Posted tagged ‘Mendacity’

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Anti-Israel Double Standards Enable Assad’s Brutality

August 23, 2016

Anti-Israel Double Standards Enable Assad’s Brutality, Investigative Project on Terrorism,  Noah Beck,August 23, 2016

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Syria’s civil war claimed 470,000 lives since it started in March 2011, the Syrian Centre for Policy Research announced in February. That’s an average of about 262 deaths per day and 7,860 per month. The carnage has continued unabated, so, applying the same death rate nearly 200 days after the February estimate, the death toll is over 520,000.

Such numbers are staggering, even by Middle East standards. However, the violence has become so routine that it only occasionally captures global attention, usually when a particularly poignant moment of human suffering is documented. The most recent example is Omran Daqneesh, a 5-year old Syrian boy who was filmed shell-shocked, bloody, and covered in dust after the airstrike bombing of his Aleppo apartment block.

The tragic image of Omran caused outrage around the world, as did the image of Aylan Kurdi, the drowned Syrian boy whose body washed up last September on a beach in Turkey. Yet Omran’s plight demonstrates that, nearly a year after the last child victim of Syrian horrors captured global sympathy, nothing has changed.

If anything, the violence in this multi-party proxy war seems to be getting worse. Since Aylan Kurdi’s drowning, Russia began blitz-bombing Syria in support of the Assad regime. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) estimates that nine months of Russian airstrikes have killed 3,089 civilians – a toll that is greater, by some estimates, than the number of civilians killed by ISIS. By contrast, Syrian civilian deaths caused by U.S. airstrikes are probably in the hundreds (over roughly twice as much time, since U.S. airstrikes began in the summer of 2015).

But Syrian airstrikes are responsible for the bulk of civilian deaths in Syria. The Assad regime killed 109,347 civilians between March 2011 and July 2014 (88 percent of the total casualties at the time), according to estimates by the Syrian Network for Human Rights. That works out to about 91 civilian deaths per day. More recently, the SOHR documented 9,307 civilian deaths from 35,775 regime airstrikes over a 20-month period running from November 2014 through June 2016. Thus, roughly one innocent Syrian was killed every hour, during the 20 months that the SOHR documented civilian casualties caused by Russian and Syrian airstrikes.

Compare those figures to the number of innocent Palestinians killed by Israel from 2011 to 2014. According to Human Rights Watch (HRW), which has been accused of anti-Israel bias, 37 Palestinians were killed in 2011, 103 in 2012, 15 in 2013 and 1,500in 2014 – the year when Hamas fired rockets at Israel from highly populated Gazan areas. That’s a four-year total of 1,655. During roughly the same four-year period, the number of Syrian civilian deaths was about 76 times greater than the HRW total of Palestinian civilian casualties.

Yet the European Union singles out Israel for conflict-related consumer labels without any similar attempt to warn European consumers about goods or services whose consumption in any way helps the economies of countries responsible for the Syrian bloodshed, including Syria, Russia, and Iran. Human rights lawyer Arsen Ostrovsky has highlighted how none of those countries is targeted by those advocating a boycott of Israel out of a purported concern for human rights. Even more absurd, most of the results produced by a Google search for “academic boycott of Syria” or “academic boycott of Iran” concern academic boycotts of Israel. That asymmetry precisely captures the problem.

In addition to supporting the Assad regime in Syria and contributing to the violence there, Iran executes people for everything from drug offenses to being gay.

Indeed, the global outcry over Syrian suffering is embarrassingly weak when compared to reactions to Israel’s far less bloody conflict with the Palestinians. Imagine if Omran Daqneesh had been a Palestinian boy hurt by an Israeli airstrike on Gaza. College campus protests, the media, NGOs, and world bodies around the planet would be positively on fire. Israeli embassies would be attacked, French synagogues would be firebombed (eight were attacked in just one week during Israel’s 2014 war with Gaza), Jews around the world would be attacked, and condemnations would pour in from the EU, the United Nations, and the Obama administration. UN resolutions and emergency sessions would condemn the incident. International investigations would be demanded. Global blame would deluge Israel, regardless of whether Hamas, a terrorist organization, actually started the fighting or used human shields to maximize civilian deaths. Israel would be obsessively demonized despite any risky and unprecedented measures the Israeli military might have taken to minimize civilian casualties.

Moreover, when an occasional Syrian victim captures global attention, the protests are generally for some vague demand for “peace” in Syria, rather than blaming and demanding the punishment of Syria, Iran, and Russia, even though those regimes are clearly responsible for the slaughter. The starkly different reactions to Israel and Syria are even more shocking when it comes to the United Nations.

From its 2006 inception through August 2015, 62 United Nations Human Rights Council resolutions condemned Israel, compared to just 17 for Syria, five for Iran, and zero for Russia, according to the watchdog group UN Watch. The lopsided focus on Israel is equally appalling at the UN General Assembly, as UN Watch has highlighted. In each of the last four years, as the Syrian bloodbath claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, there were at least five times as many resolutions condemning Israel as those rebuking the rest of the world:

2012: 22 against Israel, 4 for the rest of the world

2013: 22 against Israel, 4 for the rest of the world

2014: 20 against Israel, 3 for the rest of the world

2015: 20 against Israel, 3 for the rest of the world

A corollary of the anti-Israel bias ensures that no Israeli victim will ever enjoy the kind of global sympathy expressed for Omran Daqneesh or Aylan Kurdi. When a Palestinian man enters the bedroom of a 13-year old girl and stabs her to death in her sleep,Obama says nothing even though she was a U.S. citizen and the world hardly notices. By contrast, imagine if the Israeli father of Hallel Yaffa Ariel had decided to take revenge by entering a nearby Palestinian home to stab a 13-year old Palestinian girl to death in her sleep. The global anger would be deafening.

Why do Israeli lives matter so much less? And why do student activists, the UN, the EU, the media, and the rest of the world focus so much more on alleged Palestinian civilian deaths than on Syrian civilian deaths? Doing so is woefully unjust to Syrians. It is also deeply unfair to Israel, which has endured terrorist attacks on its people throughout its existence as a state. It is the one country that, according to Col. Richard Kemp, former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, has done more to protect civilians during war than any other in the history of war.

The global obsession with condemning Israel not only defames a beleaguered democracy doing its best, it also enables the truly evil actors like the Assad regime and Hamas, by giving them a pass on some of the world’s worst crimes.

Categories: Foreign policy, Iran, Israel, Media and Israel, Mendacity, Palestinians, Russia, Syria war, United Nations
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The Mendacity Behind Obama’s Mockery of the Cash-for-Iran Story

August 6, 2016

The Mendacity Behind Obama’s Mockery of the Cash-for-Iran Story, PJ Media,  Claudia Rosett, AUGUST 5, 2016

(Iran did not allow the aircraft sent to bring the hostages home to depart until the cash had arrived. The funds apparently are going to the Iranian military. — DM)

obama ransom

“It is not at all clear to me why it is that cash, as opposed to a check or wire transfer, has made this into a news story.”

   — President Barack Obama, Pentagon Press Conference, August 4, 2016

Thus did President Obama scold those who are now asking why his administration secretly airlifted $400 million worth of cash to Iran this past January, just as Iran was releasing four American prisoners. By Obama’s account, there’s nothing to see here. Not only did Obama deny, despite the striking coincidence of timing, that the payment was a ransom. He also mocked anyone who might see the story of the cash itself as troubling news, or newsworthy at all. Obama dismissed such reactions as “the manufacturing of outrage in a story that we disclosed in January.”

Welcome, once again, to the vertigo of the Obama “narrative,” in which the priority of his “most transparent” administration is not to deal honestly with the American public, but to spin a web of half truths, enmeshed in complexities, to cover up highly questionable uses of power — and then, if caught red-handed, use the bully pulpit to deride and dismiss the critics.

In this case, the thrust of Obama’s remarks was to write off the story of the cash shipment to Iran as a bit of out-dated trivia, the sort of thing no serious person would care about. At his Pentagon press conference on Thursday, he went on to speculate that maybe the tale is generating interest simply because it is colorful to picture pallets of cash: “Maybe because it feels like some spy novel or some crime novel.”

Yes, it does. But there are reasons that spy and crime novels — plus a fair number of felony cases in U.S. courts — are prone to feature such episodes as stacks of cash delivered secretly to the bad guys. Such behavior reeks of shady activity. Cash is highly fungible, and harder to trace than checks or wire transfers. (A word to the wise: If you ever find yourself making a multi-million dollar payment to someone, and he asks for it in stacks of cash, you might want to walk away).

For a government, such as Iran’s regime — world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism — cash lends itself less to financing national infrastructure (the use to which the administration suggestsit has likely been put) than to funding terrorists and pursuing illicit weapons. Whatever Iran’s regime might be doing in the way of sewer and road repair, its demonstrated priorities include its continued testing of ballistic missiles, in violation of UN sanctions. The prime use of ballistic missiles is to carry nuclear warheads — which suggests that Iran’s likely intent is, at a moment of its choosing, to scrap Obama’s vaunted Iran nuclear deal (on which Iran is already cheating). As far as that entails buying weapons and technology from, say, nuclear-testing North Korea, or procuring illicit inputs on world markets, hard cash is a big help.

Obama’s justification for sending the $400 million installment in cash is that the U.S., due to its strict sanctions on Iran, has no banking relationship with the country — thus the air-freighted pallets of banknotes. Except that doesn’t add up. Writing in The Wall Street Journal, former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey asks; “How come the U.S. did not simply transfer the $400 million we are told actually belonged to Iran to a foreign entity, to be converted into foreign funds for conventional banking transmission to Tehran?”

It’s also disturbing that Obama’s administration still seems unable or unwilling to officially disgorge such basic information — relevant to the accusation of ransom — as precisely what time, on what date, the $400 million worth of cash arrived in Tehran. Nor has Obama’s administration disclosed how or when it conveyed to Iran a further $1.3 billion payout, which was part of the same deal. Was it sent by check? By wire? Or were there yet more pallets of money delivered door-to-door to Tehran?

One might almost suppose Obama knows quite well that cash shipments to Tehran are actually a very big story. A story that quite reasonably raises glaring questions about his dealings with Iran, and the integrity of the narrative he offers the public.

What’s now clear is that Obama misled the public months ago, with an artfully crafted tale — omitting any mention of all that colorful cash. On Jan. 17, the same Saturday that Iran freed the American prisoners, Obama delivered a long statement, celebrating the formal implementation a day earlier of the Iran nuclear deal. In the same statement, Obama announced as if it were a separate issue — “a second major development” — that “several Americans unjustly detained by Iran are finally coming home.” Framing this strictly as a prisoner swap, Obama added that “in a reciprocal gesture” seven Iranians charged or convicted of crimes in the U.S. were being released (he neglected to add that the U.S. was also dropping extradition requests for another 14 Iranians).

Then, as if turning to yet another, independent issue, Obama mentioned the payment to Iran, but without naming any actual amount, or time frame, or how the funds would be conveyed. He said, “the third piece of work that we got done this weekend involved the United States and Iran resolving a financial dispute that dated back more than three decades.” Obama advertised this settlement as a terrific deal for America, while omitting entirely such eye-catching specifics as the information that he had directly approved a $1.7 billion payout to Iran, starting with a $400 million airborne stash of cash that we now know was touching down in Tehran within hours — give or take — of his public remarks.

Instead, Obama announced the payment in generic terms, further smoothing over the implications by using the passive voice: “Iran will be returned its own funds, including appropriate interest, but much less than the amount sought.”

To the extent Obama used his high-profile podium to name any particular sum, he mentioned not the payout, but his rough estimate, purely hypothetical, that this deal might ultimately save America money. He said (the italics, highlighting the speculative nature of his statement, are mine): “For the United States, this settlement could save us billions of dollars that could have been pursued by Iran.” Obama then used that bait-and-switch bit of guesswork about “billions” in savings to justify the timing: “So there was no benefit to the United States in dragging this out.”

Actually, it’s far from clear that there would have been no benefit to dragging out any settlement. Four previous American presidents had already dragged it out, quite rightly postponing the day that terror-sponsoring Iran might get its hands on a payout. But not Obama.

Obama deflected to Secretary of State John Kerry the job of handling the public “messaging” about the actual sum the U.S. had agreed to pay Iran, which totalled $1.7 billion. On that same day of Obama’s statement, and Iran’s prisoner release, Jan. 17, Kerry put out a press statement saying the U.S. and Iran had settled a dispute over roughly $400 million paid by Iran long ago, under the Shah, for a U.S. arms deal that fell through after Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution. Kerry described the agreement as if it were relatively routine, saying it was: “the latest in a series of important settlements reached over the past 35 years at the Hague Tribunal.” Citing “litigation risk” as the reason the Obama administration had chosen to settle this dispute that dated back well over three decades, Kerry said Iran would receive the $400 million plus “a roughly $1.3 billion compromise on the interest.”

Like Obama, Kerry made no mention of how or when or where any payment might take place. Instead, the Obama administration stonewalled relevant questions from Congress and the press, for months.

Finally, this week, The Wall Street Journal’s Jay Solomon and Carole E. Lee  broke the news of the secret Obama-approved cash airlift in mid-January to Iran. Their story included such details as the U.S. government swapping $400 million U.S. dollars into euros, Swiss francs and other currency via the Dutch and Swiss central banks, loading the cash on pallets and flying the loot to Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport aboard an unmarked cargo plane. The Journal cited a report from an Iranian news site close to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Tasnim agency, which said the cash arrived on the same day the American prisoners left, Jan. 17.

Forced to admit that the cash shipment took place, the Obama administration now appears to be having great difficulties locating information on what time the cargo plane landed in Tehran — before or after the American prisoners took off? Asked about this at a press briefing on Thursday, State Department spokesman Mark Toner replied: “I don’t believe we’ve gotten clarity on that.”

There’s also no clarity to date on how the Obama administration handled the payout to Iran of the additional $1.3 billion in interest. On Thursday The Wall Street Journal reported that “Administration officials said the remaining $1.3 billion was later paid out of a fund used to pay judgments and settlements of claims against the U.S.”  But the Journal story included no information on how or when the U.S. made that additional payment, most likely because the administration won’t say. Also this Thursday, the New York Times reported: “White House officials have declined to say whether the rest of the $1.7 billion payment (including $1.3 billion in interest) was also made in cash.”

Where does that leave us?

1. For all Obama’s denials and derision of his critics, the $400 million payment in January sure looks like a ransom, a cash-for-captives deal that can only encourage Iran to imprison more Americans — which it has already done.

2. If indeed there was a quid pro quo, and if the Iranians have any evidence of that, then Obama’s denial that he paid any ransom opens the door to Iranian blackmail of the administration over this payola.

3. The U.S. airlift of cash to Tehran quite likely sends a signal to the world that those strict U.S. sanctions need not deter others from airlifting into Iran crates, or pallets, of cash, which can then be used for Iran’s terrorist and military ventures. The U.S. government itself has set the example.

4. If there was nothing wrong with Obama’s $1.7 billion settlement with Iran, and his administration’s handling of the payments, then why won’t his office provide full information about the logistics, for both the $400 million and the additional $1.3 billion, and answer in good faith the questions of Congress and the press?

5. Finally, there’s the ugly matter of Obama belittling anyone who might question or criticize his cash payola for Iran. That shows an utter disregard for his own promises of transparency, and gross disrespect for the American public. It’s terrible policy for an American president to secretly ship $400 million — or is it by now $1.7 billion? — worth of cash to the terror-sponsoring ballistic-missile-testing Islamic Republic of Iran. It’s even worse when the president, caught out by the press, chooses to defend himself by denigrating the reporters, and his fellow citizens generally, as sensation-seeking fools. The best retort by now, no matter what the presidential mockery, is don’t stop following the money.

Categories: Hostages, Iran - hostages, Iran - ransom payments, Iran scam, Mendacity, Obama and ransom payments
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