people in the Syrian community are feeling.”
Iran Is Already Gloating: Amir Abbas Fakhravar & G. William Heiser, Real Clear World, Sept. 2, 2015
Coons Then: ‘I Won’t Support a Bad Deal.’ Now: ‘I Will Support a Bad Deal’: Elder of Ziyon, Algemeiner, Sept. 2, 2015
On Iran Deal, It’s a ‘Yes’ Vote That Could Lead to War: Bob Feferman, Algemeiner, Sept. 2, 2015
The Disintegration of Syria and Its Impact on Israel: Brig.-Gen. (res.) Yossi Kuperwasser, JCPA, Aug. 31, 2015
MASSIVE RALLY PLANNED TO PROTEST
IRAN DEAL AND ISIS GENOCIDE OF YEZIDIS
Doris Strub Epstein
CIJR, Sept. 1, 2015
"ISIS and Iran are two sides of the same coin"
On Wednesday, September 9, in front of the US Consulate at University and Queen Streets (Toronto), a massive rally is being planned to protest the Obama government's proposed agreement with Iran and the relentless ISIS genocide of the Yezidi people. It will take place between 4:30 to 6:30 pm.
Featured speakers will be Mirza Ismail, Chairman of the Yezidi Human Rights Organization International; Reverend El Shafie, One Free World; Geoffrey Clarfeld, Mozuud; Asaf Romirowsky, Canadian Institute for Jewish Research Academic Fellow, Scholars for Peace in the Middle East and Middle East Forum. Alan Herman, co-chair of the Toronto’s Chapter of the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research, will read a speech prepared by Dr. (Mordechai) Kedar. A special thanks will be given to the Canadian Government for moral leadership in its stand on Iran, ISIS and immigration of Yazidis, Christians and others in mortal danger.
ISIS is the extreme wing of Sunni Islam and the Iran regime is the extreme wing of Shia Islam, says Dr. Mordechai Kedar, of the Begin Centre for Strategic Affairs at Bar-Ilan University. Both are intent on destroying the cultures and religions of others. "ISIS has a line of targets," he said in a phone interview from Israel. "First the Yezidi people, drastically reduced by mass murder of their men and the capture and enslavement of their women. Next are the Christians, the Alawis in Syria, the Druze in Syria, the Shia in Lebanon and then the Jews in Israel. As for Iran, he denounced it as "the greatest terror machine in history aside from the Nazis."
Rananah Gemeiner, co-chair of Canadian Jews and Friends of Yezidis, who along with the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research (CIJR) is organizing the rally, said in a statement: "Radical Islam is out to destroy all of us – anyone who opposes their ideology and brand of religion, whether it be in the Middle East or in the West. If the Iran deal goes through, the world as we know it will change forever. It will be a more dangerous place."
Rallies to stop the Iran deal are taking place around the world. This rally is planned to coincide with the September 9th Rabbis' March in Washington which will include several Toronto rabbis, and the rally in Tel Aviv's Rabin Square, where Dr. Kedar will be participating.
Other demonstrations to protest the Iran deal will take place Tuesday, September 1 in New York, offices of Senators Schumer and Gilibran; Florida, August 31, office of Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Shultz, September 9, Washington West Lawn hosted by the Zionist Organization of America; Sept. 9, New Jersey , Bnai Tikvah Syynagogue. There has been speculation that the vote on the deal may take place on the ominous date of September 11.
Wall Street Journal, Sept. 2, 2015
Maryland’s Barbara Mikulski on Wednesday became the 34th Senate Democrat to announce her support for President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, enough to sustain a veto on a resolution of disapproval. So the deal will proceed, and Democrats had better hope it succeeds because they are taking responsibility for Iran’s compliance and imperial ambitions. Politically speaking, they now own the Ayatollahs.
The Democratic co-owners include Vice President Joe Biden, presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton and nearly every member of the Congressional leadership. While New York Senator Chuck Schumer came out early against the deal, he has done nothing publicly to rally opponents. His silence suggests he has long known Mr. Obama would have enough votes to prevail.
Democrats will reinforce their ownership if they now use a Senate filibuster to block a vote on the motion of disapproval. More than 50 Senators are expected to oppose the deal, and a large bipartisan majority will oppose it in the House. Yet the White House is pushing for 41 Senate Democrats to enforce a filibuster, so that a bipartisan motion of disapproval dies in the Senate and Mr. Obama wouldn’t have to veto.
But what a spectacle that would be—the President’s party using a procedural dodge to avoid voting on the merits of so consequential a deal. Previous arms-control pacts of this magnitude were submitted as treaties requiring two-thirds approval by the Senate. Mr. Obama and Senate Democrats maneuvered the Iran deal as an “executive agreement,” so he is able to commit America to trusting the Ayatollahs with the support of a mere partisan minority. At least ObamaCare had a partisan majority. As with ObamaCare, the polls now show more than half of the public is opposed to the Iran deal—despite Mr. Obama’s vigorous promotion and a cheerleading media. Also like ObamaCare, the President is assuring Democrats that public support will improve once the pact goes into effect.
But this makes Democrats hostage to Iran’s behavior. This means hostage to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who recently said that “even after this deal our policy toward the arrogant U.S. will not change.” It means hostage to Mohammad Yazdi, head of Iran’s powerful Assembly of Experts, who declared this week that “we should not change our foreign policy of opposition to America, our number one enemy, whose crimes are uncountable.” Ayatollah Yazdi will play a large role in selecting Ayatollah Khamenei’s successor.
And it means hostage to Qasem Soleimani, head of the Quds Force of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, which will receive billions of dollars in cash once sanctions are lifted. Mr. Soleimani is likely to deploy that cash to fund terrorism and proxies fighting in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and Gaza. Democrats will have essentially voted to finance Iran’s combination of Persian imperialism and Shiite messianism.
Some Democrats like Pennsylvania’s Bob Casey have been candid enough to admit the risk of Iranian imperialism contained in the nuclear deal. But Mr. Casey justified his support this week on grounds that the accord will at least prevent Iran’s nuclear progress for a decade.
It’s true that Democrats will be able to count on the reluctance of the U.S. and U.N. nuclear inspectors to call Iran on any violations. That would mean a showdown that could cause Iran to expel the inspectors, much as North Korea once did. So we are likely to have an inspections process much like it was a decade ago under former International Atomic Energy Agency head Mohamed ElBaradei, who treated signs of Iran’s cheating skeptically.
Yet all evidence suggests that Iranian leaders are bent on building a bomb, and without a democratic revolution they will look for loopholes in the deal to exploit. All the more so because they view the agreement as an Iranian negotiating triumph. The habit of the regime is to treat weaker opponents with contempt, which means they will cheat in small ways and dare the U.S. to do something about it.
Meantime, Democrats will also have to worry how Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt respond to Iran becoming a nuclear-threshold state. Democrats are accountable if a nuclear arms race breaks out in the Middle East.
The Iran deal is one of those watershed foreign-policy moments when history will remember where politicians stood. Mr. Obama has said as much by conceding that if Iran gets a nuclear weapon, “it’s my name on this.” By forming a partisan phalanx to let Mr. Obama overcome bipartisan opposition, Democrats have also put their names on it.
THE TRUTH ABOUT CONGRESSIONAL PRO-ISRAEL THEATER
Daniel Greenfield
Sultan Knish, Sept. 1, 2015
Here is how the pro-Israel theater works. Every other country has its American embassy in its capital. Except Israel. Every few years, Congress would bring up a bill or a resolution calling or even mandating that the embassy be moved to Jerusalem. Even politicians not known for their great love of the Jewish State would vote for it. Some like Biden or Kerry would even sponsor them.
The bill would have a loophole allowing a president to waive it in the interests of national security, which he always did, even when he had promised to move the embassy to Jerusalem in his campaign. The politicians were happy. The pro-Israel lobby got to justify its budget. Some Jews however were baffled why the embassy never seemed to get moved.
A similar farce would play out on other issues like cutting off aid to the PLO. There would be a bill and then a waiver and everyone would issue the appropriate press releases. And terrorists would go on killing people and then getting paid salaries with money provided by US taxpayers.
Iran's nukes are the acid test. This is the one that matters. It's the one that activists are frantically fighting for. But Congress is not about to override the White House on Iran, no more than it wanted to on Jerusalem or the PLO. The Republicans certainly didn't want to be put in the position where their vote against Iran might actually count. And then Obama would blame them.
That's what the Iran Nuclear Review Act was for. It sets up a grand theatrical production in which Republicans damage Democrats by splitting the Jewish vote without any of it actually mattering. Everyone gets to posture, to play their parts, not to get anything done, but to advance their own careers. Some Democrats will 'choose' Israel over Iran and win the undying affection of Jews. Others will back Obama to the cheers of the left. The Republicans will chortle over the split in the Dems. A few who know better, like Tom Cotton and Ted Cruz, will grind their teeth at the betrayal.
AIPAC will once again nobly lose, while increasing its donations and membership. The Republican Jewish Coalition will point to this as proof that the GOP is more pro-Israel. J Street will use the number of Jewish Democrats who defected to the Iran side as evidence that they won. Obama will do what he intended to do all along. And all this will turn out to have been the same hollow charade as the votes over recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital or defunding the PLO. The game is rigged. It's been rigged all along.
Some Congressmen really do believe in what they're doing. There are a few "righteous men in Sodom", but for the most part Congress is a way of moving money around, of making speeches without taking responsibility, of making grand gestures that don't rock the boat. The Republican Party is indeed more pro-Israel ideologically, but Republican ideology is hypothetical. While the Democrats turn left, the Republicans turn in circles. The left acts on its ideology, the right talks about it.
The most pro-Israel Democratic administration was LBJ's. The most anti-Israel Democratic administration was Obama's. With a certain amount of wavering, the trend between those two markers has been negative. The most anti-Israel Republican administration was Eisenhower's. The most pro-Israel was Bush II's. The trend here has mostly been positive. But while there's no limit to how anti-Israel the Democrats can go, there is a hard limit on how pro-Israel the Republicans can go. And Bush II was probably it.
The pro-Israel politics of Republican presidents, like the rest of their conservative ideological commitments, is more talk than reality. You can get a Republican president to say nice things about Israel, small government, the value of life, religious freedom and all that, but you can't get him to do anything about it, like moving the embassy, ending the funding of terrorism or ending the pressure on Israel to comply with assorted PLO demands. That and 5 bucks might get you a cup of coffee on Capitol Hill.
When I encourage Jews to go Republican, it's not because it will usher in a glorious pro-Israel era. It's because being associated with a Democratic Party dancing to the fiddle of the left is deeply corrosive. Being around the left is damaging. It's a destructive movement that poisons everything it touches. Especially people.
Maybe the GOP can become what it should be. We should certainly work toward that. And the first step is to be realistic about what it is and what it does. The Republican Party tells conservatives what they want to hear while taking its marching orders from an infrastructure of advisers, experts and consultants who urge it to implement the same old bad ideas while lying to the public. That is how we got here in more ways than one…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
Terry Glavin
National Post, Sept. 2, 2015
“The worst part of it is the feeling that we don’t have any allies,” Montreal’s Faisal Alazem, the tireless 32-year-old campaigner for the Syrian-Canadian Council, told me the other day. “That is what people in the Syrian community are feeling.” There are feelings of deep gratitude for having been welcomed into Canada, Alazem said. But with their homeland being reduced to an apocalyptic nightmare — the barrel-bombing of Aleppo and Homs, the beheadings of university professors, the demolition of Palmyra’s ancient temples — among Syrian-Canadians, there is also an unquenchable sorrow.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s genocidal regime clings to power in Damascus and the jihadist psychopaths of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) are ascendant almost everywhere else. The one thing the democratic opposition wanted from the world was a no-fly zone and air-patrolled humanitarian corridors. Even that was too much to ask. There is no going home now.
But among Syrian-Canadians, the worst thing of all, Alazem said, is a suffocating feeling of solitude and betrayal. “In the Western countries, the civil society groups — it’s not just their inaction, they fight you as well,” he said. “They are crying crocodile tears about refugees now, but they have played the biggest role in throwing lifelines to the regime. And so I have to say to them, this is the reality, this is the result of all your anti-war activism, and now the people are drowning in the sea.”
Drowning in the sea: a little boy, no more than five-years-old, in a red T-shirt and shorts, found face-down in the surf. The toddler was among 11 corpses that washed up on a Turkish beach Tuesday. Last Friday, as many as 200 refugees drowned when the fishing boat they were being smuggled in capsized off the Libyan coast. At least 2,500 people, most of them Syrians, have drowned in this way in the Mediterranean already this year.
A year ago this week, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry emerged from a gathering on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Wales with commitments from nine NATO countries, including Canada, to join in a military effort to “degrade and ultimately destroy” ISIL. A few days after that Sept. 4, 2014, huddle, a half-dozen Arab states signed up. At least a dozen other countries are now also contributing in one way or another.
To say the American-led coalition effort has failed to stop the war in Syria would be true enough. It would also be disingenuous, for two reasons. The first is that to have allowed ISIL to expand the scope of its rampages would have meant war without precedent in 1,000 years of the Middle East’s bloody history. The second and most important is that the Obama administration never had any intention of stopping the war in the first place.
Assad, the Iranian ayatollahs’ Syrian proxy, has been allowed to persist in his relentless bombing of Syria’s cities and his dispatching of Shabiha and Hezbollah death squads. Assad has been allowed to violate Obama’s allegedly genius chemical-weapons pact as well, dozens of times. It is the toll from Assad’s war, not ISIL’s atrocities, that is the thing to notice: perhaps seven of every eight Syrian deaths (at least a quarter of a million people so far), almost all of Syria’s seven million “internally displaced” innocents and the overwhelming majority of the four million Syrian refugees who have fled the country.
The enormity of the Syrian catastrophe is at least partly what makes the tragedy so difficult to comprehend, but in Canada there is an added encumbrance. It is the delicate sensibilities of established opinion that require diplomacy to be privileged as an unimpeachable virtue and further require the United Nations to be understood as the sole means by which disasters of the Syrian kind are prevented, or at least resolved.
It makes no difference that no less an authority than António Guterres, the UN high commissioner for refugees, attributes Syria’s agonies primarily to a failure of diplomacy, or that the UN’s governing Security Council is a hostage of Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping, or that the UN’s refugee budget is running well below the half-way mark — $5.6 billion — for Syrian refugees. Funding is already two-thirds shy of anticipated refugee costs for 2015. The World Food Program has been rolling back its refugee food allowances year after year and in the coming weeks, more than 200,000 of the most desperate Syrian refugees are having their aid cut off entirely.
In Geneva, the International Organization for Migration reckons that about 237,000 people have set out across the Mediterranean in rickety ships headed for Europe this year, a number already exceeding last year’s total figure of 219,000. The main cohort consists of Syrian refugees, the largest refugee population on Earth. Europe is now facing a refugee crisis unlike anything since the Second World War.
In the Canadian context, the only comparable event is Black September, 1847, the darkest hour of the Irish famine, when roughly 100,000 mostly Irish refugees arrived in the Saint Lawrence River in dozens of coffin ships. Roughly 17,500 Irish drowned that year, or died on board ship, or in the fever sheds on the quarantine island of Gross Isle. The Syrians are the famine Irish of 21st century.
There’s another illustrative comparison worth making. Canada has settled roughly 20,000 Iraqi refugees since 2009 and last January, the Conservative government committed to taking in 10,000 Syrian refugees, on top of 1,300 welcomed in 2014. Last month, Prime Minister Stephen Harper promised that another 10,000 Syrians and Iraqis would be added to the mix. Here’s the contrast: the kinder, gentler Obama administration has allowed only about 1,500 Syrian refugees to settle in the United States over the past four years.
Harper is right when he says the New Democratic Party’s approach to the Syrian catastrophe amounts to little more than “dropping aid on dead people.” The NDP is right when it points out the inordinately obtuse and incoherent accounting of just how many Syrian refugees have actually arrived in Canada. The Liberals are right, too, in their call to expedite family reunification visas, show more generosity and cooperation in private-sponsorship efforts, reduce processing times and allow Syrians on temporary visas to extend their stays in Canada and acquire citizenship.
But what we are all doing — Conservatives, Liberals and New Democrats, Americans, Canadians, and all the dominant elites of the United Nations and the NATO countries that cleave to that sophisticated indifference known in polite company as anti-interventionism — is a very straightforward thing. We are watching Syria die. We are allowing it to happen. And if you can comprehend that, you will know something of the sorrow that afflicts Faisal Alazem and all those other Syrian-Canadians these days.
Iran Is Already Gloating: Amir Abbas Fakhravar & G. William Heiser, Real Clear World, Sept. 2, 2015— Details of the nuclear talks between Iran and the five permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany have been made public thanks to Abbas Araghchi, an Iranian deputy nuclear negotiator – much to Araghchi's dismay.
Coons Then: ‘I Won’t Support a Bad Deal.’ Now: ‘I Will Support a Bad Deal’: Elder of Ziyon, Algemeiner, Sept. 2, 2015 — On July 14, U.S. Senator Chris Coons (D-Del.) issued the following statement: The United States must not allow Iran to develop a nuclear weapons capability.
On Iran Deal, It’s a ‘Yes’ Vote That Could Lead to War: Bob Feferman, Algemeiner, Sept. 2, 2015— The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal reached between Iran and the international community has set off serious debate.
The Disintegration of Syria and Its Impact on Israel: Brig.-Gen. (res.) Yossi Kuperwasser, JCPA, Aug. 31, 2015 — The complex civil war in Syria keeps developing in ways that reinforce the trends that have been evident for some time. Despite the reports on a number of proposals for ending the conflict, the chances of fostering a breakthrough remain unclear.
CALENDAR OF “DEAL” EVENTS:
Tuesday, September 8, 12:30 PM Washington, D.C.
Iran Deal Press Conference, featuring Members of Congress, Americans effected by Iranian terrorism, and luminaries to speak out against the Iranian Nuclear Deal.
Where: Washington DC: "West Grassy Area," facing the ellipse, in front of the Capitol building.
Wednesday, September 9, Toronto, ON, 4:30-6:30PM
Rally to protest the proposed agreement with Iran and the relentless ISIS genocide of the Yezidi people.
Where: in front of the US Consulate at University and Queen Streets in Toronto.
Wednesday, September 9, Washington, D.C.
Tea Party Patriots, Center for Security Policy, Zionist Organization of America To Host DC Rally
Where: West Lawn of the Capitol, Washington, D.C.
Keynote speakers: Sen. Ted Cruz , Donald Trump
Wednesday, September 9, 8:00 PM – New Jersey
Where: Congregation B'nai Tikvah, 1001 Finnegan Lane, North Brunswick Township, NJ
