WarSclerotic

Ben Shapiro at UCLA: “BDS is just another form of anti-semitism” – YouTube.

(Ben Shapiro delivers the knockout punch to the BDS crowd. – Artaxes)

Border Skirmishes – The Weekly Standard.

The Iran-Israel struggle heats up.

Mar 31, 2014, Vol. 19, No. 28 • By LEE SMITH

Last week the Israeli Air Force bombed Syrian military and security positions in retaliation for an operation on the Syrian-Israeli border in the Golan Heights. Four Israeli soldiers were wounded when Hezbollah attacked their Jeep. Hezbollah it seems was looking to kidnap them. This time they failed, but, said Hezbollah sources, “We are sure we will succeed in the near future.”

Maybe. If so, it is sure to resonate throughout the Middle East. The last time Hezbollah kidnapped Israeli soldiers it touched off a monthlong conflict in the summer of 2006. After the devastation Hezbollah suffered, hundreds of its elite troops dead and billions of dollars’ worth of damage done, the party’s general secretary, Hassan Nasrallah, said that had he known how the Israelis would respond, he never would have taken their soldiers in the first place. So now that Nasrallah knows what Israeli countermeasures look like, what could he possibly be thinking?

The answer is that it’s not Nasrallah calling the shots. Hezbollah is Iran’s long arm in Lebanon. Accordingly, its activities on Israel’s northern border, taken together with the maneuvers of other Iranian allies on the southern frontier—weapons transfers to Gaza-based militants and their rocket fire on Israel—are evidence of a new Iranian boldness. Perhaps as a consequence of the interim nuclear agreement Iran struck last November with the P5+1 powers (the United States, Russia, China, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany), Tehran imagines that the White House will rein in Jerusalem. But if that’s what Obama is advising, Israel isn’t paying attention. Israel’s aggressive defense suggests that if Iran keeps pushing, it may soon find itself in open warfare.

For the last year and a half, Israel has kept Iran’s allies on its borders almost totally quiet. The 2006 war that many, including Hezbollah, believed Jerusalem had lost served instead to reestablish the credibility of Israeli deterrence. To the south, Israel’s November 2012 Pillar of Defense campaign in Gaza left Hamas reeling, while the Syrian civil war and the sectarian furies it unleashed loosened the bonds that tied Iran to its chief Palestinian asset. Even as the conflict in Syria burned, Israel was careful to show that it had no stake in the outcome and would stand aside so long as neither Assad nor the rebels tried to involve it—or transfer weapons to Hezbollah.

Israel has repeatedly targeted weapons convoys moving strategic, or game-changing, arms from Syria to Lebanon, typically striking at their point of origin rather than their destination. The reasoning seems to be that with Assad under fire already and reluctant to open another front against Israel, it’s advisable to hit there rather than in Lebanon, where Hezbollah might be compelled to act to save face. Nonetheless, on February 24 the Israeli Air Force struck a Hezbollah position in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. Hezbollah’s retaliatory campaign has included at least four border incidents. In one of them, Hezbollah fighters crossed several hundred yards into Israeli territory and planted IEDs.

Until last week, Israeli responses had typically been measured—firing artillery rounds into Syrian territory, for instance. The decision to target Assad’s forces now—as Israel did not do during the 2006 war, when Damascus kept transferring supplies to Hezbollah—is something of a game-changer itself, and needs to be seen in the context of Israel’s southern front.

Earlier in March, Israeli naval commandos boarded a Panamanian-flagged vessel, the Klos C, in the Red Sea carrying arms destined for Gaza, most likely intended for Palestinian Islamic Jihad but undoubtedly with the acquiescence of Hamas. If Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hoped that the interdiction of Iranian arms was something like a public relations coup that would change the White House’s mind about its bargaining partner in Tehran, the administration paid little heed. “It’s entirely appropriate to continue to pursue the possibility of reaching a resolution on the nuclear program,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said after the arms seizure.

However, the fact that the administration showed itself unmoved was perhaps the key factor in Jerusalem’s strategic messaging campaign, for Washington wasn’t Jerusalem’s only intended audience. The Israeli government was also signaling to its own citizens. The message was twofold: First, Iran is a strategic threat, not merely because of its nuclear weapons program, but also because of its support for the axis of resistance on Israel’s borders, a message underscored when Palestinian Islamic Jihad rained dozens of missiles on Israeli towns. Second, the Obama administration isn’t greatly bothered by the fact that Iran doesn’t, as the president put it, “operate in a responsible fashion.”

As Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon said last week: “We had thought the one who should lead the campaign against Iran is the United States. But at some stage the United States entered into negotiations with them, and, unhappily, when it comes to negotiating at a Persian bazaar, the Iranians were better. .  .  . Therefore, on this matter, we have to behave as though we have nobody to look out for us but ourselves.”

If the weapons seizure was meant to drive home to Israelis that they’re on their own when it comes to Iran, then the raid on Syrian targets last week was intended to reassure them. Jerusalem showed that it will stop Iran’s allies on its borders, and also that it’s willing to go to the source—states that sponsor terrorist war, like Syria and, if the clerical regime continues to escalate, perhaps Iran, too.

Lee Smith is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.

Waltzing With Iran in the Nuclear Ballroom – Wall Street Journal.

There’s little sign of diplomatic progress, but the accommodations and service are splendid.

By
Claudia Rosett

March 20, 2014 7:37 p.m. ET
Vienna

Amid the splendors of this ancient city on the Danube, the Iran nuclear talks are waltzing toward a fiasco. Russia’s threat this week to change its position on the talks as payback for the West’s negative reaction to the invasion of Ukraine could hardly make things worse.

The stated aim of the U.S. and its partners is to arrive at a grand bargain ensuring that Iran will not obtain nuclear weapons. The reality is that four months have passed since the U.S. and its partners struck an interim deal with Iran in Geneva proposing to work out a “long-term comprehensive solution.” So far, under the negotiating mantra of “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed,” the parties appear to be talking mainly for the sake of talking. According to a senior U.S. official at the round of meetings that wrapped up on Wednesday, “We understand each other’s concerns.”

That might work in a marriage, but this is a nuclear negotiation with a murderous, messianic state. Meanwhile, Iran without dismantling its nuclear infrastructure is enjoying a visible easing of sanctions and a celebrity comeback on the world stage.

In Vienna, the process has taken on a life of its own. And a comfortable life it is. The Austrian government, delighted to have swiped the nuclear talks from Geneva, is lavishing hospitality on all concerned. That includes the six world powers dubbed the P5+1—the U.S., Britain, France, China, Russia and Germany—led by European Union foreign-policy chief Catherine Ashton. Sharing the head table with Ms. Ashton at the main bargaining sessions, while publicly proclaiming Iran’s “inalienable right” to enrich uranium, is the star of this show, Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator and foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif.

For the top negotiators, Austrian authorities have reserved one of Vienna’s most magnificent hotels, the Palais Coburg. It is an impeccably restored 19th-century palace, with a royal portico, glittering chandeliers, duplex suites, big Jacuzzis and a lobby built around portions of the historic city walls. Mr. Zarif may be an envoy of the world’s top terror-sponsoring state, but at the Vienna talks he is an honored guest; his hotel bill, along with Ms. Ashton’s, is paid by the Austrian government.

For most of the talking, the negotiators prefer to hunker down at the Coburg. When necessary, and for photo-ops, they shuttle across town to the United Nations complex that houses the International Atomic Energy Agency. The IAEA has the job of monitoring Iran’s compliance with its promise under the interim deal to ratchet back, for now, some elements of its nuclear program.

For reporters covering the talks, Austria is providing facilities in a huge convention center that adjoins the U.N. complex. The amenities include free cappuccino, cold drinks, hot meals and Austrian chocolates.

The staple largely missing from the venue is news. At the two major rounds of the Vienna talks to date, Mr. Zarif and Ms. Ashton have delivered what may be the shortest press conferences on record. Side by side, and flanked by the Iranian and EU flags, they have read brief prepared statements and then left without taking a question. Last month, they pronounced their talks “very productive.” This month, in a text that ran to all of five sentences, they described their talks as “substantive and useful.” The next round convenes in Vienna April 7-9.

Procedurally, all this counts as success. According to an EU spokesman, Ms. Ashton is “mandated to drive forward these negotiations” and “she is determined to do that.” Such determination is the classic mistake of diplomats who become so invested in bargaining that they’ll do anything to stay at the table—thus handing the advantage to the other side.

Take Russia, a member of the P5+1 team that Ms. Ashton’s office and U.S. officials say is “united.” This reflects the official urge to envelop Iran in a group hug, and so woo it to kindlier ways. But Russia has its own ideas about how to leverage this collective bargaining. Earlier this week, in response to Russia’s grab of Ukraine’s Crimea, the U.S. and EU imposed sanctions on several Russian officials. Russia’s delegate to the Iran talks, deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov, is now treating the talks not as a P5+1 team venture but as a point of leverage, threatening that Russia might retaliate by taking a separate stance from the other P5 parties on the Iran talks.

Iran has its own priorities as well. Tehran is so pleased with the partial easing of sanctions that its officials have been soliciting business and nuclear talent, from Tokyo to Europe’s trade fairs. But for all the smiles at the talks, Iran is publicly stipulating that it won’t dismantle its nuclear infrastructure, won’t stop enriching uranium, won’t abandon building the plutonium factory that is its heavy-water reactor near Arak, and won’t stop developing ballistic missiles.

After the latest round ended, a senior U.S. official offered some procedural details on trying to haggle over or monitor the troubling facilities that Iran is refusing to give up. Speaking on background, the official described a process of identifying “gaps” in agreement among the negotiating parties, and working to “bridge those gaps”—a labor of such technical, political and diplomatic complexity that the official further compared it to “a Rubik’s cube—you move one part, you affect the next.”

Actually, it’s not that complex. The equipment that Iran wants to keep isn’t vital to an oil-rich and peaceful state. What Iran wants to keep are the elements of a nuclear arsenal. We’ve seen this game before, as U.S. diplomats navigated a maze of bridge-building maneuvers in nuclear talks with Iran’s close ally, North Korea. In the end, it comes down to one big gap: The unavoidable fact that the Iranians aren’t at the bargaining table to give up the bomb. They’ve come so they get a breather from sanctions while they finish building it.

Ms. Rosett is journalist-in-residence with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and heads its Investigative Reporting Project.

Hillary’s Dubious Iran Credentials – Commentary Magazine.

Jonathan S. Tobin | @tobincommentary
03.20.2014 – 7:25 PM

IDF Says It Found Largest Ever Gazan ‘Terror Tunnel’ – The Washington Free Beacon.

BY: Washington Free Beacon Staff
March 21, 2014 10:23 am

Israel can operate in Iran if it needs to, IDF chief says – The Times of Israel.

Gantz says Israel conducts ‘secret activities near and far,’ adds Iran is ‘not beyond the army’s reach’

By Adiv Sterman   March 19, 2014, 9:21 p

UN report blasts Iran for persecution of Christians, other religious minorities – FoxNews.

By Benjamin Weinthal / Published March 20, 2014 / FoxNews.com

The election last year of self-professed moderate President Hassan Rouhani has not brought Iran’s Christians any relief, according to a new United Nations report which finds the Islamic Republic’s Bible believers more persecuted than ever.

The detailed report finds Iran has continued to imprison Christians for their faith and designated house churches and evangelical Christians as “threats to national security.” At least 49 Christians were among 307 religious minorities being held in Iranian jails as of January 2014, noted the UN, which also blasted the regime for its hostility to Jews, Baha’is, Zoroastrians and Dervish Muslims, the UN report stated.

“These are indicators that President Rouhani has no influence over hard-liners, who remain fully in charge of the judiciary and security apparatus, government entities that are responsible for the most severe abuses against religious minorities,” Dwight Bashir, deputy director for policy at the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, told FoxNews.com.

Among the Christians held in Iranian prisons is American citizen and Christian pastor Saeed Abedini, who is serving an eight-year prison term for alleged crimes related to his faith. President Obama has called for Abedini’s release, even as his administration has negotiated a disarmament deal with Iran.

“This report is as an important reminder about the true nature of the Iranian regime,” Sen. Mark Kirk, (R-III), told FoxNews.com. “We can’t pretend we are negotiating with Western moderates – we are negotiating with Islamic radicals who persecute Christians, Baha’is, other religious and ethnic minorities and women, while denying all of its citizens basic human rights — including the freedom of speech and assembly.”

In 2013, Iranian authorities arrested “at least 42 Christians, of whom 35 were convicted for participation in informal “house churches,” in association with churches outside the Islamic Republic of Iran, perceived or real evangelical activity and other standard Christian activities.”

Iran’s opaque justice system imposed prison sentences on Christians ranging from one to ten years.

“Under the law, religious minorities, including recognized Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians, also face discrimination in the judicial system, such as harsher punishments,” said Shaheed, who is an internationally recognized expert on human rights.

While the persecution detailed in the report includes wrongful imprisonment and even death sentences, it also takes more subtle forms. Ahmed Shaheed, UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Iran, said Iranian Christians have reported having viruses planted on their computers after visiting Christian websites.

Iran’s regime issued a flurry of angry responses to Shaheed’s report.

“The enemies’ ploy is a vicious circle, which changes according to the political situation,” Mohammed Javad Larajani, head of Iran’s High Council for Human Rights, told the state-controlled Tehran Times. Larajani has in the past been an advocate of the stoning of women as punishment and called for Israel’s destruction near the Holocaust memorial in Berlin in 2008.

Saba Farzan, a German-Iranian journalist and director of political studies at the Institute for Middle Eastern Democracy, told FoxNews.com: “The situation of Christians and other religious minorities in Iran is very dire because the Iranian regime is a Sharia state.”

“This dictatorship oppresses viciously all these precious groups with the abhorrent justification of Islamic law [Sharia] and by that it violates Iran’s constitution and a long-lasting tradition within Persian culture of peaceful tolerance and respect toward fellow Iranians with diverse religious backgrounds,” Farzan said.

Such treatment of Christians belies Rouhani’s stated policies, noted Morad Mokhtari, an Iranian who converted to Christianity in 1988 in Tehran and works as a human rights researcher at the New Haven-based Iran Human Rights Documentation Center. Mokhtari told FoxNews.com that in Rouhani’s December Draft Citizen’s Rights Charter, the document states “Holding and attending religious rituals of the religions identified in the constitution [Christianity, Jewish, Zoroastrian] is permitted.”

Mokhtari described the charter as the “good side” of Rouhani’s attitude toward some minorities but, practically speaking, the impact has been non-existent.

“For the Christians who are identified as religious minorities in the constitution, there is still no equal rights to hold and attend to their religious services even in official churches,” Mokhtari said. “Since Rouhani got power, at least two official Protestant churches in Tehran have been banned to hold any religious services in Persian language.”

Benjamin Weinthal reports on the Christians in the Middle East. He is a fellow at the Foundation For Defense of Democracies. Follow Benjamin on Twitter@BenWeinthal

Benjamin Weinthal is a Berlin-based fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Follow him on Twitter@BenWeinthal.

Iranian Ship, in Plain View but Shrouded in Mystery, Looks Very Familiar to U.S. – New York Times.

By ERIC SCHMITT       MARCH 20, 2014

WASHINGTON — Iran is building a nonworking mock-up of an American nuclear-powered aircraft carrier that United States officials say may be intended to be blown up for propaganda value.

Intelligence analysts studying satellite photos of Iranian military installations first noticed the vessel rising from the Gachin shipyard, near Bandar Abbas on the Persian Gulf, last summer. The ship has the same distinctive shape and style of the Navy’s Nimitz-class carriers, as well as the Nimitz’s number 68 neatly painted in white near the bow. Mock aircraft can be seen on the flight deck.

The Iranian mock-up, which American officials described as more like a barge than a warship, has no nuclear propulsion system and is only about two-thirds the length of a typical 1,100-foot-long Navy carrier. Intelligence officials do not believe that Iran is capable of building an actual aircraft carrier.

“Based on our observations, this is not a functioning aircraft carrier; it’s a large barge built to look like an aircraft carrier,” said Cmdr. Jason Salata, a spokesman for the Navy’s Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, across the Persian Gulf from Iran. “We’re not sure what Iran hopes to gain by building this. If it is a big propaganda piece, to what end?”

Whatever the purpose, American officials acknowledged on Thursday that they wanted to reveal the existence of the vessel to get out ahead of the Iranians.

Navy and other American intelligence analysts surmise that the vessel, which Fifth Fleet wags have nicknamed the Target Barge, is something that Iran could tow to sea, anchor and blow up — while filming the whole thing to make a propaganda point, if, say, the talks with the Western powers over Iran’s nuclear program go south.

Iran has previously used barges as targets for missile firings during training exercises, filmed the episodes and then televised them on the state-run news media, Navy officials said.

“It is not surprising that Iranian military forces might use a variety of tactics — including military deception tactics — to strategically communicate and possibly demonstrate their resolve in the region,” said an American official who has closely followed the construction of the mock-up.

But unlike Iran’s efforts to conceal its underground nuclear-related sites, the Iranian Navy has taken no steps to cloak from prying Western satellites what it is building pierside at the busy shipyard. “The system is often too opaque to understand who hatched this idea, and whether it was endorsed at the highest levels,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Iran has sought to exploit captured or pirated American military technology in the past. Last year, Iran’s political and military elite boasted that their forces had shot down an American intelligence-gathering drone, a remotely piloted Navy vehicle called ScanEagle that they quickly put on display for the Iranian news media.

Navy officials responded that no drones had been shot down by enemy fire, although the Pentagon acknowledged at the time that it had lost a small number of ScanEagles, likely to engine malfunction.

Iranian Navy officials could not be immediately reached for comment as the country prepared to celebrate its New Year festivities on Friday. American intelligence officials cited a photograph taken on Feb. 22 in Bandar Abbas and a brief description in Farsi of the vessel on a website for Iran’s Ministry of Industry, Mines and Trade.

For now, Navy analysts and American intelligence officials say they are not unduly concerned about the mock ship. But the fact that the Iranians are building it, presumably for some mysteriously bellicose purposes, contrasts with the fact that the Iranians stepped back from their typically heavy anti-American posture during a recent naval exercise in the gulf.

Until recently, Iranian fast-attack boats have harassed American warships, and the government in Tehran has deployed remotely piloted aircraft that carry surveillance pods and that may someday carry rockets.

With Iran’s multiple political bases of power, the government’s purposes can be hard to decipher. After the temporary nuclear agreement was reached in November between the world powers and the moderate government of Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, it was unclear to American officials whether Iran’s hard-line Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps might try to provoke a conflict with the United States Navy to undercut the accord.

The navy of the Revolutionary Guards consists of fast-attack speedboats with high-powered machine guns and torpedoes, and crews that in the past employed guerrilla tactics, including swarming perilously close to American warships.

When the mock-up will take its maiden voyage — if it ever does — is anyone’s guess, analysts said. The vessel is nearing completion, they said, and will presumably be shipped by rail on tracks that run through the shipyard, to its destiny in the Persian Gulf just a few hundred yards away.

Off Topic: U.S.-Egyptian Relations on the Brink? – The National Interest.

Chuck Freilich | March 19, 2014

Forty years ago deft American diplomacy, along with the foresight of Egypt’s then president Anwar Sadat, led to a dramatic reorientation in Egypt’s foreign policy, from the leading member of the pro-Soviet camp in the Middle East, to a major American ally. The result was the emergence of a moderate and stable pro-American Arab camp, close cooperation with these countries in containing and deterring regional radicals such as Iraq, Libya and Iran, and peace between Israel and Egypt—and later Jordan, too.

Today, American-Egyptian relations are in tatters, the result of Egypt’s domestic convulsions and an American response which may be driving it back into the hands of Russia, with which it recently signed, or at least initialed, a Saudi-financed multibillion-dollar arms deal. Signs of an Egyptian-Russian rapprochement have been brewing for months, with reciprocal visits of top diplomatic and military officials, including by putative Egyptian President Sisi in Moscow, and a possible visit by President Putin to Cairo. The purported arms deal includes advanced fighter aircraft, air-defense systems, missiles, joint military training, counterterrorism cooperation and Russian naval port calls in Egypt.

If finalized, it would be Egypt’s first arms deal with Russia since the early 1970s and a potentially dramatic reversal in Cairo’s foreign-policy orientation, with major ramifications for regional stability and peace. It would also be an intentional Egyptian-Saudi slap in America’s face. It may also be a cry for greater American attention and consideration. In either event, it is a deal which Egypt feels it is being forced into by American policy and presumably one that it would be willing to reverse, were the US to show greater openness to the new military regime’s needs.

Since President Mubarak’s ousting in 2011, well-meaning American policy has succeeded in alienating virtually all segments of Egyptian society. Some believe that the US was too hasty in abandoning Mubarak, its longtime ally, and that its embrace of the successor Muslim Brotherhood government was deeply misguided. Although democratically elected, the Brotherhood is anything but a force for democracy. Indeed, it is a radical theocratic organization, rabidly anti-American and anti-Semitic, which failed grossly in its short year in power. Consequently, the vast majority of Egypt’s population, including the liberals, overwhelmingly supported the coup that overthrew the Brotherhood last summer and continue to support the military’s efforts to stabilize the country, prevent a total economic meltdown and gradually restore at least limited civilian government.

Recognizing the complexities, the administration has repeatedly equivocated. It refused to recognize the coup as such to avoid triggering legislation which would have forced a complete cessation of economic and military aid to Egypt and led to a rupture in relations. Bending to Congressional pressure and its own values, it subsequently announced a partial cut in military aid, including such high-visibility items as F-16s. Since then it has sent further mixed signals, criticizing the harsh measures adopted by the new regime, along with its desire to end the bilateral crisis and renew military assistance. The result has been the worst of all worlds, with the Egyptian public even further alienated and the new military regime furious and flirting with Moscow.

Relations with authoritarian regimes have long posed a deep dilemma for American policy, between US strategic interests and the exigencies of realpolitik—the need to deal with the world as it is, not as we want it to be—and America’s democratic ideals. In the pursuit of the former, the US has long supported numerous heinous regimes, none more so than the Saudi oil theocracy, or South Korea and South Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s. Conversely, it has rarely failed to support democracies, or countries undergoing democratic transitions.

Unfortunately, Egypt was not undergoing a “transition to democracy” under the Muslim Brotherhood, as touted by so much of the American media and many political leaders. Free elections are only one component of democracy, along with a separation of powers, respect for the rule of law and more. The sad truth is that Egypt probably does not have, and likely will not have for decades to come, the prerequisites for becoming a stable democracy.

In all likelihood, the next Egyptian government, following the upcoming elections, will be one in which the military remains the primary locus of power and final arbiter of all policy, but in which it will allow the civilian government some latitude for day-to-day governance. In effect, it will be a somewhat liberalized version of the military dictatorship that has long ruled Egypt, or something like the semi-democratic Turkish model of the 1990s, in which the military had the final word.

The United States should encourage the new government to gradually allow greater political freedoms, primarily for liberal forces in Egyptian society and moderate religious ones, while recognizing that the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist extremists are fundamentally antidemocratic forces that should be suppressed. Democratization in Egypt will be a long-term process, if it succeeds at all. Over time, as moderate and responsible political parties emerge, they and the parliament should be given a greater role. It is a difficult balancing act and requires that we compromise on deeply held values. This is the reality the US will have to deal with.

US influence in the region is at a decades long nadir, with Russia increasingly appearing to be on the winning side, whether in Syria, Iran and now possibly Egypt, not to mention events in Crimea. The prospects for a successful resolution of the Iranian nuclear issue, Syrian civil war and Israeli-Palestinian talks, are mixed at best. Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Jordan and other Arab countries all face severe domestic crises, and their future stability is at risk. Saudi Arabia is in the midst of a deep succession crisis, and the directions of change in Iran are similarly unclear. In these circumstances, the US must prioritize its strategic objectives in Egypt, which are for a strong ongoing bilateral relationship, in which Egypt remains a moderate ally, a force for regional stability, at peace with Israel.

To this end, it is time to end the standoff with Egypt, cooperate with the new military regime along the lines suggested above, and prevent both a possible renewal of military ties between Egypt and Russia and change in Egypt’s strategic orientation.

Chuck Freilich, a former deputy national-security advisor in Israel, is a senior fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School and the author of Zion’s Dilemmas: How Israel Makes National Security Policy.

Iran Spending Medical Funds on Luxury Cars – The Washington Free Beacon.

(There goes the myth of people dying because of those evil sanctions. – Artaxes)

NIAC ‘propaganda’ collapses under facts

BY: Adam Kredo
March 20, 2014 9:56 am

The Iranian parliament’s recent investigation into a scheme to import luxury cars instead of medicine threatens to erode the credibility of a leading pro-Iran lobbying group that has long claimed that economic sanctions are preventing access to medicine in Iran.

An investigation by Iranian lawmakers recently revealed that nearly $2 billion that had been allocated to the importation of medicine into Iran was actually spent on the purchase of luxury cars, according to Farsi and English reports.

While it had long been suspected that the Iranian government was squandering funds for medicine, pro-Tehran advocacy groups like the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) used the medicine shortage as a hook to claim that sanctions were causing the shortage.

NIAC, which has long been suspected of lobbying on behalf of Iran, continues to make the claim and has been raising money off the issue, prompting criticism from those who say the group’s “propaganda machine” is disingenuously misleading lawmakers and the media.

NIAC’s repeated claims that U.S. sanctions led to the medicine shortage have been widely picked up and repeated by the Western media, which has done little to verify these claims.

NIAC even brought up the issue during a 2012 meeting at the White House with Obama administration officials.

NIAC’s campaign also has gained traction on Capitol Hill, where Rep. Jim Moran (D., Va.) authored a letter on the issue that was then used in one of the group’s action alerts stations, “Don’t let sanctions block medicine for Iranians.”

NIAC has also sent its representative to congressional events in order to pester lawmakers about the issue. During one such confrontation last year, Rep. Ed Royce (R., Calif.) chastised a NIAC official for pushing factually inaccurate “propaganda” about the medicine shortage.

This has not deterred NIAC, which has gone on to launch the “Iranian medical access project” to push the narrative that the United States is to blame for the medicine crisis.

“Why are U.S. sanctions blocking medicine for Iranians and how can we fix this?” NIAC asked in another one of its policy briefs.

The group’s continued dissemination of this narrative led to articles in CNN, the Washington Post, and several other media outlets that repeated NIAC’s talking points.

News of the luxury car scheme throws into question the factual accuracy of NIAC’s years-long campaign.

“NIAC has manufactured excuse after excuse for weakening sanctions and helping the mullahs,” said one senior official at D.C.-based pro-Israel organization. “Their talking points have been exposed as fabrications again and again. It’s no wonder that many people, including sitting members of Congress, accuse them of spreading regime propaganda.”

“The real mystery is why the White House and its allies insist on taking meetings with them,” the source said.

Other recent reports have indicated that Iranian pharmaceutical companies owned by the Iranian regime have manufactured the medicine shortage in order to drive up prices.

Profits to many of these companies soared despite economic sanctions and money is believed to have flowed directly to Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

As average Iranians struggle to obtain key medications, Iran’s ruling class has enjoyed relatively unfettered access to top-notch healthcare, a fact that has not been raised in NIAC’s talking points.

When rumors of the medicine scam first emerged in 2012, then-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sacked the country’s health minister in order to keep her silent.

It is also believed that another $20 billion was diverted from Iran’s health sector to a housing project. The diversion of these funds reportedly sparked a shortage of nurses and sick beds for ICU patients.

U.S. Treasury Department officials have repeatedly confirmed that Iran’s healthcare crisis has nothing to do with economic sanctions.

“It has been the longstanding policy of the United States not to target Iranian imports of humanitarian items, such as food, medicine and medical devices,” a Treasury official was quoted as saying by Reuters. “If there is in fact a shortage of some medicines in Iran, it is due to choices made by the Iranian government, not the U.S. government.”

However, the Iranian government and its advocates in the United States have used the crisis to divert attention away from Iran’s massively corrupt political system.