The Many Lies of the Iranian Foreign Minister

Responding to an op-ed in the Washington Post last week by Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s oleaginous foreign minister—he asserts that Tehran’s military programs are purely defensive, attacks Saudi Arabia’s military spending, and makes a snide reference to the Holocaust—Reuel Marc Gerecht exposes some of its falsehood:

[Despite Zarif’s insistence to the contrary, the] Islamic Republic’s nuclear program has not been “peaceful.” The United States and its European allies have a very long dossier, which has included information provided by highly knowledgeable defectors, cataloguing the clerical regime’s nuclear-weapons ambitions since the late 1980s. . . .

And as the foreign minister might be aware, Iran’s ballistic-missile program makes absolutely no sense if it is tipped with conventional warheads. . . .

Zarif alludes to Iran’s legitimate defense needs [by referring to the Iran-Iraq war]. He could, perhaps, explain why long-range missiles that can fly way beyond the Persian Gulf are a function of the clerical regime’s continuing post-Saddam Hussein trauma.

Zarif is . . . right about the dangers of Islamic extremism, except that he forgot to mention that Saudi Arabia’s hugely destructive practice of spreading Wahhabism, the foundation of modern Sunni jihadism, is matched on the Shiite side by the Islamic Republic’s aim to radicalize the Shiites wherever Zarif’s bosses gain influence. The clerical regime has [also] tried to replicate the Lebanese Hizballah elsewhere in the Arab world, especially in Iraq and Syria. . . .

And concerning Iran’s military expenditures, wouldn’t it be a good idea to allow Iranians free elections so that they can decide how they want to spend their own money?

Read more at Weekly Standard

More about: Hizballah, Iran, Iran sanctions, Politics & Current Affairs, Saddam Hussein, Saudi Arabia

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society