How an Iran-Backed Lobbying Organization Defamed Israel to Push the Nuclear Deal

Founded at the at the beginning of the century to advance reconciliation between Washington and Tehran, the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) was formed in close consultation with Hamyaran, a quasi-governmental institution in the Islamic Republic. NIAC became a major lobbyist and public advocate on behalf of the nuclear deal once negotiations were made public, and consulted frequently with the Obama administration. As revealed by a 2008 lawsuit, NIAC’s president Trita Parsi was in regular email contact with the Iranian diplomat Mohammed Javad Zarif; Parsi also made 33 visits to the Obama White House between 2013 and 2016. Hassan Dai, in a detailed report, examines NIAC’s sources of funding (much seems to come from Iranian sources via left-leaning American foundations), its continuous closeness with the Iranian regime, and its use of anti-Israel sentiment:

The Iranian strategy . . . rested on a depiction of Israel as the bullying force behind sanctions and pressure against Iran. Iranian leaders believed that the marginalization of Israel and the weakening of its influence in Washington would help them attain their strategic goals. . . . NIAC and Parsi carried out the Iranian regime’s anti-Israel and anti-AIPAC campaign in the United States in part by presenting its campaign against Israel and pro-Israel lobbyists in the United States as a modern-day “David-versus-Goliath battle.”

According to Parsi, Israel should be blamed because, since 1992, it has been preventing a U.S.-Iran rapprochement. . . . For Parsi, the United States is a passive character that bows to Israeli pressure and adopts the policy dictated by Israel at the expense of American national interests. As a result, the United States imposes sanctions on Iran and ignores Iranian overtures for dialogue. . . .

NIAC’s close alignment with Tehran’s anti-Israeli campaign was on display in March 2015 when Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu traveled to Washington to address the U.S. Congress. On March 2, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei wrote on his English Twitter account: “The day when Western people realize that their problems result from Zionism’s hegemony over governments, they will make an inescapable hell for them.” . . . NIAC similarly escalated its anti-Israeli campaign and bought a full-page ad in the New York Times accusing the speaker of the House of being “loyal” to Israel. Two weeks later, Parsi posted a tweet about Senator Lindsey Graham’s trip to Israel, and wrote: “Graham re-pledges loyalty to a foreign leader.”

Read more at Tablet

More about: Anti-Semitism, Barack Obama, Iran, Iran sanctions, U.S. Foreign policy

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