Last month, Adam Purinton shot two Indian-Americans in a Kansas bar, killing one, after accusing them of being illegal immigrants and shouting ethnic slurs. He reportedly confessed to a bartender afterward that he shot “two Iranians.” In response, Trita Parsi—president of the lobbying organization the National Iranian-American Council (NIAC) and an influential supporter of the nuclear deal with Tehran—produced an essay with a colleague placing responsibility for the attack not only on Donald Trump and his supporters but on anyone who called for the U.S. to take a tougher stand against Iran. Jonathan Zalman comments on the essay and on NIAC itself:

Per Parsi and [his coauthor Tyler] Cullis, journalists, think-tankers, and policy advocates who have allegedly demonized the Islamic Republic’s regime . . . bear some responsibility for the Kansas atrocity. More than a few people [have] noticed that the only people the authors called out by name—Michael Rubin, Eli Lake, Adam Kredo, Josh Block, and David Keyes—had one curious thing in common: they are all Jews.

Parsi and Cullis argue that these five, [who include] a Bloomberg columnist, the CEO of [the advocacy organization] The Israel Project, and the English-language spokesperson for Benjamin Netanyahu, “push war with Iran in the most hyperbolic terms, all the while defaming those—most particularly, those in the Iranian-American community—who urge a peaceful resolution to the historical tensions between the two countries.” The Kansas shooting, the authors argue, was the inevitable result of this group’s allegedly warmongering work. . . . The authors rhetorically connect . . . their perceived political opponents to a hate crime without going through the effort of proving that the shooter had drawn any inspiration from their work, or even knew that these five people existed. . . .

But these logical leaps represent the least of NIAC’s current issues, as the organization is now facing increasingly visible opposition from the constituency it claims to represent.

On February 20, a diverse group of over 100 Iranian-Americans and Iranian exiles, including former officials of both the shah and the current regime, submitted a letter to Senator Bob Corker and Congressman Ed Royce, the respective heads of the Senate and House Foreign Affairs committees, calling for “a congressional hearing on the efforts of Tehran’s theocratic regime to influence U.S. policy and public diplomacy toward Iran.” The letter, which . . . does not mention NIAC by name, . . . requested that Congress “launch an investigation into any and all lobbying activities of Iranian-American groups, which ostensibly promote the interests of our community but whose real goal is to undermine long-term U.S. national-security interests in Iran and its neighborhood.”

Early Friday morning, Israel attacked military installations near the Iranian cities of Isfahan and nearby Natanz, the latter being one of the hubs of the country’s nuclear program. Jerusalem is not taking credit for the attack, and none of the details are too certain, but it seems that the attack involved multiple drones, likely launched from within Iran, as well as one or more missiles fired from Syrian or Iraqi airspace. Strikes on Syrian radar systems shortly beforehand probably helped make the attack possible, and there were reportedly strikes on Iraq as well.

Iran itself is downplaying the attack, but the S-300 air-defense batteries in Isfahan appear to have been destroyed or damaged. This is a sophisticated Russian-made system positioned to protect the Natanz nuclear installation. In other words, Israel has demonstrated that Iran’s best technology can’t protect the country’s skies from the IDF. As Yossi Kuperwasser puts it, the attack, combined with the response to the assault on April 13,

clarified to the Iranians that whereas we [Israelis] are not as vulnerable as they thought, they are more vulnerable than they thought. They have difficulty hitting us, but we have no difficulty hitting them.

Nobody knows exactly how the operation was carried out. . . . It is good that a question mark hovers over . . . what exactly Israel did. Let’s keep them wondering. It is good for deniability and good for keeping the enemy uncertain.

The fact that we chose targets that were in the vicinity of a major nuclear facility but were linked to the Iranian missile and air forces was a good message. It communicated that we can reach other targets as well but, as we don’t want escalation, we chose targets nearby that were involved in the attack against Israel. I think it sends the message that if we want to, we can send a stronger message. Israel is not seeking escalation at the moment.