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

June 30 2017

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

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic