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Some Questions for Jeffrey Goldberg: Manfred Gerstenfeld, CIJR, June 3, 2015— Jeffrey Goldberg is a senior American journalist who recently interviewed US President Barack Obama for the Atlantic Monthly.
Paying Tehran’s Bills: Lee Smith, Weekly Standard, June 8, 2015 — Even the Obama administration acknowledges that Iran is up to a lot of mischief in the Middle East.
Obama’s Favors for the Mullahs: Wall Street Journal, June 14, 2015 — The Obama Administration has long insisted that any nuclear deal will have no effect on U.S. determination to stop Iran’s regional ambitions or support for terrorism.
Obama Just Tossed Away His Last Card on Iran’s Nukes: John Podhoretz, New York Post, June 2, 2015 — As the June 30 deadline for the Iran nuclear deal approaches, President Obama is putting all his cards on the table — by announcing he is keeping no cards in his hand.
‘Look … It’s My Name on This’: Obama Defends the Iran Nuclear Deal: Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic, May 21, 2015
Israel’s Role in the Struggle over the Iranian Nuclear Project: Brig. Gen. (res.) Yossi Kuperwasser, BESA, June 11, 2015
Israelis and Saudis Reveal Secret Talks to Thwart Iran: Eli Lake, Bloomberg, June 4, 2015
Iran’s Greatest Vulnerability: Michael Ledeen, Weekly Standard, May 11, 2015
Iranian Nukes, the Arab Gulf, and Obama's Seductive Summitry: Steven J. Rosen, Washington Times, June 2, 2015
SOME QUESTIONS FOR JEFFREY GOLDBERG
Manfred Gerstenfeld
CIJR, June 3, 2015
Jeffrey Goldberg is a senior American journalist who recently interviewed US President Barack Obama for the Atlantic Monthly. He has interviewed Obama in the past, and in this latest interview, Goldberg brought up the Iran nuclear deal and ISIS, and also asked Obama for his opinion on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
In their discussion of the conflict, Goldberg did not challenge Obama on his use of double standards against Israel and his other observations of extreme bias. The president expresses what he calls “tough love for Israel”, while remaining silent about the major Islamo-Nazism in Palestinian society. In light of Obama’s tilted perspective, I have prepared a few questions for Goldberg should he have the occasion to conduct a future interview with Obama and should he decide to become a more objective journalist.
Goldberg could start, for instance, by asking Obama: “Mr. President, when I interviewed you in May 2015, you spoke about how we should be ‘repairing the world.’ Yet, if we look at the world in its current state and compare it to how matters stood were when your presidency began in 2009, it seems that the main issue at hand should be how to prevent the world from going further downhill. “Relations between the West and Russia were much better when your presidency started than they are today. The Middle East is in far greater chaos today than it was in 2009. Genocidal movements in the Muslim world have greatly expanded since 2009. What are you doing about preventing the world from becoming even more chaotic instead of fantasizing about repairing it?”
Goldberg could then ask, “You made a variety of statements about Israel having to live up to Jewish values, with some of those values largely invented by yourself. What makes you an authority to speak on Jewish values? Why should anyone believe that you have more than a superficial and distorted understanding of them?
“In the past, you have even been known to radically misrepresent Islam when you declared that ISIS is not Islamic. The Pew Foundation investigated support for al-Qaeda in various countries while Bin Laden was alive. There was wide backing for al-Qaeda in a variety of Muslim societies in 2014. Among Palestinians it was around 25%.
“Al Jazeera, the international TV station of Qatar – a country which opposes ISIS — asked its Arab viewers in May 2015 whether or not they agreed with the values of ISIS. Of the more than 50,000 who replied, 81% agreed with ISIS. Even if it were 10% that would have been shocking. A variety of Muslim theologians across the Muslim world agree that ISIS’s views are a legitimate form of Islam. Mr. President, what makes you an authority on Islamic values to such an extent that you may belittle the conclusions of all these Muslim people regarding Islam and what it represents?
“You state that Israel should take risks to achieve a two-state solution. The late Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon took irresponsible risks when he chose to have Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005. He was warned by Israeli experts that Hamas or Al Qaeda would take over the area. This is exactly what happened. Israel has been under violent attack from Gaza for years. Yet Israel is frequently criticized by the West when it defends itself against Hamas, an Islamo-Nazi movement that clearly states in its charter and elsewhere that it wants to exterminate the Jews. Mr. Netanyahu says that ceding additional territory would ultimately lead to having it taken over by Islamic terrorists. Netanyahu says this in view of the current Middle East reality, and there are strong indications that he is right.”
Goldberg could continue: “Hamas came out as the largest Palestinian party, gaining the majority of seats in the Palestinian parliament during the only democratic elections that have ever been held in the Palestinian territories – those of 2006. Hamas clearly states its aim of exterminating the Jews. Its top representatives have repeated this attitude publicly during Israel’s 2014 Protective Edge campaign. Recent polls show that if elections were to be held at present, Palestinians would prefer Hamas leader Ismail Haniyah over the Palestinian Authority’s Mahmoud Abbas. Why do you claim that Mr. Netanyahu errs in saying that any territory Israel would cede would fall in the hands of Islamic terrorists and why would you want him to take this risk?
Goldberg’s next question could be, “During the interview, you criticized the existence of Israeli checkpoints. You know that these checkpoints were installed in order to reduce the number of Israelis being murdered by Palestinians. Isn’t your approach an example of an increasingly frequent phenomenon, that of progressives indirectly supporting murderers, for instance by remaining silent about Palestinian Islamo-Nazism?” A further question to Obama could be, “You speak of avoiding double standards. You criticize Israel out of your so-called attitude of ‘tough love’. Yet you remain silent about the widespread Palestinian Islamo-Nazism and the many crimes of Islam, a religion from which far more criminality emerges than from any other religion. You are also silent regarding the frequent, radical, anti-Semitic hatred emerging from large parts of the Muslim world.”
The US State Department’s definition of anti-Semitism defines double standards as acts of anti-Semitism. Why should your use of extreme double standards regarding Israel not be considered acts of anti-Semitism?” Another question: “You confessed your love for the Jewish people. Why, then, did you call the murder of Jews in the Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket in Paris ‘random attacks’ while they were so clearly anti-Semitic ones?”
And finally, “In your speech in the Adas Israel Synagogue in Washington, D.C., given a few days after our interview, all you said was that the “Palestinians aren’t the easiest of partners.” As their biggest party is the Islamo-Nazi Hamas, this remark was a caricature of reality. Why do you consider that your flagrant understatement regarding Hamas, while heavily criticizing Israel, is not yet another expression of extreme double standards? If Mr. Goldberg requires further clarification on the issues raised above, I’ll be happy to provide it.
Lee Smith
Weekly Standard, June 8, 2015
Even the Obama administration acknowledges that Iran is up to a lot of mischief in the Middle East. Tehran is engaged in a sectarian conflict from Lebanon to Syria and Iraq that has recently come to include Yemen as another active front. However, the White House continues to insist, against all evidence, that the clerical regime’s aggression won’t increase when it gets a huge cash infusion from sanctions relief and an immediate $30 to $50 billion bonus, when (or if) it signs the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, aka the nuclear deal. According to Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew, Iran will almost surely use that money to improve its domestic economy. And besides, as Obama argued last month, “most of the destabilizing activity that Iran engages in is low-tech, low-cost activity.”
The numbers say otherwise. Staffan de Mistura, the U.N.’s Syria envoy, recently estimated that the war to prop up its Syrian ally is costing Iran $35 billion a year. That assessment is likely too high, but certainly of all Iran’s regional projects, keeping Bashar al-Assad’s regime afloat is the costliest. And that’s because it’s an occupation, says Fouad Hamdan, campaign director of Naame Shaam, an organization that keeps tabs on Iran’s war in Syria. It’s a foreign occupation that affects Iran directly, because without control of territory in Syria, Iran loses its supply lines to Lebanon and Hezbollah, the Iranian regime’s most powerful deterrent against an Israeli strike on its nuclear program. Thus, says Hamdan, “the battle for Syria is a battle for the survival of the Iranian regime.”
There was a time when the White House found it convenient to argue that the Syrian conflict was costly to Iran. When the war started there, rather than arm rebels to help topple Assad, the administration told its media surrogates that it was wisest to stand by as the war would bleed Iran. They were right about its potential to be a quagmire for Tehran. Now, sanctions relief, including the signing bonus, will enable Iran to bolster its support for Assad.
“Imagine Syria as a kind of Iranian province or governorate,” says Tony Badran, research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “Military defeats are boxing the Assad regime into an increasingly small region, basically now an enclave in western Syria along the Damascus-Homs corridor leading up to the Alawite homeland on the Mediterranean coast. Assad’s ability to survive is becoming almost entirely an Iranian responsibility. Facing a continuing war of attrition, the regime in Damascus has lost most of its ability for overland trade, with its only secure border being Lebanon. The Iranian responsibility is only increasing, as the Assad regime’s resources, and thereby its ability to maintain its patronage networks, pay salaries, and so on, shrinks or vanishes.”
Fouad Hamdan argues that the Assad regime is already well past that point. “Syria is broke,” he tells me. The various Syrian state institutions that the Obama White House says it wants to preserve even if Assad does fall are now almost entirely dependent on Iran. “Iran is pumping $500 million a month to the Syrian central bank that takes care of things like salaries and many of the internally displaced as well as Damascus and the coastal areas,” says Hamdan. “Iran spends maybe another half-billion a month for things like food and fuel, weapons and armaments, as well as the various militias now fighting in Syria, from the newly recruited Afghan Shiite militias, known as the Fatimeyun division, to Hezbollah.”
Naame Shaam (Persian for “Letter from Syria”) estimates that Iran’s Syria expenditures are $10 to $15 billion annually, roughly $1 to $1.2 billion a month. Hamdan, a 55-year-old Lebanese-German national, explains that his organization, which is made up of four Shiites (himself, a Syrian, and two Iranians) and was founded in 2014, gets most of its information from open source materials, especially the Iranian media. “The Iranian regime will boast about its activities openly,” he tells me. “Then maybe someone comes along and tells them it’s not a good idea to make that information public, so they remove it from the Internet.”
What Tehran is most keen to obscure, says Hamdan, is the fact that its war in Syria is an occupation. Syrian rebel fighters acknowledge that the Syrian army still exists in places, but, according to Hamdan, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is calling the shots. This was made plain in January when a high-level convoy targeted by Israel on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights included IRGC officers and Hezbollah fighters but no Syrian officials.
“In the chain of command,” says Hamdan, “Qassem Suleimani is on top, and the IRGC-Quds Force commander takes his orders directly from the supreme leader. Under him is Hossein Hamedani, who oversees IRGC operations in Syria. Then there’s the Iranian ambassador, various IRGC commanders, and Hezbollah commanders. Hezbollah does most of the training and takes on the most dangerous missions. Then there are other militias, like Iraqi and Afghan fighters, at the bottom.”
The Syrian regime’s most significant contributions to the war effort, says Hamdan, are its air force and the so-called National Defense Forces. These Iranian-trained civilian fighters have been combined with the paramilitary gangs known as the shabiha to replicate a Syrian version of the Basij, the paramilitary group created by the founder of the Islamic Republic, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Accordingly, almost nothing happens on the ground without the Iranians knowing about it or giving the direct orders, which includes war crimes and chemical weapons attacks. If the White House once boasted that it had rid Assad of his unconventional arsenal, the reality is that Iran has also crossed Obama’s red line against the use of chemical weapons….
It will be very hard for Iran to end its occupation of Syria. The Syrian border with Lebanon is Iran’s supply line to Hezbollah. If Iran loses that channel, an asset it has built up over 30 years with billions of dollars is isolated. The Iranians lose their ability to project power on the Israeli border as well as their most effective deterrent to protect their nuclear facilities against Jerusalem. Were Hezbollah to be deprived of its Iranian lifeline, it would be vulnerable not just to Israel—which has made clear over the last few weeks how dearly the party of God and all of Lebanon will pay in the next round of hostilities—but also to Lebanese (and Syrian) Sunnis looking to repay the blood debt Hezbollah has earned with its war in Syria…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
OBAMA’S FAVORS FOR THE MULLAHS
Wall Street Journal, June 14, 2015
The Obama Administration has long insisted that any nuclear deal will have no effect on U.S. determination to stop Iran’s regional ambitions or support for terrorism. As the political desire for a deal grows more urgent, however, this claim is proving to be hollow.
Consider Hayya Bina, or “Let’s Go,” a Lebanese civil-society initiative founded in 2005 by publisher and producer Lokman Slim. Hayya Bina works largely with Lebanon’s Shiites on a variety of health, environmental and citizenship issues, largely as a way to offer a moderate alternative to Hezbollah’s efforts to dominate that community. The group has received modest funding from the State Department and groups like the International Republican Institute. But as the Journal’s Jay Solomon reported last week, the State Department sent Hayya Bina a letter, dated April 10, which “requests that all activities intended [to] foster an independent moderate Shiite voice be ceased immediately and indefinitely.” To underscore the point, the letter added that Hayya Bina “must eliminate funding for any of the above referenced activity.”
Why cut funding? The State Department said the programs weren’t meeting expectations. But it hardly went unnoticed in Lebanon that the cuts came barely a week after the U.S. and Iran struck their framework nuclear agreement in Switzerland April 2. Hezbollah is Iran’s Lebanese subsidiary and has made a practice of going after its domestic opponents, including Mr. Slim. The withdrawal of U.S. funding “is another desperate PR attempt by the Obama Administration to appease the Iranian regime in order to reach a nuclear deal,” says Ahmad El Assaad, a prominent Lebanese Shiite opponent of Hezbollah.
Then there is the curious case of Buhary Seyed Abu Tahir, a Dubai-based Sri Lankan businessman who in 2004 was cited personally by President George W. Bush as the “chief financial officer and money launderer” for the nuclear-proliferation network of Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan. According to a 2004 investigation by Malaysian authorities, in 1994 or 1995 Mr. Khan asked Mr. Tahir to ship uranium centrifuges to Iran. “BSA Tahir organized the transshipment of the two containers from DUBAI to IRAN using a merchant ship owned by a company in Iran,” according to a Malaysian report. “BSA Tahir said the payment for the two containers of centrifuge units, amounting to about USD $3 million was paid in UAE Dirham currency by the Iranian. The cash was brought in two briefcases.”
The Bush Administration put Mr. Tahir on the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) list of sanctioned persons. But the Treasury Department removed his name from that list on April 3, exactly one day after the framework agreement was announced. We asked a Treasury spokesperson why Mr. Tahir’s name was removed and if there was any connection to the Iran deal, and she said the “delisting was based on a determinaton by OFAC that circumstances no longer warrant the blocking of Tahir pursuant to Executive Order 13382.” That order, signed by President Bush in 2005, is “aimed at freezing the assets of proliferators of weapons of mass destruction.”…
Then there is Iran’s ballistic missile program. Ballistic missiles have long been considered an integral part of Iran’s nuclear program as the most effective way to deliver a weapon, and the Administration pushed for U.N. sanctions on Iran’s missiles in 2010. When it came time to negotiate, however, the Administration gave in to Tehran’s insistence that it would accept no missile limitations, thus separating the missile and nuclear programs. But now that a deal is near, the Administration is reversing itself again, claiming that for the purposes of sanctions Iran’s missile program is “nuclear-related,” meaning the U.S. is prepared to lift the missile sanctions.
And there’s more. “Of the 24 Iranian banks currently under U.S. sanctions,” noted the Associated Press in a story last week, “only one—Bank Saderat, cited for terrorism links—is subject to clear non-nuclear sanctions.” In other words, once the “nuclear-related” sanctions go, so go all the rest, notwithstanding Administration promises. It may be too late to prevent President Obama from striking this deal. But as its contours become clearer, it looks increasingly like a betrayal of our friends, a whitewash of history—and a gift to a dictatorship.
OBAMA JUST TOSSED AWAY HIS LAST CARD ON IRAN’S NUKES
John Podhoretz
New York Post, June 2, 2015
As the June 30 deadline for the Iran nuclear deal approaches, President Obama is putting all his cards on the table — by announcing he is keeping no cards in his hand. In an astonishing interview with Israel’s Channel 2, the president declared that “the best way to prevent Iran from having a nuclear weapon is a verifiable, tough agreement. “A military solution will not fix it, even if the United States participates. It would temporarily slow down an Iranian nuclear program, but it would not eliminate it.”
Why is this astonishing? Because Obama is publicly eliminating any American possibility that we will bomb Iran’s nuclear sites even if the deal in which he has invested so much collapses. Despite his declaration at a Washington synagogue last week that “Iran must not, under any circumstances, be allowed to get a nuclear weapon,” the president is in fact making it very clear Iran will go nuclear, and with his implicit assent. Period.
Note that he has decided to eliminate the possibility of a military strike even though he has already indicated his deal will allow Iran to go nuclear in 2028. That’s what he told NPR last month: “A more relevant fear would be that in year 13, 14, 15, they have advanced centrifuges that enrich fairly rapidly, and at that point the breakout times would have shrunk almost down to zero.” He scoffs at the value of a military strike because he says it would only “temporarily slow down” Iran’s ambition. But that is also entirely true of the deal he’s desperately trying to sell.
Assuming Iran obeys every last jot and title of the agreement, which its behavior up to now assures us it would not, Obama himself envisions an Iran gone nuclear 13 years from now. If that’s not “temporary,” then what is? Look: If your choice is (a) Iran goes nuclear or (b) Iran goes nuclear, then obviously a military option is a bad one and a diplomatic solution is better.
But the president has spent his entire time in office assuring the American people that Iran going nuclear was not a choice at all. Indeed, David Rutz of the Washington Free Beacon counted 28 separate occasions on which the president has made exactly the vow he made to the Washington, DC, synagogue-goers. Only now he’s amending it a little bit. Last month, he said Iran wouldn’t go nuclear “on my watch.” Of course, his “watch” ends in 18 months. So long, suckers! Après Obama, le déluge.
Unquestionably, the best possible option would be for Iran to see the error and danger of its ways and give up its nuclear program on its own. Obama is acting as though he has the carrot that will make the mullahs act as he would wish: lifting sanctions and unfreezing bank accounts to the tune of $150 billion. But what’s a carrot without a stick? We got a sense of that Monday morning, when the International Atomic Energy Agency reported that Iran’s nuclear stockpile is growing — even though the 2013 agreement that began the talks with the United States required Iran to freeze production.
“Contrary to the relevant resolutions of the Board of Governors and the Security Council,” a new IAEA report announced, “Iran has not suspended all of its enrichment related activities.” In the words of a somewhat apologetic New York Times story, “The overall increase in Iran’s stockpile poses a major diplomatic and political challenge for President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry.”
Oh, come on. What difference does it make? Obama isn’t going to hit Iran, and he’s going to make a deal at practically any price. The Iranians are going to do . . . whatever. And come 2017, Obama’s successor is going to have a hell of a choice to make — the choice he was too cowardly, or too craven, to make himself.
‘Look … It’s My Name on This’: Obama Defends the Iran Nuclear Deal: Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic, May 21, 2015 —On Tuesday afternoon, as President Obama was bringing an occasionally contentious but often illuminating hour-long conversation about the Middle East to an end, I brought up a persistent worry.
Israel’s Role in the Struggle over the Iranian Nuclear Project: Brig. Gen. (res.) Yossi Kuperwasser, BESA, June 11, 2015—In this comprehensive review from someone who has been intimately involved in global diplomacy regarding the Iranian nuclear program, Brig. Gen. (res.) Yossi Kuperwasser details Israel’s role in the struggle over the Iranian nuclear project.
Israelis and Saudis Reveal Secret Talks to Thwart Iran: Eli Lake, Bloomberg, June 4, 2015—Since the beginning of 2014, representatives from Israel and Saudi Arabia have had five secret meetings to discuss a common foe, Iran.
Iran’s Greatest Vulnerability: Michael Ledeen, Weekly Standard, May 11, 2015—Iran is on the march all over the world, from Syria and Iraq to Venezuela and Cuba (where they have a Hezbollah base).
Iranian Nukes, the Arab Gulf, and Obama's Seductive Summitry: Steven J. Rosen, Washington Times, June 2, 2015—President Obama convened the May 13-14 Camp David summit with the Sunni Arab leaders of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) in pursuit of a grand bargain.
