The Myth of Iran’s Anti-Nuclear “Fatwa” Returns

Last month, mainstream American news outlets reported that Ali Khamenei, the Islamic Republic’s supreme leader, had issued a fatwa, or religious ruling, in the 1990s forbidding the production of nuclear weapons. The reports, based on a recent statement by the Iranian intelligence minister, are nothing new: mention of the fatwa has appeared in Western media for years, and it has been cited by policymakers and analysts as evidence that the deeply religious regime has no intention of putting its nuclear program to military use. But the problem with this line of reasoning, writes Sean Durns, is that no such fatwa exists:

Iran’s spy chief, [by citing the supposed ruling], is . . . engaged in a longstanding, and recently renewed, disinformation campaign. . . . Tehran has long used claims of a nuclear fatwa as part of its propaganda. . . . In his September 24, 2013, remarks before the UN General Assembly, then-President Barack Obama said, “The supreme leader has developed a fatwa against the development of nuclear weapons.” Both Hillary Clinton and John Kerry echoed Obama’s remarks.

In April 2010, Khamenei wrote a letter to the Tehran International Conference on Disarmament and Non-Proliferation referring to nuclear weapons as prohibited. But this is not a fatwa. . . . Since 2004, Iran has published hundreds of newly issued fatwas online. They run the gamut from political to religious and cultural issues, addressing subjects as varied as dancing to taking medicine that contains alcohol. No fatwa against nuclear weapons has surfaced.

Although there isn’t any evidence of an Iranian nuclear fatwa, there is growing evidence of Iran’s nuclear activity.

Read more at National Interest

More about: Ali Khamenei, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Iran nuclear program, John Kerry

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