Iran’s Clandestine Network in Latin America

By sending clergy and other religious functionaries to Latin America, Iran has extended both its political and ideological influence as well as its terror networks to the western hemisphere. Emanuele Ottolenghi writes:

Across Latin America, Iran’s public face appears innocuous: mosques, cultural centers, schools, halal meat inspectors, religious literature, social work, and even Boy Scout groups. Yet beneath the veneer of piety, outreach, and interfaith dialogue, Tehran leverages connections with anti-American regimes and movements to gain a foothold in the region, and to indoctrinate local Muslims in its brand of revolutionary Islam. Rather than relying on the traditional tools of statecraft, Iran advances its agenda with mosques and missionaries.

Tehran’s use of Iranian and Lebanese Shiite clerics as unofficial agents of the Iranian revolution is not new. The first such cleric to reach Latin America was Mohsen Rabbani, who in 1983 came to Argentina to lead the al-Tawhid mosque and serve as a halal meat inspector in Buenos Aires. Both tasks appeared innocuous enough, but Rabbani was intimately involved in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish cultural center in the Argentine capital that killed 85 people and injured over 300. . . .

The dual role of Shiite clerics as religious and political emissaries of the Islamic revolution was underscored in 2010, when the U.S. Treasury identified another religious minister as Hizballah’s representative in Latin America.

Read more at National Interest

More about: AMIA bombing, Argentina, Hizballah, Iran, Latin America, Politics & Current Affairs

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